This is a brief reading from THE SHOEMAKER’S TALE that was performed at the University of North Florida on November 17, 2005. The video was shot with a cell phone from the audience by April Bacon.
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Remembering Bruno Schulz
December 15th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
ON November 18th, we remembered Bruno Schulz, the writer and artist murdered by a Gestapo officer on November 19, 1942.
The Program
1. Intro. (Mark Ari)
2. “Who is Bruno Schulz” (written and directed by Robby McChargue; Performed by Robbie McChargue, Chris Williams and Chris Valade)
3. Historical Perspective (Dr. Charles Closmann)
4. Painting unveiled (Kristen Knapp)
5. Reading 2 (Mark Ari)
6. Butoh Dance (Created and performed by Ashton DeVito)
7. Reading 3 (Mark Ari)
Remembering Bruno Schulz from UNF Videos on Vimeo.
Looking Back on Louis
November 12th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
A tune, a painting, a poem, or a story begin as something personal that emerges out of a person’s urge to say a thing by what means they can best say it. Sometimes it resonates so others, strangers, can feel at home in what was made, as though it is their own voices sounding there. After that, nothing is ever the same.
We don’t always know these moments when we’re in them. We have to look back from a distance over time to try to pick them out of memory’s soft static. But they stick with us all the same. We take them to heart, each in our own way. Often there’s a need to share the experience. Sometimes, there’s a longing to add something of our own. From the personal to the universal to the personal and on and on again. That’s the pulse of it. It don’t mean a thing if ain’t got that swing.
I don’t know when Jazz was born. No one does. And it’s just as hard to peg that tipping point when it entered the lifeblood of our worlds. I do know that Louis Armstrong made the first recordings that listed him as bandleader on November 12, 1925. The sides recorded for Okeh Records were “My Heart” and “Cornet Chop Suey.” Johnny Dodds was on clarinet, Kid Ory on trombone, and Johnny St. Cyr played banjo. Lil Hardin-Armstrong was at the piano. That must have been a hot moment. It wasn’t mine. Not directly. But many decades later I got a taste of the cheesecake baked in that oven.
Looking Back on Louis
I had deadlines. Time was getting away from me. That’s the thing with time: the more it eludes, the more we feel it pressing. The shorter it becomes, the wider and deeper and closer its shadow. I felt that, though there was no time to think it. Bug-eyed and claustrophobic, blinkered with purpose, I scurried room-to-room looking for a book that had the quote that said the thing I could not say without it. Ken Burns’ Jazz was on the video. My wife had put it on, and I stopped to to look over my shoulder…
To read more: Prick of the Spindle/Looking Back on Louis
Nibbling Chum
October 28th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink
There’s a small flock of deans where I work. They’ve decided to offer a regular time on a regular basis when they’ll make sure one or more of them is available to hear from folks about whatever those folks have on their minds. That sounds pretty good. It shows a desire to make communication easier. I don’t think they really want to hear what’s on my mind—and they don’t make it a fair risk to tell them—but, on the surface at least, it’s a nice gesture. There’s something to be said for that.
The result was a flurry of e-mails. One person saw the invitation as an occasion for bluster, and the “reply-to-all” button on their email client as a convenient megaphone.
I’m not against “reply-to-all.” It has its uses. And I’ve no problem with soap-boxing. I’ll stop to listen if the voice is a compelling one. But I do like having the choice to move on and be done with it should that voice strike me as hollow. “Reply-to-all” makes that nearly impossible. It turns the public street into an endless loop. I have to come back again and again if only to read enough to know that it is that same windy thing I want to delete.
The fellow had his withers swelled about grade inflation. It’s not a new subject, so he must have felt it was one not taken seriously enough. The invitation from the deans was to walk over and tell it to them, but that requires legwork. And it’s private. He wanted an audience.
All right. Even if I never bought the rap about grade inflation enough to care about it in the least, I figure the guy has some congestion to clear. I can live with that. And if he has to be rude and mean-spirited, I can let that pass, too. I’ve been there. Let him blow it off. Then maybe he’ll pour himself a drink with a little bite to it, put on some music, and let it all go away. That’s what I was thinking. I didn’t type it and hit “reply-to-all.”
The professoriate is a wreck. It is hidebound. As winkered by procedure and atrophied presuppositions as any rankist clergy. Sure, it will change. Everything is changing now. Technology is ahead of us. And whether you think we’re caught in the web or at home in the cloud there’s no going back unless we tear it all down and start again. More and more, the professoriate puts on the uniform of the corporate structures it serves. Some members pay lip-service to resisting that direction; others welcome it. Those in opposition don’t fight too hard. The bargaining table is a Brahmin picnic where everyone is afraid they’ll go hungry and no one is aware of how fat they are.
Of course, the blowhard’s rant didn’t die. “Reply-to-all” is electronic chum. Fish gather.
In the itty-bitty frenzy of back and forth that followed, someone from the “hard” sciences “replied-to-all,” claiming her department does not have to be concerned about grade inflation. Half of their students are failing. That was a mark of pride. Of solid pedagogy and high standards. “How easy,” I thought. I did not hit “reply-to-all.”
I feel pretty good about my students. And though my job is a temporary one, I’ve been at this place for better than ten years. I’ve met good folks. Both on faculty and in administration—even a dean or two. Ones I admire and like. There are some loons about, too, and that pleases me. And sure, there are plenty of others who are forgettable except in their own minds, and a few who are a curse on everything living. I don’t care. Just stay out of my mailbox.
I’m not sure what it is that made me want to write this rather than spend the time working on a song, but there you have it. It might have been the invitation to talk which, while well-intentioned, was in essence personally meaningless. Maybe it was all the grade inflation nonsense—the problem has never been in the classroom. Maybe rising grades are a symptom (and I’m not swearing to it) of something else but, if so, the fault is elsewhere. Or maybe it was that “weed-them-out” mentality that reeked of a discredited (one would hope) Social Darwinism. But I’m betting it was just that “reply-to-all.” Get a blog, for God’s sake.
It could be that windbag did me favor. I’m looking around. I’m looking at my wrists and ankles. I’m smiling as I type.
Under the Influence
October 14th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
I am under the influence of blended whiskey
Of day old bread dipped in six bit wine
Of caffeine and hot sauce
And Soutine’s meat
I am under the influence of frightened people.
To read the whole of it: Spoken War
I Don’t Give A Shit
October 6th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink
Okay, so yesterday I heard some guy is going around saying I don’t give a shit. Ticked me off. I steamed over it. After all, who the hell is going to tell me I don’t give a shit? But he didn’t tell me. He said it to other folks. It just got back to me. And now I’m going have a trouble liking this guy. What a nuisance.
He seemed all right before. Didn’t know him well but wanted to. Chatted a few times. Got the impression we were simpatico, and I don’t get a hell of lot of that sense around where I live. Now, in retrospect, I guess those conversations were just politics. Okay. It’s a political world. I don’t give a shit.
Most likely I don’t give a shit about some of the same shit he gives a shit about. In the context of the universe of which he is the center, my attitude probably does come off as more general. Context, if not everything, is a lot. And there’s no accounting for universes. We all make what sense we can out of the world, and we only have our own feeble perceptual and cognitive powers by which to construct the conceits we live by. Sometimes, when I get a glimpse into one of those worlds, I’m glad there are so many others.
I don’t have a need to get along with everybody. I don’t trust people who do. But that doesn’t mean I want to do anything about them. I just take it into account on an instinctual level. Beyond that, I don’t give a shit. There’s too much else to do.
I like walking with people. I like it when there’s wine and the gab is good and we’re walking and picking up stuff along the way to make a noise with. I like the improvised syncopation that happens, the joyful stumbles, the sounds of voices charged with merriment. I like the word “merriment.” But when the route is mapped and the drumbeat insistent, I prefer to slip out. I disdain neat rows. The irrefragably programmatic. The very idea of like-mindedness as the highest aspiration makes my sinuses ache.
I kind of like that “build it and they will come” concept. But when it’s married to blaming the ghosts who don’t arrive, it loses meaning. They don’t come because there is greater nourishment elsewhere, or because there is some other place in that moment where they must be to manifest more according to their own lights. That’s obvious. It ought to be respected.
So what do I give a shit about? I don’t know. I think as long as there is food in the world, everybody ought to eat. As long there’s medicine, everybody ought to have what they need. As long as there are people, everybody ought to have a friend and a lover with whom to make crazy love all the time. I think there is nothing sweeter than a kiss, and I want everyone to know what that can be, to judge for themselves. I believe the world has a lot of hardness in it, and we ought to make things easier for the next person when we can. We ought to help one another find and do what each of us loves to do because, in the end, at the heart of things on a very individual level, it makes all the difference. The quality of our sleep depends on it. Every morning, we leave pieces of our dreams on our pillows. These get into the air we breathe.
I believe one of the greatest gifts we can give one another, one that is within the reach of everyone to give, is encouragement. The most remarkable state of being is not to be inspired but to inspire. And I know the value of that from having been given inspiration. And whatever the temple, no matter how tempting it is to appoint oneself gatekeeper, it’s better to “Unscrew the locks from the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!”[i]
Oh, and yeah, everything is personal. Everything. That’s probably why I was still so ticked when I started typing this. I wish I wasn’t so hot-headed sometimes. After all, it’s pretty stupid to get all fired up by hearsay. But I’m smiling now. In another couple of days, I’ll forget why I was so bothered in the first place. Maybe that means I don’t give a shit.
Meeting the Living/The Julian Beck Interview
October 1st, 2011 § 2 comments § permalink
I met Julian Beck through Jack Gelber in 1984, shortly after the Living Theater returned to New York for a run at the Joyce Theater. The press was harsh; more like ridicule than review. After 10 years of self-imposed exile and more than 30 years of relentlessly experimental work, the Living Theater was broke and broken up. When I arrived…
To read more and listen to the interview: UbuWeb Sound :: Julian Beck
Ten Years After
September 22nd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
In 2001, I was still writing my column, The Ari Files, regularly. When 9/11 happened, I just let it go dark. Some folks wrote me about that. The following is from September 23, 2001:
Words and One Eye Open
I’m surprised at how much e-mail I have received from readers of The Ari Files asking me not to be silenced by the horrific events of last week. The most affecting were ones from a couple of pals: a Canadian and a Staten Islander.
The Canadian had lived for some years in New York City, long enough to become part of a neighborhood. That’s how you become a New Yorker. That’s how she gets under your skin. Once you’ve got a neighborhood, you’ve got the whole town, and you take her with you for the rest of your life.
New York makes you a part of her. The timing, the tension, rubbing bellies in narrow green grocer aisles; breaths shared, mouth to mouth, over meek distances in crowded trains and elevators and laundromats; the confluence of streams of humanity bunching up on street corners and sliding, headlong, up and down sidewalks in human eddies; words spoken or left in the bubbling stir of thoughts behind blinking eyes; all the living and some presumed dead languages of humanity escaping from tongues and through ears to cling to the sides of buildings and on window glass, making dunes in the panes; words mixed with carbonic soot and black as same. Black. The color of the deep and distance and the unknown. The color of poets in leather jackets or cotton Ts. The black of boots and berets and moons beneath tired eyes and asphalt. The black of Homburgs in Williamsburg and Borough Park. The Lower Eastside black of fishnet stockings and hip tight skirts and dyed hair and painted lips and fingers and toes. Ebony Jazz. The black beard of dockside Romeo dropping fishhooks into the inky Narrows. The glossed lampblack empty nucleus of an open eye through which everything may enter and beyond which everything is revealed, including the wonder of ultimate unknowability. This black pools in the pores of your skin. You carry it with you. It gets into your blood. It stripes your soul with a brush dipped into a concentrate of richly mixed humanity.
My Canadian friend took the terror planes in his belly. Just like the rest of us. The Staten Islander lost a dozen of his people. Oh God. The scent of dear flesh blown from bones onto the air in fire and chemical smoke. Screams and tears rush into the hollows of charred periosteum. Eardrums shatter. Silence, desperate leaps. There is no air left in the world.
Everyone is missing now. Everyone. What words could there possibly be?
We need time. To catch our breaths after a blow to the windpipe. To let cohesion return to the mind. To let sadness have sway. To squeeze rage out of our rag hearts and let it drain into gutters. To bury our dead.
What can I say? Watch your back. All this sadness and rage: we’re going to be crazy from it for a while. You’ll have to sleep lightly now. And keep an eye on that guy over there wrapped in a flag. I think he’s looking for trouble. Better keep one eye open at all costs. For safety’s sake. I’m talking about the neighborhood here.
Again and Brand New
September 7th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
When my son, Noah, turned 12, he and I began a journey together to the time when he would become a Bar Mitzvah . I wanted something for him other than what I had experienced. It was. For both us.
Over the following year we read together—history, poetry, philosophy, sacred texts, prayers, short stories and novels. We watched films, looked at art, and listened to music. We tried our hands at some. We talked about it all. Asked questions. He decided he wanted to read Torah in Hebrew, so we studied together and learned to piece the sounds into words, and we discussed those words and what they might mean for us. He wanted to chant, so we downloaded the signs for the tropes and listened to recordings of the sounds they represented. Then we put them together with the words of his Haftarah.
It was not an easy year. I was working two jobs to keep us afloat. He had his schoolwork and music and all the things a boy of 12 has to do to be a boy of 12. But we did it. We made the time for it, because it meant a lot to both of us to spend that time together, he and I, on this journey. We each kept a journal of it, of our thoughts and impressions and things we wanted to remember. He has his. Someday, he’ll have the one I made.
On his 13th birthday, we went to the beach. No rabbi. No synagogue. Just him, his mom, his sister, me, and a small group of friends to make our minyan. Noah wore the tallit I had worn when I became a Bar Mitzvah. I wore the tallit that belonged to my grandfather.
Noah chanted beautifully. Afterwards, he spoke what he had in his heart to say about our year together, what he felt he had learned, and what it all meant to him. It was something. Then he and I left the group for a stroll along the edge of the water. I told him how proud I was of him, of how I admired him and loved him. I thanked him for the best year of my life. He put his arms around me and said, “It doesn’t have to stop now, does it?” “Of course not,” I told him. And it hasn’t.
One year from now, this weekend, my daughter, Kezia, will become a Bat Mitzvah. We have just begun.
About
September 1st, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Mark Ari was born in Brooklyn and lives elsewhere. This is his website. For the moment, he has nothing more to say on the matter.