The Embiggening: Day One
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Day one is in the books
Went to the opening remarks, which drew a standing room crowd at the Visit Knoxville listening room. Glad I went, as I was able to hear Anna & Elizabeth harmonize beautifully and to get a 15 minute master class demonstration from Bela Fleck, from raga to “Sound of Silence” to jazz standards to traditional breakdowns, the history of the banjo in a pair of hands.
But the first official concert was the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) performing “In the Light of Air” by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir. That this was performed by an ensemble called ICE was more than fitting. This music made cold palpable and, oddly enough, alluring. Five musicians – piano, harp, violin, percussion, and cello – created washes of sound, waves cascading over waves. The feeling of traveling on a boat, slowly, with great chunks of ice clanking against the hull, giving way to sunrise, and noonlight glimmering on water, to sunset, to chill nighttime, to another sunset.
The Mill & Mine hosted this show, and it was the perfect venue. The ensemble was arrayed on the floor, with the audience encircling the players. This configuration is where Mill & Mine shines. The warehouse resonates like the finest concert hall, with the added benefit of the audience sitting literally a few feet away from the musicians. The proximity is key to the transformative effects of the music. Not just transformative: transportive. The capacity crowd was transfixed for an hour, and likely could have taken an hour more.
Quickly from there to The Standard to hear Susan Alcorn redefine the parameters of the pedal steel guitar. She played a piece by Messiaen and two pieces by tango legend Astor Piazzola. The “Invierno porteno” – the Winter Tango – was devastating in its beauty. Alcorn has uncovered elements of the pedal steel that were hard to imagine, but that seem perfectly logical once you hear and see her work. Her original compositions – especially the one inspired by the sickness- inducing meal she got on a transatlantic flight – are little gems. The i2b team spent a few minutes at the gorgeous Tennessee Theater listening to Marc Ribot and David Hidalgo. They delivered gritty blues and Latinx folk tunes, an affable pair of pickers who seemed more like they were on someone’s front porch than a theater stage. Good stuff, and the crowd loved.
A quick scamper back to Mill & Mine for a solo set from cellist Okkyung Lee. This was a take no prisoners event. Lee has all the chops you could ask for from a well-trained cellist, but she was not bringing that style. Scrapes, harmonics, low bleats, swirls of sounds: this is her bag, Ascension via cello, relentless and committed. At one point, her high register scrabblings began to sound like a Braxton or Roscoe Mitchell sopranino solo, complete with keypad tappings and the dog whinny yelps. Gorgeous work, exceptionally well received.
Okkyung Lee wishes to inform you that everything you think you know about the cello is wrong.
Dash across the railroad tracks, back to The Standard for a set by my pals Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel (D4T&LS). I have heard these guys dozens of times – and played with them a few – and I have never heard them better than tonight. At last, a sound system that can deliver what they intend, from delicate whisper to ground-rattling bottom to shimmering clouds of ambient float. They have two more appearances this weekend. Catch one or be sorry.
Finally, back to Mill & Mine for the sonic mayhem of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I can think of several reasons to not like this performance – lack of rhythmic/tempo variety, overly simple composition and harmonic development chief among them. But I loved it. It was way, way, way fucking loud, a blast of feedback and howling from the 9-piece group. They know each other, and they know what they are trying to do: their music is an outgrowth of the ColtraneAscension aesthetic, a headlong pursuit of transcendence through sheer sonic excess.
It’s easy to hear references to the great sonic explorers of rock – Hendrix, The Who, Led Zep, Floyd, and especially King Crimson – all of whom absorbed the Coltranian zeitgeist that transformed not just “jazz”, but rock-based seekers as well.
Both D4T&LS and Godspeed benefited from intelligently curated film imagery. Godspeed’s film technician really deserves full band member credit, his elaborate dance – managing four 8-mm projectors and a large spinning carousel of film loops to choose from – as much a part of the performance as anything else.
And speaking of film, there is an enormous film festival component to Big Ears. Can your intrepid correspondent find time for a moving picture show?
Stay tuned.
Ears Embiggened: Rova
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The Rova Saxophone Quartet played in Atlanta tonight, a little sneak preview of the coming sonic onslaught of Big Ears. Two sets, unamplified, in the beautifully resonant Existentialist Congregation Church in Candler Park. There was a decent little crowd in attendance that knew how to listen and unpocket their cash for CDs. Rova is appearing twice at Big Ears, once in the Knoxville Museum of Art (Friday at 2 p.m.) as a quartet. The sound in that building is perfect for Rova, which is celebrating its 40th year as an ensemble.
Consider that, the level of commitment that entails. No knock on the fellas (who are really fine company over a good meal), but this is not music to get rich by. Yet they have hung together, recording around three dozen albums and collaborating along the way with a brigade of prominent musicians, dancers, and composers.
Tonight’s show was primarily material from their latest album, In Transverse Time. The high point of their two sets was the lengthy composition “Hidden in Ochre”, a composition by tenor saxist Larry Ochs. At 24 minutes, this is not an easy pull for most audiences. The moods shift, there are alternating segments of silken beauty and percussive splats. It is in some ways a prototypical Rova piece, a stealthy mix of composition and improvisation that – like the best of what was once called ‘avant garde’ or ‘new music’, and is now really just music – often leaves the listener wondering where the composition/improvisation border resides. No matter. The crowd fairly exploded at the quiet conclusion of this piece.
Pre-show, the quartet played a few notes of Coltrane’s Ascension, a brief teaser for their Saturday midnight show at the Bijou. Rova Channeling Coltrane: Electric Ascension will feature the quartet alongside the likes of Nels Cline, Jenny Scheinman, Okkyung Lee, Cyro Baptista, Yuka Honda, Ches Smith, and Mazz Swift. It is one of the red star, must see events of the Big Ears banquet.
Coltrane’s Ascension, recorded summer of 1965, is one of the most radically transformative works in the music some call jazz. It is also one of the most controversial: the seemingly unbridled energy belies a structural underpinning that listeners often miss. This structure forms the foundation of Rova’s recreation. This is not cover band mimicry, but rather an attempt to tap into the energetic stream that Coltrane was cultivating in his later period. This is music in pursuit of ecstatic immersion, a headlong dive into the possibilities of transcendence through souuuuund. It is also a logical extension of Trane’s pursuit of the transcendence – a headlong pursuit of what some call Godhead – that became apparent with A Love Supreme.
But damn. Ascension was hard listening for anyone trying to squeeze it into a jazz frame, or into any kind of frame that isn’t Ascension itself. Since then, sonic explorations of this nature have become part of the accepted vocabulary, and at its worst, a set of cliches deployed by players who lack the depth and chops to make it really work. But even in the most capable hands, this is not easy listening by any stretch. Here comes that word again: commitment.
Lucky for us, Rova and their assembled cadre have the inside- playing credibility to turn their outside excursions into something worth hearing. It’s worth the commitment.
Some folks – like me – believe music can change the world. The fact that Rova has the impulse – much less the sheer audacity – to bring Ascension to life 50 years after the fact indicates that they believe it, too. This may be one reason why they have persevered for 40 years.
Ears Embiggened: Seven Bassoons. No, Really. Follow @immunetoboredom on Twitter or check back here for updates throughout the festival. Share this widely if you please.
Last year, Big Ears kicked off with nief norf (more on them soon) performing Michael Gordon’s composition “Timber”, a piece for six percussionists playing amplified 2×4 pieces of wood with mallets. It was one of the great surprises and thrills of the festival. It’s a terrific piece, hypnotizing and thrilling at the same time.
This year, nief norf is back (they are based in Knoxville at UT) and Bang on a Can is bringing it as well. But that’s for another post.
Hidden among the riches in the 2018 Big Ears schedule is the Rushes Ensemble on Saturday from 2-3 p.m. at the Knoxville Museum of Art. Now strangely, there is no mention of Rushes Ensemble on the festival lineup page, so they might be easy to miss.
Don’t. Miss them, I mean.
Rushes is a group of seven of the best bassoon players in the world. That alone is enough to pique interest, but their entire raison d’etre derives from a commission that led Michael Gordon to write a piece specifically for…yep…seven daggum bassoons.
It is hard to describe. The music takes much from Steve Reich’s pulsation methods, and while the overall effect is of something like a Fripp Soundscape – all washes and gorgeous drone – the ensemble is playing to a click track to ensure that the pulsations are overlapping precisely. Eventually, overtones begin to build that create illusions of instruments that are not actually there. I’ve experienced this effect before as both a musician and an audient. It is one of the rare and wondrous physical manifestations of music. The impact on deep listeners can be profound and emotional. It is both gentle and not for the faint of heart.
You can dig around on YouTube and find a performance of this piece by this group. I say, don’t do it. Just turn up Saturday afternoon and experience this for yourself in the acoustically lively atrium of the museum. This could well be the hidden gem of the whole danged festival.
You heard it here first. i2b never sleeps.
Ears Embiggened: The Fine Vibrations of the Well Plucked String
Another in a series of 2018 Big Ears Festival previews courtesy of the i2b staff. All one of us. Share this widely if you please.
A passel of soul-thieving tempters in disguise; Pythagoras was fascinated by them, developed several laws of physics by observing them, and found his way to proposing a cosmology based on those laws. The well plucked string is a slippery damn slope, no question. Ask anyone who has a bottomless guitar collecting habit. Or ask their significant other.
There’s something irresistible about an exquisitely excited string. Acoustic or electric, nylon or steel or gut, strung taut over wood or gourd or some kind of animal skin – or even an old cigar box or tin can. Cleanly replicated or tormented beyond recognition by tubes, transistors, and unholy volumes. Plucked, strummed, bowed or otherwise placed in motion, the string is the elemental sound of life, of sex, of sadness and joy, mourning and loss and ecstasy on a strand of molecular vibration. If recent physics theory is to be believed, the string is essence of all existence.
Pythagoras was no fool.
So the old guy he would have been beside himself at the prospect of the string ticklers scheduled at this year’s Big Ears. You’ve got banjos (Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn chief among many) and dobro (Jerry Douglas is as good as any musician on the planet). A highlight of the 2017 fest, Wu Fei returns with her gezheng in duet with Washburn and as the leader of a massive “improvisation game” at the Knoxville Museum of art. Deep-dive folk archivers Anna & Elizabeth might wield any manner of stringy thingy as serendipity demands.
There’s a string quartet – Brooklyn Rider in full and in collab with Fleck, and their violinist will present a concert of the entire Bach solo violin repertoire – and the string sections of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, together, apart, re-configured, hell, hanging upside down from a chandelier, even. Anything is possible.
Cellist Okkyung Lee draws sounds out of her instrument that are surprising and soothing and sometimes disturbing. Violinist Jenny Scheinman brings her distinctive jazz/folk/rock voicings in multiple contexts, from trad with silent films (Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait) to a paint- peeling Coltrane-ish howl for Rova’s Electric Ascension. (Trust me, you’ve heard her, either with Bill Frisell or Norah Jones or Lucinda Williams or too many others to list. You’ve heard her. And she is fantastic.) Aine O’Dwyer is certain to play the harp – the proper harp, the thing that looks like the inside of a piano – though tbh, I am hoping she plays her Music for Church Cleaners for pipe organ.
Pedal steel player Susan Alcorn takes her instrument way outside the expected mainstream suggested by its history. She can shift on a dime, from dreamy twang to terrifying yowls, but always with a connection to the instrument’s traditional heritage. Lap steel player Frank Schultz – half of the aptly named Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel – tends to a more gentle approach, coaxing dream tones and reverberations that compliment Scott Burlands oddball sci-fi doohickey clouds.
From Africa, Tal National and Innov Gnawa blend electric guitars and traditional instruments like the sintir to induce trance with an interlocking sound that will drag even the most doubly-left footed lunk onto the dance floor. Be prepared. You will dance and you will sweat.
Then there are your basic, run of the mill guitar players. Right. The guitarists at Big Ears this year are a veritable hero gallery. Nels Cline, Arto Lindsay, Marc Ribot, David Hidalgo, and Mary Halvorson – a lineup akin to the 1927 Yankees, heavy hitters every one of them – are on hand to demonstrate pretty much the full range of what a guitar has to offer. And no slouch herself, Anoushka Shankar, daughter of Ravi and established sitar master in her own right, brings her poignant piece about immigration, “Land of Gold”, to the Historic Tennessee Theater. One of the festival’s must-see events, you can expect a big crowd for this one, so go early if you want a good seat.
Have I missed anyone? You bet. Godspeed You Black Emperor fields a trio of guitarists as part of their sonic onslaught, and Atlanta-based Algiers thrashes with the best of them. And we haven’t even begun to talk about the broad array of bluegrass/traditional pickers that will be literally all over downtown Knoxville throughout the festival.
We could go on, yes, we could. And we will, with coverage throughout the weekend from our crack team. i2b never sleeps.
Ears Embiggened: Big Ears Sensory Overload
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The Big Ears Festival in Knoxville is, for me, the singular music event of the year. Four days jam packed with more music than you can shake a stick at, and way more than you can hope to catch. It is a banquet that offers far more than you can possibly sample, even if your appetite is yoooge. The option anxiety I face as I try to wrangle the Big Ears schedule into a digestible menu is fierce. I know I will miss something that I will regret. And yet…
And yet that doesn’t even begin to address the film portion of the programming, a subset to the music that is arguably as strong as most film festivals that stand on their own ground. And then there are the literary events, and the panel discussions, and the Sunday morning brunch and the beer exchange and the various and sundry places to get your coffee/food/beer/wine thing happening. And a day long bluegrass hoedown in Market Square and and and.
Promoter Ashley Capps tells us this embarrassment of riches is not as sadistically perverse as it might appear. While acknowledging that many people try to chart an expeditious dash between conflicting events, his suggestion is to make a choice and stick with it. You can worry about what you are missing or you can immerse in the where-you-are. Be here now, as the old Ram Dass book suggests.
Look at it as something of an exercise is Zen acceptance: you are either going to hear Milford Graves – a jazz legend who, among other notable achievements, played with Albert Ayler at John Coltrane’s funeral – or you can catch the vitally important Anna & Elizabeth and their excavations of Appalachian culture. Even for an inveterate jazzbo like Your Narrator, this is no easy choice. Graves is a living icon of the music; A&E are fantastic performers and serious historians. Where will I end up at 4.30 pm on Friday? I won’t know until 4.15. I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as I do.
These kinds of conflicts abound. Another big choice awaits on Saturday morning. Violinist Jenny Scheinman presents Kannapolis: A Moving Portrait from 12.30 – 1.30. It’s a mixed media show, with old film footage and new/old music set to evoke the history of an area of North Carolina and Tennessee just before WWII. But at 1 p.m., Rhiannon Giddens – founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, music historian, and Guggenheim fellow – delivers a keynote address. This is a woman with something to say about, say, the musical history of North Carolina and Tennessee.
A week ago, these events did not overlap on the schedule, but at Big Ears, scheduled events can change. Add to that the “secret events”, appearance that you only find out about hours or minutes before they take place. One of your favorites, popping up in a one-of-a-kind collaboration. The hell? You thought you knew what your were doing. You have to adapt, think on your feet. Improvise. Make a choice and live with it.
This is tough for an OCD fellow like Your Narrator. My greatest fear is that I will die with the best book ever written sitting on my nightstand, unopened. That I will not get around to hearing all the music that needs to be heard, the movie that will change my insight, the simple turn of phrase in a poem that will be the click in the lock that is really all I needed to understand, to just simply underfuckingstand, don’t you get it?
Perhaps you can understand my dilemma. It’s a funny thing, this dance between accepting a gift with gratitude or looking just behind the giver to see what you might grab if you just…If only…What about…
Now if I could only figure out what to do about the conflict between Craig Taborn and the Bang on a Can All-Stars.
Curse you, Capps!
Ears Embiggening: A Roscoe Mitchell Preview
The first in a series of preview posts for Big Ears 2018. Share this widely if you please.
Last year, somebody that looks like me called Big Ears “the best festival pound-for-pound in the United States”. It was a lush feast, damn near too much for any human to absorb in a four-day stretch.
And now comes the 2018 version which is, probably, better. As always, there are big themes at play in the Big Ears lineup, and central characters from which a great deal of the action emanates. Perhaps it is a function of personal bias, but I’d call this the Year of Roscoe Mitchell.
I have been a fan of Roscoe Mitchell since a spring day in 1979 when I attended a concert by the Art Ensemble of Chicago in Athens, GA. Over the years, I found myself driving preposterous distances to see them perform.
Mitchell is recently enjoying something of a moment, with multiple album releases and large-scale commissions (he was wrapping up an orchestral recording when I spoke to him a few days before the Festival) and glowing notices in the NY Times and the Village Voice (among others). It might seem as if this is some sort of comeback, but the man has been composing, performing, and recording at a steady clip for a little more than 50 years now.
(His debut, Sound, came out in 1966 on the Delmark label, and featured future Art Ensemble partners Lester Bowie and Malachi Favors. It is a landmark in modern music. Listen.)
Last year, ECM released his Bells for the South Side, recorded live in 2015 at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art as part of an exhibition devoted to the 50th-anniversary of Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.
Mitchell’s output far exceeds the capacity of any single label to release it all, but there seems no shortage of outlets for his work.
Chuck Nessa worked for Delmark whenSound was released. Mitchell and Lester Bowie urged him to split away and form his own label. In 1967, the first Nessa release, Numbers 1 & 2 under Lester’s name, is another groundbreaker, and a clearer antecedent to the Art Ensemble with the addition of Joseph Jarman. In 2018, Nessa released Ride the Wind by Roscoe Mitchell and the Montreal – Toronto Art Orchestra. Mitchell plays on just one track here, a blistering sopranino sax solo on “They Rode for Them – Part 2”. Click here folks. School’s in.
(I love how, when he finished tearing the roof off, he steps back calmly and puts his hand in his pocket. So smooth.)
The rest of the album is an orchestral performance based on transcription of a Mitchell Trio performance from 2013. It is wondrous, and a fine example of the range of structures he is ready to deploy in an effort to keep his music from standing still.
The man will be 78 this year, yet the pace of his activity – not to mention the considerable level of fitness necessary for his performances – shows no indication of diminishing. Wherever he plays at Big Ears, I will be there, jaw hanging.
I have not always understood Mitchell’s music, and to be honest, there have been times when I have been utterly befuddled and even put off. But I have never been sorry I listened to his work. Much like his fellow AACM pioneer Anthony Braxton, Roscoe’s music so clearly demonstrates intelligence, passion, and commitment that – even when I can’t figure out wtf is happening – my gut tells me to stop thinking and let the music do its work. Analysis can come later. Beyond that, it is utterly his own. He sounds like no one except Roscoe Mitchell. There are damn few artists in any discipline who match that description.
In the moment, whether it is the monumental wash of sound he generates through his phenomenal technique
The guiding light of the 2017 festival was the late Pauline Oliveros, and really, she might as well just wear that honor forever. She once held the Darius Milhaud Chair in Composition at Mills College that Mitchell now fills. Their music is similar in that it rewards deep listening in a way that defies description. Try it.
My Summer of Reading Dangerously
Summer of 2017 found me reading voraciously around considerations of race – whatever that might really be – and the legacy of America’s original sin. I have been increasingly fascinated by the Civil War and both its pre- and after-maths over the past ten years or so. A few years back, an up and coming blogger at The Atlantic ran a series of posts documenting his immersion, as a Black American, into the history of that period. His name: Ta-Nehisi Coates. I became a big fan. The publication of hisBetween the World and Me sparked an interest in James Baldwin, and I was lucky enough to catch I Am Not Your Negro in Berkeley the week it was released. That led to a near-obsessive consumption of Baldwin.
Last spring, I noticed a young historian on Twitter plugging an upcoming book that fit into the larger themes and questions I’d been mulling. The theme struck a resonant chord. I was lucky enough to befriend Keri Leigh Merritt and meet her over drinks once in Atlanta. Her book – the one at the top of the pile in the photo – turned out to exceed high expectation, so I tried to place a review in at least a half-dozen publications. Alas, I failed. Fortunately, the book has done well without my help, appearing in paperback just last month.
Now I’m tired of sitting on this piece. It took me months to research and write. That pile of books at the top of this post is only part of the background material. In the end, I whittled the article down to focus on four of these, but the remainder loomed large. Not to mention all the material not pictured.
So without further ado…
The Racialization of the White Underclass
Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, Keri Leigh Merritt,
Cambridge University Press (2017)
White Trash: The 400 Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg, Viking
(2016)
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, JD Vance, Harper,
(2016)
The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter, WW Norton & Co. (2010)
The ongoing how-could-it-be narrative of our unexpected President fixes on convenient stereotype: the typical Trump voter is white and economically anxious, the forgotten average man (sic) typified by a Norman Rockwell-ish shorthand that presents small-town America as more “real” than the rest of the nation. What was it, media chin pullers pondered, that made this group susceptible to such transparent charlatanism?
Never mind that voter data shows majorities of whites across classes/genders/regions voted Trump. The idea that the aggrieved white underclass was his true base allowed liberal White America to pin the blame on its lesser brethren/sistren. The crackers. The rubes. Convenient shorthand was convenient, and accuracy take the hindmost. The historic racialization of the White underclass was gaining momentum. Again.
What explains the angst of the white underclass? So many factors; so little time. The decline of the family farm? Offshored manufacturing? The war on coal? Coastal media/banker elites?
Maybe it’s this old chestnut: the resentment of welfare state handouts to Those PeopleTM. Never mind that underclass whites benefit from these programs disproportionately more than any other population. Convenient answers are preferred.
In 2016, J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy appeared astride a substantial marketing juggernaut. A handsome Horatio Alger poster child of pure pluck and will rising Phoenix-like from Appalachian squalor. An impressive story.
His memoir, not so much. Elegy is narratively predictable and reliant on facile description and cliché that veers into poverty porn. Just look at those wretched people! He evinces scant warmth or humor, though one could perhaps accept his defiant use of the hillbilly insult as at least a tad ironic, the white guy’s version of a rapper’s n-word self- identification. He can say it. You can’t.
But hey! Certainly this coal country escapee – a veteran of the Marine Corps, Yale Law School, and a stint at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm – has insight into root causes and possible solutions. What is his hopeful message?
Be more like J.D.! Try harder!
Stop taking drugs, having kids, being shiftless. Work harder, quit yer damn bellyaching about the boss. If you’re down, it’s your fault for not grabbing the American dream, even if you were born into a dying town filled with addictions and empty of prospects. Bill Cosby’s ‘hillbilly’ equivalent, Vance offers tough love for the losers and lets the winners off the hook.
Vance ignores structural considerations like the role of monopoly capitalism in fostering social conditions that led Rust Belt laborers into psychological dependence, not on government handouts, but on the scant largesse of company town economics. That this might lie at the root of the near- religious devotion of coal miners to the coal economy does not merit Vance’s consideration. Cradle to grave dependence on mine or factory? No worries. Dependence on government assistance to survive a dead and gone economic paradigm? Get off your ass and make something of yourself, moochers.
The comforting appeal of his fatalist message – “The poor will always be with us. Why worry?” – is undeniable: 73 consecutive weeks and counting on the NY Times bestseller list. Ron Howard has begun production on a movie adaptation; one can scarcely imagine the bathos to come.
Recall Ragged Dick: “Thank you for your kind advice. Is it gratooitous, or do you expect to be paid for it?”
Vance expects to be paid and he does what he must to cash the check. His views align nicely with those who might sign his checks. Reports have Vance in talks to join the Heritage Foundation or the Breitbart media empire. Far be it for me to question Vance’s sincerity of belief. It has worked for him. He is indeed an exceptional hillbilly. We should all be so lucky.
Lucky for aging, Southern white guys like me (statistically, you would be forgiven for mistaking me as a Trump voter), there is plenty of literature available to help understand the racial dynamics of our society and how my tribe arrived at this historic moment of culpability and opportunity.
Nancy Isenberg, Professor of American History at Louisiana State University, offers a considered look at the mechanism and fallout of White underclass racialization from Colonial America to the present in White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America. Isenberg made the NYT list for a shorter time than Vance, though it recently re-appeared on the list in paperback. Let’s hope this more affordable version gives it second wind.
Published in May, 2017, Keri Leigh Merritt’s debut book lends detailed support to Isenberg’s survey. Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, is a vivid and nuanced look at the impacts of slavery on the White underclass in the Deep South. Her approach is broadly interdisciplinary, with a keen eye for intersections of economics, labor, education, and law enforcement policies that create conditions that define the underclass and limit its means of rising to prosperity.
First, let’s consider an older book: The History of White People, published in 2010 by Nell Irvin Painter, Emeritus Professor of History at Princeton and one of our most cogent thinkers on the irreality of race and the realities of racism. It is impossible to read at any length about race theory without encountering Painter’s work. Fortunately, she matches her scholarship with an exceptionally readable style; her books are hefty, but they read fast.
Painter reaches even farther back than Isenberg to look at the roots of racial conceptualizing in ancient Greece. Then as now, these categorizations were based in the need to rationalize domination and enslavement of one group of people over another. Racializing the conquered applied moral salve to the act of enslavement.
Until relatively recently, racial classification had little to do with skin tone and everything to do with geographic origin and the supposed ingrained traits created by certain climates, topographies, and humors of the blood. (Yes, it is as crazy as it sounds.) The people we think of as White Europeans were finely sliced into an almost innumerable set of categories.
As Enlightenment Europeans (men, naturally) began to dominate the field, they turned to more scientific metrics like the cephalic index; sizes and shapes of human skulls were thought to hold the key to understanding racial differences and the innate superiority/inferiority of the different races.
In the end, science was the undoing of racialist theory. The human genome map puts paid to any assertion that race is biologically determined. Never mind the hopeful television commercials offering to pin down your ethnicity via genetic testing: the identicality of 99.9% of the human genome across skin colors, cultures, and ethnicities backs up Painter’s contention that race is a purely social construct. In September, 2017, she offered this uncategorical refutation of racial categorization: “There is no such thing as the “white race” — or any other race.”
Painter and Isenberg highlight that the first indentured cohort in America was largely White, albeit whites of lesser humanity: waste people, disposable and endlessly replaceable. Skin tone as the primary demarcation of racial identity came later, coincident with the Africanization of the slave trade. When slave identity became overwhelmingly melanin-based, expiation of the original sin demanded a melanin-based theoretical underpinning. Such science simplified enforcement as well.
Painter and Isenberg present mutually reinforcing histories. Where Painter tracks evolving justifications for racialization in general, Isenberg focuses on specific mechanisms that brought underclass whites to heel. Beginning with the forcible ejection of Europe’s degenerate class to the “waste firm” of America, the colonies became the convenient dumping ground where “the surplus poor, the waste people of England, could be converted into economic assets.”
The vast majority of European settlers traveled to America under terms of indebted servitude. Once in America, their fortunes rarely improved. Convicts, offered the carrot of freedom in return for a set term of servitude, “would be employed at heavy labor”. Few received wages. Many died. But that was fine; there were plenty more where those came from. This callous disdain for the humanity of the underclass – regardless of skin color – remains a fixture of American life 400 years along.
Significantly, white servants at least held out hope for eventual liberation where their enslaved counterparts knew they must either escape or die in slavery. It is one among many of the “hey, at least we’re better off than those folks” ideas that persuaded a substantially oppressed and denigrated underclass to side with their overseers and against their logical allies. Keeping poor whites even a baby step above the lot of Black folks has been a hallmark of divisive manipulation in America from the beginning.
(Sadly, this kind of slicing stratification – Creole v. Black, Catholic v. Protestant, Hutus v. Tutsis, &c. – remains a global phenomenon.)
Isenberg’s history traces the othering of “white trash” into the present, through the caricatures of Depression era cartoons like Lil Abner, the personae of Elvis Presley and Andy Griffith, and 60s sitcoms like The Beverly Hillbillies and its kissing cousins. These stereotypes find more recent form in the mockeries of shows like Duck Dynasty and the Honey Boo-boo clan. No matter that the purveyors of these tropes make fun of themselves; while they laugh all the way to the bank, their antics give the rest of America permission to scorn everyone who fits under their umbrella, evoking pride of heritage even as they make it ridiculous. Is the anxiety so surprising?
Racialization of poor whites was a continent-wide affair, with various waves of European immigrants (Irish, Italian, German, and especially Jews) bearing the brunt of the previous wave’s frustration at being racialized. But it was especially acute in the Deep South.
In Masterless Men, Merritt explores the realities of White poverty in this culture. This group was generally illiterate, so primary sources are rare. Merritt overcomes this documentary gap through examination of official documents in small town and county courthouses. Civil and criminal court proceedings/pleadings illustrate the tenuous lives of the underclass. Primarily non-propertied, this largest segment of Southern whites derived no benefit from slavery. Arguably, the massive source of free labor via slavery ruined the labor value of white workers. On top of that, the ability of landowners to leverage slave value – in the form of their labor and collateral property value – gave the aristocracy outsized power over less wealthy whites to enlarge their landholdings and dominate commerce in their constrained economic realm. Little surprise then that underclass support of secession and war was thin and riddled with resentment. Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight.
Interaction among poor whites and slaves, both economically and socially, fostered anxiety among the elite. Sexual liaisons created offspring that defied easy categorization – hence the fractional madness of quadroons, octoroons, one drop rules, &c. Owners of humans also feared the idea of slave/white commerce: stolen food and tools exchanged for liquor and other goods, maybe even escape. But the greatest fear of all – a broad class alliance that might portend revolt – haunted the landowners. Legalistic control mushroomed, including confiscatory taxation and limits on voting rights.
The greatest tool in the aristocracy’s arsenal was the Olde English prohibition of vagrancy. Broadly defined, vagrancy statutes allowed landholder-dominated local governments to punish anyone outside the ownership economy. Ostensibly designed to discourage citizens from being lazy layabouts, those who labored least – e.g., landed slave holders – were exempt by virtue of property ownership.
Convicted vagrants were provided to property holders who would pay their fines in exchange for a period of servitude. Convicted servants received little to no pay, yet another suppression of the value of labor as measured by wages. On top of providing valuable labor at low cost, these legal instruments were about keeping people in their place. The word vagrant was synonymous with epithets for poor whites: hobo, tramp, trash. The waste people.
Vagrancy statutes were also useful in controlling female sexuality. Women who traded their bodies for money – or even those who expressed themselves through drink and “lasciviousness” – were targets. This fear of loose morality – especially acute in light of Southern anxiety about the purity of its women – found further expression in miscegenation statutes. Taken together, the legal and economic restrictions on poor whites were as effective as the control conferred by slavery, albeit far less violent and at least offering the illusory hope of escaping the leash. But with the disruption of families, lack of work opportunities, and the all but absolute refusal of the landed elite to fund education for the masses, any meaningful escape was unlikely.
In cruel irony, Emancipation’s aftermath found the Southern ruling elite shifting these same tools – vagrancy prosecutions chief among them – to facilitate the conversion of Black laborers into unpaid convicts and to deprive Blacks at large basic civil rights. Suspected miscegenation between Black men and white women was typically handled extra-judicially and horrifically, while sexual exploitation of Black women by white men was an assumed benefit of white manhood; punishment was deemed unnecessary. Finally, the South’s persistent hostility to universal education and suffrage, especially for Blacks but extending to poor whites, built a social superstructure that still exerts downward pressure on the Black and White underclass.
Painter, Isenberg, and Merritt serve up scholarship that is diligently resourced for anyone inclined to dig deeper. But while their formal structures are built to endure peer contention, their accessible and clear prose invites us into the material. They connect their research with current dynamics, a practice strangely controversial among some traditionalists who suggest such engagement might undermine academic impartiality. Naturally, this imaginary ‘view from nowhere’ posits a baseline worldview that has been dominant for centuries; ongoing upheavals in class/race/gender dynamics renders irrelevant this imaginary impartiality.
These scholars illuminate the exceptional precision with which the beneficiaries of division wield their pressures and propagandas. Historically, these efforts reach highest expression when economic and social conditions are at their most tenuous. We see this today in the rise and appeal of the alt-right, a movement largely steered by cossetted children of privilege – and various loyal climbers deemed worthy of ascent from the underclass – and filled out at the bottom by the undereducated, resentful, and easily manipulated targets of underclass racialization.
Critically, none of these writers equate white underclass sufferings to the depredations of slavery and Jim Crow. Rather, all three demonstrate that the parallel racializations of Blacks (as a whole) and underclass Whites (as a degenerate sub-population) constructed a hierarchy that places the White underclass fractionally above people of color, the better to encourage their counter-productive alliance with the predominantly-white upper class. White Americans of all social strata have proven enormously resilient in our adherence to the racially based hierarchy, economic self-interest be damned. The intentional racialization of underclass whites instills a dual sense of misplaced inferiority and aspirational identification toward a privileged class that is the natural enemy of the ‘waste people’.
White America can no longer compartmentalize what was once called the “Negro problem” any more than we can interrogate the discontents of poor Whites in isolation from other racialized groups. The racial divide is an invention based on false science, but the social costs of this structural inequity and manipulative miseducation are all too real.
Farewell, My Lovely
Keep your distance Keep your distance When I feel you close to me What can I do but fall Keep your distance Keep your distance With us it must be all or none at all*
First, I just need you to know. It’s not you. It’s me.
Through all this time, you never wavered. Your fine taste and ability to deliver potent delight only improved over time. From the first time I felt you on my tongue – me, a mere teenager with raging hormones and no experience in, well, anything – I was at your mercy, your slave in love. You were my constant companion, giver of comfort, shelter, delight. And perhaps most importantly: confidence.
Yes, with you at my side, my social insecurity and fears washed away on a sudsy wave. Emboldened by your strength, I was at last able to speak up, speak out, be seen. With you, I felt myself, at last, to be a man.
And you’ve always been there for me. Sure, I strayed away at times, occasionally tempted by a sassy Scottish lass or a robust Italian red. But it was you, always you and your yeasty kiss, that I came back to.
But no more, dearest. No more.
Somewhere along the way, your vixenish power outmatched my sense of proportion. I would begin to think longingly of you at mid-day, so anxious for our first evening embrace on the patio, or on the lawn, or an illicit dalliance in the office before the work day was through. And once we were together, there was nothing else but to drown in your amber beauty.
Your succor has become a toxin, my dear, and so I say to you, in sorrow more than anger: away and no more.
Make no mistake. As I nurse a bubbly pint glass of tonic and lime, it will surely be you that I am longing for. The empty husks of LaCroix, opened and drained with nary a thought to their pure and sparkly essence, will litter my wake, sad echoes of our once mighty passion.
And worse: there will be times, dearest, when I see you across a crowded room, the plaything of another. Perhaps someone who handles you with the tenderness we once knew, perhaps a rogue of rough trade who treats you cheaply, perhaps even knocking you over with sloppy ineptitude. Either way, your beauty will arouse memories (those that I can remember) of happier times. For truly, what ex-lover fails to be more beautiful when seen with a replacement suitor?
But still: the time has come when we can no longer. The passion is obliterated by habitual compulsion and disregard for the subtler delights on offer in this crazy world of ours.
Please don’t try to call.
Je ne regrette rien. Je regrette tout.
If I cross your path again Who knows where, who knows when On some morning without number On some highway without end Don’t grasp my hand and say Fate has brought you here today Fate is only fooling with us, friend*
* lyrics by Richard Thompson, 1991
America’s Virgil
At this point, just about everyone has at least heard of Ta- Nehisi Coates. His second book, Between the World and Me, won the 2015 National Book Award. Written as a letter to his teen- aged son, BTWAM has sold 1.5 million copies in 19 languages. He won a MacArthur “genius” award. His writing drew comparison to James Baldwin from no less a voice on high than Toni Morrison. He was anointed with dreadful millstone descriptions like “voice of a generation” or, even worse, “the conscience of his race”.
Now comes the follow-up, and it’s shaping up to be quite the media event. The reviews have been almost embrassingly laudatory and hagiographic profiles of Coates are popping up everywhere. The man himself has been making the rounds of all the high-profile venues. Just last night he sat down with Colbert.
So the burning question. IsWe Were Eight Years in Power worthy of the fuss?
Yeah, you better believe it is.
It would have been easy to just package a bunch of his Atlantic essays, slap an introduction up front, and call it a day. It likely would have been every bit as commercially successful as the more considered volume that hits the store shelves today will be. We Were Eight Years in Power collects those essays – one from each of the past 8 years – but instead of one big retrospective introduction, Coates has written an introduction to each essay, a sort of mini-essay on where he stood professionally and philosophically at the time. Running in parallel to the uber-phenomenon of the first black presidency is the micro-story of a college dropout from Baltimore coming to grips with his voice, his thinking, his place in the world, and eventually, his blazing rocket ascension into his role “as one of the most influential black intellectuals of his generation”, as the NY Times recently put it. And then, to cap it all off, Coates offers a new meditation on the rise of the inexcusable Trump, “The First White President”, that kicks the hornet’s nest anew. Here’s how I’d put it: Coates is shaping up to be America’s Virgil, the man of letters who will serve as our guide through the circles of hell built on the foundation of white supremacy, theft, murder, rape, and lying.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate. So let’s take a walk, shall we?
The essays alone, arranged chronologically and ranging from his look at the stern moralizing of a pre-disgrace Bill Cosby to the nightmare rise of a dim-witted game show host to the Oval Office, give the reader a tour through a young man’s mind as he comes to better know himself, his craft, and the world around. But even better: the new essays give us a matured writer in conversation with his younger self, chastising the flaws and failures and giving us a glimpse of struggles that should resonate with any writer.
One of the great pleasures in this volume lies in witnessing Coates’ gradual, and then sudden, development.
Coates backs up his provocative positions with solid evidence, but nobody turns to Coates for a recitation of statistics. He is one of the finest prose stylists alive. Every page brings at least one passage – a phrase, a sentence, an entire paragraph – that demands multiple re-readings.
At one point early in his ascent, he describes attending a dinner party where someone mentioned the Continental Divide, something he had never heard of at the time.
I did not know what the Continental Divide was, and I did not ask. Later I felt bad about this. I knew, even then, that whenever I nodded along in ignorance, I lost an opportunity, betrayed the wonder in me by privileging the appearance of knowing over the work of finding out.
Raise your hand if you ever pretended to know when you didn’t.
Coates writes at length about the influences that made him the writer he has become. He speaks frequently of his love of graphic novels
That was how I wanted to write – with weight and clarity, without sanctimony and homily. I could not even articulate why. I guess if forced I would have mumbled something about “truth.”
It’s easy to forget that just ten years ago, Coates was struggling to get his words out, struggling (and often failing) to provide for himself and his family. Struggling to find a voice. And grappling with the question of what, exactly, he needed to be writing about, when along comes a skinny guy mixed-race guy with a beautiful family and a very black name to upend the apple cart of assumptions about race. Coates was in the right place at the right time. And he had prepared for the moment, even if it would take a few years of hindsight to realize how fortune had smiled.
It’s not fair to say that Coates would not have “made it” absent the phenomenon of Obama. He is simply too talented and curious not to have arrived in some fashion. But just as the fact of Obama created the ground that enabled the ascendancy of Trump, so too did it provide a framework for Coates to both blossom and achieve success beyond his wildest imaginings. In “Notes from the Second Year”, which introduces his 2009 profile of Michelle Obama, he acknowledges this turn of fate.
Their very existence opened a market. It is important to say this, to say it in this ugly, inelegant way. It is important to remember the inconsequence of one’s talent and hard work and the incredible and unmatched sway of luck and fate.
Revisiting Coates’ work over the Eight Years in this volume reminds me of how much his work influences my own approach, and how surprisingly
But even with the pleasures provided by Coates’ writing, this collection is unlikely to make you feel especially chipper. Beginning with the audacious hope that the Obama era confers, the story closes with Coates pondering the specter of America’s “first white president”, a man who has achieved the highest office in the land based solely on his appeal to whiteness. In electing Trump, he suggests, “the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man – no matter how fallen – can be president.”
The American tragedy now being wrought is larger than most imagine and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality that held that its overt invocation would scare off “moderate” whites. This has proved to be only half-true at best. Trump’s legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wise in the ways of Washington, schooled in the methodology of governance, now liberated from the pretense of anti-racist civility, doing a much more effective job than Trump.
In recent interviews, Coates has taken something of an absolutist stance: the myth of race and the horrific reality of racism is the one key factor, “the only thing” that explains everything, as he said to Chris Hayes. I swing between believing this to be a rhetorical gambit – a means of framing the debate on his terms, almost like a negotiating stance – and believing him to be quite sincere in this belief.
I’m not much for grand theories of everything, but he has a point. He poses compelling arguments that the United States, and everything about its financial strength and global power, is predicated on the violent appropriation of black peoples’ labor, under slavery and under both the original and new Jim Crow. He is at his most forceful when he challenges America to face its original sin, to acknowledge the “bloody heirloom”. And he is at his most resigned when he avers that a snowball stands a better chance in hell.
It’s not that Coates does not offer or hold out hope for our future. In essence, the hope lies in his demand that we acknowledge our true history, unadorned by myths of exceptionalism and bootstrappy pluck and all the other fairy tales the nation has told itself over the years.
Like Baldwin (and so many others before and since), he despairs that he will ever see such a turn of fate. Yet he manages a quiet note of hope. He quotes Baldwin:
White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this – which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never – the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
The “race problem” lies in America’s enthusiastic embrace of the falsity and myths of exceptionalism and of “authentic” (read: White) American working men and women raising themselves through dint of their own merit and pluck. That this formulation rests on a false notion of Whiteness that can only exist in juxtaposition to a fabricated myth of Blackness is the unspoken dirty secret that keeps us all on blindly flailing on side-by-side treadmills, hurtling toward an illusory destination while making scant progress and never noticing that the rats in the cage next to us are really more like us than we have been led to believe.
For Coates, white supremacy is so foundational to the entire American enterprise that he sees little chance of White America writ large rejecting the premise. It’s hard to argue with him, even as it leaves one in despair. In his sit-down with Colbert, he was asked to offer hope for a better tomorrow. Coates was having none of it. COLBERT: I’m not asking you to make shit up. I’m asking if you personally see any evidence for change in America.
COATES: But I would have to make shit up to actually answer that question in a satisfying way.
So don’t look to We Were Eight Years in Power for a pleasing bedtime tale. Coates offers analysis, not bromides. Or as he puts it in what his perhaps the most Baldwin-esque passage in the book:
Art was not an after-school special. Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It must reflect the world in all it brutality and beauty, not in hopes of changing it but in the mean and selfish desire to not be enrolled in its lies, to not be coopted by the television dreams, to not ignore the great crimes all around us.
Entr’acte
Exposition.
Rising action.
Resolution. That’s the standard structure of the 3-act arc in theatre, movies, opera, lit, &c. Between each act, there is the interlude known as entr’acte (in Italian, intermezzo; en Espanol, intermedio). It’s a time to hit the head, grab a bag of kettle corn. Or maybe just sit and reflect.
It’s not often that we can observe the clear demarcation of acts as our lives unfold. Nobody turns on the house lights or projects a helpful “Intermission” card on the big screen. No orchestra strikes up a medley of themes to cue a rush to the lobby to get ourselves a treat. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjB5gjTEEj8
Then again.
Some life moments have such innate powers of punctuation that only the dullest mope can miss the signal. Thus does Your Narrator find himself entr’acte.
Yesterday, we packed My Favorite Boy off for a year abroad. A year. In Germany.
That photo up there is emblematic of The Boy. For the next year, he is enrolled in the Congress-Bundestag Youth Exchange Program (CBYX). He will repeat his senior year of high school. Only this time he will do it in German
A clearly delineated three-act arc emerges as we hang suspended, Stanwyck and I, between II and III. Like The Boy in the photo, we are a little afraid and shall likely get wet. We have already pillaged the lobby for snacks and cocktails. We sit quietly in the dark, awaiting the curtain’s rise.
Act One: Youngsters – children, almost – meet, fall head over heels. Declare themselves dedicated to life as Artists. Commit themselves until death do them what what, exuberantly pledging their troths one to the other.
Montage: Chasing dreams with varying levels of “success”. A dozen years pass, carefree times – more or less. But something is missing. The dilemma: discover the source of dissatisfaction.
The yearning to create a family takes center stage. Hindrances emerge, the fates are unkind. Laboratory experiments ensue, negotiations with the gods of medical science: no avail. Copious pleas to Aphrodite, to Ishtar, to Mithras, to Macha and Marduk – all for naught. Our favorites sink into a slough of wretched despond. All seems hopeless.
But hark! What luminous fortune shines in the distance? Are those blue eyes we see shining from a mythical mountaintop? Our heroes embark, a quest to climb this mountain, to best the demons and dragons, to conquer the traps set in our path. Our child is waiting. We must persevere. We must prevail. We must.
Cut to a military green DCF office bathed in flickery fluorescence. A door opens. In walks a woman
“Who gets her first?”
The world’s unlikeliest and most reluctant father steps forward, arms outstretched.
And scene.
Act Two: We find our heroes trying to figure out what parenting entails. Like almost everyone, this is largely a trial and error process in which we are certain to provide our charges with plenty of things to talk to a therapist about in later years.
But they adapt and start to think they have a handle on things. As the gods abhor hubris, the phone rings and, almost overnight, the Beast know as Bender, aka Bam Bam, arrives. All illusions of having mastered the process are dashed. Cue Thalia who takes her turn as director of mayhem. The audience may now enjoy hearty laughter at the heroes’ expense.
Are they laughing at or with?
Montage: Children growing up, our heroes growing old(er), a span of laughter and tears and broken bones and banged shins and and and… (Staging note: this transpires at ultra-high speed, almost as if 20 years might elapse in a trice.)
Cut to Daughter kicking every available ass at university. A science rock star in the making. But, alas, flown the nest.
Cut to the local two-mule airport where a coupletwothree of The Boy’s friends have gathered to offer their fare thee well as he departs for the far off land of Deutsche. For a year. Auf wiedershein.
Voiceover: Andre Gregory’s final words from My Dinner With Andre.
A son? A baby holds your hands and then suddenly there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?
Camera follows The Boy through the security checkpoint. Cheers of farewell follow his progress. Even the TSA agents get in on the action.
Cut to our heroes, proud and bereft.
The nest, it is empty.
And scene.
Act Three: As the curtain rises, our heroes, and their trusty hound Maggie, are in the kitchen. Stanwyck is wearing one of the Lad’s favorite t-shirts. Your Narrator strokes his beard and ponders.
The action is not yet established, the third act not yet written.
We begin again. Constantly.