SOME of what I'm thinking...

I was informed Tuesday of the firestorm that has been raging in the media over the Reverend Doctor Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's now infamous "former" pastor. It is evidence of the extent to which I have been immersed in my work recently that I was completely out of touch with this situation.

I have just watched Reverend Wright's entire presentation at the National Press Club from Monday morning, including Q&A, on YouTube (best sequence is posted by user CSPANJUNKIEdotORG in six separate clips). It is worth noting that this speech essentially comprised introductory remarks to a 2-day seminar on the African American religious experience. It is also worth noting that on this subject, this man is absolutely unassailable. I did not find one word that he uttered at this gathering to be anything other than thoughtful, intelligent, and mind-bendingly well-informed.

What I did find to be many things other than thoughtful, intelligent, or even mildly well-informed were the questions posed to Rev. Wright following his comments by the poor woman who was in the unenviable position of being the mouthpiece of the National Press Club on this occasion. She found herself unarmed in a battle of wits with an intellectual giant. I felt for her because the questions she was made to pose were an embarrassment, designed to provoke and inflame a man who is misperceived, in large part due to the media's inaccurate and unfair portrait of him, as some sort of loose cannon. Instead, Rev. Wright remained calm, cool, and composed - and always well-spoken - as he fielded with great intelligence and not a little humor what were a representatively appalling collection of questions from members of the NPC.

Now. Another matter all together were Rev. Wright's remarks to the NAACP in Detroit the night before (also available on YouTube - best sequence is posted by user westthea also in six separate clips). This speech was indeed far more inflammatory than the relatively palatable - dare I say whitewashed - presentation to the NPC. But, as a graduate of both the English and African American Studies departments at UC Berkeley, I am challenged to identify Rev. Wright's NAACP speech as anything more than a Black clergyman telling it like it is to his peers.

Anyone who has any significant degree of understanding of the reality of the African American experience - and I do count myself as one such person - knows that Black folks talk differently amongst themselves than they do amongst white folks. Now if you consider that observation in any way inflammatory, then I propose that you do not have a significant degree of understanding of the reality of the African American experience. This is a fact, people; it's the way it is. It's an historically rooted matter of survival, and one to which Rev. Wright alluded in his NPC presentation when he spoke about the Black Codes of the late nineteenth century that prohibited more than two Black people from "gathering" without a white person present.

At the NAACP event Rev. Wright was talking to a room full of mostly Black folks. It's always sticky territory here because race is such a hot-button issue, and the age-old problem of anti-Black racism in the U.S. not only is the result of but breeds a tremendous amount of misunderstanding. But I am going to try to push through here because this is important. Rev. Wright's remarks to the NAACP gathering were neither edited nor censored for a white audience. Nor should they have been. What is problematic is that they were broadcast, and how the media are handling the story. Immediately following Rev. Wright's speech, which aired on CNN, Rick Sanchez appeared onscreen looking like he'd just had his heart ripped out. His body language and facial expressions betrayed his prefabricated intention to inflame viewers by painting Rev. Wright as some kind of madman. And that is pretty much what he proceeded to do. It was painfully obvious that Sanchez was programmed to pick a fight.

Oh... I realize that the argument I want to make here would require days and days of writing (which I would be up for if this were my job). But Black folks know what I'm talking about here.

Andrew Hacker's 1992 book Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal is one of the most concise volumes I have read on the subject of the Black-white racial divide in the U.S. If you're Black you don't need to read this book; you already know it because you live it. If you're white, check it out and you may begin to hear Rev. Wright through a new set of ears.

Yes, yes... the Black-white divide again. What about Latinos and Asians and Native Americans and all the rest? Well I am talking here about a very specific sociological challenge that has plagued this country for centuries, and that is the psychic damage wrought on all sides by the historical oppression of Black people in the U.S. It's not easy to undo, and the impact continues to wreak havoc on our society. Witness all of the fallout because a Black man who was the pastor to another Black man who is running for President of the United States has been saying what's on his mind.

I seriously could and would love to ramble on about these subjects for several days but alas I must get to sleep so that I can get back to work tomorrow. But I will say that as a former Black nationalist (those of you who've known me for more than ten years know what this means) I found Obama's reaction to Rev. Wright's NAACP speech - or let's put that more accurately: his reaction to the media's reaction to Rev. Wright's NAACP speech - to be disheartening. Disheartening not so much because I think Obama should have done anything differently - he couldn't. He had to, as Rev. Wright knows and said in both of these public addresses, do what a politician would do under the circumstances. But what I find disheartening is that the climate in this country around race remains so charged and so mystifying and so positively confounding and unresolved that a wedge has to rise up between these two Black men, each of whom in his own right is such a powerful public figure, and who once were as close as two crossed fingers. This is treacherous terrain and I am not even going to attempt to qualify this. It is my opinion and you either get what I'm saying or you don't.

Anyway, I have been in Obama's camp not quite from jump but for a good long while now, and I don't mind saying that one of the reasons I hope he will be the Democratic nominee is because I believe he has a better chance of defeating McCain than Hillary does. I do not believe that this country is prepared to deliver such a blow to the institution of patriarchy as to elect a woman President. And what we are witnessing right now, with Hillary's refusal to back down and with the media feeding frenzy over Jeremiah Wright and his association with Barack Obama, is the weakening of the best hope we have for radical change in this country.

And by the way, radical change is exactly what we need and of the three Presidential candidates left standing, Barack Obama - despite his concessionary conciliatory stance on the issue at hand - is the only one who represents radical change.

Not quite as radical as Jeremiah Wright, but plenty radical for the White House.

If you're not buying my half-baked argument, please see Jimmy Carter on "Larry King Live," a.k.a. a real voice of reason, on this subject.

Peace out.

Went to see the Annie Leibovitz exhibit at the Legion of Honor a few weeks ago. By far the most moving photos - and I would say the most interesting component of the exhibit - are the formal portraits and casual shots of Susan Sontag in varying degrees of repose and decline. The abundant family photos are of interest as well. As for the plenitude of celebrity portraits, they are less engaging in part because they are so familiar (as a long-time Vanity Fair subscriber/reader I feel like I've seen all of these photos before)... however, as a friend pointed out, they possess their own value if only for the elaborate setups and the deliberateness of the compositions.

For me one of the highlights of the exhibit were two "working walls" of small format prints that were meant to recreate the feel of the photographer's studio during the period when she and her editor were selecting photos for her book "A Photographer's Life." This process is depicted in a five-minute film that runs on endless loop in one corner of the exhibit.


Highly illegal snapshot from inside the exhibit, nabbed by my iPhone.

Leibovitz explains that as a child she and her family took many road trips, and that she began to see the world around her framed through a car window, a sort of ready-made - or makeshift if you will - viewfinder.

She was in town in mid-April to lecture at her alma mater, the San Francisco Art Institute, and I went with my pal Charlotte. It was an exquisitely stimulating evening. Leibovitz was sharing from an unedited manuscript of her forthcoming book (yes, another one!) tentatively entitled Work. The premise: a select few photographs will be accompanied by her reflections not only on the circumstances and technical details of the photographs themselves, but on her own development and evolution as a photographer, as well as on some of the more adventurous phases of her career - e.g., being on the road with the Rolling Stones.

Perhaps the most surprising part of the evening was discovering the fact that Leibovitz herself is charmingly unassuming - pretty remarkable for one who has seen and done all that she has in her 58 years.

No sooner is it memorialized than I need to amend it.

So there are four iPods in rotation here: a 40gig that stays home, an 80gig in my glovebox that kicks out through the Harman Kardon system in my '05 Cooper S - which is about to be replaced by an '08 Cooper S that sadly will not have Harman Kardon because for some mystifying reason BMW elected to ditch their longtime audio partner in favor of an unnamed "Hi-Fi" provider, the only compensation being that the premium sound system has gone from eight to ten speakers, which potentially is a head full of music for such a small interior space - a first generation Shuffle that accompanies me on the bike, and then the iPod partition of my iPhone.

Needless to say it's a lot of capacity for a lot of music, and the other day my 40gig iPod, which sits atop a now obsolete but still beautifully functional iPod HiFi unit, decided to remove itself from the DMB playlist I had it fixed on, and returned to an "All Songs" / "Shuffle Song" mode.

After getting over the fact that there was a ghost in the machine, I have settled into this more expansive listening mode, which takes me trekking through my very eclectic music collection where the frequent surprises and long-lost ditties can't help but make me smile. What could be better than jumping from Keith Jarrett improvising in top form at Sun Bear to Jay-Z's mother talking about how Hova taught himself to ride a bike at age four on "December 4th" to Aerosmith cutting up on "Mama Kin" to Hendrix blazing through "Crosstown Traffic" ("...so hard to get through to you!") to a Bowie oddity from "Images" to D'Angelo purring his cover of "Cruisin'" to k.d. lang crooning "Wash Me Clean" to Morrissey wailing "Jack the Ripper" to Bob Marley preaching "Blackman Redemption" to Zeppelin laying down "Whole Lotta Love" to Daniel Ash keeping time on "Ghost Writer" and back to Hendrix, this time for a flammable version of "Hear My Train A-Comin'" live at the Fillmore East. Well, you get the idea. Damn!

And the beauty of it is that there is so much Dave Matthews up in the joint that he cycles through at least once every dozen or so songs.

So no more DMB endless loop at home for the moment.

Free your mind and the rest will follow. (Catch the En Vogue reference if it rings a bell.)

If you know me you know that I pretty much listen to Dave Matthews on endless loop at home, in my car, and on my iPod while riding my bike. He has surpassed the Red Hot Chili Peppers as my primary musical interest, although the Chili Peppers still rank a close second, and if I resumed listening to them on endless loop they probably would persuade me that they are worthy of recapturing the top slot. All of which is to say that it's pretty much a tossup.

But right now it's Dave, Carter, Boyd, Stefan, and LeRoi. Eckhart’s book (see previous post below) stays in my bed and DMB stays in my head – they’re my constant companions right now. And in much the same way that rereading a thought-provoking book can yield new insights each time, I find that the more I listen to Dave’s lyrics, the more I realize how enlightened he is. And the music itself – the musicianship – is nothing short of epic. I think one cannot be that creatively fertile without having reached a certain level of enlightenment. I’ve pondered this from the chicken-or-the-egg perspective and feel pretty certain that the creativity follows the enlightenment and not vice-versa.

I should interject a sidebar here on a subject that I consider one of the organizing principles of my life, and that is the challenge of finding/identifying the artist within - or as I like to refer to it, the inner artist. I believe there is an artist inside each of us - and when I say artist I do not necessarily mean a sculptor or a painter or a writer or a musician or a photographer or the like; your inner artist may be engaged in business or science or raising a child... anything about which you are utterly passionate.* So I guess what I'm really talking about is finding/identifying your passion in life.

Anyway, I was online the other day looking up a guy named Daniel Lanois, who wrote a beautiful song called “The Maker” that Dave Matthews occasionally covers in concert. Before I knew it I had clicked my way to the Wikipedia entry on Dave Matthews. For all of my – ahem – enthusiasm for this guy’s music, I don’t know a lot about him. Well, for starters he was born exactly nine days before I was. But more important are a few details about his personal history that go a long way toward explaining the origins of his gorgeous existential lyrics. When he was ten his father died and when he was 27 his older sister was killed by her husband, who later killed himself. They had two kids whom Dave & his younger sister apparently have either raised or helped to raise. Such grist for the songwriting mill, and his music resonates so deeply with Eckhart's teachings that it boggles my mind at times. His lyrics are intensely philosophical (as pop music goes that is) and he is deeply invested in living responsibly and loving well, right now.

So a little anecdote that is tangentially related. On St. Patrick’s Day I went to meet a cherished friend at Liverpool Lil’s. She had been waiting there for me for a couple of hours, having gone directly when she got off work, while I was enduring a particularly dragged-out session of writing class. By the time I walked in, she was seated in a corner surrounded by a bunch of reveling men. You’d have thought it was the second coming the way she jumped up and expressed her delight that I’d finally arrived. So around the bend we went, out of the bar area and into the dining area, which was deserted but for one other table. Whereupon we somehow got onto the subject of music. Well, my dear little friend has the musical tastes of a gay man – Streisand, Garland, Minelli, obscure off-Broadway musicals, etc.

So I confessed to her my relative ignorance of her preferred musical genre and revealed my passion for Dave Matthews. To which she replied, thrusting her arm out, index finger pointing over my head in the direction from which we had just fled, and with a slightly horrified look on her face, “That’s what those guys listen to!”

I became aware in that moment that a preponderance of Dave Matthews fans are basically frat dudes perpetually transitioning into manhood. And this was confirmed by what I saw that same night of my Wikipedia wanderings when I watched two DMB concerts on DVD to distract myself from other matters.

My point – and yes there is one – is that I’m oddly gratified to know that millions of frat boys and their ilk are being exposed to the enlightened messages in Dave Matthews’ lyrics. Because on some level I think Dave Matthews is like an accidental Johnny Appleseed of Eckhart's teachings.

This brings me to my dear friend Page Hodel, deejay extraordinaire, who once asked aloud of no one in particular (but while I was standing a couple of feet away), something to the effect of, "Does anyone get Dave Matthews? I just don't get it. What is the appeal?" I vowed right then and there that I was going to, well, enlighten her on the subject by making her a CD of hand selected DMB songs, and she said she would look forward to it and it became this sort of unspoken challenge: would I be able to convert her to DMB appreciation?

Shame on me, for I never have delivered that CD.

But I surely do carry on listening to Dave & Co. like there's no tomorrow.
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*It is a question for another day whether it is in fact possible to be passionate about raising a child. Completely dedicated, yes. Passionate? I wonder.

Well goddamn, it's been too long. Forgive the profanity but it's part of the deal.

Where has one-quarter of 2008 gone already?

For me these last several months have been all about getting enlightened. Yes, I'm on the Eckhart Tolle bandwagon, and enormously grateful for the fact that when he appeared on my radar a couple of months ago, I was ready for him! I have been making my way through A New Earth at a glacial rate because (1) I don't want it to end (though I will simply begin rereading when it does), and (2) I tend to read it really late at night - or more accurately, often around 2am - so [a] I start to zonk out pretty quickly, and [b] in general I find that I can read only about three to five pages before I feel compelled to take a break either because I'm overwhelmed by the information I'm taking in or because I'm overcome with gratitude for same, and for my own preparedness and receptiveness to same.

The overarching lesson of "the power of now" is so profoundly useful in daily life... it's like Prozac without the pill. I am able to talk myself down pretty quickly from just about any level of anxiety, melancholia, etc. The key to this for me has been becoming aware of and mastering control over ye olde pain body. Set that shit down by the side of the road! Um... I was aided in this neat trick by a recent passerby who I'm hoping will circle back around (you know who you are). One small casual conversation leads to one giant advance in personal growth. Wow. You never know when life is going to take a dramatic turn.

Back to the subject of Prozac and the like for a minute, I'm one of the few people I know who is not on anti-depressants, a reality that at times freaks me out because it makes me feel like all of these people who are near and dear to me, and with whom I am interested in having deep and meaningful relationships, are kind of numbed out. I don't mean to sound judgmental about SSRIs or people who take them, but their effects have been described to me by someone who has taken at least four of the most popularly prescribed SSRIs (and is no longer taking any) as basically dulling emotional sensation. Hmmm... my own emotional sensations are so acute that I wonder sometimes where this leaves me in relation to so many people I love.

Well, if I am indeed back in the saddle, it's quite a dramatic return.

The other notable activity I've been involved in for the last four months or so is a writing class through The Writers Studio. This terrific program is based on mastering the narrative voice, and was founded by Philip Schultz who just won the Pulitzer Prize for his latest collection of poetry, Failure.* I had the pleasure of hearing Phil read about a dozen poems from this superb little book on Saturday, March 29th. I was on the verge of tears for about 45 minutes while he read. The sensitivity of this man's heart when he is writing about subjects dear to him... wow. After he read I had a brief conversation with him about his work and the challenge to legitimize oneself as a writer, and then I drove to a bookstore and bought the last copy of Failure. And literally nine days later he won the Pulitzer. Absolutely glorious.

Anyway, as those who know me know, I recently have been around the block and back about writing versus photography versus Web design as my primary creative outlet(s). And try though I have over the years to abandon this goddamn writing thing, I can't get away from it. And in recent months the stars have aligned to help me accept the fact that this is my medium, and that what will be will be.

More on this another time. Methinks I'm rambling and I've got other things to do.

But it's nice to be back.

If indeed I am.
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*When I grabbed that link to Amazon, I noticed that Failure is currently out of stock. Go Phil!