Amiri Baraka, 1934-2013

The audio on the above imbed is not, you know, safe for the work­place, and may in fact piss you off in some way even if you listen to it in com­plete private. 

Which, you know, was part of what Amiri Baraka was about. There is SO much about vari­ous of the things he wrote and pro­nounced that I find/found infuri­at­ing, but he always had my cal­loused respect because he could write, he could read, he had, for bet­ter or worse, a genu­ine and full voice, and of course because he was from New Jersey and remained of New Jersey. 

His very tough play Dutchman was made into a movie by, of all people, Katharine Hepburn’s best friend and all-around Caucasian Person of Refinement Anthony Harvey. And Harvey made it as a pas­sion pro­ject; it was the Dr. Strangelove edit­or­’s first dir­ect­ori­al effort. Godard lif­ted a scene from the play and plunked it right in the middle of 1966’s Masculin fémin­in, a year before Harvey’s film ver­sion of the drama was released. The scene fits right in and sticks out, just as it is meant to; its elec­tri­city, its imme­di­acy, even with Baraka/Jones’ words trans­posed into French, is still palp­able today. I am infuri­ated by Baraka’s flir­ta­tions with anti-Semitism, with his 9/11 truther­ism, just as I’m appalled by Céline’s vir­u­lent racial idiocy, even as I’m dogged by the intu­ition that what’s objec­tion­able about them is part of what makes them valu­able; they are prob­lem artists; the neg­at­ive space of their cre­at­ive out­put and pub­lic pro­nounce­ments, what’s abject about them, provides a dis­com­fort that in some ways is neces­sary. But obvi­ously there’s a line. “Who Blew Up America?” took the Socialism Of Fools into the lun­at­ic asylum, defin­it­ively, and he deserved all the dis­hon­or and dis­ap­prob­a­tion he got in its wake, and more. I figured I was done with him, but, you know…[sigh]…dig this pas­sage from his essay “You Ever Hear Albert Ayler?” writ­ten two years after “Who Blew Up America?” and included in Baraka’s 2009 book Diggin’: The Afro-American Soul Of American Classical Music (n.b., all input­ting sic):

One night Albert, Black Norman, and I, at Albert’s insist­ence, jour­neyed up to Lincoln Center. It was a Trane con­cert, armed to the teeth with some of the most impress­ive of the new musi­cians, who were now mag­net­ized to the mas­ter. Eric Dolphy, Pharaoh Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Rashied Ali, and Elvin Jones. We arrived back­stage, Norman’s eyes shift­ing the shad­ows of the darkened stair­case from which we checked and dug the fant­ast­ic out bad doom a doom whooah out of the heavy jam.

The whole of the mise en scene entered the play­ing, as the play­ing danced and hugged every­body (alive’s) tender scream­ings or head cas­ted to the rest of the audi­ence like a trans­fu­sion, the blis­ter­ing mol­ten blood swish­ing through our hearing.[…]

At the top of that nuc­le­ar “My God!” What emo­tion­al con­ver­gence turned Albert into the horn he sud­denly had in his hands? He began to stride out onto the stage. The horn raised high above his head, as if he wanted to take Pres man­qué all the way out. The bell point­ing as much as pos­sible at the embroidered ceil­ing of the place. And then, Lord, with that pose as his heart’s sig­na­ture, he began to open a hole in the roof so his angels could des­cend, summoned by his explod­ing plaints. 

See what I mean? Anyway. I do not write this as an attempt to present any­thing like a fully for­mu­lated the­ory, or rationale, but to explain my regard for a fig­ure who has been and will be widely reviled. Also, he was pretty funny in Bulworth.