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9/29/2014
1/03/2014
Another Year, Another Pollyanish Breakfast Metaphor, But This One In The Style Of Vice Magazine.
I fucking love to make pancakes from scratch. I think they
are pretty good, too, and my wife loves them also, as does my son. My son (get
ready to be jealous other hipster hippie art parents who try to give their kids
healthy eating habits in this fucked up consumer junk food culture) likes them
PLAIN. Fucking plain pancakes. That’s how good they are.
You fucking know what else? They’re fucking gluten free,
dickheads.
Fucking. Gluten Free. Pancakes. That a toddler boy likes without any syrup or
butter on them. BECAUSE THEY ARE THAT GOOD. Fuck you.
Okay, but here’s the fucking thing: it took a long time,
hard work, experimentation and sacrifice, to get the gluten free pancakes-from-scratch
recipe right. Okay, maybe not fucking sacrifice, fuck you, but all the other
stuff. Maybe I just sacrificed some flour and eggs. Does that count? I don’t
know.
But listen, here’s another detail to sweeten the pot: I
don’t use a measuring device. I fucking eyeball these pancakes. Also? I fucking
alter the recipe on a whim, depending on what I feel like, and what’s around.
So fuck you and your Bob’s Red Mill. Okay? I love my pancakes, and I could make
them blind, probably.
Here is what I use. I use some millet flour, some corn
flour, some buckwheat flour, and if it’s around, I use chickpea flour. Some
fucking walnuts. Yeah, some eggs and whatever milk or yoghurt I have around,
maybe some sunflower butter, and baking powder, little salt, vanilla, cinnamon,
whatever. Fuck it. I mix the dry ingredients up, then do the wet ones in a
separate bowl. A little more liquid than dry overall, but I don’t know, it just
fucking looks right. And then put them together, let it sit, fry them up. Fuck
you. Amazing pancakes.
But look, you can’t just make these pancakes the first time,
okay? Or maybe you’re special and you can. Maybe you cooked at Bouley years ago
and talk about it like you were a track star. Maybe you can, but then the next
time you’ll just fuck it up ‘cause you’ll get cocky. You have to commit to the
fucking unknown, you have to go too far, you have to add too much of one thing
and not enough of another. You have to accidentally make fucking BANNOCK one
day, and then end up with some weird pudding the next, and you have to feel
like you’re a fucking loser who can’t even eyeball a pancake correctly. And
then you finally find it. And if you don't know what Bannock is you can look it up.
I mean you can read a recipe. You can get a bag, read it,
follow instructions, open the bag and stir and make and shit. But anyone can do
that. You’re reading this. You’re an asshole. Like me. You can make pancakes
from scratch. If you just fucking let yourself fail.
Welcome to 2014. This is the year we will fuck up our
recipes until we make breakfasts so good that sugar-loving toddlers will eat
them plain.
12/14/2013
PAVE Lecture
I gave a little talk on "Thriving As An Artist," this fall, at ASU's PAVE Program. I hope you enjoy it.
IT'S RIGHT HERE
IT'S RIGHT HERE
10/15/2013
More Questions About Detroit (And Other Places)
“In particular, indigenous peoples and people of color become the occasion by which the white subject can self-reflect on her/his privilege.” – Andrea Smith,“The Problem With Privilege.”
The post I wrote over the summer about Detroit was nicely picked up by Culturebot, and was praised by a lot of my friends. Soon after I put it online, I had a conversation with a colleague in that city – also white, like me - and a longtime activist and artist. We discussed a few gaps I might have left open, a few questions I couldn’t answer, or oversimplifications I might have made. At the same time, I noticed that most of the people visibly approving or championing the post were white.
I wonder how my point of view was impacted by the access I
have to certain forms of societal opportunities as an educated white person of
some means. By ‘some means’, I’m specifically talking about the education I
had, and the access to social and job networks granted to me by my education,
and other opportunities. No, I’m not rich, but money isn’t everything.
In the last post, I wrote about artists I’d met through the Kresge
Fellowships, for whom I teach a yearly workshop. My Detroit friend and
colleague pointed out that, while the fellowship is of tremendous value there,
the language of those fellowships – their guidelines and mission – are the
language of a particular kind of cultural norm – a mostly white, mostly
educated norm. Kresge is, of course, not alone here, but just my closest
experience at hand.
These opportunities are great. The people who get the award,
all of them, are remarkable artists, all deserving, regardless of their level
of access. But as an example and embodiment of the seemingly subtle (but not
subtle if you’re black or brown) ways that exclusion takes place unintentionally,
without even anyone needing to discuss it, Kresge, like many grantmakers, might
have some more work to do. And my practical experience in that one city brings
up questions for me about the way many funders and their guidelines interact with
diverse communities. I hope anyone reading this from that community can take this inquiry in the spirit of generous progress.
Another way to put it is, in a city that’s 80%
African-American, the grant recipients are largely not African-American. Again,
it’s not that the intentions or practices of the foundation are excluding black
people by design. It’s that they don’t even have to. Nor am I suggesting that
the population of grantees should necessarily be an exact reflection of the
overall population, just that the disparity seems glaring. A starting point to
unpack the problem is this: that the way the grant is positioned and described is
race neutral, yet the results of the process are not. Because nothing is.
For those of us in the middle of it, whose intentions are
100% positive, the critique here can be mystifying. What I would say is that,
if we should look at the language funders use, and the language surrounding
concepts and trends like “social practice”, “community engagement” and
“artistic excellence” as being in part specific to a particular set of people, then
issues of unintentional exclusion might start to make more sense. Or, put
another way, as an African-American colleague said to me at a conference
recently, “Social practice. We’ve been doing social practice for a long, long time. We just didn’t call it that.
Now we can’t get in the door.”
I don’t know answers for Detroit. I’ve seen and read work by
people like Grace Lee Boggs and Invincible, Allied Media and the US Social
Forum, as well as smaller collectives and even individual activists like Bill
Kellerman. I’ve met and loved the work of artists and gardeners galore, and I’ve
been visiting with my in-laws for a bunch of years. But in the larger
discourse, I keep seeing a kind of blind adherence or a resignation to market
principles (profits over people, business start-ups over needs and services, though
perhaps this time couched in a comfortable scruffy hipster coffee shop instead
of a casino), and to the rhetoric of ‘opportunity’ and ‘entitlement’ over
justice, equality or democracy.
“…our project becomes less of one based on self-improvement or even collective self-improvement, and more about the creation of new worlds and futurities for which we currently have no language.” – Andrea Smith, “The Problem With Privilege."
There is a dynamic and almost dialectical tension in the
city that is palpable and painful – between the rhetoric of improvement and the
continued desperation; between the fact that people are making things happen
everyday that do not conform to what we think of as renewal, but those same
people are largely shut out of the official process of renewal and salvation
the city proposes. Because those people are engaged in daily acts of renewal,
and daily acts of resistance, does not mean they are doing okay. The system
doesn’t work in Detroit. Other systems are forming. Both of these facts
highlight the ongoing racial scars in our history, our present, and perhaps our
future.
The Questions
The Questions
I ask readers,
especially white readers, the following questions. People of color have been
asking them and answering them for a long time. Whether or not you’re in the
arts, these are questions I actually don’t know the answers to, and I think
they’re worth thinking about. There will not be a test, or there already is.
What do you feel responsible for, politically?
What don’t you feel responsible for?
Why?
How do you benefit or suffer because of restrictive
offerings?
What is the cost of making politics solely about economic
impact?
What is the cost of making politics about ‘the best we can
do,’ ‘the sensible solution,’ ‘the most we can hope for?’ What have we lost by
our pragmatism?
What are many well intended people forgetting when it comes
to race and class, when it comes to trying to remake, renew, or simply
re-engage a place like Detroit?
What are the unspoken assumptions about what’s possible in
the realm of what we now call “politics’, when it comes to Detroit’s future,
and the future of cities in general?
How is the language behind certain opportunities offered by
well-intentioned bodies – foundations and government agencies offering grants and fellowships,
educational institutions offering new models, bodies politic changing
governance to surmount a real problem – restrictive or exclusive to the
underclass, however unintentional or covert those restrictions might be?
How are you creating opportunities for people unlike
yourself to have the systemic, embodied power that you have?
Do you feel you ought to be doing “more?”
Do you feel you ought to be doing better?
What do you assume to be true about the necessity of the
entrepreneurial spirit, the profit motive, competition?
What are the corollary benefits to being white, over and
above the color of your skin?
Have you accidentally internalized the dominant rhetoric
about poverty?
Does some part of you believe it’s a choice to remain poor?
Do you believe that there is a level playing field?
Really?
Further Reading
7/31/2013
Dual Economies
People from the suburbs tailgated
in back of St. Peter’s Episcopal; their small change kept afloat the soup
kitchen, the home for young mothers, and even the congregation. Some years, parking
for games was one of the top sources of income for the church; a little
creative fix for an entrenched and impossible problem.
At a time in which most “solutions”
to Detroit’s entrenched problems are punitive and racially biased, three things
have remained positive in the nearly 20 years I’ve been visiting: culture,
religion and activism. This is the home of Grace Lee Boggs, of Allied Media
Projects. It’s the home of St. Peter’s new pastor and longtime activist Bill
Wylie-Kellerman, who rebuilds park benches the city tears down, because he wants
to make sure the newly minted “historic district” of Corktown still offers
somewhere for its many indigent to sleep.
Politics has failed the city.
The democratic process, writ large, has failed. The city, economically, has
failed. So people make up their own solutions – temporary, imperfect and
small-scale. I hope these solutions don’t get lost in the reshuffling of the Detroit’s
larger structure and finances.
As Boggs told me when I met
her a couple years ago, “Detroit is a city of dual economies.” There is the
economy that is in the newspapers, and that continues to deteriorate and
oppress. And then there are micro-economies that pop up in a neighborhood, on a
block, or even in a single building, where residents take on the basic services
a city normally provides, like policing and mediation, water, education, and
garbage. Some of these micro-economies serve entire neighborhoods; some exist without
knowing others like them are out there.
What Do Artists Know?
In addition to my family
visits, I’ve been making a trip every year for the last five, to teach professional
skills workshops to Detroit artists who’ve received a Kresge Fellowship. Every time
I’ve taught there, there’s been a discussion about whether Detroit’s new cultural
visibility, weighed against the continued dysfunction on governmental and
economic levels, will propel it forward or set it back yet again. Cultural
renewal takes a long time on its own. It does not equal civic engagement, and
can easily become instrumentalized (witness many other major metropolitan
areas).
This year the questions were
especially poignant. The workshop started on July 19, the day after the city
declared bankruptcy. There weren’t any hotel rooms within 8-Mile Road because
so many officials and business owners with a vested interest in what happens had
filled them all. We were all in the city at the same time, which made the
divide especially poignant to me. I wanted the financiers all to take a break
from the numbers, and stop by our workshop, because I was amazed, as I always
am, by the adaptability and generosity with which artists I meet in Detroit deal
with so many entrenched and massive problems.
Some of them were relatively
recent arrivals who felt the call to be there, wanted to live off the grid in
an urban setting; maybe they romanticized the metaphor and then fell in love
with the actual place. One started a farm, lives on $6,000 a year and feels
like she has enough. Another has a bookshop that’s been open since 1982, and
also formed some legendary and rambunctious creative collectives in the
meantime. Another made paintings in secret while working a regular job for 30
years, and then opened up his garage studio to the world one day. Yet another has
a day job in restorative justice and started writing speculative fiction
because, “So much of that writing is about apocalypses, and we’ve already been
through our own.”
Now, I know that on a bad week
artists can be as dysfunctional as anyone; I know we can be corrupt and
scheming, competitive, even cruel. I know many of us can’t do a budget to save
our lives. I know that there has to be an official component to any renewal
that happens – a restoration of services, of deliberative democracy, of
streetlights and ambulances, schools and cops.
I also know that artists
make something out of nothing, and, generally, they know when they have enough.
Maybe the extreme circumstances of Detroit make that kind of skillset even more
necessary to hone than other places.
The way Detroit’s problems have
been addressed on an official level has largely been about impositions of
policy over people who have already lost their civic voices, the vast majority
of them people of color. Even the notion that what will save Detroit is to lure
“creatives” there so that they can start up new businesses misses the point.
The creativity is already here. It’s so far advanced and so far removed you
just might not recognize it as such. This is a post-market city. This is the
city we can both help to re-emerge and from which we can learn.
I don’t think Detroit can be
“fixed” by a single overarching solution that is seen as the lesser of two
evils – I don’t think the neo-liberal consensus-based approach will work here. In
part because it’s not working well most of the time anyway, and in part because
it doesn’t allow us to do the deeper work of examining why this place has
fallen apart so thoroughly, what ingenuity has arisen within the gap, and what
we could do differently, maybe in other places, too, moving forward.
As everyone converges to
figure out how to cut the losses (which, put another way, means figure out which
lives matter least enough to forsake), or how to cut up potential spoils, how
to twist the arm of a place already hobbled from bending to the latest slow
disaster, maybe people should stop and hear from activists, artists and
priests. They’ve been there the whole time.
What will happen if we both
start to address structural problems, and also understand the value of daily
miracles, even if some of them just work for a single block, and others might
be viable for miles? Here’s how you change the tone of capitalism, they could
say to us, here’s how create a beautiful light in the dust. Here’s how you use
your eyes, your ears, and your mouth. Here is how you make a new city. People
are doing that right now, and have been for years. We just may have overlooked
it because it doesn’t look like what we are used to calling America, or what we
are used to calling progress.
Further Reading
7/09/2013
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