Owing in large part to Hollywood’s discovery of its infinite star vehicle potential, the “intersecting lives” narrative has become, in recent years, something of a cop out. When the A-story isn’t strong enough, simply prop it up with parallel stories B through F and have them all fatefully (and conveniently) collide about a third of the way through the final act. It’s a trite and often tiresome trick that, with few exceptions, sacrifices meaningful narrative at the altar of novelty.
In riffing on this form with his debut novel London Triptych (Arsenal Pulp, first North American edition, 2013), Jonathan Kemp is playing with fire. Mirroring its namesake, Triptych sweeps across the centuries, tracing the lives of three different men in three historically distinct Londons; men tied to one another by their shared experiences of queer desire and by their participation in libidinal economies of queer touch and feeling that, despite the best efforts of hetereosexual society, refuse to exhaust themselves.
Are you curious what goes on in the mind of a queer Islamaphobe? Or perhaps you’d rather pick the brain of a polyamorous lover?
No, I’m not suggesting you call up your cable provider and subscribe to TLC. Rather, you should step away from the screen and hit up the Human Library, which provides an unscripted opportunity to learn more about real people who may not share the same values or culture as you.
The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book is the second graphic novel from activist Gord Hill. It is a chronicle of several anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements over the last two decades, from the WTO protests in Seattle to the recent Occupy movements. Hill also places a great deal of emphasis on the violence that has accompanied these movements, regardless of whether that violence was perpetrated by police or protestors.
As a documentary account of these events, The Anti-Capitalist Resistance Comic Book does a passable job. Hill was clearly involved in many of the movements chronicled in the book and is able to expose events that were under-covered or completely overlooked by mainstream media outlets at the time. This is the greatest strength of the book, which is at its best whenever it is able to provide first person accounts from inside the political actions it depicts.
As decent and occasionally eye-opening a documentary account as Hill’s book can be, it utterly fails for me as work of commentary. A brief history of capitalism and its myriad problems (and I’ll be the first to agree that there are many) is provided but very little in the way of solutions beyond blind rage is offered.
Penguin Books is releasing new editions of George Orwell’s best known books on January 21 to commemorate the inaugural “Orwell Day” — an annual event to celebrate the author and his influence on media and modern discourse.
Qatari poet Muhammad ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami was sentenced to life in prison for writing and performing a poem celebrating Tunisia’s Arab Spring.
The poet’s lawyer, who is appealing the decision, has said that the trial was held in secret, the poet was not allowed to defend himself or even to enter a plea. According to an article in The Guardian, Ajami was charged with “insulting the Gulf nation’s ruler, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, and inciting to overthrow the ruling system”, a crime punishable by death.
Ajami is a third-year student at Cairo University studying literature. The poem came to public attention after a video was posted on Youtube. Ajami has been in solitary confinement since his arrest in November 2011.
Qatar is home to the international news network Al Jazeera, including Al Jazeera English whose coverage of the middle-east and international news in general has garnered increasing respect from Western audiences. It is a cruel irony indeed that the government that funds such journalistic integrity also restricts freedom of speech in such a violent and reactionary manner.
Thanks to The Guardian for coverage of Ajami’s plight.
While some of postmodernism’s more vocal evangelists might claim otherwise, the post-Stonewall mainstreaming of queer sexuality has yet to deliver on its grand promise of erasing the gender binary. Politically, culturally, and socially, gendered differences and the power inequalities they uphold persist. Perhaps especially in LGBT communities, it is in fact masculine desires that continue to frame desire in general. The cis-male body and the attributes of “maleness” it carries continue to signify and perform operations of power; functioning as the allegedly neutral standard against which “deviations” like femininity, transness, and gender non-conformity might be judged, measured, and often attacked.
“Allegheny, BC” is Rodney DeCroo’s first published book of poetry. It follows a body of musical work that has received international acclaim. His albums—there have been six so far—have earned considerable respect from reviewers on several continents for the power of his lyrics and the haunting quality of his music.
The river that both his book and his poem “The Allegheny” are named for runs through DeCroo’s hometown of Pittsburgh. Though he has lived in Vancouver, BC, for most of his adult life, his mind has been swimming in that river since childhood. He writes about the filth from the steel mills and factories lining its banks, about the monstrous carp and catfish that people would catch but no one would eat, about how
“Each summer it claimed a child
from the cancerous towns along its sides,
as if it were an angry, wounded god
demanding tribute…”
Adrian Glynn and Brendan McLeod aren’t known for writing music with a political slant. When he’s not writing gorgeous western-tinged melodic songs, Adrian joins Brendan in the Vancouver band, The Fugitives, a four-piece composed of musicians who double as slam poets, writers, actors and hilarious accordion players (ok, there’s only one of those). But Bill C-31 was just the right issue to ruffle their feathers and inspire a divergence.
“Brendan and I often lament how difficult it is to write songs about political issues,” Adrian told me when I started asking questions about this particular song. “If it was easy to write good songs that aren’t overly preachy or cheesy and still somewhat musically satisfying then I think we’d do one every week. But it’s hard. In this case the issue at hand is just so infuriating and so outlandishly un-Canadian that it was immediately inspiring.”
Invocation of the Queer Spirits (Governor's Island) - AA Bronson
There is always a certain magic to be found in the moment of queering. As bodies are opened to unsanctioned desires and sensations, tense moments of wonder unfold before them. Static charges crackle and spark as genders and sexualities are peeled away from the sticky fabric of the everyday.
Such moments and times pulse with magic; they ask us to overreach ourselves, to live in other bodies, to step outside of axiomatic truths and ways of being. To be queer, or to queer, is, in this sense, a kind of spell or invocation; an incantation, an enchantment, and an act of imagination all at once.
Yet despite this apparent congruity, the magical resonances of queerness are rarely given their own voice. The themes of affect, embodiment, and performance that have been so central to queer theoretical work for two decades have made the specifically magical tangential at best, marginal at worst.
When you go to the website for Berlin’s 7th Biennale, you encounter a stream of changing photographs from occupy and protest movements from around the world — Venezia, Toronto, Florence, Malacky, Athens and on and on. It is emblematic of curator Artur Zmijewski’s approach the largest art exhibition in Germany, which opened on April 27.
In the forward to Forget Fear, the accompanying publication of the Berlin’s 7th Biennale, Zmijewski explains that “Art needs to be reinvented, but not as some crafty option to aesthecize human problems of the impoverished majority. What we need is more art that offers its tools, time and resources to solve the economic problems of the impoverished majority. For the actual limit to the possibilities of left-meaning art is effective engagement with material issues: unemployment, impoverishment, poverty.”
Zmijewski wants to transform the art of impotence and individualist survival, which is how he describes contemporary art markets and the institutionalized art world of galleries and curatorial careers, into art that is “genuinely transformative and formative”, art that “practices politics”, and art that is “real action in the real world and [that bids] a final farewell to the illusion of artistic immunity”.
Over the coming weeks, Art Threat will be profiling some of the artists and their contributions to the 7th Berlin Biennale (which runs until July 1), and some of the events that will be happening in Berlin in the coming months. In today’s report, quick look at two upcoming events: a workshop for using art in political protest, and a performance installation that features interviews with 16 economists, historians, thinkers from around the world speaking on viable economic alternatives to capitalism.
Contributors
Stefan Christoff, Colin Horgan, Julia Pyper
Michelle Siobhan Reid, Valerie Cardinal, Race Capet
Laurence Miall, Terry Fairman, Tyler Morgenstern
