Black Power and the Arts, Yesterday and Today

This summer I took an African Amerian Lit course, and I was particularly fascinated by the Black Arts Movement.  The movement, as the Norton puts it, aimed "to create works that would be--in the words of Maulana Karenga--'functional, collective, and committing.'  Hence, the Black Arts of the 1960s proposed to create politically engaged expression as a corollary to the new black spirit of the decade."

Amiri Baraka is one of the most recognized Black Arts writers, and his poem "Black Art" gets at the heart of the period, I think.  Here are a few excerpts:

Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step.  Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down.
...
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns.  Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.
...
Let there be no love poems written
until love can exist freely and
cleanly.  Let Black People understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of lovers and warriors and sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world


We want a black poem.  And a 
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD

Baraka's poem resonates with the same violent anger that propelled Black Power during the sixties and seventies.  Today marks the official release of Göran Olsson's documentary The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975; you can read the NPR review here.  It looks pretty interesting--it's a take on the movement from Sweden, which apparently was pretty anti-US at the time.  Check out the trailer below:

Andy Warhol Gets Rowdy

About a month ago, Letters of Note, an awesome blog that scans fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos, posted a complaint letter that Andy Warhol received from his landlord after his parties were becoming a nuisance.  Here's a little background from the post:

One can only imagine the parties that occurred on the fifth floor at 231 East 47th Street during the 60s, for this was Andy Warhol's Factory, the very studio in which his famous silkscreens were created on a daily basis; a veritable hot-spot that welcomed a steady stream of visitors that included, amongst many, many others, Jagger, Dylan, Capote, Ginsberg, Dali, Morrison, and Burroughs. From 1965 the Factory even had a house band of sorts, in the form of The Velvet Underground. No wonder the parties were so regular and legendary. It was the place to be.

With that in mind, it's hard not to sympathise with Warhol's landlord at the time...

Transcript follows. Image found in the stunning book, The Velvet Underground: New York Art.

Transcript

ELK REALTY, INC.
1107 BROADWAY
NEW YORK, N. Y. 10010
AREA CODE 212
WATKINS 4-3560

November 15, 1965

Mr. Andy Warhol
231 East 47 Street
New York, New York

Dear Mr. Warhol:

We have been advised that you have been giving parties in the fourth floor space occupied by you. We understand that they are generally large parties and are held after usual office hours. We have found that your guests have left debris and litter in the public areas which you have never bothered to clean. Further, we feel that a congregation of the number of people such as you have had may be contrary to various applicable governmental rules and regulations and also might present a serious problem with the Fire Department regulations.

Your lease, of course, does not permit such use and occupancy and you hereby directed not to have any such parties in this building.

Very truly yours,

ELK REALTY, INC., Agents

(Signed)

Alfred R. Goldstein
President

ARG:sd

Summer of '65

Before cable or the Internet turned us into the Big Brother of Hollywood stars, silent home videos captured the intimate lives of celebrities and were tucked away for safekeeping.  A collection of films from the summer of 1965, belonging originally to Roddy McDowall, has recently surfaced on YouTube, and the videos are simply amazing.  The 60s are my personal Golden Age, and these videos feed into my longing for the decade like woah.

Note: The Robert Redford video is for you, Alexa.

From Open Culture

Weekend Face-Off

Mad Men: Golden-Age Nostalgia or a Melodramatic Painting of Days Gone By?

This weekend's face-off features critics  Katie Roiphe and Daniel Mendelsohn to debate what truly drives the narrative of AMC's hit show Mad Men, now filming its fifth season, as well as the particular relationship between its sixties-era characters and a contemporary audience. Below are some highlights from each article; as for the winner, you be the judge!

Many thanks to my good friend Mary for sharing Mendelsohn's article with me!

"On 'Mad Men,' The Allure of Messy Lives" by Katie Roiphe (July 2010)

• "Watching all the feverish and melancholic adultery, the pregnant women drinking, the 7-year-olds learning to mix the perfect Tom Collins, we can’t help but experience a puritanical frisson about how much better, saner, more sensible our own lives are. But is there also the tiniest bit of wistfulness, the slight but unmistakable hint of longing toward all that stylish chaos, all that selfish, retrograde abandon?" 
• "The large-scale messiness of 'Mad Men' is not for us, the free fall into chaos, into that stranger’s warm and enticing bed; it frightens and enthralls us. What we want, in other words, is to watch four seasons of it through the safe, skewed mirror of the television set." 
• "Perhaps part of what is so appealing, so fascinating about 'Mad Men' is the refusal of bourgeois ordinariness, the struggle against it, in all of its poetic and mundane and tragic forms." 
• "Of course, it’s hard to write in praise of that much drinking in the middle of the day without being perverse; it’s equally hard to advocate purely recreational affairs; . . . . And yet can these messy lives tell us something? Is there some adventure out there that we are not having, some vividness, some wild pleasure, that we are not experiencing in our responsible, productive days? . . . Could we use, in other words, in these fine healthy times, just a little of the madness?" 

"The Mad Men Account" by Daniel Mendelsohn (February 2011)

• "With these standouts (and there are many more), Mad Men shares virtually no significant qualities except its design. The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish." 
• "For a drama (or book, or whatever) to invite an audience to feel superior to a less enlightened era even as it teases the regressive urges behind the behaviors associated with that era strikes me as the worst possible offense that can be committed in a creative work set in the past: it’s simultaneously contemptuous and pandering. Here, it cripples the show’s ability to tell us anything of real substance about the world it depicts." 
• "The tension between the luminous ideal and the unhappy reality is, of course, what the show thinks it’s “about”—reminding us, as it so often and so unsubtly does, that, like advertising itself, the decade it depicts was often hypocritical, indulging certain “images” and styles of behavior while knowing them to be false, even unjust." 
• "The point of identification is, in the end, not Don but Sally, not Betty but Glen: the watching, hopeful, and so often disillusioned children who would grow up to be this program’s audience, watching their younger selves watch their parents screw up."