The ‘white hands’ ad ran by Jesse Helms in the week previous to his first general election contest with Harvey Gantt was authored by Dick Morris, who has worked for the Clintons in Arkansas and became the architect of their political identity since 1994. In a column published yesterday, Dick Morris said what I had been thinking the past few days, that the Clintons after Iowa have been seeking to make Obama out to be ‘the black candidate.’ What throws people for a loop is that the comments about ML King came before the SC ‘black’ primary, and everyone assumes that they are directed at African-American voters. Actually both Bill and Hillary commented on the topic right before NH. Since Hillary’s comments, she has gained new momentum with white voters after the race had been effectively declared over, maintaining a seven point cushion over Obama over the past few days.

On the day after Obama’s Iowa victory, Morris in his NY Post column with Eileen McGann said “Obama - by winning in a totally white state - shows that racism is gone as a factor in American politics.”

Yesterday Morris had new observations to share: “(The Clintons) embarked on a strategy of talking about race -- mentioning Martin Luther King Jr., for example -- and asking their surrogates to do so as well...

“According to the Rasmussen poll of Monday, Jan. 14, Obama leads among blacks by 66-16 while Hillary is ahead among whites by 41-27. The overall head to head is 37-30 in favor of Hillary.

“It does not matter which specific reference to race can be traced to whom. Obama's campaign has resisted any temptation to campaign on race and, for an entire year, kept the issue off the front pages. Now, at the very moment that the crucial voting looms, the election is suddenly about race. Obviously, it is the Clintons' doing. Remember the adage: Who benefits?”

The Morris and Clinton saga is critical to the careers of both Morris and Clinton. When Clinton lost his gubernatorial reelection in 1980 in Arkansas' response to the thirtysomething Yalie kid’s motor vehicle tax, Clinton joined forces with Morris for the 1982 race and joined the Democratic Leadership Council, getting the job back. In 1994 he started corresponding with Morris again during Newt Gingrich’s Contract for America campaign against him, and upon losing the House over Hillary’s ability to botch a universal health care proposal that the public overwhelmingly wanted, Morris became the most influential advisor to Clinton, the architect of ‘triangulation,’ and chaired his successful reelection campaign. During the period when Morris advised Clinton on race politics, Clinton fired Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders and signed the welfare reform bill written to Gingrich’s specifications that he had previously vetoed.

When Morris got caught with the call girl in the Willard, Clinton sent him packing with two months to go in the election. Morris said publicly that the disclosure was insufficient reason to can him, effectively ending his career as a campaign operative, and I think that is why he has run an obsessive campaign against the Clintons starting with a publication of a tell-all the next year.
Media Matters, the center-left watchdog organization started by former GOP smear artist David Brock (The Real Anita Hill) after he was outed, has called attention to how Morris teamed up with David Bossie, a renegade Clinton-hating Dan Burton staffer that produced with Morris the conservative response to Fahrenheit 911, to do a ‘swift boat’ style documentary (as Morris characterized it) on Hillary. Morris’ opinions and credibility should be seen with this perspective, but he knows Bill and Hillary’s political mindset concerning what Leon Panetta called ‘the dark side’ of race politics more than anyone.

In addition to insinuating that Obama, despite more support of independents and better polling in general election head to heads against every Republican, is less electable because he is black and thus less likely to pass reforms in the tradition of LBJ, Hillary Clinton sat beside Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson and watched while Johnson made racially tinged insinuations about Obama’s admissions of early drug use. Imagine if a white politician said Obama was ‘doing something in the neighborhood - and I won’t say what he was doing.’ Hillary then said she had no input on the statement and Johnson said he was referring to Obama’s community organizing, which is obviously dishonest as ‘I won’t say’ wouldn’t apply to community organizing.

Why does Johnson support the Clintons? He has a film company backed by JP Morgan Chase, an equity fund financed by The Carlyle Group, and a hedge fund backed by Deutsche Bank. The Carlyle Group, cited by Michael Moore and others for a board of directors including both the Bushes and the bin Laden family, currently has Arthur Levitt, Clinton’s SEC Chair, as its Senior Advisor, and William Kennard, Clinton’s FCC Chair, as its Managing Director.

Gloria Steinem’s piece in the New York Times has provoked an inevitable response from African-American intellectuals. She doesn’t need to win the argument, and she doesn’t and can’t, but her objective is to initiate a conflict that divides white women and blacks. There are fourteen woman Senators and one African-American Senator (Obama) and both Hillary and Elizabeth Dole have been treated as major presidential candidates. Carol Moseley-Braun was not treated seriously by the media because she had lost her Senate seat to a white challenger, not showing Obama’s skill at winning white support.

Steinem and Hillary are making the argument together that women are more marginalized but blacks can’t win. Steinem’s is the same approach that Dick Morris utilized for Helms’ benefit: make an enfranchised class feel disenfranchised so that they rally together in opposition to the disenfranchised. Obama, of course, has never said that anyone should vote for him because African-Americans are disenfranchised, which is why the Clintons’ strategy is significant.

If Hillary wins the nomination, it will come at the cost of her having divided the party amongst racial lines, despite the African-American candidate being less divisive, more popular amongst conservatives and moderates, and more electable in November. This is a price the Clintons are willing to pay because they don’t care about the party, as evidenced by how they let the Congress go Republican in the 90s, and because after Iowa the pundits left their presidential hopes for dead. Hillary's current lead for the nomination has vindicated her cynical strategy for gaining the support of white Democrats.

This is the time of year when Cienfuegos, Cuba holds its Luiz Gomez Ballad Festival of punto guajiro music. Gomez is the singer in the white shirt, who worked tobacco fields growing up and learned to sing horses to sleep. He is sparsely mentioned on the web and this video is one of the rare recordings of his voice in circulation. Guajiro songs were originally sung by farmers that were driven into the hills by the sugar barons in the 19th Century.

I was looking at the MSNBC exit poll Tuesday night. Chris Matthews apparently has exit polls he finds more reliable. Congressman Kucinich has asked for a recount. “(NH Secretary of State) Gardner said he has heard one of the lesser-known Republican presidential candidates may also seek a recount.” Who might that be?

On the TV the pundits are saying that the voters reacted to the media by voting Hillary, but Hillary won because Catholic women over 40 making less that 50K household who made up their mind over a month ago turned out and the kiddos didn’t. If anything the inevitability of Obama may have kept his supporters from getting off their butts and voting. It’s also interesting that the two main early primary states have virtually no minorities.

Caution - consumerism: I finally broke down and purchased one of those mp3 players, ‘imported’ and all that over the weekend and now I can’t hear. Also, squirrels got into my seaweed over the weekend.

I collect compilations of mid-century Cuban music and my favorite is an album called Trova Cubana that I found in El Rastro in Madrid, featuring Son by Compay Segundo and friends. Segundo became famous giving hangover cures (chicken comsommé before you drink) in Buena Vista Social Club, which also featured the uniquely talented pianist Rubén González, who got his first break playing in the 40s with Arsenio Rodriguez, the revolutionizer of Son Cubano.

Before Rodriguez left for NY in 1948 hoping to get his blindness cured he left his band in the care of trumpeter Felix Chappottín, who renamed the band Conjunto Chappottín or Chappottín y sus Estrellas. Those guys were just the tightest. Incredible! The first song heard on the Youtube video is a half minute live excerpt of the song Mentiras Criolles. The live vocals are not as good and harmonized, the many percussion elements distract from the melody, and the studio version is so well produced, but you get an idea of what’s going on and the way Chappottín took Rodriguez’ Son Montuno trumpet sections and ran with it. Check out Chappottín’s facial expression at the 3:35 mark in this video, and try not to get up and dance!

Chappottín’s grandkids have restarted his band with new albums, and they’re ok but don’t approximate the old sound in any way.. What does in the absence of a Chappottín reissue is Rodriguez’ recordings of the time which are being reissued on a number of labels. The one good song on this disc that can be downloaded easily is Cheo Marquetti’s Aprietala de Rincon, but it is the least enjoyable of Marquetti’s three songs on this disc due to stiff competition. That voice! Marquetti also got his big break with Chappottín. Also standing out here is Conjunto Casino, a Son Montuno band of the 40s and 50s and Orquestra Novedades from the late 50s.

I thought this might happen, tho my predictions usually err on behalf of the underdog. What Obama needed to do, as it’s now clear, was win Iowa by a large margin and make a great acceptance speech - then the money would pour in even more and the media would anoint him as the inevitable nominee. The polls were mixed as to who led in ‘likely voters’ in a way that suggested some were just wrong, and the 60% turnout of women seemed to favor Hillary, but Obama won them.

There is a common progression of Obama’s victories in that he makes a quick dash from underdog to ‘the inevitable.’ This is somewhat similar to his Senate race, where he started out third in the primary, knocked off a front runner that was arrested for beating his wife, his Republican opponent left after his divorce records of swinger clubs were unsealed, and he then took on the comfort level of a three term incumbent, beating Alan Keyes 70-27 whose job it was to remind Black America that Obama’s was an immigrant family rather than plantation descendents.

Media types have taken to calling him the likely next president in part because of the lack of a clear, strong general election opponent. The Republican result is notable in that it didn’t eliminate anyone out of the top six, and Huckabee, while still fighting uphill, is the only candidate that can seal the deal before mid-February. Thompson was the one that people thought was out the door but he edged McCain out for third. Guiliani, though not campaigning, saw what was once a lead in Iowa and thereafter double digits become four points. The setback to Romney is much discussed - anything but a win in NH will end his candidacy. This may be the perfect storm that strategically vindicates McCain’s seven years of courting the establishment, since they may call on him to take out Huckabee.

The theatrics of Obama’s speech were effective, he filled the void of Leader of America in a manner that evoked the Kennedys in the 60s, and I let myself somewhat counterintuitively to get teary eyed during the speech and enjoy it all. Whatever liberals think of his policies, we feel a sense of closure after the wrath of W. African-Americans I’ve run into today have a smile on their face and a spring in their step and their past support of the Clintons will apply to this race no further unless the news changes drastically because of the perceived electability of Obama.

The best thing the Clintons did was remove Bush from the White House. Hopefully Obama will amount to much more, but he has at least taken a major step to remove the Clintons from White House contention. I enjoyed watching Hilary and Bill with Madeline Albright spinning a loss. All the strategists of the DLC that have advised Democratic presidential losers and steered the triumphant Democratic congress to an approval rating hovering between Dick Cheney and Paris Hilton have been treated to a preview of the future of the party.

One of Sam Smith’s data dumps makes the strong case that Obama is a centrist that global finance favors with contempt for the activist left. We can’t prove whether or not Obama’s fundraising from Wall Street was necessary for this result, and time will tell what an Obama administration will amount to, but Obama spent more money on TV in Iowa than all the 2004 candidates combined and that definitely had an effect on the turnout. The fact that the three billion spent on an election cycle is not paid for by the taxpayers in exchange for honest government is both the shame and salvation of the current political class. Less funded by corporate America, the suddenly populist Edwards is calling it a two person race, and so be it.

As it’s hard to imagine the Obama juggernaut as a vote of confidence for the affections of foreign policy advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski while his son Mike is a chief advisor, it’s clearly a defeat for the neocons that Zbig trashed in his latest book. With Republicans split between the neocon ‘bomb Iran’ contingent (Guiliani the most hawkish, with McCain and Romney right there with him) and the advisorless ‘where is Iran?’ contingent (Huckabee), a general election featuring Barach will be a match between a neoliberalist caretaker and one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Obama’s rhetoric on Pakistan, perhaps Zbig-influenced, has justifiably angered peace activists but it has called the neocons bluff as to whether we are really spending all this money to combat Al-Qaeda. Neoliberalism and neoconservatism are both elitist ideologies, both facing an overwhelming popular resistance, but one can anticipate the conflicts created by neoliberalism will cause fewer people to die.

Obama’s campaign rhetoric about alternative fuels and fuel efficiency standards is backed by his voting record and is in stark contrast to Hillary’s votes and the Clinton-Gore administration, impacting both their economic and foreign policies on the whole. Obama and Edwards both cut their teeth on trade after the public had woken up to the pitfalls of secretly negotiated hemispheric treaties which, as in the case with NAFTA, Clinton had his finest hour as a congressional headcounter ratifying, restoring a WW2 tin subsidy in one Texas district in exchange for a vote. In her ‘a bunch of charts’ response, Hillary reiterated the empty ‘labor and environmental’ caveat that her husband used back then to placate the base. Hillary said “we’re not going to just have our president meet with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez” while Obama said he would, and Obama voted to cut off funding for TV Marti in Cuba.

Nationalism thrives on the self-image of citizens, and Obama adroitly makes people see themselves in his unspecific message of hope, inclusion, and a togetherness that seems to rely on his authority for its harmony. But his charisma and cunning has given us potentially a major step forward in American governance and policy.

DC Art: Haven’t been to the Hirshhorn in perhaps a year: Jiří Kolář’s collages are up, hard to come by online and elsewhere. Was banned from publishing his poetry or even giving his poems to friends so he expressed himself through photographic collages, which are wonderfully subversive and, being anti-Stalinist, can be shown across the street from Voice of America. They seem to be grouped around elemental themes like water, earth, smoke, the vertical.

Nine and a half minute interview with Václav Havel on Kolář (link to avoid registering):



I noticed they have a strong assortment of early David Smith- late Ernst sculptures which is always pleasing. A seven year old girl said she liked Ernst’s Moonmad the best (there's also one in Philly).

Miniature Whistlers in the basement of the Freer. I like how his paintings upstairs are the occasion for presenting Pound’s attack on American art of the time on an accompanying card. African and Indian getting more folky rather than modern. Still no Old Musician.

Dream journey: Got into the food business which led me to be one of a cluster of 20 nude men that hammer pig’s feet in Tunisia, in a manner that taxes the waist, to make some sort of gravy. I started to pull raw sausage out of my mouth and the sausage turned out to be 20 feet long.

“Kurt (Gartz, a Bavarian medical student) was obsessed by the philosophical ideas of Nietzsche and I observed in him mental anomalies; at the same time I observed that he, in common with everyone who had read Nietzsche, had not in fact understood what constituted the true novelty discovered by the philosopher. The novelty is a strange and profound poetry, infinitely mysterious and solitary, which is based on the Stimmung ( I use this very effective German word which could be translated as atmosphere in the moral sense), the Stimmung, I repeat, of an autumn afternoon, when the sky is clear and the shadows are longer than in summer, for the sun is beginning to lower. This extraordinary sensation can be found (but it is necessary, naturally, to have the good fortune to possess my exceptional faculties) in Italian cities and in Mediterranean cities like Genoa or Nice; but the Italian city par excellence where this extraordinary phenomenon happens is Turin. I tried to make Kurt Gartz understand all these beautiful things; he listened to me very intently and made a great effort to understand, wrinkling his forehead and looking down, but I felt that he did not understand and would never have understood.”
- de Chirico, Memoirs

The Friday before last I imagined that everyone at work were incarnations of thoughts I’ve had or moods I’ve felt. The next day I went to see the Francisco Toledo show that I’d only walked through quickly, preparing myself for imagery of the nagual, what the part-Zapotec Toledo describes as spiritual metamorphoses with animals, expressed in mask rituals. Toledo encountered the recently published Accursed Share by Bataille in late 60s Paris while being discovered there as a teenager, which excerpted Bernardino de Sahagún’s transcription of the Aztec myth of the creation of the sun representing the share that nourishes but blinds (Nanauatzin, the sun, who jumps into the fire) and the reflection that can be seen (Tecuciztecatl, the fearful moon). Toledo illustrated a book of the Sahagún transcription. A warm winter night a few days back, the cloud cover was so thick that the moon’s brief appearances felt like an interrogation.


Nagual in some tribes has an aspect that casts a spell against assimilation, which reflects on the conflicts of Toledo’s art and life: the money he made painting was spent both bringing institutions of modernity to Oaxaca (contemporary art museums, art cinema) and archiving local indigenous culture. The Princeton/ UTEP show presents some of his illustrations of Kafka’s Report to the Academy, where a monkey sent to Europe escapes his cage by metamorphosing into a human and describes an essence he can’t return to.

One more week of this show, the best on the East Coast now and the first, though way too small, US retrospective of Toledo in years and years. I’ve never seen his drawings and the draftsmanship is strikingly original. His works presented together enable you to inhabit his mythical logic, play of masks, and mirror hall of sacrifices, ‘the gods had to die.. The wind tore out their hearts and used them to animate the newborn stars.’ (Sahagún)

Toledo’s daughter Natalia has poetry, some of which is written in Zapotec, featured in the Copper Canyon Mexican anthology but has yet to be translated book-length; this portrait of her is most likely based on erotic photos of Francisco in his youth in snake and alligator skin.

There’s been some music in town lately. Last weekend the orchestra here tackled Varèse’s Amériques, which you really need to have your local orchestra do rather than an avant ensemble because it requires 120 to 140 instruments depending on the version, including seven french horns, eight cellos, and a lion. I’ve never heard it, thinking until a few months ago that Antheil had the idea to use sirens first (who else would have done it?) I’ve heard so much that imitates it that it sounds like an old favorite warhorse, like the missing warhorse; I will listen to it many more times.

Some virtuoso girls doing Bartók at the Curtis Institute: first Sang Hyun Mary Yong’s over the top rendering of the Concerto for Viola and Orchestra on Monday then Elena Urioste ripping up the Sonata for Violin and Piano this evening. Urioste conveys a broad range of emotions through her mastery of pieces, following up the Sonata with V. Williams’ light, dreamy Lark Ascending, bringing her edge to Beethoven and Janáček, then putting a rose in her hair and (being Mexican-Basque) deconstructing the Carmen Fantasie. An unforgettable graduation recital and I look forward to collecting her recordings.

I bought a bunch of Bartók discs years back and I never really worked them into a listening routine that fit into a particular mood or ritual. I mean, I seem to like every other ‘difficult’ composer. I find his chamber works, or works arranged for chamber, to be more initially engaging because it is easier to appreciate his melodic structure rather than with the combination of melodies in many of his symphonies, which I’m nonetheless inspired to dust off now. Yong's Concerto was exciting, but Urioste enabled me to emotionally connect to Bartók for the first time in a while.

+ on Monday my favorite chamber work, Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night. Written in the throes of a complex love affair, it combines Romantic passion with the forms and dramatic structure of modernity. I have gone through long stretches when I’ve gone to bed to it nightly, and I felt as if my mind halfway between wakefulness and sleep was being presented a public meeting.