Let Fury Have the Hour

by Antonino D'Ambrosio

  For Jamaican-born, U.K.-based dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, poetry manifests itself in the same way: in the beauty of indigenous language that expresses more truthfully what the dominant language does not. Johnson is the only black poet and the second living poet published by the Penguin Classics series. Using Jamaican patois over dub reggae, Johnson rose to fame during the Thatcher era. “Writing was a political act and poetry was a cultural weapon,” Johnson explains. “It might sound very intellectual but I’m trying to understand the relationship between experience that goes into the music, into reggae music, what implication that has for the listener when he hears his own experience on record.” Both Levine and Johnson embody the courageous spirit of a poet to initiate the debate, to find the words to say out loud, to expose the hustlers, to keep us from going numb, and to fortify our world.

  A few years after Levine’s groundbreaking poem, filmmaker Charles Burnett assembled its cinematic counterpart. “In retrospect, it can be seen that the two great independent features of the late ’70s were Killer of Sheep and Eraserhead,” J. Hoberman wrote in Village Voice. “A masterpiece,” Dave Kehr added in the New York Times. “One of the most insightful and authentic dramas about African-American life on film. One of the finest American films, period.” Burnett’s neorealist classic Killer of Sheep offered a glimpse into black American urban life seen through the eyes of the people in the Watts community of Los Angeles. The film can be seen as a tone poem, unrelentingly playing the same note: the quiet struggle of a Watts family as it moves through life with great dignity but few prospects. The film was not released in 1977 due to issues surrounding music clearances. Yet Burnett refused to remove songs by Etta James, Dinah Washington, George Gershwin, Sergei Rachmaninov, Paul Robeson, Earth, Wind & Fire, and others because each piece fit so perfectly with the story he was offering. The main character, Stan, is wracked by melancholy and insomnia. Working at a slaughterhouse to support his wife and two children, Stan kills sheep to keep his family alive. The troubles he grapples with “lie within the family, trying to make that work and be a human being.” Burnett explains that what we learn from this film is that one doesn’t “necessarily win battles; [one] survive[s].”

  “Every line means something,” painter Jean-Michel Basquiat explained.

  Arising out of the culture clash of punk, street art, underground cinema, and the mix of Haitian and Puerto Rican culture, Basquiat’s flexible aesthetic was representative of a rising pocket of America, enriched by cross-cultural resettlement and defined by a broader worldview. Basquiat brought everything to the surface of the canvas. “He freely borrowed from and floated among many cultural and geographic traditions,” Edwidge Danticat writes. “Like many other culturally mixed, first- or second-generation Americans, his collectivity was fluid.” Basquiat’s artwork captured an aspect of living in the modern world otherwise unknown to many, particularly the insular—mostly white—elite art world. Basquiat’s hand moved with the melody of the jazz giants he celebrated in his art.

  In addition to jazz, Basquiat’s work carried with it the posture of punk with a dash of new wave and hardcore mixed in to add bite. When I look at his work, I hear Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, the great punk bands Death and Bad Brains, and the hardcore group Minor Threat. “Don’t care what they may do we got that attitude,” Bad Brains sang. “Hey, we got that PMA (positive mental attitude). Hey we got the PMA.” This could have been Basquiat’s anthem. “When I got into punk rock, I turned the radio off forever, for real!” Ian MacKaye of Minor Threat tells me. That’s what I felt and did. In the same way, Basquiat’s paintings were keys unlocking the doors to the gallery residing in the streets, my imagination, and the unknown world.

  One of Basquiat’s heroes was Charlie Parker, who began a 1949 Paris performance by incorporating the first notes of Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” into his solo “Salt Peanuts.” Thirty-six years earlier, in Paris on May 29, 1913, Stravinsky’s pioneering partnership with choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, set designer Nicholas Roerich, and Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes caused a riot among outraged theatergoers. Once the dust settled, the old theatergoers couldn’t find their seats again. Stravinsky had dramatically recast the staid symphonic and cultural terms that had constrained classical music. Equally, the cultural cognoscenti looked down their nose at Basquiat’s work describing it as base and primitive.

  They dismissed the work just as they did that of Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and countless others. There can be no doubt that the experimental work of those still to be born will face a similar struggle. Yet when the paint dried, Basquiat had joined the immortal community of creative response. There is always tension between art and commerce, particularly when the dominant culture tries to appropriate something deemed “rebel” or “revolutionary.” That’s why it’s important to understand that art in and of itself cannot change things: you need people organizing behind a common issue. Creative response is the first step toward that joining together and encouraging action. It’s less about taking risks and more about people who find a way to see around the corner, taking the first few steps to discover what lies ahead but always firmly rooted in bringing people together to act as one. It’s less about the game of politics and more about the reality of humanity, with all its flaws and imperfections. Some may coopt the artwork but no one can commodify its spirit. “I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous,” painter Mark Rothko explained. “The reason I paint them is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it.”

  Perhaps the most intimate work happens on the street where artists scale walls and buildings, hopping from roof to roof, sliding in the shadows, evading every kind of authority and the glare of streetlights. Graffiti/street art/public art, to me, has always been about finding a way to speak anonymously to an anonymous people in hopes of creating a public dialogue. “So whether that’s graffiti in a Nazi prison, whether that’s graffiti on the subway train, whether that is lyrics to a song, what it revealed was a kind of common humanity,” film participant Stanislao Pugliese, author of Desperate Inscriptions, tells me. “We are fathers, we are sons, we are brothers, we are husbands, and we have this thing in common, and we want to be free.” Public art offers a visceral statement into the hidden things that shape a people’s collective consciousness.

  Just as Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album Nebraska was a response to President Ronald Reagan’s harsh brand of politics, Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man took on Reagan policies. “I think that when Ronald Reagan became president a darkness settled over this country . . . my idea was to put forth an alternative vision of the America that was being put forth by the Reagan-era Republicans,” Springsteen said. Gould’s book took on the history of psychometrics and intelligence testing as a form of scientific racism. More specifically it challenged the use of discredited scientific tools, including eugenics and biological determinism, to develop and institute public policies, which were used to manipulate data in support of an argument that looked to roll back key social policies of the New Deal and the Great Society. Gould fought against pseudosciences that advanced racism and sexism. He challenged creationism, using the term “Non-Overlapping Magisteria (NOMA)” to describe how science and religion cannot comment on each other. An adherent of Darwin, Gould rebukes the appropriation of the English naturalist’s work, which argues that Darwin’s theories make for a cruel and compassionless world. “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent but the one most responsive to change,” Charles Darwin wrote. It isn’t “survival of the fittest” but the advancement of creative response that makes society strong.

  Graffiti on the wall of Serge Gainsbourg’s house on the rue de Verneuil in Paris. From the film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

 
“If you expect to lose hope.” Street art from the film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

  Doctor and drummer Imran Malik of the punk band the Kominas during the filming of Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

  During the 1980s, Public Enemy turned up the heat on the Reagan revolution with persuasively stimulating rap music. The group’s political orientation led to a distinctive partnership with filmmaker Spike Lee. “If it wasn’t for Spike Lee being able to mesh theme, music, and film, ‘Fight the Power’ wouldn’t have been what it was to influence an entire generation,” Chuck D tells me. “So everything was done as a collective, and behind that is the community dealing with the community issue that was taking place, that was able to galvanize a situation against injustice. That’s what we make art for. Black music always had to be love music, not just a ballad, but I got your back, I’m looking out for you.” The song is our generation’s “We Shall Overcome” and “Strange Fruit” compressed into a potent popular anthem. Public Enemy’s emergence in popular culture came with the rising tide of neoliberalism where social relations could only be established in a hyperindividualized state. “We’ve been extremely influenced by the Clash,” Kominas drummer Imran Malik tells me. “They represented the poor working white man in England. We represent a certain niche, and I think people like Public Enemy represent a certain niche, but it actually relates to everyone.” It’s a new kind of folk that speaks to the human condition, like the Carter Family, Guthrie, Seeger, Cash, and Bob Marley. “Marley, that’s amazing folk music,” musician and film participant Sean Hayes tells me. “All those different influences of rock and reggae and Ska and Motown and all those things. At its best, it breaks through and reveals something about being alive.”

  Out of the glowing embers of all of this, a new era of creative responders arose: playwrights Tony Kushner (Angels in America) and Suzan Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog); novelists Edwidge Danticat (Krik? Krak!), Zadie Smith (White Teeth), Hari Kunzru (The Impressionist), Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street), Kenzaburo Oe (Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!), and Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives); poets Suheir Hammad, Staceyann Chin, and Saul Williams; graphic novelists/illustrators Art Spiegelman (Maus) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis); punk art surrealist Winston Smith (Dead Kennedys album art and logo) and Seth Tobocman (You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive); musicians Manu Chao, Rachid Taha, Café Tacuba, DJ Spooky, and Violeta Parra; artist Ai Weiwei, philosophers like Slavoj Žižek; scientists like Brian Greene; environmentalists like Lester Brown, and many others representing economics, architecture, graphic design, photography, and medicine. Each stepped into the fray hoping to unplug not just the mechanism but also the mind-set of individualism and the neoliberal way of engaging the world.

  So, creative response junks the view that change is impossible and resists those who dismiss anything that tries to advance change as “utopian,” a word now used as a slur to denounce the possible. You’re a utopian—you’re a fool, a dreamer, naive. The only things “possible” are gleaned through private pleasure and individual interactions with technology. “What the ruling ideology is telling us, maybe we will live forever, maybe we will become omnipotent, whatever you want—we will all travel to the moon—that’s all possible,” Žižek explains. “But a small social change of more health care is not possible. Maybe the time has come to change this and to dream less about these Gnostic possibilities in which we will all turn into digital entities and more about quite modest social changes.” Instead of the things that we used to invest in like community action and solidarity (now “impossible”) we focus on consumption as what binds us together, what satisfies us (always “possible”).

  Now more than ever, we live in an age defined by mass migration and creative immigrants feeding creative response and the movement of world citizenship. “Conrad, Nabokov, Naipaul—these are writers known for having managed to migrate between languages, cultures, countries, continents, even civilizations,” Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk said. “Their imaginations were fed by exile, a nourishment drawn not through roots but through rootlessness.” Such emigrations extend our perception and tailor our consciousness to the turmoil reverberating in the modern world. The role of artists, particularly those engaged in creative response, continues to be essential as our current political and economic climate continues to disintegrate. “I wonder whether one day we will wake up from the nightmare that is life for so many people,” Portuguese writer José Saramago wrote in The Notebook. “Persecuted for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I feel humble, almost insignificant, faced with the dignity and the courage of the writer and journalist Roberto Saviano, the man who has mastered the art of living.”

  With his expose Gomorrah, Saviano presents in gripping detail the true story of unrestrained globalized hypercapitalism combined with the brutal violence of mafia corruption running wild in the pursuit of instantaneous wealth. The casualties are the most vulnerable human beings—the invisible class—on the planet; the new millennium migrants whose lives are simply tossed aside like yesterday’s trash. In his masterwork of creative response, Saviano merges prose with old-school investigative journalism, recalling the work of Lincoln Steffens (The Shame of the Cities) and the literary touch of Gabriel García Márquez (News of a Kidnapping). Saviano faces death threats from the mafia and has been forced to live underground for years. For all this, celebrated Italian semiotician Umberto Eco calls Saviano a national hero.

  “When we revolt, it’s not for a particular reason . . . there are many reasons but we revolt because we cannot breathe,” a character explains in Claire Denis’s 35 Shots of Rum. When the worn-out thinking of politics and stale pop culture institutions fail us, there is music, art, literature, and film, there is Miles Davis bending the notes to create a new way of saying what seems impossible to articulate, confusing to comprehend, and unsettling to address in the whirlwind of economic globalization and exponential technological change. As we bend, jump over, under, and around to find new spaces of freedom, we maintain a mysterious harmony that unites us and replenishes our inspiration. By cultivating a visionary approach, we maintain our sensitivity to human nature and our ability to adapt to the shifting concerns of our history. Creative response.

  “So you have to use your intelligence and intuition,” French actress Juliette Binoche said. “And that’s why art is more important than politics.” Binoche made these remarks after winning the Best Actress Award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival for her role in Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s magnificent Certified Copy, a film in which reflections multiply constantly, asking us to reconceptualize every action we see and every word we hear. Kiarostami is one of many filmmakers throughout the world who are inheritors and not imitators in bending the narrow constraints of storytelling, refusing to be narrative, documentary, journalistic, or just pop culture entertainment. It’s whatever the viewer conceives it to be. Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar; Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki; New Zealand’s Christine Jeffs; Romania’s Corneliu Porumboiu; Brazil’s Walter Salles; Hong Kong’s Wong Kar Wai; America’s John Sayles, Julie Dash, Spike Lee, Lucy Walker, and Jim Jarmusch; England’s Ken Loach; Germany’s Wim Wenders; and South Africa’s Neill Blomkamp all end up at a similar point as they work outside in and inside out to bring new work to the world. “Yes, there is a structure there,” John Sayles tells me. “When we can use the structure, let’s use the structure, but let’s not have the structure use us.”

  New York City graffiti following the economic collapse of 2008. From the film Let Fury Have the Hour. (Photo by Antonino D’Ambrosio.)

  Ultimately, creative response refuses to accept the immutability and the unchallenged “truth” of standard operating procedures. The U.S. invasion of Iraq offers a telling example. The United States asserted that Saddam Hussein was so evil, so debased that he gassed his own people. “The question is, Did Hussein think of the Kurds as his own people? I think he
saw them as a different people,” musician Ian MacKaye tells me. “Much like George Bush and his friends thought of the Iraqis as a different people. If you’re bombing people in another country, you’re killing your own people, because there’s only one people.” Picasso’s Guernica is a visual manifestation of what MacKaye describes: there’s only one people. That’s the enduring legacy and influence of creative response: it transmits something that is lasting and timeless, because at the core of the work is an awareness that is deep-rooted and ancient: only one people.

  It’s for this reason that during the march to war in 2002 the United States forced U.N. officials to hang a blue curtain over a tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica at the entrance of the United Nations Security Council in New York. The location is where diplomats and others make statements to the press, and ostensibly officials thought it would be inappropriate for Colin Powell to speak about war in Iraq with an iconic protest against the inhumanity of war as his backdrop. They were afraid of people catching a glimpse of Guernica over Powell’s shoulder as his remarks were broadcast around the world, since it would pull down the curtain concealing the orchestrated con game the U.S. was playing. For this reason, it’s important to understand that creative response is first and foremost the images and the soundtrack we create together when we see injustice and start finding a new way to talk about it. Creative response is only the beginning of the conversation, but given the effort and the sensitivity, what follows can be profound, and the result can cultivate engagement.