Griots for a Global Village

This year marks the 100th birthday of Romare Bearden, and yesterday's article by Holland Cotter (with a slideshow) noted several ongoing celebrations of his work. Bringing together several themes in this blog, Cotter's article is titled "Griot for a Global Village." Bearden's visual storytelling adapts rhythms and motifs from traditional forms and makes them new, as did several other Harlem artists of the 1930s. Jacob Lawrence spoke of the interwoven fabric of visual and narrative art that emerged in that period, when he explored writing and Ralph Ellison studied sculpture.
    Bearden's Foundation shows the broad sweep of that vision in his case, and how it continues to influence the way we see stories. There you find the statement about his influence by the griot of American 20th century theater, August Wilson: "What I saw was Black life presented on its own terms, on a grand and epic scale, with all its richness and fullness."

Blurb is a Verb: Your Book Trailer as Calling Card: A Success Story

Guest post on Sarah Pinneo's helpful book publicity blog.

WPA Stories Caught the Quiet Before Pearl Harbor

On the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, it's hard to imagine a time when that name didn't sound shadowed by a surprise strike. But just two years before the 1941 attack, family members spoke sunnily of their loved ones stationed in the faraway port in the South Pacific.
    The WPA life histories, lost in storehouses for decades, are now safe and searchable on the Library of Congress website.
   "By a strange coincidence, this boy, the pride of my life, is a soldier of Uncle Sam," Eliza Brady of Fernandina Florida says of her son Anthony. She tells WPA writer Rose Shepherd proudly that he "is Lieutenant-Commander of the aerial squadron in Pearl Harbor at Honolulu, Hawaii."
    Ernest Gerber, a Swiss-American farmer in Marietta Georgia, recalled his stint in Pearl Harbor during an earlier world war. "
    "In September 1917 they sent me to the hospital at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii," he told A.G. Barie. "I was assigned to repair room and ward duties," but he spent his off-duty hours exploring the island with photography, often by boat. He told his interviewer of a rare surprise during his stay:
   "A man who was preparing material for a book embracing a story concerning the eruption of a volcano had come to the island for inspiration, and he asked me if I would be willing to take a party to Launa Los. I had been planning a trip there myself so we got a party together and sailed over. One of the men was a camera man for Fox Films." As they approached the volcano from the beach, "suddenly it seemed as if the earth itself was about to go to pieces. After a short sharp rumble a mass of smoke and fire shot up into the air hundreds of feet and a stream of lava rushed through an opening in the crater walls... This was the eruption of 1918, which furnished headlines for the newspapers, and stories for some of the magazines."

Touring the Occupied Lands

Last week a visit to the Occupy DC movement in McPherson Square revealed an impressive level of awareness and a sense of settling in, as many braced for colder weather.
    Then I was in Providence, RI over the weekend for a conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), on the role of the arts and humanities in a democracy. The hotel was right across the street from the Occupy Providence forces, where tv crews did standup reports as commuters waited for their buses at the edge of the square. Impressive that some young people handling the protest's media tent could get college credit for their activism. Also impressive how seriously some in colleges and universities are about making education connect with the world in new ways, and with the arts to foster the empathy that many Occupiers yearn for. A good discussion after the screening of Soul of a People.
    Finally, passing back down from New England, I passed the half dozen tents that marked Occupy Poughkeepsie.
    In yesterday’s paper, Thomas Friedman drew the parallels and contrasts between the Occupiers and protesters in India: “Both countries are witnessing grass-roots movements against corruption and excess. The difference is that Indians are protesting what is illegal… And Americans are protesting what is legal – a system of Supreme Court-sanctioned bribery in the form of campaign donations that have enabled the financial-services industry to effectively buy the U.S. Congress… I think that repairing our respective dysfunctional democracies … is for our generation what the independence movement in India and the civil rights movement in America were for our parents’ generation.”

Voices of Frustration

Well, things change in a week. The protest on Wall Street has gathered momentum in cities across the country. In TheRoot today, Chris Jenkins lets four skilled black professionals in DC speak for themselves on the frustrations of finding work now, in words that crystallize the protesters' concerns often better than the Occupiers themselves. Tyrone Jackson, an electrician, gives powerful expression to that experience and the lengths he's gone to -- hours back and forth between the city and Spotsylvania County, Virginia -- to find work.
    "You could build a house with a foundation with the types of people I know who have skills out here and can't find jobs," he says.
    Jenkins does right by Jackson and by the tradition of oral history.

What Happened to the Left?

In Michael Kazin’s recent essay in the New York Times, he pointed out that measures that became institutionalized during the New Deal – Social Security, minimum wage, occupational health -- didn’t come simply from popular outrage at the Great Depression; the issues had percolated through decades of steady work and clarification.
    It's ironic, Kazin says, that in many ways the great American middle class of the 1950s and 60s was built with the help of these programs, such as Social Security and Truman’s G.I. Bill, that many Americans deemed radical when they were first proposed.
    Conservatives took the lesson. When they were out of power in the 1970s, they responded by organizing and developing their own voice and infrastructure, including much of talk radio now.
    Now the tide has changed again, Kazin argues, and progressives need to fortify institutions and create a coherent movement that articulates anew how they propose to improve Americans’ lives. They cannot assume their programs are transparent in their benefits to Americans; they must organize.
   Yesterday Kazin was on National Public Radio discussing his argument with listeners and The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel, who insisted that there are progressive movements that are demonstrating for changes in America. She blamed the media in part for not reporting on these movements, including the American Dream Movement.
    A final note: this week we say farewell to our friend Stetson Kennedy, who died last month. We say farewell with a celebration of his life tomorrow afternoon at his beloved home of many years, Beluthahatchee (the name means ‘place of peace’). If you’re near Jacksonville, turn out for what will be a remarkable party. Details at www.stetsonkennedy.com.

Amid Jobs Talk, Action for Creatives

In a show of innovation and rare unity, nearly a dozen private foundations have partnered with the National Endowment for the Arts to fund local-level arts projects, recognizing the arts are essential for community growth, economic and otherwise.
    Through a program called ArtPlace, a series of grants totaling $11.5 million (plus $12 million in corporate loans) will be distributed to 34 projects around the country.
    "Too many people think of the arts as luxuries," the Ford Foundation's Luis Ubiñas told the New York Times. "The arts are inherently valuable, and they're also part of what's going to get us out of this economic problem we're in."

    Besides Ford, other foundations involved are the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Found-ation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the James Irvine Found-ation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Rasmuson Foundation, and the Robina Foundation.
    Federal agencies involved (not as funders) include no-nonsense departments of Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Transportation, Education, and Health and Human Services.
    Of course, the grants total equals just two percent of what Ford gave out in grants for 2009. But the program gives a sense of action. In the 1930s only a tiny fraction of WPA and other recovery funds went to the arts.
    The Times article also notes that a second group of grants starts today. Groups have a month to submit applications on the ArtPlace website.