The Birthday Party (continued)
Commentary by Chitown Kev
The Par-tay is up here on The Porch today...still going strong!
Yesterday, of course, was the 69th birthday of our mother, sister, friend, mentor, and my beloved Auntie, Denise Oliver Velez, or, as I affectionately call her, “Miss Denise.”
And today would have been the 92nd birthday of my favorite author, James Baldwin.
I did, appropriately, get a little bit of a jump on Mr. Jimmy’s birthday in July’s installment of the LGBT Literature series.
I am continuing to read Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work and, of course, it is so much more than an extended essay of film criticism; Baldwin’s thoughts on race, his own life, the theatre, and literature are woven together throughout the piece.
TDFW has always been one of those favorite books of mine that I didn’t talk too much about. On the whole, the book-length essay did not receive good reviews upon its’ original release. In fact, many of the original reviews of Baldwin’s work of the 1970’s until the end of his life speak of his personal bitterness, the decaying of his prose-style, and the speculation that because Baldwin now lived in France, that he had lost touch with the American scene.
As I was preparing my Baldwin post for this past Sunday evening, I ran across Noah Bertlasky’s 2014 article in The Atlantic magazine “The Most Powerful Piece of Film Criticism Ever Written.”
Published in 1976, the piece can’t be categorized. It's a memoir of Baldwin's life watching, or influenced by, or next to cinema. It's a critique of the racial politics of American (and European) film. And it's a work of film theory, with Baldwin illuminating issues of gaze and identification in brief, lucid bursts. The dangerous appeal of cinema, he writes, can be to escape—"surrendering to the corroboration of one's fantasies as they are thrown back from the screen" And "no one,” he acidly adds, “makes his escape personality black."
Not only do I wholeheartedly agree with Bertalsky that quality art and literary criticism is, itself, quality art on it’s own; quality criticism can, at times, elevate the art being criticized by forcing you to see and understand it in a different way.
Bertalsky’s essay also hints at something else: With few exceptions, art and literary criticism in America continues to be overwhelmingly produced by white people, even as America continues to become (to use Pam Spaulding’s phrase) more “browned and seasoned.” One result of the persistent and continuing segregation of races and ethnicities in American society (although things have gotten better) is that, in many cases, we don’t see the same qualities and defects when looking at a work of art (or much of anything else). For that reason alone, James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work continues to become a touchstone for new and later generations of art and literary critics of color. The book will continue to become more popular and read than it was upon its’ initial release.
The text that Baldwin supplied for his 1965 collaborative effort with his old high school classmate, Richard Avedon, Nothing Personal, with his old high school classmate, Richard Avedon, was collected in his 1985 collected essays, The Price of the Ticket. I’ve read the essay, of course; in fact, I remember getting dizzy at that page long sentence of Baldwin’s and his musings on what goes on in the wee hours of the morning.
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I have never seen a copy of Nothing Personal nor do I recall ever having seen any of Avedon’s photographs of Baldwin. Baldwin was one of the most photographed writers of the 20th century; many of them show him smiling and almost all of them show him holding a lit cigarette.
I suppose that reading this morning’s essay by that Head Bobo in Paradise, David Brooks, put me in a mind to look at some of these photographs.
Brooks’ essay on Frederick Douglass (I did not know that Frederick Douglass had written and delivered lectures on photography!) and the intersection of art and politics is a good read that I highly suggest. Still, I do feel that the Head Bobo should be speaking more loudly and forcefully about other matter concerning his choice of political parties, especially as that political party has consistently devalued the importance of the arts and humanities in American public life.
Whatever.
Question: Have you read any of James Baldwin’s books? (if you haven’t then you should. Today!) If so, what literary work by James Baldwin is your own personal favorite?
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette has added six more people to his roster of defendants accused of causing or exacerbating the lead poisoning of Flint's tap water. The charges, which include willful neglect and misconduct in office, are against three current or former employees of Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) and three from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. In a press conference about the charges today (July 29) Schuette said the defendants attempted to cover up the crisis. "These people concealed the truth," Schuette said. "They were criminally wrong to do so. And the victims, well, these are real people. Families who have been lied to by government officials and have been treated as expendable, as if they don't count."
The defendants who remain at the health department are Nancy Peeler and Robert Scott. Their colleague Corinne Miller no longer works for the agency. MDEQ still employs defendants Patrick Cook and Adam Rosenthal. Fellow defendant Liane Shekter-Smith has stopped working for MDEQ.
When asked why Gov. Rick Snyder isn't "being arrested," Schuette responded: "There is no target. We're just going where the truth takes us."
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Zimbabwe is in turmoil. For the past two weeks, workers have been striking and angry citizens have been taking to the streets to express their anger. Foreign Policy: Why A Hashtag Isn’t Enough For A Revolution In Zimbabwe.
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Zimbabwe is in turmoil. For the past two weeks, workers have been striking and angry citizens have been taking to the streets to express their discontent with unpaid public-sector wages, proliferating corruption, declining living standards, and police injustice. President Robert Mugabe’s government is broke, the result of decades of financial mismanagement, and so far it has conspicuously failed in its desperate efforts to find new sources of international financial aid. Failing new support from outside, the country’s economic collapse is almost sure to accelerate.
Many disgruntled citizens — particularly urban young people — have turned to social media, venting their frustration at the 36-year reign of President Mugabe and his patent inability to resuscitate the failing economy. Indeed, the recent protests and work stoppages have been encouraged by social media activists, most prominently Pastor Evan Mawarire, founder of the#ThisFlag movement.
The influential role social media has played underlines the vast spread of internet use in Zimbabwe, primarily on mobile smartphones.
The influential role social media has played underlines the vast spread of internet use in Zimbabwe, primarily on mobile smartphones. It’s a phenomenon reminiscent of the so-called Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, when social media was critical to inspiring and coordinating movements against dictatorship, corruption, poverty, and inequality. Some have even referred to the toppling of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak as the “Facebook Revolution.”
Some Zimbabwean activists, buoyed by their recent successes in mobilizing protests, are already proclaiming the dawn of a social media-assisted revolution. This, in turn, is prompting many pro-democracy commentators and journalists to declare that Mugabe’s rule is in its final days.
These predictions of Mugabe’s imminent downfall are wrong. The reason is quite simple: the angry urban social media activists and pro-democracy pundits have failed to absorb two key lessons of the Arab Spring. The first is that the role of the military in times of civil unrest is pivotal. The second is that social media activism can never substitute for organized political activity on the ground.
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Solar-powered electricity units are removing the need for dangerous kerosene lamps and allowing Africans to stay connected. The Guardian: The Africans buying sunshine with their phones.
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Julie Njeri did not believe her son when he declared he no longer needed spectacles to read his books and complete his homework. She took him to the doctor and was told young Peter Mwangi no longer suffered the sharp irritation and redness in his eyes that had resulted in him being given glasses. Peter’s mum exclaimed: “It’s a miracle!”
The explanation was somewhat more tangible. In late 2013, Julie and her husband bought an M-Kopa solar power kit – something 4,000 east Africans now do every week.
The $200 (£150) device comes with two LED bulbs, an LED flashlight, a rechargeable battery, adaptors for charging phones, and it is all charged by a small solar panel that is propped on the roof. More than 300,000 families in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania who are not connected to the electricity grid have purchased the unit which is linked to the mobile money transfer system M-Pesa.
After paying a deposit of $35 or $25, depending on their M-Pesa credit history, customers are then able to settle the balance through daily mobile phone payments of 50 cents for a year until they own the device outright.
It has brought clean energy to many homes and powers thousands of businesses ranging from small greengrocers in heavily populated low-income settlements to restaurants that can now stay open longer.
More importantly, children like Peter no longer have to use kerosene-powered paraffin lamps to do their studies in dimly lit houses, and their parents enjoy saving the money that was spent on unclean sources of energy.
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Hiring people to fit company culture is one of those things that sounds great in theory when you want to work in a place where everybody gets along and wants the same things.
But there is increasing concern that cultural fit is also used as a lazy excuse for old-fashioned bias in recruitment. Jobseekers may find themselves judged too introverted, too rightwing, too working class, too money-focused, too unattractive, too female or too foreign to fit in.
“Don’t get me started,” groans Steve Shepherd, an employment market analyst and 28-year veteran of the recruitment industry. “The most common excuse about why people didn’t get the job was that they weren’t ‘the right fit’ and that is often a code for ‘they weren’t somebody like me’,” he says. People tend to hire in their own image and, in such cases, their workplaces are full of people who look and behave like their managers.
Some employers even have separate interviews to determine cultural fit, asking questions to determine whether an applicant’s past behaviour fits with “the way we do things around here”. They may also use psychometric testing to find out whether someone’s personality type will suit the team.
Those employers know poor cultural fit (working in an organisation that doesn’t suit you or with people you can’t identify with) can damage productivity. And if the job doesn’t work out and someone leaves, it can cost between 50% and 60% of that person’s salary to replace them, according to the Society for Human Resource Management.
But where does this harmonious workplace leave diversity? Rae Cooper, an associate professor in work and organisational studies at the University of Sydney business school, says employing only people who fit together nicely doesn’t necessarily make a great company.
“It is those organisations that have very different types of people that are the organisations which tend to have very vibrant cultures, which are more innovative and where people feel a greater capacity to speak and feel safe, and feel acknowledged in their work,” she says.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Light and Shadow dance a summer waltz, spinning in a thermal haze. After many afternoons, the bandstand conducts an afternoon of the mathematics of the Bolero, as Light and Shadow stamp their heels in a hard calculus of syncopated time. Hot winds blow and dust devils scour the parkland. A ballet of swans glide on the lake, and a cosmic buzz vibrates among the dying leaves.
All summer connotations fill this light,
a symmetry of different scales—the site
of fibrous silence, the velvet lace
of iris, alders the moon can ignite.
One feels the amplitude of grief, the pace
of oscillating stars, power in place
where time has crossed and left a breathy stain.
A body needs the weight and thrust of grace.
I want to parse the logic, spin and domain,
the structure mourning will allow, the grain
of certainty in two estates, the dance
of perfect order, flowing toward its plane.
That bird you see has caught a proper stance,
unfaithful to its measure, a pert mischance
of divination on the move, the trace
of sacred darkness true to light's advance.
— Jay Wright
“Light's Interrupted Amplitude”
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY’S PORCH