Monday, September 28, 2009

I AM T-PAIN "ashy elbows" Bertona Diss Song

Nolan was kind enough to share with the world his latest track as T-PAIN, entitled, "Ashy Elbows". In that same vein as De La Soul's "Take It Off" Nolan-PAIN has called out the corgi dog, that lives (rent-free) with him in Chinatown, and at his behest to begin the process of eradicating those short, albeit ashy elbows.
We're all hoping that through the mention of Johnson & Johnson product placement in the track that the higher-ups in the advertising department will recognize an entirely new population in order to sell their hygiene products to, thereby exhalting Bertona's plight into the spotlight.
The track can be played via the link and I highly recommend figuring out a way to make this your new ringtone.
Goodbye Sonic Youth's Bull In The Heather"...
YOU HAVE BEEN REPLACED.

http://iamtpain.smule.com/mysongs/uid/1/92711/?did=422159

Bertona's ashy elbows can clearly be seen in this photo-op taken during one of the 6 days of summer in Chicago this year. Also featured is me yelling at Anubis, who clearly thinks that he's still running people's lives in concentration camps, and by that I mean he knocked into me multiple times.

Monday, September 14, 2009

I Realize With Selfhood Subtle and Gross Homeostasis Equilibrium of My Humanness That Is Oscillating Consciousness Beyond An Ensnaring Veil.

There is a seemingly sadistic quality to those that write about events post-facto, particularly ones that the reader just nearly missed experiencing instead of merely perusing on this technological hydra, its' as if to say, "I could've hipped you to this.. but chose not to for personal reasons of awfulness". With this said I move onward with an exhibit that happened so long ago that its' only element worthy of discussion is perhaps the most salient aspect of the curated group effort, that being, the shift of rhetoric in canvass of race and the desire to both retain and reject racial identity.


The "BLACK IS, BLACK AIN'T" exhibit took place April-June 2008 at the University of Chicago and was curated by The Renaissance Society using a line from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man which, in my opinion, should have been noted in the brochure instead of assuming that each person had it memorized from their junior year high school English class. I take issue with pretense for the sake of pretense..let's turn the mane down a tad, Skidd Row.


In the celler of the main character's racial consciousness the preacher's sermon begins,


"I said black is...an' black ain't...black will git you...an' Black won't...It do, Lawd...an' it don't- Black will make you...or it will unmake you."


And so, we begin with some of the more cerebral pieces in what was an exquisite aggrandizement to the ongoing discussion on race and racial identity, one that will conceivably continue until Saul Williams gets his money back.





The image above, created by Carl Pope Jr., was used as a two-sided poster and brochure for the exhibit which was a lovely parting gift that had remarkable potential for re-postering across this great city. Imagine walking down (insert whatever Chicago street doesn't make you ralph thinking about the zonkeys that have taken it over) and within eye-site an ombre concoction sets the records straight in the nigga/nigger debate. Just like THAT. There's your 12th member of the jury, man, the verdict is in.


The "ER/A" contention becomes nil when the ace of experience is dropped onto the table, and like various identities before, most notably the Jewish Holocaust experience (which was Jimi Hendrix's first band), the discussion becomes revitalized in the conscious reclaimation of empiric identity. Just like how certain Chicago scenesters from Schaumburg will never quite get that romanticization of poverty right, certain areas of racial identity do not belong to those outside of that ethnicity. My apologies to the pro-appropriation egg-heads, or as Gabriel Shadwick says, "I prefer steal".

Shaman:Horse from Todd Gray (as seen above) challenges racial identity as the Los Angeles based artist bukkakes an African-American man with shaving cream. One of the more notable aspects of Todd Gray's previous gigs was as Michael Jackson's 'Official Photographer" from 1979-1984 which can not be easily dismissed in terms of documenting image and imagery of one of the most famous black men in the past 30 years.

The polarity in image of his former employer alone is enough to warrant the dialogue between the warring factions of fame and image, with the crux of Gray's job to silently chronicle the darker skinned, Afro-donning, more Afro-centric nose of the "Off The Wall" era to the sparkly, most definitely 'lighter than a paperbag', Jeri-curled, L.A. nose of the "Thriller"stage. One black man has undergone physical and occidental transformation while another black man catalogues this change into personal and public annals. Who said, you can't always get what you want?



As it may be, Demetrius Oliver's "Till" (above) was my absolute favorite of the entire collection for so eloquently articulating the mashed-in and mangled face of poor poor Emmett Till. The photograph, with it's use of cleverly basted frosting alternately becomes the blood, muscle, swollen and lacerated flesh, and pulverized bone fragments in a boy's face which, just a month before his death in Mississippi, had turned 14 years old.

The photograph below is a still from Till's open coffin; which until recently was not easily accessible to the public since it's debut on the cover of a 1955 issue of Jet Magazine, which published the image in order to revitalize the slagging Civil Rights Movement. The jutting nature of both images juxatose the previous unavailibilty of the corpse photo, in that, the vast majority of people viewing Oliver's work do not have the original Till image in their collective memory banks. Therefore, if one has never seen what Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam did to Emmett's worldly vessel does that make Oliver's world more or less poignant to the viewer?



The paradox between the two images create a spectral competition among the boys in the pictures...who disturbs the viewer more? Is the affect didactically opposed to the end result of the infamous hate crime or does one confront the horror more explicit or implicitly through the differing lens'?
Personally, Demetrius' "Till" photograph wins the emblematic race by providing the viewer with the articulation of the murderous beat-down in that MOMENT as opposed to the sewn up bag of skin that is now housed in Burr Oak cemetary. Oliver's photograph transports the spectator back to the scene of the crime whereby Emmett is still thrashing in the Tallahatchie River with a 70 pound cotton gin fan tied to his body with barbed wire.

Another personal favorite was Edgar Arceneaux's "Failed Attempt At Crystallization" (above) whereby the artist has taken the novel "Roots" and turned the book upside down while using sugar crystals to begin to sensuously devour the work of literature. Arceneaux's focus in his work is the connectivity of poetic and literary (that is, published) language and the experience of daily life, and while he attempts to seek these invisible patterns within society it is impossible not to note the paramount importance of choosing "Roots" as the medium upon which to make that critique.

The notion expressed is simply that the ideas expressed in "Roots" have not crystallized within our consciousness; that we have not learned from the past and instead remain static in our dealins with race and oppression. Albert Memmi had right back in 1957, "it is what it is because they are what they are, and neither one nor the other will ever change", but then again he also gave us the gem, "racism sums up and symbolizes the fundamental relation which unites colonialist and colonized". Arceneaux begs the audience to break its' obsession with masochism and begin to ferment the experiences of our shared pasts if only to stop being our generation's sloppy racial and racist seconds.

The most plesantly surprising out of all of the pieces in the exhibit had to be Andres Serrano's "White Nigger" (above) from his "Interpretation of Dreams" series by which the work showed a welcome departure from Serrano's more explicit and obvious controversial subject matter. I'm aware that in interviews Serrano states that he never meant to create such an uproar with "Piss Christ" to which my father would say, "don't bullshit a bullshitter".

In this piece the audience is more captivated than merely shocked with the question of racial identity placed at the forefront which was precisely the intention of The Renaissance Society curating these specific pieces. The man in the photograph, fellow artist Aaron Olshan, appears to be an African-American man with the exception of the lower inch of the portrait's frame which sneakily hips the audience to the joke. Perhaps the question presently is no longer what are you, but moreover who are you to which Ralph Ellison echoes back, "when I discover who I am, I'll be free".

*I wanted to discuss Carl Pope Jr.'s video installation Palimpsest, which was not included in the exhibit, in another post. The title from this particular post is from the third section whereby Pope's twin sister (and co-creator) narrates a poem while it is tattooed on Pope from the ankle to the back of his neck.

Friday, September 11, 2009

I'm Falling For You: Examining the Hegelian Process of Bildung, 9/11's forced negation of self, and America's Nero Complex

The morning of September 11, 2001 is perhaps one of the clearest memories that I have stowed away in my consciousness without the proverbial assistance of the "Memory Committee" used to jog recollections, and in this instance I can recall exactly the '5 W's' of the morning as such:

WHO: myself, in a dark bedroom convinced that I was dying from an undiagnosed malady, possibly cholera; the reality being a sinus infection.
WHAT: woken up at 10:30am to be told that "the world is on fire".
WHERE: Elmwood Park, IL
WHEN: 9/11 fool!
WHY: because "they hate our freedom" as our President at the time so eloquently stated.


At the time I was a member of the Communist Party and working with the Revolutionary Communist Party of Chicago on some propaganda brochures, which I considered myself to be the Goebbels of that scene, and by that I mean REALLY GREAT at getting the job done.

This of course was before the RCP was forced to relocate their unheated digs in Wrigleyville to the more charming neighborhood that houses the Empty Bottle, albeit a more appropriate setting for their whole ideologies which fetishizes' a self-imposed expatriate who hung out with the Black Panthers "a few times".
The guy actually referred to himself as "CHAIRMAN Bob Avakian"...what a goof-ball! NO WAY!
I digress.

The morning the towers fell I reacted only as a 20 year old fully-fledged Revolutionary could, which was to say I ran into the living room shouting "BURN MOTHERFUCKER BURN!", while my heart swelled and I remember feeling the exact same way as when I first heard Huey P. Newton's poem, "Revolutionary Suicide":

"By having no family I have inherited the family of humanity.
By having no possessions I have possessed all.
By rejecting the love of one I have received the love of all.
By surrendering my life to the revolution I have found eternal life.
Revolutionary suicide."

At that precise moment the World Trade Towers, which had been in my political dreamscape represented as two unapologetic rigid middle fingers posed to the rest of the world, had finally experienced Fanon's 'year of the boomerang', which is not to quote the Rage Against The Machine contribution to the 'Higher Learning' Soundtrack.

The chickens had, indeed, come home to roost.


The attacks on the World Trade Towers can consequently be understood using the same pathology of recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse, that is, each person carries the collective consciousness of the impact within our own cultural, political, economic, and most poignantly our personal selves.

The aftermath of 9/11 has forced each one us to construct a new personality of "Americans" within the context of the rest of the world for perhaps the first time since our own warding off of colonization, along with rebuilding our sense of self in the face of our own Nero Complex. With no direct sensationalism intended I pose this picture of the WTC 'Jumpers' (which sounds like a new band name for my bff and I) in order to illustrate an overwhelmingly concrete feeling that I feel exemplifies post-9/11 developments on both didactic and dialectic levels.


Faced with the realization of eminent death and a pervasive fear of immolation, although realistically the majority of WTC workers near the sites of impact asphyxiated on smoke and chemical debris from the buildings, groups of people began to take flight from the towers; some holding hands as if lovers and others leaping alone seemingly escaping from the albatross of the Towers.

Regardless, the 'Jumpers' of 9/11 represent more than an individual choosing their own destiny in the face of unabashed destruction, but moreover each nations' own process of Bildung, which in America's case created a forced negation of self and the critique of our own Nero Complex.

While I no longer subscribe to the People's Weekly World there is no doubt in my mind that 9/11 occured as a concrete actualization of dialectical materialism, that is reality and change in such are representations of the constant conflict of opposites that arise from internal contradictions. Plainly, America karmically deserved it.
If America had been a girl filing a rape report the patriarchy would have said that she asked for it. Dig?
Let's talk about the Hegelian process of Bildung.
Bildung is the complex process by which individuals and collectives seek cultural formation by both learning, experiencing, and developing various aptitudes of personality, authenticity, and humanity. In the context of 9/11, the attacks are a direct response to the conceit of globalization as well as our own interconnectedness among the diverse cultures of the world, in that, each individual began to experience culture without our own awareness or consent until Al-Qaeda's public declaration of: FUCK YOU WESTERN CULTURE wrested the notion into our collective consciousness.
It is paramount to correlate globalization, which may be seen as a culturally spectral Bildung movement, to the ideologies of Islamic fundamentalist groups as its' antithesis. The growing pains of forced Western globalization is reflected in Nietzsche's letter to a friend, which states:

"First, one has the difficulty of emancipating oneself from one's chains; and, ultimately one has to emancipate oneself from this emancipation too! Each of us has to suffer, though in greatly different ways, from the chain sickness even after he has broken the chains."

9/11 has given, specifically, America the gift of self-negation and the opportunity for an existential crisis by which we can begin disrupt our process of living in the ways we have become accustomed to as well as to question timeless truths that we have manipulated the world into believing. The attack on the towers may be seen, ultimately, as a turn to terror and/or terrorism in order to contest Western globalization as a transcendent truth and in turn created fanatical devotion to an ideology of martyrdom.

Many critics have stated that America has thus had a Nero Complex regarding the effects of globalization on both the developed and underdeveloped nations of the world, by which we continue to eat our Big Macs while watching the telly as commercials of starving African children cause us to in turn to choke down larger handfulls of Ranch Doritos. I feel that the situation is perhaps more dire than the common satire of Americans, and that we have not so much played the fiddle while Rome was burning, but went to a Fall Out Boy concert where pictures of said concert were immediately uploaded onto our personal social networking site.

In other words, this is already America's default picture.

At this moment, I feel that there will never be an honest dialogue not so much as to why 9/11 happened, but moreover why it ultimately had to occur. As many of us understand from our childhood's sometimes an old-fashioned ass-whupping is exactly what an unruly brat needs in order for the concept of wrong-doing to sink into their grey matter.

Slavoj Zizek has most likely best described the entire fiasco in his new book entitled, "First as A Tragedy, Then As A Farce", whose title references Marx's notion of history repeating itself and that the end result is perhaps more terrfiying as a farce. Afterall, the collapse of global capitalism as evidenced by America's "Great Recession" is the just desserts for ignoring the needs of our natural and social world while instead continuing to manifest a culture of celebrity.

Zizek's book comes out October 5, 2009.