Dada Reads_020621
Articles: Robin Wall Kimmerer on ecology and gratitude, Alexis Pauline Gumbs on time, Jon Ross on Marion Brown, Amirah Mercer on Afro vegan traditions, Adam Shatz on Tyshawn Sorey, and more
The stronger-than-usual apocalyptic winds of late December and January in America meant that Dada reading took place amidst a never-ending squall—sometimes acting as bonus micro-burst, at others as shelter. Like many (most?) people who engage the written word, reading takes on a variety functions in my life, much of it devoted to day-to-day missives that may be of import but aren’t applicable to the machinations and purposes of Dada Strain. (Or at least not immediately important—though sometimes there are exceptions.) There’s always a need to have regular materials informing one’s short-term outlook and long-term vision—and that habitually feeding both is crucial to achieving a healthy balance in comprehending the world. Especially when we are drowning in daily communications distractions, adding to its digital volume with every post and comment. (And Substack, FFS.) This note is within the context of defining my purpose for Dada Reads, which is to shine a spotlight on longer work that takes broader views and engages in topics outside the usual cycle. Also: to make a concerted effort in spotlighting independent work, produced outside of mainstream editorial outlets (though, as you’ll see below, not always), And increasingly to promote DIY ‘zines and editorial platforms doing the work in the present (and the past), for the future, in music or in adjacent cultures.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance” (Emergence Magazine, December 2020) | Kimmerer is an ecologist and author, as well as a citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, whose heritage informs her environmental scientific and writing work. It feeds her emergent outlook in the best ways, the observations and cultural knowledge molding a potential future, combining the spiritual and social paths forward. Her cultural history of a berry leads to notions on the philosophy of gratitude. “For me, the most important part of the word Bozakmin is ‘min,’ the root for ‘berry.’ It appears in our Potawatomi words for Blueberry, Strawberry, Raspberry, even Apple, Maize, and Wild Rice. The revelation in that word is a treasure for me, because it is also the root word for ‘gift.’ In naming the plants who shower us with goodness, we recognize that these are gifts from our plant relatives, manifestations of their generosity, care, and creativity. When we speak of these not as things or products or commodities, but as gifts, the whole relationship changes. I can’t help but gaze at them, cupped like jewels in my hand, and breathe out my gratitude. In the presence of such gifts, gratitude is the intuitive first response. The gratitude flows toward our plant elders and radiates to the rain, to the sunshine, to the improbability of bushes spangled with morsels of sweetness in a world that can be bitter. Gratitude is so much more than a polite thank you. It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods. Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver….To name the world as gift is to feel one’s membership in the web of reciprocity. It makes you happy—and it makes you accountable. Conceiving of something as a gift changes your relationship to it in a profound way, even though the physical makeup of the “thing” has not changed. A wooly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand knit by your favorite auntie, then you are in relationship to that “thing” in a very different way: you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world. You’re likely to take much better care of the gift hat than the commodity hat, because it is knit of relationships. This is the power of gift thinking. I imagine if we acknowledged that everything we consume is the gift of Mother Earth, we would take better care of what we are given. Mistreating a gift has emotional and ethical gravity as well as ecological resonance.”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “A Poet, a Nebula, and the State of California” (Sierra 12/31/20) | If there’s anything that seems to unite all survivor (kinda?) pandemic/quarantine narratives, it is how our collective and individual existence these past 11 months has altered our relationship with time. Like, the whole idea of time being linear, evenly spaced and adhering to some widely-agreed-upon logic has essentially disappeared for everyone but die-hard literalists. As if poets and naturalists who always saw time as more malleable and less rigid have always right. Leave it to Gumbs, a poet, to try to make sense of this. (Note: reading this on the last day of 2020 felt important.) “So then, why do I look up? Because I crave a longer perspective. Looking up, allowing myself to perceive or imagine light reflected to me from 1,000 light-years away makes me feel both small and expansive. And while movies set in space and private shuttles to other planets seem to be fueled by futurism, I would say that they are just as obsessed with the past. They are backward facing. When I look into the stars, I am looking into a past long before my lifetime.”
Jon Ross, “Marion Brown's Musical Portrait of Georgia” (Bitter Southerner 1/12/21) | Though saxophonist Marion Brown is a major figure in the late-Trane Impulse!/”New Thing” moment of the 1960s, and the more creative music-minded compositional/improvisational milieux that followed, he’s not been “seminal” enough to get a lot of ink in the best of times. (In fact, I first came to him through his son, the fantastic DJ and sometime Afropunk Djinji Brown.) Reading this great profile, especially in a boutique publication like Bitter Southerner, I couldn’t help wondering what came first, the gorgeous never-before-seen images by Larry Fink, or Jon Ross’ pitch. But this overview of Marion’s career, which gives extra space for his early-’70s “Georgia Trilogy” (making it thematically relevant for the magazine), features interviews with the likes of Wadada Leo Smith and Chick Corea, is supple and multi-faceted and right on time. It’s a lovely historical poem to Brown’s Atlanta, echoing some of the musician’s own work. “The title track on ‘Georgia Faun” is not about the notes played or the facility of each performer; Brown didn’t even pick up his saxophone during the 17-minute tune, but the ideas, the organization, and the feeling are his own. In fact, nearly all of the musicians on the record stayed away from their primary instruments. Brown played a zomari, a Tanzanian double reed instrument, and various forms of percussion; saxophonists Anthony Braxton and Bennie Maupin can be heard on wooden flutes, evoking birds and woodland life. The emotive quality of the sounds is paramount. Brown hewed to this concept throughout the trio of records. He catalogued the sound world of ‘Georgia Faun,’ describing experiences and memories from his childhood. ‘Things that I saw and heard each day going from my house to school, church, visiting, roaming with my dog and a BB gun looking for birds to shoot. We cooked them over open fire in thick patches of woods near where I lived, he said in an interview for 1973’s Notes to Afternoon of a Georgia Faun: views and reviews. ‘It was also,’ he continued, ‘the things my ears enjoyed: birds singing outside my window, dogs barking, a rooster crowing in the morning, crickets in the summer, the sound of people having a good time in one of the houses where those good times are had, standing outside the sanctified church at night enjoying music, and the sound of happy feet stamping furiously, in tune with the preacher and themselves.’
Amirah Mercer, “A Homecoming” (Eater 1/14/21) | Shortly before we entered quarantine, I received Vegetable Kingdom, the Black vegan chef Bryant Terry’s latest cookbook, as a media item, and it has actively changed my diet. Terry is a central character in this excellent piece about the vegetarian dietary traditions in the communities of the African diaspora. And even if you don’t care about “food writing,” Mercer’s story of becoming vegetarian is great at shaping the argument of popular history distorting deep-rooted norms; of how philosophical thinking can simultaneously lead to both extravagantly misguided results and foundational truths; and how something can be good and bad for you at once. “Food is political, and that is especially true for Black Americans. A lack of access to healthy food is a problem that disproportionately affects Black and Latino communities—a condition that the U.S. Department of Agriculture formally describes as a ‘food desert,’ though the food justice activist Karen Washington prefers the more apt term ‘food apartheid—which are defined in large part by the nearly century-long legacy of redlining. Decades of U.S. agricultural policies that overwhelmingly favor meat, dairy, and corn have caused many Americans to load up on a diet rich in fatty, processed, and refined foods, but the ill effects of the standard American diet (appropriately also called the SAD diet) are heightened for racial and ethnic minorities. Systemic racism within the dietetics industry has kept Black dietitians out of the field — their number has fallen by nearly 20 percent over the last two decades — while the resulting Eurocentric view of diet and nutrition has severely constrained its approach to non-Western cuisines and cultures. Not only is there a lack of knowledge about the nutritional foundation of many traditional diets, but people from non-Western cultures are pushed toward Westernized views of health and wellness even though, for instance, people of color are generally less able to process dairy products. Both health care and food policies are greatly affected by who is voted into office. Unfortunately, African Americans have historically been and continue to be victims of voter suppression, which takes away our ability to advocate for health care policies that nourish our families. And so for many in the Black vegan community, plant-based eating can be an act of protest against this disenfranchisement. Much like the Black Panther Party did through its free breakfast program in 1969, today’s food activists seek to build a conscious community by way of nutrition….In 2020, ‘Black Lives Matter’ has come to encompass a more holistic approach to well-being — whether in public, while interacting with the police, or in private, via self-care, health, and nutrition.”
Adam Shatz, “The Composer Tyshawn Sorey Enters a New Phase” (New York Times Magazine 1/7/21) | It’s probably fair to call Shatz my favorite jazz features writer regularly working in mainstream publications nowadays. (His annual piece of the Times Magazine is always a must-read, though his writing in the New York Review of Books is even better.) Here he engages the socially complex story of a singular artist. Sorey is both a player and composer, a bridge between musical traditions that society has actively segregated. It has made him a sexy “genius” figure over the past few years, a perfect hip name to be dropped at the (Zoom) water-cooler conversation about difficult music. Shatz’s piece goes a long way towards explaining the actual burden of doing all this “genius” work that the canon actively resists—especially when its being done by a Black man in white arts temples. “Sorey sometimes says his work is about ‘nothing’ other than itself, but also describes it as ‘the means through which I “talk” about social issues and other matters.’ Both are true at once: His music is formally abstract but also permeated by his experience, especially his experience of Blackness. This does not always express itself in obvious or even audible ways; until recently, it has tended to emerge obliquely, down in what Ralph Ellison called the ‘lower frequencies.’ Lately, however, Sorey has become more explicit about the moral and political passions beneath the rarefied surface of his aesthetics, writing vocal music set to poetry about Black lives. Silence and abstraction may remain his pillars, but he has given them a more explicit context and grounded them in more accessible forms.” (RELATED: Tyshawn Sorey’s Trio, also featuring Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano, is livestreaming from the Village Vanguard this weekend, Feb. 5-7. Highly Recommended.)
Rubin Naiman, “In Exile From the Dreamscape” (Aeon 12/24/20) | Not just a scientific, creative and phenomenological breakdown on the importance of dreaming, but the physical importance of the mystery. How some of the things that can’t be fully explained actually enable people to live better and more fully, even as it leaves us grasping at explanations many are often taught that it is impossible to live without. “[D]reams, especially big dreams, are a natural and effective way of negotiating troubled times. And we live in troubled times. In this great era of globalization—of global warming, an economics of greed, and pandemics—our dreams readily reflect the expanse of the collective unconscious, of shared hopes and dark forebodings. Indeed, we see reports of increased dreams and nightmares in these times. Rather than push those nightmares and phantoms aside, we might engage in what Carl Jung called ‘shadow work’—a process of dialoguing with frightening dream images. This can be done while dreaming lucidly or afterward by reliving the dream. The essence of shadow work involves finding diamonds in coal, discovering a precious something buried in what appears to be a dark and dirty place. How we negotiate dark dreams parallels how we approach similar waking-life challenges. Such dreams not only reveal our approach, but also provide opportunities to consciously evolve it.”
Let’s face it: at the moment, New York City really sucks in promoting its homegrown culture, especially on the musical side. (Not just pandemic era either…) There is no media voice (and no Voice) listening to all the boroughs and neighborhoods, talking about what’s going on, contextualizing the haps for the curious. And no, Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele’s crucial dance-music ‘zine Love Injection is NOT that central depository of today’s musical New York, but it appreciates both the grand myth of the city’s clubs and DJs, and the individual stories that helped shape that myth; and it exists to bring it to you because so few people will frame it that way. Having started publishing in 2015, the magazine is now on issue #59, and its balancing act shows no signs of teetering. The new issue has an interview with Michael Holman, an artist, party promoter and musician (1979-81, he was in the band Gray with Jean-Michel Basquiat) whose career is woven into the fabric of the city’s club scene; a conversation with the Detroit-to-Brooklyn techno transplant Lauren Flax; a Francois K appreciation of Danceteria’s legendary DJ Mark Kamins, and more. Physical copies of Love Injection can be found around town and at discerning record stores around the world—even more so now, since they got global distribution earlier this month—or else as PDFs on their site.
Also reading:
Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One; Wanda Coleman, Wicked Enchantment; Nathaniel Mackey, Bass Cathedral; Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones; William Sites, Sun Ra’s Chicago