Norman Mailer Has Died.

Norman Mailer the writer has been a part of my awareness since high school, when my then dearly beloved English teacher loaned me his copy of The Naked and the Dead, and on hot, dull, summer afternoons, read his long, fascinating articles in old issues of magazines like Life, sprawled out on one of the beds down in my maternal grandparents' basement.

Oh those basements of the houses in town to which both sets of grandparents had retired, after lives of endless, constant farm work. How much eclectic past was collected in those basements, family and county, state and nation, and the world's. How much information I gleaned about those worlds before my time, and the world outside our little nowherelandia, so very very isolated from what I early began to think of as "the real world." I pawed through stacks of mildewed books and magazines, boxes of letters, greeting cards for holidays, birthdays, baptisms and funerals, albums of photographs and trunks of treasured dresses and jewelry from other times, collection of carefully washed medicine bottles, all of it equally mysterious, and somehow, glamorous, because all of it was from a time now gone.

Mailer was a great writer. Perhaps not as great as he intended to be or wished to be. But he was a writer of elemental force, perhaps the last of such writers. He was the first to open many worlds to me -- many of them worlds I wish were not so, such as men seeing women as their primal, primary antagonists, the holders and withholders of sex. That was a difficult concept to grasp for a girl who, as yet, had no idea what sex even was, but instinctively I got the message that this was something I needed to understand, if only as self protection. That is how good a writer he was.

As a child and young adult, down in my grandparents' basements, pondering the flotsam and jetsam so carefully collected and preserved of worlds that I did not inhabit, I began to understand that these basements preserved stories, and that stories could be, and were, connected to each other, and it was by writing that we were best able to learn those stories, and preserve them.

Mailer said, not too long before his death, "I think the novel is on the way out. I also believe, because it’s natural to take one’s own occupation more seriously than others, that the world may be the less for that.”

So do I.

Rest in peace, Norman Mailer.

If You're In NYC November 27 - "Listen Again" NYU Roundtable

This is a function connected to the Experience Music Project, the annual conference held in Seattle every spring. There's going to be food and drink and lots of opportunity to meet, greet and schmooze. Was invited to forward this invitation, so I'm not being indiscreet.

"Listen Again" NYU Roundtable Event Nov 27 @ 7:30 pm

The Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University cordially invites you to attend LISTEN AGAIN

A Roundtable Event on Pop Music, Past and Present with Today's Top Music Critics, Journalists and Scholars celebrating the new Duke University Press release Listen Again: a Momentary History of Pop Music, edited by Eric Weisbard.

FEATURING:

• David Brackett


• Franklin Bruno


• Daphne Carr


• Henry Chalfant


• Holly George-Warren


• Jason King


• W.T. Lhamon, Jr.


• Greil Marcus


• Benjamin Melendez


• Mark Anthony Neal


• Ned Sublette


• Steve Waksman


• Eric Weisbard

WHEN: TUESDAY NOVEMBER 27, 7:30-9:30 pm

WHERE: Studio 914, The Kimmel Center for University Life, New York University, 60 Washington Square South at LaGuardia Place and the South end of Washington Square Park www.nyu.edu/kimmel.center

Admission is free, but RSVP is required.

RESERVATION AND INFO LINE: (212) 992 8405

Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis. Venue is wheelchair-accessible, with a wheelchair-accessible bathroom.

Picture ID is required for entrance to the building.

Sometimes Your Heart Will Break

At the library this young man appeared, bewildered and puzzled. He wanted something but didn't have the communication skills to explain what it was. He was sent to the reference librarian, which today wasn't me, but as I was probably the oldest person around he assumed it was me.

He might have been 20. He wanted to know something about the Dominican Republic, but it took a while to figure out what it was. This was the story, as I finally got it:

He'd been in a taxi over the weekend and the driver had mentioned something that evidently hit the guy's curiosity organ hard. The driver had said something like the DR had the oldest medical school in this part of the world. He wanted to find out more information about that. For some reason this excited him deeply, though he's not a Dominican himself.

I just happened to know something on this order, because Vaquero shot a music video there for his "Cowboy Rumba" album, in the ruins of what was the first hospital in Santo Domingo's Old Town that contains the Western Hemisphere's first cathedral, first monastery, first hospital, first university, and its first court of law. "In declaring the city a world heritage site, UNESCO recognized Santo Domingo as the cradle of European civilization in the New World." I told him that Columbus's son had been charge there, while Columbus would go back to Europe looking for more money to fund further explorations (for pillage and rapine, nevermind).

This was the most difficult reference question I've ever answered because the guy's education had been so deficient. He hardly knew who Columbus was. His sense of geography nearly non-existant. A computer isn't the most helpful when it comes to maps for explaining these things, so we found an atlas in a book to assist spatial orientation. He had no idea what to do in a library.

But -- something had excited him, something about which he wanted to know more, and it brought him to a library! I hope in my attempts to figure out what it was he was looking for I didn't ruin that excitement. Finding a history around here that would focus on the Dominican Republic and its early years with the Columbus family isn't easy, whether in Spanish or English. His reading skills are low too. I looked for online things instead, and magazines like the National Geographic, that have lots of photos. Fortunately the library has the CD-ROM National Geographic. Over the years the magazine's done a fair amount on Santo Domingo (the capital of the DR). And he does know how to use CDs etc. So I think I left him with the means to look for whatever it was he was looking for. I don't know if I made him happier. But I hope his experience in the library was unthreatening and pleasant enough to have him come back again, and allow himself to get excited about more things that he does not at this time even know exist.

I just can't help but think of how differently this very young man has been raised from how my 14-year-old friend, the son of our friends. It makes me cry. Because, you know, I don't think my young friend is intrinsically more intelligent, curious than this young man. It's that his opportunities have been so very, very, very great and so very much encouraged in every way, by EVERYONE he interacts with, from his parents, his other relatives, his teachers, and even the friends of his parents. It's just so DAMNED UNFAIR. Every kid should have these opportunities to learn and be enabled to follow her - his curiosity wherever it leads him - her. That this is not so in this country is a crime.

Something Good

An invitation -- to a Whitney reception next month, "celebrating" Kara Walker's show.

Which, weirdly, is a co-reception "celebration" for the Whitney's retrospective of another of our favorite living artists, a founder of the Conceptual Art movement, Lawrence Weiner. He also happens to be a long-time friend, with whom Vaquero has done a few projects over the years.

This is going to be so much fun, since there are going to be people there we know -- unlike the Guggenheim Richard Prince dinner for his retrospective we attended last month. (Not that we didn't enjoy ourselves anyway, with such high quality champagne and food, and the human comedy.)

For more information on Lawrence you can go here. And here.

Kara Walker

Kara Walker is one of our favorite living artists -- we fantasized having a cover by her on The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square. We didn't think it could happen, and it didn't. But she was very gracious in her rejection of the gig -- Too Busy, preparing for a show.

And now the show is up, at the Whitney Museum of American Art.A tremendo review of the show ran in today's NY Times Art section.

The problem I had with the review is that it could only see the issues of slavery and race in her work. Equally so, the issue she tackles is that of women, and their special place in slavery, and the reviewer seems to have missed that.

This a dense and complex, gothic and spooky artist. Her work is a most appropriate national expression of Halloween, not least because so much of it is created in the 18th and 19th century medium of the silhouette cut-out. Her work says so much about those racists who are currently placing nooses as warnings to African Americans.

[ And then there is the theme: race. It dominates everything, yet within it Ms. Walker finds a chaos of contradictory ideas and emotions. She is single-minded in seeing racism as a reality, but of many minds about exactly how that reality plays out in the present and the past. For her the reliable old dualities — white versus black , strong versus weak, victim versus predator — are volatile and shifting. And she uses her art — mocking, shaming, startlingly poignant, excruciatingly personal — to keep them this way.

Nothing about her very early life would seem to have predestined her for this task. Born in 1969, she grew up in an integrated California suburb, part of a generation for whom the uplift and fervor of the civil rights movement and the want-it-now anger of Black Power were yesterday’s news.

When she was 13, her family moved to Atlanta, and her life changed. There, she discovered, integration had not been fully internalized. As she stumbled her way through the mortifications of adolescence, she was constantly reminded, in large and small ways, that she was black, and she was made to hurt for that. ]

John Stewart Apologizes to Jeremy Scahill

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/04/1355211

[ Last night on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Jon Stewart apologized to independent journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill for a critical interview earlier this year on Scahill’s book “Blackwater: The Rise of The World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” [includes rush transcript] ]

Mellencamp - Jena 6

Mellencamp sings of Jena 6 case

[ The man who sang "Small Town" is now using his Americana rock sound to weigh in on the "Jena Six" case.

"Oh oh oh Jena, take your nooses down."

Those are the words repeated over and over in the chorus of John Mellencamp's newest song, "Jena," according to his official Web site, www.mellencamp.com.

Mellencamp has been working with producer T-Bone Burnett on a "very exciting and intriguing new album" and already has filmed a video for "Jena," according to a release on the site.
The video -- shot in black and white with red writing on the screen throughout -- has been posted on his Web site, on Mellencamp's MySpace.com page and on YouTube.com.

It features images of the civil rights movement, people being lynched by nooses, images from Jena, La., and recent news clippings from the Jena Six case, in which six black high school students were charged with attempted murder in the beating of a white student. Civil rights leaders organized a rally last month that drew 20,000 or more to Jena.

Reaction to the video has been mixed. Some have commented on Web pages that they will never again listen to or support Mellencamp. Others have said they think he is bringing light to a much-needed issue. ]

Vaquero got e-mail that says Mellencamp is going to join T-Bone tomorrow afternoon at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in SF. This is something they just now decided to do! (Vaquero takes off tomorrow for the festival, with guitar, laptop and cowboy hat; he's performing Sunday, at the Porch stage, 3:30 p.m.)

Big Coffers and a Rising Voice Lift a New Conservative Group

They want Iran.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/us/politics/30watch.html?ex=1348804800&en=99584dd6163c334b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss
[ Big Coffers and a Rising Voice Lift a New Conservative Group

Freedom’s Watch, a deep-pocketed conservative group led by two former senior White House officials, made an audacious debut in late August when it began a $15 million advertising campaign designed to maintain Congressional support for President Bush’s troop increase in Iraq.

Founded this summer by a dozen wealthy conservatives, the nonprofit group is set apart from most advocacy groups by the immense wealth of its core group of benefactors, its intention to far outspend its rivals and its ambition to pursue a wide-ranging agenda. Its next target: Iran policy.

Next month, Freedom’s Watch will sponsor a private forum of 20 experts on radical Islam that is expected to make the case that Iran poses a direct threat to the security of the United States, according to several benefactors of the group.
Although the group declined to identify the experts, several were invited from the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group with close ties to the White House. Some institute scholars have advocated a more confrontational policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, including keeping military action as an option. ]

[ With a forceful message and a roster of wealthy benefactors, Freedom’s Watch has quickly emerged from the crowded field of nonprofit advocacy groups as a conservative answer to the nine-year-old liberal MoveOn.org, which vehemently opposes the Iraq war.

The idea for Freedom’s Watch was hatched in March at the winter meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Manalapan, Fla., where Vice President Dick Cheney was the keynote speaker, according to participants. Next week, the group is moving into a 10,000-square-foot office in the Chinatown section of Washington, with plans to employ as many as 50 people by early next year. ]

A Rights Advocate’s Work Divides Dominicans - SONIA PIERRE

From the NY Times.

[ Born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian parents, Ms. Pierre, 44, has spent her life advocating on behalf of Haitians and ethnic Haitians who hold Dominican citizenship but are subjected to racial discrimination in a society that places a high value on lighter skin. At the age of 13, she organized a protest by sugar-cane workers in one of the Dominican slums — known as bateyes — where she grew up seeing Haitian workers oppressed by their Dominican bosses.

Her current troubles with the government stem from 2005, when her organization, Movement for Dominico-Haitian Women, took to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights the case of two ethnic Haitian children who were denied Dominican birth certificates. The court found in their favor, ordering the government to provide the birth certificates and pay $8,000 in damages to each of the children. ]

[ Race is a complicated issue in the Dominican Republic, where much of the population traces its ancestry to the African slaves brought to the island, but where few regard themselves as black. Ms. Pierre said it was considered a compliment for a light-skinned Dominican to tell a dark-skinned one that he had the soul of a white person. Saying that someone thinks like a black person, Ms. Pierre says, is the equivalent of labeling the person ignorant. ]

[ “Haitianization” is what Dominicans call the negative influences that poor Haitians bring to their side of the island. Mr. Morales, the foreign minister, explained in his letter protesting Ms. Pierre’s award that his country could not handle the huge numbers of illegal Haitian immigrants. He put the blame on the United States and other countries for failing to improve conditions in Haiti. ]

Security Vacuum Cleaner

link to official document Federal Registry

[ Buried in the September 5 issue of the Federal Register, was a notice that this Thursday, September 20, the Transportation Safety Administration (TSA) will hold public hearings on their ¨Secure Flight Plan.¨

Come with me into a nightmare world where American citizens will have to obtain permission from the government before they can travel by air in the U.S. ]

[ Beginning in February 2008, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) will implement their ¨Advance Passenger Information System (APIS),¨ the gist of which is that you will need permission from the United States Government to travel on any air or sea vessel that goes to, from or through the U.S. The travel companies will not be able to issue a boarding pass until you are cleared by DHS. This applies to ALL passengers, US citizens and visitors alike. And how do you get said permission to travel? That´s for your government to know and you to never find out. ]

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20070926&articleId=6892

http://www.papersplease.org/wp/

http://dmses.dot.gov/docimages/p102/484384.pdf

Candidate Support Rally Washington Square Park

I head up to Washington Square Park as is my wont at this time of day when it is so nice outside to go over yesterday's work.

Can't get in. I'm assaulted at all sides by obama supporters asking me for money to support his candidacy, to wear his buttons, etc.

I am locked out of the park. I've been locked out of it since it was supposed to open at 6 or is it 7 a.m. this morning. The place is barricaded and NYC cops -- whose overtime here I'm paying for -- because -- Obama is having a Support Obama rally at 6 p.m. and security cannot allow any real human beings, er, voters even walking on the ground for 12 hours before hand.

In the meantime for most of this week I've not been able to go anywhere on the east side within 40 square blox of the UN because of clownface nattering on about human rights, freedom of speech and why reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is the wrong way to deal with climate change -- while, of course anyone who protests what he says is arrested, and / or kept 40 blox away from him.

This country's so very f*cked.

requiem for katrina

ATale of God's Will (a requiem for katrina), on the jazz label, Blue Note, is mostly composed, conducted, produced by trumpeter-composer, Terrence Blanchard. This album is an expansion of the music he wrote for Spike Lee's HBO series, When the Levees Broke. He includes new material on this expansion of the sound track by members of his band. It's been what we've been listening to most since the end of August, i.e. the anniversary of the breaking of the New Orleans's levees, sometimes several times in a single day.

This is a difficult period. It's now the interregnum between the two great catastrophe-disasters of our entwined lives, between August 29th and September 11, both of which changed our lives and those of the people we are most close to, for the rest of our days. Both of these disasters, if not exactly caused by the current political regime, were made infinitely worse by their actions and non-actions both.

These are the watershed for us: before we were still young; after, we no longer were.

So then it seems appropriate that this album is just a bit more movie score-ish in places than we would normally like. The music of our lives, our national lives, as heard by a movie composer.

The cuts:

Ghost of Congo Square
Levees
Wading Through
Ashé
In Time of Need
Ghost of Betsy
The Water
Mantra Intro
Mantra
Over There
Ghost of 1927
Funeral Dirge
Dear Mom

There is a great deal of history embedded in these titles, if you know New Orleans and the Mississippi River history. For example, "Ghost of 1927" refers to the great floods of 1927 and 1928 when the entire Mississippi drainage system, from the Missouri Platt on down over-topped the banks and levees, concluding with the deliberate dynamiting of the levees that drowned (black) thousands in the lower parishes of Louisiana, to save the property of the capitalists.