Carnival Badu

Last night I saw Erykah Badu in a free concert at Wingate Field, in East Flatbush, Brooklyn.

Showtime was 7:30, but my friend Justin and I arrived to line-up around a quarter to 4. Overkill perhaps. But soon after we arrived, the lines — security insisted on keeping two separate lines for men and women, oddly– snaked around the block. We brought chairs and food; my Spelt Sushi caused a small frisson of interest. (Effete!) The guards opened the field a little before 7, and after we found our seats — great ones, 10th row center — the line continued for an hour and forty-five minutes, during which we we endured Brooklyn President Marty Markovitz’s borough-proud patter — charming, really — a blessing by a pastor, and some dead air. A small price to pay.

Between 8:30 and 9, Ms. Badu’s band made their way to the stage, and after an overture of Lil Wayne’s “Milli,” the diva herself came out wearing a fantastic grey jersey jumpsuit (Halston updated, which is to say, reminiscent of Tom Ford design’s for Gucci, ca. 1996), backless and slit down to her belly-button. Accessories: great stilettos, her signature supernova afro, some red bakelite-looking rings, and a stripe of fuchsia make-up around the eyes. She ditched the eccentric Annie get-up of her Madison Square Garden show for a sexy bitch persona, complete with Naomi Campbell/Diana Ross posing — squatting down around the microphone with her back arched, ass out, head lifted to catch the light. Her vanity a ironic drag wrapped around a core of commanding need (”Worship me! Love me”).

I wish I had taken notes on the set list. Badu began with a few numbers from New Amerykah (”The Healer,” “Me”), connected by some intriguing Afro-beat and then Sunni-sounding outros (”What’s that shit, Erykah?” mused one audience member). Then she took it “back, waaaay back,” with numbers of Baduism, like “On and On,” and “Other Side of the Game.” I’m less interested in this material, but she turned these songs into unsurpassable vehicles of vocal expression and star power. No phoning it in. “That was worth the wait.” Agreed.

I want to write a longer review of the show — there are almost too many highlights to name (though not enough from New Amerykah). I also want to talk more about how Badu’s late-act manifesto on politics and anti-authoritarianism (”power to the people”) rubs up against and abrades — OK, let’s just be direct and say contradicts — her own magnetic draw as a star. (Cf. Susan Sontag’s “Fascinating Fascism.”) Until I have time to work up a thesis, this anecdote on divinity — the celebrity-artist as demi-god, who arouses and harnesses the desires of the crowd — will have to stand in.

During Badu’s last number, “Bag Lady,” she descended from the stage and ran the gauntlet up and down the middle aisle as a frenzy of arms and voices sought her attention. About 3 feet away from me, a couple of men got grabby and had to be disentangled by security officers. My body pressed against he barricades as the audience swelled behind me. Things got ugly, and I worried the show was over. But then Badu was free, and kept walking until she was right in line with me.

At first I didn’t register — the invisible man, the only whitey, fag whitey at that, who came close enough to the black goddess to genuflect. But she finally met my eyes (I had taken off my glasses) and she seemed to recognize the energy — the intelligence — I was trying to send her direction: “How absurd and wonderful is this moment!” She laughed, and placed both hands on my collarbones, affectionately chokering my neck. Palpitations, flush. Then she was gone, onto the next disciple.

Posted on August 5, 2008
Filed Under Song of the Summer, hype, pop music, the spectacle | 1 Comment

Notes on The Dark Knight

Of course The Dark Knight is disappointing. With an Everest of hype and B.O. you can smell from 30,000 feet, how could it not disappoint?

There’s a lot to complain about on the technical level: sloppy editing, drab lighting, the illegibility of the action sequences. This review of the movie by Ron Silliman illuminates for me a crucial flaw in the movie: its boring uniformity of pacing, which deadens the film’s expressiveness. And this is a movie that lives or dies by expression; think of how Tim Burton glamorized Gotham’s gloom.

Yes, Heath Ledger is very very good, but is it a role worth dying for? Ouch. I don’t really mean that, but I pose the question because it’s the very one the movie producers exploit in their publicity for the movie. In our celebrity culture the star has become more interesting than the character; the story about the movie more interesting than the movie itself. Heath Ledger’s death is a huge draw for The Dark Knight. The movie would have been huge without it, but probably not the cultural inevitability it has become. Where the celebrity story and the role converge, where the characterization seems a commentary on the actor’s own life, stardom ignites. Heath Ledger’s performance, thanks to accident and some prodding from the Warner Brothers PR department, is a supernova. But to the detriment of the movie, which doesn’t in the end support our prurient speculations. The Joker is a disturbed character, and Ledger embodies his evilness with intensity. But he also brings welcome humor to the show; his Joker is the most playful, even joyful, aspect of this otherwise dutiful movie. (Harvey Dent — now there’s a character arc that could bum out an actor.) Certainly it is poignant, watching the movie, to imagine what great acting would lay ahead of Ledger. But his acting is finally better than our cheap desires to read the actor’s self-immolation into his role. His Joker is destructive, not self-destructive.

One thing that did intrigue me about the movie, and which I haven’t seen discussed as fully as I would like, is the movie’s attempt to comment on terrorism and post 9/11 America at the same time that it provides blockbuster thrills. The allegory runs something like this: the Joker is a terrorist, not an (aim-motivated) criminal; the government must decide if it’s worth it to sacrifice freedom (Batman’s freedom in this case) and capitulate to terrorist demands. There is a straw man, or straw men (as Iraq is the straw man in our battle against terrorism); the wrong party is blamed. In the movie’s penultimate set-up, with the two loaded ferry boats, the Joker (almost) divides the electorate against itself, much as our country is fractured into red and blue.

But the allegory is finally unsatisfactory because Nolan (the writer and director) has to play within the givens of the Batman mythology. So while it’s relatively easy in this analogy to compare the police and D.A.’s office to the US government, and the Joker to Osama bin Laden, Batman’s role confounds the allegory. He’s a wealthy vigilante, an independent crime fighter; he’s Bloomberg on steroids. Which raises the question, if he’s in cahoots with the government, is it a good thing or a bad thing? In his unethical (but justified) use of surveillance, he seems rather like the C.I.A. Even worse, in his private defense contracting (very private), he resembles Halliburton — though his work is done gratis rather than grossly exploitative for profit.

On the level of simple story, Batman embodies ethical good. But on the allegorical or ideological level, he maps to some of the most unsavory aspects of “the military-industrial complex” (to quote Hair!, which I saw this week in Central Park).

How very American, then, is this compromised, unpopular, ethically ambiguous superhero.

Posted on July 31, 2008
Filed Under film, media, the spectacle | Leave a Comment

Review: Frank Bidart’s Watching the Spring Festival

I reviewed Frank Bidart’s latest book, Watching the Spring Festival, for Time Out New York. I gave it the book five stars (which in TONY-land means a “book of the year”), but somebody in editorial trimmed it to four. I guess my review didn’t seem like enough of a rave. Too bad, because the book is really gripping — after a dozen or so readings, its mysteries and truths seem inexhaustible.

Also, I know Bidart would disagree with the last stanza of the review, in which I argue the poet is most powerful when approaching the unspeakable. In fact Bidart himself makes a direct counterclaim in “Little O”:

imagining that words must make the visible

a little harder to see, –
or speech that imitates for the ear speech

now is used up, the ground sealed off from us,–

is a sentimentality. Stevens was wrong.

(Bidart’s argument is with Stevens’ “The Creation of Sound.”)

My claim — perhaps wrong-headed, perhaps overstated — is motivated by a desire to push those inured to read only within their aesthetic ghetto to look at Bidart’s poetry with fresh eyes. It’s also a way of saying that I prefer the poems of Watching the Spring Festival to the more transparent and polemical pieces in Bidart’s last book, Star Dust, whose preoccupation with “making” I found programmatic and parched. Bidart’s better on the edge, whether it’s the edge of psychosis or the edge of silence.

I’m also grateful to see Bidart amp up his production with this book, arriving just two year after Star Dust. There’s no long poem in Watching the Spring Festival, which is a loss, but not a catastrophic one (note the word “strophe” contained in “catastrophe”). I wouldn’t go as far as to say I prefer Bidart’s shorter poems (”Ellen West,” an early long poem, is a tour de force). But the 26 short to mid-length poems in this book feel themselves like an abundantly rich gift; it would seem gross to ask for more.

In the review I mention the distance between Bidart and his mentors, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. That said, one of the most interesting pieces in this book is a sestina titled “IF SEE NO END IN IS” (the titled is composed out of the sestina’s endwords). The sestina form, which recycles the same six endwords throughout its six stanzas (plus an envoi) is one that Bishop famously revived to grand effect in “A Miracle for Breakfast” and “Sestina”–the latter poem an especially magical use of the form. Bidart’s taking up the sestina is clearly a nod to Bishop, but his use of it could not be more different. Where Bishop charms, Bidart glowers.

“IF SEE NO END IN IS” is a meditation on mortality that feels, in its brutality, as if it were composed using the scissors of the three graces — those crones who cut the threads measuring our lives. Uncertainty is our portion (”What none knows is when not if”), confused retreading our lot (”You feel old, young, old, young: you scan the sea / for movement, though the promise of sex or food is / the prospect that bewildered you to this end”). In Bishop’s “Sestina,” the repetition of the endwords creates a feeling of cozy domesticity (stove, almanac, grandmother, child, tears, house) — a limited palette but not a poor one. In Bidart’s poem, the repetition is more like a dirt storm, in which you wander blind for bearings that never arrive. Any insight is crossed by a sudden and decisive reversal, as in this stanza turn:

there is no
end, if you once see what is there to see.

You cannot see what is there to see —

Perhaps the most powerful modulation Bidart makes to the sestina form in “IF SEE NO END IS IN” is his elision of the envoi, the three-line stanza that caps the poem (with two endwords wrapped up in line, the envoi creates an effect of rapid closure, as if the poem were doubling up and eating itself). The absence of the envoi could mean many things: that the poet’s journey is not over. (Writing in his late sixties, Bidart is haunted by an end that hasn’t yet materialized.) The absence of an envoi also feels like an austerity, a lack consonant with Bidart’s pessimistic outlook. As humans, we are born wanting, and that want is never satisfied. Poetic form is one way of approaching the closure promised by the Platonic vision of love — two halves coming together to form a whole. Yet even on the substitutive level of art, the promised closure never arrives.

Instead, Bidart offers us closure of a more bitter sort. The last line of the poem, “. . . What none knows is when, not if” repeats exactly the poem’s first line, mimicking the book’s cover image: a snake biting its own tail.

Posted on July 3, 2008
Filed Under academia, books, media, poetry, writing | Leave a Comment

Hype: The Next in Line reviewed

Hi kids. Sorry about the long hiatus. I was out of town, and then some longer writing projects needed my attention. Also, every time I came back to the blog and saw that word “deathless” hanging fire, I ran scared. Some omen.

Good news: The Next in Line, my book of poems, received a sympathetic and accurate review in Publishers Weekly. The reviewer’s generosity inspires me to be more descriptive and less judgmental in my own reviewing.

The Next in Line
Christopher Schmidt. Slope (SPD, dist.) $14.95 (77p) ISBN 978-0-9777698-3-4

This Slope Editions prize-winning debut contemplates the nuances of 21st-century homosexuality with continuous candor and winking humor. The three sections showcase a range of poetic forms and styles: sonnet, ghazal, dialogue-driven narrative, lyrics and prose poems, all rendered in a wordplay-obsessed voice that is by turns darkly clever (“Black. Black letters. Blackhead. Black Island. Around the black.”), weirdly sexy (“bus runs to sub-Boston porn moor, horny homo zoo”) and beautifully grim (”his moldy eyes / roll to the sky // nervy thing / his larded wings // leave my hands / dark as newsprint”). Schmidt references Beckett, Hitchcock, Kafka, Callas, YouTube, Priapus, campy slang, mementos of gay culture and techno-jargon in considerations of love, familial dynamics, and relationships between strangers, students and teachers. In a few pieces, the stop-starting language and punning can be so amped up as to be off-putting, but most of these 38 poems display a powerful and appealing energy: “Too young to drive. High time to bale. Then damp harvest and how to pay. The problem begetting lever, machine. Give me a log tong, I’m good.” (June)

The only thing that isn’t accurate is the publishing date. June is almost over, and the book isn’t out yet (printing delays — don’t get me started). But you can sign up to be notified when the book becomes available through Amazon.

Posted on June 28, 2008
Filed Under books, hype, poetry | Leave a Comment

Hype: Boys in Heat

Some short stories/lyric essays/feuilletons I wrote a few years ago ended up in an erotic fiction anthology just out from Cleis press, Boys in Heat. Some folks might wrap this shit up in a pseudonym, but as part of my ongoing project of speaking the obscene, I’m putting it on my C.V. (Well, I probably won’t go that far, but it does merit blog mention.) Don’t the coverboys look like David Cook, squared?

Ironic, this erotica label. Because the stories, although sex-obsessed, are ultimately anerotic (a failed cruise, lovers who don’t fuck, a rape at the beach). But perhaps erotic in their obsessively stylized prose? Neurotic, at least — composed using OuLiPo word substitutions and vowel constraints (the last piece is actually a prose poem included in my forthcoming book, The Next in Line). The very kind editor, Richard Labonté, grouped the pieces together under the title “Three Scenes,” but they’re not meant to be read as a single continuous narrative. Though an Amazon reviewer did read it that way. Totally inaccurate, but I encourage misreading:

“Three Scenes” by Christopher Schmidt

A man’s boyfriend who believes it’s perfectly fine to cruise other men while in a relationship leaves town, which opens up interesting possibilities for the one left behind. An erotic twist on when the cat’s away the mice will play, this episodic tale’s interesting stylistic devices are a dominating force in this quickly paced sexcapade.

Posted on June 28, 2008
Filed Under books, hype, queer, sex | Leave a Comment

Hype: Diva Compex

Premature hype, but I noticed some other bloggers posting about this, so I’ll say it as well: I’ll be one of the contributors to a book of essays, forthcoming in 2009 from Univ. of Wisconsin Press, called Diva Complex.

Diva Complex: Gay Men on the Women Who Shaped Their Lives, an anthology edited by Michael Montlack, features 64 essays on a range of divas, including Bjork, Julia Child, Margaret Cho, Queen Elizabeth I, Wonder Woman and Sappho as well as the standards. By accomplished and emerging writers including Edward Field, Wayne Kostenbaum, David Trinidad, Alfred Corn, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Crus Cassells and Reginald Shepherd.

How dreary it must be to be one of “the standards.” (I kid.) My essay is on Ms. Kiki Durane, aka Justin Bond, one of the stars of the drag act Kiki & Herb. The book was originally supposed to be an anthology of poems about divas, but I guess the editors liked the accompanying essays better than the verse. Upstaged by non-fiction! Typical.

On the right, Ms. Kiki Durane of Kiki & Herb

J’adore Justin/Kiki — in fact, just this week I saw a reprise of his/her Trans-fest, “Lustre,” at the Abrons Arts Center on Henry Street. However, if I were to be ruthlessly honest, the formative diva for me would be supermodel Linda Evangelista (so 90s, so embarrassing). But I haven’t written a poem about her. Essays galore, but no poems. (Or would the formative diva be my mother? Is the diva a mother substitute?)

I read that Reginald Shepherd chose Kate Bush as his diva, an inspired choice. I hope one of the contributors wrote about Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes — now that cat was a complex diva.

Posted on June 28, 2008
Filed Under books, fashion, hype, queer, supermodels, the spectacle, theater | 4 Comments

deathless prose

I woke up this morning with “deathless” on the brain, a word I’ve never used before. The sentence that came to mind was, “The key to Madonna’s longevity is her deathless mediocrity.” Tetrameter, that.

Then I looked up the word in the OED. The second definition, added in 1993, seems the more interesting one:

deathless, a.

Add: [2.] b. Freq. as deathless prose (iron.).
1966 in Random House Dict. 1978 Washington Post 5 June A20/1 What reporter has not dreamed at some point in his career of being able to sue his editors for distorting his deathless prose on the copy desk? 1981 Q. CRISP How to become Virgin v. 62, I had imagined that my jumbled speech would be translated into deathless prose.

Posted on May 29, 2008
Filed Under writing | 2 Comments

American Boy

Who is this Estelle, and how does she make off-pitch singing — those bendy scoops — sound so delirious and seductive?

And is that really Kanye rubbing up on the word “Rubbish”? I’m liking.

Posted on May 28, 2008
Filed Under Song of the Summer, pop music, the spectacle | Leave a Comment

The Problem with Unity

Paul Krugman, in his latest op-ed column, offers up a rational but untenable solution to the Democratic primary impasse: that Obama should select Clinton as his running mate. Krugman’s proposal isn’t itself convincing. Clinton would bring all her negative baggage to the ticket without, it seems, offering any substantial lift. But the basis of Krugman’s proposal — that “it’s up to Mr. Obama to deliver the unity he has always promised — starting with his own party” — is actually a canny critique of Obama’s platform.

Now that the Democratic primary seems to have descended into a quagmire, it’s becoming apparent how self-contradictory — and perhaps self-defeating — it can be to run on a platform of unity. (At base, unity and election are at odds; the whole idea of an election is that one person is singled out above others.) Practically, the problem is not so much that campaigning on unity makes it impossible to attack your opponent. (In his disagreements with Clinton, Obama has, to his great advantage, taken the high road, letting his staff and supporters make their jabs while he looks the other direction.) Rather, the problem is that Clinton’s fractious, divisive theatrics have vitiated Obama’s ability to deliver his promise of unity. While this is really an unfair complaint — it is Clinton’s unprincipled grasping for the nomination that has thrown the Democratic party into such prolonged disunity — it’s unavoidable: the longer the party remains fragmented, the less credible Obama appears on this particular claim.

The problem is that any attack — merely by virtue of being an attack — undoes Obama’s believability to deliver unity. A campaign is surely a different animal than a presidency, and of course Obama never promised a unified campaign. But I fear the rhetorical aporia in Obama’s platform is there to be exploited. The attack “He can’t unify” is what language wonks might call a performative statement: saying it makes it so.

Posted on May 27, 2008
Filed Under politics, the spectacle, writing | Leave a Comment