Glass Bead Game
In the General Introduction to The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse presents a model for a fictitious society of scholars, separated from the world, engaging, rearranging, and reformulating the inherited traditions of all the world’s knowledge. This process, called the Glass Bead Game, is defined as “a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette.” Not withstanding the utopian-dystopian machinations of the novel as a whole, as it explores the boundless nature of human potential and the implications of our attempts to bound that potential, the Glass Bead Game offers an excellent metaphor for the art of rearrangement. I have borrowed the title to demonstrate an aspect of artistic practice that focuses on thematic organization and expression of the world’s ideas. This is an ongoing project that offers models for multidisciplinary performance practice, playlist construction, and similar modes of organizing knowledge to help elucidate the threads running through discrete disciplines, and to support development of interdisciplinary consciousness.
Election Countdown
TEN
Black Eyed Peas and Jennifer Hudson: The Love
For Black lives and Black voices, and a country that needs them.
NINE
Archie Roach: Took The Children Away (30th Anniversary)
For the children on the border.
EIGHT
Mashrou Leila: Roman
For all the facets of feminism and identity that are under threat tonight.
SEVEN
Pussy Riot: Make America Great Again
For Amy, may she fail to sustain the dystopia she was appointed to protect.
SIX
Joan Baez: The President Sang Amazing Grace
For those left behind, from Columbine to Charleston to Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and for the memory of basic human decency in leadership.
FIVE
For artists in exile, at home and abroad.
FOUR
Taboo: Stand Up / Stand N Rock
For the recentering of Indigenous voices, and for the landscapes they protect.
THREE
Μάνος Λοΐζος: Accordion
For anti-fascists, past, present, future.
TWO
Leonard Cohen: Solidarity Forever
For the dignity and sustainability of essential workers, and the unions working to affirm that dignity.
ONE
Charly García: Los Dinosaurios
For all those affected who have no vote.
ZERO
Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changin’
For the better angels of our nature. May we be worthy.
POST MORTEM, PRIORI RENOVATIO:
Hope.
I felt it, today, struggling at first to recognize a sensation that had eluded me for quite some time.
It is a conditional hope, but one no longer fettered by the constant daily barrage of depravity and debasement that we have been forced to endure these past four years.
This is not a victory, so much, as a reprieve. We have borrowed four more years to set the stage for a real fight against the oppression, racism, climate suicide, late stage unfettered capitalism, and other intersectional vagaries of a nation founded on slavery, dispossession, and genocide. But that’s not all it was founded on, and I’m not willing to throw out all of the origins of a unique and hopeful version of democracy that found champions in people such as Abigail Adams, Sojourner Truth, Eugene Debs, John Dewey, Recy Taylor, Thurgood Marshall, Pete Seeger, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, Maxine Greene, Harvey Milk, Angela Davis, bell hooks, John Lewis, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and countless other politicians, organizers, activists, artists, teachers and citizens, who have grappled with that history and attempted, over and over again, to build something beautiful in its wake. I turn again to areas ripe with activist potential: election reform, education reform, institutional reimagining, and, perhaps the hardest of all, bringing back into the fray some of the 70+ million people who just voted for white supremacy and US-American fascism. And so we march on, demanding a renaissance with all of the hope and vigor we can muster, to sustain us in the battles for hearts and minds that lie ahead.