Monday, August 30th, 2010

E.L. Doctorow On The State Of The Arts & Artists

E.L. Doctorow has a brilliant essay in this week’s issue of The Nation on where American artists and arts are now at this point in history. An excerpt:

Artists in America don’t usually band together. They are independent entrepreneurs of their imaginations. They create universes of which they are the sole occupants. They may influence one another, they may be bundled by critics as members of an aesthetic movement, but they work alone and think alone, and if they gather on social occasions, like the members of any trade, it is for warmth, for they all know how few of them there are and how unseen by most of the population.

But there are critical moments in our national life when artists do come together as a constituency…

(snip of a beautiful passage on artists in the 1930s)

So here now today, in a new century, is this assemblage of artists, poets, musicians and playwrights, and we must ask what is the crisis today that impels them, in all their brilliant individuality, to present themselves as a group show?

The fact is that some terrible deep damage to the nation was done in the aftermath of 9/11. The government that swung into action misdirected its response and, with devious arguments to the American people, took us to war. In short time it had adopted the policies of an authoritarian state. Americans found themselves the sponsors of torture, and of the endless imprisonment without trial or counsel of presumed terrorists; they learned well after the fact that they themselves were subject to secret illegal surveillance by their government, and they saw their Constitution disdained with the unilateral abrogation of international treaties such as the Geneva Convention, though such treaties are constitutionally “the supreme Law of the Land.” All these measures were claimed as wartime expedients and promoted with a propaganda of fear. At the same time, the scientific evidence of global warming was ignored, religious literalism was put in the way of medical advance, regulatory agencies were given over to the very industries they were to regulate and, rife with wartime corruption, this government left to wallow an American population severely alienated by gross economic inequalities, the forces of wealth thriving at the expense of the middle class and the shrill demagogues of right-wing radio and television shouting down all principled disagreement with what was happening. The resulting trauma to the American people’s sense of themselves and their country is still being felt. We have not wanted to believe that a sitting president and his advisers could have so given themselves to an agenda of social, economic and environmental deconstruction, and with such relentless violations of constitutional law as to render themselves, definably, as subversives.

(snip, you just gotta go read it)

…All of this together would seem to define a national identity crisis, a terribly weakened sense of ourselves as a proud citizenry in charge of our lives—a calamity of heart as bad as what America suffered in the Great Depression.

Under these circumstances, our art, literature and music, all of which comes up from the bottom, uncensored, unfiltered, unrequested—the artists of whatever medium always coming out of nowhere—does tell us that something is firm and enduring after all in a country given to free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate.

Read it in full here.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 3:27 pm | 0 Comments

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

The End Of Darkness?

Not here to give idiots any more earned media–except to say “Hmmmm, ‘End of Darkness’, MLK evocation…and all this Beck/Tea Party/idiot BS is not about race?” OK.

But more to the point, I’m back. Saying HEY after another summer of our national discontent to give you a quick update on what’s up in my world.

I’ve been working furiously on Who We Be: The Colorization of America and so the good news is you can expect to see some of the fruits of that in the coming months, as well as more writings.

Since I will be doing a lot of heavy lifting for the book–and a couple of other huge projects I’ll be telling you about soon–you won’t see much of me publicly over the next several months. If you’re interested in that, check the Dates page.

But I will be back around here a bit more. I’ll be working on updating The Reader with more articles I’ve done over the years.

For everything else, you can always follow me too at my Twitter feed at Zentronix.

Back to school, back to work, back to fighting the idiots. See you soon.

posted by Jeff Chang @ 6:45 am | 0 Comments

Feed Me!

Revolutions

DJ Nu-Mark :: Take Me With You
DJ Nu-Mark remixes the diaspora…party ensues!
El General + Various Artists :: Mish B3eed : Khalas Mixtape V. 1
The crew at Enough Gaddafi bring the most important mixtape of 2011–the street songs that launched the Tunisian & Egyptian Revolutions…
J. Period + Black Thought + John Legend :: Wake Up! Radio mixtape
Remixing the classic LP w/towering contributions from Rakim, Q-Tip + Mayda Del Valle
Lyrics Born :: As U Were
Bright production + winning rhymes in LB’s most accessible set ever
Model Minority :: The Model Minority Report
The SoCal Asian American rap scene that produced FM keeps surprising…
Mogwai :: Hardcore Won't Die But You Will
Dare we call it majestic?
Taura Love Presents :: Picki People Volume One
From LA via Paris with T-Love, the global post-Dilla generation goes for theirs…

Word

Cormac McCarthy :: Blood Meridian
Read this now before Hollywood f*#ks it up.
Dave Tompkins :: How To Wreck A Nice Beach
Book of the decade, nuff said.
Joe Flood :: The Fires
The definitive account of why the Bronx burned
Mark Fischer :: Capitalist Realism
K-Punk’s philosophical manifesto reads like his blog, snappy and compelling. Just replace pop music with post-post-Marxism. Pair with Josh Clover’s 1989 for the full hundred.
Nell Irvin Painter :: The History of White People
Well worth a Glenn Beck rant…and everyone’s scholarly attention
Robin D.G. Kelley :: Thelonious Monk : The Life And Times Of An American Original
Monk as he was meant to be written
Tim Wise :: Colorblind
Wise’s call for a color-conscious agenda in an era of “post-racial” politics is timely
Victor Lavalle :: Big Machine
Victor Lavalle does it again!