Summer of Stein

It took us three visits to get to the end of The Steins Collect exhibit at the MOMA.  It is true:  the fact that the MOMA got all these paintings from varied collections to show at this one time and location is a monumental accomplishment--a coup of great social and political import.  Seeing this collection assembled in a set of rooms you can wander aimlessly through (provided you forgo the ear bud propaganda) is an experience that can help you imagine the experience and power of having original art in your home.  Art you chose because you felt something resonate between the two of you:  yourself and the picture, recalling Alice's insight, "you don't know a painting until you've dusted it." 

But when you snake through the exhibit, careful to avoid overhearing the docents, you arrive at the last exhibit room:  the propaganda kiosk.  I took note of this room on our first visit to the exhibit.  They had Alice's cookbook, The Making Of Americans (I assume to coincide with SPT's day long reading.), Gertrude's Picasso,  and a bunch of adult and children's books about Matisse, Picasso and Paris.  You could hardly comprehend that Ms. Stein was a writer.  I believe the MOMA prides itself on leading the pack, visually and culturally:  I though they'd foreground Ms. Stein's literary accomplishments and her role as collaborator, mentor and patron.  I lost my decorum when I saw the black t-shirt with the white lettering:  You can either buy clothes or buy pictures. 

This line appears in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast (which I'm surprised they didn't have on stock), from the chapter "Miss Stein Instructs."   At this point in the chapter Hemingway is recounting the afternoon Ms. Stein "told [them], too, how to buy pictures."

"You can either buy clothes or buy pictures," she said.  "It's that simple.  No one who is not very rich can do both.  Pay no attention to your clothes and no attention at all to the mode, and buy your clothes for comfort and durability, and you will have the clothes money to buy pictures."

"But even if I never bought anymore clothing ever," I said, "I wouldn't have enough money to buy the Picasso's I want."

"No.  He's out of your range.  You  have to buy the people of your own age. . .There are always good new serious painters."     

Given their (SF MOMA) fascination with Matthew Barney I don't think irony is their strong point.  The point of the t-shirts, the posters, the Print On Demand photocopies misses the significance and importance of the nexus created by the Steins. 

If you want to see Henri Matisse go to the MOMA.  If you're looking for a more nuanced discussion of this nexus head out the door, up the street and over to the Contemporary Jewish Museum where the emphasis is on seeing Ms. Stein and Ms. Toklas.

"The premise is that material objects, whether fine art, household artifacts, or curious possessions, highbrow or lowbrow, that belonged to Stein and Toklas could, if read closely, yield fresh insights about them and their universe."

The Contemporary Jewish museum presents Five Stories:  Picturing Gertrude, Domestic Stein, Art of Friendship, Celebrity Stein and Legacies.   This exhibit looks at Stein, her home, her body, her image, her artistic process, her creative relationships and her lover. 

Gertrude:  patron, husband, writer and friend.

Kundera writes about Bach:

"The historical position of Bach's work therefore reveals what later generations had begun to forget—that history is not necessarily a path climbing upward (toward the richer, the more cultivated), that the demands of art may be counter to the demands of the moment (of this or that modernity), and that the new (the unique, the inimitable, the previously unsaid) might lie in some direction other than the one everybody sees as progress."

These words could have been said about Gertrude and Alice, about the Steins and their collections; I will revisit them during the course of this series.

In the current arena of buying and selling (aka, get the rake, the artist is dead):  the Picasso circle jerk at the deYoung in the name of membership and cultural hegemony (including their decision to limit tickets for members, a change in policy members only learn about, after renewals), the bottom lines decision makers, and the proliferation of giclée prints and fine oil arts available at Aaron Brothers, very few people own original art they can dust.  Part of the problem resides in the fact that "people want art ( or an immediate return on investment), but they don't want artists."  (Niki Lee)  Gertrude and Alice's apartments and lives reveal a bit of the historical and artistic significance of artists supporting artists—financially as well as artistically.  Their lives (and this exhibit) demonstrate the intricacies, difficulties and absurdities necessary to survive "the wars I've seen," those foreign and domestic.

What does it mean to be a writer, an artist, a homemaker and a homo, then and now—in the day to day and over a lifetime, even those subject to revision for a SKU and a kiosk.

Summer of Stein

A few years ago the SF Opera hosted a traveling minstrel, Porgy and Bess.  Now, my woman has been dragging me to the opera for 12 years, back when I was healthy enough to hold onto the railing at SRO.  We've never seen many folks, but she loves it nonetheless. 

For Gershwin we got sit down tickets and swam in the sea of black to brown.  I've never seen a haughtier sea, and we certainly were as unwelcomed in it as we are in the pink sea we normally swim in.  Now—we didn't read the synopsis.  Nina loves Porgy so we figured we'd love Porgy too.

In the beginning, there is Summertime.

As the show went on I kept thinking we gotta get out of here.  This reminds me of the book someone gave a friend of mine for their child, the one where an Indian chops himself into bits, and can't even feel it.  Needless to say the book went to Eshu.

As I sat I could not believe all these folks paid money to sit here and watch this.  I can't believe we sat among them. 

I can't accept this.  I can't embrace the language as mine.  I refuse the narrative that claims that we (women, coloreds, poor people) when given the choice choose violence, poverty and isolation.

I was telling this to my cousin and she said, "you won't even give us, the fish is jumpin and the cottin is high."

I shot her back an uncompromising no.  I won't buy it, in another ticket, or another moment.  Especially if the fish is jumpin.  To bless this baby, our most precious of beings, those who come to us with the sole responsibility to grow into an elder, those who come to watch us and take from us those lessons on how to make choices.  What does this blessing do, but fatten the goat for the slaughter.  I won't offer myself to that.  I won't patronize artists and businesses that do. 

I believe:  "The ethical imperative for linguistic and all other social behavior:  one should address others with a presumption that they are capable of responding meaningfully, responsibly, and above all, unexpectedly."  (Gary Saul Morson in Bakhtin:  Essays and Dialogues on His Work) 

Nothing in this minstrel show is unexpected.  It's a dime store novel backed by money and power. 

Give me Dorothy Fields and Jimmy McHugh's Porgy, the one Nina sings at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, on the evening of June 30:

"I got my man now.  I got Porgy.  My baby understands now.  I got my Porgy.  I'm through with byways.  His way is my way.  Forevermore. 

Lord when I feel his arms around me.  Knowing he can't go on without me.  I wants to beg for a chance to camp at his door.

Say he's not much for looking.  Say he's lazy and no count as he can be.  He's got the kind of love for me.

So I'm changing my style, my way of living.  Glad I've stopped taking and started giving.  I got my man.  Got my Porgy.  Now."

Give me Gertrude and Virgil.  Even Gershwin thought their opera was "refreshing as a new dessert."  He was so influenced by it (Four Saints) he used the same director Thomson (Virgil) used in his production of Porgy and Bess, an entire year later.  An entire year later.

In my own ignorance I had always believed (and heard) that Porgy and Bess was the first NY opera with an all black cast; I know Duke lamented his own failure in that arena, but Gertrude and Virgil premiered their "perfect masterpiece" a year earlier.  Few people have even heard of it (Four Saints).

Their choice of material, four saints and a landscape. 

Thomson has said that he and Gertrude envisioned saints as "a parallel to the life we were leading, in which consecrated artists were practicing their art. . .needing to learn the terrible disciplines of truth and spontaneity, of channeling their skills without loss of inspiration."

Artists' choice:  truth and spontaneity.  The lives of artists:  the relationship between land and spirit. 

"Art that has religious reverence carries with it harshness and discipline; the anarchic and the arbitrarily subjective are sometimes the enemy that destroys art from within.  When I say religious attitude, I mean the belief that inside every person, landscape, and still life, there is hidden a noble beauty."  (Aharon Appelfeld in A Table for One)  

This winter I watched The Secrets.  That film left me with same sickening feeling Gershwin did.  The writer and director forced the characters into an ending I could not believe.  I still don't believe it, and I still can't shake the violation I felt as I watched this film, twice, trying to make myself accept the end he offered me.  Was it me or was it the movie. 

"I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality."  (Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed)

I know Naomi and Michal--I don't believe their double white wedding, to men and to healing through self sacrifice.

"An event as we imagine it hasn't much to do with the same event as it is when it happens."

I know when I am being manipulated.  I hate it.  Even when I can't form words, the feeling is impossible to ignore, it chokes me.  I am smothered inside it.  The lie, the lack of spontaneity, the failure "to learn the terrible disciplines of truth and spontaneity, of channeling their skills without loss of inspiration."

This is the summer of Stein, devoted to artists and patrons, saints and landscapes, choices and vision.

K'é: Running Naked

"Imagine me.  I was born to die.  I know that.  If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death.  Give some child, some thirteen-year-old, the hope of the remade life.  Tell the truth.  Write the story that you were always afraid to tell.  I swear to you there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I'll be naked for you.  It will be our covenant."    Dorothy Allison, In "Survival Is the Least of My Desires" originally given as the keynote address at OutWrite Lesbian and Gay Writers conference in 1992

Dorothy Allison delivered these words a lifetime ago.  16 years.  Some of us do not live to see a 17th or 18th birthday.

In Native America, suicide is the second largest leading cause of death for people between 10 and 34.  The Navajo Times reports that the Thoreau Chapter lost a 14 year old last weekend.

Last week on Navajo we had a fever of activity.  We held primaries for our Presidential elections, the Navajo Commission on Emergency Management and President Shirley declared a state of emergency due to the monsoons and flooding, and we saw a tornado touch Many Farms and Chinle.  Many spoke about prophecy.  Some looked for rabbit brush, to make sure it was still growing, here in this world we walk upon.

On the 29th, in Winslow, 12 of the candidates met to discuss the youth.

The, our, problems:

2 out of 5 children have experienced domestic violence.

Addiction and public drunkenness.

Suicide (several youth have taken their lives in just the last few months).

In a special to the Navajo Times Bill Donovan reported on the meeting.  http://www.navajotimes.com/politics/election2010/072910forum.php

I was particularly affected by two of the responses:

"We have to look at what is going on in our family that triggers this kind of action [addiction]."

and

"Many of our children's hearts are empty. . .We need to fill them with our faith."

I come from a broken family, and I am an alcoholic.  The summer of my freshman year in high school I laid on my bed singing to Al Jarreau's "Just Believe" in my own personal effort not to kill myself.  I continue to struggle today and still listen to Al.

My heart, then, was not empty.  It was full, full of self hate, full of terror, full of debilitating pain I did not think I could survive.  Thirty years later I can start speaking, writing, articulating the fact that, for me, wanting it—that fullness inside—to go away was what I searched for in those moments when death presents itself as the only answer.

These are shameful words I was taught to never share.  I am a notoriously private person.  Information trafficking was, and continues to be, a wanton practice of great emotional and spiritual violation in my life.  I speak now in the hopes that admitting these truths before you, shi diné, and all my people, we can together acknowledge some things no matter how ugly.

During the Winslow forum on youth many people concluded that solutions should and could begin with parents (greater involvement, education and as role models) but I kept wanting someone to admit that not all parents love their children (many do not even love themselves).

The legacy of absence and/or rejection by one's parents is something no one wants to discuss, at least not openly.

People freely and eloquently talk about the importance of our cords and the places where they are buried.  Fighting for access to these, our own bodies, in western hospitals and taking great pain and effort to fly, drive, ride cords back to Navajo for a proper burial site and ceremony.  Devastatingly for many, the corresponding bond between mother and child, when broken, is not acknowledged—our lives silenced.

This silence can fill a person and smother their soul.

In Tiana Bighorse's book, Bighorse The Warrior, she writes:  "In Navajo, a warrior is the one who can use words so everyone knows they are part of the same family."

Looking to parents may be worse than inadequate.  Telling a child, like myself then, and now, to look home only left me more isolated, terrorized and hopeless.

We, as people, have always balanced the need for individual autonomy with our responsibilities to each other and to the earth.  Somehow it has become taboo to speak or reach into these places that exist in that balance—the public and the private.  Our homes have never been characterized by closed doors and thick walls.

Like every Navajo, I hate to be told what to do, but in this moment I am only asking to be seen.

Domestic violence, suicide, alcoholism and addiction are not easy to hide, and we are not a stupid or unaware people.  I know how shame and propriety work to enable violence and despair—this is a legacy we pass down, a response to the wars of extermination and coerced conversions.  Seeing and being seen are awkward and painful; I believe we must begin there.

"It will be our covenant."

Red Ink 15.02

I have a new short story (soon to be a play) published in the latest issue of Red Ink (15.02).

The issue is available at http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/red-ink-1502/8516252

Please support this journal with your béeso! 

ííníssin

My Grandpa Knew That

"FACING THE FACTS


If there are energy shortages, individuals will have water problems.
If there is ecological damage, individuals will have water problems.
If there are economic crisis, individuals will have water problems.
If there are computer glitches, individuals will have water problems.
If there is political turmoil, individuals will have water problems.
If there is war, individuals will have water problems.


Almost anything that happens in the future can result in questionable availability of fresh water. This is not just an environmental problem. The continued pollution of the atmosphere, the surface and subsurface of the earth is not the only cause for alarm about availability of fresh water. Water availability to individuals is dependent on every other social system being in place, stable, healthy and at peace. It is inevitable that we will experience failure of one or more of these systems at some point in the future."
-from the Garbage Warrior's website: www.earthship.net


On Wednesday, the 18th of Nilch'ih Ts'ósí, we went to a class at our local nursery. We signed up for a Rain Barrel class; it was renamed "Winter Tasks: Water and Lighting." The class leader, from the Urban Farmer Store, introduced the theme reminding us that winter requires us to alter our behaviors: our plants need less water and we have more dark, less light, daily. We are entering our rain season: November to March.


Most rain is directed off roofs directly into sewage drains which empty into the bay and the ocean. The city of San Francisco has begun a program to encourage people to divert their drains into rainwater harvesting systems. They are even offering rebates. We received handouts and a very brief demonstration. It's really quite simple. In San Francisco (and many municipalities) we water with potable water that comes pressurized, with energy added to it. Every drop of rain water saved, reused or diverted back into the aquifer reduces the water, energy and chemicals used to treat stormwater, and transport potable water from the reservoirs. Keeping this relatively clean (rain) water out of the sewer system is easy. San Francisco only gets a one inch rain twenty times a year. Every 1,000 square foot home, during a one inch rain, could store 620 gallons of rainwater.


The Urban Farmer Store has manufactured rain barrels from reused olive barrels. They are available for purchase. With the city rebate it's quite inexpensive to install barrels at home. You will need a little sweat equity. Other sleeker and larger barrels are available from other manufactures, at a higher cost, but the point is how easy and inexpensive a basic system is to set up. If you can't use your harvested water (you have no garden, or your architecture makes it impossible), you can at least let it drain slowly (soak in) and replenish the aquifer.


San Francisco has very few permeable surfaces, even less than Manhattan.


After a discussion of permeable pavers and rain gardens one of the participants asked, "When will I make my money back?"


The leader responded: "That's like listening to music and asking when am I going to get my return on this purchase?"


Nothing will allow a people to go beyond a third or fourth year drought; as they enter the fifth and sixth year, they will give up their hope for rain.


During this last "storm" (Friday, the 20th) I heard many complaints about the rain. The best one being that it would interrupt someone's granddaughter's soccer game. When this grandma was told that the storm was fast moving and would surely be gone by Saturday she was relieved, briefly, until she realized it would probably make the field soggy. That doesn't top my favorite complaint: I can't wear flip flops. (But that leads to an entirely different discussion of shoes and why the very population that forced hard soled footwear on us now refuses to wear them.)


Many thinkers are blaming our current environmental problems on an idea that humans "just couldn't handle the transition from being hunter-gathers to high technology."


Scholars have tended to view us (American Indians) as a people who lack technology and architecture. But Daniel Wildcat, a Yuchi of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and co-director of the Haskell Environmental Research Studies Center, offers a more nuanced understanding of our relationship to technology.


In Power and Place he writes: "It appears natural selection has not selected us for a particular niche or place on the planet, but has selected traits that have allowed human beings, with the use of technology, to adapt to different places and environments on our Mother Earth.


Central among those traits is our sociability or social nature. . .our physiological awkwardness dictates a necessity for toolmaking and manipulation absent among other animal species. This is less a sign of human superiority than a sign of biological difference. In my mind this explains why in our traditional indigenous ways of speaking and praying we so often describe ourselves as pitiful beings. Humans depend on many good relations and relatives to live and survive in this world—hardly superstition, just ecological fact. Nature, nurture, and technology are intimately connected."


As we enter this yearly ritual of excessive consumption (Thanksgiving till Christmas) I want to highlight the fact that our (world) economy is based on severed relations. Simply ask yourself where your electricity or water come from, who sewed your underwear, or where your last apple was grown and what was the name of the individual who picked it.


In Slow Money, Tasch writes: "By prioritizing markets over households, community, place and land, the modern economy does violence to the relationships that underpin health and that give life-sustaining meaning—family relationships, community relationships, relationships between consumers and producers and between investors and the enterprises in which they invest, relationships between companies and the places in which they do business, relationships to the land and in the soil. Such relationships are attenuated, or in the extreme, deracinated, by the modern, global economy."


We can start simply by shaping our lives to the patterns of the earth not "the market." Detailed knowledge of the earth's patterns is precisely what we find in the oral tradition and tribal languages of indigenous peoples; this knowledge has been handed down for generations. For many, though, this will mean a new beginning, shaping daily life, including the care and construction of home, first by addressing how they are using and treating dirt, water, human waste, sun and wind.


Michael Reynolds, the Garbage Warrior, creator of the Earthship calls for "direct living," building the mechanism for "taking responsibility for what happens beyond the reach of our fingertips. Light switches and faucets" into each home he builds whether it is on Pine Ridge, Nogales, or Andaman Island India.


The land has a rhythm, if we step in time. We can be dancing in a house of beauty.

K'é: It Begins Here, In the Thin Winds

We have just celebrated the "top of the year". The month when we store and prepare our corn. We pick piñon, leaving those that received rain for the deer. If we have had the first frost we happily begin telling our winter stories. We gather medicine; it will be used to heal the family during the cold winter. We, the earth surface people, and the animals, each begin our preparations to move to our winter homes.

It begins here, our year, in October.

During the month of Slender Winds (Nílch'ih Ts'ósí) we continue our preparations: grinding corn, cooking and storing our harvest. We hunt. Meat is preserved. The winter story season is in motion, and our children sit inside it. At night adults play stick and moccasin games and children play with string. We attend ourselves and our winter homes, and the animals attend to theirs, many going into hibernation. We have a late sunrise and an early sunset. And as our language tells us, Nílch'ih Ts'ósí blows.

Anthropologists are keen on explanations, noting "the calendar of an agricultural people concerned with season, weather, and crops naturally varies from calendars determined by hunters and warriors." As do calendars determined by the market and apostolic conversions. Aside from the mistaken belief that agricultural people are a people without hunters and warriors, this accounting of where a people place their attention fails to acknowledge how a life rooted in the environment cuts through the false notion that agriculture, technology, hunting and gathering are unrelated and disparate ways of understanding and interacting with the world.

During these months of winter stories, children, parents, aunts, uncles, and grandchildren are called together, to play and listen. We are called together to give our attention over to skills and knowledge we've learned through a devotion to story and storytelling. These dark and rainy day moments ask us to attend to language. They require us to speak across the generations, back through the ages, following the migrations of our ancestors and those we joined, left and met along the way. They require from us, at every age, to communicate across experience: First Man and First Woman, Changing Woman, the Warrior Twins, old Coyote, Bat Woman, Butterfly and Reared Within the Mountains.

I was raised by my Grandmother. She was raised to believe the only good Indian was a Christian who spoke unaccented English. Last Thursday we saw the film, The Only Good Indian, at the Palace of Fine Arts, thanks to the 34th American Indian Film Festival. The Only Good Indian told the story of a young Kickapoo abducted on the Kansas plains and taken to boarding school. In one scene he is forced to eat soap, for his refusal to answer in English. When I was four I was forced to eat soap myself. Our familial obsession with cleanliness, not talking backwards and Catholicism carries over into everything I write and every word I speak (properly or not).

It begins here, with the willingness to face the pain and shame involved in relearning our languages, and the willingness to face the ridicule and social discomfort of devoting our time, resources and money to them, and to each other. I often joke and say we, the learners, are providing community service by giving people something to laugh about, as we talk like children. Children grow into the adults we help shape them into. Our gods knew this, and so they gave us words. They set us tasks. They told us to remember, to live, this way, now. Each morning we rise into the same now our ancestors rose to—the opportunity to live, good, in this way.

Many people believe the oral tradition is more fragile and less reliable than the written tradition. Many believe it is also less advanced.

Alfred Morsette, paatúh kananuuninó, Not Afraid of the Enemy (Sahnish)

Began recording with Douglas Parks, linguist, on July 1976 in Twin Buttes and completed his recordings in October 1979 in Bismark. They always met during winter (roughly October through March), following the "old custom" of telling stories only during that time. When they would meet Alfred would tell 2 to 5 stories. In the end he told 61. He'd tell stories for three hours, first in Sahnish, then he would tell the same story in English. He'd take a break at 10:30 for "a little lunch." And in the morning he would rise and sing Arikara songs till breakfast.

He had a phenomenal memory for songs. After he heard a song once he retained it. At the turn of the century the Pawnee brought 20 songs to the Arikara, he was the only one to still remember them. In one week he recorded the old grass dance songs (one set from Crow Ghost and a second set from Red Star). In the end he recorded over 200 songs and then "told the story behind each one."

In his introduction to Myths and Traditions of the Arikara Indians Parks describes working with Alfred: "I would turn on the tape recorder when he was ready, and then he would proceed to narrate, frequently closing his eyes and folding his arms as he recited from memory the details of the story, told, as he would say, exactly as he had heard it. Some stories he had been told only once or twice while a child or youth; others were accounts he had heard later in his life. He had repeated many of the stories to his own children when they were growing up, but many had not been related to anyone since he heard them originally, so the latter required thoughtful preparation before recording."

The Advocates for California Indigenous Language Survival recommend creating an immersion situation for yourself, one where the sounds that surround you can confirm your world. Language carries everything: prayers, recipes, k'é, skills and philosophy. Deb Murillo, at the Breath of Life workshop, spoke about devoting 3 hours a day to language. She is faced with the heartbreaking task of reviving a language where there are no living speakers. The Advocates live by the simple truth that it is never to late. Three hours listening and speaking words to yourself, to your family, to the ancestors; they are listening.

Portrait of Alfred Morsette, paatúh kananuuninó, Not Afraid of the Enemy by Niki Lee