Bye Bye, DADT! + Niemeyer's 103rd

There's been so little to celebrate of late with the current administration or the now lame-duck Congress, and the capitulation on the tax cuts for millionaires-to-get-an-extension-of-unemployment insurance for the most vulnerable Americans, during the winter holidays no less, was a particularly bitter pill.  But today proved that the government will not end the year only on low notes.

Today brought one of the highest of the year thus far. Although Senate Republicans last week killed a bill to provide funding for 9/11 first-responders and the Defense Appropriation Bill, which had included a DADT repeal component, and this morning, with the support of five Democrats, quashed passage of the Dream Act for the children of undocumented immigrants, the Democrats with some GOP help today broke this sorry string by first voting 63-33 (a third of the US Senate was still voting no, but six Republicans, Collins, Brown, Murkowski, Olympia Snowe, Mark Kirk and George Voinovich, voted with nearly all the Democrats) to invoke cloture on a bill introduced by Joe Lieberman, then voted 65-31 this afternoon to repeal the 1993 Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT) policy, which barred openly lesbian and gay servicepeople from serving in the US military. The House had already passed a DADT repeal earlier this week. President Obama, who had promised in campaign to repeal this odious policy, has fulfilled this promise, and is expected to sign the bill in the next few days.

For years before the 1993 policy, enacted under President Bill Clinton as a response to extreme reactions to his attempts to end the prior, harsher policy against LGBT servicepeople (Secretary of State Colin Powell, the Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was strongly against allowing openly gay LGBT to serve), brave active duty soldiers, veterans and gay activists had fought to allow LGBT people to serve openly in the military, and after the 1993 policy took effect, activists increased their efforts to repeal DADT, since like previous policies it consigned valuable members of the US military to dismissal, destroying their careers and livelihoods prematurely, based solely on their sexual orientations or others' perceptions thereof.

After this week's votes I, like all other LGBTQ people, and like all Americans, can say I have lived to see the day that this heinous, unequal policy and the one preceding it were repealed by my federal representatives, and signed into law by the President. Most impressive to me was that Congress's courage finally matched that of the American people, who in increasing numbers in recent years have come to believe this policy should be ended, and that of the military's leaders, officers and soldiers, who also agreed that it should be repealed.

Thank you to all those who fought tirelessly to end this policy, through protests, lawsuits, putting their careers and lives on the line. Thank you to all the LGBT people who protested, wrote their officials, wrote articles and blogs to push for the repeal, and to all the non-LGBT allies. Thank you to all those in the military leadership, from the Secretary of Defense to the Chairperson of the Joint Chiefs and present and past officers, who changed their views and did the right thing. Thank you to the rank-and-file, whose responses helped to shape the broader public discourse and the specific arguments used by those who still were unsure. Thank you to Congress, especially Speaker of the House Pelosi, and Senators and Majority Leader Harry Reid, Joe Lieberman, and Kristen Gillibrand, along with the handful of Republicans, for passing this bill. And, once President Obama signs it into law, we will be able to thank him for doing what he promised he would do, and what should have been done years ago.

***

On Wednesday, one of the great living architects, Oscar Niemeyer, an artist whose medium is sinuous concrete and steel, turned 103, and celebrated his birthday by inaugurating the newly opened site he had designed in 1997, the headquarters of the Fundação Oscar Niemeyer (Oscar Niemeyer Foundation), in Niterói, a city across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro.  The Foundation was created in 1988, but is only now debuting this spectacular, futuristic site, which is several kilometers to the north of another of Niemeyer's masterpieces, the space ship-atop-a-hill that houses Rio's/Niterói's Museum of Contemporary Art. Both the foundation's new headquarters and the Museum are part of a series of buildings and sites, known as the Caminho Oscar Niemeyer, in Niterói (formerly the provincial capital when Rio de Janeiro was the federal capital of Brazil), which also includes People's Theater of Niterói, Charitas Boat Station, and Plaza JK (Juscelino Kubitschek, Brazil's president from 1956-1960, and the visionary behind Brasília).  All are accessible after a short and picturesque ferry-ride from the city of Rio.

Though Niemeyer has designed notable sites and buildings all over the world, 600 in total, including some of the buildings at the United Nations (with Le Corbusier), he is perhaps most famous for his site plan and structures for Brazil's third and permanent capital, at Brasília, which he created at the behest of then-president Juscelino Kubitschek beginning in 1956.



Debuting in April 1960, Brasília unfolds on a vast plane in the hinterlands along a monumental axial plan devised in 1958 by Niemeyer. All of its iconic buildings are his designs, dating from the late 1950s forward: the Palácio da Alvorada, the Presidential residence; the Metropolitan Cathedral of Brasília; the National Congress Building; the Federal Supreme Court; the Palácio de Planalto Presidential offices; the Square of the Three Powers; the Itamaraty Palace, for foreign relations; and the Brasília airport.

For these and his many other works, Niemeyer was awarded the 1988 Pritzker Prize for Architecture. He continues to design buildings and sites; one of the newest is the Prince of Asturias's Cultural Center, in Avilés, Spain, which also debuted on Wednesday.  Parabéns e feliz aniversário, Oscar Niemeyer e que foram muitos anos mais!

Niemeyer, with his wife (to his right) fans, at the event.

 Niemeyer and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói

Fundação Niemeyer site from a distance (photo by Fábio Barros)

 Prince of Asturias Cultural Center, in Avilés, Spain

Some Talks & Music (Garcia, Cadava, McGurl, the Drawers)

I'd actually forgotten that I'd posted a blog entry to start May off, so I was about to apologize for just now acknowledging the month had arrived, but it's been slamming me and beyond classes and my syllabi I barely can keep up with what day it is, let alone month. I thought this week was going to be slower, but it's been just as rough, but June is, thankfully, just around the corner....

Amidst all the reading, I have attended a few events at the university, all of which have been edifying in different ways. Starting backwards, tonight I went to hear the musician Paulinho Garcia present a short (1 1/2 hour) tour of Brazil.  Truthfully, as all who know me will readily acknowledge, anything having to do with Brazil gladdens me immensely, and this didn't fail in that regard. The interactive performance felt like the best way to end a busy week. Garcia, a native of Belo Horizonte and 3-decade long resident in the US, was introduced by my great colleage Ana Thomé-Williams (above at right, with Garcia) also from Brazil, who had also helpfully created a slideshow featuring not only a map of Brazil but featuring song authors, titles, and lyrics, to which we could all sing along with Garcia. And sing people did as Garcia walked us through the samba (giving us information on its origins in Bahia and before that the Congo region, and word's Bantu etymology), then several different sertanejo (from the sertão, the harsh scrubland interior or backlands of the northeast) forms, and then the choro and chorinho, then a caipira (another type of folk song--and the source of the word, on through bossa nova.  Tracing it via songs and musicians, he sang (beautifully, touchingly) Ari Barroso's "Aquarela do Brasil," Luiz Gonzaga's "Asa Branca," Tom Jobim's "Andança," Pixinguinha's "Lamento," Zequinho de Abreu's "Tico-Tico no Fubá" (one of the earliest Brazilian songs to achieve fame in the US, and which made Carmen Miranda famous), Pixinguinha's "Carinhoso" (so achingly moving), Renato Teixeira's "Romaria" (which Ana graciously led us through in chorus), Tom Jobim's and Vinícius de Moraes's "Eu sei que vou te amar," Jobim's and Vinícius's "Chega de Saudade" (from Marcel Ophuls's Orfeu negro/Black Orpheus), João Bosco's and Aldir Blanc's fairly contemporary "Coisa Feita" (with its strong Afro-Brazilian storyline), and finally, to end the event, Ana and Garcia sang the always stirring Carnaval melody, "Tristeza," a snippet of which I captured on camera. Afterwards I chatted briefly with Garcia, who was explaining the ins and outs of Brazil to some undergraduates and other attendees, and I ran into a former student, from my earliest days at the university, who was doing really well. I also spoke with a young math student from Belo Horizonte, who suggested I tell a friend now conducting research in Niterói, just across the Guanabara Bay from Rio, about the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics that sits between Rio's Botanical Garden and its Tijuca Forest. How on earth could you get any work done in such a remarkable setting? I'd like to find out.

Exactly before the Brazilian musical event, which constituted what felt almost like the second half of a Cartesian exercise, I attended a lecture by Eduardo Cadava (in the yellow shirt, with Sam Weber (at left) who teaches English and many other subjects at Princeton. Professor Cadava gave a rich, truly absorbing talk entitled "Marx Before Literature," in which he sought to explore, among many questions, why Marx so often turn not just to literary language, but to literature. This tour, intellectually demanding in the best way, ranged over any number of theorists (Benjamin, Blanchot, etc.) and literary figures (Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Roque Dalton, among others), in order to rethink productively Marx's relationship to literature and literature's relationship to Marx. Or, to put it another way, that there could be no Marx before literature, and we could not understand literature before Marx. Cadava's reading of "before" involved, if I may venture to characterize it so, an almost phenomenological relationship (before in temporal, spatial, affective, etc. terms), an "encounter," as he put it at the end of the talk. Among the many notes I took, some stand out, and all, if rightly transcribed, should be ascribed to Cadava: that at moments of revolution, Marx said, "a person becomes lyrical"; that when he first went to college, as he confessed to his father, he was drawn to "lyric poetry"; that his return to poetry occurs in his letter withdrawing from it, which he stages in a literary fashion; Marx's memorials to literature constitute the "entirety of his corpus"; his work is a kind of and form of "mourning for literature"; that in their critique of the young Hegelians, Marx and Engels wrote the offenders "into" their own Quixote, as it were; that Sub-Commandante Marcos, leader of the Zapatistas, noted to Gabriel García Márquez that Don Quixotewas one of the best books of political theory, followed by Hamlet and Macbeth; that literature "names the event of absolute freedom"; and that resources from revolution "come not from the present but from the future." Of course there was so much more, with a propulsive, compelling argumentative throughline that left me thinking as I raced over to the other event; I shall have to return to my notes, and to Cadava's work, and to Marx and, of course, though I never leave it, literature itself.

Last night, I went to see UCLA professor Mark McGurl (at right, at the lectern) whose recent study historicizing MFA programs and their effects on American literature, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard University Press, 2009), I'd noted on this blog before. I can only say that his talk readied my brain for Cadava's. Titled "On the Future of Literary Institutions," it represented excerpts from a larger current work dealing with posthumanism, literature and culture, among other themes, and leapt off from Wai-Chee Dimock's critical book Through Other Continents, which seeks to rethink scholarly understanding of work via another scale than the current historicist models, or historically materialist ones, which is to say, according to what Dimock calls "deep time," or scientific and other larger, longer paradigms. As with Cadava's talk I don't want to wrongly summarize McGurl's, but it was provocative in the best way, and after roving through the issue of "big historicism" and citing Quentin Meillassoux's concept of "ancestrality," which I'd never heard before, McGurl focused specifically on the problems of vastness, the horror of getting lost in time, not through privation but through "troubling plenitude," and ways in which the horror genre in particular had interrogated and dramatized these fears. He then spoke about the reciprocal relationship between the fictions of H. P. Lovecraft, with their desire, as in the "Call of Cthulhu" (which I taught last spring), to address the issue of scalar instability and all that that indexed (the social, political, cultural, racial-ethnic, gendered, sexual, etc.), and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and his work on infinity, Everything and More. McGurl argued that while Lovecraft was "attacking institutions from the outside," Wallace, as the product of the sorts of institutions to which Lovecraft could not gain entry, "was attacking them from within," while also conservationally (as opposed, say, to conservatively), defending them against neoliberalism, in part by allowing them a scaled down, containable temporality and scope, and by dramatizing their necessity in his plots. He went on to note how last summer, after Wallace's suicide, readers created a community, Infinite Summer, around reading Wallace's book, creating the sort of "connectedness" that, McGurl suggested earlier, these vaster paradigms and scales, also created, beyond the scope of families, more obvious affiliations, and so forth. This led me to ask a question about Andy Warhol's A and Kenneth Goldsmith's durational texts, such as The Weather, particularly in terms of the way that both celebrate--to put it simply--plenitude, vastness, a lack of authorial control and of the very institutions, down to genre itself, that would contain them, and yet how, interestingly enough to me, both have come to constitute "institutions," one a kind of genius of proliferating art forms and concepts, the other the impresario of "conceptual writing" itself. I'm not sure I fully grasped McGurl's answer, though he did relate both works (and their authors) to strategies of the avant-garde, but I remain curious about how, especially in the case of Goldsmith, one might think about this issue of ancestrality, particularly if one were to carry the concept of his text through to its logical end, which is to say, to record, over an (infinite) time span, of extended duration, weather reports from a particular signal. Would this not bear out, in terms of people connecting through the text itself, its relations to and in discourse, an example of ancestrality in practice?  I made a note to return to McGurl's great study when I have a break of extended sort, but also to dip into Wallace again and, if I can bear him in anything but tiny doses, the often repellant Lovecraft.

And finally, two nights ago, I went to a public conversation sponsored by the university's Center for Writing Arts, entitled "Partnership of the Picture and the Word," that featured four quite highly regarded comics artists/graphic novelists: Chris Ware, Ivan Brunetti, Jeffrey Brown, and Anders Nilsen (r-l above, Ray Pride at far left) I was familiar with the work of all but Nilsen, and had even suggested Ware as a possible visitor a few years back. Film editor and writer Ray Pride conducted the conversation, inving all four artists to spell the audience about their work, working methods, ideas about art and their own artistic practices, and more. I've periodically read Brown's work (I've used a snippet of it for a class I've taught) and regular follow Ware, but I think this was the first time I've seen either live, or several graphic artists conversing with each other, for that matter. One of the elements of their conversation I found most enlightening was when they spoke about writing in pictures, or, as Ware put it, "making pictures" versus, as sometimes is assumed, a process parallel with cinema, which he characterized as "taking pictures." Each talked about his influences, how they developed stories, their publishing experiences, and the changing appreciation for graphic art and novels today. I was glad to see so many people turn out, and am now interested in how a conversation between someone working primarily in a graphic format, someone still primarily using text (the majority of fiction and creative nonfiction writers, playwrights, and poets), and someone bridging the two, might turn out. I'd also love to see what they'd say about the new digital formats in relation to their work; with Chris Ware in particular, what might a page on an iPad look like, and could it be even more dynamic--in 3 dimensions as opposed to 2, than it already is?

Brick City on Sundance + Poem: Manuel Bandeira

C and I have been watching Brick City the five-night Sundance Channel documentary series Forrest Whitaker, Mark Benjamin and Mark Levin, also its director, have produced about nearby Newark. At each episode's center is Newark's charismatic, determined young mayor, Cory Booker, who made his movie debut in 2005 in Marshall Curry's enthralling, Oscar-nominated documentary Street Fight, which chronicled his determined but unsuccessful run against longtime city head and now convicted felon Sharpe James and James' corrupt, municipal machine. Booker ran again in 2006 and defeated James's chosen successor, Ron Rice, and since then has worked tirelessly to improve the city and the lives of its residents. A great deal of his heroic effort, presented here in clips from 2008, is on display in Brick City; when he isn't fretting over how to plug holes in the city's budget or exhorting his police department to drive the crime rate even lower (murders, Newark's longtime bane, have fallen consistently) or addressing yet another negative article on the city he governs, Booker shows himself, to many residents' delight and his parents' pride and concern, to be the city's most diehard champion and booster, and, it must be said, a kind of quasi-coach, teacher and mentor to many of its denizens, going beyond parades and groundbreakings to play midnight basketball, ride sidesaddle with the police during bouts of insomnia, and cajole young people even to pursue their dreams.

But were Brick City the Booker show all the time it would certainly be engaging but hardly offer any real perspective into the city's ongoing problems. Instead, the filmmakers have selected some of the city's less famous residents, like couple Jayda, a sharp, charismatically gifted young woman and member of Bloods gang, and her sloe-eyed partner and expectant baby-daddy Creep, a Crip, who are struggling to maintain their relationship, take care of themselves and their two children, and imagine and experience new lives outside the prisonhouse of gang life, poverty and low expectations, and the penal system. Watching Jayda as she energizes the young women she works with has given me some hope about Newark's future, yet even this potential heroine, who is pregnant with her second child (and what will be Creep's as well), ends up finding herself on the wrong side of the law because of an old warrant she'd been avoiding. One of the realities the series underlines is this persisent, not always hidden trap, made of snap emotional responses we all feel combined with old and problematic, sometimes deadly ways of addressing problems, which ensnares so many of Newark's young people, including those like Jayda who are full of potential, and potential leaders. Instead of being able to enjoy their lives, so many of them are tagged early on and dragged quickly and inexorably down into a mire of drugs, failure, prison, and death.


Newark Police chief Garry McCarthy and Mayor Cory Booker (Photo, Sundancechannel.com)

Other residents of the city who make an appearance include principal and poet Ras Baraka, his Vice Principle Todd Warren, a grizzly bear of a man, and their crew at Newark's Central High School, which during the series moves into its strikingly new, $100 million complex, after some unfortunate and poorly defended delays; Newark's police chief, Bronx native Garry McCarthy, and others on his force, captured in strategy sessions and on the beat; and some ex-cons who've succeeded in turning their lives around but find current events tempting them to exact retribution that will return them to the very personal hells they've mostly escaped. The series has focused a lot more on the police than on City Hall, despite featuring Booker, and it's interesting to think about all of the corruption and sleaziness that came through in the earlier documentary, which preceded James's conviction, and the light touch with which the filmmakers have addressed such issues here. Instead, we are given more of a sense of what Newark's true challenges are, shorn mostly of any spectacle, and the tough conditions the majority of its residents face and endure, despite the best efforts of the new mayor, new police chief, and many of the city's indefatigable residents themselves, who are presented as subjects and authors of their own lives, and not the objects of beneficent but blind liberal concern.

A spectral presence here that I immediately associate with Newark, Ras Baraka's father, the renowned and notorious poet and author Amiri Baraka, has turned up once so far, to commemorate the 41st anniversary of Newark's uprising. In his brief appearance he manages to serve up some unvarnished old-style Marxism and denounce Booker as a "a white racist Negro," echoing of one of James's more outrageous criticisms of his opponent, that because of his upbringing and education (Stanford, Yale and Oxford Rhodes Scholarship) he wasn't really black or down (he is, yet some voters, despite all visual and other evidence, believed this). Despite this bitter burst of Barakatude, it's been fascinating to see Ras at the center of a film about Newark while his father, who played a key role not only in formulating a radical political and artistic agenda for Newark and black people in the late 1960s on through the 1980s, but also worked doggedly to elect Newark's first black mayor, Kenneth Gibson, remains only a ghostly figure. Two episodes are now finished, and I'm already wondering if we'll see Amiri Baraka again. It almost feels like the documentary's almost missing something key if we don't.

◊◊◊

Earlier this summer I completed and sent off a translation of Brazilian writer and media personality Jean Wyllys's collection of stories, Aflitos (Fundação Casa Jorge Amado; Editora Globo, 2001). I've published a couple of the translated stories in literary journals and I hope the entire book is published at some point, preferably in a bilingual version, mainly because I enjoy Wyllys's grain-of-sand prose and because the stories as a whole offer a different image of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil's 3rd largest city and one of its major cultural capitals, than one usually encounters anywhere. To open the book Wyllys chose a poem, "Desencanto," that happens to be by one of Brazil's very important 20th century poets, Manuel Bandeira (1886-1968).

Originally I looked up translations of "Desencanto" and even considered using one (with credit to the original translator), since I'd initially intended only to translate Wyllys's prose as well as the introduction, by Bahian journalist Antônio Torres, but after reviewing what I could find in books and online I thought, I have to do this myself. I like the result, though there's a prosodic issue in the second stanza that's bothering me, so I still have to work on it. Nevertheless, for the first time in a while, here is the original, and an original translation, of a poem.

DESENCANTO

Eu faço versos como quem chora
de desalento... de desencanto...
Fecha o meu livro, se por agora
Não tens motivo nenhum de pranto.

Meu verso é sangue. Volúpia ardente...
Tristeza esparsa... remorso vão...
Dói-me nas veias. Amargo e quente
Cai, gota e gota, do coração.

E nestas versos de angústia rouca
Assim dos lábios a vida corre,
Deixando um acre sabor na boca.

--Eu faço versos como quem morre.

DISENCHANTMENT

I write these lines like one who cries
In discouragement...in disenchantment...
Shut my book, if, for the moment
You have no cause for tear-filled eyes.

My poetry is blood.  Burning ecstasy...
Scattered sadness... vain regret...
My veins ache from it, bitter and hot,
Drop by drop it tumbles from my heart.

And in these verses, anguished, raw
So runs life from between my lips,
Leaving a bitter taste in my jaws.

--I write these lines like one who dies.

Translation Copyright © John Keene, 2009.

Reviews: Persepolis, 4 Weeks, The Longing

I've been meaning to write a review of Persepolis for a week now, so here are few thoughts about most of the films I've seen of late. Reading the archives of this site, I cannot believe how many movies I used to go to or watch in a given week, but then I used to write a lot more and read for pleasure as well....



Two weeks ago, I saw Persepolis (2007, Vincent Paronnaud and Marjanie Satrapi, directors, based on the novels by Satrapi), the very faithful film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi's acclaimed graphic novels, Persepolis 1-4, which appeared from 2000 to 2003 in their original French, and then in translation as Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood (2003) and Persepolis 2: The Story of Return (2004), both from Pantheon. A good friend of mine, Phoebe M., originally recommended the first English translation, and I quickly fell in love with it, incorporating it into a literature course I taught a few years back. The books together narrate the unfolding of Satrapi's childhood and adolescence against the backdrop of political and social upheavals that occurred in her native Iran from the late 1977s, the last years of the Western-oriented and supported, authoritarian Shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, through his fall and exile, which culminated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979-1980, and the subsequent, brutal 8-year Iran-Iraq War, launched by Saddam Hussein with the backing of then US-president Ronald Reagan and VP George H. W. Bush. (Reagan's administration later engaged in an illegal arms trade with Iran to fund the Nicaraguan contras, which exploded as the Iran Contra scandal, but none of this is part of Satrapi's interest or focus.)

In the film as in the book, Satrapi introduces us to her upper-bourgeois progressive, left-leaning family, including her liberated and often funny but deeply wise grandmother, widowed as a result of the Shah's machinations, her politically connected father, her mother, and other family members who initially embraced the Shah's overthrow only to find themselves in the crosshairs of the new regime, which grew increasingly severe, as the external threat (of war) combined with its internal, societal obsession with a puritanical understanding of faith and practice. Satrapi conveys the normalcy she as a upper-middle-class child is able to establish amidst this turmoil, which results in teenage rebellion and resistance fueled, in part, by Western culture in the form of punk rock music. (As a child of privilege (her mother is a descendent of the 19th century Shah, Satrapi naturalizes her own class and subject position, and one of the things I wanted to know about both in the book and the movie was how Iranian women and girls of other classes, especially the working-class and poor, experienced this period.) Eventually, her parents become so worried about her outspokenness that they send her off at age 14 to Vienna, Austria, where she develops tenuous friendships and hungers for the stability of home. She returns, marries, divorces, and then sets off again for Europe, this time wiser and surer of herself and her abilities, but also tempered by a deeper understanding and love of her troubled country. The genius of the graphic novels lies in Satrapi's imagery, which manages to be simultaneously pared down, both in color and formal terms, and richly evocative, in the the skillful narration of what is essentially a straightforward, moving memoir, and, in the seamless melding of the two.

The film, as I note above, almost directly mirrors the books, so the real novelty lies in the black-and-white animation, which removes the competitive and productive tension all graphic novels generate between the words as a conventional narrative text and the imagery, which often tells a parallel and sometimes different story, in favor of what is essentially a superbly rendered animated film for adults. Major French actors, including Catherine Deneuve (Mrs. Satrapi), Chiara Mastroianni (adult Marjane) and Simon Abkarian (Mr. Satrapi) provide the voices, and there's never a moment when the film flags or falters. A colleague who also saw the film mentioned that she wished there'd been something else, new, added, but for me, the transformation, which entailed considerable artistry in maintaining all that was best in the books while translating it into cinematic terms, succeeded tremendously. I'd read that the initial plans to dub the film with English-speaking actors has been dropped, but I hope that it occurs, not because I want to lose La Deneuve's dulcet tones, but because I think an English-language version may be more likely to reach many people in the US who know little to nothing about Iran and fail to see people like Satrapi's family (or Azar Nafisi's, whose Reading Lolita in Tehran offers a similarly personal though divergent take on the same era), whose humanity, whose very being, gets lost in fear-laden political abstractions.



A few nights ago I saw 4 Weeks, 3 Months, 2 Days, the new and heralded film by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu. I'd been told that the film had moments of real horror, which I mistook for a "horror film," but after seeing it, I realized that the horror is ethical in nature, and definitely present, in both the theme and the plot. What's more, this is one of the most truthful and thought-provoking films I've ever seen in a while, and it treats the topic of abortion with the complexity it deserves, rather than the false choices and cop-outs (Juno, Knocked Up, etc.) that Hollywood is so fond of. I'd add that 4 Weeks could stand as one powerful though extremely disturbing response to anyone who wants to ban or severely limit abortions, birth control medications, or RU-486 and similar drugs but has not considered or refuses to consider the implications.

The scenario in brief is this: during the latter days of the Ceaucescu Communist dictatorship in Romania, a female college student, Gabita Dragut (Laura Vasiliu), with the aid of her much more outgoing and self-assured roommate friend, Otilia (Annamaria Marinca, above, RevisionCinema.com) seeks an abortion, which is criminalized. Ceaucescu fetishized childbearing and punished both the pregnant woman and the abortionist, as well as anyone assisting them, if they were caught. The pregnant young woman is no icon or heroine, but a passive-aggressive, manipulative, dissembling mess, which becomes quite important when we learn the awful ramifications of her approach to acquiring and then trying to deal with an unspeakably sleazy male abortionist, Viorel "Bebe," aka Mr. Bebe (Vlad Ivanov). Mungiu first presents Bebe as reasonable, almost sympathetic (he takes time to look after his mother, though the scene shows his harsh edges which, to my viewing, only augured trouble) and, given the circumstances, almost professional. But then he makes a shocking demand that only underlines the extreme vulnerability of the young women, and cruelty of the system they're living in and under. Yet from this point forward we witness in Otilia a fierce determination that sits beside an almost unvoiceable disgust and horror, a disgust at what she has been forced to submit to, at what she's allowed to occur, at what her boyfriend, whose snobbish urbane family casually treats her like a country bumpkin, cannot even begin to fathom, despite his obvious love for her. There's also disgust, verging on rage, that merges not with sympathy for, but with empathy--which it can only be, as she is as deeply implicated and involved in what transpires--with Gabita, and the ensuing portion of the film, whose details I cannot reveal, shows Otilia operating almost by sheer force of will, and pushes the notions of ethics and empathy to a near breaking-point. The acting by the leads is excellent, but Marinca especially burns a hole in the screen with her ferocity and determination, while Vasiliu's pusillanimous neediness raises your hackles as it's meant to. This is acting.

At least twice during the latter portion of the film, which pivots on several moments of rising suspense, I sat in uneasy, sometimes stunned silence. There is a moment where Otilia is wandering through the barely-lit streets of Bucharest, on a mission in the most literal sense, and the screen grows so dark it's almost unclear what's going on, and worse, what might happen, which induces a feeling of dread--pending horror--that's almost visceral. The film's conclusion includes a little joke, like a steam gauge quickly opened, that barely relieves all that has come before it, but it and the plate of food that embodying it serve as objective correlatives to what you eventually surmise: people, in this case women, may get by, may get on with their lives, may even still be able to live and hope and love, with a little or, in this case, a lot of help from their friends, after suffering, even under the harshest circumstances.

In this sense, the film was a provocative thematic companion to Persepolis, and I'm glad I saw them. Both films deserved Oscars tonight, but as of this entry, the first lost in its category, and the second was not nominated at all. I'll say it: typical!



Though only 2 years old at most, my DVD player finally gave out, so I've been watching rented films on my computer, whose screen its on its last flicker. One film I rented recently, daring my computer not to fail, was Jürgen Brüning's 2003 film, The Longing (Saudade-Sehnsucht). I got it because of the Brazilian them, but I would not recommend this horribly acted, poorly plotted, melodramatic and maudlin wreck to anyone, except that it contains one scene that nearly makes up for the entire rest--waste--of the film. But you have to sit through the rest to get to it, and if you're not interested in depictions of Afrobrazilian gay people, then skip the film completely.

To summarize the plot, three 30-ish German guys are staying at an estate in Paraty (the picturesque historical town southwest of Rio de Janeiro, on the way to São Paulo state and city) belonging to the father of one of them, the spoiled and sulking Cyrus (Tarik Qazi), who is seeking his mother. The other two are a former hiphop (!) musician, Tim (Daniel Bätscher) who also mopes about when not blaring his awful raps, and the tragic blond Erik (Hendrik Schneider), who has lost money on the stock market and complains about being broke. To make money, the trio tape themselves having frolicking and broadcast it on the Net. (I'm not making this up.) They collectively treat the Afrobrazilian maid, Maria (naturally, played by Maria Lucia da Silva Ludwig), an adherent of the syncretic spiritualist faith Macumba (naturally), like she's an idiot, though you quickly learn she and a friend, also Afrobrazilian, hold a mutually dim view of these three. And rightly so. Things unravel from here, at least for Erik, who's involved in a deadly accident on the beach after a near rape (!), then, while in his own fit of guilt and pining, falls in love with an Afrobrazilian telenovela actor, Miguel (Aldri d'Anunciação) who just happens to hanging around a park in downtown Paraty, and, implausibilities of implausibilities, is also the brother of the man that dies in the encounter with Erik. At the funeral, Miguel's mother, played by the (very) famous and ageless Afrobrazilian actress Zezé Motta (star of Xica da Silva and other notable films--she was a replacement for Sonia Braga, who had the great sense to stay far away from this debacle), thinks Erik was her late son's friend and...well, it's just not worth going into. Suffice it say that somehow Maria, after taking Cyrus and Tim to a Macumba ceremony, with they both praise and mock, links up the hiphopper manqué links up with a real local hiphop group (his longing), and aids Cyrus in seeking his vanished mother (his longing). She isn't able to do much for Erik, who traipses after Miguel to Rio, where the telenovela is filmed, out of love.

There are more implausibilities, including a plane crash and so forth, but it's in Rio that the truly interesting scene occurs. Somehow or other, Miguel, who blurts out interesting comments about the plight of Afrobrazilians, decides to attend a meeting of a Black gay group. At this meeting, which is, I remember correctly, male and trans, a fiery young group leader, Fabio (Sérgio Menezes), holds forth on the social, political and cultural marginalization of Black Brazilians, gay Brazilians, and then gay Afrobrazilians. His disquisition is transfixing, and immediately made me wonder whether this was a documentary scene in an otherwise fiction film, or a fictional rendering of a real event. I also wondered whether the director, Brüning, had written his words, whether they were extemporaneous, or improvised, and whether such a speech, and moment, had ever been rendered in a Brazilian film. Of course I wanted to see more about this, which could have been its own documentary, short or feature, and which had the only decent acting in the entire film, but it was over in an eyeblink. Also fascinating was the fact that in the audience are identifical twin drag performers, the Dolly-Twins (Márcio and Marcelo Rodrigues), whose ultra-blasé responses and expressions provide a comical dose of irony, though they do keep listening until Fabio finishes and then jointly give him their "beijos" (kisses) before leaving to prepare for their star turn at a local bathhouse later on. The blond beloved shows up, in about as clumsy an irony as is possible, Fabio mildly reads Miguel, the lovers embrace, and the scene is over. We get no context for the scene except that Miguel is already portrayed as politically aware and that, to the extent that it's possible, he's partially out. But I kept thinking, what led Brüning to cram the scene in this film? Was it a desire to color the other narrative, along with familiarity with a similar group, Quimbanda Dudu, which exists in Bahia, and which is affiliated with Bahia's longstanding, activist organization Grupo Gay da Bahia? Have films of any sort been made about either group, or about Rio's gay rights group Arco Íris (Rainbow), or the ones in São Paulo? And given the rarity of representations of out Afrobrazilian LGBTQs, especially politically conscious ones, in documentary or fiction films, doesn't this warrant greater interest? It manages to queer an already queer film in ways I imagine the director never imagined. Nothing I've read about this film addresses this moment, which verges on breaking the diegetic trajectory of the movie.

In the accompanying documentary on the making of the film, Brüning does say that all his films are flawed, thus explaining the majority of what's on the screen, but with this one he wanted to portray something different about Black Brazilians than we usually see. (In the same documentary, Annunciação says that depictions of gays in Brazilian films are rare, though there are some high profile examples, in films such as Madame Satã, Carandiru, etc.) He certainly does that in this one scene, and it's a shame that he didn't decide to scrap the rest of what surrounds it and build on what I'm assuming is a minor cinematic revelation.

BOMB's Brazil Issue

I'm slowly making my way through the new, Winter 2008 of BOMB, which is dedicated to Brazil. Tisa B. first alerted me that this was its focus, and Reggie H. directed me to the site, which makes a few of the articles available for free. Years ago I read BOMB regularly, then stopped, and even heard (and read), wrongly it turned out, that the magazine was going under. Reggie would tell me about its issues, which I sometimes still browsed when I would pop into Nico's while in the City, and finally, last fall, I decided to subscribe to it after Reggie sent the photocopies of the informative conversation that Edwidge Danticat conducted with Junot Díaz, and the piec on Isaac Julien's video installation pieces, including his recent Small Boats.

Whenever I hear that a magazine or journal is focusing on Brazil, my question becomes, is the focus essentially going to be the Rio-São Paulo axis, those being the cultural and economic megalopolises (megalopoleis?) or will it look at another region (say the Northeast, the Amazon, the South), will it be a thematic-sociocultural focus (say on Afrobrazilians), or will it mix things up? (Of course there are numerous other ways of approaching Brazil.) This issue, some of which is online, appears to mainly follow the first, most common approach, with a number of the contributors living in either Rio or São Paulo, or coming from there (and now resident in the US). The issue has much of interest, gathering together some of the most notable contemporary plastic artists (Ernesto Neto [whose work enthralls both Tisa and me], Fernanda Gomes, the Campana brothers, Lucia Koch, Marilá Dardot, Laura Lima, Jarba Lopes, OsGemeos,Thiago Rocha Pitta, etc.), filmmakers (Cao Guimarães and Karim Aïnouz [of Madame Satã fame]), writers (Arnaldo Antunes bridging the two fields of literature and music, but also the very distinguished Lydia Fagundes Telles, as well as Bernardo Carvalho and Francisco Alvim), and a very famous architect (Paulo Mendes da Rocha). The "First Proof" literary section features the work of a handful of writers, some of them very well known, like Rubem Fonseca, whose philosophical crime-drenched novels and stories initiated a new style in Portuguese literature and have led to Nobel Prize stirrings, and the subtle poet Adélia Prado, whom I've suggested might be a potential winner. (Below right, Ernesto Neto, Leviathan Thot, 2006, Lycra tulle, polyamide fabric and styrofoam balls, 174×203 x 184’. Pantheon, Paris. Photo: Marcus Wagner. Courtesy of the artist; Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo; and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY.)

As a general introduction to some of Brazil's contemporary stars, music notwithstanding (because really, that would require a year's worth of issue, each covering the four largest cities, São Paulo, Rio, Salvador da Bahia, and Belo Horizonte), it seems pretty good, and some of the plastic artists are probably not well known in the US at all. Mendes da Rocha might be more familiar to people in the know, as he's received the 2006 Pritzker Prize, and I was glad that the editors didn't simply take the easiest route by going with the country's centenarian (yes, he'll be 101 this year!) genius, Oscar Niemeyer, who admittedly and astonishingly is still designing buildings, and has since the 1930s. The writers on the whole might also not be so well recognized in the US, but Fonseca, Telles, Prado, João Ubaldo Ribeiro (a Bahian of African descent), Manoel de Barros, and Salgado Maranhão are all internationally known figures, though none has the profile, I would imagine, of either of Brazil's best known 20th century writers, Jorge Amado, Clarice Lispector, or João Cabral de Melo Neto, or its current phenomenon, Paulo Coelho.

The interviews are pretty informative, and there's a good deal of discussion about Brazilian society and the country's various continuing social problems, though there was considerably less talk about national politics, which, from what I can tell, are in an interesting place right now. I was also hoping that the magazine would feature more writers and artists under 50 (Guimarães fits this criterion, as do novelist Patricia Melo and a few others), but also show more regional diversity, venturing further north and south to find out what's happening outside the Rio-São Paulo axis, and certainly more ethnic diversity. This last problem seems to plague most special issues on Brazil, unless they're devoted to writing by Afrobrazilians or Japanese Brazilians, say, from the favelas, and so on. But who knows, perhaps I've read right past something. I'll keep reading, and perhaps another journal will take up the charge and offer new and exciting angles on what's happening in the arts scenes in the "country of the future."

Congrats to Tisa & Renee + Johnson Slammed + Shakespeare's Cognitive Art + LGBTT Conf. in Brazil

Since I can barely read computer screens these days or type more than one sentence without a major spelling--which becomes a grammatical--error, I almost thought about using images like the one above, somewhat like what I used in an online piece eons ago. But I'd probably mix those up too. I'm too trifling to get my act together to film it properly, but if I could, I'd film the hibernation I hope to engage in in a little more than a week's time.

***

Congratulations are in order to two friends, Tisa Bryant, and Renee Gladman, who have just published new books. Tisa's book, Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, headed up by none other than Renee (=fierce)), is a daring hybrid work incorporating literary and film criticism, autobiography, and fiction that opens up an array of reading possibilities and pleasures, and you even get to converse with Othello, Julie Christie, Afro-English-women, and Caribbean and California Negroes, to name just a few.

Renee's new volume, Newcomer Can't Swim (Kelsey Street Press--and yes, her title, like Tisa's, is signifying!), is listed as poetry by Small Press Distribution but like Tisa's text, though in a different way, it deliciously breaks genre wide open and reconstitutes it. I'll be nourishing my neurons with these two texts, and I hope--know!--you'll check them out too.

***

After having read Denis Johnson's stories in Jesus' Son many times with delight, I decided to start teaching some of them, and for the last few years have been using "Emergency," a horrifyingly compelling tale, in my intro class. It never fails to spark amusement, awe, conversation, and imitation, though the students' personal knowledge one of the story's central elements, mind-altering drugs, is thankfully much more greatly reduced--at least based on what they tell me and what their responses indicate--than would have been the case with students of my generation. I have not read the prolific Johnson's plays, poetry collections, novellas or novels, however, since Fiskadoro, which would have been, well, back when I was the age of my students (yes, that long ago), but I keep saying I'm going to read at least one of his novels published since then, and I recently thought that I'd start with the most recent, Tree of Life, which has received rave reviews and this years's National Book Award.

But there's someone out there who thinks rather differently about Johnson's new novel, and s/he's not mincing words, the one-and-only, which is to say, notorious, R. B. Myers, in this month's Atlantic. You have to read the stunningly waspish "A Bright Shining Lie" to get the full dose, but here's a sting:

Not being religious myself, I do not feel personally insulted by any of this, and lest other tempers flare, let me make clear that free-thinking Skip, the man who wants the truth to wet him, cuts the silliest figure of all. Besides, most of Johnson’s prosethe metaphor of the jungle as screaming mosque, for exampleis too imprecise and empty even to give offense. One closes the book only with a renewed sense of the decline of American literary standards. It would be foolish to demand another Tolstoy, but shouldn’t we expect someone writing about the Vietnam War to have more sense and eloquence than the politicians who prosecuted it?

Those two qualities are linked. There can be no deep thought without the proper use of words, as our current president never fails to demonstrate. This is why it is dangerous to hold up bad English as good and why Philip Roth should know better than to announce that Johnson writes “prose of amazing power and stylishness.” There are people who will take that seriously. Less worrying, because so obviously lunatic, is Jonathan Franzen’s blurb: “The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnson’s.” Really? Then God help Jonathan Franzen.

Ouch!

Anyone else want to weigh in on Johnson's new tome? Or least offer a counterweight to Myers's sledgehammer?

***

On a related note, since I mentioned Shakespeare the other day, I have to post a link to this short piece by Philip Davis, editor of the Reader (?) magazine. He surmised that Shakespeare's verbal artistry might have cognitive effects, and decided to test things out with several brain researchers. His specific experiment examined the effects of what linguists call "functional shifts" or "word-class conversions," which is to say, those moments when Shakespeare substitutes one part of speech for another, with minimal change to the sentence's shape or syntactic arrangement. He cites three examples: in King Lear, "He childed as I fathered" (nouns shifted to verbs); in Troilus and Cressida, "Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages" (noun converted to adjective); Othello, "To lip a wanton in a secure couch/And to suppose her chaste!"' (noun "lip" to verb; adjective "wanton" to noun). And the result was...well, I'll let you read it, but it's pretty fascinating. One interesting aspect of the piece is that although Davis is an editor and a teacher, he doesn't mention "rhetoric" once in the piece, though the particular effect he's describing is called "anthimeria" and is a form of the rhetorical device of "enallage." Please correct me, Shakespeare readers and scholars, if I'm incorrect, but anthimeria appears frequently in the later plays, which leads me to believe that once the Bard latched onto this wonderful device, like so many others (one of my favorites, which I started noticing in a few of Elizabeth Alexander's poems a few years ago, is epizeuxis) he wasn't going to let it go given its ability to...well, you'll have to read the article! But it appears in other authors, and especially in great frequency in e. e. cummings's poems, where he elevates it to a central aesthetic principal. Think of his famous poem, "anyone lived in a pretty how town," for example. (Does anyone teach cummings any more?) I'm curious to see what other research projects using Shakespeare or other authors Davis undertakes, and what the results are. Meanwhile, start paging your Macbeth...

***

Recently the Noctuaristocrat Reggie H. (who convinced me to start reading Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise, which I can't put down), forwarded an article about Bahia, Brazil's "Black Rome," becoming a key travel destination for African-American tourists interested in that state's strong and enduring African cultural retentions (shaped, of course, by their development in Brazil over centuries). (João deS. forwarded the same article later that day, so thank you.) Authenticity, baby. I've written a bit on here about this topic, and the post led me to check out Brazzil.com, which had another interesting article, on Brazil's first nationwide LGBT conference, which will take place in May 2008 and be sponsored by the Brazilian government, a Latin American first. (Actually, it'll be conference on Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transvestites and Transgenders.)

Brazil's Socialist president, Lula, is firmly supporting it, and has decreed that it will be held

under the auspices of the Special Secretary of Human Rights of the Presidency of the Republic, with the objectives of 1. proposing the directives for the implementation of public policies and the national plan for promoting the citizenship and human rights of gays, bisexuals, transvestites and transsexuals - GLBT, and 2. evaluate and propose strategies to strengthen the program Brazil Without Homophobia.

How refreshing, and what a stark contrast with US politicians, including many of the supposedly "progressive" presidential candidates, who for the most part still can't help but speak out of both sides of their mouths when it comes to LGBT issues. So consider attending it along with a visit to Bahia; I had to check another site to find out that it's taking place in the post-urban capital Brasília, a city I've never visited, though I hope C and I get to see it one of these days soon.