Josephine Baker – Kees van Dongen, 1925
I saw her a year before she died. She was greeting people at the Rainbow Sign in Berkeley, California. Ntozake Shange, a poet and playwright, coaxed me into the receiving line because I was shy. And when it came my turn I presented her with a copy of [Mumbo Jumbo,] the novel on whose cover I had used an old photo of her to represent two sides of the Vodoun goddess Erzulie. And she flashed that famous smile and squinted those famous eyes and she said, ‘Do you know the young man who wrote this book?’ I was so awestruck, I said, ‘Yes, ma’am, I knows him,’ forgetting that that young man was me. That was Josephine Baker. Such a divine presence she made you forget yourself.
– Ishmael Reed in the New York Times Book Review, December 12, 1976
Posted in Art, Humor, Lit, Movies, Music, Non-Fiction | Tagged Dancin' Dames, Ishmael Reed, Josephine Baker, Kees van Dongen, Mumbo Jumbo | Leave a Comment »
Ominous – Nicholas Roerich, 1901
I think prophecy is an important part of writing, at least as important as technique or form. I think there are magical processes going on in writing. Like this raven thing. I’d been writing using the raven myth, and when I went up to Sitka in Alaska, the ravens disappeared. It was very unusual. Then the day before I left they all returned and flew around the totems. It was a strange experience.
Ishmael Reed, in an interview with Jon Ewing for The Daily Californian, 1977
(from Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, 1978)
Posted in Art, Language, Lit, Music, Non-Fiction, Psych | Tagged Ishmael Reed, Jon Ewing, Magick, Mythology, Nicholas Roerich, Ravens, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, Vodoun | Leave a Comment »
The Leper – Rembrandt, 1631
I had tried to be fair. It is the one single thing no one will forgive you for, neither the communists nor the fascists, the rightists nor the leftists, the white racists nor the black racists… One will make more enemies by trying to be fair (marked by impartiality and honesty) than trying to tell the truth– no one believes it is possible to tell the truth anyway– but it is just possible that you might be fair.
Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt
(quoted in Ishmael Reed’s essay “Chester Himes: Writer”)
Posted in Absurdity, Art, Humor, Lit, Music | Tagged Billie Joe Armstrong, Chester Himes, Fairness, Go-Gos, Ishmael Reed, Rembrandt, The Leper, The Quality of Hurt, Truth, Unforgiven | Leave a Comment »
April 24, 2015 by Joseph P. O'Brien
A Stroke of Luck – Rene Magritte, 1948
‘If you know a man is wrong, I mean, if you know he did somethin’ bad but you don’t turn him in to the law because he’s your friend, do you think that’s right?
‘All you got is your friends, Easy.’
‘But then what if you know somebody else who did something wrong but not so bad as the first man, but you turn this other guy in?’
‘I guess you figure that that other guy got ahold of some bad luck.’
We laughed for a long time.
Walter Mosley, Devil In a Blue Dress
Posted in Art, Horror, Humor, Lit, Music | Tagged Bad Luck Blues, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Devil in a Blue Dress, Luck, Rene Magritte, Stroke of Luck, Walter Mosley | Leave a Comment »
February 19, 2015 by Joseph P. O'Brien
This here’s a paperback anthology of the first four issues of the zine I’ve been editing, but I guess it was less “editing” than it was “picking very cool pieces of literature and arranging in them in a way that would flow like a kick-ass double-album, like ‘London Calling’ or ‘The White Album.'”
There’s something in here for everyone– horror, humor, romance, sci-fi, western, crime, fairy tale, fantasy, memoir, poetry. But by “something for everyone” I don’t mean middle-of-the-road; most of these pieces are very much to the side of the road, and some are even off the road entirely, having skidded through a ditch and crashed into a tree at the edge of a dark forest. (I mean that in the best possible way.) And it’s now on sale for $18 US.
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January 19, 2015 by Joseph P. O'Brien
[mild, vague spoilers]
If Superhero Movies are our new mythology, Birdman makes our new mythology feel like crumbly newsprint and warped videotape. Not that Birdman will or should render Superhero Movies obsolete or anything. I still like, and still expect to enjoy, Superhero Movies. But Birdman reaches certain levels of truth, buried deep in the middle of an inescapable labyrinth, that might make it impossible for me to see our new mythology Superhero Movies the same from now on (at least until a movie comes along that can out-Birdman Birdman).
Things like “universal themes” and “timeless stories” are great, but I know now that I need more blood, more super-realism. Larger Than Life with more Life. If Superhero Movies are Led Zeppelin, Birdman is punk rock.
Darren Aronofsky dabbled in this kind of mythology with The Wrestler and Black Swan (before he got all Biblical with Noah). But where those two films hurtle towards death, Alejandro González Iñárritu & his co-writers wallop Aronofsky’s artistic defeatism with an optimism that’s more transcendent than anything I’ve experienced with a Superman story. Icarus need not be a tragic figure. There’s a Birdman in all of us.
Posted in Art, Fictional Non-Fiction, Movies, Psych | Tagged Alejandro González Iñárritu, Birdman, Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky, Edward Norton, Emma Stone, Icarus, Michael Keaton, Mythology, Superheroes, Superman, The Wrestler, Zach Galifianakis | Leave a Comment »
January 16, 2015 by Joseph P. O'Brien
Kneeling breast feeding mother – Paula Modersohn-Becker, date unknown
When the breast withers away to a vanishing point, other oral and maternal values are also drying up and atrophying; when the breast spouts forth again, these values are also returning.
By no accident, the most admired poem among American intellectuals in the 1920s was T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; although actually dealing with his adopted country, England, his symbols spoke very eloquently to American sensibilities also. The withdrawal of the breast is suggested in Eliot’s images of wandering in the desert, of thirst, of the failed crops in the land rules by an impotent king, of sterility in general. The most famous of Eliot’s images– e.g., “lilacs out of dead land,” “The Hanged Man,” “the Unreal City,” “the corpse you planted last year in your garden,” “rock and no water and the sandy road”– all revolve around the theme of life struggling to survive without nourishment. The final section, in the mountains (breast symbols, according to Freud), brings the promise of rain and renewal. If all poets seek to summon the mother goddess in her guise as Muse, Eliot in a very real sense is calling for her to appear as wet nurse.
Robert Anton Wilson, Ishtar Rising
Posted in Art, Language, Lit, Verse | Tagged Fiona Shaw, Ishtar Rising, Kneeling breast feeding mother, Mythology, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Robert Anton Wilson, The Waste Land, TS Eliot | Leave a Comment »
January 13, 2015 by Joseph P. O'Brien
Snakes – M.C. Escher, 1969
…consider a final parable, which comes from Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice and is said by him to contain the whole secret of practical occultism:
Two passengers are sharing a railway carriage. One notices that the other has a box with holes in it, of the sort used to transport animals, and asks what animal his companion is carrying. “A mongoose,” says the other. The first passenger naturally asks why this eccentric chap want[s] to transport a mongoose around England.
“It’s because of my brother,” says the second man. “You see, he drinks perhaps more than is good for him, and sometimes he sees snakes. The mongoose is [to] kill the snakes.”
“But those are bleeding imaginary snakes,” says the first man.
“That’s as may be,” says the other placidly. “But this is an imaginary mongoose.”
Robert Anton Wilson, Ishtar Rising
Posted in Absurdity, Art, Horror, Humor, Language, Lit, Music, Psych | Tagged Aleister Crowley, Cobra Vs Mongoose, Ishtar Rising, Magick in Theory and Practice, MC Escher, mongooses, Robert Anton Wilson, Shonen Knife, Snakes, Truth | Leave a Comment »
January 12, 2015 by Joseph P. O'Brien
Fake Picasso?
An art dealer once went to Picasso and said, “I have a bunch of ‘Picasso’ canvasses that I was thinking of buying. Would you look them over and tell me which are real and which are forgeries?” Picasso obligingly began sorting the paintings into two piles. Then, as the Great Man added one particular picture to the fake pile, the dealer cried, “Wait a minute, Pablo. That’s no forgery. I was visiting the weekend you painted it.” Picasso replied imperturbably, “No matter. I can fake a Picasso as well as any thief in Europe.”
Robert Anton Wilson, Ishtar Rising
Posted in Absurdity, Art, Fictional Non-Fiction, Humor, Language, Lit, Music, Psych, TV | Tagged Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty, Golden Girls, Ishtar Rising, Pablo Picasso, Robert Anton Wilson, Truth | Leave a Comment »
January 10, 2015 by Joseph P. O'Brien
Oh, future! – Nicholas Roerich, 1933
This book has a lot to say about Ancient Greek perspectives and their meaning but there is one perspective it misses. That is their view of time. They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.
When you think about it, that’s a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Posted in Art, Language, Lit, Music, Psych | Tagged Dr Frank, Mr T Experience, Nicholas Roerich, Oh future!, Robert Pirsig, The Future Ain't What It Used To Be, Time, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance | Leave a Comment »
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