Friday, October 30, 2009

JEFFERY IN THE HOUSE

“One Question” with Jeffery McNary
NORBERT MARSZALEK
neoteric ART
10/29/09

Jeffery McNary came of age in Chicago, Illinois. After a career in public service, including service as an Economic Development advisor to then Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, turned to journalism and writing. His work can be found in Newsweek, Rolling Stone, The Vineyard Gazette, the Boston Phoenix, Transition Magazine, and other outlets including Chicago Art Review. His poetry has been published in Iconoclast Magazine. Mr. McNary is currently crafting a screenplay, “Ro”, in which he captures the volatility and passion of socio-political in the 60’s and 70’. He is also currently composing a volume of poetry, “Simple Epistles”. Mr. McNary currently divides his time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Paris, France.


Neoteric Art: How did you get involved with Chicago Art Review (chicagoartreview.net)?

Jeffery McNary: The opportunity to engage visual artists while exploring and learning about their art and various techniques is both challenging and exhilarating. For me, writing for Chicago Art Review. Net has provided a vehicle for such a very rich and uncommon opportunity.

I hardly see myself an “art critic”. I’m a working writer fortunate enough to have wandered into this genre and found a fit which works for both me and Chicago Art Review. A large portion of my time has been spent crafting a work for stage which explores the relationship between two literary giants, James Baldwin and William Styron. Baldwin lived in Styron’s Connecticut guest house while he was writing, “Another Country”. Styron was beginning, “The Confessions of Nat Turner.” It’s a fascinating story, and the project, it’s off the charts. I’m enthralled by writers who meld different avenues as the subject and times demand and expand and contract….Didion, Mailer, a dose of Sartre on occasion.

Born in Chicago, I’ve spent most of my adult life in New England, a tour of the meta-spiritual with the Jesuits, Harvard, then government and campaigns and campaigns and government and back to academia. Such tides can grow rough. A significant amount of my writing had been politically geared journalism, teamed from time to time with the occasional mandatory poetry, that queen of blood sports.

As the air in the room of political writing grew thin, I sought out other options. To my surprise my first art review found a home in Harvard’s, Transition Magazine, about a year ago. High-cotton. Not at all bad company.

I met Chicago Art Review through a gallery owner who holds some respect for my work. I wanted the kind of space and mobility the outlet has provided. The deadlines bring about a smile, and the interaction with artists calls for sensitivities to the individual’s magnetic-north, influences, and media. There’s a trust factor at play when translating the visual into the written. It shouts at the writer to neither drop nor add. It’s a marvelous banquet of sorts. It’s self defining. Perspectives cannot be un-addressed.

The objective trust factor also blends over into the editor-writer relationship, a new and enriching thing for me. It’s also helpful in rounding up the stray comma. As of yet, there’s been no “Wylie Coyote” moment. I haven’t run off a cliff, yet. To quote Baldwin, “I want to be an honest man, and a good writer.”


Wednesday, October 28, 2009

IGOR AND MARINA at THOMAS MASTERS GALLERY

jeffery mcnary
CHICAGO ART REVIEW.NET

In a unique and quite amazing partnership, Igor Kozlovsky and Marina Sharapova, are artists who paint together, on the same works that is. They are husband and wife, and painting collaboratively and approaching the canvas from different directions with an expanded sense of each others style and talents.

Their current exhibition, at the Thomas Masters Gallery, provides a glimpse of the constant supply of delectable compositions produced by this duo. Igor’s sense for color and, “appreciation for the tactile nature of pain, canvas, and wood” compliments Marina’s realistic drawings in poetic fashion. “We divide the duties”, shared Marina. “Igor does backgrounds…color, the dramatic.”

Still, on occasion they appear to venture and stand on their own. ‘Legend of the Spring’, a graphite on paper, is Marina in full flight with crisply articulated and precise stokes. Here the female figure emerges appearing to wear a bird nest-esque hat, arms folded, with bird perched upon her thumb. In ‘Night of the Carnival’, Igor leads the dance with his bold, Pollock style background of bold strokes and splash. He smiles, “Pollock was my favorite. What I took from him was passion. We were trained classically. Pollock was radical. I was attracted to him. De Kooning is another favorite.”

“Wyeth is my favorite”, Marina adds. “You know, the different weather conditions. Sometimes you want something different. Sometimes you just want to try something new.” That they have done in charting and cutting from whole cloth their, ‘Walkers’ series. Here the works reflect the artists’ influence by wall paintings of ancient Egypt and the murals of Pompeii.

‘Apples for Helena’ takes the viewer for a wonderful ride. The early sketch reflects the continued development, dents, and quality of Marina’s calisthenics. Igor’s adopted coloring livens the theatre with skin tones and glow.

Such exhibitions rarely pop-up and embrace about the place. Viewers should feel really bad only if they’re not enlightened.

Monday, October 26, 2009

MARIE N'DIAYE, TROIS FEMMES PUISSANTES, ed. GALLIMARD

Marie N’Diaye a 42 ans et elle écrit depuis 30 ans. Elle est née à Pithiviers en 1967, d’un père d’origine sénégalaise, absent, et d’une mère française, professeur de sciences naturelles. A 17 ans, la même année, elle passe son baccalauréat et publie son premier livre, Quand au riche avenir, chez Minuit. Elle rencontre alors un autre écrivain, Jean-Yves Cendrey, avec qui elle vit depuis, loin des grandes villes et de leur tumulte médiatique. Elle continue à écrire, pour le théâtre, elle est actuellement la seule femme vivante à figurer au répertoire de la Comédie Française, pour le cinéma, co-rédigeant le scénario de White Material de Claire Denis, pour les enfants aussi. De ses origines africaines, elle n’a jamais parlé dans ses onze romans publiés. Il faut sans doute qu’elle s’installe à Berlin, qu’elle échappe à la langue française et qu’elle y écrive un douzième roman, Trois femmes puissantes, pour que naissent ces trois personnages. Trois portraits et destins de femmes, entre le Sénégal et la France, qui se dispersent ou se croisent, dans ce « non » qu’elles partagent. Trois femmes puissantes est présentes dans les premières sélections du prix Goncourt.Dans la deuxième sélection Goncourt

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

M. WEST DE RASSEMBLEMENT

M. WEST DE RASSEMBLEMENT
Issue/Publication: THE ROOT
Web Links
Mots de l'autre M. (Cornel) occidental Avec un nouveau mémoire sur des étagères (et des e-lecteurs), le disciple de Princeton parle le prix Nobel d'Obama, le futur de la politique noire et ce qui Jésus fait (s'il étaient président). Par : Dayo Olopade Signalé : 20 octobre 2009 à 4:22 P.M. Avec un nouveau mémoire sur des étagères (et des e-lecteurs), le disciple de Princeton parle le prix Nobel d'Obama, le futur de la politique noire et ce qui Jésus fait (s'il étaient président). Cornel occidental, professeur distingué au centre de Princeton pour des études d'Afro-américain, et à l'auteur des best-sellers tels que la course importe (Vintage, 1994) des sujets de démocratie : Gagnant le combat contre l'impérialisme (pingouin, 2004) et gardant la foi : La philosophie et la foi en Amérique (Routledge, 1994), a un nouveau mémoire, ouest de frère : Vivant et aimant dehors fort (livres souriants) dans les magasins maintenant. Dans lui, l'ouest décrit son voyage du « enfant de la maman et de l'enfant du papa » à être l'un des sociologues prépondérants travaillant aujourd'hui. La racine s'est assise avec l'ouest récemment pour parler l'art, la politique et le premier président noir. Dans la partie de cette entrevue en deux parties, plats de Dr. West 40 ans d'études afro-américaines, Obama' ; prix de s Nobel et entretien d'offres vrai sur Barack, Bill Clinton et ce qui se produit quand Jésus met ses pieds vers le haut sur Pontius Pilate' ; bureau de s. Lisez la partie ici. La racine : Cette année marque 40 ans d'études afro-américaines. Que pensez-vous à des études afro-américaines, dans et hors du canon, l'idée des études noires ? Dr. Cornel West : Pour moi, les deux sont inséparables, mais non identiques. Pour le commencement même vous ne pouvez pas être bien informé au sujet des études afro-américaines sans être bien informé des études américaines, sans être bien informé au sujet de la modernité. Ce qui inclut l'éclaircissement, le romantisme et les langues très européennes que la plupart des nègres parlent de toute façon. La notion entière de eux étant séparés de n'importe quelle manière analytique ou intellectuelle est vide. En termes d'où on leur enseigne, c'est une question différente. Cela doit faire avec les divisions disciplinaires de la connaissance dans l'académie. Vous pourriez finir vers le haut avec une partie du meilleur travail étant fait sur les sciences humaines sur ce que signifie il pour être moderne et Américain dans le département d'études d'Afro-Américain, s'il est fait convenablement. Mais vous devez cross-fertilize et cross-pollinate… TR : Quel est votre sentiment au sujet de HBCUs, leur importance aujourd'hui, et comment l'éducation fournie se rapporte à une université comme Princeton ? On est qu'on ne peut pas mais avoir le grand respect pour la tradition de ces établissements, parce qu'il a produit une partie du plus de haute qualité des penseurs noirs. Toni que Morrison-vous pouvez s'arrêter bien là. Nous pouvons nous arrêter bien là, nous ne parlons pas de Brown sterling, Amiri Baraka et ainsi de suite, Phylicia Rashad et ainsi de suite. Mais dans la situation contemporaine, ce n'est pas simplement que les masses des étudiants noirs vont aux Instituts de Formation Supérieure et aux universités d'état, mais que les établissements blancs d'élite embrassent les étudiants supérieurs de noir d'entaille en 40 dernières années. Vous devez être très créateur maintenant chez le Howards et Morehouses et nous dire ce qui font offrons, ce qui est distinctif ou unique par opposition à quelle offre de Swarthmore ou de Haverford ou de Harvard. TR : Parlons Obama. Vous l'avez critiqué pour ne pas mentionner Martin Luther King Jr. dans son discours de convention, et dans le livre, êtes encore vous ce que j'appellerais prudent au sujet de sa victoire. Pensez-vous des personnes de couleur devriez-vous être plus circonspect au sujet d'un président noir ? Onde entretenue : Nous devons être honnêtes, nous devons vérité-dire, mais nous devons également comprendre. Après que la célébration de célébration-un qui a été justifiée parce qu'elle était historiquement une sans précédent élection-il doive être protégée. C'est vrai ; protection de lui et de son famille précieux. En second lieu, il doit être respecté. Les gens le traitant sans respect de certaines manières sont quelque chose que nous devons combattre, il semblent à moi. Et troisièmement, il doit être critiqué a basé selon le principe. Ma lecture de frère Barack est comme suit. Il est brillant ; il est charismatique ; il est très stratégique. Il est rapidement devenu hypnotisé par le braininess de certaines de ceux attachés à Wall Street. Et il a voulu rassurer l'établissement afin d'obtenir sa pose parce qu'il est un venu. Les venus sont toujours très inquiétude montés vis-à-vis d'un établissement qui est été autour pour des centaines d'années… Le Président Clinton était un venu. Dès qu'il est entré, il s'est tenu en arrière sur la facture d'investissement, est allé avec Wall Street, apporté dans Greenspan. C'est un genre semblable de chose parallèle. Vous obtenez ces gens qui sont sur le feu parlant de la démocratie, personnes journalières, travailleurs. Et quand vous êtes présenté dans les halls de la puissance, ils entrent vous dans le bureau ovale ; ils disent que « c'est le bouton pour la bombe atomique… » Voyez, il sait le tout que la substance maintenant-il est tête d'un empire. Elle est plus profonde que l'assimilation, et ce n'est pas corruption ; c'est juste la vie au dessus. Si vous mettez Jésus dans le bureau de Pontius Pilate, comment va-t-il se comporter ? TR : Que pensez-vous du prix Nobel ? Onde entretenue : Je souhaite juste que ses parents aient été autour de le voir. Je pense que ces prix sont, car la pierre astucieuse indique, une affaire de famille. Ils sont pour les gens qui vous aiment. Je pense que ceci le met dans une situation très difficile parce qu'avoir un prix de paix Nobel et puis s'avérer être un président de guerre va être très durs. …. Puisqu'ils ont donné basé sur la technologie de l'information sur la promesse et le fait que, et ils sont absolument exacts, ce frère Barack Obama a produit autrement de plus d'un sens d'espoir et de possibilité que n'importe qui sur la planète. C'est un fait qui doit être reconnu, et si c'est les critères pour le prix, il obtient le prix que la manière James Brown l'obtient pour dégonfler-incontesté. Incontesté. Mais c'est au niveau de la promesse symbolique. Le Now sont vous allant avoir un prix de paix et envoyer encore 68.000 troupes en Afghanistan ? Vous avez toujours des gens marcher autour de qui a torturé les personnes, qui sont complètement inexplicables. Vous avez des avocats qui ont autorisé des crimes contre l'humanité et vous dites que vous voulez tourner à partir de cela. Mais quand Jamal se fait attraper avec la fente sur le coin, vous ne tournez pas à partir de celui que vous étudiez et poursuivez ce frère il obtient envoyé à un complexe industriel de prison. Et c'est hypocrisie au niveau le plus profond quand il vient à la règle du droit. Mais elle est maintenant sous Obama. Ce n'est plus Bush. TR : Que faites-vous de ce qu'Obama appelle la « génération de Joshua » des agents élus ? Je veux dire Artur souvent-mentionné Davis, agent de réservations de Cory, Deval Patrick, Adrian Fenty et semblable. Que le récit de la politique noire fait-il avancer ? Onde entretenue : Un que je pense qu'il y a beaucoup de confusion. Une partie de elle doit faire avec l'effondrement relatif des bases organiser-en dépit d'Obama. Je n'irais pas jusqu'ici dire qu'Obama était des bases ; Je l'appellerais Astroturf. Il doit faire avec l'utilisation de la technologie de mobiliser rapidement, mais il est toujours à partir du dessus. Il a attaché au bureau du candidat…. Mais mobiliser pour une campagne est différente de la mobilisation pour une cause. Fannie Lou Hamer et Baker d'Ella n'ont été attachés à aucune élection à court terme. Ils essayaient de réveiller la conscience des personnes pour être les coureurs long-éloignés pour la justice. Et nous avons très peu de cela aujourd'hui. Les formes dominantes de conduite sont attachées au bureau électoral, attaché à la nation état-qui va être le prochain gouverneur noir, maire noir, le président noir. Et je pense par certains côtés qui est l'une des conséquences plus limiteuses d'Obama comme président. Dayo Olopade est journaliste de Washington pour la racine.

ROSILENE LUDUVICO, PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS

jeffery mcnary
Chicago Art Review.NET

An exhibition of primarily small-scale, interrelated works of German-based artist Rosilene Luduvicao currently hangs gracefully in the Michigan Avenue Galleries of the Chicago Cultural Center. The works are soft and sparse and subtle, and they beacon a close-up look.

The show, co-curated by the City’s outgoing Deputy Commissioner for Visual Arts, Gregory Knight, is titled simply ‘Paintings and Drawings’, rather than the artist’s early suggestion of, ‘Lindomar’ or ‘Beautiful Sea’. There is actually little ‘sea’ to be seen.

Luduvico’s paintings and figures are poetical and lyrical, light and airy. They employ soft shades as exemplified in her ‘Ele’ (He), oil on chalk grounded canvas, depicting a lone figure on a seascape. ‘Lotus’ and ‘A New Kind of Water’, both oil on ground canvas, carry an air of mystery, with their pink tints and bird forms in naked trees. They convey a sense of winter, of quiet. The observer can almost hear the crunching snow. At points, some of her figures are playful, and her manner in applying oil to canvass casually mimics watercolor and produces the effect of “blurring the distinction between painting and drawing.”

Born in Brazil, Ms. Ludvico currently lives and works in Dusseldorf, Germany. She studied at Espirito Santo University as well as Dusseldorf Acadamie of Art. She has shown primarily in Europe. This being her first U.S. exhibition, Luduvico’s work has been more spoken of, more than viewed, by many.

Nine of the, ‘Untitled’ works are inter-changeable, all oil on chalked canvas. One can move rapidly amongst or past them.

She goes on to present, ‘Chicago Boy’, color pencil and graphite on paper an entertaining, happy piece with few strokes. Here an elfin, curly haired figure appears napping. There is glitter strategically placed along the drawings bottom.

Although Luduvico has not clearly identified with any art movement, her work is said to reflect that of Caspar David Friedrich and the Romantic Period of German/Northern European painting. Her, ‘Dream Traveler’, it is worth noting, harkens similarities to the work of Peter Doig. So far, however, there is no singular spirit which comes across fully in this show. That will take a little more time, and the viewer should eagerly await that announcement. (Jeffery McNary) October 18, 2009

Friday, October 16, 2009

JOSUE PELLO: NEW WORK

jeffery mcnary
CHICAGO ART REVIEW . NET

Central to the art of Josue Pellot is, “Questioning cultural structures would be overall. Then, focusing on political and familial experiences,” he says. This is confidently rolled out in his exhibition of “New Works”, currently in the Michigan Avenue Galleries of the Chicago Cultural Center. Here, the artist utilizes an array of mediums and formats, establishing a kind of ‘ethnic modernism’ and delineating linkages often overlooked. A Chicago artist with Puerto Rican roots, he has clearly found ways, through these works, to connect figuratively and creatively his heritage and the American experience, with both pop culture and consumerism.

Pellot’s installation, “Detail of 1493”, uses neon and argon lights to present a three panel historical tale. It begins with a Taino Indian, an indigenous figure, standing on the shore viewing the arrival of three sailing vessels, and concludes in the third panel with a conquistador thrusting his sword into a prostrate Taino figure. “The neon pieces were fully realized and produced after I re-encountered the facade of a Liquor store (styled like a Spanish fortress)”, he explains. “Each sign hung on its own window at the store next to big orange signs that read things like 'Milk 2.99', RC cola .99, eggs, etc.” One sees more than the obvious in what he refers to as an, “index to a story”. Why the neon? “I thought neon would be a great medium to talk about a consumed history, and when the liquor store came in to play it was a must,” he shares.

Another such “index” emerges in,‘Temporary Allegiance’, an amalgamation of U.S. and Puerto Rican flags almost creeping from a large plastic garbage bag. “The floor piece is the end result of a site specific installation project. The 15x25 foot flag was hung on 70 feet high on a light post that divided the highway in Puerto Rico. It lasted about 12 hours before city officials castrated the seam of the flag and put a few extra holes in it for me,” says Pellot. “I waited every day at city officials offices till I finally got the flag back, cut up and stuffed into a black trash bag. And the castrated seam now wraps around that post to this date.” Both installations secrete the artist’s aesthetic argument inviting the viewer to digest the connections of colonialism and consumerism as being more than just inconsequential. A story is being told here.

Pellot’s oeuvre has been influenced by that of Felix Gonzalez Torres, David Hammons and Tom Friedman. “These would be 3 artists who have had an impacted on me. A mixture of humor, politics and unquestionable creativity,” he says.

In his large photograph, ‘Dama a Caballo’, the artist demonstrates his broad range of skills and technique. Here he builds upon a classical work of another Puerto Rican artist, Jose Campeche. Yet true to his internal coherence, Pellot updates his work via a Puerto Rican background rather than the European landscape of the original.

How then, does an artist with such deep political convictions brace for the difficulty of rendering art which does more than lecture? Does the ‘work’ fight back? “More often than not I run with a 'bad' piece to the end. I've spent hours on pieces that will decorate my studio”, he says. Concluding, “The end result can either surprise me or lead to work that does feel right.”

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

JANE FULTON ALT : AFTER THE STORM

At the Michigan Avenue Galleries of the Chicago Cultural Center
-jeffery mcnary

With “After the Storm”, Jane Fulton Alt’s dramatic, powerful exhibition recounts the aftermath of hurricane Katrina’s impact upon the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Her 30 photographs and accompanying commentary posted aside capture much of the devastation of the unprecedented disaster. The artist use of light and shadow reflect elegance and grit and draws the viewer into an emotional skirmish of irony and frankness. Now at Chicago’s Cultural Center, the photos recall. The shots are carefully composed. The photography is brutally exact.

“I never went thinking I was going to "seriously" photograph the aftermath of Katrina,” said Alt, also a clinical social worker who traveled to New Orleans via a program, “Look and Leave.” “Up until my trip there, I always shot black and white film, had my own darkroom and never done color. I brought a new digital Canon rebel camera along. Had I thought I was going to photograph, I would have brought other equipment. It wasn't until the 3rd day, when I felt I had reached my end physically and emotionally, that I realized photographing would be helpful to me and the larger community.”

In ‘Blue Cup’, Alt takes the viewer through a dense grey fog, down a street where leaning power poles come through like invading monsters. There is a collapsed structure of brown wood and rusted pipe in a heap, as a thing with wings and shanks stemming from it. Catching the eye is a teal blue paper cup, on its side as if a wounded survivor. The photo appears black and white with tint, yet, “They were all color images. There was just no color in the landscape”, says Alt. “Everything was covered with mud and dust and the air was rancid. Never in my life have I seen such destruction.”

Exploring the inherent strains and duality of roles of social worker/artist during Alt responds, “The stories were too much to contain. I asked my team leader if I could leave the "Look and Leave" site early as I thought I was going to have a "meltdown," she says. “I returned to my room and within an hour, I realized I had to photograph what I was seeing. It was like an epiphany...knowing the work would be strong and seen widely, and titled, "Look and Leave." She adds, “I actually had a change of clothes in my car for my different roles.”

Differences are cutting in ‘Mardi Gras Storage House’, its roof gone, skeletal arches and timber appear to hold up a clear sky. On the floor lay’s a silver ‘Tin man’ character from the ‘Wizard of Oz’ while across the way stands the Scarecrow sans broken neck. The vivid colors of the characters stand in sharp contrast to the rest of the picture.

“Superdome”, holds its breath, a grey, alien structure, a threatening presence at nightmares edge. “This picture was difficult...how to get the menacing feel into the photograph. I have to say that for the first time in my photographic career,” she recalls. “I knew when photographing that I was 'getting it.' It was like the pictures found me. It felt effortless, right. There was no struggle. My analytic mind took a back seat and I was responding to the landscape.”

These photographs are not entertainment. The artist captures the community in its fear and despair and searches to do so in its optimism and hope.

Monday, October 12, 2009

AMY CASEY - UNCERTAIN TIMES: NEW WORKS

JEFFERY MCNARY
CHICAGO ART REVIEW
When it comes to the art of Amy Casey, ‘House Casey’ is probably not a brand the artist wants for her themed work. Nonetheless she had to know what she was getting into and how viewers would react. She stems from a new, noisy generation of painters full of journal entries. She breaks from that crowd with exercised, vivid authority, hardly detached from events, the show is a cautionary tale.

“Uncertain Times”, Casey’s current exhibition at the Zg Gallery consist of works driven by her recurring dreams of a world calamity. Here the artist captures bad dreams, recurring sessions of buildings collapsing, ecological catastrophes, reflections of the current nervous state of affairs of society.

“Composition is something very intuitive for me, and I usually lightly sketch out a piece with that first plan and keep it around to look at in my studio while I am forming the painting in my mind, then I block forms in very lightly and work the composition out-usually over a few days or even weeks, by taping bits of paper to the painting and trying different shapes and movements,” she says.

There is amazing detail and sensitivity in Casey’s work. With shades of rust, browns and deep reds and precision, the artist lays out an almost surreal landscape of urban landscapes in decay. Casey applies acrylic to paper, a technique allowing for exacting detail. With her “BigCity, Small Town”, a large work, she exhaust every house used in previous works. She references houses and buildings from her native Cleveland. Structures appear strapped together in absurd attempts to save themselves. “I focused on something that has bothered me for some time about my little communities and networks- that no matter how many group together it must be impossible to get from building to building and actually interact in some real way, which seems absurd since connection seems an important part of the idea,” Casey shares.

In other works stilts are used as a survival strategy for the houses and in others lines have snapped leaving the structures in a state of collapse. In her, “Stragglers” some structures are washed, producing an effect of dust rising, a fog.

There is no debate in Casey’s work. Here is a non-negotiable exhibit of failed fixers and engineers. Her environmentalist aesthetic is translated in a distinctly dramatic fashion. “My biggest struggle with individual pieces is wanting to make every tiny bit of the painting detailed and real to the best degree I can,” she concludes, “but being up against the reality of time and also not overworking something to death. Probably my next biggest struggle when working with a piece is dealing with accidents and having to rethink something that I felt I knew so well.”
(Jeffery McNary) October 5, 2009

WHO WROTE DREAMS FROM MY FATHER

October 09, 2008
Jack Cashill

Prior to 1990, when Barack Obama contracted to write Dreams From My Father, he had written very close to nothing. Then, five years later, this untested 33 year-old produced what Time Magazine has called -- with a straight face -- "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
The public is asked to believe Obama wrote Dreams From My Father on his own, almost as though he were some sort of literary idiot savant. I do not buy this canard for a minute, not at all. Writing is as much a craft as, say, golf. To put this in perspective, imagine if a friend played a few rounds in the high 90s and then a few years later, without further practice, made the PGA Tour. It doesn't happen.
And yet, given the biases of the literary establishment, no reviewer of note has so much as questioned Obama's role in the writing, then or now. As the New York Times gushed, Obama was "that rare politician who can write . . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself." These accolades matter all the more because Obama has built his political persona around his presumably superior intellect, Dreams being exhibit A.
Shy of a confession by those involved, I will not be able to prove conclusively that Obama did not write this book. As shall be seen, however, there are only two real possibilities: one is that Obama experienced a near miraculous turnaround in his literary abilities; the second is that he had major editorial help, up to and including a ghostwriter.
The weight of the evidence overwhelming favors the latter conclusion and strongly suggests who that ghostwriter is. In that this remains something of a work in progress, I am willing to test my hypothesis against any standard of proof and appreciate any and all good leads.
In my career in advertising and publishing, I have reviewed the portfolios of a thousand professional writers, all of them crowded with writing samples, but only a handful of these writers would have been capable of having a written a book as stylish as Dreams. I have also written a book on intellectual fraud, Hoodwinked, and examined any number of bogus biographies that excited the literary left to the point of complicity, Edward Said's and Rigoberta Menchu's prominent among them, Menchu winning a Nobel Prize for hers. Obama's ascent seems to follow a century-old pattern.
Tracing Obama's literary ascent is complicated by what Politico.com calls a "scant paper trail." That trail begins at Occidental College whose literary magazine published two of Obama's poems -- "Pop" and "Underground" -- in 1981. Obama calls it some "very bad poetry," and he does not sell himself short. From "Underground":
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance . . .
It would be another decade before Obama had anything in print and this an edited, unsigned student case comment in the Harvard Law Review unearthed by Politico. Attorneys who reviewed the piece for Politico described it as "a fairly standard example of the genre."
Of note, Politico reporters Ben Smith and Jeffrey Resner observe that "the temperate legal language doesn't display the rhetorical heights that run through his memoir, published a few years later."
Once elected president of the Harvard Law Review --more of a popularity than a literary contest -- Obama contributed not one signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time."
A 1990 New York Times profile on Obama's election as Harvard's first black president caught the eye of agent Jane Dystel. She persuaded Poseidon, a small imprint of Simon & Schuster, to authorize a roughly $125,000 advance for Obama's proposed memoir.
With advance in hand, Obama repaired to Chicago where he dithered. At one point, in order to finish without interruption, he and wife Michelle decamped to Bali. Obama was supposed to have finished the book within a year. Bali or not, advance or no, he could not. He was surely in way over his head.
According to a surprisingly harsh 2006 article by liberal publisher Peter Osnos, which detailed the "ruthlessness" of Obama's literary ascent, Simon & Schuster canceled the contract. Dystel did not give up. She solicited Times Book, the division of Random House at which Osnos was publisher. He met with Obama, took his word that he could finish the book, and authorized a new advance of $40,000.
Then suddenly, somehow, the muse descended on Obama and transformed him from a struggling, unschooled amateur, with no paper trail beyond an unremarkable legal note and a poem about fig-stomping apes, into a literary superstar.
To be sure, it is not unusual for successful politicians to hire ghostwriters -- John McCain gives due credit to Mark Salter for his memoir, Faith of My Fathers -- but it is highly unusual for unknown young Chicago lawyers to hire ghostwriters.
I have attempted to contact Dystel by phone and email without success. It is highly unlikely she refashioned the book, and Osnos admittedly did not. If my suspicions are correct, the ghost on this book shared many of Obama's sentiments, spoke his language and spent considerable time reworking the text.
I bought Bill Ayers' 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days, for reasons unrelated to this project. As I discovered, he writes surprisingly well and very much like "Obama." In fact, my first thought was that the two may have shared the same ghostwriter. Unlike Dreams, however, where the high style is intermittent, Fugitive Days is infused with the authorial voice in every sentence. What is more, when Ayers speaks, even off the cuff, he uses a cadence and vocabulary consistent with his memoir. One does not hear any of Dreams in Obama's casual speech.
Obama's memoir was published in June 1995. Earlier that year, Ayers helped Obama, then a junior lawyer at a minor law firm, get appointed chairman of the multi-million dollar Chicago Annenberg Challenge grant. In the fall of that same year, 1995, Ayers and his wife, Weatherwoman Bernardine Dohrn, helped blaze Obama's path to political power with a fundraiser in their Chicago home.
In short, Ayers had the means, the motive, the time, the place and the literary ability to jumpstart Obama's career. And, as Ayers had to know, a lovely memoir under Obama's belt made for a much better resume than an unfulfilled contract over his head.
For simplicity sake, I will refer to the author of Dreams as "Obama." Without question, he contributed much of the book's raw material, especially the long-winded accounting of events and conversations, polished just well enough to pass muster. The book's fierce, succinct and tightly coiled social analysis more closely matches the style of Fugitive Days, a much tighter book.
Ayers and Obama have a good deal in common. In the way of background, both grew up in comfortable white households and have struggled to find an identity as righteous black men ever since. Just as Obama resisted "the pure and heady breeze of privilege" to which he was exposed as a child, Ayers too resisted "white skin privilege" or at least tried to.
"I also thought I was black," says Ayers only half-jokingly. As proof of his righteousness, Ayers named his first son "Malik" after the newly Islamic Malcolm X and the second son "Zayd" after Zayd Shakur, a Black Panther killed in a shootout that claimed the life of a New Jersey State Trooper.
Tellingly, Ayers, like Obama, began his career as a self-described "community organizer," Ayers in inner-city Cleveland, Obama in inner-city Chicago. In short, Ayers was fully capable of crawling inside Obama's head and relating in superior prose what the Dreams' author calls a "rage at the white world [that] needed no object."
Indeed, in Dreams, it is on the subject of black rage that Obama writes most eloquently. Phrases like "full of inarticulate resentments," "unruly maleness," "unadorned insistence on respect" and "withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage" lace the book.
In Fugitive Days, "rage" rules and in high style as well. Ayers tells of how his "rage got started" and how it evolved into an "uncontrollable rage -- fierce frenzy of fire and lava." Indeed, the Weathermen's inaugural act of mass violence was the "Days of Rage" in 1969 Chicago.
As in Chicago, that rage led Ayers to a sentiment with which Obama was altogether familiar, "audacity!" Ayers writes, "I felt the warrior rising up inside of me -- audacity and courage, righteousness, of course, and more audacity." This is one of several references.
The combination of audacity and rage has produced two memoirs that follow oddly similar rules. Ayers describes his as "a memory book," one that deliberately blurs facts and changes identities and makes no claims at history. Obama says much the same. In Dreams, some characters are composites. Some appear out of precise chronology. Names have been changed.
As a control, allow me to introduce my own book, Sucker Punch, which is no small part a memoir about race, specifically in my relationship, at great remove, with Muhammad Ali and the world of boxing. In the book, I describe my own unreconstructed coming of age in racially charged Newark, New Jersey as it happened. I change no names, create no composite characters, alter no chronologies. Most memoirs observe the same conventions. Dreams and Fugitive Days, however, are both suffused with repeated reference to lies, lying and what Ayers calls, in his pitch perfect post-modern patois, "our constructed reality."
"But another part of me knew that what I was telling them was a lie," writes Obama, "something I'd constructed from the scraps of information I'd picked up from my mother."
"That whole first year seemed like one long lie," Obama writes of his first year in college in Los Angeles, one of at least a dozen references to lies and lying in "Dreams," a figure nearly matched in "Fugitive Days."
The reader knows that Ayers -- with some justification -- has much to hide. He senses that Obama does too, but he is never quite sure why. This presumed poetic license leads to the frequent manipulation of dates to make a political point.
"I saw a dead body once, as I said, when I was ten, during the Korean War," writes Ayers. This correlation is important enough that Ayers mentions it twice. The only problem is that Ayers was eight when the Korean War ended.
Obama tells us that when he was ten, he and his family visited the mainland. On the trip, back in their motel room, they watched the Watergate Hearings on TV. The problem, of course, is that those hearing started just before Obama turned twelve.
One could forgive a single missed date, but inconsistent dates and numbers appear frequently in both books and often reinforce some moment of lost innocence. In the same spirit, both books abound in detail too closely remembered and conversations too well recorded. These moments in both books occasionally lead to an awareness of the nation's seemingly ineradicable racism.
In 1970, for instance, the 9-year-old Obama alleges to be visiting the American embassy Indonesia. While waiting, he chances upon "a collection of Life magazines neatly displayed in clear plastic binders."
In one magazine, he reads a story about a black man with an "uneven, ghostly hue," who has been rendered grotesque by a chemical treatment. "There were thousands of people like him," Obama learned, "black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person."
Obama's attention to detail is a ruse. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed it was Ebony. Ebony ran no such article either. Besides, black was beautiful in 1970.
In a similar vein, Ayers tells of hitching a ride in Missouri with "Bud," the driver of a "brand-new Peterbilt truck." The man proceeds to regale Ayers with a string of dirty jokes -- at least two of them retold word for word -- before reaching under his seat and pulling out a large pistol, his "N****r neutralizer."
"White people can never quite remember the scope and scale of the slavocracy," Ayers reminds the reader again and again, writing as though he were not a member of this benighted race.
These parallels intrigue perhaps, but they prove little. To add a little science to the analysis, I identified two similar "nature" passages in Obama's and Ayers' respective memoirs, the first from Fugitive Days:
"I picture the street coming alive, awakening from the fury of winter, stirred from the chilly spring night by cold glimmers of sunlight angling through the city."
The second from Dreams:
"Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds."
These two sentences are alike in more than their poetic sense, their length and their gracefully layered structure. They tabulate nearly identically on the Flesch Reading Ease Score (FRES), something of a standard in the field.
The "Fugitive Days" excerpt scores a 54 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. The "Dreams'" excerpt scores a 54.8 on reading ease and a 12th grade reading level. Scores can range from 0 to 121, so hitting a nearly exact score matters.
A more reliable data-driven way to prove authorship goes under the rubric "cusum analysis" or QSUM. This analysis begins with the measurement of sentence length, a significant and telling variable. To compare the two books, I selected thirty-sentence sequences from Dreams and Fugitive Days, each of which relates the author's entry into the world of "community organizing."
"Fugitive Days" averaged 23.13 words a sentence. "Dreams" averaged 23.36 words a sentence. By contrast, the memoir section of "Sucker Punch" averaged 15 words a sentence.
Interestingly, the 30-sentence sequence that I pulled from Obama's conventional political tract, Audacity of Hope, averages more than 29 words a sentence and clocks in with a 9th grade reading level, three levels below the earlier cited passages from "Dreams" and "Fugitive Days." The differential in the Audacity numbers should not surprise. By the time it was published in 2006, Obama was a public figure of some wealth, one who could afford editors and ghost writers.
The publisher of Dreams, the openly liberal Peter Osnos, tells how this came to be. According to Osnos, Dreams took off during Obama's much-publicized race for the U.S. Senate in 2004, nearly ten years after its modest release. After winning the election, Obama dumped his devoted long time agent, Jane Dystel, and signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.
Obama pulled off the deal before being sworn in as Senator, this way to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to members of Congress. To his credit, Osnos publicly scolds Obama for his "ruthlessness" and "his questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday."Unfortunately, the technology is not currently available to do a fully reliable authorship analysis. As expert in the field Patrick Juola of Duquesne University observed, “The accuracy simply isn't there.” He cautioned that for high stakes issues like this one, “The repercussions of a technical error could be a disaster (in either direction).” That much said, preliminary QSUM analysis supports an Ayers-Obama link. Systems designer Ed Gold--with twenty years of high-level experience in image and signal processing, pattern recognition, and classifier design and implementation--volunteered to run a QSUM scan on multiple excerpts from both memoirs. “I have completed the analysis,” he wrote me, “and I think you will be pleased with the findings.” In assessing the signature of sample passages from Dreams, he found “a very strong match to all of the Ayers samples that I processed.”Like Juola, Gold recognized the limitations of the process and of his own resources. He has volunteered to make the raw data available to more established authorship authentication experts, and I will be happy to pass that data along. Gold saw the complementary value, however, in text analysis, as did Juola, who encouraged me “to do what you're already doing . . . good old-fashioned literary detective work.”Given that advice, I dug deeper into both memoirs and established one metaphoric thread that ties the two books together in a way I believe is just shy of conclusive, a thread that leads back to Bill Ayers's stint, after dropping out of college, as a merchant seaman.
"I'd thought that when I signed on that I might write an American novel about a young man at sea," says Ayers in his memoir, Fugitive Days, "but I didn't have it in me."
The experience had a powerful impact on Ayers. Years later, he would recall a nightmare he had while crossing the Atlantic, "a vision of falling overboard in the middle of the ocean and swimming as fast as I could as the ship steamed off and disappeared over the horizon."
Although Ayers has tried to put his anxious ocean-going days behind him, the language of the sea will not let him go. "I realized that no one else could ever know this singular experience," Ayers writes of his maritime adventures. Yet curiously, much of this same nautical language flows through Obama's earth-bound memoir.
"Memory sails out upon a murky sea," Ayers writes at one point. Indeed, both he and Obama are obsessed with memory and its instability. The latter writes of its breaks, its blurs, its edges, its lapses. Obama also has a fondness for the word "murky" and its aquatic usages.
"The unlucky ones drift into the murky tide of hustles and odd jobs," he writes, one of four times "murky" appears in Dreams. Ayers and Obama also speak often of waves and wind, Obama at least a dozen times on wind alone. "The wind wipes away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed," he writes in a typical passage. Both also make conspicuous use of the word "flutter."
Not surprisingly, Ayers uses "ship" as a metaphor with some frequency. Early in the book he tells us that his mother is "the captain of her own ship," not a substantial one either but "a ragged thing with fatal leaks" launched into a "sea of carelessness."
Obama too finds himself "feeling like the first mate on a sinking ship." He also makes a metaphorical reference to "a tranquil sea." More intriguing is Obama's use of the word "ragged" as an adjective as in the highly poetic "ragged air" or "ragged laughter."
Both books use "storms" and "horizons" both as metaphor and as reality. Ayers writes poetically of an "unbounded horizon," and Obama writes of "boundless prairie storms" and poetic horizons-"violet horizon," "eastern horizon," "western horizon."
Ayers often speaks of "currents" and "pockets of calm" as does Obama, who uses both as nouns as in "a menacing calm" or "against the current" or "into the current." The metaphorical use of the word "tangled" might also derive from one's nautical adventures. Ayers writes of his "tangled love affairs" and Obama of his "tangled arguments."
In Dreams, we read of the "whole panorama of life out there" and in Fugitive Days, "the whole weird panorama." Ayers writes of still another panorama, this one "an immense panorama of waste and cruelty." Obama employs the word "cruel" and its derivatives no fewer than fourteen times in Dreams.
On at least twelve occasions, Obama speaks of "despair," as in the "ocean of despair." Ayers speaks of a "deepening despair," a constant theme for him as well. Obama's "knotted, howling assertion of self" sounds like something from the pages of Jack London's "The Sea Wolf."
In Obama's defense, he did grow up in Hawaii. Still, the short Hawaii stretch of his memoir is largely silent on the island's natural appeal. Sucker Punch again offers a useful control. It makes no reference at all, metaphorical or otherwise, to ships, seas, oceans, calms, storms, wind, waves, horizons, panoramas, or to things howling, fluttering, knotted, ragged, tangled, or murky. None. And yet I have spent a good chunk of every summer of my life at the ocean.
If there is any one paragraph in Dreams that has convinced me of Ayers' involvement it is this one, in which Obama describes the Black Nationalist message:
"A steady attack on the white race... served as the ballast that could prevent the ideas of personal and communal responsibility from tipping into an ocean of despair."
As a writer, especially in the pre-Google era of Dreams, I would never have used a metaphor as specific as "ballast" unless I knew exactly what I was talking about. Seaman Ayers most surely did. One more item of interest. In his 1997 book, A Kind and Just Parent, Bill Ayers walks the reader through his Hyde Park neighborhood and identifies the notable residents therein. Among them are Muhammad Ali, “Minister” Louis Farrakhan (of whom he writes fondly), “former mayor” Eugene Sawyer, “poets” Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and “writer” Barack Obama. In 1997, Obama was an obscure state senator, a lawyer, and a law school instructor with one book under his belt that had debuted two years earlier to little acclaim and lesser sales. In terms of identity, he had more in common with mayor Sawyer than poet Brooks. The “writer” identification seems forced and purposefully so, a signal perhaps to those in the know of a persona in the making that Ayers had himself helped forge.
None of this, of course, proves Ayers' authorship conclusively, but the evidence makes him a much more likely candidate than Obama to have written the best parts of Dreams.
The Obama camp could put all such speculation to rest by producing some intermediary sign of impending greatness -- a school paper, an article, a notebook, his Columbia thesis, his LSAT scores -- but Obama guards these more zealously than Saddam did his nuclear secrets. And I suspect, at the end of the day, we will pay an equally high price for Obama's concealment as Saddam's.
Jack Cashill is the author, among other books, of Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Hijacked American Culture. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from Purdue University.

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

TURQUE DE FRANCINE

Dans le dialogue de la Turque de Francine, l'observateur trouve des secrets, et des traces de la tradition romantique le long de la modernité latérale. Le corps Language', de `actuellement à la source d'art de Chicago entoure la visionneuse avec l'esprit et passion. « Mes travaux sont les portraits émotifs. I don' ; de t l'aspiration toujours de mes propres expériences, » l'artiste indique. « Mes dernières séries de travaux sont des réponses directes à un désir de dessiner un rapport entre la fabrication de marque, la figure, et la langue. » La place et l'atmosphère de l'exposition est dominée par la nudité, principalement médias mélangés sur le papier, reflétant le confort tôt d'utiliser-et d'artiste avec le charbon de bois. « Je peux obtenir rattrapé en cours de fabrication, et finis tuer vers le haut la chose. Je ne suis pas grand à exprimer un bon nombre de sang-froid quand elle vient à celle ; la figure plus linéaire schémas dans la montr sont plus dure pour moi dans ce sens, » elle partage. Alors il y a son voyage subjectif dans des choses françaises. « Mon impulsion à voler à Paris et pour frotter les tombes au cimetière de Pere LaChaise était un que je ne peux pas entièrement expliquer, il était une impulsion d'intestin avec laquelle j'ai suivi à travers. » Ce sont des frottages avec les bords approximatifs, noms en peinture d'or, émail noir avec l'écriture française un-decipherable sur des nuances de texture de fourniture blue-black. Plus le notable est « Proust ». Le triomphe apprête dedans, C une Femme de Pas de nid de lui d'e non » plus » et « de CE ». Avec leur fond fauve, l'artiste revisite l'écriture de sa série de petit de `, lavée au-dessus des notes en français, avec la nudité trouvant un endroit vers l'avant. Les travaux de compagnon fournissent une avenue Montaigne de stroll vers le bas. « Je pense qui est pourquoi les gens peuvent rapporter à mon travail, ils voient qu'un raccordement entre quelque chose ils ont le feutre. Je la crois que nous fonctionnons hors d'un état de guérison, travaillant vers devenir une meilleure personne plus entière, » conclut.