Poetry Matters: Bed Bug - Original

Bed Bug
2018

You ensnare me in your web of silk sheets

And crawl into my arms

To mark me with your kisses

And give me a rash of reasons

To catch incurable affections

TV Matters: Insatiable Reviews

Insatiable, Netflix

2018

Insatiable, or rather the reviews of the show, exposes a leftist reactionary tendency toward a kind of representational censorship that erases reality in favor of a progressive vision of the future. To be clear, I'm as left leaning as then come. To paraphrase Sarah Palin, "I can see Brooklyn from my house." Which is why I think it's important to unpack these reviews and the reaction they have caused to understand where we on the left miss the mark when it comes to our tolerance for certain forms of representation.

It's been widely reported that the show was petitioned to be cancelled based solely on its trailer. Man, do we love petitions! We know that we can't stop Netflix from airing the show, but we can show that world that there are hundreds of thousands of us on the right side of history!

Indeed, the trailer, posted above, is full of representational triggers for many marginalized groups; plus-sized women, southerners, closeted people across the LGBTQIA spectrum, Asians, Christians - each group is represented in base stereotypical ways for what seems to be cheap laughs. 

Thankfully, our side has an army of critics telling the world things like, 

[Insatiable] just doesn’t have many discerning opinions about body image, confidence, and overcoming bullying. It tries so hard to push the envelope that it doesn’t really push anything at all, falling flat as a satire and as an intentionally over-the-top comedy. 

The sentiment here seems to be two-fold. First, Insatiable fails because it's tone-deaf and secondly because it's poorly made. Which begs the question, why should we expect a poorly made show to have "discerning opinions?"  Why are we holding a show that was ordered (and cancelled!) by The CW and released in the middle on August on Netflix to such a high standard?

Because, dear reader, your social conditioning (which isn't your fault) makes you think that the trailer is sexy and wildly appealing. Which means that you need to be made aware of the fact that it's NOT sexy and is, in fact, UNAPPEALLING.

Which feels, a bit, reactionary and, a touch, self-righteousness.

Perhaps I take these critiques personally because I spent a year of my life trying to make art that addresses privilege and intersectionality. Guess what, it's really really hard to do. The attempt, in and of itself, is admirable. But the very nature of this art practice is highlighting sites of micro(macro)aggression to elicit a reaction/reflection from/by the audience that is uncomfortable.

Cringing when you see Debby Ryan in a fat suit is the point. Why did you cringe? Is it due to that fact that throughout film history representations of womens' bodies are wrought with problematic stereotypes that have lead to widespread body dysmorpia and bullying? My Brooklyn readers are nodding furiously in agreement. Or, could it be because you've internalized the value proposition that certain body configurations are more valuable than others and seeing a fat body is repulsive? My honest readers are half-nodding in resignation.

Of course, there are myriad other reason one might cringe but it's the cringing that's interesting, not the representation in and of itself but it's representation that's under attack. Take Vulture's Jen Chaney's following comment for an example,

Insatiable is impressive in its capacity [to] offend a vast array of ideologies, including the notion that TV in 2018 should really be a hell of a lot smarter and more nuanced than this.

The implication here is that there is a base "smartness" and "nuancedness" that a show must have in order for it to be aired in 2018. I'm not sure what 2018 the reviewer is referring to, but the one I live in has a reality show star as President of the United States of America.

There is an argument to be made that art should (re)present a world that has moved past body-shamming, racism, sexism, abilism, classism, and homophobia and that we are all living in Woketopia (a neighborhood in Brooklyn, I presume) so that we can one day make it there. But there is another argument that art should re-present the world we are living in through a place like Masonville, Georgia where all of these societal ills still exist despite a mountain of evidence that they should not so that we can start to change our minds.

In fact, in a world were arguments about isolationism and nationalism are winning at the polls around the world, an artistic attempt to grapple with these topics in a milieu were the hegemonic forces of the community tacitly condone marginalization is probably a more relevant exercise.

Blast Insatiable for not having enough Nonnie or for having too many puns but be careful when calling out the show for not representing the toughest issues of our day in a way that makes sure that every marginalized group is represented in their best possible future as opposed to their broken and complicated present.

Magazine Matters: Difference is Our Common Ground

Why Autocrats Fear LGBT Rights - New York Review of Books
Masha Gessen

In the penultimate paragraph of Masha Gessen's "Why Autocrats Fear LGBT Rights," she writes, "Looking at a person who embodies choice—the possibility of being or becoming different—can be like staring into the abyss of uncertainty." "Person," here, means a member of the LGBT community and represents what Gessen calls, "a convenient stand-in for an entire era of liberalization," that has ushered in a wave of authoritarian regimes across the world. This is a rather tidy reading of the motions that have lead countries as disparate as Turkey and the United States to come to the same conclusion and elect the same type of leaders. What seems more likely is that the rhetoric of difference is used by the left and right to elicit a emotional response to protect one's own at all costs. This article is an entry from the left and it must be tossed in the same waste bin as similar arguments from the right.

Members of the LGBT community are normal and any attempt to suggest that their existence is something outside of society, beacon of hope or coming of the apocalypse, is to accept the idea that difference inexorably separates us when, in fact, difference could be the thing that unites us. If this article is to be believed, a queer society is, by rule, a freer society. If only that were the case. Our work would be so easy. Sadly, our problems are much deeper.

For example, the Dyke March exclusion of a lesbian expressing her Jewishness makes sense in the context the West's casual antisemitism. The organizers fell into traditional authoritarian roles because that's what normally happens when people gain power and they are as normal as anyone else. Queerness, as such, does not cause societies to be one thing or the other. Societies are what they are because of the laws (natural and artificial) that govern them.

The ways in which the West deals with queer people, and difference in general, is problematic, but the problem is in the problematization of that or any other difference.

Take this article and replace the premise that suppression of queer rights is "the frontier in the global turn toward autocracy," and replace it with the premise that suppression of Morman rights is "the frontier in the global turn toward autocracy" and have it published in the summer of 2016 as an attack on the advances of LGBT rights under the authoritarian regime of Barack Obama and one starts to understand how difference is weaponize by left and right to separate people.

We need a different "difference" argument. One that goes something like -- we are all different and that's what makes us the same. Difference is not a threat, it's our path to building a more inclusive society.

In order for this idea to take hold, we must reject arguments that celebrate our particular difference as the exemplar of all differences. Such a rejection of self interest is difficult and counter-intuitive and may require an intellectualization of our emotions in a way that may not be possible on a grand scale. If it is achievable, we could dismantle the structures in our society that have been built on the lies of us-vs-them tribalism. Slavery was built into the law. Mass incarceration of blacks is built into the law. Police use of force is built into the law. The gross mistreatment of queer communities is built into the law. These are the problems and only a united front of all of us can fix them.

We can only achieve radical change if we are all feed up with being manipulated by our emotions and are organized to create a society worthy of the idea that each one of us is created equal and has curtain inalienable rights that must be defended by the rule of law.

Poetry Matters: Lunar Lover Lesson: Original

Lunar Lover Lesson

A Moon shimmered at dusk over California
Skies and I wanted to capture it for myself,
Own it, but as I reached out to take it in hand,
Nox whispered in my ear, "This Moon has captured you.
Devote yourself to Her; change as She changes; glow
Just as brightly on the faces in the darkness;
Feed Her with loyalty and cloth Her with honor;
Make a home with Her wherever Her travels lead
And always remember that you are Her bright Sun;
Make Her your guide through My bewildering nighttime
Jungle; Listen to the many Moons that She echoes;
Join with Her forever and ever and ever…"

Black Lives Matter: Judith Butler on the Necessity of Stating the Obvious

Watch the full hour, but start here for a direct discussion on how people allow themselves to value one life and devalue another. 

I spend a decent amount of my free time watching the great minds of our time give lectures to small auditoriums of academics. It's not entertainment, per se, and I would not typically review these videos in the pages of Entertainment Matters, but the current moment demands that we gather and share the best information we have in the fight against the devaluation of black lives in America.  

In the clip above, Judith Butler, discusses our ability to, at once, fully ignore or, in fact, glorify the violence that States enact on people during war, while at the same time abhor violence that non-state actors enact against people. At around 36:55 Butler says, and I quote selectively (the lecture is actually a snippet of an essay entitled, "Survivability, Vulnerability, Affect" published in a collection called "Frames of War," Verso 2009) 

The critique of violence must begin with the question of the representability of life itself: what allows a life to become visible in its precariousness and its need for shelter, and what is it that keeps us from seeing or understanding certain lives in this way? The problem concerns the media, at the most general level, since a life can be accorded a value only on the condition that it is perceivable as a life, but it is only on the condition of certain embedded evaluative structures that a life becomes perceivable at all.

…An ethical attitude does not spontaneously arrive as soon as the usual interpretive frameworks are destroyed, and no pure moral conscience emerges once the shackles of everyday interpretation have been thrown off. On the contrary, it is only by challenging the dominant media that certain kinds of lives may become visible or knowable in their precariousness. It is not only or exclusively the visual apprehension of a life that forms a necessary precondition for an understanding of the precariousness of life. Another life is taken in through all the senses, if it is taken in at all. The tacit interpretive scheme that divides worthy from unworthy lives works fundamentally through the senses, differentiating the cries we can hear from those we cannot, the sights we can see from those we cannot…

When I heard this, all I could think was, "This is why "Black Lives Matter" is such a relevant rallying cry." My next thoughts was, "Wait, why aren't Judith Butler quotes dominating my Facebook feed right now?" 

Then I come to find out, that on January 12, 2015 (18 months ago), Butler was interviewed by the New York Times for a piece entitled, "What's Wrong with 'All Lives Matter?" where, among countless clearly articulated statements she says, 

Perhaps we can think about the phrase “black lives matter.” What is implied by this statement, a statement that should be obviously true, but apparently is not? If black lives do not matter, then they are not really regarded as lives, since a life is supposed to matter. So what we see is that some lives matter more than others, that some lives matter so much that they need to be protected at all costs, and that other lives matter less, or not at all. And when that becomes the situation, then the lives that do not matter so much, or do not matter at all, can be killed or lost, can be exposed to conditions of destitution, and there is no concern, or even worse, that is regarded as the way it is supposed to be.

Followed quickly by, 

So it is not just that black lives matter, though that must be said again and again. It is also that stand-your-ground and racist killings are becoming increasingly normalized, which is why intelligent forms of collective outrage have become obligatory.

I could go on quoting Butler and that's my point here. If you are struggling to articulate why the term "All Lives Matter" makes no sense in the context of the current moment, stop struggling and quote someone who thinks for a living. 

And spend your time participating in "intelligent forms of collective outrage" so that one day black lives can become lives. 

Poetry Matters: "In Response to Trees," by Lisa Hiton

Cherry Blossoms 2013, Aaron Mosby

Lisa Hiton, "In Response to Trees," Two Poems, The Adroit Journal, Issue 12

For two weeks in April, Washington, DC partakes in an annual ritual called the Cherry Blossom Festival.  The epicenter of the festivities is the Tidal Basin where 1,800 Somei-Yoshino trees burst into pink and white bloom. The landscape is typically garrisoned with a phalanx of amateur photographers armed with digital cameras trying to capture the effervescent blossoms that seem to start falling the day they bloom. Having been one of those camera-armed soldiers, I can tell you that there is a sense of urgency that compels one to take as many pictures as one can before the sun goes down or before it rains or before our short spring morphs into our long summer. Rarely have I simply gone to the Tidal Basin and just sat underneath one of these blooming trees and just listened to what they were saying.

Lisa Hiton does pause to listen and offers us, "In Response to Trees," a vivid, contemplation of the language of nature. The poem, published in Issue 12 of The Adroit Journal, starts off with an acknowledgement of T.S. Eliot's cruel spring, "In winter I knew them all / as one dead thing," but seems to sluff off the despair in the next line, "but now I love to watch them blossom." For Hiton, it seems, the past is not something to be memorialized, it is merely the last guidepost on the uncharted path towards new discoveries.

The guide on this particular path, a Japanese tree, like so many soothsayers, seems to speak in riddles. While it "translates / beauty into sunlike white and pink," it leaves enough mystery that our narrator states, "I lie under them / deciphering / their shapes. …" There is a juxtaposition here between the primary language of nature that we can tap into with our senses, "sunlike white and pink," and the secondary (tertiary, etc.) language of thought, that attempts to reconfigure natural occurrences, like the blossoms of a tree, into something geometric like "shapes." This movement leads to the general problem of thought, eloquently stated in the poem, "…How to a give a name / to something you know so well…"

In the turn of a word, Hiton takes us back to our first real encounter with nature, "…:Mother," in what seems like an attempt to discover something we've always known.  But as we've learned in the first lines of the poem, what we claim to know is often loss and death.

"I know you are afraid

of my love
when I watch the little round discs fall

suicidality towards me. …"

Here, the fear of love is wrapped in the loss of love which is inextricably linked to the possession of love. And while we all know this natural occurrence, all too well, are we not in the same boat as the narrator who states:

"…I am afraid

of what I might call them
while they are in the air…"?

Here there seems to be a fear of naming the gravitational body that pulls us away from our first love "Mother" because that body takes the unfortuitous position of becoming a new "Mother" who will fear our love and who we will one day fall away from. And, again, we know this but what we know, as Hiton shows, is not as lovely as what we can dream:

"tiny petals like eyelids
dropping down. The first time I dreamt

of falling
it was peaceful like this:--

nameless world, filled with green light…"

Nature takes us out of the tongue-tied world of our conscious mind into the sensory-guided world of the unconscious.  Here, the act "of falling" from love to love is free of named loves lost or loves to be lost. It is simply a force of nature as natural as light itself.

Hiton leaves us with a coda that echoes the narrator's first question, "by what name, Japanese tree, / by what name, Mother?" And for me, that is the beauty of this poem. It reminds us that the answers to the biggest riddles of our lives lie in a return to nature and the language of light, vibration and touch.

Next year, I'm going to leave the digital camera at home as I walk through the cherry blossom trees. Instead, I'm going to have my dear friend Lisa's poetry in my heart as I ask the trees the big questions.  

Poetry Matters - The Last Slice - Original

On the occation of the launch of Pious Pies I offer a reflection on true love.

The Last Slice

True love is a pie eaten piece by piece. 

The first slice is often a surprise

The second, a lie. Peace,

By Peace, you survive each

Slice, some too small

To leave a

Mark, others

So

Big, they nearly cut your heart right out.

But you grow wiser as the pie

Grows smaller. You can calculate the

Dimensions required by true 

Love to make

Your hunger

Cease.

So when that piece lays before you, perfectly

Sized to fulfill your needs and desires

You can savor each freely

Offered bite without fear

Or doubt because

It's your
Last.