Remembering writer and activist Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)

The great American writer Amiri Baraka died this past January. I have been looking at a lot of material online and thank goodness there is a lot! Baraka was an immensely significant figure in manifold ways: music historian, Beat colleague and publisher, poet, Black Nationalist, Communist, activist, founding member of the Black Arts Movement, and incisive critic and speaker. Despite this (and to a degree because of this) he hasn't always been recognized as widely, because of his allegiance to "subversive" ideas and challenging notions. Baraka's writings are vivid and lively on the page and they will stand, but he was an engaging persona as an interviewee, lecturer, performer so I thought I would collect some links. Democracy Now held an informative panel discussion on Baraka's legacy; and the Hammer Museum hosted a lively conversation between Baraka and his daughter the art historian and curator Kellie Jones; some other interesting talks include a 2011 lecture at the University of Virginia; and a 2008 reading/discussion at the University of Minnesota. He read his poetry on HBO's Def Poetry Jam and heaps of vintage audio on MP3 is posted on ubuweb: sound. Just a start....

Nicholson Baker's "Traveling Sprinkler"

I've just finished reading (and skimming) NIcholson Baker's most recent novel "Traveling Sprinkler". Baker is an amazing, if at times frustrating, prose stylist and bleeds immensely complicated prose from the tired body of everyday existence. This has been the nature of many of his books, which tend, however eclectic in their topical pursuits, to involve detailed monologues, innovative wordplay, and enthralling gamesmanship. I picked up his latest as I am keenly interested in Baker's writing, if I only read it sporadically, rather than addictively. In addition this book is a sequel to a fascinating comic novel called "The Anthologist" which gained considerable critical attention a couple of years ago. In that book, a narrator named Paul Chowder (not unlike Baker himself) is a middle-aged writer who spends much time ruminating upon how poetry works, its history, and how to compile a poetry anthology. Chowder is clearly a lot more bungling and less renowned than the author, but it's probably owing to the fact that Baker empathizes so closely with Chowder as an alter-ego that the book really resonates so strongly. However "Traveling Sprinkler" is less focused, and as with most "sequels" pales a bit if compared to "The Anthologist." But maybe i'm a bit taken with Mr. Chowder whose chosen mundane pursuits include: composing (bad) pop music and taking up cigars (both) at a relatively advanced age, worrying over US foreign policy and writing crap lyrics about it, caring from a distance for his ex-partner, and wondering when to speak up at Quaker meeting. Chowder is often boring and silly, self-centered yet kind, yet eminently human. A modest and potentially highly enjoyable book if you are up for a meandering monologue rather than a plot filled feast. You can watch a brief interview of Baker from the Los Angeles Review of Books here.

René Ricard (1946-2014) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014)

I certainly wasn’t intending to give the impression that I’m writing an “obituaries blog” but some very important artistic figures have died recently, and in the cases of Ricard and Hoffman, although I never met either personally, both took up a huge amount of space in my cultural imagination. Of the two, Hoffman would need little introduction for anyone remotely familiar with the last couple of decades of Hollywood cinema, and he is already being proclaimed as “greatest actor of his generation.” Such superlatives are meaningless, especially now, but I would agree with that assessment. I spent many hours wading through almost every movie he made over the years, even if awful, just considering that his mere involvement would likely make it worth my time. Ricard was far less known in the wider circles of popular culture but an integral figure in the New York art world as a critic and poet, and in more recent years as a painter who inscribed poetic phrases onto his canvases. His 1981 essay “The Radiant Child” is one of the most memorable pieces on artists Keith Haring and Jean Michel-Basquiat. I had the fortunate opportunity to write on Ricard for a catalogue of a 2005 exhibition entitled Sad Songs curated by artist Bill Conger and wrote: “These recent paintings are inscribed with breathless anecdotes, as if Haikus hastily scrawled in lipstick onto a bathroom mirror. While artists today are frequently at odds with painting, Ricard offers paintings at odds with themselves, as if deciding whether to be texts, images, or from a distance appealingly bright, monochromatic ciphers. … The poet has always been brutally confessional in his writings, but this approach is often leavened with an unlikely degree of tenderness. Ricard is often abrasive yet the confirmed aesthete.” Given the wild circles that Ricard travelled with over the years—Warhol’s Factory and the East Village Scene—his death of cancer at the age of 67 effectively means he outlived so many of his contemporaries, while Hoffman, purportedly dead of a drug overdose, at the age of 46 has died prematurely, terribly, and avoidably. Read Ricard’s writings, watch Hoffman’s filmography. Both are revelatory.