04-02-2025
On April 1st, the TINYisPOWERFUL sync heard my frustration! About our recurring concern with well being. Self-care conversations, I believe, would be more candid and to the point if they took place in person. Some personal topics, in an in-person situation, are an opportunity for eye contact, smiles or grimaces, the instant coalition of tacit (dis)agreements, the rise or fall of room temperature, the theatrics of socializing … In my experience, in a virtual reunion, any lack of clear communication or of transparency leads to frustrations and regrets. The worst of it being the “let’s put this one in the parking lot for our next meeting”. There can not really be verbal rebuttals here, which, around a glass of wine or a meal would be inevitable. Read Plato’s Banquet. Even Eros was there!
04-05-2025
Yesterday, all day, I was a priest, from head (mind) to toe (body), including the obligatory white clerical collar!
No joke though. Twenty or so inter-racial “Gen Z ers, studiously exerting themselves to make a short film in which I was asked to perform a wedding ceremony, in a real church, in Ravenel SC …..
Some weeks ago Abriel had asked me if I would be part of the cast in a short movie directed by her friend Skenny Legend. Of course I accepted. Mine was the only speaking role. The lines were:
Do you promise to have and hold them, from this day forward? For better or for worse, for rich and for poor, in sickness or in health? Do you promise to love and cherish them, till death do you part?
In the morning, before leaving the house, I printed the text on white paper and concealed it in a book that could pass for a prayerbook, . The book I picked – is it grace? is it luck? – happened to be Tony Morrison’s “The Origin of Others”! All about belonging in a segregated place, where being an Other “matters”, as Ta-Nehisi Coats writes in the preface. He adds: “[this book] … if it does not demonstrate an immediate escape from the grip of the past, is a welcome aid in grappling with how that grip came to be.”
But here is the catch! Although I had read through, and partly forgotten Skenny’s script-related material before accepting my part, I had not registered that the whole scenario pivoted around the concept of ‘baggage”, as in: to marry is to embrace a whole new family with its unique baggage, good or bad. In fact, because I was coming with Tony Morrison and her own baggage of concerns with “Others”; because her baggage was also mine; because, at the occasion of a chapel scene, I observed that every member of the wedding party was wearing a black mask … how could I not assume that the whole piece was about racism and its corollaries? Racism is a baggage, wherever. I also admit that the blood on the bridesmaids’ dresses was puzzling. Enough for me to ask one of them why so much blood. She answered: the baggage! Hidden domestic violence is also a baggage wherever
.
The last scene, the one I was on set for, is key. The officiant is standing on the chancel with the groom. He extends his hand to invite the bride up the steps. At that moment, in unison, the six Groomsmen (whose outfits are bloody too but less so) and six Bridesmaids standing closely behind, grab the bride’s arm, as to prevent her from joining the groom – This whole choreography was complex. After a few hesitant takes, Skenny spoke at length to explain the spirit of the scene and synchronize the moves. This was my eureka moment! What did the black masks and the bloody dresses mean in the scenario? They symbolized both the burden and the violence it is, for women and men, to be black and risk marriage in America. With a clear accent on women’s plight.
A memorable day this was!
04-06-2025
Whether I got the true Baggage content or not, this whole experience was unique. It lets me, once again, appreciate how graciously the Black-America-I-know lives through the thick and thin of everyday history. I particularly need to thank the cohort of Gen Z ers I spent a day at the movies with, that Saturday. And I understand why Gwylène and I enjoy the company we keep. That being said, I would like to ask Abriel to talk to Skenny and see if they would like to have a further conversation, an exchange. Not sure about what, but we will know better after it! Such should be the dynamics of socialization. Too often we have a great meet with folks we don’t really know, only for it to last the time of the encounter. Come and gone. No consequences. A characteristic and negative trait of the American way.
04-09-2025
Last Saturday, Charleston cancelled its participation to the national anti-Trump protest march because it was ‘Bridge Run’ day!
A city, then, where sports, entertainment and tourism supersede democracy.
I could not have participated anyhow,
I was busy with the movie!
Now – this is ironic!
—–
This afternoon Abriel came to the studio with Ron, her boyfriend. He is the one who was shooting Skenny’s movie the other day. He wanted to show me the 3D printed Oni mask he needs for his Trident Tech school project. She did some work on her piece and left. Ron and I talked for a while and I told him about how interesting a time I had on the movie set the other day. Then we decided to have a dinner, the 5 of us, Skenny, Ron, Abriel, Gwylène and I, for some kind debriefing and a possible follow up. In my mind, this was a chance, for members of TINYisPOWERFUL, to meet young creatives (that is how Abriel qualifies herself and her friends), and to introduce the possibility of launching a project together. In the spirit of the arts. Since this is really the way I see the future of TINYisPOWERFUL: a network builder!
04-14-2025
The debriefing won’t take place until June. Too bad. The level of interest for that experience with Skenny’s movie will have waned.
—–
My home library does not have Hannah Arendt’s book ‘On Revolution’. The closest I can get to it is an article by Roger Berkowitz, offered by ‘Amor Mundi’ , a section within the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College: HA and the Constitution of Freedom.
It is a presentation of her constitutionalism. How she defines the role of the constitution within the American political system. In a few words, Berkowitz explains how the presence of money in electoral politics has corrupted elected officials enough that all they see in politics is their own reelection, not legislation. This sinkhole in the present system based on the separation of powers, is being infilled by the executive and its legal arm, the Justice Department. For HA, constitutionalism consists in the distribution of power among as many institutions as possible in the socio-political landscape; the distribution, and the augmentation of the number of power sources, to guarantee that no one power will possibly suck up all the power(s) of the republic and threaten its very foundation: FREEDOM. Wars are started in the name of freedom. So are revolutions. The goal of Revolutions, then, is not ‘Liberty’. lt is the Constitution of Freedom.
Freedom, for HA, is the possibility for each and for all to think and do what it takes to find meaning and act accordingly. It is not the right to do anything you want.
[This, by the way, reminds me very much of the declaration Gwylène and I chose to end ” the Running Dog “, our sound piece about liberation, at the time of the 1980 Polish insurrection headed by Lech Walesa and the Gdansk dock workers. This collaborative artwork was a loud artists’ scream against any form of authoritarianism and the necessity for physical and mental freedom to see art projects to their end, in order to grasp and appreciate their relevance; meaning, to learn from experience and to advance in the terms chosen by their creators, individual or collective. We were so intent on going to the deepest implications of our quest that, in the process, we understood the most intimate, the most enduring values of freedom. We still live with them. In our daily life and in our art making. Art as any field of research requires the absence of limits in where the mind can reach and explore. That is why Simone Weil, among others, never accepted the dogmatic elements of any religious faith. That also explains why wannabe dictators make science and art the first targets of their repression … along with immigrants and all “others”, whose baggage may contain ‘uncontrolable elements’!]
04-15-2025
I can remember 03-15-2025 as if it were yesterday. 30 days are like 30 seconds. Why?
Where are all illusions gone?
But why, this morning, did I pick up two strong signals of resistance to the Trumpinochet
hate-bloated hurricane? First, there is Harvard University which is saying NO to his demands for DEI repression and the denunciation of foreign students as it relates to the deadly hypocritical equation anti-Netanyahu’s Israel = anti-semitism. Then there is a law scholar, presently in the Netherlands, asked about her research on the Habeas Corpus principle and its Magna Carta roots. The Harvard resistance is a first. It may entice others to follow. As for evoking Habeas Corpus in the case of Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador, what it does is give a universal dimension to a situation, way beyond Trump or Bukele’s own self-importance. Although some countries do not recognize the content of Habeas Corpus, the spirit of it is more than a legal principle. It is also an essential foundation of human psychology, individual and collective. Its denial is a tool of maximal repression which, simultaneously, strips agent and plaintiff of their humanity.
‘Homo Homini Lupus’. How right is Hobbes to bring up the wolf analogy? For sure, it suggest a pre-societal condition of bestial violence, where raw strength means raw power, absent any behavior beyond instinctual self-preservation. Wolves are also known for living in family units, in packs, with their particular pecking order. How current can Hobbes be? How to better describe a head honcho, his lady Muse, their close relations, children, protective cadre and foot soldiers? … All infesting the public landscape to affirm their irrelevance,
04-20-2025
From universal Eco-anxiety to individual inviolability, the present spectrum of humanity’s
experiences vacillates between pain and anguish. There are as many shades of mood as there are people on the planet.
—–
As I approach the writing desk, this morning, I just learn that Pope Francis had died.
Then I realize that JD Vance visited him yesterday, and I imagine the VP injecting Francis with a lethal dose of Novichok! Why not? He had just corrected Vance’s remarks about care being like a series of concentric circles which protect the family, at the center. No, said the pope: it is the other way around. The concentric circles go from the center out. He obviously was telling the VP that the family is not a tribe; that tribal behaviors bring about separation and violence against the Others … Trump is the head of a tribe. Back to Homo Homini Lupus!
—–
Francis was a universalist humanitarian. Too much of a doctrinarian still but what a pleasure to see him pontify (being pope), not pontificate (being preachy), like most of his predecessors Pius, Leo, Paul, John, John Paul …
—–
Yesterday – France-Musique – Saturday at the Opera.
Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci.
What an overblown expression of romantic inner turmoil!
How this opera feeds on torrents of desperate passion, outpours of impatient love, quickly frustrated!
Clichés? Some say so.
Nevertheless …
A cold Saturday afternoon – Winter of 1990 – Fast&French – Opera afternoon
From the New York Metropolitan Opera
Texaco Opera Radio Broadcast
Peter Allen modeled voice …
Some customers would even cuddle up and stay longer!
Yesterday, Pagliacci … la commedia e finita …
LA COMMEDIA È FINITA LA COMMEDIA
04-20-2025
We just missed the Logan Memorial!
Cannot believe it
Cannot get over it.
We were at the Citadel a few minutes ago. It was hot out there, on the waterfront, next to the boat launch now surrounded by cookie cutter, generic buildings sitting on sparse greenery smothered by whistle clean tarmac!
We were not the only ones looking for the Memorial meeting place. We did not know what was happening until I called Lawrence. He thighed a thigh of despair and had a deep “Ah, Gwylène! – it was yesterday”. Now, it was our turn to despair. A major point we had promised ourselves to make was to bring with us friendship, empathy, solidarity, sadness and the sense of community developed at G&M, around people like Lawrence, his family, Logan, Melissa, Chris, Julia and friends … Amy, Alexa, Erin, Melanie, Jennifer, Latonya, all those who must have been so surprised and saddened by our absence … An enormous miss. So ridiculously huge that I told Gwylène that we will organize something for the first Anniversary of Logan’s death.
And we will.
Logan, Lami and everyone, we are sorry.
04-24-2025
I have a plan for the next five years of my art development, still revolving around the Tale.
Interestingly, at this point, after the enormous miss of Logan’s Memorial, how I understand why I must associate the whole experience of 40 years in Charleston with this deeply regretful episode. There is no guilt feeling involved here, though. (Suffice it to say that other people were at the Citadel on the wrong day, who had misunderstood a possibly muddled invite). The miss is as troublesome as my and Gwylène’s long association with the city , which is also full of felled opportunities. Charleston has been good to us but only half-good. It is as if adoptive children of the city were not entitled to ever be full citizens. I believe entitlement is, indeed, the right word to use here. How often we remark that we have been better embraced by the Black community of Charleston than by its white citizenry! Like Black folks, we are uprooted souls. We are not blue blood. But as restaurant employees, we fit the role well enough. Of course, this is a distorting generalization and in any case, in no way is it a judgement. We accept that Charleston’s haughtiness is a consequence of what history had endowed white Charleston elite with: it is hard to be a descendent of slave owners, isn’t it! But how impossible is it to recognize history and honor it (!) good or bad? It is not because we – Gwylène and I – do not share the same history as our neighbors that we are among Tony Morrison’s “others”, or is it?
04-25-2025
Question asked by René Backmann, a journalist, to Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer, in a dialogue reported on Mediapart this day:
<
Sur ce point, je veux être très clair. Il ne s’agit pas du droit à exister, que chaque État peut légitimement revendiquer, mais de la justification de cette existence. Dans une perspective démocratique, humaniste, un État n’est pas une fin en soi. C’est une construction humaine, sociale, une entité politique qui a vocation à servir les êtres humains. Son but est de créer un environnement légal, politique, culturel, économique et de sécurité, dans lequel les citoyens peuvent valoriser leurs talents, poursuivre leur recherche du bonheur, être les auteurs de leur propre histoire.>>
My translation:
Recently, you estimated that the present régime is destroying the justification for the existence of the state of Israel. Why?
On this point, let me be very clear. It is not about the right to exist, which every State can legitimately demand, but about the justification of this existence. In a democratic, humanist, perspective, the State is not an end in itself. It is a human, a social construct, a political entity whose purpose it is to serve human beings. Its goal is to create a legal, political, cultural, economic, and secure environment in which citizens can promote their talents, accomplish their pursuit of happiness, be the makers of their own history.
A delicate question with a very simple and clear answer, particularly eloquent on the humanitarian reason for a State to exist. A constitutional State, strong in its legitimacy, rooted in the people’s will.
This is a good introduction to a paper I need to write for TINYisPOWERFUL’s web app or/and NewsLetter about autonomy. There seems to have been a misunderstanding around this concept. Although, every time I have used the word autonomy, I have been very cautious and added that autonomy has to be understood within a social context of mutual support, it may have contributed to the fact that, presently, members of
TINYisPOWERFUL are having a hard time working together, in a collective spirit. I personally believe that this difficulty is mostly a consequence of practicing Zoom more than in-person meetings. Everyone seems to be satisfied with this format. I am adamantly opposed to it, at least in our field of the arts: IN/WITH COMMUNITY ART. At the last Creative Sync, I observed some lethargy, although the group was just coming out of a Special Event at the Cannon street Art Center which seemed to have been well attended. Gwylène and I were not there due to the Logan Memorial, which we, however, so sadly missed by one day. When I asked whether there would be an article about it for the record and drew but a blank, I seriously worried. I analyzed it as symptomatic of an atomization of the group. Gwylène suggested exhaustion and a need for a two week break from all activities. Also, anxiety and depression are factors, on the day the FBI arrested a judge in Wisconsin, for refusing to obey an ICE order! To be facing a major constitutional crisis is disorienting. The erasure of justice in a country left to a cruel, violent and gregariously submissive minority means only bad things for the younger generations … Unless May First successfully gathers 10 or 20 million people who will legitimately invade Congress and the White House! Ah Ah!
But – I am drifting
But – it has to be said
But – the similarity in directions Israel and the US are taking now needs no further proofs.
But – Michael Sfard promises – and he seems to know: <<... the fact that these trends are presently growing does not mean that they won't come to an end. They may go as far as a full and rapid reversal. This has already been seen often in history.>> (my translation)
And – Simone Weil refutes any abstract sense of historic inevitability
And – don’t forget, it is either “Socialism or Barbarism” (Cornelius Castoriadis)
And – there is no end to hope but death
Notes:
Michael Sfard is the author of “Occupation From Within: a Journey to the Roots of the Israeli Constitutional Coup”.
Simone Weil, at 24, wrote “Reflexions on the Causes of Liberty and Social Oppression”
And Cornelius Cartoriadis also wrote: “The Imaginary Institution of Society”
04-30-2025
Lately,
There have been many days of misery and some nights of discovery!
Misery …. when her landlord treats Celeste as landlords best know to: exploit that is.
Louise something, now a millionaire, is pretty much blackmailing my sweet daughter.
As I am reminded of it at this instant, there is a necessary level of probity and gravity for human intelligence to ‘kick in’!
Discovery …. how about a midnight virtual visit of the Shinto Ise Grand Shrine?
Amaterasu is goddess of the Sun. She resides at the Ise Grand Shrine.
I have found a site where to learn more about the Ise Grand Shrine. The page is divided into left, with images and text concerning the shrine itself – and right, where visitors are invited to bet their money on horse racing or weight loss. One side upends the values promoted by the other. What to think? How to assess this recessive merchandizing plot against the endearing tradition of building an identical shrine next to the existing one, every twenty years, – in order to conserve the traditional skill of Japanese Joinery and all the wisdom attached to this art? I need to know more about this. It is a marvel of human intelligence up against a heap of triviality which, nevertheless, makes the conservation possible. There would be danger in passing on sameness if it smothered updating knowledge and innovation? This may be one existential question which has given Japan so much grief for the last decades? Saleha visited Japan with her daughter two months ago. She came back in awe of people who seam so self-organized and orderly. Of course, after a few weeks of Trump 2.0, who would not be impressed by self- restraint and orderliness?