He's one of the few figures to emerge from the celebrity-chef fad with a few shreds of dignity and something interesting to say about food and culture. Sure, I like Tony Bourdain because he's a hard-drinking world-weary pulp-novelist with a seething disdain for mass-produced overly-processed pop-formulaic culture product. But just behind that jaded exterior, he shows more genuine heart and emotion than any of the fake-cheery bobbleheads working their bland hustles on Food Network. Bourdain loves food, not the foodie-industrial complex. And he loves the same kinds of food that I most love and respect: bold unpretentious food, street food, rustic food; spicy noodle soup or beef stew for breakfast; food which nourishes the body and soul not the ego; food rooted in wisdom not flash; food which pulls you closer to this teeming world not further from it.
Here's a stirring and informative segment from a recent episode of "No Reservations" in Laos, in which Tony takes a look at the work of an organization called UXO LAO as they clear unexploded US bombs from the countryside:
At the risk of beating a dead literary-institution carcass, I want to clarify something about the massive failage of The New Yorker's now-infamous cover.
Not that I'm particularly aggrieved, incited, or surprised by the standard brain-farting and deep mutual butt-sniffing of white liberals of the variety that produce and display The New Yorker. I mean, I worked for years on Wall Street and in corporate media, so I'm tiresomely familiar with the cultural contours of that worldview and the soul-less snickering and self-congratulatory self-absorption at its anxious core. People of color are objects, not subjects, in that conversation; the presence and exhibition of our melanin, but not our voices, is meant to serve as guilt-balm, affirming liberal tolerance and unctuous self-regard.
Most of the criticism I've seen directed at the image has construed the problem as being that only urbane cosmopolitan sophisticates will get it, with commenters hastening to add, "Oh of course I get it, but what about the ignorant yokels? Remember the philistines!" But that's really not how I see it. Because to me, those who claim to get this image are the unsophisticates who lack the cultural and artistic literacy to understand the proper meaning of the word "satire". It's not the same as "sarcasm". That's why we have two different words. (Hint: that last line was sarcastic, not satirical. And I won't even get into the massive popular abuse of the word "ironic".)
See, in my world, the purpose of satire is iconoclasm; by which I mean, the breaking of icons, the exploding of false power centers and false narratives which hold destructive sway over society. The New Yorker cover, despite its intention and despite being sarcastic, is not satire; rather, it is a visualization and manifestation of racist cliches and stereotypes, and thus a propagation and perpetuation of racism. It does not interrogate the validity of those racist stereotypes, but rather accepts and gleefully embraces their marginalizing and dehumanizing power, then implies that it's ludicrous for conservative yahoos to think that the Obamas are those kinds of blacks; the Obamas are good blacks, not scary militant blacks or Muslims; the Obamas do not sport Afros or turbans, they are not reminiscent of dangerous Sixties radicals, no sir, they are down with the program, they are safe for whites.
Aside from the racial insularity from which it emerges, this art
fails on purely discursive grounds. You can't fight demeaning
portrayals by actualizing them. If
a woman is accused in sexist society of being ugly, the appropriate
response is not to draw a picture of her looking extremely ugly
according to certain patriarchal standards in order to
chuckle about it. That
doesn't work. The appropriate response is to undermine the entire set of underlying assumptions and beliefs which give potency to sexist slurs.
Perhaps most fundamentally, the piece does not connect with the social realities of blackness, but only with the fears of the white imagination. In so doing, it reaffirms and reanimates those fears and social divisions at a pre-intellectual level, which is where art primarily impacts the psyche. The lives of people with Afros, the lives of people who wear turbans, the actual legacies of the Black Panthers and 60s social justice activists, are all distorted, discarded, and mocked in the service of asserting the palatability of the Democratic nominee to provincial white sensibilities. And there's nothing even remotely cosmopolitan or sophisticated or iconoclastic or hip about that.
So there it is: witness the miseducated dorkiness of The New Yorker, neither funny nor provocative, just another sloppily-dressed comic too cross-eyed drunk to realize how badly he's bombing on stage, because the audience is laughing not at his jokes, but at him.
Kety did a very slick job of pressuring both the Obama and McCain campaigns to show Latin@ communities something solid and specific, beyond "mariachi politics" as it has come to be known. Yes yes we all know that Obama is the stronger of the two mainstream candidates on all manner of issues, but like any other politician on the brink of power he must be forcefully coerced into taking gutsy, smart political risks which may fall outside of craven Beltway orthodoxy. Such risks sometimes involve antagonizing an influential few to the benefit of the unsung many. This is how populism happens. As I see it, Democratic Party politicians are unlikely to grow a backbone until their constituents do.
The founding editors of The Sanctuary have put together a detailed questionnaire focusing on issues surrounding immigration, which we are distributing to the 2008 presidential candidates. [ Image: Sanctuary poster by Nezua, of course.]
We sent the questionnaire to the Obama and McCain campaigns a little over two weeks ago. Since we hadn't heard back from either of them, yesterday we publicized the survey on a major Latin@ email list which gets read by all sorts of Beltway mucky-mucks. The Obama campaign promptly got in touch with us and reassured us that our survey is not being ignored; they are working on it along with the hundreds of other such requests they receive. O the woes of making it a mainstay of your campaign sloganeering that "change comes not from the top down, but from the bottom up!" Come on, Barry, show us some change we can believe in!
Meanwhile, no word from the McCain camp.
Obviously, both Obama and McCain have in recent weeks been increasing the volume of their bleating noises about reaching out to Latin@ voters; but it's not enough to chant "Sí se puede" or visit the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. Many Latin@ communities are currently under virulent attack by a lethal wave of reactionary scapegoating and hatemongering, institutionalized intimidation, repression, and violence, and thumb-twiddling liberal indifference. The questions in The Sanctuary's survey express many desperately urgent concerns, and any unwillingness by any candidate to offer unambiguous answers to these questions speaks volumes about the chasm between rhetorical posturing and actual policy positions. As Marisa Treviño writes at Latina Lista in her own post about this survey:
Depending on the source, recent headlines have touted Obama and McCain of either "pandering" for the Latino vote or "courting" it.
Given that both men have been or will be appearing at national Latino or Latino-participant events (NALEO, LULAC, NCLR, UNITY 08), it's obvious they both want to be seen as supporting Latino causes.
But do they really? Do they dare to make their true stands on the issues known before November 4, 2008?
Each claims that he has but while speeches touch on issues of interest to Latinos, in true political style, the issues are acknowledged but not explored. Talk with no substance.
Of course, we are also reaching out to Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney (who has just named Rosa Clemente as her running mate) and other third-party campaigns, though we're still in the early stages of these efforts and have nothing to report yet. As readers here probably know, I'm a fervent advocate of third-party politics, because I believe that the two-party Coke-Pepsi lockdown on US politics is one of the biggest obstacles to progressive change in this country and the world. Most of the great victories in US social justice history — from the abolition of slavery to suffrage for women to the union movement — have depended upon third parties. There is absolutely no reason to believe that future social justice victories can be achieved without similar pressure. The status quo never changes out of the goodness of incumbents' hearts; the establishment succumbs to change only when it is the least costly option.
So I'll keep this post updated with additional posts on this matter from my colleagues at The Sanctuary, as well as with any further developments in our communications with the campaigns. And you're invited to help us raise a stink about it as well! Let's make some noise, friends! That's what these intertubes are for.
The Sanctuary's Presidential Candidate Questionnaire
[ Please provide direct, detailed answers and explain how long you have held each position. ]
1. Could you please articulate what you think are the most pressing issues for the U.S. immigrant community, at home AND abroad, and how you would hope to address those issues as President?
2. Do you support comprehensive immigration reform?
3. What policy conditions would comprehensive immigration reform have to meet in order for you to support it? Please be specific.
4. Do you support the establishment of an expanded guest worker program?
5. Do you support the expansion and construction of a virtual border along the U.S./Mexico border?
Actually I went to Feist's concert last night in Prospect Park, where she played an energetic, uplifting set in front of thousands of rain-drenched singing dancing fans. A friend of mine called me up at the last minute with an extra ticket to the show, so I boogied over to Brooklyn. We got soaked to the skin and had a blast.
Here's some light-pop near-future sci-fi anarchist imagery to get your engine turning on this sluggish morning, about a petroleum crisis which drives people around the world to take matters into their own hands and come to the simple realization that the Earth's natural resources belong to everyone...
...When the government turned its back on the farmer man what I hear
Is they dragged the pumps out of the ground with a big vintage John Deere Now I've got soldiers on my payroll standing guard on my front drive
Snipers on my roof poised at those who didn't want me alive
'Cause they audited my taxes and my family under threat 'Cause I've got a message and a megaphone and I'll scream it to the death...
Being the type to generally embrace any and every excuse to throw a party, I like all holidays, especially when there's barbecue and fireworks involved (fireworks being arguably the third greatest Chinese contribution to world civilization, after books and noodles). I like celebrations, and I like people who are in the midst of celebrating.
Of course, I also like to excise from my attention all forms of loopy nationalistic propaganda as I participate in events such as July Fourth Weekend, whose entire premise is pretty much nationalistic propaganda. See, I really don't like being hustled, and since the essential objective of nationalistic propaganda is to turn people into suckers and suck-ups, well that whole thing doesn't work for me. Admittedly there's something vaguely funny about dorky dittoheads who think it's patriotic to wave flags made in China and watch fireworks made in China while US hegemony turns to toxic compost beneath their clogged noses. There's also something vaguely tragic about it, this desperate hunger to belong to something great which drives people to fabricate rather than realize greatness, and to put out their own eyes and cut out their own hearts in order to avoid unlearning lies about that which is ungreat.
Do I love this country? It depends on what you mean by "country". I certainly love the land and many of the people. I love movies and sandwiches and tequila. I love the blues and jazz and rumba and rock. I love Thoreau and DuBois and Hurston and Whitman and Hughes. Actually I love a lot of things happening here. But there are also plenty of people and institutions and operations in this country whose destructive agendas directly collide with my interests and those of humanity and the Earth; they are my enemies, even if they live in the same country as me or occupy high offices in the corporate-political power structures of this nation-state. That's just how it is and how things are gonna go down, and I couldn't care less if this means that infantile cootie-carrying labels get lobbed at me by dimwits so remedial they're still stuck on such games; I wouldn't listen to such fools discuss the weather, much less the proper relationship between individual and country.
So I enjoyed the weekend. It was a nice opportunity to relax and watch fireworks and chat with neighbors and watch the US Olympic trials. And of course every weekend is a nice opportunity to declare our interdependence:
We, the people of planet Earth,
In recognition of the interconnectedness of all life
And the importance of the balance of nature,
Hereby acknowledge our interdependence
And affirm our dedication
To life-serving environmental stewardship,
The fulfillment of universal human needs worldwide,
I think it's safe to say that we know a little something about virtual conflict in this bloghood. Some conflict is inevitable; some is meaningful, even productive, educational, transformative. However, it does seem like some forms of online conflict are decidedly unproductive, at times hurtful and unhealthy. Can virtual conflict be managed and minimized by implementing best practices and online community-building strategies?
We're still finding our way in the new media realm, figuring out what works and what doesn't, figuring out what kinds of virtual communities and activities enrich our lives and reward our participation, and which ones end up simply being draining.
In the past week, I have read no less than 5 meltdowns on blogs in
which the blog owner has stated unequivocally they are sick of
infighting, monitoring comments, and are thinking of quitting. I wrote
one myself and it was not pretty. And now, there is one from a radio DJ
that has officially received enough hits to become a wordpress “hawt
[sic] post.” So is it in the water wires?
I tend to think that discussions are inevitably going to get heated, passionate, intense, angry, personal, when dealing with the kinds of issues we deal with on anti-racist anti-imperialist anti-oppression sites. Then again, the strange thing is that online communities of all stripes — not just political blogs, but forums about seemingly innocuous topics such as HTML or bicycles (as Tom once said) — seem to exhibit similar dynamics of conflict escalation degenerating into personal attacks and bitter exchanges.
Where am I going with all this? I'm plugging a research project on managing virtual conflict being conducted by my dear friend Zoe for her NYU graduate studies. She's collecting survey data for her thesis; it's confidential and doesn't take long, so if you've got a minute please fill out the survey and help academia better understand this whole "flame war" thing!
The Vancouver International Jazz Festival was raging throughout the week that I spent north of the border, featuring hundreds of local and world artists in dozens of venues around the city. During that week, you could pretty much duck into any downtown live-music bar at night and be likely to see and hear something interesting and worthwhile which you'd never seen or heard before.
Last Wednesday night I ended up at the Commodore Ballroom, on the bustling nightlife strip of Granville Street where clubs and pubs, cafes and music stores, noodle shops and sex shops, operate side-by-side in apparent harmony. As the name suggests, the Commodore is essentially a cavernous room with a generous stage up front and a large wooden dance floor in the center, flanked on two sides by tiered tables and, amazingly, three full bars. There were two sets on the ticket that night: first, burgeoning local chanteuse Ndidi Onukwulu[pictured] with her versatile trio; and second, son of iconic Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti and heir apparent to the musical-political lineage, Seun Kuti, accompanied by Fela's Egypt 80. Both groups put on powerful, inspired performances.
Ndidi Onukwulu started things off and got the crowd going with her electrifying bluesy vocals and her uniquely quirky, folksy, eclectic style of songwriting. Glittering in a black sequin dress with a poofy high-waisted knee-length skirt, she cheerfully declared to a smilingly appreciative audience: "All of my songs are about heartbreak, heartache, death, and world destruction. I'll adhere strictly to these four themes. Heartbreak, heartache, death, and world destruction." Canadian daughter of a Nigerian father and German mother, Onukwulu has
just released her second CD, titled "The Contradictor", which she says is partially inspired by cemeteries she visited around the country. She says, "You can learn a lot in cemeteries. They are almost like chat rooms for dead people." Hmm. I guess that's kinda cool. Less cryptically, she adds, "The blues is my soul. That’s where I come from. But I
was never a self-proclaimed blues artist. When I think of what I’m
doing today, it’s organic music that steps outside of any boundaries. I
embrace the idea of cabaret. There’s an excess of emotion, almost to a
comical point."
“I know who I am. Even if I sell 100 million
copies of my album, even if I tour the world six times, even if I win
70 Grammys, people will be talking about my dad. There's no escaping
it,” says the younger Kuti, who has even adopted his father's second
Yoruban name of Anikulapo (“I've got death in my quiver”) and
references the legacy upon which he is building with his self-titled
debut, “Seun Kuti & Fela's Egypt 80.”
After years of singing and performing his late
father's songs, Kuti, who comes to World Caf Live in Philadelphia on
Saturday, has issued his own incendiary collection of politically
pointed oeuvres that swing with all the brash militancy and
invigorating dance rhythms of his father's hallmark sound. “Seun Kuti,”
released last week on Disorient Records, is an explosive attack on the
corruption, ignorance, maladies and other ills ravaging contemporary
Africa, the music a pressing and vibrant horn-saturated blend that
brims with inventive guitars, keyboards, percussion and vocals.
That Egypt 80 is comprised of more than
two-thirds of its original members, who for years played nightly at the
Shrine nightclub at Fela's Kalakuta commune in Lagos, Nigeria, keeps
much of the band's original sound in tact — the gritty funk-jazz fusion
steeped in traditional African rhythms and chants that was pioneered by
the elder Kuti.
And while his youngest son asserts that he is
very much an individual, he is determined to maintain a certain degree
of purity when it comes to preserving the kinetic big-band formula.
“Afrobeat is what I want to do. I don't believe
it has to sound like any other genres. They want to put hip-hop, soul,
samba, Latin music to try to make it modern. I say Afrobeat is already
modern,” says Kuti, who speaks, as he sings, with a muscular urgency.
“Afrobeat is the future. All these other genres need to put Afrobeat
into the music.”
Although he acknowledges a love for hip-hop,
which along with rap, has gained sway over the Nigerian music scene in
recent years, he is not a fan of much of what he hears in his homeland.
“In Africa today, the establishment supports
hip-hop because the kind of hip-hop they do in Africa today is very ...
it's light, it doesn't teach you anything. It's ignorant hip-hop that
talks about rubbish,” he says. “But it's what the establishment pushes.
It is not a big threat to them, not opposition, not asking questions;
it keeps people in the box they want them to be (in).
“Hip-hop doesn't have a wider audience; it has
a bigger commercial support. But Afrobeat, with or without support,
will still carry on living because it's the truth.
“Afrobeat is not a kind of music you just
perform. It's the kind of music you have to believe in. It's a movement
that takes over your life and it's a personal movement as well.”
And
so along with a musical legacy, Kuti has also inherited his father's
defiant outspokenness and inflammatory politics. “Many Things,” from
his debut disc, lambastes governmental hypocrisy and the empty promises
made by former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, even including an
excerpt from one of his speeches, while “Mosquito Song” decries the
inexcusable prevalence of malaria due to corruption.
It was an amazing time at the Commodore. By the end of the night, chairs had largely been abandoned, the crowd was on its feet, dancing, sweating. And that makes the subversive political message even more dangerous.
Pinoy powerhouse Manny Pacquiao, belt-holder in four (arguably five) weight divisions, the greatest active pound-for-pound fighter in the world, on the brink of crossover superstardom...
Over the solstice weekend, I spent a relaxing afternoon hanging out at the Canadian International Dragon Boat Festival in Vancouver, where I'm currently staying. The event obviously has Chinese roots, but it's been flourishing here in Canada for 20 years (ever since being introduced to the region in 1989 by British Columbia's first Lieutenant Governor of Asian descent, David Lam) and has now evolved into a multi-cultural panoply. Having shown up with a voracious appetite, I decided to invest some time exploring the smokey rows of food vendors, who were serving up grub from Jamaica, Ecuador, Greece, Turkey, the Southern US, and elsewhere. There was also a concert stage, a beer garden, a bustling children's playground, and all manner of corporate sponsors plying passerby with sample products. Of course, the main event was what was happening out on the water: the dragon boat races, where some 140 teams and 4,000 paddlers, representing an enormous range of organizations and causes, from mega-corporations to activist groups, from pumped macho dudes to long-haired hippies to little old ladies, huffed and puffed their way across the finish line in pursuit of immortal glory!
View from the beer garden: Cirque du Soleil tents against the mountains...
Concert stage, where Delhi 2 Dublin was rockin' the Asian-Celtic connection...
Through holding together, restraint is certain to come about. The yielding obtains the decisive place, and those above and those below correspond with it. Strong and gentle; the strong is central and its will is done. This is called the Taming Power of the Small.
— The I Ching, hexagram 9: Hsiao Chu / The Taming Power of the Small
Alms Bowl
Highlights
Brokedown Dreamhouses of a New York Suburb (Sept-2007) Rene Javier Perez took leave of his wife Miliana Morales and their 2-month-old daughter Gladys in the Guatemalan town of Chiquimula. Unfortunately, the years did not unfold as planned. Sometimes you just can't summon the strength to fight for yourself anymore; sometimes you stop believing that things will get any better; worst of all, sometimes it's true.
President McKinney (Oct-2007) The whole notion of "electability" is a profoundly misguided and anti-democratic concept. There's a reason elementary schoolteachers ask children to put their heads down on their desks before voting by show of hands: they're learning to make independent decisions. Asking which candidate is more "electable" pre-emptively marginalizes one's own value as a unique perceiver and one's agency as a democratic participant.
Protesting a War of Cowards and Madmen (Oct-2002) As much as the invasion of Iraq is a coward's war, it's also a madman's war, and there's a dangerous intersection between cowardice and madness where many acts of horror originate.
The Obama-Clinton Show (Mar-2008) I tend to view the whole spectacle of presidential politics as a grand charade during which tremendous national energy gets spent endlessly chattering about which pre-approved palatable public figure is to be the next temporary PR/sales representative of the global neo-imperialist gangster state.
The White Liberal Conundrum (Oct-2007) Many of my POC friends would actually prefer to hang out with an Archie Bunker-type who spits flagrantly offensive opinions, rather than a colorblind liberal whose insidious paternalism, dehumanizing tokenism, and cognitive indoctrination ooze out between superficially progressive words.
Midsummer, the woods of Southwestern Connecticut buzz with bright pastoral magic. This gallery attempts to capture a quick arbitrary sliver of that brightness. Most of these pictures were taken in my immediate neighorhood; some were shot at Wampus Pond; some at the Audubon Fairchild Wildflower Garden.
The Outlaw Bible of American Essays This diverse, dense, rowdy, erudite collection of classic dissident writing is full of required resistance reading.
Joyce Carol Oates: On Boxing A sweeping, passionate exploration of the colorful characters, crazy contradictions, and mythic meanings which animate the sport of boxing.
