Victor D. Infante's Blog, page 183

Poetry, poetry, poetry ....

I've been buzzing all day after last night's Poets in the Salon reading at the ARTSWorcester Gallery. Seriously, the energy in that gallery was amazing, and with a night of all-new, never-read-in-public-before work, there was a tension and urgency I just can't describe. The whole damn thing came of far, far better than it had any right to. I've been describing it as a "high-wire act," and it really was. The whole mess was just exhilarating, and came off without a hitch. Absolutely magical. Big thanks to Lea, Alex, Nick, Shane, Josephine, Cynthia, Jan and everyone else involved and everyone who turned up for such a wonderful evening of poetry, art and music.

Funnily enough, my next gig also hinges on new work. I'll be reading for The Encyclopedia Show Providence at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 10, at Brown University in Providence. More info as we get closer, but the theme is "EXPLOSIVES!" And I'm pretty sure it'll live up to that.  I've been to all but one of the Encyclopedia Shows down there, and they've all been killer experiences. Megan Thoma doesn't mess around.

In the nearer future, there's agreat article by Richard Duckett in today's Telegram & Gazette on superstar poet (and all around great person) Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, who will be performing Monday at the Dirty Gerund Poetry Series at Ralph's Rock Diner with her other half, the always hilarious Shappy Seasholtz and one of Worcester's finest musicians, James Keyes. Cristin & Shappy will also be performing at the Kitchen Sessions on Saturday and Cristin will be featuring at the Women of the World slam in Providence Sunday. Check them out while they're here! 

Thursdays Are For Pimping!

Lots and lots going on today!

*In my column, I talk to guitarist Chris Opacki of the band Crumb, and continue my quest to develop an appreciation of heavy metal and hard-core despite my profound ambivalence!  

*In TWSN, recommendations for great events, including Jordan Valentine & the Sunday Saints, Gandalf Murphy and the Slambovian Circus of Dreams, the Cantstanjas, Astronomer, a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe and celebrity impersonators the Edwards Twins!

*And lastly, WoMag has a nice write up of tonight's festivities at ARTSWorcester, which will feature ALL NEW POEMS by myself, Lea Deschenes, Alex Charalambides and Nick Davis, as well as music by Shane Hall! You should totally come. It's free!

Spirit ... Heart ... Mind ... Hand

Of the many sins the new TV show The Cape needs to be called on, the line "I want to show my son that one man can make a difference," is simply the first of them. Because, one? Cheesy. Second, and perhaps more salient to our discussion, it's a crock. Without the backup and skills of the Carnival of Crime (who, OK, are pretty awesome) and the computer skills of Summer Glau's Orwell (also a saving grace for the show), betrayed cop Vince Faraday is clearly pretty much in over his head.

There's a mythology of the lone hero, and it's probably got a billion sources, from knights errant to ronin to gunslingers. Perhaps, in America, it's a symptom of rugged individualism. I don't know. But really, I don't think anyone really buys it anymore. Certainly, one needs not look too deeply into the culture to see that teams of more-or-less equals with complimentary skills and character traits largely trump the lone-gun "superhero." Sidekicks have given way to partners, and it may be Harry Potter or Buffy Summers on the marquis, but the fact of the matter is, without Hermione Granger & Ron Weasley or  Willow Rosenberg & Xander Harris ... well, both Harry and Buffy would be the first to admit they'd be lost.

These relationships, originally presented as being between heroes and their friends, both grow into actual units. The relationships provide emotional stability, yes, but also mutual support, skill and power. This is particularly illustrated In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Primeval, when the Slayer, her friends and their mentor, Rupert Giles, magically meld to create an entity to defeat an unstoppable Frankenstein's monster called Adam. The spell highlight what each brings to the mix: spirit, heart, mind and hand. Buffy, the hand (or more precisely, fist)  in the equation, is gifted with their attributes, such as Giles' mind (particularly his ability to speak Sumerian) and Willow's spirit (again, more precisely, her magical power.) One would think Xander's superfluous to this mix, but when Adam questions what Buffy's become, she replies, "You'll never understand the source of our power." Because the source is that unrelenting trust and love, which Xander exemplifies. It's what allows them to become close enough to use the spell effectively.

Many years ago, I wrote:

It's this reliance on others that differentiates her from the succession of Slayers preceding her all the way back to the dawn of mankind. This eventually brings her into conflict and confrontation with the spirit of the first Slayer, perturbed by her lack of self-reliance. Buffy responds to the first Slayer's accusations in typical Buffy fashion:

"I walk. I talk. I shop, I sneeze," replies Buffy. "I'm gonna be a fireman when the floods roll back. There's trees in the desert since you moved out, and I don't sleep on a bed of bones...You just have to get over the whole primal power thing. You're not the source of me."

Buffy may as well have been speaking to the canon of heroes that came before her, lone wolves with sidekicks, living alone and isolated. Buffy rejects that, and rejects that just because her friends are physically weaker than her, that she's their superior. (Although to be fair, she struggles with that a bit, as illustrated in the episode Conversations With Dead People, but life is a process, not a series of epiphanies. People work out their issues in tides, not straight lines.)

And the formula did change in Buffy's wake. In addition to Harry Potter and his friends, it became de rigueur for heroes to emerge in sets, rather than individuals. Sarah Jane Smith, of Doctor Who fame, becomes the mentor figure to a trio of teenage alien investigators: her adopted son, Luke Smith, who has computerlike intelligence, and his friends Maria Jackson and Clyde Langer (later, Maria is replaced by budding investigative reporter Rani Chandra.) In Percy Jackson & the Olympians, young demigod Percy is accompanied by Satyr Grover Underwood and friend Annabeth Chase.One imagines there's even something of the pattern in the Twilight books, with Bela, Edward and Jacob, but I'm largely ignorant on that particular subject. Even Bruce Wayne has abandoned the pretext that his extended "family" are somehow separate from him, creating a new operating structure where they can operate interdependently on a global scale, and including heroes in different countries, including the much buzzed about Muslim French-Algerian Batman, and the original Robin, Dick Grayson, still gets to be Batman. We're a long way from "An Army of One," as the old Army recruiting slogan went. Trust and reliance on others -- things which our culture has often sent mixed message about -- are enjoying a weird sort of cultural vogue, a shift that seems almost odd when we still have politicians talking about self-reliance, and sneering derisively at empathy.

But then, politicians, culturally speaking, are usually the sideshow. Their thinking -- even good ones -- is often years behind the times. It's just human nature. They're generally older, and conservative with a small "c." Their conception of what is "liberal" and "conservative"  is fairly different from their youngest constituents. Politicians drive politics, but youth drives media and culture in a very real way. And, also in a very way, youths' perception is driven by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Pushing the politics aside for a moment,and arguments for or against it,  young people look out at the wars and see armed forces working in a different way than generations past have. They understand that the military isn't simply men with guns in long lines firing at one another, but rather they see a men and women, of different backgrounds, with different skill sets working together toward a common goal. They see people with guns, yes, but also specialists in computers, cryptography, explosives and more. They see the concert between military forces and intelligence forces, and understand that each have their role to play in achieving a goal. And certainly, they see a place for individual acts of courage -- such as when Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, the first living recipient of the Medal of Honor, saved the lives of members of his squad -- but on the whole, they have a sense of teamwork and separate skill sets meshing into a greater whole. That's a powerful shift, but it's one the culture has been echoing with increasing regularity.

Real-Life Heroes: Daniel Hernandez Jr.

Last night at the Poets Asylum, before The Duende Project went on, I was chatting with Bill Macmillan about the shooting in Tuscon. That was the first time I had heard that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' life had been saved by a quick-thinking 20-year old student intern who had been on the job for a mere five days. At that juncture, I didn't even know his name.

This morning, as I read through my news feeds, I learn that he's also an openly gay Latino. It's unclear what sort of first-aid training he's had, but he obviously knew enough to check multiple gunshot victims' pulses, apply pressure to open wounds, and keep the congresswoman upright so she wouldn't choke on her own blood. He was brave and selfless enough to run into the line of fire to save others.

This is a hero. Unequivocally.

I've gone on and on about the importance of portraying persons people of a variety of background as heroes in media. I don't do this simply out of a vapid political correctness. I do this because people -- all people -- believing that they can be anything that they want to be, that they can, indeed, be heroes, makes all of us better.

There are deep currents of racism, homophobia and misogyny in our culture, mostly politically driven, yes, but rooted in the misguided belief that if one group has opportunities, another loses something. This idea is nonsense. Our world is better for having Daniel Henrandez Jr. in it, a man who's smart, selfless, community involved, brave and, yes, gay and Latino. To echo the Joe My God blog, "This means he could be stopped anytime in Arizona and asked to produce proof of citizenship. And, until a few weeks ago, he would have been barred from military service." In most states in the union, including Arizona, he can't marry.

Our fears are the flipside of our violence, and always have been. We only need to look at people like Hernandez to see what we have to gain by letting go of them.

Violence: Batman, Dexter and Afro Samurai

I intended to return to the subject of portrayals of violence in media even before the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, but somehow it seems more urgent, now. Because, as I've inferred before, we have a complex relationship with violence in America, one which we don't always fully understand. I am not, nor will I ever be, one of those people who blame societal woes on gratuitous violence on TV. But I do think it sound to have a deeper relationship with our stories, to understand the relevance between, say, the massacre at the end of Hamlet and the nonstop flying bullets of a Vin Diesel movie. This is a function of understanding literature, and alas, it's one that Americans often only seem to only grasp shallowly.

The American mythology is an odd process of explosions of violence and the subsequent sanitizing of violence. Have you ever notice how a good many depictions of The Revolutionary War appear bloodless, even though more than 77,000 American, British and German soldiers died in the course of the war, either through battlefield injuries or disease, or some combination of the two? It seems distant, somehow. But it was a real war, and like a good many countries, America was born in blood. That's probably something worth remembering, on occasion.

When looking at literature, having a protagonist that's "born in blood" is significant. When you're talking about Superman, the destruction of Krypton and his parents' death is important, but he has no actual memory of it, and in most versions, he only learns it all as an adult. With Spider-Man, the death of his Uncle Ben at the hands of a robber he could have stopped earlier is what spurs him to become a hero, but again, that's a choice he makes as an adolescent. The treader understands the motivations behind Clark Kent or Peter Parker's decisions, but honestly, they could have gone different directions. They're noble, but arguably not predestined. 

But with Batman, who famously witnessed his parents' violent murder, that he's immediately marked to make some pretty big life choices. One does not encounter violence in that way and remain unaffected. Bruce Wayne might not be predestined to become a hero at that moment, but he's obviously going to do something. He might become a psychopath. Certainly, Dexter Morgan's witnessing of his mother's brutal murder is at the heart of his dementia, the event that leads him on the path to becoming a serial killer. Although some poorer interpretations of the Batman story have insinuated otherwise, Wayne remains sane, whereas Morgan does not. Wayne is driven, yes, but uses his tragedy as fuel to help others (aided nicely by a personal fortune, which must help.) Helping others is never a priority for Morgan. Wayne never intentionally kills, Morgan has no goal to anything but. (I'm actually a little surprised this comparison doesn't get made more. It seems a natural.) Both character are in a constant state of dealing with the effects of violence and putting it in a place where it won't consume them. The violence never really leaves there system. It never does.

As I said before, I'm not a proponent of blaming media portrayals of violence for anything the discussion of its many manifestations, from cartoon violence to its use as a metaphor to more realistic portrayals, is worth a constant cultural conversation. As most Americans become more and more sheltered from its real-world consequences, we end up with a disjointed understanding of its realities. We only have a small subset of Americans who are faced with violence in any concentrated manifestation, mostly soldiers and their families and the urban poor. I think that disjointed perspective goes a long way toward explaining the culture's schizophrenic view on the subject, and why, perhaps, when real-world political violence uses violent imagery and rhetoric, it has potentially lethal results. That violence, inserted into a culture, does not go away. It's fundamentally different than, say, gunning down virtual virtual aliens in a video game such as Halo. It's real people who are ostensibly among the nation's leaders seemingly condoning violence, or at least the iconography of violence.

Writes George Packer, for the New Yorker, "for the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents. Not just arguing against their opponents, but doing everything possible to turn them into enemies of the country and cast them out beyond the pale. Instead of “soft on defense,” one routinely hears the words 'treason' and 'traitor.' The President isn't a big-government liberal—he's a socialist who wants to impose tyranny. He's also, according to a minority of Republicans, including elected officials, an impostor. Even the reading of the Constitution on the first day of the 112th Congress was conceived as an assault on the legitimacy of the Democratic Administration and Congress."

Again, I think no sane person looks at Sarah Palin's map of the U.S. -- with gun targets aimed at 20 politicians, including Giffords -- and thinks that Palin means that someone should assassinate these people. But when you escalate political rhetoric to the levels they've been, lately, and when a 24-hour news cycle ratchets tension to unbelievable heights on even the most prosaic subjects, then ... yes. Eventually someone will take them up on it. Just as someone crashed their plane into an IRS building. Just as a constant demonization of those who don't fit a particular cohort group eventually leads to persecution and violence. The same impulse that led a rash of gay teenagers to suicide is what leads a lunatic to open fire on a congresswoman in a Tuscon supermarket: Empathy, political disagreement, tolerance ... they've become marginalized in our discussion.

Writes Michael Tomasky, in The Guardian, "Republicans and even Tea Partiers will have the sense – again, for a while – to steer clear of directly gun-related rhetoric. We won't be hearing much in the near term about 'second amendment remedies' and insurrection and so forth. But this will be temporary. Guns are simply too central to the mythology of the American right, as is the idea of liberty being wrested from tyrants only at gunpoint. For the American right to stop talking about armed insurrection would be like American liberals dropping the subjects of race and gender. It's too encoded in conservative DNA."

If I were to counter anything in Tomasky's argument, I'd argue that guns are instrumental to the totality of the American self-image, not just to conservatives. You can make many of the same arguments of gang culture or the great American Western. Guns remain not only a political hot button, not just a symbol of personal freedom and safety, but a direct connection to the American mythology.

The gunslinger, and it's Japanese counterpart, the Samurai, is a fascinating bit of iconography: the image of a lone individual in a violent, lawless landscape imposing order by force. The reality of the Old West was murkier, of course. People headed that way for any number of reasons -- criminals on the run, soldiers and marshals, deserters of one side of the Civil War or the other, freed and escaped slaves, employees of corporations looking to build towns and railroads, fortune hunters and of course, actual cowboys herding cattle. Never mind Native Americans who were either already there or pushed further West from their traditional lands. The list goes on, and from the penny dreadfuls that first brought us  exaggerated tales of Buffalo Bill, Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp and the rest, to 1903's The Great Train Robbery, to   John Ford's films to more recent films by Clint Eastwood, all the way up to last year's reinterpretation of the John Wayne film, True Grit, that romance of the West has been an undercurrent of our culture, and indeed, it may be the most central mythology to the contemporary American identity, a place where law is a luxury and authority often untrustworthy, where force is often needed to to enforce order, and where questions of personal and familial honor trump questions of right and wrong. Indeed, the setting of the narrative is inconsequential: there's very little separating a traditional vengeance-driven Western plot from Hood films such as 1991's Boyz n the Hood, where Ice Cube's Doughboy takes revenge on gang members for his brother's death, eventually dying in retaliation, whereas other characters are able to leave the "frontier" and join civilization by going to college. Vengeance, for Doughboy, is a matter of moral necessity, and he is not naive to what the consequences will be. He bows before the cycle of violence even as he encourages others, such as his friend Tre, to leave.

Westerns, again, share a common lineage with Japanese cinema and literature -- and indeed, many of the great Westerns are actually remakes of Samurai films, so it's probably not surprising that a lot of the more recent Japanese anime is riffing off Western themes (although often with a Japanese twist), such as Cowboy Bebop or Trigun. Perhaps one of the most interesting has been Afro Samurai, which fuses elements of the traditional  Japanese samurai and Western themes, but also iconography from contemporary American hip-hop culture.  The central character is the titular Afro-Samurai, voiced by Samuel L. Jackson, a black ronin in a dystopic future Japan who is seeking to kill the warrior who murdered his father in front of him. (It's a bit more complicated than that, but that'll do for the moment.) This singular goal is a consuming desire, and eventually, and it displaces everything else in his life.

It's interesting that, with both Bruce Wayne and Dexter Morgan, neither character is particularly motivated by vengeance. Wayne seeks justice, yes, and at least in some continuities is able to get it through the eventual arrest of their killer, Joe Chill, but his primary motivation, as writer Grant Morrison puts it, is "to heal his city." Morgan, likewise, kills the man who murdered his mother, Santos Jimenez, but really, it's just another kill to him, and it changes nothing in his behavior.

Despite their similar starting point, Afro Samurai is different. The unique circumstances of his path toward vengeance in fact lead him through a wave of violence, mostly in defense from people seeking to kill him to attain status, but also against two people who, for the most part, are innocent, and who are directly engaged in attempting to stem the tide of violence that infects the country. In both cases, he places vengeance and honor above any sense of right and wrong, and makes a conscious, willing decision to kill. Moreover, the latter victim, Shichigoro is killed in front of his surrogate son, who seems positioned, at the end of Afro Samurai: Resurrection, to grow and perpetuate the cycle of violence.

The anime itself seems to recognize the tragedy of this, that no matter how stylish or cool its character or presentation is, the overall story arc is tragic. Afro Samurai is not a psychopath like Dexter Morgan. He can walk away, and is given numerous opportunities to do so. But that sense of honor prevents him from doing so, and eventually, consumes him.

Infante, Deschenes, Charalambides & Davis at ARTSWorcester Thursday!

Sorry for the lack of blogging, lately. I've been a little buckled down writing and editing for Thursday's Poetry Salon at the ARTSWorcester Aurora Gallery, where myself, Lea Deschenes, Alex Charalambides and Nick Davis will be presenting all-new work inspired by the exhibitions. That's right. All-new. Not field tested at open readings, not posted in "friends-locked" posts on Livejournal. This is poetry without a net.

Come by and check it out!

Poetry at the Salon
Thursday January 13, 2011 6:00- 8:00pm
snow date: January 20th

ARTSWorcester’s Aurora Gallery
660 Main Street
Worcester, MA 01602

Official Press Release Stuff from ARTSWorcester:

Locally and nationally known published poets and writers Alex Charalambides, Victor Infante, Lea Deschenes and Nicholas Davis will present new spoken word pieces that mirror and reflect upon the aesthetics, subject and mood of the diverse artwork on display in the Triple Nonpareil exhibition. The poets will feature dynamic and fast moving literary pieces that intellectually engage the audience by presenting a new way to see and understand visual art. Taking on the feel of the grand literary salons of the past and present, each spoken word performance and poetry piece is different and unexpected, reflecting the mood and characteristics of the artwork that inspired it.

Each poet will be presenting a reinterpretation of the artists’ works in ARTSWorcester’s current exhibition “Triple Nonpareil” including “Exposing Through Disposing”, “The Big Small Show” and “Older Artists, Newer Works”. Highlighting the night are the sculptures containing found objects which Lucy Marcigliano describes the objects as “Once integrated into the sculpture each object preserves its personal history and then joins the voices of a cumulative history” The work is storytelling through sculpture, a story that has been absorbed, analyzed and felt by each of the poets.

“Poetry at the Salon” offers literary art inspired by visual art that will fill the gallery with creative spoken word.

This event is free and open to the public and will feature light refreshments and music.

For more information contact ARTSWorcester’s Program Director Cynthia Woehrle at (508) 755-5142 or via email: Cynthia@artsworcester.org

Music Detritus (Part II) (Redux)

Something went really screwy with my last post. Deleted and started over. Basically, went on and on about how much I love Amy Winehouse, but that video seems no longer available to be embedded. Which? Weird. Anyway, I sung some praises about Paloma Faith:



And then I said nice things about Coto Normal:



And then I talked about how Richard Thompson's rendition of "Oops, I Said It Again" is pretty much the gold standard for cover songs:



And then I raved about Jenny Owen Youngs' version of Nelly's "Hot in Herre":



It's been a day.

Random Music Detritus (Part II)

This is what I get for skipping my column this week: I end up writing even more about music. But I just wanted to carry over a couple conversations -- both here and elsewhere -- into a new post.

First off, soul: As I was saying in the comments of the last post, soul's the sort of thing that can't be faked. I really don't want to pound on Eliza Doolittle or Duffy or any of the current wave of British faux-soul singers, because they're actually quite talented, but I find most of them to be a bit hollow when held up to their predecessor, Amy Winehouse, whose immense talent and personal troubles collided and spurred record labels to find their own (more manageable) version. Still, she's still the queen of that particular genre:



Out of the current British neo-soul wave, my particular favorite has been Paloma Faith:




I've heard a couple different recordings, but I've got the original cut at home, and it remains my favorite. The tendency to overproduce these days gets a bit maddening. Still, I understand the impulse for emerging artists to perfect what they feel are their best tracks. One of my favorite bands, Coto Normal, has newer, dancier versions of their songs out relatively recently, and I have to admit, I quite like them:





The other subject that's been of much discussion in our household lately has been cover songs. There's a real art to a good cover song. The gold standard, for me, is Richard Thompson's rendition of the Britney Spears pop song "Oops, I Did It Again," which he reinvents without irony, unveiling something new and engaging:





A good cover both becomes the artist's own, and says something new in the process. My most recent favorite has been Jenny Owen Youngs' version of Nelly's "Hot in Herre":




Much, much fun.

ETA: I have no idea why my spacing's blowing out. Will try to fix when I have time.

Random 2010 music detritus in my head ...

In my last column of 2010, I talked a bit about the great local and touring music I encountered in the course of my job. No column this week, as I've been a bit walled in by holidays, but I thought maybe I should get my last thoughts on 2010 music out before I turn my attention to 2011.

In a lot of ways, this was the year of the video for me. I really didn't think about music videos much before, but in the course of writing, I found myself paying more attention to them, and indeed, found the quality to be much improved, probably through a combiantion of more easily available technology and the overall rise in know-how that's come with YouTube's explosion. The two videos I singled out in my column were by locals Hey Now Morris Fader, and Brooklun musician Kate Tucker, who played here last summer:





Of course, I made no secret in real life that my favorite video of the year was Cee Lo Green's "Fuck You." Seriously, it's rare that I've ever been so enraptured by a pop song:



It wasn't just artists that were putting together videos, though. There were seemingly an endless amount of videos based on Lady Gaga's "Telephone." For my money, though, one of them beat the one by the staff of NPR:



Amanda Palmer easily dominated by musical year, though. We saw her perform twice at the Oberon -- once in Cabaret, and once in a cabaret -- and we acquired the Evelyn, Evelyn and Amanda Palmer Performs The Popular Hits Of Radiohead On Her Magical Ukulele. But while I enjoyed both, neither felt like they had the energy or power of her precevious album or her work with Dresden Dolls. But then "Map of Tasmania" came out, and it was all over. Crazy, fun and salacious. Great stuff.

I'm sure there was more. There always is. But I'm excited to see what the new year brings.

From Last Night's Bonus Ruckus

My Rock 'N' Roll Rider

Dear Venue,

There are a few things we need to get straight. What follows is a list of things essential to my art, to be delivered 45 minutes prior to the beginning of the performance. Any omission may result in cancellation, Armageddon or impotence on either my part or yours. Maybe all of the above. Peace.

*786 Green M&Ms, each touched by a member of KISS.

*Nick Davis' voice on my home answering machine.

*A giraffe, plucked from the Serengeti, twitchy, with a wrecking ball head.

*An exclusive interview with a schizophrenic blogger, to attribute my words to ocelots.

*An ocelot.

*13 dancing girls dressed as the third extra from the right in the airport scene of every Hugh Grant romantic comedy.

*26 Jetstream pens, lined up along the bar, each balanced on the tip.

*Sheet music to the complete works of Def Leppard, and enough heroin to convince the band to play them.

*Def Leppard, if the heroin is problematic.

*A 10-pound bag of ocelot chow.

*A team of starved and acid-crazed TSA inspectors, to be stationed by the entrance.

*An airport scanner, set up on the stage, screen pointed toward the audience.

*The sheet music to "99 Problems" by Jay-Z.

*Everything necessary for a full-audience-participation game of Russian Roulette.

*A quiet space, a couch, a DVD player and any John Wayne Western.

*A microphone, a stand, and a hug from someone you've never met.