1948-1969

"I can never ever stop

thinking about Fred Hampton

and youth, and how it ends."

From Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews by Nathaniel Mackey

Centrifugal work begins with good-bye, wants to bid all givens good­-bye. It begins with what words will not do, paint will not do, whatever medium we find ourselves working in will not do. Amenities and conso­lation accrue to a horizon it wants to get beyond, abandoning amenities and consolation or seeking new ones. It will, of course, suffer marginal­ization, temporary in some cases, unremitting in most.

Black centrifugal writing has been and continues to be multiply mar­ginalized. Why would it be otherwise? At a time when academic and crit­ical discourse battens on identity obsession (even as it “problematizes” identity), black centrifugal writing reorients identity in ways that defy prevailing divisions of labor. In the face of a widespread fetishization of collectivity, it dislocates collectivity, flies from collectivity, wants to make flight a condition of collectivity. It says that “we” was never a swifter fiction—not so much a war between family and flight as the familial song of one’s feeling for flight. It says that only such admitted fugitivity stands a ghost of a chance of apportioning prodigal truth. This is one of the lessons it has learned from black music. It remembers that Coleman Hawkins felt no identity crisis playing an instrument invented by a Belgian, that Lester Young referred to the keys of his horn as his people.

Black art, like any other, is innovative, demanding and/ or outside to the extent that it addresses the wings and resistances indigenous to its medium qua medium, address ranging from amorous touch to agonistic embrace, angelic rub. To don such wings and engage such resistances as though they were the stuff of identity and community is to have taken a step toward making them so.

"The wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive."

Happy birthday, James Baldwin.

The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Carports

Photo by Paul Redmond.

Only built for internet linx

1. I recently watched a talk between Arthur Jafa and bell hooks wherein Jafa says that cameras, regardless of the race of their operators, function as surrogates for the white gaze. This was bumping around in the back of my mind as I read this week's Race/Related newsletter, which features a conversation between NYT photo editor Sandra Stevenson and Harvard professor and Aperture guest editor Sarah Lewis on black representation in photography. In light of Jafa's statement, is it any surprise that film photography is rife with racial bias on an operational level?

2. Try reading all of the quotes in this article about Pitti Uomo without throwing your computer out the window. It's really hard!

3. Must-reads on the state of education, discrimination, inequality, and the "surrendering of advantage" in America: Nikole Hannah-Jones' heartbreaking piece on school segregation in New York City and Jia Tolentino on the recently decided Abigail Fisher case.

4. Ludacris is having a concert at Guantanamo Bay on the 4th of July.

5. "Álgos (longing) is what we share, yet nóstos (the return home) is what divides us. It is the promise to rebuild the ideal home that lies at the core of many powerful ideologies of today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with an imaginary one. In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unelected nostalgia breeds monsters."

6. Delete your account.

7. "Denouncing a view or person as racist is easy but trying to reestablish links between left wing parties, movements and white working class communities is the harder job": on Brexit and "when being racist doesn't matter." UPDATE 7/2: London Review of Books contributors looking back and looking forward on the Leave vote.

8. I don't have much to say about Fanta Sylla's Black Film Critic Syllabus except that it's perfect.

9. "What is required now of architecture, especially academic architecture, is not another retreading of the usual antagonisms. Resipsa loquitur: The boring and never-ending Facebook-adjacent arguments around this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale are primarily about mindless parametricist fundamentalism versus patronizing do-gooder fundamentalism. Who cares? Only the difficulty of real adversarial engagement, not fantasy critiques launched from the ivory tower at the profession, will further the conversation. Architecture will not advance one step as either a symbol of the one percent or as a tool of the other 99 percent; it must adapt and grow beyond its currently servile relationships with capital and/or community. What is required is nothing less than a wholesale attack on the discipline’s stagnating orthodoxies, left and right." Peter Zellner going all the way in on the failures of the traveling House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate exhibit (whose Los Angeles arrival I was [unfortunately?] out of town for) is everything. The housing crisis will not be solved with more "brutalist" event websites and intellectually lazy panel discussions.

10. Anyway! Craft beer sucks and Jon Taffer agrees with me, so.

Bonus: I'm always thinking about the mall and thinking about different ways to think about the mall which often leads me to find things like this, a long but worthwhile paper on programmed music in shopping centers, which of course means I also have to remind everyone of these K-Mart bangers from the early 90s.

Mother's Little Helper

I'm not in New York right now, but if I were I'd check out Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts before it closed on the 19th.

Frank O'Hara, "At the Old Place"

Joe is restless and so am I, so restless.
Button’s buddy lips frame “L G T TH O P?”
across the bar.  “Yes!” I cry, for dancing’s
my soul delight.  (Feet! feet!) “Come on!”

Through the streets we skip like swallows.
Howard malingers.  (Come on, Howard.) Ashes
malingers.  (Come on, J.A.)  Dick malingers.
(Come on, Dick.)  Alvin darts ahead. (Wait up,
Alvin.)  Jack, Earl and Someone don’t come.

Down the dark stairs drifts the steaming cha-
cha-cha.  Through the urine and smoke we charge
to the floor.  Wrapped in Ashes’ arms I glide.

(It’s heaven!)  Button lindys with me. (It’s
heaven!) Joe’s two-steps, too, are incredible,
and then a fast rhumba with Alvin, like skipping
on toothpicks.  And the interminable intermissions,

we have them.  Jack, Earl and Someone drift
guiltily in. “I knew they were gay
the minute I laid eyes on them!” screams John.
How ashamed they are of us!   we hope.

---

Lifted from Andrew Epstein's post on the Orlando massacre, Frank O'Hara, and the legacy of gay nightclubs.

SALVE NARCISO NEGRO

Curly Myrick, "It Be's That Way"

It do.  (Shout out to Kenswil!)

(One day I'll post something on this blog aside from links and songs but honestly I don't even know what I'm doing with this thing. You know what, though? IT BE'S THAT WAY.)

Only built for internet linx

1. "Farming simulators placate a need for a collective and organized past as an alternative to contemporary chaos." WOW @ ME NEXT TIME. Speaking of black farmers: they (we tbh) out here.

2. In defense of cliques.

3. Nicholas Hume-Brown at Slate rolls up his sleeves and digs into AllRecipes - apparently the world's most popular English-language food website - and makes a condescension-free broccoli & cheese casserole.

4. While walking through a village on the east coast of England this past winter, I thought of Southern California. It wasn't a palm tree or a free-range chia seed pudding what done it, but rather a low-slung bungalow with a wide, green lawn. With California in the midst of a housing crisis (to say nothing of our water situation), what will become of one California's most enduring icons, the single-family bungalow?

5. "Those black people who make their way into the business are heavily concentrated in stereotypical roles. This has meant sport, entertainment and especially what is euphemistically called urban affairs, often meaning reporting on black people. By contrast, there are very few black journalists writing about politics and national security, international news, big business, culture (as opposed to entertainment) or science and technology – they are essentially absent from large swaths of coverage, and even more sparsely represented among the ranks of editors. This is not a trivial matter, or a subject of concern solely to journalists: the overwhelming whiteness of the media strongly but silently conditions how Americans understand their own country and the rest of the world."

6. Some fun media shade: Politico going in on Salon (featuring Glenn Greenwald doing what he does: tying every-fucking-thing back to Hillary Clinton and her intergalactic Eileen Fisher car coats or whatever).

7. I just discovered an excellent podcast called Racist Sandwich, wherein "chef Soleil Ho and journalist Zahir Janmohamed interview chefs and purveyors of color and tackle food's relationship to race, gender, and class." Their name comes from an incident which gave me one of my favorite images found on the internet (see above) and you can listen to their first episode - featuring Bertony Faustin, Oregon's first black winemaker - here.

8. Remnants of Los Angeles' Little Italy.

9. Vice Dean of the Committee on Strategic Alumni Technology, Estimated salary: $294,664

10. "'All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,' he said. 'Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.'"