Re-post: Separation of art & state

Click here to read the NYT article on the difference between the Smithsonian and the Tate, both national museums - and the role of politicians, and politics, in what art gets displayed.

In Honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is midwinter here. The cold has set in, so deeply. It is tough to retain hope with the chill so entrenched.

I didn't get today off work. That didn't help. But instead of wallowing in my bitterness, I am reaching out to Martin Luther King, Jr. When things got tough for him, he didn't puss out. He used difficulty to make him stronger. He turned adversity into fuel.

When white moderates and the church community told him that his civil rights advocacy was ill-timed, this is what he wrote:

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

...

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community...

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

Martin Luther King Jr

Letter from a Birmingham, AL Jail

16 April 1963

In Defense of Us (the Millennials)

Recently I had the opportunity and displeasure of being present in a room full of theatre board members as they unleashed their anger and vitriol about millennials. This included a discussion of how we are lazy, live with our parents, don't value the arts, aren't ambitious/working, and aren't contributing or donating charitably to the arts. While I understand the frustration, what you're grappling with is that we aren't doing what you expected and wanted us to. Instead, we are doing things our own way. And to be fair, we weren't given a clean slate.

Come on. It's time to take some accountability for the crappy state of affairs that you left us with.

I write to ask you to give us a fair shake, to re-examine your view of us which is based on us failing to behave like you, and to ask for understanding. Please understand that our systems of representation and education will not look like yours. They will be flawed, and human. But they will constitute our striking back and striking out.

Here are a few things you should give us credit for:

We are well-educated but struggle to find work in a world with increasing specialization. Our generation has more master's and advanced degrees than any of our predecessors. This is in response to a highly specialized and knowledge-based economy. Oh, and your generation won't retire. That doesn't help. The market is saturated with bachelor's degrees now - the BA is just a ticket to the fair. Doesn't get you on any of the rides. A lot of American jobs have left the country. Our generation didn't start the outsourcing but we are left to reconfigure the economy to render it sustainable and viable. We aren't the first generation to struggle with this: Pierre Bourdieu describes the cheating of a generation in France in the 60s, labeling it "diploma inflation," and comments about the disenchantment engendered by the failure of the generation's attainment of educational qualifications.


We are open-minded and we are willing to experiment. Maya Angelou wrote, "It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength." Our generation has started doing this. We are more receptive to immigrants, gay marriage, non-traditional family structures than our predecessors, according to research by the Pew Research Center. We aren't rushing to the altar, because we saw our parents' generation struggle with incredibly high divorce rates. Is this a bad thing? Can you blame us?

We also, as Erica Williams notes in her speech about how we are redefining civic engagement, a generation attempting to be post-racist.

PopTech 2009: Erica Williams from PopTech on Vimeo.

She also notes that politics, for us, is about how we're going to change the world together. It doesn't look like your politics. So please stop expecting it to.

Also, we are able to hold a multiplicity of viewpoints. We don't reduce things to binaries. For us, it's not inconceivable to respect both Kant and Kanye. My listening to Kanye and appreciating his lyrics does not diminish my ability to respect the intricacies of Kant's philosophy. Stories like those that the Coen brothers tell on film enhance my appreciation for great literature, like Shakespeare, Austen, Tolstoy. The Coen brothers live in an era where they can masterfully use visuals to relay the same elements of drama, to depict characters as complex as Anna Karenina. I listen to Bach when I study for exams; I listen to pop when I work out at the gym. Pop culture and classical culture are not mutually exclusive, and only those with limited imagination and a binaristic, exclusive world view would think so.

I tire of hearing older generations complain how we don't know about the arts. Well, you let Reagan slash funding for arts in schools. If you prevented us from having arts in schools, how and where do you expect us to have attained this proficiency, fluency?

You're not making sense with money. If our generation is struggling to make ends meet and living at home, can you blame us for not donating to charity? Really? You can't fault us on both of these. They are two sides of the same coin. Let's find some jobs that allow us to pay rent first; once we get there, then you can start nagging us on our funding priorities.

We are tech-savvy. There are some serious downsides to technology - shortened attention spans, a sense of instant gratification and difficulty negotiating slower, "snail" systems. Yes, I agree. I'll give you that. BUT. Who made the tv the babysitter? What generation did that? Hmmm.

And technology is uniting the world, creating new systems and ways of doing things. Organizations like Kiva offer imaginative remakings of old systems of money, using technology to do so. Note Erica Williams' discussion of activism via internet research and Flipcam testimonials. There are phenomenal possibilities available with technology. We don't have them all figured out yet, but doesn't it seem fair that we are proficient with it, since the world we are left with demands it? If we aren't tech-savvy, we are less viable candidates to employers. You have us damned if we do, damned if we don't.

So, maybe we need some time to figure out how we want to navigate the world you left us. We saw the mistakes you made, and we don't want to make them. That's why we're more likely to go into nonprofits - we aren't interested in a profit-driven world. You left us some shitty systems: a world with an increasing and volatile gap between the rich and poor, a devastated environment, and a fully unsustainable economic and work system. That's a lot of work for us to take on. But we will get there. We have some great tools.

Just because we do not accept your way as the right way does not mean that we aren't concerned or disengaged - we just do things in a different way. I am asking you to do something that Pierre Bourdieu notes is atypical for those in the privileged, dominant class (which you are). In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, he writes that "the most privileged individuals, who remain most attached to the former state of affairs, to be the slowest to understand the need to change strategy and so to fall victim to their own privilege" (24). You are attached to your systems, and that's fine - but please understand that we are too. And it's our world that rising.

Looking at Africa: The Wizard of the Crow by Ngugi wa Thiong'o

Ngugi wa Thiong'o is not a small name in African literature. He and Chinua Achebe famously debated whether it was possible to write in the language of the colonizer: can the formerly colonized (even that is debated, is colonialism every truly over?) write and express themselves in the language of the colonizer? Does that constitute a mental adherence or subjugation to a form of expression, a way of seeing the world, that belongs to the colonizer? Because of this, despite being in exile from his native Kenya, Ngugi wa Thiong'o has written in Gikuyu. He translates his novels himself into English.

My question, after reading the mammoth 776-page Wizard of the Crow, shares that same concern of retaining African voices and expression. Does the magical realism of Wizard detract from the seriousness of the other depictions in the book? If despotism, corruption, and bribery are as despicable as they seem, and so egregious as to endanger so many lives, does the magical realism of the Ruler's illness, of the magical and mysterious disguises of Kamiti and Nyawira, make the reader take the corruption less seriously too? Does that endanger our thinking about Africa, or strengthen it? Open it?

The story is a rich one, tracing the lives of several characters as they grow or diminish in power in the state of Aburiria. I appreciated the irony of Kamiti, who becomes (by accident, largely, but also by fate) the Wizard of the Crow, falling prey to an illness he himself divined in others. The Wizard was also Kamiti, Nyawira was herself also the Wizard, but also the Limping Witch, and assumed many disguises and characters in the book. I took this to be an interesting comment and depiction of the many faces we assume in our daily lives, manipulating others or being manipulated.

Thiong'o ends with an optimistic note: the discovery that Arigaigai Gathere (A.G.) had saved the Wizard's life in the fatal shootout scene towards the end of the novel. A.G., as a policeman, had throughout the story believed in the Wizard's power, but was an agent of the state. In the end, he seemed to be the only character who escaped a fate of either government agent (powerful at some times, and taken from power viciously by enemies at others) or citizen fighting the government. In the end, A.G. is the only one who wrote his own fate. Haki ya mungu.

Repost: Museum 2.0

Check it out: what if museums were useful, integrated? What if they didn't showcase only the Anglo canon? Thanks for speaking up Nina!

Repost - from 'The Material World' blog

Click here for some fascinating photographs on the ruin of Detroit. These pictures certainly don't evoke "America" automatically, and it's difficult to admit them as such.

See original post here.

This is what it means to say January

Ski slope, December, Bolton Valley, VT

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from...

--TS Eliot - from Four Quartets, "Little Gidding," part V

Another year behind me, a year older: I finished a master's degree, got engaged to a man I dearly adore, and lived in one apartment (this is a big deal for me). On a more pedantic note, I found a job in a tough economy, and make enough to make some loan payments and even buy some groceries. I watched dear friends move forward too, becoming lawyers, parents, or spouses.

I am very lucky.

But more hard work ahead, and some resolutions scribbled in a journal, reminiscent of Eliot, yet again:

A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)

My hopes for 2011 is to reduce, simplify, more honesty...there will be some changes coming to the blog, in support of this move. Stay tuned, faithful (8) readers.

Urban Constellations

Urban Constellations (12/10) - NYC from beth harrington on Vimeo.

I flew into NYC one night in early December, and the whole city was spread out beneath me, all lit up. The urban constellation I saw reminded me of stars.