The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2014: pt. 26: Kiini Ibura Salaam

Pleasures of 2014 
by Kiini Ibura Salaam 

When I’m well nourished and rested, making art comes naturally to me. However, adult life seems to be about navigating the necessary tasks that may not nurture you, but do support your survival. I went through a dark depression when I crashed against the realities of adulthood. It was frustrating to realize that I would be too tired at the end of the day to face my paints. That if I didn’t invent some new reality, I would never develop as a writer.

The pleasures of 2014 were full of unconventional ways of doing things: artists who mounted shows from another country, artists who participated in shows posthumously because another artist recreated their work, relationships that happened through lunchboxes, masters who uncovered new ways of working when illness and frailty made their established ways of working impossible.

January

The Shadows Took Shape, Studio Museum of Harlem

 In January I had a fantastic trip to the Studio Museum of Harlem for The Shadows Took Shape, an exhibition on Afrofuturism: http://www.studiomuseum.org/exhibition/the-shadows-took-shape. The show demonstrated artists interested in interdisciplinary thinking and expression—bringing in math, unconventional materials, and mixed media.

David Hammons selling snowballs

While at the Studio Museum, I was surprised to find another exhibition—the Radical Presence performance art exhibition—up at the same time: http://www.studiomuseum.org/exhibition/radical-presence-black-performance-in-contemporary-art. Performance art always gets my mind racing. The idea of breaking form, breaking preconceived notions of what art is or isn’t and exploring the ideas that come to an artist is so intriguing to me. To me, it represents freedom, something I deeply desire as an artist.

February

Using a complex delivery system, 5,000 deliverymen in Mumbai, India, pick up hot lunches from homes and bring them to workers for lunch. The lunchboxes change many hands before reaching their destination, but somehow only one in million are lost or delivered to the wrong place. In The Lunchbox, when a lunch box is delivered to the wrong person, a correspondence ensues creating a sweet love story between two people who never meet. http://www.sonyclassics.com/thelunchbox/

March

From 2012 to 2014, there was a traveling retrospective of Carrie Mae Weems’s work under the subtitle "Three Decades of Photography and Video." In 2014, the retrospective came to the Guggenheim. She started her photography career taking pictures of her large family. A shift came when she decided to set up a tripod and stage pictures of herself at the kitchen table. The Kitchen Table Series is now iconic: http://carriemaeweems.net/galleries/kitchen-table.html. What isn’t shown when you just look at the images online is the narrative that is installed on the gallery wall along with the photographs. The text and the story behind the series is equally as compelling as the images. http://www.artbabble.org/video/art21/carrie-mae-weems-kitchen-table-series



April

At this year’s Whitney Biennial curating seemed to be as central to the biennial as artmaking. There were three curators who developed the show, yet many of the artists selected to participate played a curatorial role. One artist built a wall in the gallery, then selected the artists he wanted to exhibit on his wall. A young artist used photographs to recreate the work of artist who was not celebrated when she was alive—hence her work was never conserved: http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2014Biennial/GretchenBenderAndPhilipVanderhyden. There were organizations committed to specific themes, materials or approaches: http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2014Biennial/CriticalPracticesInc. Other artists curated rooms recovering the work of artists that had passed away or practiced during a specific time period. This show within a show structure created a tension between the artists and the gatekeepers which suggests a storming of the gates in which artists curate alongside their creation of artwork.

May

Nick Cave Video Still

Nick Cave, a former dancer, has long been making soundsuits—full body costumes that mask the identity of the wearer and make sound as the wearer moves. The suits are beautiful and otherworldly. At the Black Eye group exhibition in May, he showed a video that captured a black-fringed soundsuit in motion. The video was altered to make a symmetrical pattern with one side mirroring the other. The result was a series of mesmerizing movements that piqued curiosity as the brain tried to categorize the image as alien, animal, or inanimate. It was a beautiful meditation on movement, at once otherworldly and serene. http://www.jackshainman.com/artists/nick-cave

June

A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, Kara Walker

This summer the NYC art scene was abuzz with conversation about Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” a 35-feet high and 75-feet long nude sphinx mammy coated in sugar. It was, among many other descriptions, a spectacle. Over 350,000 people made the pilgrimage. Everyone had something to say about it whether they had seen it or not. Whatever I thought I thought about it completely shifted when I saw it in person. The sphinx’s scale was awe-inspiring and she had a calm, regal presence. It was quite a conversation piece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRkP5rcXtys

July

I found the Dear Sugar column on the Rumpus website only after its author—bestselling author Cheryl Strayed—had been unmasked. This unmasking did absolutely nothing to diminish the power of Strayed perspective, writing, and voice. It was exciting to hear that the columns had been collected into a book—Tiny, Beautiful Things. Strayed tackles all manner of thorny topics from the meaning of life, to surviving as a writer, to abuse, to abandonment and everything in between. All throughout the book, I unearthed quotes worthy of being saved and savored. It’s a moving, fierce, and fantastic collection of columns. http://www.cherylstrayed.com/tiny_beautiful_things_114549.htm

August

This year, I saw a number of documentaries, among them was Finding Fela about the groundbreaking Afrobeat musician and activist. The film covers Fela’s life, interviewing his children, bandmates, and one former partner. It also documents some of Bill T. Jones’s process in building the hit Broadway musical Fela! Beyond his talent, Fela was a singular individual, pursuing a lifestyle that ran against the cultural norms, openly criticizing the government and passionately advocating for a restoration and value of traditional Nigerian—and African—culture. Despite his excesses and misogyny, I was completely fascinated by how far he went in living his own lifestyle and how fearless he was in facing down beatings, the death of his mother, and all manner of harassment and abuse to speak his truth. http://www.felaonbroadway.com/

September

Dacia Carter, Kehinde WIley

Another documentary I saw this year was Kehinde Wiley: An Economy of Grace. Wiley is a highly skilled portrait painter who places black men in tableaus from classic European paintings. His work deals with race as well as masculinity and self-image. An Economy of Grace was his first series using women, and the documentary followed the process from the casting—which Wiley does himself on the street—to the dressmaking process, to the shoot, and the exhibition in which the women saw their portraits. Wiley’s work is very distinctive and has followed the same structure for many years. What the film did was open the doors on the process and demonstrated how amazingly immersive and transformative the experience is for the subjects and the viewers. I loved taking that journey with the artist and understanding that even for art that looks the same to the viewer, the process behind creating each piece may be transformative for the artmaker and the participants. http://www.pbs.org/arts/programs/kehinde-wiley-economy-grace/

October

One of my pleasures of this year has been the development of The 100, a series on the CW that shows a dystopic Earth, post-nuclear destruction. At the outset, it seemed as if dystopia was just a backdrop for another teen show, but as Season 1 progressed, the show became more confident in moving away from a classic teen drama to become its own animal. Now in Season 2, The 100 has reached its stride. There’s plenty to make me uncomfortable—in the show’s two years, I’ve noticed only two black women: one is a drug dealer and the other is a warrior who is the most savage of the savages. Despite hating the way I am represented in the show, I love the questions and quandaries the characters are in. People are aligned in very specific survivor camps that are at odds with each other and we watch the dissolution of characters’ identities as they make their way through a desolate world. http://www.cwtv.com/shows/the-100

November

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi is a strange novel that draws on Snow White to develop a narrative about identity that seems at once historical and modern. The novel has drawn mixed reactions from readers, but once I passed a few initial barriers, I read through quickly without stopping. While I had a few thorns to navigate, what I enjoyed most was the confidence the writer had in her characters. They were unique people drowning in history, myth, fear, and a measure of loathing. When I read, while I am diving into the story of the work, I like imagining how the author put the work together. With Boy, Snow, Bird, I felt the writer explored various facets, approaches, voices, and perspectives in a way that provided nuance and layers. It felt like she dove right in with her characters and set loose on the pages. It was imperfect and intriguing.

December 

I spent the winter break on the West Coast, which brought me in contact with two artists.

Parrot and Siren, Henri Matisse

On the plane, I saw a video titled Matisse: Cut Outs. It covered the exhibition that started at the Tate Modern in London and is now at MoMA, profiling Matisse’s later works—huge collages created from paper he painted one solid color, then cut with scissors, and—with the help of his studio assistants—assembled on the walls of his studio. He did this work from his wheelchair and his bed while he was elderly, ailing, and often in pain. Despite his advanced age and failing health, the paper cutouts were a great discovery for him—and through this new medium he expressed great joy and emotion. Matisse’s cutouts are a wonderful example of the inventiveness of the creativity and demonstrates the power of creativity to surpass limitations and uphold artistic expression.

With Wind, Ai WeiWei at Alcatraz

In San Francisco at the Alacatraz Prison, I saw an exhibition titled @ Large featuring the work of artist Ai Weiwei. http://www.for-site.org/project/ai-weiwei-alcatraz/ Weiwei had never been to Alcatraz. He was unable to travel there because he is confined to his studio and home by the Chinese government. He created a humongous dragon, beautifully painted with names of many prisoners of conscience. The parts of the dragon were all small enough to create in a limited space, but when assembled it took up a large open room. He also created an installation that shows portraits of 176 prisoners of conscience from around the world. The portraits—made entirely of legos—were designed by computer and sent with specific directions for a team of volunteers in San Francisco to assemble. When complete, the artwork covers the floor of a large prison building. One of the things I took away from the exhibition is the vastness of creativity. Through technology, he was able to research and explore Alcatraz and develop a major exhibition connecting him to other prisoners. His other pieces illuminated the prison’s history of imprisoning Hopi parents who refused to have their children taken away to an assimilating boarding school, the music of prisoners of conscience, and the reliance of Tibetans on solar powered cookers to eat. He also took his moment of virtual freedom to touch the lives of other prisoners of conscience. One of his installations was made up of thousands of blank postcards that encouraged visitors to write letters to the prisoners. What better meditation on the power of art and communication than for large groups of people to become aware of and communicate with prisoners around the world who have used and continue to use their voices for humanity, equality, and justice.

Happy 2015!

Kiini Ibura Salaam is a writer and painter from New Orleans, LA. Her work is rooted in eroticism, speculative events and worlds, and women's perspectives. Her fiction has been published in a number of anthologies, including Dark Matter, Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Dark Eros. Her essays have been published in Essence, Ms., and Colonize This. She is the author of the KIS.list, an e-column that explores the writing life. Her first collection of short stories, Ancient, Ancient, was published by Aqueduct Press in May 2012 and was a co-winner of the James Tiptree Jr. Award. She lives in Brooklyn.

The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2014, pt. 25: Veronica Schanoes

The Pleasures of 2014

by Veronica Schanoes

This year, I had it figured out.   I started keeping a log at the beginning of the year, and writing down everything I read/saw/heard that I enjoyed, on the off chance Timmi asked me to contribute at the end of the year.  How clever was that?  How marvelous was my foresight?  Look at my planning!

            I kept this list on my beloved netbook.  I saved it regularly.  Sometimes I would open it and pore over it, reveling in my forethought and cunning. 

            And then my toddler godson accidentally dumped a glass of sangria into my netbook.

            That was not the disaster it might have been, as I had backed up almost everything I’d written onto a flash drive, but I’d never bothered to back up the list of cultural pleasures because, well, it wasn’t creative writing and it wasn’t scholarship, so it wasn’t a big deal, so what the hell?

            The good people at Computer Overhauls tell me that it would cost more to repair the netbook than it would to buy a new computer.  Six months later, I’m typing this on my old MacBook, which no longer recognizes the battery and has to be rebooted every time my godson trips over the cord or I decide I’d rather sit on the couch with my best friend than by myself at the table.

            So yet again I found myself in the position of trying to figure out if I have actually read anything in 2014, or seen any shows, or heard any music.  Was the year a wasteland?  All I could remember are endless episodes of Dinosaur Train and Daniel Tiger.  After cudgeling my brain tirelessly, I managed to recall these items making an impression:

1)        Cabaret: At the last minute, a friend called me up with a spare VIP ticket to Alan Cumming in Cabaret on Broadway.  I had never seen any incarnation of the musical before.  We went to the old Studio 54 and were seated at a small table about six feet from the stage and given a complimentary bottle of champagne, which was all very well and good, and how every evening should begin, as far as I am concerned.  The production was simply devastating—not the story of the tedious young lovers, because who cares about them, but the story of Germany’s descent into Nazism, the knowledge of what’s going to happen to Herr Schultz, and the final scene highlighting the futility of trying to go along with fascism to get along.  I admit to being somewhat surprised at some audience reactions—the audience laughed along to and then audibly gasped at the final line of “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes,” the love song the MC sings to a gorilla: “She wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”  Really?  You were all shocked?  You didn’t know that was coming?  This is a musical about the rise to power of the Nazis.  Whom did you think the gorilla was standing in for?  Well, I am Jewish, and as my experience with the next entry in my list shows, my perspective is perhaps more specialized than I assume.  Alan Cumming was amazing as the seedy 40-year-old MC trying to pander to popular mood and those in power.  My ideal production would play up Cliff Bradshaw’s desire for other men somewhat more, but that’s a quibble about a production that brought tears to my eyes.

2)        Life After Life by Kate Atkinson – I have been a fan of Atkinson’s for about a decade now.  I loved the magic realism of some of her early novels, particularly Human Croquet, and I find some of the Jackson Brodie novels quite lyrical; they are what I think Douglas Adams’s holistic detective novels aspired to be.  This novel recounts the story of Ursula Todd, born in 1912, died…well, that’s the thing.  Ursula dies many times: at birth, at the seashore as a child, beaten to death by an abusive husband, and each time she begins again, making different decisions, with the vaguest awareness that something…strange is happening, a sort of déjà vu when she encounters turning points, creeping up on her.  In one life she murders Hitler in 1932; she herself is summarily killed by his flunkies, so we don’t see how that particular endeavor plays out (I’ve always been suspicious of this trope—were Mengele, Himmler, Goebbels, not also monsters?  But indeed there was such a fervent cult of personality around Hitler, perhaps this is a case of a man making history rather than the other way round.).  In another life, Ursula visits Germany in the early 1930s and marries a member of the Nazi party; she kills herself and her daughter after hearing rumors of the Red Army’s depredations as it heads toward Berlin.  It is of this life Atkinson speaks when, in an interview published along with my edition of the book, she says that it was important to include the experiences of German (presumably gentile) civilians because, after all, “they had it so much worse than us.”  And this is the sentence that brought me up short.  “Us?” I thought.  “They had it worse than us?”  And then I realized that her “us” was British civilians and I felt a chasm open up between my perspective on the second world war and Atkinson’s.  Never, when speaking of that time, would my “us” refer to, say, American civilians, though that is what I am.  My “us” would always be Jews, and that will always temper my sympathy for what German gentile civilians suffered at the hands of the Red Army.  There is no excuse for atrocities, particularly those directed at children, but for the adults, well—these were the people perfectly happy to cheer as people like me, their neighbors, were defamed, vilified, stripped of rights, shipped off, and tortured to death.  So, not to put too fine a point on it, fuck them.  That does not mean, of course, that I condone the rape and exploitation of, well, anybody, but it does mean that my capacity for sympathy in this case is limited.  It means that it would never cross my mind to say of the German gentile civilian population that they had it worse than us.  My “us” in this context will always be Jews.  And I don’t know if I have a right to that “us.”  My family had been in the US for a couple generations by World War 2.  My grandmother, born in this country, had exchanged letters with family back in Klevan until, well, until letters stopped coming back, but no family of mine closer than that suffered at the hands of the Nazis.  But.  I know what the Nazis did in the towns my great grandparents emigrated from, and I know what they would have been only too happy to do to me and mine if they never had emigrated (well, without emigration, I wouldn’t have existed as my mother and father would never have met), and I use that “us” anyway.   I have rarely felt more alienated from a writer I loved than when I read that statement of Atkinson’s, and realized that in no life did Ursula Todd marry a German Jew; apparently Atkinson did not feel it important for her to explore those events.  It was a profound experience for me, even if not the one Atkinson had envisioned.

3)        The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine – It was not all Nazis all the time for me in 2014.  This was the year that Genevieve Valentine’s novel resetting the fairy tale of the twelve dancing princesses in the speakeasies of Prohibition-era NYC (full disclosure: Valentine is a good friend of mine; I still love this book).  I read an early version a few years back and the manuscript made my “best of” the year list.  The published version is even better, the characters more finely drawn, their relationships more affecting and complex.  I only wished there had been more of the book!  The relationship between the two oldest sisters was one that I really hadn’t gotten when I read the manuscript, but it was a particularly poignant element of the finished novel.  It’s a story that deserves visual representation of the flashing dresses, lipsticked smiles, tapping shoes, smoky speakeasies, perhaps in cinematic form, perhaps in comic book form (Valentine is currently writing Catwoman for DC).  And Valentine writes an excellent adult protagonist—Jo, the oldest sister, is decidedly not 16 or 18 or 22.  She’s in her late 20s, and she feels older.  Trauma will do that to a person.  I recommended the novel before and I recommend it now.  And hey, now you can read it!

4)        A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge – Hardinge is my favorite living children’s literature writer, and I don my official mortarboard of authority to say so (my academic field of specialty is officially children’s literature).  But this book took me a little while longer to get into than usual; I don’t know that it had anything to do with the book, though I kept bouncing off the central conceit, which is that in the underground world of Caverna, where artisans make dangerous cheeses, wines that wipe and restore memory, and perfumes that compel behavior, children do not naturally mimic facial expressions.  All such expressions have to be purposely studied and acquired, and facesmiths are responsible for creating and teaching the faces, as well as setting the styles for faces.  Drudges, or the working class, learn only a few, while aristocrats have vast wardrobes of faces.  Into this world falls a girl from the outside, whose face moves naturally, and her presence wreaks havoc.  I kept trying to fit the premise into what I know of infant and child development and coming up with “But that just couldn’t happen!”  Eventually I had to hand-wave it for the sake of the novel (though I think I now have an inkling of how physicists might feel when reading books that include faster-than-light travel).  However, by the time characters have betrayed our protagonist and felt remorse while other characters, initially sympathetic, left her high and dry, by the time the complex politics of Caverna were being overturned by revolution, and a previously devious and self-serving girl had betrayed and sold out her entire immoral family to do the right thing, I was caught up in the adventure of it all.  Hardinge often writes of oppressive societies turned upside-down and shaken apart by clever, brave young girls.  Having been brought up by leftists, I suppose she’s writing my wish-fullfillment fantasies.

5)        Marvelous Transformations edited by Christine A. Jones and Jennifer Schacker – I reviewed this book for Marvels and Tales, the premiere fairy-tale studies journal, and I’m recommending it here because it is a fabulous text for learning the history of fairy tales and the state of critical thought about them.  Most texts of this sort take a narratological approach, where each chapter compiles variants of a given tale, say, “Cinderella.”  This book instead adopts a historicist approach, dividing its chapters by historical era.  The advantage here is that it includes tales that do not normally get anthologized, like stories from Giambattista Basile’s Pentamarone that do not have contemporary fairy-tale cognates (it is in Basile that we get our earliest European versions of Cinderella and Rapunzel), and allows us to make connections across tales as well as track generic changes from century to century.  The section on contemporary, post-modern work is particularly good, including pieces by Kelly Link and Nalo Hopkinson.  A particular pleasure for me, as I had not before read Hopkinson’s “The Bottle Tree,” a revision of Bluebeard that revolves around the relationship between colorism and self-hatred.  It’s a great piece in a great book, one that will definitely find its way into my classroom.  

6)        I’m going to end by talking about punk rock, the kind that makes you shout and jump and make sparks fly through the air and your blood fizz with excitement and possibility.  And really fucking loud, too.  I spent a good part of 2014 trying to see The So So Glos play as much as I can, because if all goes well, I’m going to give birth in late June, and I suspect my going to punk shows will be sharply curtailed for a year or two.  I have not felt like this about a band since I was a teenager. Punk rock, when it’s right, when it’s on, is like getting an electric injection of adrenaline and speed straight to the heart, your pulse races, and you might explode or die, and if you did it would be worth it, it would be well worth it, and you don’t care.  I can feel the bassline sometimes inside my ribcage, and it feels like being shaken into pieces from the inside. I’ll tell you what else I love about the Glos—they look like they’re having a tremendous amount of fun when they perform.  Their last album, Blow-out, came out in 2013, and it’s pretty fucking great.  I don’t know what the crossover between feminist spec fic and punk rock appreciation is, but I have at least two data points, myself and my friend Psyche, and Amazon once told me that "We've noticed that customers who enjoyed Maria Tatar's The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales also like Punk: The Definitive Record of a Revolution," so what the hell.  I fell in love with the Glos some years back when I saw them play a song about gentrification that cut right to the heart of the matter (“My Block,” off Tourism/Terrorism).  They’re older now, and have a manager and opened Lollapalooza this past summer, but seeing them is still loud and intimate and lovely.  (A few sentences of this last entry could previously be found on my LJ.  Only a few, though.) 

    

       Veronica Schanoes is a writer and assistant professor in the department of English at Queens College - CUNY. Earlier this year, she won a World Fantasy Award. Her work has appeared at Tor.com and in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, Interfictions, and Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 21. She lives in New York City and does not like cats. Her book of criticism, Fearless Children and Fabulous Monsters: Lewis Carroll, Angela Carter, and Beastly Girls, will be appearing in the near future. She currently lives in New York City.