Cuba's Long Black Spring

If you don't know them, change that today: Citizens for the Protection of Journalists, a professional organization and non-profit I joined almost a year ago when I first came across one of their reports on human rights abuses.

Today's focus at their monthly luncheon was on Cuba's policy on independent journalists. In March 2003, the government went after and arrested 75 dissidents, 29 of whom were journalists, and 20 of whom remain behind bars in sub-human conditions five years later.

While the Spanish government has worked to release many of them, the American government remains mostly silent on the topic. While it is better to get them released, the speakers at today's luncheon suggested that neither the Spanish policy of engagement with Cuba (which on the one hand encourages Cuba's employment of dissidents as human bargaining chips) nor America's economic embargo serves as a model response to Cuba's human rights violations.

For more details on what CPJ has uncovered and recommends, see their report, Cuba's Long Black Spring, available on their website, at CPJ.org.

An Evening with Akram Zaatari

Akram Zaatari was an adolescent, a teenager, a bored observer of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Or so he tells us on March 17th as we gather at a theater of the Museum of Modern Art for the US premiere of his latest documentary.

Excavating his journals, audio recordings (on audio cassettes), photos and knickknacks of that time, Zaatari (born in 1966 in Saida, Lebanon) desires to see with the eyes of other men, his peers in age and nationality, who experienced the occupation differently. On this night, we were treated to excerpts of four of the more than thirty films in Zaatari's oeuvre: All Is Well on the Border (1997), This Day (2003), In This House (2005) and Nature Morte (2008).

An anthropologist of sorts, Zaatari literally unearths the story of one of his peers, Ali Hashishu, now a foreign correspondent with Agence France Presse, who served in the resistance army; his communist ties and experience on the front continue to serve him in his role as journalist. "Following the Israeli withdrawal from Ain el Mir in 1985, the village became the frontline. The Dagher family was displaced from their home, which was occupied by a radical resistant group for seven years. When the war ended in 1991, Ali Hashisho, a member of the Lebanese resistance stationed in the Dagher family house, wrote a letter to the Dagher's family justifying his occupation of their house, and welcoming them back home. He placed the letter inside an empty case of a B-10, 82 mm mortar, and buried it in the garden." In November 2002, Akram Zaatari headed to Ain el Mir to excavate Ali's letter and outsprang the film, In This House.

In another film, Neruda (a nickname given to him by another soldier because of his romantic and poetic sensibility) learned how to dismantle an AK47 at the age of ten. Once he could successfully make his target in seven of ten shots, he was promoted to RPGs at the age of 13. By 16, Neruda was caught during a bombing mission and held in detention-pseudo-jail by the Israeli army until he could legally be tried and imprisoned at 18. Neruda spent ten years in captivity. His story, shared primarily through the letters he exchanged with his devoted mother, and through interviews Zaatari held with other Lebanese prisoners in Israel, provide the context of the film, All is Well on the Border, completed in 1997.

In the artist's desire to relate his peers' experience of the invasion, Zaatari, the founder of the Arab Image Foundation, comes to understand that, "the story of resistances is really tied to mediation." In the attempt to tell a story of in-betweens, of ambiguity, of individuality, forces weigh against the storyteller leaving binaries of victim and victimizer, soldier and civilian, good and bad. Zaatari strives to get beyond these dualities, but feels hampered at every turn, with the characters in his stories, the audience, the government, all pushing toward black and white understandings and oversimplifications.

In the fourth film excerpted at MOMA, Nature Morte is a self-described, "poetic document that is not a fiction, but not documentary either." Commissioned by the Centre Georges Pomipidou in France, the film excerpt we see at MOMA is bare bones: no dialogue, one room, two characters who interact by mostly not interacting.

An older man wears a black nit cap, his dark eyebrows offset by a graying beard and few days' beard growth. Working under a kerosene lamp he hunches over a table low to the ground, where he is sitting and methodically assembling an explosive device. Behind him a younger man dresses in winter outer clothing, also seated, silent and methodical. He concentrates on sewing - mending a torn clothing article. He wears muted colors of army green with dark mustache and beard against a white-washed wall. After a number of minutes of this silent preparation, the older man loads a gun, the two stand facing each other, silent, inches apart. Who will go? Both? I assume the younger...isn't it always the young that we send to fight our wars? We break to the outside, flash from one man to the other, still unsure who will leave. And one finally does begin to climb up the hillside bordered by a low rock wall as birds chirp in the wintry low light heralding the almost-dawn of spring.

Zaatari's exploration of war, of objects, of experience over the decades appears to herald the dawn of spring, as well - both for him and for the world in the grip of wars worldwide.

From the MOMA catalogue:
An Evening with Akram Zaatari
Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari interweaves documentary and personal narrative to examine the complicated social, political, and cultural issues of a country shaped by extended territorial conflict. His videos and installations speak of the contradictions of everyday life within regions of conflict further fragmented by media. Al Yaoum (This Day) chronicles thirty years of Lebanon, and in How I Love You, five Lebanese men speak about their passions and relationships. Presented in conjunction with Asian Contemporary Art Week. 90min. Monday, March 17, 7:00pm.

Death and Life in Jersey City

The calling cards, homemade organic whole wheat fig bars and the journey to and from are some of the most memorable parts of last night.

Melissa McAlpin’s little brown envelopes with a replica in miniature of one of her hand-drawn images tucked inside hint at the sweet sadness of her sister's story. The lovely round coaster printed with a lemon so yellow it makes me pucker just looking at it, once flipped over reveals Amanda Thackray’s work described in an ancient yet futuristic language, the piece signed and numbered; a work of art in itself – printed at Sesame Letterpress in Brooklyn. And my friend, Maya Joseph-Goteiner’s modern interpretation of an almost obsolete item: the paper library catalog card, printed on heavy water-color board in courier font as though hand-typed on the Corona in her installation on war in literature.

These give-aways accompany the artwork at last night’s opening of WWIII: A Wonder Women Project presented by _gaia and hosted by the Mana Fine Arts Exhibition Space* in Jersey City, NJ. Calling-card art in miniature, and yours for the taking, now through April 12th.

The whitewashed cinderblock walls and gray cement floor of the gallery seemed perfectly fitting to both the neighborhood immediately outside the large steel doors as well as to the theme of the show, which examines the artists’ understanding of and relationship to war. Ten women were chosen to participate in a residency at _gaia in Hoboken. Over the course of six-weeks, they talked, wrote, shared and executed creative projects related to the theme of war. This collection, organized and curated by Joanna White (whom I know from my time at ICP) and Doris Cacoilo, shows the inconsistency of its participants - for some, it seems to be a summary of an experience, for others a work in progress.

My journey to the show begins at the World Trade Center site NJ PATH terminal in lower Manhattan, an appropriate jumping-off point given that for so many in America, the war most affecting our lives exploded here on this soil. For me, the Iraq War started in the White House, with our dependence upon oil, and with our arming of Saddam Hussein decades ago when the US government assisted in hoisting him to power before toppling him after 9/11. Political beliefs notwithstanding, I experience the symbolic depth of this place that when peering down into the p;it it feels as though I am looking half a mile into the core of the earth and into what has gone wrong in our world.

The bright white taut canvas canopy and swaying flags herald the entrance to the terminal, in contrast with the basement-like station at the bottom of the escalators. Cement, leaking pipes and an abundance of harsh fluorescent lighting overhead and on booms could confuse a visitor into believing they've walked into movie sound set where an interrogation scene is about to take place. Surrounded by chain-linked fencing and views of the monstrously large excavation of what was once skyscrapers foreshadow the war-zone to come in Jersey. Like the gallery, the WTC PATH terminal feels clean but harsh – like an emergency room operating out of a mammoth garage. Cold, intense, sterile -- but not in the sense that when you drop your brie and grapes on the floor, as I will later do at the gallery, you would still want to eat them, unless you’re in the midst of a war zone and some food off the floor is the least of your worries.

After a less than 10-minute train ride, I exit at Grove Street in Jersey and am greeted by a moist-wind-swept plaza (it’s only a short distance to the shore with rear-facing views of the Statue of Liberty). Using the Dunkin-Donuts as a marker, I am told to go left down its street, which is Newark Avenue. Starbucks is opening on the plaza as well: a sign that Jersey City has either arrived or has gone to hell, depending whom you talk to.

Turning right onto Coles, walking through a neighborhood that seems to change with each of the twelve blocks I walk, a mix of rundown and renovated, single family clapboard and elegant brownstones, divey bars and more upscale restaurants, clearly a neighborhood in the process of the big bad word: gentrification. Just as Coles seems to Dead End, a handwritten sign beckons the traveler through a construction site under an overpass that ushers autos in and out of the City via the Lincoln Tunnel. Oh, so this is where we are. I’ve seen this neighborhood from a car window thinking it looked like it was either decaying or just being built. Now that I’m on the ground, walking through broken pavement, mounds of dirt, around piles of beams in the almost opaque darkness of evening, I realize that both observations are true: Jersey City is dying one death and coming to new life simultaneously. In that way, gentrification could be thought of like Easter for a neighborhood. Hmmm. If only we could all believe in its promises of development as resurrection. Starbucks doesn’t feel good in my own neighborhood of Jackson Heights, which just this morning I noticed has opened in amidst the bodegas and Colombian, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, El Salvadoran and Italian restaurants. But, I digress.

Following more hand-written signs “this way, don’t be scared!” illuminated by the blue light of my mobile phone, I stumble over one last bit of debris (or was that the start of a sidewalk?) into the exhibition space. It’s large enough to comfortably hold the ten installations as well as at least one hundred people without feeling cramped or hot. There’s none of that standing on tiptoes or brushing past and subtly nudging others to get closer to a display card to read what the work is about. And this is one of those shows where you want to read what the artist intends if, like me, you like to know those sorts of things. I’ll take a first impression, stand back (which there was also room to do) get up close, think about it, feel it, but, ultimately I don’t want to walk away scratching my head, which would have been the case with a number of these less-than-straightforward pieces.

Take the lemon-coaster woman’s work, as example. Amanda Thackray set-up plywood boards with a tree’s worth of lemons attached by electrical wire that then connects to a pulley running though a yellow-painted bicycle suspended from the ceiling and from which hangs a cinder block over a plate with more lemons. Next to the plate of lemons, on a table lined with a delicately embroidered cloth and above which hangs more old school looking needle-point works of lemons as though you've just entered your grandmother’s kitchen in Europe, limoncello-spiked lemonade is being served out of a glass decanter. Huh? I don’t get it. After reading Thackray’s statement – the one in English, not the one in Esperanto, the constructed “universal language” meant to foster peace and understanding across cultures – I understand that her intention is for me to consider the power of the lemon: its acidity can, in this fantastic creation, manufacture sufficient power to crush other lemons so that I can drink the lemon nectar. Come the apocalypse, lemons can kill themselves to nourish me. Oh, okay. I get it now. I think.

Another artist hung a traditional wood medicine cabinet on the wall and on the rung below an army-green hand towel that reads “look inside.” Swinging the door open, which is lined on the inside with a mirror, shows a video projection of a green hill, the number 3009 on a large sign and row upon row of white crosses. Above the video stands a shelf filled with prescription pill bottles, face creams and toiletries. The common, everyday items we see and use juxtaposed with the death of soldiers that has become all too-common in our lives and the lives of people around the world. On the day in January when the film was shot in Lafayette, CA, 3009 Americans had lost their lives in Iraq. Today on public radio I heard that as we approach the five-year anniversary of this war we’ve lost over 3,700 American lives and anywhere from 40,000 to 100.000 Iraqis.

The exhibition also includes a video accompanied by sand spread on the floor (I didn’t read the description on that one…), portraits of Protestant and Catholic women organizing for peace in Northern Island accompanied by the artist’s journal of the same; a discombobulated map hand drawn and mis-assembled; homage to the water crisis fueled, in part, by the unnecessary dependence in first world countries on plastic bottled water, 1/5th of which does not get recycled; a wedding dress fashioned out of 400 used dryer sheets; and a woman promoting a candidate for the presidency who doesn’t exist except in her imagination. Or, at least, I think that’s her shtick. I have to admit, I’m already so sick of the presidential campaign that I couldn’t bring myself to get close enough to her table of leaflets and buttons and “Die Harder,” a play on the Bruce Willis movie, posters to really understand. Fortunately, the food table beckoned only a few steps away so I bee-lined in that direction.

One of the more impressive, elegant yet profound works is Melissa McCalpin’s Phone Call, in which she relates the story of how her sister, a marine serving in Iraq, lost a close friend when his helicopter was shot down. In a quilt of three-dimensional boxes on the wall laid out in a 9 by 4 grid, McCalpin succinctly tells her sister’s story in word and drawing. Each group of sentences is framed and flush with the wall; on either side, the accompanying squares further frame the sentences raised just an inch or so from the wall. Pinned only at the top, McCalpin's transparent tracing paper sketches flutter as if a feather falling from the sky – or a man rappelling from a helicopter. She has carefully tinted the drawings wiithin a palette of perhaps three colors. McCalpin is, perhaps, making order out of the chaos of her sister’s experience, juxtaposing the solidity of the facts of the story, "In scarves and hats they mingle learning how to smoke cigarettes" with the tragic whimsy of the illustrated details like the image of the soldier's arms or the naive teenager's boom box - a young man who today plays Man on the street corner and could be recruited a year or two from now to serve and die on the streets of Baghdad. The work provides a powerful juxtaposition both in content and mood.

My dear friend, Maya Joseph-Goteiner, prepared a room whose walls are books with war in their title, perhaps two hundred of the more than 20,000 titles ever published in English. You will find the classics like Tolstoy's War and Peace as well as little known titles translated from other languages at the turn of the 20th Century. War Library is lit by brass lamps that remind me of the New York Public Library, with over-sized and plush green pillows for sitting in the center, Joseph-Goteiner invites us into the space to reflect in silence or in discussion on our understanding of war. Stacks of blank manila card catologue index cards call for reflection; clothespins hang longingly on invisible wire suspended from the ceiling, waiting for cards to fill in as wall paper and, as the wires are decorated with cards, the library’s walls increase in height.

Nine o’clock arrives quickly, and the host switches the lights on and off to signal that opening night is coming to a close. Eight friends head out into the soft drizzle to brave the war zone underpass as a battalion looking for a dry, warm place and a cold beer. After a quick stop at Maya and Mike’s apartment on fourth, we slip past a few drunk, heavyset men into one of those dive bars just blocks from where Starbucks is due to open. After paprika fries and Guinness, shouting over and singing with Ozzie, Thoroughgood and AC/DC blasting from the juke box, I feel resurrected and grateful to be able to push thoughts of war to the back of my psyche for another night.


* Artist Talk and Closing– April 12th 4-9pm
Gallery Hours M-F 10-6 pm or by appointment
Mana Fine Arts Exhibition Space, 227 Coles Street, Jersey City, NJ 07310 (800) 330-9659White

King Arthur - Surely You Jest?

Tattered point shoes, cardigan paired with a long blue tulle tutu; metal folding chairs, ladders, a refrigerator and a man inside covered in fake frost. "King Arthur is not a dance, it's a show," director and choreographer Mark Morris boasts in the notes to his dramatick-opera, King Arthur.

The original version, with music by Henry Purcell and text by John Dryden, when first performed in 1691 at the Queen’s Theater, Dorset Garden, London ran about four hours. Morris' version weighs in at just under two.

While the semi-opera has never had a "traditional" interpretation, Morris' version takes it to its outermost examination. This Baroque-contemporary updating jettisons the spoken text - all of it - substituting the movement of Mark Morris' dance group for words, accompaned by seven solo New York City Opera singers flowing in and out of the troupe.

The humorous and joyful result is almost vaudevillian, a let's make a play and dress-up revel that on the one hand is campy and fantatic and on the other at times left me with my head tilted to the side saying, "huh?" While many scenes rocked and popped with pleasure, others were equally tiresome, the artifice distracting rather than entertaining.

If you take opera or dance seriously, the good-times of Morris' performance at Lincoln Center may provide less formality than what you care for. Yet even those dressed in ball gowns were caught smiling and laughing during the glorious final scene that included a Chinese-ribboned maypole dance and paper airplanes being tossed overhead.

"I couldn't have real airplanes," Morris bemoaned in the theatre notes. "I didn't have any money to hire the Blue Angels for a giant festival with a flyover." Perhaps not, but his
jovial production still manages to soar and delight.

Improvising with McCoy Tyner and Savion Glover: Bring it On!

At times whimsical, alive, thoughtful, competitive, paternal and prayerful, tonight's performance by the McCoy Tyner Trio and Savion Glover at Peekskill's historic Paramount Center for the Arts* sent me spinning and dancing.

The audience leapt from our seats begging for an encore (which was granted). Rarely have I heard four musicians more connected with each other or so enjoying making music together. Never before have I heard a man's feet become an instrument quite like Glover's did tonight.

The floorboards and the keyboards were ablaze with the blues of Tyner's West Phillie upbringing, the jazz of Coltrane and Savion's Newark funk-i-fied feet. As a wannabe disciple of the church of John Coltrane, I know the Spirit moving when I see, hear and feel it.

Glover's sheer joy shone through his almost ever-present smile, poured out of his lanky, agile, ever-moving frame as he tapped on his toes, his heels, the sides of his shoes, sliding, stepping, shuffling across the stage on risers just inches above the other guys. Dreads tossed into a loose bunch on the lower part of his head, a few raucous strands jutting out in various directions, dancing along with his skinny legs and gangly fingers, Glover played his feet like a second percussionist to drummer Eric Kamau Gravatt.

Most of the night he faced Tyner who was stage right, like a son looking to his father for direction, for acceptance, for partnership. Occasionally Tyner glanced up from the keyboard, all the while tappin' his left heel on the floor while his right toes pressed the pads of the Steinway, and a satisfied smile would cross his face immediately reinvigorating Glover like a child who's parent had just given him a "nice dive, son" and thumbs up poolside. As the musicians took turns soloing, Glover would begin to hear the subtle shift either to his left and engage the drummer, or behind, and engage bassist Gerald Cannon. No matter the musician, Glover's feet could accompany.

The 30-something year-old woman beside me, who has been taking tap classes for many years including recently studying with a student of Savion's, remarked that it's not just his speed that is impressive, or that he never stops moving. It is the clarity of each and every ba bah BAH bah BAH swish, ba bah bah BAH of metal on wood like the precision of a violinist's fingers on strings or a skater's double somersault landing on ice. There is nothing more impressive or inspiring than that kind of precision, especially when offered with such joy, such elegance and such apparent ease.

In the second to last piece, Glover and the drummer took center stage entering into a duel of cymbals depending on what they struck and how they landed. Their boxing match of music entailed one taking lead and the next responding - and then taking it one step further. After a good few minutes and a few subtle, then less subtle key strokes, the almost-70-year old Pappa Tyner would reign in his fighters to harness their abundant energy into a cohesive ensemble again. As Turner pulled the posse together, Glover would tap and turn himself unconsciously back toward the father. Okay, we're all here now. We know who's in charge. And the call and response would begin anew.

In the finale before we called Encore!, Glover had been wiping the sweat from his brow with a white towel when the music consumed him and next thing he was dancing with the towel in his hand. Where his hands had been loose and free all night, now one clenched the towel and the other became fisted with one finger pointing. As his hands shifted, so too his legs and arms; what had seemed to be constantly flexing and lengthening had now become stiff like a new skier on a steep slope. What had flown freely like his baggy pants and t-shirt became rigid with anticipation. His tap tap tap became STOMP STOMP STOMP and his smile disappeared as a look of squinted concentration consumed his face, a face now turned upward as if his whole body were saying Bring it On, YES YES YES. Or maybe it was Amen! or who knows where he was going but he was flying and we were flying with him. We came out the other side, drained and thrilled and on our feet, but falling over with pleasure.

It's nights like tonight that I am reminded we each have something we are meant to be doing. What a ride. Thanks, guys.


*From the Paramount Theater press release:
Grammy Award winning jazz pianist McCoy Tyner performs a groundbreaking evening of music and dance with the critically acclaimed, world renowned tap dancer Savion Glover. Tyner's blues-based, percussive piano playing (formulated while a key member of John Coltrane's legendary quartet) has transcended conventional styles to become one of the most identifiable sounds in improvised music. Glover's phenomenal tap repertoire first exploded on the scene with the award winning Broadway show, Bring in Da Noise, Bring in Da Funk. Since that time, he has amazed audiences through appearances in film (including his tapping in the animated film Happy Feet), other plays, and touring performances with his own group.