Wesley Morris

Doug Fraser

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Blacklisted.  My opinions will NEVER appear in my local newspaper, the Cape Cod Times.  Why not?  For the latter, I simply do NOT exist...

TABOO:  THOU SHALT NOT CRITIIZE NEWSPAPER EDITORS AND THEIR JOURNALISTS!  Break it and be blacklisted.  

The Silence of the Lambs… and the Silence of the Journalists, though that’s probably the same thing.  

Unsurprisingly, the targets in the above cartoon did not respond.  

From: George Slone

Sent: Monday, March 28, 2016 2:56 PM

To: dfraser@capecodonline.com

Subject: Notes on Daily Reporters of the Year...

To Doug Fraser, Daily Reporter of the Year, Cape Cod Times Staff Writer:

So, why didn’t the Daily Reporter of the Year wish to write a story on local Barnstable senior citizen permanently trespassed from Sturgis Library without due process for a… speech crime?  And why doesn’t the Daily Reporter of the Year care that his newspaper blacklists local citizens like me from expressing viewpoints in the form of letters to the editor?  So, how then should I interpret what Daily Reporter of the Year really means?  Does it mean good journalism or does it mean chamber-of-commerce, pre-approved journalism, which is really not journalism at all?  Does it mean possessing a special appreciation for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, due process, and vigorous debate, democracy’s cornerstones, or does it really mean only a superficial appreciation of those things?  Nothing personal here.  I don’t know you.  I just saw the full page promoting your… grandeur.  Behind all the kudos, there’s usually another story.  Well, I don’t expect to hear from you.  After all, your job depends on being obedient to your editor, Paul Pronovost, who is certainly NOT a good journalist.  If you follow in his dubious footsteps, you’ll know silence to be golden…

From: George Slone

Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2016 4:23 PM

To: ppronovost@capecodonline.com

Cc: jack@unitedregionalchamber.com; l.conway@nenpa.com; m.sherman@nenpa.com; info@nenpa.com; editor@barnstablepatriot.com

Subject: Doug Fraser satirized in a new P. Maudit cartoon

To Paul Pronovost, Editor, Cape Cod Times:

Prior to sketching the attached cartoon, I tried communicating with your “Daily Reporter of the Year,” Doug Fraser, but he decided he didn’t want to respond.  Evidently, he takes after you when it comes to criticism… you know, the ole earplug and silence is golden routine.  Anyhow, why not publish the cartoon in your newspaper?  It would really show the public that you are INCLUSIVE, OPEN-MINDED TO CRITICISM, and most of all an ardent proponent of FREEDOM OF SPEECH and VIGOROUS DEBATE.  Pipe dream?  You bet!  

Ruth Marcus

Philip Kennicott

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From CronyCapitalism to CronyArtism

Establishment Art and Its Professional Paladins

Justifying Lack of Objectivity

Le plus grand style en art est l'expression de la plus haute révolte.  

—Albert Camus  

The high and mighty, those in power, cultural or other, seem to be able to get away with just about everything and anything.  Now, that’s a platitude, as obvious as it gets.  Alas, Pulitzer-Prize winning Washington Post culture critic Philip Kennicott doublespeaks like the worst of political hacks.  First he presents the evident objectivity problem when one reviews the art work of a friend, then, of course, opts for that lack objectivity, though in a flurry of masking blather to further promote the work of his friend.  

“Can an art critic fairly review an artist friend’s work?” he asks in the title of his article.  Without yet reading it, I immediately concluded he’d respond in the affirmative.  And sure enough.  Kennicott begins with a dubious statment:  “There’s no upside for an artist to be friends with an art critic.”  Evidently, there is an upside if one is friends with critics like him, who are perhaps form the establishment majority.   “The personal connection means the critic must pass on reviewing the artist’s work, and while the loss of critical wisdom may be negligible, the loss of exposure is a nuisance for the artist,” he continues.  And yet the critic Kennicott does not pass on reviewing his friend’s work and surely he does not give a damn about the zero exposure of many artists, myself included.  In fact, those like me who actually stand up and criticize the Kennicott ilk, as unobjective gatekeepers of propriety and pushers of chamber-of-commerce friendly l’art pour l’art, not only do not receive exposure but, for all intensive purposes, are blacklisted into oblivion.  Period.   

Next and unsurprisingly, Kennicott argues:  “I have wanted to write about Maggie Michael’s work for years now, but I can’t without first offering the reader a huge caveat:  Anything I say must be reasonably assumed to be compromised by the fact that I know her, like her and socialize with her.”  But why even bother with the caveat?  Most people who ponder art are likely well aware that art establishment circles are highly incestuous, akin to D.C. crony capitalist circles that likely control them as puppet masters.  

And so the female friend is promoted.  The painting, “Clone No. 17 (Bunny Grey),” highlighted in Kennicott’s article is in itself utterly innocuous, a virtual threat to nobody, questions and challenges absolutely nothing, and could easily be used and further promoted in the nation’s kindergarten finger-painting art classes.  Indeed, it is no more threatening than the can of paint used to create the two blobs.  Kennicott’s description of seeing it and the other items in Michael’s solo show, called “A Phrase Hung in Midair as If Frozen,” is mind-numbing:  “As we stood in front of paintings, I babbled about the things I was seeing. I was particularly struck by several early works from more than a decade ago, the “Clone Series,” in which two pools of paint are thickly poured onto an acrylic sheet, creating ‘clone’ forms with rounded edges.”  Those works constitute the direct opposite of what Albert Camus and others had envisioned:  l’art engagé.  And indeed socio-politically engaged art, the kind Kennicott likely would not be reviewing, is threatenting to the art establishment, which promotes the opposite kind of art to ensure it’s own survival.     

In accord with another establishment art critic Kriston Capps (Washington City Paper), the show “makes the case for her [Michael] as the strongest painter to emerge from D.C. in a generation.”  Has art really tumbled so far downhill into the absyss of absurd vacuity?  Apparently so or at least in D.C., home of the nation’s political corruptocrat crony capitalists.  Michael’s “clones” illustrate why art doesn’t matter, to paraphrase the “why poetry doesn’t matter” supposition of former NEA CEO crony capitalist appointee Dana Gioia.  The chamber of commerce is ever hovering above the art scene holding the puppet strings.  

Kennicott isn’t interested in the evident conflict of interest in reviewing a friend’s art, or rather he’s really interested in rationalizing it as somehow having a positive influence, as in “how friendship [i.e., cronyism] changes the way we see art, how it both sharpens the eye and expands the meaning of the work. I’m interested in a fundamental question that is at the heart of so much criticism: Does affection improve our judgment by making us receptive to ever finer nuances, or does it weaken our critical faculties and cloud our objectivity?”  

Objectivity?  Is he joking?  Gatekeepers, by their very nature, are not objective.  Might he and Michael be having an illicit affair?  After all, it’s DC we’re talking about here.  Is his essay the first step in their coming out?  Or perhaps he’s hoping to build a large art critic backing in an effort to win another Pulitzer Prize?  

Kennicott cites the incestuous relationships of a couple of past critics to back his rationalization.  “Critics were not always so worried about the conflict of interest that friendship creates between the reviewer and the artist.”  No, they’re usually a lot more worried that someone might notice the friendship (i.e., the cronyism) and blow the whistle.  

The music critic and composer Virgil Thomson maintained social relations with the flower of New York’s musical aristocracy for years, and reviewed their work regularly. The art critic Clement Greenberg absorbed artists into his egomaniacal orbit, maintaining complicated and deeply compromised personal and financial relationships with many of them, including an affair with Helen Frankenthaler. Both critics are still read with passionate interest today, even if their ethics wouldn’t pass muster at a provincial daily newspaper. In fact, their continuing influence has as much to do with their social and artistic alliances, and the power over and insight into artists that gave them, as it does with their writing.

Kennicott argues that “Respectable critics live by different standards today, though social relations still complicate the best of intentions. It’s easy to see why personal connections would compromise disinterested discernment.”  Yet isn’t he one of those purported “respectable critics” and NOT living “by different standards today”?  And is it really that easy to see… or is it a lot more easier to rationalize, as he does again and again?  “But critics who entirely isolate themselves from artistic circles sacrifice a great deal, too. One loss is sympathy, not just for a particular artist, but for the whole artistic profession, which is often lived precariously on the edge of poverty.”  

The edge of poverty?  Give me a break!  Is Michael on the edge of poverty?  Poverty is an old artist stereotype.  For some odd reason, today, poverty is a PC-positive trait, which is why Hillary had argued that after leaving the White House, she was on the edge of poverty.  Kennicott seems desperate to justify his dubious position of being in favor of evident lack of objectivity.  Indeed, by making it public and open, he seems to hope his position will be strengthened.  “Only by long and careful observation, an osmosis of decades, can a critic begin to understand the creative act, and that is unlikely to happen if he has lived entirely in the glorious and sterile seclusion of pure independence and objectivity.”  

In other words, the critic should get dirty (i.e., corrupt) and write art hagiographies for artist friends.  But imagine staring at Michael’s “clones” for decades and then finally understanding the meaning of life itself.  Inevitably, a certain distortion must evolve during those decades, where the critic begins to see not the paintings but rather the interior of his own brain.  And indeed some people can fill tons of pages with virtual nothingness… especially when they’re paid nicely to do so.    

Kennicott argues that critics often (usually) describe an artist as the sum total of past artist influences.  “But it’s very easy to get that wrong, and given the one-way-street nature of most criticism, the critic is never corrected. So it’s possible for critics to be very stupid about art, for years and decades, without ever confronting the solipsism of their ideas and judgments.”  Yet why are critics never corrected (i.e., criticized)?  Kennicott doesn’t go there.  Yet only the desire of an artist to climb the establishment ladder would prevent him or her from criticizing the critic.  And what harm might that desire/cowardice do to the artist’s art?  Kennicott doesn’t go there either.  The reality is different.  Critics are criticized… but they do their best to keep those criticizing them fully ostracized, as if the latter don’t exist.

“The chastening blessings of friendship are the best corrective to that, but are available only to critics who occasionally cross the church-state line that divides criticism from creativity,” notes Kennicott.  Crossing the “church-state line” is, of course, a thinly-veiled euphemism for willingly engaging in intellectual corruption.  One might also ask why Kennicott thinks there’s some kind of great divide separating criticism from creativity.  Evidently, an artist can be a critic and vice versa.  Or perhaps it’s a question of dubious professionalism, as in paid critics of the establishment.  

Finally and quite oddly, Kennicott evokes unfairness, though still concluding that conflict of interest intellectual corruption is justified.  “The problem with mixing friendship with criticism isn’t that it clouds judgment but that it increases it immeasurably, which is unfair to all of the other artists. Indeed, one might say that the ideal state of affairs would be for critics to befriend every artist, to better see their work in all its intimate detail. But that is impractical, and honestly, how many artists would want to put up with us?”  Well, likely all ladder-climbing artists desperate for recognition (i.e., the bulk of the herd) would just love to put up with you characters…  

Peter Hart

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From: George Slone
Sent: Friday, March 25, 2016 5:40 PM
To: ncac@ncac.org
Cc: charles.brownstein@cbldf.org; pen@pen.org; mickey@projectcensored.org; dan@bookweb.org; info@abffe.org; bstripli@syr.edu; info@publishers.org; ftrf@ala.org; madler-kozak@nacs.org; dangelo@nacs.org; info@cbldf.org; oif@ala.org; jlarue@ala.org; dstone@ala.org; justin@nefirstamendment.org; pamelageller@gmail.com
Subject: Att: Peter Hart and NCAC hypocrisy

 

To Peter Hart, NCAC Communication Director,

A cartoon I just sketched with your regard, highlighting your bias against free speech, was just posted here:  http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2016/03/peter-hart.html. 

Will you respond?  Likely not because likely you will not be able to offer a cogent counter argument to the message in the cartoon.  All you will likely have in your arsenal is ad hominem or thinly-disguised ad hominem, as in “looking to cause controversy”…  BTW, in case Joan Bertin kept it from you, my critical essay regarding NCAC’s “15 Threats to Free Speech 2015” is located here:    

http://www.globalfreepress.org/contributors/usa/g-tod-slone/3936-15-threats-to-free-speech-2015-an-egregious-and-purposeful-omission.  It features a nice photo of Molly Norris.  Have you ever heard of her?  

On another note, though really the same note, I’ve come to conclude that far too many proponents of free speech are ideologically bound (i.e., blinded) to the extent they are not really proponents of free speech.  Karen Wulf of PEN New England is an example.  Charles Brownstein of CBLDF serves as another example.  You can read my dialogue de sourds with him here:  http://wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com/2016/01/comic-book-legal-defense-fund.html.  Or perhaps, like Joan, you too are not curious and abhor criticism when it concerns you and your pals.  

If you are into the HATE SPEECH mantra, then why the hypocrisy and need to pretend to be into FREE SPEECH?  

Matthew Zapruder

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L—A—M—E

A Dialogue de Sourds with the New York Times Magazine Poetry Editor 

Matthew Zapruder is the new poetry editor for the New York Times Magazine, as well as MFA director, creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California and editor at large at Wave Books.  His words are taken verbatim from his self-introduction in the New York Times.  Since the latter would NEVER publish my alternative view, I’ve woven it into this dialogue de sourds.  PM, poète maudit, is my cartoonist sobriquet.  

MZ:  As I started to choose the poems that will appear each week in the New York Times Magazine over the next year, I imagined who might be reading them. 

PM:  You mean like, uh, well-to-do, politically-correct, bourgeois poets and their groupies—you know, other safe, pensioned, and cocooned academics like you, who have opened wide and just said ahh to poetry?  

MZ:  I thought about how life is already so complicated and busy, and how, on Sunday mornings, people might want to just sit and drink coffee and quietly move through the paper. I thought that people might turn the page and see a poem and say: “Oh, no. Something else I have to do. Except for the crossword, I thought I was safe.”  

PM:  Well, any poem you likely decide to select will inevitably be a safe one!  So, no problem, people, the poem next to that ole crossword puzzle will just make the safe space a bit larger.  Yawn!  More coffee, please!!!  

MZ:  For most of my life as a poet, I have been thinking about this very moment, when a poem enters into someone’s life.  Most of the time, this happens in expected situations: a classroom, a wedding, a funeral.  Maybe we have even chosen to pick up a book of them. But I believe that poems are meant to be a part of our lives. They are made up of our language, reconfigured and rearranged to make our minds move in different directions than they ordinarily would. At their best, they make something close to a waking dream.

PM:  Well, for most of my life as a poet, I haven’t been thinking about that at all.  Instead, I’ve been trying to shake up the comfy lives in which far too many poets like you dwell.  The poems I write are sure as hell NOT going to be part of your life in the ivory tower, though they’d probably make your mind move in a different direction if you didn’t keep the door so firmly shut and would probably be a waking j’accuse nightmare for you and those like you.    

MZ:  It’s great to have the chance to put poems in front of people in the midst of what they are otherwise doing. I like the idea that someone would turn the page of the magazine and see a poem, and that those words in the poem would have a chance to follow up on, refract, amplify, reconfigure the language of culture and news. The poem gets a chance to exist in a place that is not isolated or rarefied. 

PM:  You mean it’s great to have the chance to be an official gatekeeper of poetry and serve as a filter for what poems people will have in front of them.  And how does a poem get a chance to exist in such a place when it is created by an isolated (insulated) entrenched ivory-tower academic like your first choice, rarefied Poet Laureate of the US Congress, Juan Felipe Herrera?

MZ:  Poetry is in fine shape now, as it has always been, even though there is a small industry of people periodically informing us it’s dead.

PM:  Oh my, so I must belong to that small “birther” industry of literary deniers, who argue that poetry has indeed become a protected safe space to the extent that whoever dares openly question and challenge the ineluctable flaccidity of the poetry—the dead poetry of zombie poets—presented to the public by the gatekeepers of the literary established order, will be ostracized and banned.  

MZ:  Nevertheless, people go on writing it in all sorts of different ways. Why? I guess we need it. Virginia Woolf wrote, “The poet is always our contemporary.” I believe she meant that poets, for all time and in all lands, have always found the places in language that continue to be common to human experience. 

PM:  Well, I write it not out of some vague “need,” but rather as part of my citizen duty to decry corruption in all its forms.  For me, it is not the language (forme), but the message (fond)!  And why choose such a vacuous quote?  Well, it does seem to back the flaccidity of your self introduction.  How about this quote by Charles Bukowski?  After all, he’s now perfectly acceptable as part of the literary establishment.  You can find him on the Academy of American Poets website.  It really sums up your MO perfectly.  “Poetry has long been an in-game, a snob game, a game of puzzles and incantations.  It still is, and most of its practitioners operate comfortably as professors in our safe and stale universities.”

MZ:  Poems are, in and of themselves, an assertion of both a particular imagination and a common humanity, the possibility that my dreams can be yours, and vice versa. 

PM:  Now what the hell does that mean?  My dreams of inclusion will never jive with your dreams of excluding poets like me.  And your dreams of obtaining and publishing badges and names could never have jived with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s… you know, as in “I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names [Herrera], to large societies [Academy of American Poets] and dead institutions [St. Mary’s College]. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.”  Rude truth?  Well, we ain’t gonna find that in your poesy selections for the New York Times Magazine!  

MZ:  My exciting and somewhat daunting task is to pick, each week, a poem and write a very short introduction, which somehow manages to open up the poem without interfering with it. When I think of these introductions, I imagine them as little keys that will open the lock of the poem. And each time, just like in those old stories we heard as children, once the lock opens, the lock and key will disappear, and it will be clear that nothing was ever locked at all.  

PM:   Locks that have to be opened by special gatekeepers of poetry?  No wonder poetry doesn’t matter!  No wonder it’s dead!  Rather than stories heard as children, how about stories heard as adults, you know, like censorship and banning by the Academy of American Poets, Banned Books Week hypocrisy, ivory- tower speech codes, etc., etc.?  Now, how about a little rare honesty and tell us what poems and poets you will kneejerk reject in the name of inclusivity from appearing in the New York Times Magazine?  How about stepping aside from the gate for a moment and allow this dialogue de sourds ,as clarion for new openness, real inclusion, and vigorous literary debate, enter into your realm? 

MZ:  [Silence is golden…]… or  [adhominize me as angry, jealous, hateful, illiterate… in an effort to entirely divert attention away from the points made in my argumentation]

Fogo Island

Well, I am into photography, not just hardcore criticism.  And I'm into Newfoundland and Labrador.  Why?  The answer is in the photo above.  I shall be returning in June once again.