LUKE CAGE

HOLD UP HOLD THE PHONE HOLD EVERYTHING THERE'S NEW DESSA

Eugene Lee as August Wilson in "How I Learned What I Learned"

August Wilson, The Art of Theater No. 14 (Winter 1999)

INTERVIEWER

You were the director.

WILSON

And I acted when the actors didn’t show up. As the director, I knew all the lines and I took over more times than I wanted to. I didn’t know much about directing, but I was the only one willing to do it. Someone had looked around and said, “Who’s going to be the director?” I said, “I will.” I said that because I knew my way around the library. So I went to look for a book on how to direct a play. I found one called The Fundamentals of Play Directing and checked it out. I didn’t understand anything in it. It was all about form and mass and balance. I flipped through the book and there in Appendix A I discovered what to do on the first day of rehearsal. It said, “Read the play.” So I went to the first rehearsal very confidently and I said, “Okay, this is what we’re going to do. We’re going to read the play.” We did that. Now what? I hadn’t got to Appendix B. So I said, “Let’s read the play again.” That night I went back to the book and sort of figured out what to do from that point on.

perfect song, perfect vid

BBC Proms: Bowie Prom – Ashes To Ashes

Andrew Bird: Live From The Great Room - The New Saint Jude (ft. John C. Reilly & Tom Brosseau)

sailors fighting in the dance hall

NONE OF YOU TOLD ME ABOUT CHARLES BOWDEN YOU'RE ALL REALLY MOTHERFUCKING FIRED

I MEAN IT THIS TIME

and I kneel down and pray

you can turn it off or on

That first "Hey baby" just absolutely fucking slays me.

So far 2016 seems like one of those years that gets described in history books like "As the world slid farther and faster towards fascism, most citizens felt powerless to do anything other than witness the horror." Jesus fucking wept.

saving my sanity WHAT THERE IS OF IT today, the voices of angels

case/lang/veirs - Full Concert (opbmusic)

beauty

Method actors like to talk about something called “public solitude” — that is, the ability to seem alone onstage. Really, to be alone, without wondering how you look to the audience. They will tell you this is the basis of naturalistic acting: to forget about the audience. Only then can you build a character, pay attention to others onstage and act out a scene.

To write a story also requires public solitude. You can’t be worrying how you sound. You can’t wonder whether you or your characters are likable or smart or interesting. You have to be inside the scene — the tactile world of tables and chairs and sunlight — attending to your characters, people who exist for you in nonvirtual reality. This takes weird brain chemistry. (A surprising number of novelists hear voice, and not metaphorically. They hear voice in their heads.) It also takes years of reading — solitary reading.

For all these reasons, writing fiction is pretty much the opposite of writing a good tweet, or curating an Instagram feed. It’s the opposite of the personal-­­­slash-professional writing that is now part of our everyday lives. More than ever, we need writers who are unprofessional, whose private worlds come first.

- NYT

Women are good at translation. We are culturally programmed for it. We learn early on to translate the world we inhabit: to adapt the stories that permeate our culture to have meaning for us; to adapt our own stories to be amenable to the male ears that might be listening; to adapt our bodies, our voices, our words, our thoughts to make them acceptable.  We translate to find our own stories in a male narrative, and our own vision in a world framed by a male lens.

From childhood, we develop this skill....Of course, this type of translation is not a linear search for linguistic equivalence. It does not prioritise a seeming originary text. It does not see a clear progression from source to target. It does not even consider fidelity to the source important – because that source invariably negates the female experience. It is a lateral, rhizomatic form of translation that gives a resigned shrug and weary sigh to the traditionalists’ frequently, and tediously, trotted out axiom, traduttore traditore(translator, traitor), and carries on regardless with its own meaning creation and quiet works of subversion.

- Jane Griffiths

Young millennials get more attention for their student loan burdens, but students faced such hefty burdens nearly 15 years earlier. Most college-educated people in their 30s and early 40s went to college just as tuition rates began their meteoric climbs, and at or around the time when the federal government got out of the student loan game and turned over the origination of federally subsidized loans to private companies like Sallie Mae. These students entered the working world at either the end of the first tech bubble, shortly after 9/11, in the middle of two wars or at the start of the Great Recession.


YES

FUCKING THANK YOU

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST

NOT EVERYONE IN THEIR FORTIES NOW WAS PART OF THE FUCKING "BOOM" IN THE NINETIES/EARLY AUGHTS

But we're not the Boomers or their kids! so nobody gives a shit.

books read in July 2016

Fiction is in red. Date of first publication in (parentheses).

35. The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries, Jessa Crispin (2015) (AKA 'Eat, Pray, Sulk'; remarkably shallow and twee)
36. An Abbreviated Life, Ariel Leve (2016)
37. Stone Mattress, Margaret Atwood (2014) (deliciously wicked indeed)
38. The Lyre of Orpheus, Robertson Davies (1988) (reread)
39. Truth: Red, White & Black, Robert Morales and Kyle Baker (2004)
40. The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides (2011) (just BAD)
41. Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb, Nick Schou (2006)
42. The Killing Game: Selected Writings by the author of Dark Alliance, Gary Webb (2011)
43. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, Gary Webb (2nd ed., 1999)
44. You Will Know Me, Megan Abbott (2016) (very disappointing; time to stop buying her books new)
45. Aftermath, Rachel Cusk (2012)
46. Hagar, Barbara Hambly (2015)
47. Death on the Moon, Barbara Hambly (2016)


all 2016 booklist posts

smash those faces bro

....so we're watching The Social Network (yeah I am ALWAYS this behind the cultural curve, I go back so far, I'm in front of me as McCartney sings) and the impression I have so far from the first half-hour is that if Zuckerdude had been able to keep his mouth shut long enough to get a pity fuck from a townie girl, our future here-and-now would be OH SO VERY different.

Chuck Klosterman apparently just went through incredible contortions (and so many words!) to answer "What artist would represent Rock and Roll far in the future?" and admitted the obvious fucking answer would be the Beatles, but then he'd get paid about ten cents for the goddamn article. Then he admits the second obvious fucking answer is Elvis, but somehow he has to cram Bob Dylan in there, because....don't ask me, man. (Bob Dylan, rock? Really?) So he talks and talks and he talks and then finally the grand conclusion is --

Chuck fucken Berry.

I like Chuck Berry okay but oh my fucking God, no.

Also nobody has to pay anyone else to cudgel their brains and kill trees pixels to come up with an answer to this question anymore, because I found it for all time after thinking for five fucking minutes:

BO DIDDLEY

You know who is not mentioned once in that fucken article as far as I can tell?

BO DIDDLEY

Yeah, Klosterman, I don't motherfucking care if two white people picked Chuck Berry to represent us all on Voyager. The answer to your fucking question is

BO DIDDLEY

I mean, JESUS FUCKING CHRIST. He caps it all off triumphantly with a quote from John goddamn Lennon anointing Chuck Berry. I can top you there, man. (And of course I can't find this interview right now, dammit. I know I have it in a book somewhere....)

INTERVIEWER: What musicians have influenced you?
JOE STRUMMER: Bo Diddley.
INTERVIEWER: ....and what other musicians have influenced you?
JOE STRUMMER: Bo Diddley.

This right here is the fucking biggest way Gen Exers get fucked over, man. We're squeezed to death between the Baby Boom and the Millennials, nobody gave a damn when our futures went bust in the nineties, grunge is a hissing and a byword when it's not a joke, and our NYT-sanctified spokesperson is....Chuck fucking Klosterman.

Who has apparently never heard a BO DIDDLEY RECORD IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE. I don't even fucking know. It's like being represented by Elmer Fudd.

Portishead - S.O.S. (ABBA cover) (for Jo Cox)

Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each other. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.

-- Olivia Laing

The signature to a life requires
the search for a method
rejection of posturing
trust in the witnesses
a vial of invisible ink
a sheet of paper held steady
after the end-stroke
above a deciphering flame

- Adrienne Rich, 2011

Wood's own feelings about the photo have evolved. He remembers feeling angry at Arbus for "making fun of a skinny kid with a sailor suit." But today he thinks of the image as one of the great conversation pieces of all time. And Arbus clearly fascinates him. He riffs about her for a good 15 minutes.

"She catches me in a moment of exasperation. It's true, I was exasperated. My parents had divorced and there was a general feeling of loneliness, a sense of being abandoned. I was just exploding. She saw that and it's like . . . commiseration. She captured the loneliness of everyone. It's all people who want to connect but don't know how to connect. And I think that's how she felt about herself. She felt damaged and she hoped that by wallowing in that feeling, through photography, she could transcend herself."

Wood remembers that his interest in guns and grenades prompted teachers at his Catholic grade school to suggest he see a shrink. ("They thought I was deranged" is how he puts it.) His father dismissed the idea. Wood ended up working for years with his father, a former professional tennis player who invented, and for a long time installed, a new kind of court surface. Wood tried a few different careers after that and eventually moved to Los Angeles to try his hand at acting. He found the auditioning process humiliating and he quit. Now he sells insurance.

He doesn't talk often about his cameo with Diane Arbus but it's been a long time since he was embarrassed about it. Once he wanted to break into theater, and when he started his own production company he knew what to call it: Grenade Boy Productions.

- "Double Exposure," Washington Post (just got the new bio)

What do you fear when you fear everything? Time passing and not passing. Death and life. I could say my lungs never filled with enough air, no matter how many puffs of my inhaler I took. Or that my thoughts moved too quickly to complete, severed by a perpetual vigilance. But even to say this wold abet the lie that terror can be described, when anyone who's ever known it knows that it has no components but is instead everywhere inside you all the time, until you can recognize yourself only by the tensions that string one minute to the next. And yet I keep lying, by describing, because how else can I avoid this second, and the one after it? This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.

- Adam Haslett

Angélique Kidjo performing "Shango Wa" Live on KCRW

Ali was attending a rally for fair housing in his hometown of Louisville when he said:

Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights? No I’m not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. This is the day when such evils must come to an end. I have been warned that to take such a stand would cost me millions of dollars. But I have said it once and I will say it again. The real enemy of my people is here. I will not disgrace my religion, my people or myself by becoming a tool to enslave those who are fighting for their own justice, freedom and equality…. If I thought the war was going to bring freedom and equality to 22 million of my people they wouldn’t have to draft me, I’d join tomorrow. I have nothing to lose by standing up for my beliefs. So I’ll go to jail, so what? We’ve been in jail for 400 years.

This is not only an assertion of black power, but a statement of international solidarity: of oppressed people coming together in an act of global resistance. It was a statement that connected wars abroad with attacks on the black, brown and poor at home, and it was said from the most hyper exalted platform our society offered at the time: the platform of being the Champ. These views did not only earn him the hatred of the mainstream press and the right wing of this country. It also made him a target of liberals in the media as well as the mainstream civil rights movement, who did not like Ali for his membership in the Nation of Islam and opposition to what was President Lyndon Johnson’s war.

- Dave Zirin

books read in June 2016

Fiction is in red. Date of first publication in (parentheses).

26. To the Power of Three, Laura Lippman (2005)
27. True Crime Addict: How I Lost Myself in the Mysterious Disappearance of Maura Murray, James Renner (2016)
28. End of Watch, Stephen King (2016) (not as good as the second one -- also features an evil ambitious policewoman, boo)
29. Under the Harrow, Flynn Berry (2016) (quite good)
30. Imagine Me Gone, Adam Haslett (2016) (wildly overpraised; Franzen Lite)
31. The Girls, Emma Cline (2016) (terrible, so disappointing)
32. Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind over Body, Jo Marchant (2016) (okay, v pop-sci)
33. While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Young Man's Descent into Madness, Eli Sanders (2016 ) (So many. Sentence fragments. Not bad, much less gripping than the reporting it's based on)
34. The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Olivia Laing (2016) (pretty good)


all 2016 booklist posts

There is an Indiana Jones–style, “It had to be snakes” inevitability about the fact that Donald Trump is Clinton’s Republican rival. Of course Hillary Clinton is going to have to run against a man who seems both to embody and have attracted the support of everything male, white, and angry about the ascension of women and black people in America. Trump is the antithesis of Clinton’s pragmatism, her careful nature, her capacious understanding of American civic and government institutions and how to maneuver within them. Of course a woman who wants to land in the Oval Office is going to have to get past an aggressive reality-TV star who has literally talked about his penis in a debate.

- New York Magazine

'we're just basically a punk band'