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The words we use

By on March 24, 2012 in Writing

My background research on The Whistler led me to lay hands on a few issues of Life magazine from 1965 which I keep around my office.  Too dispirited to jump into work after hearing the latest news update on the Trayvon Martin killing, I began leafing through the August 27, 1965 issue. The cover story was on the Watts riots:

  • Arson and Street War–Most Destructive Riot in U.S. History

The interior subheads read:

  • Out of a Cauldron of Hate–Arson and Death
  • ‘Get Whitey!’ The War Cry that Terrorized Los Angeles
  • In a Roaring Inferno ‘Burn, Baby, Burn’
  • Wild Plundering–Grab It and Run
  • Deep New Scars in the Rubble-strewn Precinct
  • Deadly Souvenirs of the Insurrection [sic]

The slant is hard to overlook, but maybe it was an outlier. I took the time traveler’s privilege to backtrack and rifle through March 5, 1965, with its cover story on the assassination of Malcolm X.

  • A Monument to Negro Upheaval

trumpets the cover.  Hm.  There are others, but you don’t need to hear them.

I’ve been thinking lately about how we transcend racism, and how we fail.  The Martin case is depressing, outrageous, and thought-provoking, but it’s not news. We’ve been here before; in fact, we never left.  How many times in your life could you say, “It’s a choice between us and us, not us and them.” It takes an act of intellection, almost a leap of faith: it takes having friends of another color. In The Whistler, Joshua the jazz musician tells Henry the protagonist that “Every morning when I look in the mirror I think, ‘Oh look, you’re black, and you’re going to be that way all day.'”  Until he has a different story to tell, our sickness must get worse. But the truth, as another character points out, is always bigger than the stories we’re able to tell about it. Therein, I think, lies the hope.

And in the meantime, the distance from Life magazine’s “Get Whitey!” to the death of Trayvon Martin is short, pointed, unexceptional, unacceptable.

Dystopias I

By on December 28, 2011 in Art

I’ve been thinking about Bob Trotman, a sophisticated, self-taught artist whom I met this year.  Over the holidays I visited his sculpture Vertigoat the North Carolina Museum of Art: a larger-than-life guy in a business suit falls through space as if the bottom had dropped out; he looks surprised, terrified, and monumental. It’s the “monumental” that gets me, like the institutionalization of existential crisis. The falling figure is forever frozen in time like the characters on Keats’ Grecian urn, and while cheap analogies come readily to mind, I don’t want to settle too quickly on an interpretation that reads this work as an expression of the “Occupy Whatever” movement, vague political malaise, or even the larger Zeitgeist. It’s more like a local expression of a recurrent aspect of the human condition.

Trotman's "Vertigo"

When you stand underneath the falling man you can’t help but flinch, wondering just how strong those cables are–that block of wood must weigh a good 2,000 pounds, I figure–and you too could be crushed by gravitas.  Did this guy jump from a bridge without even loosening his tie first?  Was he pushed from an airplane?  Or did the floor simply disappear under him?  The sculpture’s title should make me think of comparisons to the Hitchcock movie, but instead my thoughts quickly flicker to another monumental sculptural form before which I stood open-mouthed on my last trip to London: Sir Jacob Epstein’s Jacob and the Angel at the Tate Modern, an unlikely alabaster performance that has been regarded as an allegory of Britain’s struggle in WWII, or of the Jews during the Holocaust.

Literally, it is just what it says: at the end of the wrestling match, though Jacob’s thighbone has been dislocated he refuses to give up, and the angel clutches him, sustains him perhaps against his will. The two become as one, their embrace almost a rescue, almost erotic. “Let me go,” cries the angel, “for the day breaketh.” And Jacob, beaten, persists: “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”  It is a terrifying moment.

These two sculptures have no obvious connection:  one Biblical,  the other secular; one a fugue, the other a solo; one affirmative, one hinting at our darkest fear. Yet they touch me in the same place. I think I will have more to say about this.

Prisons of the Imagination

By on June 7, 2011 in Writing

I’ve been working on a story about prisons. As I investigate the history of crime and punishment in Western society, I’m struck by the influence of G.B. Piranesi’s famous renderings: everybody refers to these, cites them, uses them in a frontispiece. Continue Reading →