Garfunkel's a reader. Obama is a winner.

1.) Yesterday I got a message from my friend Nora regarding Art Garfunkel's online library. It turns out that Art has been keeping track of every book that he has read since 1968. He has the title, author, number of pages, and month he read it. Coincidentally, I have been doing the same thing for a little over a year now. Basically, I'm going to be the next Art Garfunkel (in a way...) If you are curious, you can check it out here:http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library.html

Also regarding the state of the "book", Ursula Le Guin has an article in the latest Harper's titled "Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading." Le Guin is a Portland-based author and basically explains that book publishing industry and capitalism do not make good partners. Besides textbooks, many people do not have reason to purchase books other than the fact that they enjoy them, and Le Guin argues that there have never been that many of us booklovers anyway. Publishers should stop trying to cram "best sellers" down our throats or declaring books "unsuccessful" if they don't make a certain amount of profit in a short period of time. Realistically, the "midlist" or books in print that continue to sell a bit each year are really what should be publishing houses' bread and butter. When talking about "the decline of reading", Le Guin cites the same NEA surveys that I referenced a month ago, but while I read the statistics and found them demoralizing, Le Guin says "Even during the "century of the book," when it was taken for granted that many people read and enjoyed fiction and poetry, how many people in fact could make much time for reading once they were out of school? During those years [1850-1950] most Americans worked hard and worked long hours. Weren't there always many who never read a book at all, and never very many who read a lot of books? We don't know how many, because we didn't have polls to worry us about it."

2.) Obama beat Hillary 55% to 27% in the South Carolina primary yesterday. Obama is my candidate so I'm obviously happy about that result but I also liked what the blogger Average Bro (http://www.averagebro.com/) had to say about a black man actually having a real chance at the presidency. You can check out the latest post yourself, but what I got was that although blacks have becomes billionaires, headed companies, even been to the moon, the presidency is unique in the fact that it has to be "granted"...one has to be chosen/elected..you can't just work harder to obtain that achievement. Obama also represents the ability to dream...really. Black fathers would finally be able to tell their sons honestly and realistically that they too could possibly become president one day...(although you probably still need an Ivy league education and a certain level of wealth...but at least skin color maybe wouldn't be the negating factor..)

MLK and the art of being a human.

I don't feel like I have much to blog about this week. I'm very much in a stage of limbo in the interim time before moving. I sold my drums, have an actual date to go down to California to look at apartments, and am really broke. I feel acutely aware of which friendships I want to maintain and have been trying to spend time with those that I have an existing relationship with. Because of this state of transition, I've been especially fragile and prone to emotional outburst...

One example is a movie a saw last weekend, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I loved the film and you can read a review of it here:http://saxoneuro.blogspot.com/2008/01/divine-bell-and-butterfly.html. I have to say though, I began crying probably 30 minutes into the film, and did not stop until way after it ended. (I had a moment during the credits where I tried to gain my composure, wipe off all of the mascara, take some breaths...all to no avail...I began tearing up again on the escalator out of the theater). I know partially it hit home because of an accident that my dad had a year and a half ago, and honestly Diving Bell is a film that could make even the most stable person lose it..but also I think I'm just in a place where I've been preoccupied with the trajectory of my life, my plans, my relationships, my mortality (a little dramatic, I know). I was shaky for quite a while, but highly recommend this film even though I personally will not be able to watch it for some time.

I feel as though I should write something regarding MLK in honor of this Monday, but in some ways King is so iconic, his words so well known, his message still something to strive for that it seems unnecessary for me to add anything to the discourse. It's not surprising at all that presidential candidate Barack Obama would choose to align his fight for the White House with King's fight for civil justice. In some ways Obama embodies King's dream and vision for America. I think he was a great man, who has been obviously mythologized for good reason. I just hope that America's familiarity with him doesn't continue a complacency towards the racial inequality still present in our society. That being said, I still can't resist...in the words of the man himself:

"It is one thing to agree that the goal of integration is morally and legally right; it is another thing to commit oneself positively and actively to the ideal of integration- the former is intellectual assent, the latter is actual belief. These are days that demand practices to match professions. This is no day to pay lip service to integration, we must pay life service to it."

"When millions of people have been cheated for centuries, restitution is a costly process. Inferior education, poor housing, unemployment, inadequate health care- each is a bitter component of the oppression that has been our heritage. Each will require billions of dollars to correct. Justice so long deferred has accumulated interest and its cost for this society will be substantial in financial as well as human terms. This fact has not been fully grasped, because most of the gains of the past decade were obtained at bargain rates. The desegregation of public facilities cost nothing; neither did the election and appointment of a few black officials."

"I think the greatest victory of this period was...something internal. The real victory was what this period did to the psyche of the black man. The greatness of this period was that we armed ourselves with dignity and self-respect. The greatness of this period was that we straightened our backs up. And a man can't ride your back unless it's bent."

July to December: books

Welcome to the sequel to a post back in June regarding the books I had read up to the halfway point in the year. Back in June I had cited a statistic from the National Endowment for the Arts report titled "Reading at Risk" (2002) that said 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school. The Guardian actually reported on an Associated Press poll back in August of this year that showed that one in four Americans read no books in the past year and most people typically said that they read four books. http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,2153877,00.html


So once again, here is my somewhat self-indulgent compilation of the books I have read in the past six months...doing my part to up our national average...


1. The Trial - Franz Kafka
2. Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
3. Hunger - Knut Hamsun
4. the Gospel Singer - Harry Crews
5. the Clown - Heinrich Boll
6. Berlin Stories - Christopher Isherwood
7. Know What I Mean? - Michael Eric Dyson
8. No Country For Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
9. Gargoyles - Thomas Bernhard
10. Victoria - Knut Hamsun
11. Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
12. Three Novels by Beckett: Molloy, Malone Dies, and the Unnnamable - Samuel Beckett
13. A Hundred Little Hitlers - Elinor Langer
14. Selected Stories - Robert Walser
15. Hard Work: Remaking the American Labor Movement
16. Ferdydurke - Witold Gombrowicz
17. Killing the Black Body - Dorothy Roberts
18. Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler
19. Zeno's Conscience - Italo Svevo
20. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
21. Sundown Towns - James Loewen
22. Slowness - Milan Kundera
23. Crystal Frontier - Carlos Fuentes
24. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors - Susan Sontag
25. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
26. Street of Crocodiles - Bruno Schulz*
27. Rereading America*


*= still in process, expected to complete by the end of the month


highlights: Selected Stories (Walser). the Clown. Gargoyles. Molloy. Hunger. Crystal Frontier. Pale Fire.
favorite nonfiction: Killing the Black Body
estimated number of pages read in the past 6 months: 8500
total number of books for the year: 43

Subjective

In an attempt to beat out both Saxon and Pitchfork, here's my end of the year selections for Top Ten Albums of 2007 (in chronological order, of course)

Ponytail - Kamehameha
Panda Bear - Person Pitch
Twilight Sad - Fourteen Autumns & Fifteen Winters
Love of Diagrams - Mosaic
Electrelane - No Shouts No Calls
Silver Daggers - New High and Ord
Angels of Light - We Are Him
Talib Kweli - Ear Drum
Jens Lekman - Night Falls Over Kortedala
Radiohead - In Rainbows


Honorable Mentions: Grinderman, No Age, the Ponys, Battles, Caribou, and the new Jay Z

...and some film reviews

Tonight I saw I'm Not There the Bob Dylan story as told by Todd Haynes through 6 actors including Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere. I think this film is Todd Haynes most successful experiment to date (previous tries including Velvet Goldmine and Far From Heaven). The movie is interesting to say the least, blatantly tackling the mythology surrounding celebrity and the chameleon quality of Dylan himself. The film occasionally delves into Fellini-like metaphorical imagery which sometimes works, and sometimes seems really odd. The running time is fairly long, and the plot quite far from linear...not really a problem for me and I would recommend the film with all of its flaws.

Recently I rented Andrei Tarkovsky's first film Ivan's Childhood. The story revolves around a twelve year old boy whose entire family is killed in the war between the Nazis and the Soviets. After their deaths he becomes obsessed with revenge and works as a scout for the Soviets. He is angry but still very much a child with vivid dreams. Parts of this movie are incredibly beautiful and I really enjoyed the whole thing.

Lastly, I really don't need to add my voice to the praise for No Country For Old Men, but it has to be the best movie I've seen all year. A quiet, gory, existential, Southern Western critique of modern society and violence. A far better film than a book. I look forward to seeing it again soon.

So that's all for now, back to more "important" matters next week.

forget about Poitier

In the last week or so, I have had the pleasure of watching three distinct entries in the realm of "black cinema": Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Shaft, and Killer of Sheep. I enjoyed all three films, but for very different reasons.

Symbio is an experimental independent film by the director William Greaves. Greaves is considered "the dean of black cinema" and has produced a few feature films as well as many documentaries. The documentaries all seem to center around black figures, history, or sociology of the black experience. I also saw Still a Brother this week which examined the black middle class and whether such a thing can even really exist, or whether it's just social imitation of the white middle class without being accepted by them. Anyway, Symbio was made in 1968 and was essentially a movie about making a movie. In some scenes we see the two actors in Central Park, but then we also see interactions between Greaves and the actors, and even between Greaves and the crew, and towards the end with a homeless man who wanders onscreen. There are also very interesting scenes where the crew of about ten would all sit in a room apart from Greaves and discuss how they perceived the meaning of the film and issues of reality (such as the audience not really being able to know whether the conversations they were having were authentic or scripted). This film, unlike the documentaries, had little to say about the black experience, but instead just seemed to be an experimental undertaking by a director who happened to be black.

Shaft is obviously the most well-known of the three movies. Generally considered the second blaxploitation film, one can see the key aspects and stereotypes that you would expect from such a film. Lately I've been thinking about why I even like blaxplotation. Negative stereotypes about black sexuality (ie. hypersexed) and tendency towards violence and crime are ever-present in this genre. Reading up on the history, the term "blaxploitation" was coined by the NAACP and the Urban League who condemned the genre and pushed for an end to these types of movies. Realistically blaxploitation films were only made for a 4 year period. However, for the most part these films were made for blacks by blacks. Black audiences tended to enjoy these films as they were a departure from the well-behaved, potentially tom-leaning black characters typically displayed in feature films. In blaxploitation, the black man gets away, he fucks white girls (and any other girls he wants), outsmarts the police, and beats up a ton of people. These characteristics can easily be seen as an outlet for the anger that had been pent up in the black community at that time. I also noticed that many films contain tangible statements about racial conflict, in a more honest way than you would see in mainstream films. I guess when it comes down to it, I like blaxploitation for many of the same reasons I enjoy gangster rap...it's supposed to be hedonistic and exaggerated. Just because it contains negative imagery doesn't mean that it also doesn't include real perspective on the difficulties of being a black person in America.

I already spoke of Killer of Sheep in a previous post, and now that I've actually seen the film, I can enthusiastically recommend it. The film is not centered around a narrative plot, but we do follow a few main characters through their activities over a couple of days in Watts. Whether the kids are playing by the train tracks, two men are trying to pick up an engine for a car, going to the liquor store, or just hanging around the house, the images are memorable and beautiful. The main character also works at a meatpacking warehouse where we see sheep being slaughtered over and over again. The juxtaposition of the the people in Watts with the scenes of the meatpacking plant creates a very strong visceral connection of oppression that I think is thought-provoking rather than heavy-handed.

Skinheads and Zombies

1.) I read a book this week entitled A Hundred Little Hitlers by Elinor Langer. I have been looking for books about the history of race relations in Portland and this is one of the only sources I could find on the subject. The central story is about the beating and murdering of an Ethiopian man by a group of skinheads in the late 1980s. I had briefly heard bits about this event somehow or another, but I was shocked to find out that the murder happened literally one block away from my house. The book also attempts to provide a history of the uprising of the Neo-Nazi movement, with Tom Metzger as the main character in that story. Metzger is a name I remember hearing growing up because the headquarters of White Aryan Resistance(WAR)/his house was located in Fallbrook, CA where my parents actually currently live. The other main piece of this whole story is that of the history of racism in Portland since its existence as a city. Initial laws basically banned African Americans from residing in the state. Then a low-income community called Vanport came into existence during the shipping boom, but that community dissipated due to a flood and whatever blacks were left moved into NE Portland. The most shocking piece of information to me was that the state of Oregon did not even ratify the 15th Amendment (the one that lets any male citizen vote regardless of race) until 1959. And actually due to a wikipedia search, I was even more surprised to find out that Oregon wasn't even the last state to ratify the 15th amendment...California, Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee all ratified after 1959...Tennessee didn't until 1997!

The case and the histories were all very interesting, but I think the overall point of the book was that after the constituents of Portland and Oregon got their symbolic victory over their history of racism...it really was mostly symbolic. The family of Seraw (the man who was murdered) was awarded 12.5 million dollars but only a fraction of that money would ever make it to the family. Metzger was made to sell his house, but other than that there wasn't much in the way of assets. Even the money that he would receive from supporters of WAR was often just diverted to another more anonymous PO Box. The organization that served as the prosecution for the case, profitted immensely by increased recognition and notoriety and therefore an increase in donations. Metzger is still able to conduct racist propaganda, meetings, and lectures and essentially hold on to his power withing the White Supremacy movement due to the First Amendment. And the Northwest, even specifically Portland, still maintains a reputation for skinhead activity and for many within the movement the Northwest still represents the "white American bastion."

2.)Last weekend I was finally able to see Night of the Living Dead. This may seem unrelated to the above writing about neo-Nazis, however I do think there is a connection on the basis of race relations in this country. I do not typically like horror films as a genre, mainly because I usually think they are just dumb, but I do have an appreciation for certain films and subgenres such as "zombie movies." I think a good horror film is one that uses visceral, maybe even ridiculous imagery to provide social commentary should one choose to read the movie that way. Zombie movies can be particularly telling about the current state of government/societal/technological control in a given country. Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968 and was mentioned in some reviews as a critique of American involvement in Vietnam. The movie takes place in middle America and features tons of American "casualities." However, I think the racial aspect of the film is particularly interesting and not all that often mentioned.

The plot of the film is basically that a group of people seek refuge from zombies in a farmhouse whose owner has already been killed. The group includes a small family, a young couple, a hysterical white girl, and the level-headed, extremely competent black man, Ben. Ben acts as leader and takes charge of boarding up windows and doors and doing what he can to protect the well-being of everyone in the house. In contrast, the white husband/father of the small family does weasley, self-centered, cowardly things on multiple occasions, even nearly getting Ben killed. Throughout the movie, one by one, everyone gets killed until Ben is the only one left. Simultaneously a posse of rednecks, led by the local sheriff have discovered that zombies can be killed by shooting them directly in the head and deactivating their brains. They basically act as a militia group and are quite successful at destroying the zombies in their community. They go to check out the farmhouse for any signs of zombies and end up shooting the only survivor Ben in the head, apparently mistaking him for a zombie.

Although the director, George Romero, claims that the only reason a black man was cast as the protagonist (still a fairly rare occurence) was because "he auditioned the best." I find it extremely difficult not to read things otherwise. 1968 may have been near the height of Vietnam, but it was also a key year in the Civil Rights Movement. Society has often dictated that a black person must put forth more effort, success, virtues than the average white person in order to be accepted, and even then people will seek to push you back down. The fact that Ben survived an extremely tense and diffcult ordeal, overcoming not only the zombies, but problems with other people in the house, only to be shot by the honky redneck posse seems incredibly ironic, but also incredibly apt for those times. It's also difficult not to see echoes of the assassinations of MLK and Malcolm X in a scene like that.