H2Omeloncholy: 2020

Sunday, December 20, 2020

20/20: the year of (vision)airy-fairies

VOGUE copyright Conde Nast

Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from KM Fikes is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to KM Fikes & h2omeloncholy@blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. No excerpt or link may be used for monetary compensation.

Feel free to read with Tchaikovsky's Sugar Plum FAIRY Suite playing in the background. Personally dig the oboe here as it comes in like Gladys-Knighted Pip. Safest Season's Greets...

~~Air~~...Ere the Democratic party settled on the numbing mediocrity of Joe Biden, it was a vibrant presentation of progressive possibility. For some? This snow-flaked vibrancy blinded. Others found themselves tickled. 'Too bright, too soon' garnered a laughter less patronizing and more so welcoming of comic relief on the campaign trail. Ultimately, 'dimming' was chosen - mystically as preemptively numb from COVID and Northwest fires yet to occur, an eerily prescient non-choice formed a nigh psychic Democratic ticket. The year had yet to unravel where blindspots were in the usual order - utterly unrecognizable until too late. Desperate need for comfort and return to semblance of sense, made the risks of evolving policy untenable. In theory. Yet HOW, despite our motley selves, we wound up practicing some riskiest bidness!

The top lunatic contenders were - ostensibly - Senator Bernie Sanders' Medicare for All, businessperson Andrew Yang's Universal Basic Income and motivational author/speaker Marianne Williamson's early mention of African-American Reparations. Much of the demos scoffed.

2020 laid bare mad genius by dusting cobwebs off common sense. The need for comprehensive health coverage during a pandemic became too condescending to consider self-explanatory. The lunacy was no longer in a socialist-suspicious policy proposal but in the inane custom of tying medical access to employment. Apparently, we required the lesson of who is 'essential' to our economy and none, ironically enuf, sat in the boardrooms - no longer union halls - that chronically decide our fate.

For those who still chuckle at Mr. Yang, one wonders if they were too amused to cash their Stimulus check. And/or hope for another.

The candidate who slid into silly base embraced Reparations as an extension of her ethos. Oh so long ago. She preached atonement and framed Reparations as a nation's natural 'reckoning'. Further, her call for sum'in as airy-fairy as consciousness stood in unnerving contrast to a White-House-turned-Black-Hole where nuttin' escapes the gravitational pull: "alternative facts" - like time - slow whilst any 'light' is sucked thru this mysterious cosmic straw where moral fiber does not fray nor snap but simply eviscerates. Ethical cores stretch past recognition into what astrophysicists actually term, 'spaghettification'. Alas, 'twas Williamson who served as the noodle on a Democratic stage.

The ideas deemed least were needed the most this year of years. 20/20 vision - like the lens click of an ophthalmologist: Clearer here? Or here? One. Or Two? This practice of clarity to refine our 'gaze' was thrust upon America's collective myopia.

Now is not the time.

Now would be too much to ask; all in due course.

White 'allied' preachers spoke thus to MLK. Contrary to the most recent commercial film's exorbitantly generous depiction, Harriet Tubman's husband was not supportive of her desire to flee - gaslighting her resolve with the limitations of her disability - 'spells', as they were. Black Lives Matter activists were nigh terrorists by popular discourse the day before a state knee squeezed out the last breath from George Floyd.

A standard Snellen vision testing chart from the 1950s.

American Academy of Ophthalmology

That was Lens One. Click to Lens Two: BLACK LIVES MATTER placards on upper-middle-class (erstwhile-Red-Lined-currently-gentrified) lawns was the only - oddly - apropos response. Not Obama's translation of Cesar Chavez' "Si, se puede". Because "can" is not - and never will be - the immediate 'matter' of must.

This GenX Northern Californian well recalls the national AIDS crises of the nineties with apathetic policy abandoning our sick and dying. Likely not Marianne Williamson's memory as she chose not to ignore in lieu of her activism to found Project Angel Food.

That was Lens One. Click to Lens Two: Whom amongst us could have fathomed AIDS survivors (albeit still disproportionately representative of a privileged class within the LGBTQIA+ community) - still positive - standing healthy as whole, traversing long lines wrapped around San Fran's City Hall for marriage licenses - preceding the nation's Supreme Court tardiness by years.

Speaking of one's beloved region, our latest fire disaster began with mythological lightning. Ay, change, gentlesoulfolk, happens in an almost-otherworldly flash. Or lens click - correcting vision. Granted, grassroots labor pounds each nail into the rusted tracks so that Change can choo choo to meet its moment. That moment though? Decades, if not centuries, of preparation - oft in the form of mortal sacrifice - set the groundwork for the otherwise miraculous instant to hit the ground running. The baton (or hammer) can be dropped and recovered but rue the generation who forfeits their own ride.

Substantive change is rarely convenient and those who imagine it can ever be neat n' tidy in ideal time frames must have missed Tarana Burke's MeToo Movement not exactly upend but stick a prick in the overinflation of patriarchy's underbelly. Why the term 'jab' waited for COVID vaccines boggles the mind. Sum'in shifted; a population rose when Adam's Rib poked the whole cage. Then again, misogyny cannot be inoculated so perhaps 'jab' would have only stung realistic sensibilities. One intentionally types "sensibilities" rather than 'expectations' because the point here is that expectations are set to be toppled with outcomes even better. Let us beckon results to blindside. And dazzle.

What does the ballet brutal that was 2020 bode for 2021 and any time that might be lent us beyond? My good peops, there be but one lens of recourse: bold as hell and gracious as heaven! Submitting relevance to face rejection on a sugar-coated platform, eliminating themselves from serious consideration to plum cabinet prospects, (vision)airy-fairy candidates took flight - offering survival 'dust'. Shunned. [Cue the oboe.] Williamson, Yang, and Sanders now stand not in the vicinity of a Presidential podium. Their ideas tho'? Forged a pandemic response plausible. Once diagnosed far-sighted yet proven near, their imagination rippled right into reality before a President-Elect could confer said status. For the love of all things evolving, Biden is, well...he is what is 'left' us. To lead a transformation. At a juncture in a democracy fantastically fragile. Thencefo', what does conscious citizenship involve/demand/dare? Maybe some magical 'poof' of provocation. Relentlessly - as if the nation depends upon thy ~~rabble~~-rebel-rousing. Fo' sho' seems so. The mind's eye of (vision)airy-fairies doth not tip-toe; it flits to n' fro. Should we trap dragonflies' glow in a jar, allowing the Biden/Harris administration to inch in incremental-Obama-regression? Or might we break the seal with lil' mo' than combustive "twinkle, twinkle", cracking, if not shattering - less symbolic and more structural - glass ceilings? Might we insist upon striding ahead by perhaps ignoring that 2021 is not marked by February's calendar and can still be a year to leap?

Winter Solstice is upon us - the season honoring restorative hibernation. We spent the better part of 2020 sheltering. Already. Only then, we shivered in fear. Each season's purpose, howe'er, should be holistically honored: "reap, sow, turn, turn". Consequently, this winter, gather thy strength. Pause at the enormity of loss that our po' coddled culture seems ill-equipped to see straight. For ev'ry life past? Blink. Thru most reverent tears for it is only that welling up with the dignity of grief that justifies a blurry eye. Fall asleep weeping. Let dreams be haunted by how much we fail. Awake.

Press on; rise high. Make the mass exit worthy of our remain. In one (vision)airy-fairy New Year.

a clever as compassionate critique

on the implausibility

of POSTness

Til our next 'post', feast upon produce in season...

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

...hood of men

VOGUE copyright Conde Nast

BACK of medal inscription:

Pro pace et fraternitate gentium

(For the peace and brotherhood of men)

Da Nobel Peace Prize, to many, has been defunct since Obama. Or first, was it Kissinger to dim the medal's shine? And then the latest nail in said coffin: no rebuke of Aung Sung Su Ki. Gandhi? Nominated thrice. Altho' South Africa is likely pleased that the 'golden goose' alluded him.

O, the irony of an 'honor' losing its merit. Consequently, the following campaign regretfully invokes one's watermeloncholia. Doesn't take much to do so.

https://www.cubanobel.org

Is the current incarnation of the Nobel 'worth' trying to restore with 'worthy' nominations? Is there a mo' pointed philosophical argument, with Stockholm glaring errors aside, that just the idea of 'awarding' the highest of humanitarianism might counter productivity of inspiration? Such deeds of dire dignity - when authentic, such moments of intense conscientiousness beyond self interest? Are those rare ego-drained displays not ostensibly born of a humility-laced courage wherein the notion of 'reward' is void by the exalted altruistic act?

Just...don' know.

Ay, this specific cause, e-'linked' per thy perusal, is most worthy as timely. But what is worth 'it'? And what is not? Or in the vicinity of a regalia-ed nod but not quite enuf for distinguished consideration? And what of 'worth'? Is 'worth' mere nebulous noun or concrete concept? And who are we to applaud one deliberate act of grace above the invisible, infinite others - neva acknowledged, yet entirely responsible for holding up the delicate fabric that weaves our very dignity as a risky species?

Just...don' know.

Reminiscent of "Oscar So White" hashtags. Or is that comparison too trite? To those micro protests one could only manage barely a bristle: "Why do you, so-called Autonomous-Ethnic-Ethos-in-Revolt, even give a fig - or gnawed H2Omelon rind - about the Academy? How does a vote from such an antiquated source elevate your artistry? Why do you even need 'their' warped acceptance to affirm your craft?" In 'kind', the Nobel committee sacrificed its own relevance in innumerable examples of exclusion.

Thus here we are at present. Contemplating a campaign for Cuba. Or to feign some political pragmatism: rooting for the Caribbean island's doctors. Once mo', begging to be seen, willing to accept the illusion of visibility (to Other). Yet again.

Just...don' know.

This quill is too much a feather afloat - currently lacking the depth of an impulse of integrity, that necessary weight of conviction. To simply sign. Albeit liberal guilt is heavy and therefor inclined to assist. By no means 'anchor' yet perhaps direct the following existential musing - less adrift. Maybe heeding Voltaire:

Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

(The perfect is the enemy of the good.)

Furthamo'? One is fully aware of the unnerving 'now' of this request. And yet? Just a bit too near November Third - a date already as defunct as the Nobel Peace Prize. Due to COVID-conscious mail-in ballots, the results shall likely find us all scratching our napps whilst collectively uttering:

Just...don' know.

And again, November Third's point is not only void in its presumed aftermath. Its implications may ~~count~~ matter before the contentious count. One plans not to mail her ballot but double-glove it into the official election drop box at our County Clerk's office in October. Just prior to taking a knife to carve a crooked smile. Into a pumpkin - an edible squash whose nutritional value will be forfeited for decor. Once alive albeit on a low coiled vine. At least grounded as visibly prominent amongst all garden's produce. Soon forced to grin - until it rots. Its seeds' fate? Salty. And roasted.

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

Just...as soon as said official election orange flesh...arrives.

The only choice will be whether to use a black or blue ball-point. Black n' blue: the colors of bruises on skin or ink from a pen. That non-decision will be followed by a rather frantic 'shading' in of that compromised, empty Oval to denote a political ticket. Eerie echo of this ambivalent exercise in bequeathin' a broken crown unto one undeserving.

Then again...

https://www.cubanobel.org

Maybe there is one campaign raising our level - at least with allowance for an allusion to some semblance of sum'in nigh betta.

a clever as compassionate critique

on the implausibility

of POSTness

Til our next 'post', feast upon produce in season...

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

spelling b--s

VOGUE copyright Conde Nast

ANNOUNCER: "Your word is WhitePrivilege."

15-YEAR-OLD: "Pardon...did you say 'privilege'?

ANNOUNCER: "No. Your word is WhitePrivilege."

15-YEAR-OLD: "Would you please use it in a sentence?"

ANNOUNCER: white privilege...\ˈ(h)wīt priv-lij \

"According to witness accounts AND video footage, police apparently let the gunman walk past them and leave the scene with a rifle over his shoulder and his hands in the air as members of the crowd were yelling for him to be arrested because he had shot people."

15-YEAR-OLD: "Part of speech?"

ANNOUNCER: "There is no part of speech; it is a part of existence. I read not from

Merriam Webster nor Oxford Dictionaries. Associated Press is a not-for-

profit with a Board of Directors. On that board sits the head of Scripps.

Just a disclaimer there. The AP inadvertently quintessentially defined

WhitePriv thru one sentence, eerily ironically embedded in Groves' and

Bauer's article today titled:

17-year-old arrested after 2 killed during unrest in Kenosha

15-YEAR-OLD: [pausing long betwixt each letter]

"...doubleYOU...H...I..."

EndLESS Act

a clever as compassionate critique

on the implausibility

of POSTness

Monday, August 17, 2020

Cocktail Labour Parties: with a wedge of melon

VOGUE copyright Conde Nast

Love's Labour's Won. Lost play of Willy Sh-- or yet another myth-morsel, a gingerly crumb to send Bard devotee-detectives deeper into the forest?

The fact that Won's existence cannot be confirmed registers as more metaphorical than mythological.

Can we 'win'? Is ethno-existential triumph possible?

According to the musical, The Wiz, its Scarecrow croons an emphatic, "No."

The H2Omeloncholic™ set, howe'er, prefer the question. Ay, eva, sooth, yon quest.

Can the Labour Party rule Empire? Can reparations - promised - atone for the forced labour that built a 'super' power? Can labour unions resurrect to defend/embolden the working class? Can the labour of sheltering wives/mothers be equal to their male counterparts - during plague - on the domestic front? Is the 'gig' economy a labour protected under the law? What labour is 'essential' and if it be so, where are its essential benefits? How is the worth of labour determined, who is tasked with such demarcation, and is their impetus ethical exchange thru conscientious compensation? Within labouring, does the demos collectively rekanize equitable 'efforting' - with means of correction when such dynamics become distorted? Does such consideration suggest labour's impact is fiscal as much as psychic? Can the arguable additional emotional labour of peops of color, exhaustively balancing their Du Bois-ian 'doubling' or "twoness", result in qualifiable reward?

One's queries seem to stand not alone. And nay, one refers not to Marx or other economic theoreticians. Albeit both red n' pinko-pink scarves are oft artfully tied round one's throat in a Hoxton knot. Preferring philosophers who masquerade as poets, one does not stand as much as kneel: humbled to keep illustrious company from Langston to Lorraine to PRINCESS of Da Bard's L. L. Lost. To be lost is generally experienced in isolation of some sort - standing alone. Less concerned with Western concepts of 'win', one chooses 'found' as the optimum opposite of 'lost' - imagining community. Thus, one conjures a conversation - as intimate as of mythic proportion - at a back booth in a bar at the height of 'happy' hour...

LANGSTON: What Happens to a Dream Deferred?

Does it dry up...

LORRAINE: ...like a raisin in the sun?

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST (V.2)

PRINCESS:

Your oath I will not trust; but go with speed

[maybe it just sags]
To some forlorn and naked hermitage,
Remote from all the pleasures of the world;
There stay until the twelve celestial signs

[crest and sugar-over]
Have brought about the annual reckoning.
If this austere insociable life
Change not your offer made in heat of blood;
If frosts and fasts,

[fester like a sore]

hard lodging and thin weeds

Nip not the gaudy blossoms of your love,
But that it bear this trial and last love;
Then, at the expiration of the year,

[explode]
Come challenge me, challenge me by these deserts,
And, by this virgin palm now kissing thine
I will be thine; and till that instant shut
My woeful self up in a mourning house,

[stink like rotten meat]
Raining the tears of lamentation

For the remembrance of my father's death.

If this thou do deny, let our hands part,
Neither entitled in the other's heart.

a clever as compassionate critique

on the implausibility

of POSTness

Til our next 'post', feast upon produce in season...

Monday, July 20, 2020

Black Ay Peace

VOGUE copyright Conde Nast

serial radio broadcast, originally aired July 13 - July 16

https://publictheater.org/productions/season/1920/richard-ii/

"Ay, no; no, ay; for I must nothing be..."

Richard II, Act IV, Scene 1

I know no I

Offer. Gentlesoulfolk, that is what NY's Public Theatre does every summer, free of charge to the rarified few who manage tickets under the stars. And in a BLM-COVID-conflated moment, the late Joe Papp's vision for Shakespeare in the Park was not failed. One 'checks' oneself to avoid the trap: that of defaulting an 'inclusive' Shakespearean endeavor as worthy due to repazentation e'er ravenous. Oblivious casting dangerously sacrifices intentionality, resulting in an unwitting bypassing of the violence of absence for oppressive presence. Minus expansive interrogation, harms merely replicate themselves - inadvertently as insidiously. Here, howe'er, one found oneself less inclined to mediate that incessant muck. To an unrestricted nod. Earned.  Richard II took to the socially-distanced radio waves, unmasking the work with no less than Professor Ayanna Thompson as a treat of a guide. Pointing out the irony of the Act IV line, Thompson spoke of Richard's "unraveling".

One wonders...and wondering being one's digression of choice...if one might have arrived on the porch of the following musing absent director, Saheem Ali's intentional casting of this Richard: André Holland in the titular role to Miriam A. Hyman's Bolingbroke.

Richard II is supposed to be another (arguably one o' da betta) Bard takes on 'power'. Finely tuned here yet no novel concept in Shakespeare's canon. Still, this particular tour de force - as sho' 'twas - allowed one to gleam sum'in new as welcome. This production brought one less to the alter...or back porch...of 'power' than its oft ulterior motive: 'privilege'. Given the customary casting of the work, one hath not found herself thus compelled. And so? 'Twas here - upon this issue of 'privilege' that one teetered to n' (A)fro. Power, when beheld and bequeathed responsibly as critically, with at least some ~~heir~~ air of altruism? Such holds, or rather, releases some modicum of merit. Thaz at least the distant prospect of substantive power.

Yet 'privilege'? As hath been sentenced since the social construction of whiteness? Privilege is sum'in else. Far from any conviction - remote or contrived. A cultural quirk, disguised beyond the bounds of duplicitous, as some convenience. Happens to rule the world. And that allusion to white priv is sumi'in which the skilled Holland n' Hyman can conjure creatively. All too well. Alas, not to inhabit offstage. That very incongruity, tho' - of performative 'reach' versus societal regressive positionality - proved fruitful, daresay, at the peek of summer 'produce'. Holland's effective method in film projects is naturalistic. On stage, and in particular, Shakespeare, his take - be it personal tenor and/or chosen technique - can be experienced as a subtlest 'withholding'. There is a fine line 'twixt appreciatively thoughtful and appropriately studied. That suggestive line becomes even finer - perhaps even risking 'snapping' - for thespians of color. Whether his organic style, intention here, or both, Holland's approach works beyond well against and with a Bolingbroke full-bodied. Hyman takes ownership of her role, seizing it no less than Bolingbroke within the text. With score to settle, her offering thru 'him' is informed. Both agent-artists rose to this rare occasion of cultural-collision-in-duel-plagues: that of some alleged 'reckoning' of our salient ism and that of literal physiological immunity. Right at this time. This Richard.

On point. Together, their voices embodied that unique tension when Shakespeare's quill tip is too damp to call dry while its squid piss spells out more pathological ink blot than iambic pentameter.  Darkest cloud expelled as oceanic 'smoke screen' - upon perceived threat.  Ain't white priv thus - all but falsest of crowns? E'en Renaissance-ed north as England/south as Italy, white priv be but a Venice Merchant's 'masque', if ye will, cockblocking bucolic plague whilst projecting the debauchery of Carnival: "All that glitters" far from "gold". Once dethroned, what is left?

Wiki Commons

I know no I

White Priv and its royal cousin, White Fragility - utilized by diversity consultant Robin DiAngelo - are void of 'self'. By design. And how. The insular identity is built upon the grains of the sandcastle of supremacy. The 'self' is a citizen and that brand of citizenship or American 'right' is validated by the privilege of NOT being Ethnic Other-ed. Sociologists and journalists and bloggers, that would be either, remain confounded as to why certain citizens "vote against their own interest". One is most confounded by their confusion as to why. How can one 'vote against their own interest' when their very comprehension of their existence 'centers' the futile protection of the fallacy of priv? One need ne'er "know" the/a 'self' when priv is convinced that its 'I' is actual - sustained by generational inheritance to practice priving freely. Priv fakes its pleasure even in masturbatory exercises of prescribed 'liberty'. Life sans priv requires self-definition. A core. Whenst, alas, there may be none to be found. Not once the "unraveling" lays such institutional illusion bare. Not because 'fragile' self is not in there somewhere - shivering in a cultural curated corner. But because priv is the seductive imposter. Self never bothered to introduce itself to the conscience riding its velvet coattails. At court.

Yet in prison? Holland can speak directly thru his Richard's self-reflection in Act V, Scene 5:

"I have been studying how I may compare

This prison where I live unto the world:

And for because the world is populous

And here is not a creature but myself,

I cannot do it; yet I'll hammer it out."

Holland - Richard-retreated, priv-peeled - elaborates. Picking up said "hammer":

"...Sometimes just walking down the street, I would just say it, you know,
to myself. And it's not until the end of the play, that he finds the time to
be alone, to really sit with himSELF, and reflect. And in doing so, he
comes to understand that he is a human being. And before your very
eyes, you see a person become a person."

Here, Jimmy can have his say; Prince Jimmy's pen was nuttin' but scepter. And Hammer. One applauds Holland n' Hyman for their Willy Shhh...ache...shakes n' spearing to prod free the knot of priv from power. Their theatrical deliveries, left entangling the specificity of their respective identities, sifted Bard sediment, evoking Baldwin. Such insight of luminaries - four-hundred years cozy - constitutes ~~hem~~ hymn more than haw within Crenshaw's intersection. At the height of their individual prowess, then, where relevance ain't some rarity, should not Baldwin n' Bard be engaged in tandem? Pray, Baldwin, alongside 'Will', take thy bow:

"What white people have to do, is try and find out in their own hearts...

["ay"/ I]...why
it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place. Because I'm
not a nigger; I'm a man. But if you think I'm a nigger, it means you need
it. And the question you’ve got to ask yourself - the white population of

this country - North and South...If I'm not the nigger here and if you, the

white people, invented him, then you've got to find out...

["ay"/ I]...why.
And the future of the country...[Richard's imperialist England
long ere 'New World' Indigenous-exterminating-n'-African-enslaving-

colonist 'upstarts']...depends on that: Whether it's able to ask...

["to be or not"]

...that question."

Baldwin in Kenneth Clark interview, 1963

Richard II - "ay/I" (IV. 1), 1595

Hamlet - "to be/not" soliloquy (III. 1), 1603

a clever as compassionate critique

on the implausibility

of POSTness

Til our next 'post', feast upon produce in season...

CV

Sunday, December 20, 2020

20/20: the year of (vision)airy-fairies

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

...hood of men

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

spelling b--s

Monday, August 17, 2020

Cocktail Labour Parties: with a wedge of melon

Monday, July 20, 2020

Black Ay Peace