Nina Simone on racism, art and violence
“It's a lot of hell, a lot of violence, but I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life.” – Nina Simone
Blank on Blank is a Youtube channel full of animated versions of real life interviews. This time the chosen one was a little known interview with Nina Simone conducted by Lilian Terry in the 60s. This interview was aired on Italy and now we have access to Nina Simone talking of all things related to her life as an artist, mother and black woman.
When Anne-Marie Willis says that "we design our world, while our world acts back on us and designs us” the most obvious examples are those we already consider related to design, among these the fashion world is a good example, specially when Nina Simone talks about it:
“I love clothes. Yes, I do. I mean, if you come out and you look the way you want to look, you will create a mood before you open your mouth. And sometimes that can be enough to get your audience exactly in the groove, where you want them.
Like last year, I wore the same gown for a year, everywhere I went. I wanted people to remember me looking a certain way. I made it easier for me.
[…]
So when came on stage, the illusion was that I was actually naked. I loved that. It always kind of shocked people enough that they became mine immediately.”
The interviewer asks about the last song she interpreted in her show. “The King of love is dead” was composed by the bassist of her band, Gene Taylor, one day after Martin Luther King was assassinated. In this music, as Nina Simone says, the climax is also it’s end. After questioning what would happen after his death the music ends. This musical interruption represents the fight for equality at the USA, a question mark after a bigger movement.
Even amid segregation and seeing people die due to the color of their skins, Nina Simone still found reasons to be optimistic. Not because she see the world as good, but because she knew her fight to be right and worth the efforts.
“It's a good time for black people to be alive. It's a lot of hell, a lot of violence, but I feel more alive now than I ever have in my life. I have a chance to live as I've dreamed.
INTERVIEWER: Do you think that your child will be living through the revolutionary years?
I don't know, love. Whatever it is she's going to have pride in her own blackness. She's going to have a chance to be more than just somebody who's on the outside looking in. Like it's been for most of us, and my parents before me, but she may see more bloodshed than I've ever even dreamed of. I have no way of knowing that evolution. The cycle goes round and round. It's time for us."
We who are alive to see the future she couldn’t predict know that the blood still flows and racism is still a problem. However, if we try to be a little more like Nina Simone, strong and somewhat optimistic, then maybe something will console us and things can keep getting better.
See the animation here:
Intellectual cooptation and justifying the savagery. The Vietnam War by Noam Chomsky
“When we consider the responsibility of intellectuals, our basic concern must be their role in the creation and analysis of ideology." - Noam Chomsky
An intellectual with studies ranging from linguistics and philosophy to history and philosophy, Noam Chomsky was a great critic of the American military campaign in Vietnam and the consequences of the imperialistic politics. In the essay “The responsibility of intellectuals”, published in February of 1967, Chomsky bases himself in the previous work of Dwight Macdonald to think this subject under the specificities of the Vietnam War.
Chomsky starts affirming a concept that to him, should be obvious. And as we still see today, there are moments where even what’s is obvious can be put in danger due to general passivity and the intellectual dishonesty of those in power:
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.
[…]
The deceit and distortion surrounding the American invasion of Vietnam is by now so familiar that it has lost its power to shock. It is therefore useful to recall that although new levels of cynicism are constantly being reached, their clear antecedents were accepted at home with quiet toleration. “
Due to public cynicism and apathy the critics are divided as rational or hysterics, a category that has a lot to say about the role attributed to the intellectual in a society:
“The “hysterical critics” are to be identified, apparently, by their irrational refusal to accept one fundamental political axiom, namely that the United States has the right to extend its power and control without limit, insofar as is feasible. Responsible criticism does not challenge this assumption, but argues, rather, that we probably can’t “get away with it” at this particular time and place.”
In this scenario, the sharpest critics are silenced while some discourses are legitimated by a rise of the authority under the appeal of the specialist:
“Should decisions be left to “experts” with Washington contacts—even if we assume that they command the necessary knowledge and principles to make the “best” decision, will they invariably do so? And, a logically prior question, is “expertise” applicable—that is, is there a body of theory and of relevant information, not in the public domain, that can be applied to the analysis of foreign policy or that demonstrates the correctness of present actions in some way that psychologists, mathematicians, chemists, and philosophers are incapable of comprehending?
[…]
Responsible, nonideological experts will give advice on tactical questions; irresponsible, “ideological types” will “harangue” about principle and trouble themselves over moral issues and human rights, or over the traditional problems of man and society, concerning which “social and behavioral science” has nothing to offer beyond trivialities. Obviously, these emotional, ideological types are irrational, since, being well-off and having power in their grasp, they shouldn’t worry about such matters. “
Being an technician serving the State, we have the intellectual incapable of seeing the structure under which he lives and when he affirms his position he is also nodding to the very society he should be analyzing in order to criticize:
“When we consider the responsibility of intellectuals, our basic concern must be their role in the creation and analysis of ideology.
[…]
we might say that the Welfare State technician finds justification for his special and prominent social status in his “science,” specifically, in the claim that social science can support a technology of social tinkering on a domestic or international scale. He then takes a further step, ascribing in a familiar way a universal validity to what is in fact a class interest: he argues that the special conditions on which his claim to power and authority are based are, in fact, the only general conditions by which modern society can be saved; that social tinkering within a Welfare State framework must replace the commitment to the “total ideologies” of the past, ideologies which were concerned with a transformation of society.”
This way Chomsky brings the intellectual closer to the role of a dissident and skeptic so his actions can be conscious not only of himself but also of the society he’s part of:
“Quite often, the statements of sincere and devoted technical experts give surprising insight into the intellectual attitudes that lie in the background of the latest savagery.
[..]
Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. “Why should they? What have I done?” he asked. Macdonald concludes: “Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster.” The question, “What have I done?” is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam—as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defense of freedom.”
“The responsibility of intellectuals” was the essay that gave Noam Chomsky a political projection and this short work was later developed in his book “American power and the new mandarins”. Sadly, his words are still much needed and, as Roland Barthes essay on the specialized critics, an advertence we should not dismiss.
5 quotes to make you read: Adventures in immediate irreality by Max Blecher
Shortly before dying at 28, Max Blecher published “Adventures in immediate irreality” a book whose labels range from surrealist to hyperrealist. If the definition is unclear it’s because the book also deals with foggy aspect of the being and the reality with such a sharp eye that justifies all comparisons between him and names like Kafka, Proust and Schulz.
1
“When I stare at a fixed point on the wall for a long time, it sometimes happens that I no longer know who I am or where I am. Then I feel my absence of identity from a distance as if I had become, for a moment, a complete stranger. With equal force, this abstract character and my real self struggle to win my conviction.”
2
“Ordinary words are not valid at certain spiritual depths. I’m trying to define my spells exactly but only find images. The magic word that could express them would have to borrow something from the essence of other sensibilities in life, distilling itself from them like a new scent from a masterly concoction of perfumes.
For the word to exist, it should contain something of the stupefaction that grips me when I see a person in reality and then follow their gestures in a mirror, plus something of the disequilibrium of falling in dreams with the whistling fear that runs down the spine in an unforgettable instant; or something of the fog and transparency inhabited by bizarre scenes in crystal balls.”
3
““How splendid, how sublime it is to be crazy!” I would say to myself, and observe with unimaginable regret how powerful stupid and familiar habits were, and that crushing rational upbringing separated me from the extreme freedom of a life of madness.”
4
“My distrust in the art of the painter gave way to a newborn boundless admiration.
In it I felt the distress of not having observed the essential quality of the picture earlier and at the same time a growing uncertainty of all that I saw: since I had contemplated the drawings for so many years without discovering the material they were composed of, couldn’t it be that through a similar myopia the meaning of all the things around me escaped me, though it was inscribed in them, maybe as clearly as the letters making up the pictures?”
5
““Your life was thus and not otherwise” says my memory, and in this pronouncement lies the immense nostalgia of the world, enclosed in its hermetic lights and colors from which no life is permitted to extract anything other than the aspect of an exact banality.
In it lies the melancholy of being unique and limited, in a unique and pathetically arid world.”
Reference: Max Blecher. Adventures in immediate unreality. Translation: Jeanie Han.
The death of the moth, Virginia Woolf
The death of the moth
Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us. They are hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like their own species. Nevertheless the present specimen, with his narrow hay-coloured wings, fringed with a tassel of the same colour, seemed to be content with life. It was a pleasant morning, mid–September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months. The plough was already scoring the field opposite the window, and where the share had been, the earth was pressed flat and gleamed with moisture. Such vigour came rolling in from the fields and the down beyond that it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book. The rooks too were keeping one of their annual festivities; soaring round the tree tops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air; which, after a few moments sank slowly down upon the trees until every twig seemed to have a knot at the end of it. Then, suddenly, the net would be thrown into the air again in a wider circle this time, with the utmost clamour and vociferation, as though to be thrown into the air and settle slowly down upon the tree tops were a tremendously exciting experience.
The same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs, sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of the window-pane. One could not help watching him. One was, indeed, conscious of a queer feeling of pity for him. The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth’s part in life, and a day moth’s at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic. He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and, after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. What he could do he did. Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. As often as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. He was little or nothing but life.
Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings, there was something marvellous as well as pathetic about him. It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zig-zagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one could not get over the strangeness of it. One is apt to forget all about life, seeing it humped and bossed and garnished and cumbered so that it has to move with the greatest circumspection and dignity. Again, the thought of all that life might have been had he been born in any other shape caused one to view his simple activities with a kind of pity.
After a time, tired by his dancing apparently, he settled on the window ledge in the sun, and, the queer spectacle being at an end, I forgot about him. Then, looking up, my eye was caught by him. He was trying to resume his dancing, but seemed either so stiff or so awkward that he could only flutter to the bottom of the window-pane; and when he tried to fly across it he failed. Being intent on other matters I watched these futile attempts for a time without thinking, unconsciously waiting for him to resume his flight, as one waits for a machine, that has stopped momentarily, to start again without considering the reason of its failure. After perhaps a seventh attempt he slipped from the wooden ledge and fell, fluttering his wings, on to his back on the window sill. The helplessness of his attitude roused me. It flashed upon me that he was in difficulties; he could no longer raise himself; his legs struggled vainly. But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.
The legs agitated themselves once more. I looked as if for the enemy against which he struggled. I looked out of doors. What had happened there? Presumably it was midday, and work in the fields had stopped. Stillness and quiet had replaced the previous animation. The birds had taken themselves off to feed in the brooks. The horses stood still. Yet the power was there all the same, massed outside indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular. Somehow it was opposed to the little hay-coloured moth. It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death. Nevertheless after a pause of exhaustion the legs fluttered again. It was superb this last protest, and so frantic that he succeeded at last in righting himself. One’s sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life. Also, when there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such magnitude, to retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved one strangely. Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange. The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.