Emory Douglas

Wednesday November 4, 2009

GOLDIES 2009 LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD:

Bringing the militant chic of the Panther image to the masses

As a teenager, Emory Douglas was sentenced to 15 months at the Youth Training School in Ontario. It may have been the best thing for him — and the worst thing "the Man" could have done. In the prison printing shop, he discovered a gift for print and collage he would later use as the minister of culture for the Black Panther Party. From 1967 until the party disbanded in the 1980s, his iconic graphic art marked most issues of the newspaper The Black Panther.

Douglas brought the militant chic of the Panther image to the masses, using the newspaper to incite the oppressed to action. In the name of expediency and limited resources, he developed collage tricks to maximize his passionate message. His back-page posters emphasized the Panthers' community programs, like free breakfast for children, clinics, schools, and arts events. His works presented the struggle with a mixture of empathy and outrage — sometimes direct, sometimes allegorical — that remains innovative and contemporary amid today's high-tech standards.

In a 1968 salvo called "Position Paper No. 1 on Revolutionary Art," Douglas states: "Revolutionary art is learned in the ghetto from the pig cops on the beat, demagogue politicians, and avaricious businessmen. Not in the schools of fine art. The Revolutionary artist...hears the sounds of footsteps of black people trampling the ghetto streets and translates them into pictures of slow revolts against the slave masters, stomping them in their brains with bullets, that we can have power and freedom to determine the destiny of our community and help to build our world." For 33 years Douglas has stood by these words, working toward a better world for the people.

When Rizzoli published a compendium of Douglas's posters, broadsheets, and fliers in 2007, a new generation became familiar with the causes of solidarity, liberation, and self-determination he holds dear. He has since had large-scale shows at sites such as L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art, while his commitment to social change has led to exhibitions and speaking engagements at Oakland's New Black World and the sorely-missed Babylon Falling in San Francisco. His interpretation of Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye for last year's "Banned and Recovered" show at San Francisco Center of the Book was one of the standout pieces of 2008.

Douglas' work captures the tragedy and triumph of the disenfranchised, impoverished, and fed up; an eternal struggle against those blessed with power who choose to abuse it. Much like the works of Goya and the words of Hugo, his contribution to that struggle remains immeasurable — not just for what he has created, but for the people he will empower for generations to come. *

www.itsabouttimebpp.com

By D. Scot Miller

Amiri Baraka Keeps It Real

Amiri Baraka keeps it real about America in the Obama era

By D. Scot Miller

arts@sfbg.com

LIT/MUSIC With influences ranging from the Cuban Revolution and Malcolm X to musical orishas such as Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, and Sun Ra, Amiri Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s that became, though short-lived, the virtual blueprint for a new American theater aesthetic. The movement and his published work — such as 1963's signature study on African American music Blues People and the same year's play Dutchman — practically seeded "the cultural corollary to black nationalism" of that revolutionary American milieu.

Baraka lives in Newark, N.J., with his wife and author Amina Baraka; they have five children and head the word-music ensemble Blue Ark: The Word Ship and co-direct Kimako's Blues People, an art space housed in their theater basement for some 15 years. I spoke with him on the eve of an upcoming visit.

SFBG You coined the term "Afrosurreal Expressionism." Can you share your definition?

AB If you know the African tales or even African writers and African cultures, then you know they understand the concept of having relationships reversed, which exposes new concepts and dimensions. They understood the power of the conscious and unconscious mind to change the dimensions of the world. The various forces of nature that people developed, that people saw as gods, these elemental forces: the wind, the water, the sun, the moon. They understood how human beings interrelate to those forces. Henry Dumas' work dealt with these changing dimensions, and people who do strange things in realistic situations. It was Surrealism that changed the relationship to things. Dumas influenced Toni Morrison, who was his editor at Random House. He was a strong writer and he went out of here in a tragic way, being murdered by the police. His stories and poems are Afrosurreal, with African psychology imposing these dimensions on reality.

SFBG What brings you to the Bay Area this time around?

AMIRI BARAKA We're doing two sets at Yoshi's with Howard Wiley. Those are the kinds of musical things we have a nice time doing. I hope to bring the poetry and music to Oakland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. And I'm giving a talk at the library.

SFBG What will you be discussing?

AB Obama and his first 10 months, based on an essay I wrote a few months ago called "We're Already in the Future." I support Obama and I think that the people who supported him initially should keep supporting him because they are forgetting the huge difficulty he faces. This society, they don't want any kind of change. They do not want him, first of all. Only 43 percent of the white people even voted for him, and a lot those people resent the fact that white America is now mulatto. That election proved that it's not white America, it's multinational America, so they've set up this roadblock to almost anything he does.

Anytime you can, you see how doofus Americans are, to oppose their own quality of life improvement, their own health care. They'd rather mope along with little health care or none simply because the corporations have convinced them it's bad for them — it shows you that we have a real education gap in America. Not to mention the racism, which is behind a lot of it, big time.

The people who support Obama need to stand together to fight the right wing. It's the right wing that is the enemy. Those huge corporations including those mouthpieces they have. The media is just absurd, with [Sean] Hannity, [Bill] O'Reilly, [Glenn] Beck, Rush Limbaugh. These guys are just too much. If they're not racist, there is no such thing as racism.

SFBG I know that you spent some time in SF. What are your impressions of our city?

AB I was a visiting professor at San Francisco State for about three or four months, that was the extent of my residency. I like San Francisco. I'm drawn to the vibe there. The last time I was in San Francisco, I was reading at Ferlinghetti's bookstore [City Lights]. Most of my stuff is in Oakland, but whenever I'm in Oakland, I stop by San Francisco.

Seems to me that San Francisco is very expensive, like New York. I live in Newark, N.J., which is 12 miles outside of New York City — it's got that Oakland-San Francisco relationship. When you're dealing with New York, you have that high-rent district all the way around. San Francisco is a beautiful city, but going there and being there are two different things.

SFBG Happy birthday. I know you just turned 75. Any wisdom to impart from three-quarters of a century?

AB I've been 75 for about five days. I can say that you really need to take care of yourself. That's the cliché: "If I knew I was going be this old, I would have taken better care of myself," but it's some better wisdom than what you hear generally.

SFBG What is the role of the artist in the current climate, and what are the tools we can use to bring about social change?

AB The way things work: cause and effect, action and reaction. The '60s and the '70s were a period of intense struggle. The Black Arts Movement and the antiimperialist movement laid the foundation to get Obama elected. But then you get a reaction, and it has been quite evident. Imperialist commerce has taken over the arts. Once we were struggling to get black movies made — now we see what kinds of movies are being made by black people, and they are very backward. Act, react. We have to struggle anew to do something about these backwards elements.

Black people have 27 cities: we need 27 theaters, 27 galleries, 27 periodicals. We need to have poets, rappers, painters, actors struggling to raise the consciousness of the people. That is the role of the artist. Black people still live in these ghettos and these 'hoods. There may be more of a black middle-class, but they often are the ones helping to keep us duped and bamboozled. This is a struggle that has to be. This is reality — like they say, "Keep it real." This is a struggle that has to be.

Foxy lady

Victor Pelevin serves up a sexual odyssey starring russian super werewolves

By D. Scot Miller

www.sfbg.com

Wednesday October 28, 2009

A Hu-Li appears to be your run-of-the-mill lascivious 15-year-old prostitute in modern Russia. She does all the things professionals who cater to the discerning international pedophile do. What are those things? Well, she posts ads on the Internet that read:

"A FAIRY TALE CUM TRUE: Small breasts for big money. A little ginger kitten is waiting for a call from a well-to-do stranger. Classic sex and royal head, anal, petting, bondage, whipping (including the Russian knout), foot fetish, strap-on, sakura branch, lesbo, oral, anal stimulation, cunnilingus (including compulsory), role-swapping, two-way, gold and silver rain, fisting, piercing, catheter, copro, enema, gentle and heavy domination, Mistress and Slave girl services. Face control ... Almost everything. Shag me and forget! If you can ...

In other words, A Hu-Li flagellates the middle-aged intelligentsia who answer her siren's call. She likes riding her bike, loves Nabokov, and is still a bit hung up about being a virgin. Pretty typical right?

How about this? A Hu Li is a 2,000-year-old, shape-shifting werefox from ancient China who uses her bushy tail to hypnotize men and absorb their life force. That grab ya? The title of Victor Pelevin's latest is The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, the increasingly intriguing A-Hu Li is our narrator, and the book has little to do with anything I've just written. A Hu-Li is a member of a race of werefoxes who appear to be 15-year-old girls, when they are in fact neither. They cannot die; do not bathe; and never need to eat food, as long as they can feed on the sexual energy of the "naked apes" they have been doomed to interact with for seemingly all eternity. Their tails enable them to sap the energy of their prey while convincing them that they are fulfilling their greatest sexual fantasies. As such, they gravitate toward sex work, and have since time immemorial. Naturally, thousands of years doing the same thing as civilizations rise and fall can leave an immortal netherworld creature cynical and with a lot of time on her hands. Our narrator fills it by seeking enlightenment. Might as well.

Until she meets Alexander, that is, a Wagner-addicted werewolf who ranks high in the Russian Secret Service. What follows is one of the most hilarious and horrific courtships to come out of the former bloc. But guess what? The Sacred Book of the Werewolf isn't about that, either.

Victor Pelevin may be a literary genius. He is definitely a tricky malcontent. He has written one of the most spiritually satisfying novels ever about wily werefoxes, interspecies sex, kleptocracy, and the joys of methamphetamines. In fewer than 400 pages, he manages touch on the finer points of sages from Nietzsche to Lao Tzu as A-Hu Li and Alexander seek the highest state of their kind ... super werewolf. Sound silly? That's because it is. It's also pretentious, perverse, puerile, and exasperating. Yet none of that stops it from saving your sullied soul. Sticky fur and a dash of satori — what more could you ask for on Halloween ... candy?

D. Scot Miller and giovanni singleton "ascension" & "cool"

giovanni singleton, a former debutant and native of Richmond, VA, is a fan of figs and Greek-style yogurt, and a collector of bookmarks. She is also founding editor of nocturnes (re)view, a journal dedicated to innovative and experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces.

D. Scot Miller is a Bay Area writer, visual artist, teacher, curator and a regular contributor to The San Francisco Bay Guardian, Mosaic Magazine and others. He sits on the board of directors of nocturnes (re)view

singleton will read from her recently completed manuscript, ascension, which is informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane.

D. Scot will read from his manuscript, cool, and selections of his novel, Knot Frum Hear, both of which are very sexy.

Open mic following.

D. Scott Miller: In what ways does truth - however you define it - enter into your work?

giovanni singleton: Not sure if truth of my own making/definition enters into my work. Such has proven to be a rather nasty stumbling block in previous writing endeavors. The work, I feel, brings a certain truth along with it. And it isn't always pleasant, reasonable, recognizable, or even coherent to me. Honesty and trust are perhaps more my domain.

DSM:Reading your work, particularly ascension, I'm struck by the dream-like nature of your imagery. How do dreams play within your work? How do you capture the ethereal quality of a dream or translate it into something accessible to the reader?

gs: Those are good questions. Tough. I often find playing in the back of my mind the lyrics of Row, Row, Row Your Boat, the last line of which is "Life is but a dream." What I am interested in are ways in which it might be possible to give "dream" and "reality" equal weight and measure. Neither is elevated above the other. I'd like to see/think of them as being both plausible and implausible. I am reminded of the Lankavatara Sutra's words "Things are not as they seem nor or they otherwise." This then dismantles the dualistic relationship between dream and reality. I like that open field. Dreams can be useful when not appended to Hope and Fear which again makes for a field that's open. I think an ethereal quality is somewhat necessary in order to deal with struggle and with its cessation. Impermanence as well as a connection/recognition of something greater than the "I" is also in the language of dream or the ethereal. No real in unreal. No real in real either.

DSM: Boundaries (between artist and subject, reader and writer, subject and object, object and other) sometimes seem to disappear in your larger pieces. Is this intentional or just a by-product of your process?

gs: In most instances in a life, good boundaries are important. Mind the fence. However, it is a big relief when the veil drops away and reveals the interconnectedness that holds the universe together. I wasn't aware that working on larger/longer pieces allowed for this to happen but I suppose it does. It's the removal of excess. Spaciousness is amazing canvas, I think. Erasable too.

Tan Khanh Cao Featured at AAWAA show at SOMArts

As a participating artist in the current AAWAA show at SOMArts, I was asked to write a dedication. The artists were asked to answer "who inspires you? and how"

DEDICATION

My earliest desire to be an artist was wanting to emulate my father. To be like him was to draw him back to me.

I have favorite famous artists- Wifredo Lam, Louise Bourgeois, Picasso, Eric Dolphy, Cecil Taylor-
but the people who inspire me most are the people I know.

I want to live like Paulette Baker, focus like Danny Cao, care like Targol Mesbah, dream like Kaisik Wong, swim like Jade Brooks with the patience of Walter Kitundu, the fire of Ali Dadgar, the thoughtfulness of Peter Maravelis, the tirelessness of Douglas Ewart, the joy of Carei Thomas and the intuition of Paul Yamazaki. I want to paint the music of David Boyce and the poetry of D. Scot Miller.

I am nourished by the brilliance and loving support of my family of friends. Those above, James Earle, Gary Stenger, Julie Lindow, Shashari Kiburi, Elaine Kahn, Juan Fernandez, Tad Coughenour, and of course...my mother.

With Mother (Gayle Morbacher) and Tre' Miller

With Carol of AAWAA

Tre Miller

With Juan Fernandez


With Juan and Tad Coughenour

With Cynthia Tom

See Monsters

It's a Big Machine, it's a mean machine, it's a big, mean story by Victor LaValle

By D. Scot Miller

Wednesday September 2, 2009

a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Naomi Ophelia Lamar was my cousin, but my big sister. Six years older than me, she ran away from home at 16. Though we stayed in touch, too many years of no contact had changed us both. We tried but could never close the distance. Last year, they found her body in a Dumpster in Birmingham, Ala. She'd been stabbed over 30 times. Her husband had done it. Afterward, he drove to the nearest bridge and threw himself off. She was the grandmother of three. I sat in the bathroom screaming, "We are not garbage!"

Bizarre and horrible things happen. They just do. They happen to us, around us, and because of us. Sometimes the horrible things only become horrible on reflection. We liked them at the time. Sometimes the bizarre things become so commonplace that they stop being bizarre. Both bizarre and horrible things become badges of distinction and honor when we survive. When we answer the call and stagger to daylight.

This is the general premise of Victor LaValle's Big Machine (Spiegel & Grau, 284 pages, $25), which opens with a look at Ricky Rice, a middle-aged porter in a bus depot in Utica, N.Y. It's 2005, and the world is about to go broke. Ricky's a downtrodden sanitation worker with a shady past. He's never seen better days, and none seem to be forthcoming. That is, until he receives a mysterious note reminding him of The Promise he made: a one-way bus ticket to Vermont's northeast kingdom. On the bus to the frigid north, we hear LaValle's refrain from an alcoholic goblin on a tear to his captive audience: "Human beings are no damn good. We even worse than animals. We like ..."

The ellipsis just dangles, from the book's first section on. As the events of Big Machine unfolded, I realized that that very phrase, and that very ellipsis, had been hanging from my lips since last year. It is the jump-off point for Lavalle's book, and as we travel with Ricky Rice — alongside him, but also inside his mind as it seeks justification and reason — we begin to understand why.

Big Machine is a crafty book. Every page is a precise and illuminating reveal — a large veil playfully lifted from the reader's initial conceptions of black/white, good/evil, and ultimately, salvation. Each chapter is a possible spoiler. A tough job for the reviewer, to be sure. Especially one who has been anticipating such a novel (and working on such a novel) for years.

Behold the invisible! You shall see unknown worlds: Ricky is recruited, along with six other recovering addicts and petty criminals to become a paranormal investigator. All of them have heard The Voice at the deep bottom of their shoddy existences and answered it with The Promise. Like generations of wretched of the earth before them, they are inducted into a secret society of "negros" ("I won't say African Americans," says Rice, "it's too damn long") to find The Voice and figure out what it wants.

From cleaning out bathroom stalls in work boots and T-shirts, Ricky becomes a dandy, wearing the finest clothes that the 1940s and 1950s could provide. Fitted in the best vines, he makes his way to (where else?) the Bay Area to confront a murder-suicide cult, and his own monstrous past.

Far from a standard dry examination of doubt and faith, Lavalle's allegorical approach is sweeping and swashbuckling. Big Machine takes us from Ricky's idyllic childhood — sweet as saccharine, with a black tar of burn — to his romantic nadir, dying in a puddle of piss and shit in the basement of a house owned by a man named Murder.

LaValle has named Shirley Jackson and Ambrose Pierce as influences, along with those he calls "the Black Eccentrics": Ishmael Reed, Gayle Jones, Darth Vader. His approach to gothic horror adds black Black humor and a new element of ferocity to the AfroSurreal aesthetic.

There's a lot of tearing in this book. Flesh is peeled, pried, burned, punctured. Torture plays a prominent role. Children are exploited, souls are gnawed away, and spirits are broken. Bullets fly, bodies are wrenched, mauled, mutilated and discarded — so much so that Lavalle's main refrain takes on greater weight when it reappears, in extended form, from the mouth of one of Big Machine's main characters. "Human beings are no damn good!," the character says. "The despised become the despicable. God Damn! We worse than animals! We're like monsters."

Monsters. Big Machine has those too. Some wear suits, some wear shawls, some move between the shadows with vise-grip hands. The story is neither miserable nor grotesque, and it is proof of LaValle's genius that sympathy and forgiveness extends to the whole pitiful lot.

I've been following LaValle since I read his 1999 short story collection Slapboxing With Jesus (which takes its title from a Ghostface Killah quote), and followed it up by reading 2003's The Ecstatic (which in turn inspired Mos Def to title his latest album the same). Mos Def contributed a blurb to Big Machine, and the book's blurbs are telling: according to them, LaValle is Marquez mixed with Poe, or Marakami mixed with Ellison, or Bosch having a baby with Lenny Bruce. But I feel they all miss the mark — I'm here to tell you that Victor LaValle is a believer in the unseen world. He has been there, and what he has brought back has affirmed my belief too. Yes, there are monsters out there, and what's an AfroSurrealist supposed to do?

"I guess we could lock ourselves in the bathroom and hide. Let someone else face the fight," says Ricky. "But we're not going to do that."

Sweetest Taboo

Banned and Recovered: Artists Respond to Censorship"

By D. Scot Miller

PREVIEW The taboo has always had a special place in my heart. As a pre-adolescent, I was given a list of banned books from a rogue librarian and I hunted down and read every one of them. It may have seemed odd to find an 11-year-old black boy reading the likes of John Rechy's City of Night (Grove, 1963) and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (Olympia/Grove, 1959), but these verboten tomes, along with the librarian's free beer and porn, served as an illicit gateway out of my little coal-mining town into the larger, lustier world. If not for the innocence-stealing pederast posing as the coolest adult I knew, I might still be in that town, feeling like I was missing something but never knowing what. In short, banned books saved my life: I never would have read a single one had they not been banned.

That's why it's exciting, even titillating, that the San Francisco Center for the Book, in collaboration with the African American Museum and Library in Oakland, presents "Banned and Recovered: Artists Respond to Censorship." The 63 installation, multimedia, and graphic artists showcased at the two sites don't so much address the issue of banned books as celebrate their favorites, which happened to have been banned somewhere at one time or another — and what great book hasn't? Among those praising the forbidden at the Center for the Book are Enrique Chagoya, who offers a 2000 diptych to Burroughs, and ex–Black Panther propagandist Emory Douglas, who brings Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) to light.