So Sad When the Daws Pick at a Scarecrow

An appreciation of an Outsider Artist

 

     ________

We are the children of concrete and steel
This is the place where the truth is concealed
This is the time when the lie is revealed
Everything is possible, but nothing is real

– Vernon Reid, Type (Living Colour)

Running parallel through his arteries is Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Romare Bearden and Andy Warhol. These are his bare bones influences and they helped to liberate what he had held inside.

“Art is my outlet, connection, retreat, my pleasures jumbled with my pain, art is my therapy”.                       – Scarecrow

Crayon Meltdown, 2014

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A scarecrow in the traditional sense is a figure made up to resemble a human being set up to frighten crows and other birds away from a field where crops are planted. A scarecrow may be frightening, but it’s not literally dangerous. The same can be said for works of art that exceed the boundaries of our imagination, erase them altogether, or simply remind us that no matter how horrifying the world is – it is our lack of inner vision and reflection that makes it all the more ugly. A bomb destroying a tent of doctors, pregnant women and sick children is loathsome. But to not acknowledge this horror inside of us to begin with is even worse. To turn away, ignore, pretend – is the greatest of sins. And in our times we are all in collusion, we’re all guilty of seeking refuge away from not only the horror but anything that may make us tick and writhe as deeply feeling human beings. Only art can sustain man’s senses and humanity in a rapidly eroding society that is full of aggression and hostility towards all things affirming, conscious, loving, honest, celebratory, and rebellious. The governments of the world no longer need to lift a finger to oppress or imprison: we do this for them – to ourselves and to our brothers and sisters around the world. The tiny moments we don’t are often initiated by taking in a work of art or allowing ourselves to be humbled.

The work of an artist aptly named Scarecrow (Cro Dadi) does both.

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Cro’s painting A Joyful:

Upon seeing it, I immediately felt that it was as if someone, something, somehow – fell in between the hard resilient lines of a chalk drawing and a tenuous floating dream…What is most compelling about Cro’s work, aside from its seemingly effortless quality (great art is like breathing my wife always reminds me, no matter how dense it always leaves the impression that its creator is one with the work, that they could literally not do anything other than the work itself) is the fact that there is so much going on. But it’s rendered ‘simply’. I use ‘simply’ in the Charles Mingus sense – Mingus always wanted complex aspects of life succinctly reduced into sober and clear notions and feelings, so this way no matter how cacophonous or multitudinous a work of jazz might be, its meaning would always shine through– for the spaces within it would allow light in. Sometimes we don’t see the rationale or the thought behind complex works that may look like a mess to an untrained (or “un-initiated”) eye. But there is a crack in everything as Leonard Cohen tells us. And that is how the light (art) gets in.

These artworks are eternal vistas into a whole other world, a complex web into a deeper understanding of ourselves…

A JOYFUL

Overjoyed

Watercolor

Playground
CRO
ENJOY

For several months I kept an outsized, zoomed-in rendering of this piece above as a screensaver. Blown up, the flower in the center of the image comes to resemble a strange creature, an insect perhaps, or is it a tragic face awash in water behind bars? It may be sad, but it is not a despairing image. It is an affirming one.  And it is all the more affirming that a living artist created it and that a living artist can still breathe life into a canvas.

Art in general – great art, in particular – always rejuvenates some aspect of the human condition while illuminating the parts we may have forgotten — but when a contemporary living artist who still breathes and sweats on the planet as we all do – manages to cut through the gel that is beginning to harden upon the crust of the zeitgeist – it is something we should celebrate. When art can still give chills it is cause for celebration. Especially since it is wrought by an artist who has not been bought by the establishment or some venal Capitalist gallery whose prime objective is to remove the artist from the very people who initially inspired or understood his work, to begin with.

Scarecrow is an Outsider Artist. Not just because he has no formal training, but because he has, what he creates, what it means to create, and who his audience is. (If you go on online or visit his Facebook page you will be astounded to see the variety of people taken by his work and his fan base is a genuine arsenal of individuals including myself who can only, without blinking an eye, give in to this modest phenomenon that has captured our hearts and minds). He’s an Outsider Artist because his values are outside the realm of corporate art galleries and his reasons for creating have nothing to do with being jaded or cynical. He’s truly independent because (unlike the “Independent Filmmakers” – an innocuous term) he has an and catalogs and sells his own artwork himself, without the bureaucracy or pettiness of a curator or agent. No one has held his hand or tried to broker high-end deals for him at any of the Art Basels. No. That would be beneath him. And while those people give him their money – it is the support of the near-to-the-ground people of all colors and stripes – that Cro’s own network of support has been built upon. And while he is humble about this, it is no small task. The Cro appreciates the people who have taken the time to write him, comment on his artwork, share one of his images, purchase one of his paintings, and gaze into one of his drawings…He does what he does for reasons no NYC gallery or sneering art dealer would ever understand. Artists everywhere should take note and follow his example.

Ever so loud was his silence…

(October, 2014)

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There are many creative people on this planet, but very few are artists.  There are many paintings and novels and plays being done — but very few of them are works of art.  There are far too many deluded wanna-be Rappers and Actors. And sadly there are numerous creatures on this planet who have usurped and perverted the term “artist” to such an extent that the real artists no longer want anything to do with “art” or “the arts” for fear of losing themselves, becoming infected by the dilettantes and the culture of irony that has made its mark on our world. (Scarecrow himself has stated that instead of the hackneyed term “artist”, he thinks of himself as a Creative Portal, a conduit in which endless creative expression flows. This intrigues me because if memory serves me right, the great theater director Peter Brook once wrote that even the term “Director” should be replaced by something else, it was not only inaccurate – but a frustrating term to begin with!)

Nevertheless, having something to say is the fundamental ingredient for being an artist, but having a compulsion to express it is what seals your fate.

The Scarecrow is such an artist.

Born in Harlem in 1965, the artist lovingly referred to as Cro Dadi (that’s how he signs his work) – is an autodidact and a self-healing individual who came to art through a burst of pain. In 1997 he had a terrifying brush with death and nearly saw the other side as a result of a car accident. “The torch was lit” as he proclaimed in his Artist’s Statement on Tumblr.

The more he created the healthier he got. And as his health improved, so did his desire…to be…more creative.

Gordon Parks stated it is a ‘choice of weapons’ in what we choose to fight with. Some of us turn to guns, some the Bible, others the instruments of creativity. And Scarecrow himself knows this well. For it was pens, pencils, paint crayons, markers and scissors. And saying it this way – this litany takes on an almost biblical implication. He painted, he drew, he cut, he blurred. And people liked the work and people bought the work. And the curse of the car accident became a blessing, unlocking a well of creativity and vision…giving birth to the Scarecrow: an artist who would defy the demons of his world with a combative and compassionate art.

 A near-twenty year span of creativity consumed him and with every day objects – pens, pencils, paint, crayons, markers and scissors – the Cro expresses the impressions and textures he remembers from his earlier NYC days. The swirls, the dynamic movement, the urban luster of those heady days of Pop Art’s last sigh and Hip-Hops golden age: somewhere in his veins is the pulse of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five and Krs-One. Running parallel through his arteries is Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Romare Bearden and Andy Warhol. These are his bare bones influences and they helped to liberate what he had held inside. Cro Dadi is a prime example of an artist being born out of his responses and unique sensitivity to the stimulants of his environment and the aesthetic responses of a particular atmosphere – which can go on to shape and influence how one filters and sees the world and processes their own experiences internally.

” I never even considered being formally taught about art…just traveling the boroughs of NY exposed me to all that creativity had to offer… My New York experience manifests itself through my art. Abstractly I assign, define and interpret color, shape, line, space and time.” — Scarecrow

                                                     *                                  

LITERARY ACTION PAINTING

What is most interesting to discover is that Scarecrow is actually mostly known for his “conversation peace” collection of collage works and the when the opportunity arises for a live performance, in high volume with inexplicable velocity scarecrow redefines the words Art and Show. After seeing his work or a live performance, Scarecrow really makes you “re reevaluate” that item so common to us all, a pen.                                                               

                                                                                                       — from Tumblr

While I myself have never been blessed to witness one of Scarecrow’s live ‘Art Shows,’ it must be noted that his works have a literary dimension which defies the separation between word and image and which imbues his own artwork with a literal poetic alliance: his titles are poems themselves. And while not actual haikus, they work on the soul in a very similar way. Swift, like jackknives in the air, they are direct without giving up their mystery. The title of one of his masterpieces:

“Start of a sleepless nite
Insomniacs playground”

Insomniacs Playground, 2015

instantly sets the tone and mood and yet works so powerfully on its own, simply as a phrase. I quite like how the title itself feels like the mood being expressed. Neurotic lines, a spindled tone. The drawing itself is a black ink orchestra of faces, half-faces, eyes all enmeshed over figures and musical signs, notes, what have you…But even if one were blind, one could appreciate the emotional and intellectual scope of Scarecrow’s work just by hearing one of his title’s read aloud. This endows his work with a different dimension, a new sort of cub-ism in some respects.

“My art is as an act of protest against the preconceived notions of what art is…” — Scarecrow

BLESSED 
TO BE 
CHOSEN
BY 
SELECTIVE
ANGELS
THE ONE THEY
PROTECT
AND SOLELY 
BY THEIR HAND
I THUS STAND
BLESSED 
AND 
ERECT
CRO

A New Work, 2015

*

Scarecrow’s works are like the expressions of objects going through crisis or celebrations (he uses “meltdown” in titles as quickly as he’ll inject “playground”); they exist in states of extremes (as all art should, despite the west’s misunderstood alliance with notions of subtlety) and they come alive as nervous breakdowns, epiphanies, psychedelic confessions, and electric rays and squiggles that exist in the night – as if neon signs had exploded into the air and then re-assembled themselves to not advertise for vacancies but partitions of the soul. His art consoles and provokes; it is unapologetically Black American and righteous and it seeks to do many things at once.

Scarecrow’s collages are haunting and literal revelations: they present jagged and ripped shards of paper and the images beneath them. Morphed faces, obscuras, blunted perceptions, crunched-in, pushed-down, crackling stories that announce themselves in an urbane blast of truth. I’ve always seen collages as the city man’s version of the countryman’s wood-carvings. Cro’s collages are more akin to some torn notebook rather than an effete presentation of multi-layered artworks.  In the best tradition of collage art (one of the hardest things to do in my unschooled opinion), Cro gives you a few moods and ideas at once.  Like the best jazz a great deal is implied but the message is quite overt.  There are overriding themes in his collages and of course his texts (which, in case I have not made it clear, are now becoming almost as famous as his paintings themselves) help to define his works and the impulses behind them.

Reflections of a Past Self
“So much blues earned/Without an instrument to play” – Cro Dadi

Pianoless Man, 2014

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Before “recycling” became fashionable Scarecrow, for years, was using found objects as a catalyst for his art…

Some of Scarecrow’s work has a stop-motion effect. His Bo Diddley, collage, for example, proudly proclaiming the rock and roll revolutionary’s evolution from a “nothing into an American something” is a prime example of this near-animation effect.  Everything from the ragged microphone patch to Diddley’s now-iconic cigar box homemade guitar – registers the ‘down home’ tradition of Do-it-yourself-frame-by-frame manual illustrative-filmmaking and a sort of nostalgia that may very soon end up becoming part of the American Establishment’s property.  The Powers That Be – corporations, governments, architects of the New Mass Media Pop Culture Zeitgeist and their offspring who now run museums — will, one day, take all the owned memories of artists such as Bo Diddley and will try to pretend as if rebels like Diddley did not actually create himself.  Success stories are often re-woven by the establishment; but its the artworks created by the outsiders and the underdogs that best cultivate, capture, retain, and reiterate the majesty and importance of men like Bo Diddley.  For only an outlaw artist can pay real homage to an outlaw musician:

BO DIDDLEY
ROCK ROLL SOUL
INNOVATOR
FROM NOTHING 
TO AN AMERICAN
SOMETHING

Bo Diddley, 2013

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Perhaps Cro’s best works, however, are his seemingly most urgent ones.  A solitary masterpiece like “Insomniacs Playground,” has this quality as well as his pen and ink marker pieces such as “Stained People Through Stained Glass” which has an immediate power and enough for the eye to linger upon repeatedly, allowing Cro’s perception of stained people (the afflicted?) to become ours.

VIEWING 
STAINED
PEOPLE

THROUGH
STAINED
GLASS

Stained People Through Stained Glass [pen, ink, marker, 2015]

I could not help but see the colorful mélange of figures as mangled birds as witnessed through a kaleidoscope.  And this is such an integral part of experiencing and understanding an artwork:  allowing our perceptions to change and then becoming one with the artist’s work. Even if what we see isn’t intended. It’s still a correct assessment of his vision. For when all is said and done, it is myself I learn about when viewing a work of art. Even when I think I’m learning about the creator himself.

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The artist and his mask

________

“Is it 5 o’clock yet?”

SO MANY MOODS AND ATTITUDES INTERTWINED/BUSY IS THE WORKPLACE
ENDURING A NINE TO FIVE [Pen ink crayon marker watercolor, 2014]

3

Pen and Ink, 2015                                            

________

 

[On] Dec 31 2015

Scare Cro
will be retiring
from
Visual art

Thank you all for your continued support throughout
With love

There is always something humbling and mysterious when an artist – perhaps even at the peak of their powers – removes himself from the spotlight.  Or respectfully washes his paintbrush and leaves them to dry – and to be doused by someone else. The reasons for retirement can sometimes be as enigmatic as one’s suicide or why people fall in love with the people they do.

But it is also so delicately conscious and generous because when an artist says goodbye – he is letting you know in his own way that he may no longer have much to share with you.  He may have things he wants to express – man will always express – but he may not necessarily share them.  And that’s okay, too of course.  Because he has already given himself to you.  Sometimes an artist needs to keep a piece of himself in his own pocket.

Nervous systems are passed along through every canvas, and there is a time when that must stop. Whether it is because the Artist wants to move on or spend concerted energy on family or raising animals or building a woodshed or feeding the poor or devoting himself to a God in a whole other way or…picking his fingernails.  It doesn’t matter.  Remember Miles Davis retired several times. And his final retirement was due to the fact that he “couldn’t hear the music” inside his head anymore.

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A new & final phase has begun for the Cro: a harmonious collaboration with Jerry Ray Orr, a fine artist in his own right, proving again that two artists can jointly create a singular piece.  They recently had a successful joint-exhibition in North Carolina (birthplace of Romare Bearden). One of the hardest things to do for a painter or a novelist is to create a work with another artist of the same medium.  Collaboration is much more common and welcomed in music or theater — but the “lonely arts” such as painting or photography or poetry are not as open to collaboration and this is partially based on the dynamic and construct of those arts itself.  The lonely artist, no matter what type, is confessional.  And his pain or joy or struggle is often entirely his own or his own perception or reflection of something outside of him.  He doesn’t need or necessarily want help in transmitting his vision – he simply wants to vomit and be done with it.  Collaboration, however, even when painful is less grief-stricken and assertive if done in the right way.  When it isn’t, wars break out and lives (sometimes literally) can be lost.  It is not child’s play.  And yet – it requires a child’s devotion…to play.

Dynamic Duo: Cro & Orr working eyeball to eyeball…

As someone who has gratefully accepted his strengths as a collaborator and the desire to work in conjugal with someone I trust (in my case, creating directly with my wife) — I look upon Cro and Orr’s collaborations as signs of love and hope.  Although sleeker than his solo material, this new work is emotionally robust and penetrating and just might even contain more elements than Cro’s solitary pieces; on one hand this is to be expected as Orr brings a new energy – the buzz of the Rastafarians and the texture of pop cosmology of great graphic novels and illustrations.  Their collaborations are thicker, palette almost denser, colors bolder – and it reminds me of both the great children’s books, comic poster art, and some of the classic LP sleeve art of the 1970’s and 1980’s.  And as poorly stated as I have just expressed that, I mean it with all my heart. There is something nostalgic about the new work’s visual muscularity…yet something forward-looking. For it is not mere sentiment or kitsch they are after or concerned with.  It is the four corners of the mind.  They still want to make sure you shed a light on at least one of them…

As we approach
The 31 days of October
Beware of the things…
That go bump in the night

Cro Dadi & Jerry Ray Orr, 2015  

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Cause while Mingus composed it. And Henry Miller wrote it. Nobody drew it…quite like the Cro.

“And when the clown cries, the towel dries/All the smeared blood & crimson lies/Clowns don’t cry. They merely wipe their faces with the colors that dripped & smeared/ the silence left after laughter/Clinging in their eyes.”  – Dennis Leroy Kangalee

One of Cro’s Dalicasso watercolors, 2014

And with that, good people, I leave you with the Cro’s forever motto:

Like what you like

Share what you love

Be a blessing

Remembering too

That you too

Are truly blessed 

–

Cro Dadi resides in Orlando, Florida and can be found on Facebook. Please visit his page, explore his art work.  He encourages anyone – anywhere – to reach out and connect.\ https://www.facebook.com/cro.dadi

The Scarecrow himself…[photo: Everett Spruill]Prints of are available at

Prints of Things That Go Bump in The Night are available at http://fineartamerica.com

Visit Scarecrow’s Tumblr archive: http://crodadi.tumblr.com/

Listen to the Artist in JB Webb’s Interview:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBFlKmnkxYU

Lyrics from “Type” by Vernon Reid, from the Living Colour album Time’s Up © 1990

The title for this essay ‘So Sad When the Daws Pick at A Scarecrow’ came from the song “SoHa” by Dennis Leroy Kangalee, © 2011 from the performance poem Gentrified Minds.

© October 15, 2015 by Dennis Leroy Kangalee; originally published at dennisleroykangalee.wordpress

Wilmington Was On Fire Before David Zucchino…

This is a reprint and slightly different version of an original essay published June 1st, 2016.  It has been re-posted here again as a result of the conscientious effort to dismiss Christopher Everett and his extraordinarily bold and revolutionary film-making and cultural contribution to the education of the history of USA, specifically the state of North Carolina.  Because he is Black, Everett’s miraculous accomplishments with this film alone — it brought to national attention the post American Chattel Slavery-racism of the past that always lurked in the USA, it found its way into Congressional hearings on reparations – yes! – and is even used to try to ‘teach’ and inform the Police Officers in North Carolina what Black Americans have endured just in that one state alone.  David Zucchino, a White American award winning journalist (whatever that means) – has a new book out (“Wilmington’s Lies”) that for the white mainstream — supposedly reveals this little known travesty and holocaust of American history — and the subject itself is treated as if no one had known or explored this incident before.  Once again,  the Black man gets no credit – and not only that…but WE don’t do anything about it.  Zucchino himself refuses to acknowledge, credit, cite or discuss Everett’s film Wilmington On Fire despite the fact that nearly everyone on the street knows that Zucchino has not only seen the film and viewed it, but that it instigated his own investigation into the history of Wilmington and the racist coup and bloodshed that transpired in 1898.  Everett is proud that he has helped to agitate other historians and journalists and writers — and yet instead of seeking an alliance, they choose to pretend Everett and other Black independent researchers and artists who do controversial and dangerous work — don’t exist.  Well that’s funny to me.  I am sure the IRS and the good people of Wilmington know Mr. Everett and his film exists.  I know the Universities of North Carolina and throughout the United States know that Mr. Everett and his film exists.

White people constantly and consistently base their sociological explorations, historical investigations into race and racism, and their understandings and approach to music and understanding — off of the sweat and blood already spilled by Black activists, artists, laborers, and the Beautiful Unknowns who have simply exhausted their own humanity into model templates for “good citizenry” and yet…who gets the acknowledgment, kudos, support, critical attention, financial support and mainstream attention?  The Independents, the outsiders, the mavericks, and the revolutionaries fail every time this happens.  Shame on us.    

                                                  — Dennis Leroy Kangalee, May 20, 2020

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A meditation on Christopher Everett’s revolutionary documentary film Wilmington On Fire

Christopher Everett’s independent film “Wilmington on Fire” is a stunning movie about the racist massacre that took place in Wilmington, North Carolina at the end of the 19th century when a mob of whites burned down Black businesses in downtown Wilmington and either killed or exiled its Black citizens, threatening death to some of the Black property owners if they even thought about returning.  With a passionate cast of interviewees, Wolly McNair’s arresting visual reproductions of some of the events, a stellar soundtrack produced by Sean ‘Oneson’ Washington, and a jam-packed history and humanities lesson in a sobering 90 minutes, this is a wholly personal and consciousness-expanding documentary told in a direct, unpretentious, and intimate way about a genocidal act whose impact still reverberates today…

White American racists shoot Black American citizens of Wilmington, NC on November 10, 1898 in one of the swiftest acts of genocide in American history. [Courtesy of Speller Street Films; artwork by Wolly McNair]

 

Malcolm X used to bemoan Black America’s pathological loyalty to the Democratic Party.  This perverse agreement to remain supportive of the Democrats was sealed of course with President Johnson’s skillful passing of the 1964 Civil Rights act, the landmark piece of legislation that deemed discrimination of any kind illegal in the USA. What is most ironic, of course, beyond the fact that since then non-Black immigrants have actually used the gains of that bill and the Civil Rights movement in general – to benefit their own stance, corroborate white racism, and ascend the ladder within America culture. Oppressed people of any stripe are always quick to forget that they are quite often the beneficiaries of another people’s suffering. (Johnny Cochrane interestingly makes note of this in his autobiography Journey to Justice when he describes how the former LA community of west of Main Street went from being a Japanese-American middle class neighborhood to a New Black Middle Class enclave post WW2).

I struggle to understand Jews who do not see the actions of Israel as being evil and draconian in terms of how they regard and oppress the Arabs and Africans of the occupied territory once known purely as Palestine. Do we all suffer from our own selective memory, our own bludgeoning “cops in the head”, our own mangled perception of what is right, wrong, and how we benefit or not or fit in or not?

What leaves a bad taste in my mouth is the heralding of Lyndon Johnson and his “progressive” administration for putting forth the Civil Rights Act, blah blah blah…Johnson was a politician, not a moralist. He would have sold his own mother if it had meant power. Despite his obvious support of the Civil Rights Act he was staunchly racist and a serious cartoon-example of a “good old boy” white Southern cracker. His recorded conversations reveal how natural it was for him to refer to blacks as “Niggers” constantly in conversations held in the oval office (you can hear these recordings on YouTube). Jim Garrison, who charged the United States government in a coup d’état against President Kennedy implied that Johnson himself was even marginally involved in the JFK assassination, so what on earth would convince people he cared about Black people simply because he patronized us and realized he was already in a losing battle…America had to make legislative changes in the 1960’s – the pressure was too much to bear as we the far left was gaining major strides in this country and throughout the world and a Black men protecting himself at all costs against the cruelty and hate of his government would not go unheeded. It is pressure and resistance that always creates legal changes and it either hits you in the wallet or in the head. The dollar or the bullet.

Are we “a virus in shoes” as the late great Bill Hicks once proclaimed? I think we are. Whether we are killing animals or each other, Man is interminably doomed and his shameful celebration of malevolence only continues to prove that while there may not be a god – there is certainly a devil. And he weaves and works his way through the actions of human beings in a way that is profoundly shocking and mysterious. Why? Because, supposedly, everything is all about money. Or the subjugation of one group over another. Throughout history and psychology, all things, all of our spiritual carbon footprints could be whittled down to either of these causes, often both, as Capitalism is a complex duet of both avarice and racism. We are pathetic.

White racists stand amidst the carnage and destruction they proudly create in Wilmington, North Carolina on November 10, 1898 [courtesy of Speller Street Films, artwork by Wolly McNair]                         

                                                                             *

Let’s get back to the checkered past and moral confusion of the Democrats. What a fascinating and morbid history our political parties have purely in terms of their formation, definitions, and self-preservation. For it was on November 10, 1898 North Carolina Democrats enabled a White Mob to engage in a massacre that left at least 100 Blacks dead (the exact number is somewhere between 60 and in the hundreds – the records are murky about this for obvious reasons). For some reason it was the political affiliation alone that stood out to me when learning this information in Christopher Everett’s new and revealing documentary Wilmington On Fire.

First of all, I had no clue that Wilmington was at one point one of the most cosmopolitan centers in all of the USA, in fact one of the biggest and most economically inspired cities in the world before 1898. Wilmington On Fire does a fantastic job relaying all of this information. It was one of the most diverse cities with (yes!) black-owned and white-owned shops side by side in downtown Wilmington. The Black middle class was so successful, some even had their own butlers and pianos. This puts a whole new twist on the 19^th century Black life doesn’t it? In fact, what most of us can’t admit: there were more powerfully linked and healthier connections amongst black businessmen and their communities well before the official rise and fall of Jim Crow segregation laws in the USA. This warrants serious rumination.

Obviously this kind of “renaissance” and “progress” of humanity offended racists and white supremacists to their very core, many of which were staunch members and supporters of the Democratic Party. Republicans back then still had the air of liberalism attached to their party.

But meanings and their associations’ change and context – always context! – will always be the end all-be all. Still, it is no less alarming that Americans have a skewered view of the past, identities, and supposed meanings. Perhaps if we regarded political parties as complicated as we have begun to regard our sexual identities or proclivities we may see that there is more to “politics” than meets the eye; more to the values of a political party than its typically regarded associations.

Does it not amuse you  that Hollywood actor Wendell Pierce insanely defends the likes of Hilary Clinton and the Democrats legacy? While once again context is vital here, had the actor done this to a Trump supporter, I wouldn’t even mention it. I would casually admire the act for what it’s worth, shrugging off yet another ploy and performance from our nation’s true capital: the throes of Hollyweird.

Even if an actor of Pierce’s modest-stature (commercially speaking) is so disgruntled by a Bernard Sanders supporter or another candidate – he should take time to remember that political parties mean, essentially, nothing. Pierce should spend time putting weight or interest behind Christopher Everett’s excellent movie opposed to paying the state $1,000 bail as a result of his fractious encounter with a Sanders supporter.

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The Movie

About the infamous 1898 massacre of Wilmington’s black businesses and citizens, Christopher Everett’s directorial debut is an unpretentious, direct, and minimalist portrait of the coup d’état created by the white North Carolina Democratic Party in an attempt to broker the lives and future of Wilmington and eventually the entire state – ensuring the legacy and rebirth of a rekindled and acknowledged form of legally sanctioned racism, 35 years after the civil war and the USA’s official outlaw of slavery.  As Dr. Umar Johnson fluently explains, after the Civil War in 1865 – a cloud hung over the Ex-Confederate Southern white men who couldn’t bring themselves to accept the fact that they had lost a war – not to President Lincoln or the Yankees up North but to their own former slaves! We forget or choose not to remember that Black Americans fought against some of their former slave owners as Union soldiers. And the Union never would have won the Civil War had it not been for the Black soldiers who fought for themselves… and on behalf of the Union.

In retaliation and exasperation, white supremacists who governed the Democratic Party in North Carolina sought to retaliate and officially install a racist system that had been supposedly eradicated some 30 years prior as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Confederates’ dream to restore White unity and Black servitude reached such a grizzled mania that an impassioned yet calculated plot to excise the Black businesses and citizens of Wilmington completely. Independent researcher Kent Chatfield shows us copies of WB McKoy’s pamphlet of 1897, The White Government Union a constitution and bylaws created by the North Carolina Democratic Party whose sole aim was to instill white supremacy government.

The film opens with Ness Lee’s powerful track, “Voice of The Regular People” produced by Illastrate with sampled echoes of Curtis Mayfield’s inimitable falsetto heard wailing, “I’m going to war to find my brother!” is well used here and the closing number of the film has one of the best uses of anthemic protest music that I can think of in any movie since Children of Men’s closing with John Lennon’s “Free The People.” The closing number by James Diallo (produced by Michael ‘Sarkastix’ Harris) in this case is the original and haunting, “It’s a Massacre” – a moody atmospheric poetic hip hop tune that is as defiant and soulful as the film itself. The rest of the music is sparsely and confidently scored by Matthew Head.

We learn in Wilmington On Fire that the White Government Union was a more urbane and far more treacherous terrorist organization than its backyard cousin the Ku Klux Klan for example. These were men who were out for blood, had serious connections and money, and were not going to stop until they removed all Black power-brokers, cultural influence, and existence in Wilmington, North Carolina. The White Government Union’s de-facto militias – known as the “redshirts” – once again, unlike the Klan did not hide their faces and acted like savage storm-troopers upon the African-American community and, as the Nazis did, acted in accordance with some of the most strategic and wicked propaganda put forth by white racists in Wilmington in order to stir up hate and fear against the Blacks. Their vile use of rape as a fear tactic and as a way to protect the white purity of the white woman is on par with the mechanisms later used by the Nazis in the 1930’s. Who knows?   I imagine Hitler and his henchmen being the history fanatics that they were no doubt impressed and inspired by the methods used by the White Government Union.

Activist & Radio Host Larry Reni Thomas declares sadly “Wilmington – the town – is synonymous with racial violence.” Thomas ceaselessly fights on behalf of descendants of the victims of the 1898 Wilmington riot. 

                                                                           *

Wilmington On Fire was made to enlighten, inform, and arouse interest in not only a slice of American history, but also a deeply troubling event that has been swept under the carpet and seldom mentioned.   A touchstone of racism and quite honestly one of the multitudinous events that has occurred to Black people in North America alone that helps make-up the Black Holocaust – a stream of harrowing events that Western academics and historians continually downplay in favor of the gargantuan numbers involved in the Jewish Holocaust in the confines of Nazi death-camps. Still, if it were a numbers game they would lose. According to SE Anderson, somewhere between 15 and 60 million Black lives were destroyed as a result of the transatlantic slave trade alone. And the horror continues to this day. Each isolated act of terror makes up another patchwork in the terrible mighty quilt known as Modern Culture As Created by the Anglo in What Is Now Known as The United States of America.

Yet, many African-Americans still find it hard to reconcile their past in this country alone. Randall Robinson in his excellent book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks mentions his exasperation via a casual discussion he had with author Walter Mosley with Blacks’ seeming unwillingness to acknowledge their tortured past by downplaying and literally disabling the commercial business of such well-intentioned films like Beloved based on the Toni Morrison classic. Because it deals with slavery they ignored it. That’s probably even truer for the greater mainstream’s embarrassing avoidance of the entire work of genius Haile Gerima. And while pop culture has embraced a Disney-fied, eroticized, and gleefully sanitized “ANTEBELLUM SLAVE & SOUTHERN CIVIL RIGHTS” movie genre (Miss Burning to Clara’s Heart to The Help to 12 Years a Slave, etc) – most of the serious art films or documentaries go unnoticed or un-appreciated because of their innate passion or style or singular vision. Sometimes it’s because of all three – whether it’s serious protest dramas like Nothing But a Man or later radical Black-helmed pictures like Sam Greenlee & Ivan Dixon’s The Spook Who Sat By The Door – there’s always a distinct difference in the independent filmmaker’s vision and those seeking to exploit, pander, or simply fulfill a Liberal-checklist of obligations for some media company to fulfill. This must always be taken into account when you watch any film, especially a documentary: Ask, “Is this necessary?” And then ask, “Would this director be willing to suffer for giving us this information?”

A screening at Cucalorus Film Festival in North Carolina proved to be the most attended film screening in the festival’s 21 years of existence. A huge deal for a guerrilla film project. Poster designed by Marcus Kiser.

*

Documentaries, like narrative movies, do have a point-of-view. And because they are not dramas or crafted fictions – it does not mean that they are less entertaining and/or less subjective. All truth in art is beauty and contains a POV. It is not the events being reported that is debatable. That is fact. But the HOW they are being related is where the truth of a subject comes into play.

 

Ken Burns’ obnoxious and smug documentaries and explorations of American life are often comfy and bold history lessons. He gives us tons of FACTS…but no genuine HEART. His movies are ultimately shallow and soulless despite their technical perfection. His speakers themselves come off indulgent and sanctimonious. Burns’ clean and sterile mannered PBS approach may have helped to kill and generalize the documentary in the past 25 years but it also helped to usher in legion of filmmakers trying to reclaim power and truth from the establishment – each in their own way.

By contrast, Everett’s “talking heads” comprise a wonderful cast of characters, if you will. From the nervy and dutifully concerned Kent Chatfield (a white brilliant researcher whose rational deductions and drove of information would make Oliver Stone weep; he grew up hearing older men recount their passed down recollections of how whites massacred blacks in 1898) to the regal Dr. Lewin Manly (a beautifully grave man who reminds one of Thurgood Marshall and is a direct descendant of Wilmington’s Black newspaper mogul, Alex Manly, whose Daily Record printing press was arguably the main target in the massacre) to compassionate and dynamic community activists like Daawud Muhammad. But all those interviewed come off extremely intelligent and understandably concerned about the effects of this horrible event and its aftermath 118 years later…

If film can be an art and a weapon – the documentary is an often thrilling and deadly weapon in the arsenal, at times a best kept secret. For all documentaries seek to make its audience confront something. If narrative directors infused their scripts with this lesson – how much more dynamic and dangerous dramatic pictures would be!

And yet documentaries have become a particular and strange new pornography in our culture.  It has become obvious to me that over the past decade a large number of filmmakers who fancy themselves as “progressive” and “Liberal-loving” humane freedom fighters have invested a great deal of time, energy, and money in making documentaries – but not truly advocating any direct social change. They are carefully crafted movies that give facts and tons of information about terrible events or current happenings – and yet don’t actually implore their audiences to do anything. It is not necessary for a film to scream its message to its audience, quite often even the most graphic documentary doesn’t have to do that…and yet it doesn’t hurt if a documentary is a bit forward and incendiary even to its own viewer. Wilmington On Fire toes this line – it is up front about how it feels and how its director regards his subject.

And what I like most about it – is that it is a “simple” American story. By focusing in on his own state’s history and legacy, Everett combines the ideal Pete Seeger coaxed us to consider: think globally, but act locally.

You don’t have to go all the way to Iraq to collect data on terrorism – often all you need to do is investigate your own state or cities history. The United States was founded upon terrorism: where have we all been?

*

Film As Resistance

 

“Yes, I’m for the compensation for the victims and ancestors of this riot mainly because our ancestors fought long and hard for what they had – to be taken away from them because of color…In some form or fashion, they (the state of North Carolina) should compensate.”

– Faye Chaplin, great granddaughter of victim Thomas C. Miller

*

When George Zimmerman recently auctioned off the 9mm pistol he used to kill Trayvon Martin in no less a cold-blooded way– the overall reaction was simply “Oh, he’s nuts. Ignore him. Just another American story.” And while that is quite true, our tacit agreement with the racist establishment and the “American Way of Life” is one that is rapidly begin to drown us all – it is corroding any sense of sanity we have for one reason only. It provides no closure.

What kind of closure? A closure that results in the killing of one’s oppression (be it person or system), the slaying of one’s dragon in order for us to be as Joseph Campbell famously declared the hero of our own life.

The bloodbath that occurred in Wilmington 1898 – the men and women and children fighting for their lives literally as a result of a racist attack bears spiritual resemblance to all that follows later in the 20^th century from the wrongly-accused-of-rape-Scottsboro Boys to Emmett Till to the fire hoses on blacks in Mississippi to lynchings (take your pick) to Rudolph Giuliani’s reign of terror on Black men in NYC in the 1990s to the bizarrely perfunctory executions of Freddie Gray or Sandra Bland. And in all this – one must ask where the resistance lies. Why do we take it? And do we truly feel that man will change and if so how long must we wait?

Perhaps Beckett was right: the absurdity of waiting for anything to happen is our biggest tragic quality. We wait. And we wait. And we believe the waiting will remove the pain.

Throughout all this waiting is the argument for reparations paid to the descendants of the victims of this atrocity. Descendants such as Faye Chaplin, whose great-great grandfather was Thomas Miller – a generous and successful entrepreneur in Wilmington who not only worked well paid jobs but ran his own businesses. Chaplin estimates the property, money, and legacy destroyed could easily amount to millions. And while she is probably right the moral conundrum that Wilmington On Fire presents is not the reparations debate – although that is a central problem and something I myself would like to see. The centerpiece however is, as independent researcher Kent Chatfield proclaims clearly, that the state of North Carolina was involved in a massive coup and act of terrorism that to this day they have not widely conceded, admitted, acknowledged and taken steps towards restitution. Why? Because the same white racism that the North Carolina democrats employed and enabled with venal glee in 1898 is the very same racism and mode of thinking that governs not only North Carolina, but our entire society today. Racism and its tactics may have grown more sophisticated and clever, but its results and impact are the same and, quite possibly, even more dangerous today – in a world where it is becoming less clear as to who or what exactly can help you fight injustice and precisely…what that even means. Look at how we reacted to a force majeure like Hurricane Katrina. Would our collective response had been any different if we knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that it had been choreographed on purpose?

No, sometimes pure straight resistance does. Why no one has cracked and tried to kill the psychotic Zimmermans or launch a full-on offensive upon Police stations or even judicial offices that govern and enable the egregious racism, the devilish actions of the sociopaths that swear allegiance to the false gods and hateful order of this country – is beyond me. Resistance comes in many shades.

The making of this film is Everett’s own act of resistance, his own rebellion. His own artistic defiance: I am making this film whether you want me to or not and I am not doing it to get into Sundance or for a distribution deal or for a glitzy write up in the Times. I’m doing it because I have to.

His elegantly minimalist approach to filmmaking serves him well.

*

So do we learn from the past? I don’t know. I can’t honestly say yes, but the work of any artist is always an affirming one, is always hopeful – because the act of creation is always positive proof that something can be learned and digested from our sins. One is not driven to make write a book or compose a song purely for the hell of it unless they are cynical craftsmen looking to cash-in on a trend perhaps or the latest cause. But a filmmaker disclosing painful truths, like the great muckrakers of the past, or the crusading shaman is akin to the African griots who are desperately trying to heal and put forth knowledge.

 

I commend Christopher Everett and encourage everyone to see Wilmington On Fire and then see how it may apply it to their own lives. And if you don’t know, then I suggest you watch it again.

–

Wilmington On Fire is now available on streaming! 

Vimeo On Demand: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/wilmingtononfire 

KweliTV: https://www.kweli.tv/programs/wilmington-on-fire

Sad Days for Free

t

It was the type of beauty that makes an artist jealous or an atheist create a religion.

The woman’s face seemed to say “Handle With Care”. Her features were etched with a loving poise as if the brush across her face said to its own bristles: “Check this out.” Her lips had the sculpted and untouched look of a marble statue or a grandmother’s china set. Majestic, but almost too sterile. But so real that you knew if you touched it, you could break it. The delicacy of her face hosted a pair of bright cavernous eyes. They seemed deep and endless, a Xanadu unto herself. And just as lonely, perhaps. Her hair waved and nestled around her head. And her collarbone, too, seemed unloved and therefore all the more inviting. Her breasts hung and bobbed naturally, barely hidden beneath a thin wisp of loose cotton. The Maestro’s mouth twisted dumbly and his eyes ached. He felt bad about every negative comment he had ever made about women. Or life.

He watched her cross the street and saw the poetry in her gait, her bent head, tired arms. What he had always read about in dance books is what this woman was. The purity of her movement–was a great deal to take because it championed the “Beauty of a Better Tomorrow” philosophy in today. Her demeanor was confident, but mortal. And her curved marble lips were not pursed for her victim; they were curled up for grace. A shift of one minor muscle and it would have read as a smirk. All that beauty, like the blanket of stars at night, swimming through this sea of contempt, unpleasantness, and bitter digitized Eleanor Rigby’s of the world.
Seen, but not valued.
Hated because it lived and breathed.
Scorned because she was beautiful, but not wealthy.
Single, but not lonely.
Happy, but not ignorant.
And it was in the way she bent down to adjust her shoes that the trembles started and pain swelled…

He had to do something; he was still dizzy from his episode minutes earlier. He sucked on his dwindling saliva and hummed. Her tiny ballet shot adrenaline-razors through his veins.

Her shoes: tattered, worn, and dejected. But treated like the hands of Moses. She was so casual that it frightened him. The cardboard around her feet were folded and molded like moccasins. The shoestrings were made of wire like un-done hangers. If it hadn’t been for sanguine stretching for August, the stitches, like crimson thorns stuck in benign berry–he would have never noticed…And that is what continued to pain him.
Her refusal to crumble in between the pitied streets of a broken cabaret city and a metropolis frozen in spirit, caught between two different chords–minors and majors clashing and bending like fists in a boxing ring twirling with the sprays of sweat drooling on the grooves and in between the rich peoples’ collars, made him sad. And he looked and he could feel the threads of yesterday’s train pulling and hooting at some lonely distant region of his brain. Her old fashioned elegance reminded him of those black and white movies from the 1940’s and instantly his parents, who always appeared larger in his memory, came to him with comforting compassion and an immense yard of broken TV’s, each gripping its thwarted dream…

He revolted when he imagined the pain of her footsteps,–but like everyone else with a battered soul, shot nerves, and no hope–all he could do was stare and stand motionlessly. At least he gave her full attention. She removed all her clothing and ejected a rolled up ball of tissue in between her legs to help stop Aunt Rosa’s mighty flow. Sadder than an unemployed man’s footprints in the snow on New Year’s Eve.
Sadder than a subway ride on a Sunday afternoon.
Sadder than people who believe that hunger isn’t murder.
Sadder than a last minute pack or an eviction notice in the strange cool air of the summer solstice.
Sadder than a cemetery with gum on its fence.
And sadder than the boys who know who their fathers are–but have no desire to be like them.

*
— from “The Maestro” (2006)

Listen to the excerpt recorded here as a ‘Monocord.’

[photo of the author, Berlin, Germany at Bertolt Brecht’s grave, 2006.]

Originally published in the Outlaw Poetry Network

Zedekoah 4: Angela & Jean

The Protest Artist is like the ice upon a body of water; it’s the frozen lake – enabling the Activists (realizers of the vision) to carry themselves OVER the water to the other side, 

the artist is the bridge

the crossing is the activist, the arrival is the fight (revolution).  You can’t have one without the other.
The artist receives the prophecy, the activist must decide what to do with the prophecy.

The artist is the seer
the activist is the doer

(Somewhere in between…is the Actor)

—-preface to the poem “Coda for My Shadow”

[or The World Is Becoming Acquainted with the names of Dead Black Men’]

Angela Davis and Jean Genet in conversation, New York City 1969 at a​n Arts Festival. ​(Photo by Robert Cohen, circa 1969​ – ​ from page 69 of Art of Protest by TV Reed)

​The spring of 1969: as the Paris rebellions failed, a​ conference about the Black Panthers Theater took place in Oakland​,​ which ended in an argument about the direction the theater should take – ​ which by this point was in demise due to FBI infiltration.​..Angela Davis and Jean Genet confer before embarking on two separate routes to the same ultimate destination.

*

ANGELA DAVIS: If only I could only revolt as well as you create plays

JEAN GENET: No, if only I could write as elegantly as you revolt…if my words were as dangerous as your eyes I would not have the urge any longer to dream of a future. Instead I’d be living it.

AD: Yes but I was endgaming to the end of our imagination; I picked up a gun while you could still pick up a pen.

JG: The pen is not mightier than the sword.   It’s just more scary.

AD: If our words and actions were one we wouldn’t have to have this discussion. We could overturn society’s injustice with the swivel of a gun and the precision of a play and so…the world would not be a stage it would be our sun. And the sun is merely a star.

JG: But unfortunately for a star to exist one must be surrounded by darkness.

AD: “Let’s make new light out of love and erase all the darkness that comes with it.”  (I read that somewhere last year.  I think it was Bullins or Jackmon who wrote it; Huey had it painted on the back wall of one of Fred’s theater spaces in Chicago.)

JG: Is that act one or two?

AD: It’s the whole play

Or when the play –

JG: ceases to to be a play.

— Teeming Towards Triple Threats: Revolution in Radio Drama for a Podcast Age Vol. I 

Stay tuned for further information regarding transmission and production of the recorded podcast series: “Rebel Radio: Audio Works for a New Age” – coming this fall in conjugal with Speller Street Films LLC. 

 

STOLEN! The Amorality of Lifted Images: How “Atlanta” Creator Donald Glover Stole from Independent Radical Filmmaker Mtume Gant

Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once proclaimed that tracking shots are a question of morality.  I would add: so is deciding what and how to steal.  Donald Glover, the producer and founder of the FX television show Atlanta may not agree.  In fact, he probably doesn’t.  But it is fair and easy to say that while his Emmy award may ease his conscience, the fact that he stole concepts, visual motifs, dramatic themes, mood, and execution from Mtume Gant’s short film White Face for his episode 6 of Atlanta (“Teddy Perkins”) should be regarded as base fact, not mere coincidence and not something rooted in point-of-view.  Worse, Glover’s crime is tantamount to Mortal Sin in the art world – for while theft in society can be debatable depending on who is running the society, theft or to be more specific – the gross indecency of passing off someone else’s idea as their own and pretending as if it doesn’t matter is a grave act, not a minor transgression.  In this case peccadilloes won’t chirp, they’ll morph into deeply wounded bellows and extol all that they have ingested.  It’s no misdemeanor I’m writing about it, it’s a rather serious offense.  I was so wound up about it I could not sleep last night.  I had watched the Atlanta episode twice and I have seen White Face a total of six times in my life.  So I am very familiar with what I have seen, in fact I read the script years ago when Gant was writing it…and what I experienced watching the “Teddy Perkins” episode was a mixture of revolt, disgust, horror, anger, and deep deep sadness.  Not that it matters.  Because nobody cares, especially since both artists involved are Black men.  You see, in the 21^st century zeitgeist we are supposed to believe that the only real crimes of humanity that are committed specifically against Black people are by powerful White Men or police officers.  No, there is no such thing as immoral acts, lies, or “artistic crimes” committed by Blacks against Blacks or Artist against Artist.  No, those are privileged crimes.  One has to work there way up in order to file a claim or make a complaint.  No, at the lower levels all we can do is protest that someone (usually white) won’t hire us or allow us through the pearly gates.  And even if the crime is committed against you – on your own turf, you have no say.  Welcome to the Brave New World.  We have entered the land of no return.  We are through the looking-glass, folks. Black is white, white is black, up is down, down is up…and everything is up for grabs. We are in trouble.  And I don’t say this lightly.

TOP: Glover’s rendition in Atlanta Episode 6 “Teddy Perkins” (2018) of a shadow profile of Black Man in White Face engulfed in a series of projections.

BOTTOM: Still from Mtume Gant’s original “White Face” (2017) in which the main character dons white-face and screens footage of Fascist speeches and gatherings.

*

 “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”

   – Pablo Picasso

Yes, but when one steals – one should not know where one got it from!  The issue is not stealing as an artist, but covering up what you stole! Picasso is referring to not being coy and simply taking something you like and making it your own, subordinating it’s character to your very own whereby through some cosmic osmosis the very thing you took or tried to capture – becomes your very own.  It becomes, in many ways, even your identity.  To be influenced is one thing, we’re all influenced.  My god, I can’t count how many artists have directly influenced (and inspired) me as a writer, director, or performer.  But ultimately my style emerges as a synthesis of those that triggered something in me…and those I did consciously outright steal from I put my own spin on whatever it was that I was taking from them.  Artists aren’t saints that’s for sure, nor should we be.  When we take things from others, they become our own.  Any unconscious pathological thief understands this and would even admit this if he was aware of what he was doing.  They become ours.  Because they have gone through a transformation.

Not so in the case of creative people and bad artists who outright imitate a riff or a visual motif and yet don’t build upon it, making something better out of it or add to its meaning.  If I steal your car and make you see a home out of it then I’ve done something transcendent.  This often happens when men or women “lose” or have their partner “stolen” from them:  suddenly that person emerges as something frightfully “other” as something different.  Perception has been altered.

This should be the case when an artist steals from another.  First, I should not have any clue where you “got” it from.  And if I do – you’d better improve upon the original.  Comedians know about this, which is why they lose a lot of points when they detect where another comedian got his material from or who he outright stole from.  That’s where it gets very tricky.  TS Eliot proposed, “The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that which it is torn.”  (Emphasis is mine)

And this is where we reach an important conundrum:  is the work utterly different from that which it is torn?  That’s a sweeping question.  And challenge.  And filmmakers, in particular, seem to have no clue how to answer this or engage in this discussion because they do not feel they have to.  Because since Post Modernism has overwhelmed our approach to life – most artists, particularly, those born after 1983 or so – believe that since there is no objective order in life, that facts don’t matter or even exist.  Tell that to a starving child or a victim of war.

The debate over sampling in hip-hop, for example, still runs heavy and could be construed as an example of postmodern ideology (not creativity) gone amuck:  “No one is truly the author of anything” and “Well, everything came from someone else anyway so it doesn’t really matter who is credited or where I got this lick from,” etc. and while that is a different discussion altogether – there is a correlation that can be made because in this Post-Modern age a whole generation of people don’t believe that anything can rightfully belong to an artist.  As great as the internet is, for another example, it also single-handedly destroyed the image.   It high-jacked the power of singular photographic images, stripped photographers of their identity (and work) – I cannot tell you how many times I have come across an arresting image online that neither credits the photographer or mentions where the photo came from.  It is appalling and damaging and this free-wheeling copy and paste approach to art and creativity is having a corrosive effect.  And I say this as one who deeply admires collage and photo-montage, a truly dead art form in and of itself. Bearden and Saar are two of my personal favorite artists because they made new meanings out of their collation and consciously found objects. They built and expressed and pushed…True art is psychedelic, in its original meaning: mind-expanding.

Atlanta TV show creator Donald Glover STOLE VISUAL ELEMENTS AND THEMATIC IDEAS inherent in White Face and did not transcend anything that Gant powerfully gave us or explored.  In fact, Gant’s own employment of white face (a radical hallmark in the Black protest art tradition from Charles Wright to Douglas Turner Ward!) goes beyond the expected and becomes something genuinely new – not only in its haunting mise-en-scene but in the aesthetics utilized by Gant and cinematographer Frankie Turiano.  These guys were ripped off!

Legally, you can’t copyright an idea. But you can be sued for the execution of an idea if it follows and apes the original model.  And Atlanta episode 6 “Teddy Perkins” is guilty of this.  Copyright infringement supposedly protects this notion and should technically be used in Gant’s claim.  But while I am no legal advisor and can’t definitively state if Gant may have a legal case to pursue – I do know there is certainly an ethical one that needs to be addressed first!  It’s not the supposed ideas that Glover wanted to explore in Teddy Perkins, it’s how he went about it. I don’t care if he was commenting on the lost marbles of Michael Jackson or the price of fame or the American madness intrinsic to musical genius – none of that has an iota to do with Gant’s White Face and is not the reason I am livid.  I’m livid because Glover used the precise techniques, style and dramatic themes to employ his own story.  He took the frame but knocked the picture out. He took the skeleton and tried to re-arrange it with his own flesh.  That’s akin to using the same melody and chord changes of one song but using my own lyrics so I superficially change the meaning of the song.  It’s still not successful as “art” because the original will always be referenced and while I may be able to do that (sampling and rhythm track borrowing) – the song is still rooted in the original framework. In fact, I would be drawing more attention to the original.  Sometimes that’s the aim.  Successful pop songs from Puffy Combs’ “I’ll Be Missing You” — his groovy mawkish re-contextualization of The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” (with Sting’s blessing and co-credit) to Robin Thicke’s amoral, illegal and shameless “Blurred Lines,” which stole Marvin Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up” (a US Jury decided this in 2015) – have either stolen or legally borrowed from an existing work of art.  This is nothing new.  But it is a funky emblem glaring on the lapels of TV producers and filmmakers, video editors, and advertising strategists more and more as time goes by.  The difference between the pop music world and the pop movie world is that in the movies, directors are never called out for their indiscretions. And rarely are they sued!

The growing millennial perception is that “Everything is point-of-view.  There is no actual truth.”  Any sane person will argue that is simply not the case and to try and turn the psychology of being an artist into a lame defense for stealing someone’s work and NOT acknowledging or paying for it – is not only unconscionable it is unforgivable.  Because it equates the artist with the mentality of the Capitalist menace who has no problem identifying himself as the walrus as he leaves the carpenter empty-handed and drained of resources.  It is a pathology associated with the narcissist, the sociopath, and the corporate gangster.  It exceeds mere thievery.  When the ivory tower artist steals it’s because he can, not because he needs to.

*

Although the plot or storyline is different – that is merely a deviation and distraction from the guts that was ripped apart from Gant’s White Face.  Thematically, alone, Atlanta Episode 6 “Teddy Perkins” takes its cue from White Face.  It employs a Confederate flag visual (Gant wears a Confederate jacket in White Face) and it stumbles into the psychological territory of parenting: in Gant’s film, the issue of how he and his sister were raised comes to a fore, revealing Black self-hatred and the creepy lashings of colonialism.  This is where the works diverge ideologically: Glover is not politically radical and has no inclination to explore the Fanonian aspects of self-hatred but he sticks to the pat reasoning of how Teddy Perkins was raised.  That alone is enough. Gant’s Charles Rodgers is so hung up on how his mother raised him, he tries to even explain to his sister why he is the way he is.  Dramatically, in this case, the two works are just too similar, from a psychologically narrative view, to ignore. Even the emphasis on the tone of speech and the overly conscientiousness of the character’s vocal twitching is enough of a similarity.  It was extremely hard for me to not keep referencing White Face in my head several times in the 40 minutes of Atlanta…And the two pieces, as dissimilar as they are ultimately as “personal” works (if that word can be prescribed)  – are not separate enough in visual/dramatic presentation and this has done Mtume Gant’s art a major disservice and has left him with the burden of proof.  For Glover is innocent until proven guilty and as easy as it is for me to pass judgment and give my final decree – it is not easy now to undo the damage done and curtail the premature and erroneous praise Glover has received for what many consider to be a dazzling and disturbing dramatic television episode.  Disturbing it is.  It is extremely disturbing.  In the same way that pedophilia, malpractice, pimping, and plagiarism are disturbing.

Let’s turn to the visual aesthetics.

Shots – actual duplication of frames – were stolen to exploit the very same psychological state of Mtume Gant’s Charles Rodgers in White Face; they were directly imitated shots but also a kind of ‘Xerox of context.’ Glover is guilty of conceptual copycat-ism, a hair between vulgar imitation and plagiarism.  Both employ a Black actor in white face (different storyline) but both share the same exact rendering of certain “states of being” on screen.  I reiterate: If I repeat a shot-by-shot sequence from a motion picture but alter the context, the meaning alters. I’ve stolen the language but have created my own meaning.

When I copy an artistic work and consciously labor to retain its aesthetic quality – even if the political ethos or “story” is different – I have still stolen and committed a highly immoral act.  Because I’ve made a bad attempt at capitalizing on and rendering a similar mood as the original which was not mine, to begin with.  And when details boil down to the similarities between White Face and Atlanta Ep.6 – one finds oneself adrift not only in a sea of sharks but crawling through high cotton.  It is painfully apparent that Glover and his director Hiro Murai had seen White Face, which was shot in June 2016, and premiered publicly in April 2017 nearly six months before Glover had gone into production for season two of Atlanta.  He copped the overall concept and execution from White Face, simple as that.

More details:

In White Face, Gant has his character speak into a tape recorder, DP Frankie Turiano obsessively captures Gant in profiles against PROJECTIONS of political rallies, etc. and Gant’s Charles desires to be a fascistic version of Donald Trump and screens Fascist footage in his goal to become a “white knight of the new order.”  With just a heftier budget, director Hiro Murai copies and executes the same motifs: he has Glover’s character in white-face as Teddy Perkins tape recording his voice (in what is more like a gag), emanate on-screen in profile against projected cinematic flickers, and sit in a love-seat amidst a noirish reeling projector that evokes the gently smoky atmosphere and surreal noxious tone of White Face.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d wrongly assume Gant was either guest directing in a self-referential manner or that Glover & Murai were consciously giving a nod to the originality of Gant’s vision, but they weren’t!  They were simply stealing a good idea.  The tragedy here is that they lacked the finesse and creative muscle to do anything new or challenging with the idea, to make a new context out of the leitmotifs Gant and Turiano created.  Mind you, Gant and Turiano worked with their minds and creativity – their budget probably amounted to what Glover pays Kraft services per day.  The convention is easy to copy but not easy to come up with! Donald Glover and Hiro Murai ripped off the most original and daring American independent film of 2017 and they have to own up to it.  And neither the shadow of Glover’s Emmy or his bank account can protect him from this truth.

LEFT: Mtume Gant’s White Face (2017)    RIGHT: Donald Glover’s Episode 6 of Atlanta (2018)

It is not uncommon for filmmakers to reference each other and when it is done it is called an homage. That, like government, is one of the necessary evils that must be endured.  In film-making, it is understood and there’s an unstated agreement to this.

Homage is fine, if not a bit perfunctory with a lot of movie and TV creators, but again – it is something one can swallow, even appreciate despite being a bit annoying or shrill as when a major Hollywood director like Brian De Palma spends millions of dollars on kitsch and nearly 3 quarters of his movie career emulating the style or tones of Hitchcock’s psychological terror.  Or when he successfully pulled off both a coup and homage to Eisenstein in the Untouchables with the baby carriage going down the stairs…

But there’s no agreement to the unsubtle and brazen co-opting of an artist’s work by a corporate entertainment network or TV program.

There is no coincidence, good or bad, and there is no luck when art is concerned. Even the mistakes are on purpose, which is why art is an adult’s playground.  It is rough and every single thing is done for a reason.  Likewise in any creative endeavor, everything is on purpose and a result of a conscientious decision. These decisions in art are a man or woman’s lifeline, their language.  Their way of communicating with the external world what their soul feels and SEES on the inside.  It is not up for grabs negotiation or sale. And it is certainly not warranted to be fodder and gold for dramatic concepts or cinematographic conventions for television shows that purport to be examples of “Black excellence” (oy vey) and rules of thumb for “artists of color who want to tell their own marginalized stories” or some such nonsense they would like us to believe.

Well, when you have an Emmy and a network’s money behind you surely you are not “marginal” and have no interest in doing anything remotely daring or else you wouldn’t get the funding. My generation tends to bemoan that no good films are emerging out of America anymore especially amongst the millennials and while they are right they don’t stop to remember that the great or hell, even just the very good ideas are out there — they are just not being funded!

But comfortable ivory tower TV producers don’t have any scruples or conscience when it comes to attaining ideas— you see this is what the pop establishment always suffered from and why it has nefarious individuals seeking out and finding work, styles, ideas and that terribly annoying word “content” –  that can be stolen from poor artists with no litigious power.  Hell, White musicians did this to Black musicians all throughout the 20th century alone! But what about the Black artists who were/are part of the establishment and made their money off the so-called Black suffrage of the moment instigating the idea that they are somehow trail blazers for Blacks in the entertainment world or a mouthpiece for marginalized Black artists? In 2018, every Ivory Tower Black Movie Maker thinks he or she is Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King.  (If that is the case, I’m curious now, who is Emmett Till or Assata Shakur?)  This is how far gone we are into the Netherlands of psychosis – where limp and lithe movie people actually compare themselves to community organizers, religious leaders, social rebels, and political radicals.

What we have is rampant bare hypocrisy by the producers of Atlanta and to not acknowledge Gant’s movie and its influence on Donald Glover’s conception of this episode 6 is heinous and cowardly.  It is counter-revolutionary and in Black street lingo another mere slice of Hollyweird’s “tricknology.” On par with Hollywood’s fetishization of Black “cool culture” and resistance and what they contorted into a consumer delight almost half a century ago: Blaxploitation.

But Glover or Murai would most likely never concede or admit to anything I have brought up because, sadly, they represent the opposite side of the coin.  Gant’s White Face was art from below and was intended for audiences willing to toe the line and while it has been received positively by numerous people of all races – most of them are rabidly political leftists of the old tradition and/or Black dissident outsiders who crave such challenging works.  Glover and Murai de-radicalize the foundation that Gant and Turiano built their film’s visual punch upon, thereby rendering it for a mainstream audience, which is code for preparing a dish for the “white gaze” digestive tract.  Just one more sin in a litany of crimes.

*

Many popular “artists” in Hollywood eat well but are undernourished in their imagination so they must steal ideas to supplement the meekness of their own and to somehow sustain a healthy diet. They use real artists as their pawns and stepping stones and most of us, pathetically, accept the abuse because we foolishly believe that “one day” we will be duly recognized or supported or employed by these very same people.

The New Wave of Black entrepreneurs and marketing strategists of the entertainment world have ushered in some of the worst Black American talent in front of and behind cameras in the last 25 years. They are charlatans! There are plenty of Blacks with money but there’s a deficit of innate talent (I can’t express how difficult it even is to admit this), giving rise to an impoverished class of Blacks who eat and dress well but are disabled in their capacity to visualize…This false self-righteous snarky generation of bourgeois Black excellence and social justice warrioring is insulting, patronizing, and degrading.  They are money rich, creatively poor… imaginatively impoverished. These people are artistically bankrupt which is why they must steal from other, poorer artists.  It is corporate communism. Those in comfortable chairs know they can always steal toilet paper from those who still sleep on hard benches.  It is not that the nouveau-riche have no ideas of their own, it’s that they don’t trust themselves! And they can smell the authenticity and danger of an honest idea – doesn’t have to even be solely original – but it must be honest, that’s really what this is about – and they will swipe, lift, and grab that honest idea because it may be the only thing natural and organic in their well-heeled processed life.

The very notion of referring to Glover as a Method actor only proves that the millennials themselves have no clue as to what American Method acting is or where it came from.  In AV News, on April 9^th, 2018 Danette Chavez incorrectly wrote Glover “went method” for the “brilliant and unsettling” episode 6 of Atlanta.  As one who studied Meisner, then later the more formal aspects of Strasberg’s approach to Stanislavski and even later came to love the duality and contrariness of the Brechtian approach to acting – I’d say that it is a sad day, indeed, when American actors no longer know who they are or where they came from.  To be a Method actor is to use one’s own life experiences in a given part. In essence, to use oneself in a performance.  It has nothing to do with how much make-up you put on.  In fact, the less you adorn your physical body – the better as it is about behavior and how much of your own soul you are willing to bare.  Method acting is psychologically taxing and can be damaging.  It is one of the reasons why the British traditionally scorned it and why Pre-1945, American actors such as Bogart were simply mystified by it as a process.

But let’s get back on track:

This maligning and stealing of and from independent artists, who have no financial power of their own, has to stop. There was a time in the art world that such a situation would lead to a major beat down and in some terrible cases death! An artist has to be willing to die for his decisions and back them up.  Ask any martial artist: don’t start what you can’t finish.  Glover and the FX producing team have to answer for this.

You don’t play with another man’s work – especially when it is all he has. I have discoursed and fought for independent artists for nearly 20 years and in all my time as an artist, I have been an advocate of the non-corporate artist and his importance as a visionary.  You want powerful, aggressive, idiosyncratic, haunting visions?  Well, support the artists who suffer for them.  Support the artists who dig their heels in, crawl through the mud of their mind, plumb their own depths and mine their own emotional landscapes.  The artists who explored the uncharted regions of their own psychological countries and try to share their discoveries with you.  For it is the undiscovered country that lives within us that we explore and yet are afraid of and it is where the truth of all art stems from.  Even bad art.  Not everything is great.  But everything must be honest.  Why the emphasis on honesty?  Because art is a lie that reveals truth.  And it takes a lot of courage to say a lie…that reveals truth.

It takes even more courage to share a vision that may be prophetic or even just damn profound.  Profundity lies in the truth we know to be actual, to be real within the sphere of human interaction and occupation.  It is often we truth that makes us laugh, cry, or scared. We may not like it – but it will often do one of those three things. If the hairs on your neck stood when you saw the Atlanta episode, they would have saluted when you saw White Face.  Sadly, though, I feel that White Face will forever carry the burden of having to be cast amongst the shadow of Atlanta and regardless of how powerful of a movie it is, it is clear now that you can’t watch White Face without now regarding its imitator, Episode 6 “Teddy Perkins.”  Its fate has been sealed in pop culture at least for the next several years. How do we rectify this?  I’m not certain there is a way, in fact, we can’t.  You can’t throw someone in the deep end of the pool when he’s been introduced to water as being shallow and up to his knees.  Any psychologist will tell you, you will diametrically alter the balance of and to the person’s relationship to water instantly when you do that.  And in most cases, it will turn the person away from water altogether, if not actually traumatize them.  Which is why, I reiterate, art is an Adult world.  It is not for children and it is not for the impostors who run it.  While the entertainment industry has always been a venal and coarse world, it is not one that preys on the arts in hope of devouring all that makes art venomous and dangerous.  It is there to tame and seduce art.  In 1928 Hollywood had no interest in theater and the modern art movement, by 1958 it still had a hostile attitude towards “art” (which was always a dirty word) and yet it managed to make its peace with contemporary playwrights and modern ideas (isn’t it phenomenal that Rod Serling, Paddy Chayefsky, Sidney Lumet, for example, all started off in TV?) but after the 1970’s – when Pop art bled into the fragmented greedy Reagan 80’s – television, marketing, advertisements, fashion, and the culture wars all fomented into a bizarre cocktail that was created to titillate instead of illuminate; patronize instead of entertain and (worst of all) supposedly “educate” instead of humble.  That is why modern TV shows now be they reality docs or sitcoms or dramas all seem to proclaim themselves as IMPORTANT and intelligent and “in the know.”  Because they want to fool themselves into thinking that they are not only ARTISTS representing the people but true ROLE MODELS!   Well, if you get your art or role models from mainstream American Television you are in more trouble than you may know and I pity you – but this is not an attack on the audience, regardless of how ignorant or abused they may or may not be.  This is a line in the sand, just another I can add to my collection and a challenge to the Blacks in the Arts and Entertainment industry who are quick to complain and blame either the “White Man” for lack of “diversity” or those that claim Black Lives Matter.  I’ve said it before if Black lives matter then we should support our Black artists.  Not the highly paid Black art robbers who pilfer and warp good ideas, pass them off as their own and don’t extend a hand to their brother or sister in the gutter.  If a white man ripped off Mtume Gant’s White Face or any other indie cult film – we’d be up in arms, even those of us unfamiliar with underground films.  But the fact that it was a “Black” TV show and a Black American creator/producer who committed this crime we acquiesce to Big Money and give the brother a “pass,” because, you know, he did win an Emmy and we have to show “support.”  Hm.  Very disturbing.  The Black Panther Party for Self Defense hated Black Nationalists for this very reason.  They believed to simply support someone in a high-ranking tier because he or she was “Black” was dangerous.  It’s the content of that person’s character that makes one revolutionary or simply humane.  Another division, a new one is being formed – you can feel the fault lines emerging…

But it’s fine.  We, the artists, remain low to the ground anyway since that’s where all the poets are, below the table…After 20 years of creating in the gutter and supporting other artists (of all stripes) who are in the gutter receiving their own magisterial visions and prophecies, like Shamans cast out of their tribe, I don’t intend to magically have my methods of madness and technique of talent altered to fit a mainstream mode and enter the greater landscape of the establishment’s Great White Way or Hollywood.  (Besides if we’re not creating in the gutter where will the Establishment get all its ideas from?  Who will they steal from?? Certainly not each other…because then they would be forced to create something honest.  But I suppose there’s only so many scripts about rappers, golf courses, cheating bankers, confused gay children, and award dinners that you can write…)

I always believed the artist should go his or her own way. Create his own system or be enslaved by another man’s. William Blake.  I always believed that Big Entertainment could exist with Small Art.  And that an organic relationship could potentially unfold.  It only made sense that in the sixties and early seventies Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier, regardless of what you may think of them, gave huge amounts of money to non-popular or mainstream artists to express themselves.  Melvin Van Peebles to Ivan Dixon are a good example.  Dixon always said he could never have the inner docility to negotiate with Hollywood.  Cosby and Poitier could.  But who in 2018 is helping the truly independent voice of Black cinema today?

We cry about diversity, but there isn’t any.  There are more Blacks on Western TV and Movies than ever before and for the most part, they are all the same. (Yes, for every Michael B. Jordan there is a Jessie Williams, but despite their physical differences – they are still the same person to me.  They all think the same.  Perhaps it’s because they are both so straight-jacketed by the system, their own proclivities as actors or intelligent men can’t come through.   Williams loves making grand acceptance speeches…but his work as an actor is abysmal!) Once in a while, an interesting Black person or voice may emerge (usually British I must admit) and yet their individual qualities get subsumed and washed out and they become homogenized “Black” actors.  There are no freaks, as we used to say at Juilliard, and that is the problem.  The “freak” of nature was usually the best or most interesting actor cause he had things he wanted to get off his chest. And he deviated from the norm.  Jeffrey Wright and Roger Guinevere-Smith may represent the end of that “type” in the formal entertainment business.  But certainly, Donald Glover does not and is not an actor or dramatist taking a risk for us.  Instead of developing and confronting challenging ideas – he’s simply stealing them.  Because it is easier.  The same reason everyone writes poetry instead of learning how to play the violin: it is easier. 

No one is supporting the Black dissident dramatist, or the radical Black punk band or the serious Black tragedian who has no interest in playing another conflicted cop or a drug dealer or a funnyman sidekick or uppity lawyer — but in developing roles that suggest the deepest and darkest layers of his humanity.  Who is supporting the off-beat Black poet who does not write about being “Black” all the time, but decries the confounding never-ending nightmare of capitalism or the endless cycle of figuring out how to pay rent or stay sane in a world that doesn’t seem to value much?

No one. 

Who is ready to fund a film about Black people who aren’t trying to prove their lives matter to white people – but themselves?  Or that there is more to them than being acknowledged by white people or spinning on their head and trying to create a hip-hop empire?  (All white people, by Hollywood standards, believe that ALL Black Americans want their own hip-hop empire by the way)

What Black Emmy Award winner or Oscar winner is ready to get in the saddle with the Black independent film movement that’s been its own fragmented runaway train for the past 40 years?

No one. 

Bottom line here to the producers of FX:  artists need to be paid. If you like an idea or concept, approach the artist or author of that work and get permission and then write a check!  Because money is all you can offer us. Money and ACCESS to money.  You need to publish an official public apology, write Mtume Gant a check or in the very least offer him a credit and a guest-director’s job because the brother needs the work and is trying to fund his next project.  If you can’t do any of those three things – may God or the Devil (I know you believe in at least one of them) – have mercy on your souls. I just don’t know how you sleep…

It is obvious that we have reached the end of the imagination, obvious that so many things now are re-hashed and rebooted and recycled – that not only are we the children of Warhol, as I declared when gentrification itself had come to define the new New York – we’re like Hamlet running around in circles, wondering what to do next, how to survive when the odds are against us: what to do when something is rotten in the state of Denmark?

Again, there is no straight answer to this but Glover’s crime has opened up a whole can of worms and a conversation that must be broached.  And I stand here before you demanding that the Black artists and producers crazy enough to read all this take up the challenge August Wilson issued back in 1995 with his groundbreaking manifesto “The Ground On Which I Stand” (look it up), and instead of complaining about either diversity or Hollywood or the establishment ethos, let’s work together and start hashing out some things.  The reason why there is no actual “revolutionary” progress in our time, despite the fact that everyone thinks that a protest march is revolutionary (mercy on us all) is because there is no longer a healthy correspondence between Establishment Artists and Dissident Artists.  James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison were both Establishment Artists and never once did Baldwin or Ellison steal or plagiarize Amiri Baraka or Henry Dumas…(In fact Ellison, sad little man, continuously evaded Dumas’ outreach for many years, resulting in a pathetic end of a literary relationship that simply…never was…We can learn a lot from this troubling example).

And so why do I care?

I don’t know, really.  Why do you care when a mate of yours has been wronged or a comrade blacklisted or a family member wounded or an idea you cherish denigrated?  If anyone reading this has any inking of who I am then you will know that the ONLY straight and narrow I ever walked was my marriage and my art.  And while I lost my marriage, I did not lose the clutches of my soul.  And I remain devoted (much to my detriment) to the culture of Black Conscious Artists and an interest in progressive dynamic new film-making.  However, this, of course, is really about being loyal to those who have fought with me in the trenches.  How could I not support my fellow artists who have grown and taught me as much as I have taught and challenged them?  You’d expect nothing less from Miles and Coltrane or Big Boi and Andre 3000 so don’t wince when you see how angry I’m getting.  Perhaps it’s because you’re not used to passion or loyalty in the dramatic arts.  In the film world, it’s considered uncouth.  Like wailing at a funeral.  I’ve begged, borrowed, and stolen to support my art but I would never rip off another artist.  And to do it to another Black artist in the midst of the BLM and the New World Zeitgeist of Identity Politics and Safe Spaces well that just proves whose values you truly regard and how hypocritical Hollywood Liberals are.

To think we as artists are misunderstood is a misnomer.  We are just hated because we have the ideas.  We’re the voices.  And the establishment will always be jealous of those with the voices.

They know what we’re up to, what we’re thinking, what we believe in…and it scares them.

The same way Orson Welles and John Cassavetes terrified the Hollywood establishment is the same way Chameleon Street director Wendell B. Harris (my generation’s Orson Welles, by the way) intimidates the Black Hollywood establishment and is a mere curiosity to the new ones (if they are even conscious enough to know who he is).  But those calling the shots, opening doors, closing doors, and most importantly – footing the bill for artists in TV and Movies – they know.  They all know.  The maverick is never misunderstood, he is simply despised.  Hated because the powerful know what he would be able to do if he was not trying to hold up is roof with one hand and his pants with the other.  They know what he could accomplish with the camera if he could be free…and encouraged to spread his wings.  They know what he would do if he had just a little bit of money to play with…if he had access to a larger audience. He would incite the liberation of imaginations, souls, and minds. And that’s how all revolutions start.  And that is why nothing, no progress or leaps forward emotionally, spiritually, culturally, artistically, or scientifically will ever really be made in our current landscape until a civil war amongst the “creative classes” is declared.

Until then, I leave you with this:

“Nothing counts in this world except the immortal spirit of everything ever created.  The soul of everything ever made.  Only three or four out of every hundred will ever know what we are talking about. At most, four.  But the others will have their revenge.  They will let us starve to death.”

                                                                     –     Rembrandt Harmenszoon Van Rijn

*

© April 12, 2018 by Dennis Leroy Kangalee

Sins & Trespasses-prologue [Zedekoah excerpt 2]

 We are The Hanging Man

 the invisible,

The Ghost land

The indivisible mind and broken sun

with rays jagged and scattered

As if striking against each parted slice of glass

Broken with the frame

 The mirror is no more

 It is the hanging man, son. Don’t say you saw it. Don’t see him. Lie, if anything. But to see

is to be

And lord knows the hanging man

Is me.

*

Philip K. Dick, circa 1970, with his cat [photographer unknown]

There is a Philip K. Dick story “The Hanging Stranger” that sums up our problem in 21st-century pop culture, academia, and so-called cultural establishment which is this: we claim the emperor’s wearing clothes…when he’s not even an emperor.

In Dick’s story, only the conscious can see “the hanging man” whose bloated body twists in the town square

And so the aliens who have taken over must remove them one by one. They know you’re a conscious person simply if you panic and recoil in horror at the sight of a hanging person. The minute you mention it is the minute you are persona non grata. And you will be swiftly terminated. It is a phenomenal metaphor to the blacklisted genius or simply the truth-seeking artist. It is anyone who does not follow the rules, marches to his own beat, and knows – but can’t prove – that the system is not only rigged but insidious.

It’s what’s occurring right now at this very moment in formal activism, it’s what’s already destroyed institutes of higher learning.  And it has killed – if not erased completely – organized art.

There is a Nina Simone recording which sums up Dick’s story in music.

The song, Everyone’s Gone To The Moon, written by the oddball British songwriter Jonathan King, is a bizarre rendering of a world losing its grip on consciousness and ‘morality’ for lack of a better word. As if we’re through the looking glass and up is down, bad is good, etc. This is a gross simplification but the point is that by the end of the song the singer wonders if everyone has gone to the moon instead of the sun as she might prefer – so what will happen to us/to life as we know it?

 

The Essential Nina Simone Vol. 2 (RCA) contains songs of empathy, distress, love, and protest. “Everyone’s Gone to the Moon” can be found here.

It was a junkie who first told me that the song was simply about getting high and what would happen if everybody junked out.  Of course, the great irony in all this is that most gravely ill junkies or hardcore abusers are addicts who know that the world they are living in is not upside down, but right-side up in a world turned upside-down. People released from jail sometimes have a better perception of this because they see life as clear John Berger clearly explained it – the 21st century is nothing but one massive prison system.

Simone’s interpretation of Everyone’s Gone to the Moon is a freaky and majestic absurdist turn. In her high priestess wail, she is sincere and yet there’s a faint sound of nonchalance in her voice, almost – almost– as if she doesn’t have the strength to care. It is haunting because she’s alone. Everyone around her has decided to not see the hanging man.

What does this mean?

*

Our casemate has been infiltrated, we may not have much of an arsenal, but at least we had our own embrasures through which cinematic torpedoes and art could be launched.

 

________________

 

Zedekoah 1 (intro)

“The only difference between art and God being dead is that God was not necessary, yet he could not exist without art.  God came from the caves, from the plays around the fire…But art cannot exist in a time or context where money is God and where we all believe WE were created in God’s image or some such nonsense… Still, Marx  may have gotten it wrong.   Religion is not the opium of the masses.  Perceiving ourselves to be special is.”

I Do Not Have a Romantic View of Humanity

I want to make it clear that I do not have a romantic view of humanity. I don’t think we are God’s gift to the planet. In fact, if there was a God I don’t think it would create a species as deranged and undignified as we are. That being said, it is important to state this because one of our only great accomplishments or aspects (“accomplishments” might be too big a word) is our stretch for truth and beauty and understanding in our self-expression. Our art.

I often wonder how difficult it is to create something lasting or worthy if one has a high level of dislike for the human race. I struggle with this every day: my desire to be part of humanity, to help or ignite other homo-sapiens becomes put to the test when I note the present day’s atrocities committed by my fellow brethren and then neurotically re-acknowledge our terrible history on this planet, always coming up short on the side of creation and transcendence despite our maniacal compulsion to thank or make a God as a way of explaining not only our mysteries but the few beautiful contributions and achievements we have made as a species on this particular plot of land hanging in the solar system.   (Who knows how greater of an impact the work of a Matisse or a Billie Holiday would be allowed to have in another galaxy?)

*

I will never be a great artist simply because I don’t have one of two essential ingredients: The Talent and the Ability to Forgive Man’s Contempt for His Brother. Talent wise there is nothing I can do, the challenge is to make the best out of what I was given. It is a combination of what you are blessed with; innate vision, craft (technique), discipline, desire, taste, as well as laziness, empathy, stubbornness, and where you fall on the Richter scale between Truth and Appeal.

The notion that man is inherently good, however, or is too ignorant to see what he is doing to himself is one that I never accepted. And even as a young artist, it is a notion I was never fully at home with.

Actors are taught: “You can never play someone you don’t fully respect.” I don’t know if I fully believe that and quite frankly it is a very dangerous idea that one can’t fully render a portrait of another’s soul if they don’t find something within him to “like” thereby demystifying his cruelty (if playing a psychopath or colonialist or pedophile for example) and making him more “human.” What we all refuse to see is that the choices we inherently make as creative artists represents where our hearts lay (“whose side we are on”) and that of the interpretive artists such as an actor or illustrator for a book is actually even a bit deeper if only because of the challenge they are often confronted with: how do I humanize this warped rapist I am playing?

Well now by referencing the term “human” we instantly have a problem. Because it is not as if personification is something we have to do – the subject is a human being why do we need to conscientiously remember that? Would a painter of trees have to constantly remind himself – “that is wood we are seeing, yes, strong resilient bark”? Absolutely not!

But when a Caucasian illustrator needs to prep himself by committing to depict the glorious ‘humanity’ of the African Man we have a problem. He should naturally see us as his fellow human; he should immediately be aware of the fact that we are all composed of positive and negative individual traits. But because he is not endowed with enough intrinsic “awareness,” and not enlightened – he must find a way in. He must work hard to remove the layers of his own self-inflicted racism and brainwashing that his own people have created: mass media. Amiri Baraka wrote that the Africans of many countries once referred to it as the “White Man’s magic.” Indeed, television, newspapers, radio, movies, and now the cosmic terror of the Internet – certainly are.   But how did we get in this situation in the first place?

Man – regardless of race – would never have been in this conundrum anyway if he had never created such accouterments of culture which such a draconian hatred for certain members of our species of which he seeks to prey upon, warp, and call upon to enact his most debased desires. Formal slavery was just the tip of the iceberg: the true horror resides in what the European & Arab enslavers were thinking in the first place – and the gross, pervasive, insidious after-effects of such an idea. What I am trying to say is that only a human being could scheme so devilishly, could bring his thinking and feeling into such an unnatural and low state his entire civilization rests upon the destruction of a group or various groups of his own species. This is something Man has willfully created and condoned. Man is not an animal. He is a monster. And I propose we look first for reasons why we shouldn’t hate him when creating depictions and composing our art.