Herman Dune’s Love Cat Blues — A Premiere

I first heard David Ivar sing at House 1002, a store where folks seek and discover odd treasures, on Pacific Avenue in San Pedro, CA, the Los Angeles neighborhood David and I both call home. Amid House’s cavernous space crammed with anchors and old tools and bamboo couches and vintage chandeliers, he sang Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, and Tom Waits in a gentle loving tone, not an imitation of those rough-edged troubadours but a heartfull tribute. Pacific runs from the end of the Harbor Freeway to Sunken City, the off-limits tumble of asphalt and palm trees where seven decades ago, a housing development slipped into the sea. Until a damn 7-11 opened a few years ago, there were no chain stores on Pacific, just mom-and-pop ventures like House. This port town is a community of independent businesses and immigrants – a perfect spot for a French-Swedish anti-folk anti-hero to lay his Greek fisherman hat.

Inspired by the words of Mr. San Pedro, Mike Watt, at a show – “Release your own stuff! Put out your own music!” – David, under his musical name Herman Dune (other stage names include Black Yaya), is releasing his latest, 13th album on his own on May 17. Sweet Thursday is named after a John Steinbeck novel and is also inspired by Pedro’s monthly art walk on the first Thursday of every month. Along with Brett Sullivan of the band American Anymen, David has made a video for each song. He’s releasing one video every Thursday.

Today, I have the honor of premiering “Love Cat Blues,” because, you know, I’m a cat lady. The video shows David driving around Long Beach, the South Bay, and Pedro in his old blue Toyota, lovelorn and seeking. From his awkward Southern twang in the spoken intro, to the road map background, to the Steinbeckian title, to the Americana groove, the album is a tribute to his adopted hometown and homeland, delivered at a time when immigrants are not always honored.

For more info about David and Herman Dune, and to buy limited edition copies of the album and of his art work, visit http://www.davidivar.com/. You can watch the video below, or at https://youtu.be/Qs28WdgoOmE, where you can also see his other videos as they are revealed over the next month.

 

Sewing a Revolution

Faith Ringgold self portrain

Faith Ringgold was already an accomplished artist in her forties when she wrote a memoir of her life. Still, no one would publish it. Instead, the painter turned to a new medium, creating quilts that — via images and words — told the narratives not only of her life, but of other black women. “I decided I would write my story on my art,” she told the crowd packed into the atrium of the California African American Museum yesterday at the closing ceremony for the exhibit We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85.

One of the earliest figures whom Ringgold depicted was Aunt Jemima. When her daughter questioned her inclusion of the controversial syrup idol, the artist said, “She’s a black feminist hero.”

“She’s not my black feminist hero” replied the daughter, Michele Wallace – an acclaimed scholar and author.

Mother and daughter shared the dais at CAAM Sunday, a formidable pairing at an event packed with powerful personages. Before their panel, three women of the Saar family (the Saarority?) stood together: the legendary Bettye Saar with her daughters Alison and Lezley. If, goddess forbid, the CAAM ceiling had collapsed yesterday, a few generations of important, inventive artists and their acolytes and analysts would have been buried beneath the rubble. Then again, these are women who have already busted through several glass ceilings on their own; maybe they would have just weathered the crash then begun making sculptures out of the debris.

We Wanted a Revolution gathers  drawings, paintings, photos, videos, pamphlets, letters and more from a period when Black and female artists were forcibly fighting against their exclusion from museums and the mainstream. There’s Adrian Piper, Lisa Jones, Emma Amos, Lorna Simpson, Carrie Mae Weems, and  more. Many of the artists, including Linda Goode Bryant, Maren Hassinger, Dindga McCannon, and Senga Nengudi, were part of the closing symposium.

“Have friends and don’t stop working.” That was Hassinger’s advice to young artists trying to persevere, progress and prosper. “Music can be your friend; art can be your friend,” added another speaker.

The work in We Wanted a Revolution is phenomenal, though the show, which was originated by the Brooklyn Museum, is traveling on. You still have a month to see Salon des Refuses, the intense, imaginative exhibit of works by Lezley Saar also on display at CAAM. Saar’s paintings and assemblages are psychedelic and psychological in their exploration of the unconscious and of alternative states of being. Deconstructing – literally – and then reconstructing books, she breaks down definitions of race and gender. She paints Renaissance portraits of dandies and rebel girls as Edgar Allan Poe might have imagined them, with mushrooms coming out of their heads, or bats for ears.

Lezley Saar’s Salon des Refuses

It was moving to think about how Lezley Saar is carrying on the legacy of her mother, Bettye, and how Wallace has dedicated much of her career to chronicling the life of Ringgold. The ghost of the previous generation was in the room as well, as Faith talked about the influence of her mother, Willie Posey Jones, a fashion designer. Mama Jones, as the family called her, helped her daughter make her quilts. Wallace recalled that in her foremothers’ time, all women knew how to sew. But her mother corrected her. “I refused to sew,” Ringgold said. She repeated the statement a few times, emphasizing refused. So, perhaps the most famous quilter of all time was a storyteller, not a seamstress. Yesterday, she made sure her story got told – and we listened.

Adele Bertei’s Venus Flytrap in LA Weekly

I first met Adele Bertei when I accompanied Wayne Kramer’s organization Jail Guitar Doors on a visit to the Twin Towers Correctional Facility. Jail Guitar Doors brings guitars and musical instruction to the incarcerated. There was a group of musicians that day, putting on a show, and one pixie-ish woman was introduced as Adele. “What’s your last name?” I asked, and when she answered “Bertei,” I got all fangirlish. Bertei was a pioneer of the New York postpunk scene, playing for the Contortions and the Bloods, the infamous all-girl band. As a solo artist and songwriter, she has kicked around the underground and pop scenes on both coasts and in Europe since. She also acted in the incredibly ahead-of-its-time film Born in Flames.

Bjork Completes Vulnicura Cycle

Photo by Andrew Thomas Huang

Almost two and a half years ago, Björk spilled her guts to the world. On the album Vulnicura, the often reclusive musician wrote intimately and emotionally about her breakup with the artist Matthew Barney. It was a public purging of a high-profile heartbreak, a direct and exquisitely rendered “fuck you” to a shmuck – long before Beyonce squeezed her lemons into Lemonade. “I am bored of your apocalyptic obsessions,” Björk sang on the thin ice of “Black Lake,” voicing the sentiments of a million millennial women waiting for their men to join them in the 21^st century.

Ms. Gudmundsdottir is finally ending the Vulnicura phase of her astonishing three-decade artistic career. As she told me in an interview for the LA Weekly a few weeks ago, she has begun work on a new album and feels “the Vulnicura cycle is complete.” She delivered her last performance of the album at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles Tuesday night. And what a – shall we say, in deference/reference to her infamous 2010 Oscars outfit — swan-song farewell it was.

Jimmie Durham’s “Post-American” Tragic, Comic Art

I wasn’t expecting laughter and tears when I went to the Hammer Museum yesterday to see “At the Center of the World,” an exhibition of the art of Jimmie Durham. I knew little about Durham, except for some intriguing banners I’d seen around town featuring his sculpture of an Indian princess: an odd assemblage of snakeskin, feather and wood that’s disconcertingly life-like, its mismatched eyes staring, accusing. I didn’t even know the maker of Malinche was of Cherokee heritage, though that became immediately apparent in the first room, with its totem poles of animal skulls on top of sticks — clever, bizarre, strangely powerful, like the videos, drawings, sculptures, and writings filling the Hammer gallery.

Born and raised in Arkansas, Durham has been making art since the 1970s (when he was also involved in the American Indian Movement). But for the last 20 years, he has lived in Europe. This is the first show of his work since his self-imposed exile, and it’s mind-blowing. Durham, who is also a poet, can be hilariously funny and brutally dark. I repeatedly found myself laughing out loud, but I also at one point burst into tears.

I don’t even know where to begin, this show is so astounding in both its craft and content. David Hammons, Jose Bedia, Brancusi, and Fluxus are all explicit influences. I also see Judy Chicago in the cultural commentary and, again, the humor. His self-portraits, like the one above, are hilariously self-deprecating, while at the same time poking holes in cultural stereotypes – check out his “Indian penis.” Needless to say, this show is also timely and necessary, what with our liar in chief paying homage to his genocidal predecessor (Indian killer Andrew Jackson). I’m going back and I’m taking the family.

 

Mama’s “Wonderful Life”

Mama and three of her sons.

My grandmother used to watch It’s a Wonderful Life every Christmas. During the several years in which she lived with us in our ranch house in Wisconsin, Mama would usually retreat to her basement bedroom so she could view her favorite movie without all the noise of grandchildren and pets that surrounded the TV in our family room. After she moved out, it would strike me how dark and cold the room that was now used for storage was, when I would go grab something – one of Mom’s 1950s dresses, maybe — from it. Mama made the dank space warm and grandmotherly, with her constant crocheting and her love of old Frank Capra movies or TV shows starring Barbara Stanwyck.

The woman born Guyla Duncan didn’t have the easiest life; her World War I veteran, jack-of-all-trades husband had trouble staying in one place, and away from the bottle. They moved constantly, from Florida to Kentucky to California then back to Florida. So Guyla wasn’t too picky about her surroundings; a basement in the cold Midwest kept barely tolerable by the orange glow of a space heater was fine by her.

Mama survived the Depression, two world wars, six children, breast cancer, and her husband, so she had a pretty realistic view of the world. She knew damn well life wasn’t always wonderful. And yet she loved this sentimental holiday movie, with its beyond-happy ending and steadfast faith in bucolic small-town America. I came to love it too, once I got beyond my adolescent snobbiness. In fact, the screwball comedies of the golden age of Hollywood are one of my favorite things in the world, up there with Brazilian music, feminist art, and whiskers on kittens.

Using the tools of urbane high jinks, slapstick comedy, and witty romantic banter, filmmakers such as Capra, Howard Hawks, and Preston Sturges offered social commentary dressed up as popcorn entertainment. Stanley Cavell has written about how these comedies of remarriage reimagined the relationships between sexes, with women given equal footing with men as smart, classy, independent creatures — Katherine Hepburn was as adept at cutting repartee as Cary Grant. Many of these movies also flipped class structure – the department-store owner hanging with his employees, pouring coca cola into a glass of rare wine and discovering it really does taste better. It’s a Wonderful Life offers a blistering critique of Big Money and corporate banks and a plea for small, family-owned businesses. This is not old-fashioned mawkishness: In the TV show The Newsroom, Olivia Munn’s character uses Capra’s film to explain to Emily Mortimer’s the basis and importance of the Glass-Steagall Act.

It’s a Wonderful Life was released in 1946 – scarcely a wonderful time in world history. It pretty much bombed back then, but it has become perhaps the most beloved movie in all of American cinema. That was the decade Mama’s son Leon was injured at Iwo Jima and she survived a double mastectomy. This movie, like all the screwball comedies, offered a vision of the way things could, and should, be, not the way they were. It provided relief, comfort, a good laugh, and hope, all while pointedly critiquing the evil of capitalism gone awry.

That was 70 years ago. On Friday night, you can relive that first run, when the San Pedro International Film Festival shows It’s a Wonderful Life on the big screen at the historic Warner Grand Theater. I probably don’t need to point out how appropriate this film is to this moment in time, how it’s an example of art that speaks to, and not down to, multiple constituents who feel disenfranchised in our current society, while always keeping its thumb firmly on the real villain. Or how we need its humor, its love, its screwball hope.

I used to see Mama watching It’s a Wonderful Life, but I never once sat down and watched it with her from start to finish – just as my son never watches it with me. I wish I had asked her what she got from it, if she felt keenly its affirmation of rootedness – of characters who may dream of the travel they see in posters – of lassoing the stars — but in fact never leave home, and live happily ever after.

I’ll be introducing the film at the Warner Grand, 478 W. 6th Street, San Pedro, on December 23 at 7 p.m. You can buy tickets at Spiffest.org.

Punk Made Her a Black Feminist

Punk inspired Chardine Taylor-Stone (drummer for Big Joanie) to be a black feminist, and she gave a great TedX talk about it.