POWER TO THE WOMEN

Make no mistake about it, we are in the year, no, the decade of the woman.  

I know many facts do not speak to this. In the last two years of our economic meltdown, young men gained 178,000 jobs while young women lost  255,000. I know we are still considered second class citizens, given less credence, less pay, less credit and less attention. Still, everywhere I look and everywhere I go, I finally see women supporting one another, giving one another more credence, more credit, more attention, and in the cases where they have the power, more pay. It’s about time for that.

As recently as the last presidential elections, we were all made painfully aware of how far we are from where we should be. Not only did Hillary Clinton, daring to run for President of the U.S., have to deal with abuse from men -- constant references to her style and appearance, her “pimping out Chelsea” and “her chipmunk cheeks,” statements and criticisms that never would have been leveled at her male counterparts -- but even worse, abuse from women, women in power who could have been there for her. Women in the media, for example, who made mincemeat of her intentions and her efforts every chance they got. Hello Maureen Dowd, who should be restricted from all events that celebrate women for the sheer level of nastiness of her attacks against Hillary.

But significant events have happened recently to demonstrate what many of us have known for a long time: women are changing the world, slowly but surely, and finally coming together, celebrating their accomplishments, taking power, and empowering one another.

It’s thanks to women that the Arab Spring was launched. It was their incentive on the streets that ignited a revolution in Egypt and elsewhere. Last weekend’s three-day symposium at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, Women in the World, paid tribute to women from all walks of life who are have made an impact and are bettering the world. Among those featured in this amazing and exhilarating event, hosted by The Daily Beast and moderated by its editor, Tina Brown, were: a Burmese activist who had spent 11 years in prison for passing a pamphlet to democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi, then imprisoned under house arrest; Pulitzer-prize winning war correspondent Lyndsey Addario, who spoke of the recent loss of foreign correspondent Marie Colvin and the need to bear witness in times of war and conflict; two young women who invented Socket, a soccer ball that carries electricity to underprivileged villages around the globe; Meryl Streep, Oscar winning actor and supporter of the cause of women; and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is as much to be admired for what she has accomplished as a politician as for what she has endured as a human being in the face of attacks from media and public over the course of her career. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was there, and Margaret Albright, whose hair-trigger response to the question, "What is the single biggest reason women have not been able to pierce the glass ceiling?" was one word, "Men."

Although there is no woman running for President of the United States, the spirit of woman and her presence is everywhere in politics. Currently, we have the highest ever total record of female leaders serving in top positions around the globe, among them, 36-year old Kosovo President Atifete Jahjaga, who also attended the recent New York City symposium. These leaders speak openly of the need to network and harness female power on a local, regional and global level, and to end war and worldwide conflicts.

In the literary realm, women’s creative power is gaining momentum. The winners of this year's National Book Critics Circle Awards, announced last week in New York City, were Edith Pearlman, for her fourth collection of stories, Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories (Lookout Books) ; poet Laura Kasischke, for her collection Space, in Chains (Copper Canyon Press), and Mira Bartok, for her memoir, The Memory Palace (Free Press). Kathyrn Schulz also received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. See the video of Pearlman reading from her award-winning collection on the Poets and Writers website.

Read women’s writing. Listen to their words. Support them. As an Egyptian activist at the women’s symposium said, “There is no spring without flowers, just as there is no Arab spring without women.”  The Arab spring is a women’s revolution. Help make way for a better, kinder world. Join the revolution.

AN ELOQUENT INSURGENCE

I read Noah Cicero's fifth novel, The Insurgent, with great interest, as I am a fan of his work. I read his first book, The Human War, while still residing in Youngstown, Ohio, the place that Noah is from and that he writes about with such eloquence, sadness and truth.

He's a young man still, and it's painful to realize in this day of dissappearing bookstores and interest in fine things, such as literature, that Noah still struggles to make a living, given the calibre of his work and his achievements to date. This includes The Insurgent, which is about disenchantment, oppression, and death of many sorts.

Noah's work, written with enormous intensity, is presented usually line by line in his texts, so the reader can feel the full impact of meaning in the language. It's a minimalist style that works. The result is a breathless pace, dialogue that often resonates like the script of some amazing existentialist theatre work, and characters that impale the reader with their suffering and authenticity. Noah's characters are desperate loners who rant about injustices and rarely muster the courage to set themselves free.

As was true with The Human War, which was published in 2003, and recently made into a film, The Insurgent is set in Youngstown, which is, the narrator Vasily notes, "a small third-world country located inside of America." Vasily is a Russian dishwasher, and his best friend Chang, an obsessive compulsive, who can't seem to get rid of the need to wash himself; the two of them drink, pine for women, lust for better lives and, through an accident of fate, wind up with enough  money to "get out of Dodge" and head west.

It's not a trip like Kerouac and his pals made, but a desperate escape out of the mire of tedium in poverty-riddled mundanity into the silence of nature and the vast expanses of untamed America, which hold still the power to reawaken hope and dreams. Despite the encounters that turn out to be fiascos on this journey, the dream of hope prevails.

The Insurgent has some of the most gorgeous rants on the nature of death and being that I've read in literature in recent years. The characters and their lives are described in aching detail, and what I find most amazing about this read -- it was also true about The Human War -- is that instead of being depressingly dark, it lifts up, illuminates because it is true.

When The Human War, the film, comes out, see it, if that's what it takes to read Noah's books. But if you are a reader and care about the art of literature and where it purports to take us as human beings, for god's sake pick up his books too. The Insurgent, published in 2010, is available from Blatt Books. You can find out more about Noah Cicero and his writing via his blog, at http://noah-cicero.blogspot.com/

Shameless Self-Promotion and the Art of Blogging

One of the side effects of joining the blogging culture on the Internet is that it tends to provide you with the illusion that you are heard and seen by minions, when in fact the minions you suppose are attending to your mighty words may be two or three fans that are family members or the equivalent.

I don't have such illusions, but I do enjoy blogging about issues and subjects I care about. Those issues include the literary culture; spiritual events and transformations; the arts. The Internet has provided us with many freedoms, and one particularly delightful (as well as loathesome) one -- depending on whose thoughts you are viewing -- is the freedom to post your ideas in blogs and let others see what you think. In addition, venues like this one, offer (at no cost) decorative options with which to lay out your musings.

It's a gift in a way, a byproduct of a culture that places much value on opinions, while attending to virtually none. Blogging not only provides you with a platform from which to present your thoughts and feelings, but a place to put out information about one's creative work and that of others.

With that in mind, this holiday season, you may want to peruse Allbook Books for unusual and sophisticated literary gifts. The publisher Walter E. Harris III, otherwise known as Mankh, was kind enough to accept for publication and recently put out a chapbook of my poetry, JEWEL FIRE. Mankh is very interested in eclectic material, work from various spiritual or world traditions, and does an excellent job of packaging in the best possible way what he deems valuable. I encourage you to peruse and linger over his Web site, read some of his highly intelligent and timely essays, and buy some of his books.

http://www.allbook-books.com/html/jewel_fire.html

May all of you, my minions, have a healthy, happy and prosperous 2012!

A Tribute to the Beauty and Magic of Silent Films

If you see no other film this year, see Hugo, Martin Scorsese's homage to the transcendent magic of silent film. Hugo was adapted from Brian Selznick's children's book, The Invention of Hugo Cabaret, and is about a wily, sensitive orphan living inside a Paris train station at the turn of the 20th century whose exchanges with a toy store owner become life transforming.

Hugo is based on an actual filmmaker, Georges Méliès, who was best known for the special effects of his silent films that combined magic and theater at the turn of the 20th century. Méliès became fascinated with the medium after seeing a demonstration by the Lumière Brothers in 1895. Subsequently, he ran his own studio and made hundreds of films, the most famous of which, A Trip to the Moon (1907), is referenced several times in Scorsese's tribute.

Silent film buffs will relish not only the actual snippets of great silent movies, featuring Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton among others, but the many references to famous silent movie moments in imagery in the actual story, and the use of classic techniques, such as slapstick. But, like the machinery discussed with so much fascination in Hugo, everything is finely tuned here, with no extravagance or excess. Hugo is a major work of art about a medium and the magic it captured.

Hugo is in 3D, which only helps to place you in the story (as opposed to freak you out, which sometimes seems the point of 3D), and features 14-year old Asa Butterfield; Cloe Moretz, who looks in the film like a very young Ingrid Bergman; Emily Mortimer; Sir Ben Kingsley as Méliès himself; Jude Law; and a standout performance by Sacha Baron Cohen, the wildly funny and often brilliantly wacky English comedic actor (of Barat fame), who lends quiet ferocity and tenderness to his role of a Clouseau-like inspector with a squeaky metal leg and a rusty heart of gold. Cohen looks a bit like Freddie Mercury, and, as it turns out, is scheduled to play the rock artist in an upcoming film about QUEEN. Supposedly, Executive Producer Johnny Depp -- whose greatest film portrayal in my view, Edward Scissorhands, echoes the human beauty of the artistic automaton in Hugo -- plays the part of a painter who helps the children out on their adventure in the film. But if so, I missed him. Darn!

As a friend and I discussed after Hugo, there are so many occasions where a scene might have gone wrong, resorting to modern tricks or dirty innuendos, but Scorsese's tribute never fails to please and never steps down from its perch of high artistry. There is, for example, the moment when two characters who are attracted to one another introduce their dogs to one another in a cafe, a moment when, being well versed in American modern cinema, one might wince imagining what tackiness might ensue for a laugh. But the scene is played gracefully. There is the moment at the end of the film when, during a close up of the automaton, with its curiously human and moon-like visage, you half expect to see it wink at the audience for a final special effect. Thankfully, this doesn't happen either, for Hugo is a film of classical nuances not cheap tricks; it's about film's hopeful beginnings and its potential, not its tacky reprises.

Let me say one more thing about ambience. It's what silent film focussed on and what has been all but forgotten in modern movies, where pyrotechnics and visual spectacle are all the big deal. Ambience, many filmmakers forget, is what places one in the heart of a story, and makes the experience of it, real and lasting. Hugo has it in spades. You will feel a part of the Parisian milieu at the turn of the century; you will feel like Hugo himself, lost in the conundrum of a clock, in the machinery of time, in movies themselves.

Cheers to Scorsese and all who had anything to do with Hugo. I smell multiple Oscars!

TWO POEMS FOR THE OCCUPY REVOLUTION

TWO POEMS FOR THE OCCUPY REVOLUTION

1.      OPEN UP THE STREETS

Open up the streets

Let them be

For pedestrians again

Protestors with tall signs

Whose yelling can be heard

From one block to the next

Open up the streets

Let the people

March

Dance

Sing

Let the people’s voices

And footsteps be heard

All across the cities

And suburbs of America

Wherever White people and

African Americans, Latinos, Asians,

American Indians, wherever friends

From anywhere across the globe

Convene

The streets are the plains

And they are open to everybody 

The streets are the great table

Across which we lay out

The feast of our hopes and

Our anticipation

I say, Come

March with us

Come, eat with us

Come, let us create

A new America together 

Open up the streets!

2.      GUESS WHAT, AMERICA?

Everywhere is home 

The fountains

Are open to everybody

And so are the parks 

No exclusions anywhere –

How’s that for a revolution?

-          by Arya F. Jenkins