I haven’t been in a car in awhile, so I’d forgotten that there are three songs you can count on hearing on the radio on any drive through Michigan longer than an hour. “Glory Days,” “Jack and Diane,” and “Proud Mary.” Something maudlin but defiant about time moving forever forward is at the core of what rock music has always been about, and of these three classic rock tracks, I’ve always felt Creedence got the balance just right: “And I never lost one minute of sleeping, Worrying bout the way things might have been.”

Of course, Creedence also had the exceptional luck of having Ike and Tina cover their song two years after it was released, in a fantastic showstopper of a performance that converts the swamp lethargy of those turning wheels into burning hip gyrations,  Tina spitting out the lyrics like firecrackers. I heard the cover first, and that version always sounds like definitive one.

Creedence makes great driving music, the riverboat/interstate analogy works perfectly to endow whatever mundane task your headed to with a glint of rebellion.  But seeing a man with tight twists and a superman t-shirt turn it out with Tina’s version last night at a gay karaoke bar gave driving music another meaning entirely.

Ike and Tina start the song “nice on backup and easy,” Ike almost parodying Creedence by drawling out “rolling on the river” slow as molasses, before th band abruptly switches to an up-tempo dance version that jolts you out of your torpor and drives your body into ecstatic motion. Tina repeating the lyrics in both idioms lifts the spirit up through a sort of parallax view on life’s vicissitudes: two equally valid viewpoints on a single phenomenon that cannot ever be reconciled with each other.

I always know which one I want to see, hear and feel.

My new article on Barack Obama’s memoir, Dreams from My Father, is now up at The Scholar & Feminist Online, and it’s in good company, nestled between articles by Lani Guinier and Angela Davis! It’s a bit intimidating to see my name next to such icons, but I’m delighted and privileged that the guest editors, Kim F. Hall and Christine Cynn, invited me to participate.

The issue, entitled “Rewriting Dispersal: Africana Gender Studies” is a wonderful interdisciplinary mix of scholarship, essays, and creative work, so please check it out.

Books bought or received

• Paul Goodman, Don Juan, or, The Continuum of the Libido
• Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
  
• Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins, ed., The Object Reader
  
• Goethe, Complete Works
  
• William Blake, Complete Works

Books read/ing

• John Henry Mackay, The Hustler, The Story of A Nameless Love from Friedrichstrasse
  
• Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
• Paul Goodman, Don Juan, or, The Continuum of the Libido
• Felix Guattari, Soft Subversions

Not in keeping with my stated intent to focus on hybridity, but I have to rave about Liza Johnson’s new film, In the Air, a brief, almost evanescent meditation on the commotion of adolescence in a dead-end, postindustrial Ohio town.

In one of the earliest scenes, a youth sullenly refuses an adult order (is he a parent? A boss? all such relations seem collectivized, as befits the small town setting) to go fetch two sticks. As the man grows in rage, the youth finally departs — whether to complete the errand or flaunt indifference, we cannot tell — not by walking away, but repeatedly flipping backwards until out of frame.

The abrupt intrusion of such little, repetitive acts of physical virtuosity punctuate the film, elevating it above innumerable other films I have seen that seek, mimetically, to conjure adolescent boredom by being themselves boring. Johnson’s film, which centers on kids training for a circus in a town without one, is never boring. It rather grows in significance until it reached it’s final scene, one of pure cinema, that is equal parts High School Musical and Gus van Sant. In the Air leaves the emotions, just as the title promised, deliciously suspended.

Paris, Prince, and Blanket Jackson at Dad's memorial service yesterday

How paradoxical the idea of family resemblance in the case of a family like the Jacksons, whose collective enthusiasm for plastic surgery is legendary. But I always thought they looked a bit like Michael. And despite media reports that he may not have been their biological dad, I still kind of think so after getting the first sustained look at Paris, Prince and Blanket at yesterday’s memorial. Or if they don’t look like him, they at least look like he wanted to appear: flowing dark hair, porcelain skin, button nose, the picture of Disney-fied “innocence.”

Having lost my own father and lived through a memorial that (on an entirely different scale) became a disturbingly public spectacle, I feel for them. The “weird” veils and intense privacy MJ insisted upon seem retrospectively wise parenting, considering the glare of the media that they will henceforth be exposed to.

Having no idea if there is a “biological” link between the three kids and Jackson family, I find myself, despite knowing better, trying to scrutinize them for any trace of blackness. Born of surrogates, egg and possibly sperm donors, through in vitro fertilization (one reportedly doesn’t even have a mother listed on the birth certificate) — with Diana Ross, their designated caregiver, should their 79-year old grandmother become incapacitated, delivering a no-show telegram assuring them that she’ll be there should they ever need her — they are the ultimate post-racial, post-human hybrids, “vertically engineered in LA” just like the American Apparel ads.

How perversely appropriate, then, that their public debut should occur in one of the most traditional of community ceremonies, a funeral. The injunction on speaking ill of the dead (“there was nothing strange about your father,” the Rev. Al Sharpton lied) produced an almost surreal atmosphere in which the constantly evoked groundings of faith, friends and family were never more in absence. It was as if we all agreed to momentarily step into the collective delusion MJ shared with his most ardent fans, one last time.

Except, for the kids, this is only the beginning. “The pure products of America go crazy” William Carlos Wiliams warned. Heaven help them.

Snapshot of anti-miscegenation laws in 1961, the year our current president was born.

The family name of Richard Perry Loving is a gift that keeps on giving. After contributing to perhaps the most leadingly-named US Supreme Court case in history, Loving v. Virginia, the decision that overthrew laws legal bans against marriages across the color line, it has now been appropriated by the folks behind Loving Day, an annual holiday on or around June 12th celebrating all things interracial.

I missed this weekend’s festivities here in New York City, but I did get a kick out of their inter-active map of state anti-miscegenation laws throughout the centuries (notice the retroactive imposition of the red state/blue state divide). I also was intrigued by the little post-script on actually scrubbing the law books of the offensive legislation post-Loving, a symbolic process that continued up until quite recently.

This last bit of dead-horse-flogging, however, raises a larger question about Loving Day. Why bother? Elevating an ingenious legal strategy (finding a plaintiff named Loving) into an annual rhetorical occasion, and a half century later to boot, seems a very tepid means to “fight racial prejudice” and build “multicultural community” as the website proclaims.

As cultural politics, “celebrating Loving” substitutes the vague for the precise, and the amorphous for the achievable (indeed, for the achieved). Marriages across the color line are indeed now legal, and have been, in all states, for over half a century. Don’t we have other civil rights issues to take on today?

Tavia Nyong'o, The Amalgamation Waltz (Minnesota, 2009)

In honor of the publication of my first book, I’ll be devoting this blog to matters of cultural hybridity, multiracial politics, and spectacles of “mixed race” for a while. I’ll pick up on current events and new publications, both popular and scholarly. And I’ll try to address issues I didn’t get to take up in the book, or that I’d perhaps approach differently now.

Books Bought

• Alain Badiou, Logic of Worlds
• Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population
• Felix Guattari, Soft Subversions
• Haryette Mullens, Sleeping with the Dictionary

Books Read/ing

• Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism
• Paul Goodman, The Community of Scholars

The “genius” in my iPod must have been subliminally preparing me for the ignominious defeat of American Idol’s Great Queer Hope by spinning up tracks from the latest album to emerge out of the apparently bottomless Arthur Russell archive, Love is Overtaking Me. A musical wunderkind of the NYC Downtown music scene, virtuosic cello experimentalist, dance music legend, and muse/musical mentor to Allen Ginsberg, Russell has already posthumously conquered several additional musical arenas. Championed by the likes of Jens Leckman, Russell’s catalogue is deep & varied enough to inspire fantasies of a “Songs of Arthur Russell” on Idol. Okay, that would take some alternate pop universe to happen. But that’s precisely where his songs seem to come from: a dream-state Top 40 of the heart and mind.

Since his days curating music at The Kitchen, and cutting disco records under various pseudonyms, Russell has held the ear of the cognoscenti. With Love is Overtaking Me, he reveals himself to be a one-man Laurel Canyon as well, equal parts Gram Parsons and Nick Drake, with just enough of a dollop of NYC grit and assonance to make his sound unique.

Russell’s songs make an excellent decompression chamber after the weeks of staring down Glambert’s throat as he struggled to command America’s attention through sheer sonic ecstasy. Love comes at the perfect moment, and in the perfect musical register: countrified and relaxed, but with none of that “relaxed fit” approach of a singer like Kris Allen, whose “frat guy with a guitar” type is typically taken by our culture to be the yin to Adam’s yang.

On “What it’s Like” — a Velvet Underground-like tribute to his heartland roots in Iowa — Russell puts paid to the Christian mythos from which Allen and his indistinguishable ilk spring: a young zealot confesses to his wife that he now loves Jesus more than she, only to prompt her admission, in return, that she only slept with him to find out “what’s it like.” As erotic and spiritual yearning to approach this unnameable “it” mingle and merge, Russell charts an  astonishing excursion into what Zizek calls the perverse core of Christianity, leaving the milktoast troubadours of Christian soft rock far, far behind.

Some of these songs are unfinished sketches, of which Russell had recorded thousands at the time of his death. But their lack of polish only seems to increase their fabulosity. “Maybe She” is a queer boy’s paean to an intellectual crush, whom he wants to invite out for a walk, but fears she might infer ulterior motives: “she might think I want to date her, that would be hard to arrange, maybe I should ask her later.”

The precision with which “Maybe She” draws a portrait of that ubiquitous but rarely valorized state of mind, abashedly trembling on the edge of introducing yourself to an admired other, is turned inside out in the rhythmically infectious “Time Away,” in which he scoots about his room, picking up pants and putting away records while “taking time away to dream.” Russell lived a penurious life in an apartment that relied at one point on an extension chord, run upstairs by his neighbor Ginsberg, for electricity. His need to carve out time and space to create commands real respect in our era of gaytention deficit syndrome (which is really tied to our overconsumption and the need to work long enough hours to feed the vicious cycle). “Time Away” is an eloquent, jubilant reproach. But, lest we be tempted to romanticize the starving artist, Russell makes certain we overhear him sing to himself “You know I just can’t be sure anymore. I just can’t be sure.” Time away is a needed respite, but Russell is wise enough to acknowledge its transience.

The let-er-down-easy ballad “I Couldn’t Say it To Your Face” sounds like an undiscovered James Taylor single. And listening to the echoes of Taylor on Love has led me to reconsider an oft-disparaged singer who nonetheless held an important place in my childhood, whom I knew first as the composer of campfire songs I sang in summertime. “Fire and Rain,” “Something in the way She Moves,” and “Carolina on my Mind” have since been liquified into mush by their ubiquitous rotation on muzak and easy listening stations everywhere. All the more amazing, then, to discover in Russell a trove of songs that are like Taylor, only better, retrospectively restoring in me a childhood state of pleasurable sing along.

And there is something both queer and childlike in the gentleness of Russell’s songs to women, a bit like Sufjan Stevens but less twee:  “I touched you on the arm, I meant you no harm” Russell sings on “Janine.” With Sufjan, it would be a moot point, since he couldn’t possibly hurt a fly. In Russell, one can hear the pressure of an as yet undomesticated downtown scene, post-Velvets but pre-Giuliani, a context that requires the consoling, cautionary lines “Janine: don’t go with those guys. What’s in it for you?” The anodyne sounds of Love emerged as an antidote to their times, not as an acquiescence to them, as so much underachieving indie rock today unfortunately sounds like.

This fall Duke Press is publish Tim Lawrence’s biography of Russell, and there will also be a conference at NYU about his life and work. Love is overtaking indeed.

See ya! Wouldn't want to be ya!

So the South rose again and the semi-talented worship leader from Arkansas nudged out the SoCal showstopper. Proof again that America will almost always pick mediocrity over talent, just to feel better about itself.

Still, Glambert had the last laugh. After toning it down a little for Tuesday night’s competition, boy did his freak flag fly on Wednesday, as he went toe to toe with the likes of Gene Simmons and what remains of Queen, leaving Kris gasping in the dust towards the end, not even trying to keep up vocally or in terms of stage presence. I almost felt sorry for Kris, who must possess an instinctive sense of fair play, to witness that and then “win” anyway.
Still, it’s not all bad. Kris is a decent enough bloke to admit on live TV that even he thinks Adam was robbed, and Adam was enough of a pro to instantly understand that she who laughs last laughs best. No sobbing here: he was already plotting his next career move behind that guyliner and hair dye.

The two former roommates seem to genuinely like each other, and I’m sure Kris will go on to make a perfectly, acceptably bland Jason Mraz/John Mayer-esque record with Christian overtones.

But what will become of our Adam? Free of the winner’s curse, he won’t have to release that awful single. But he’s not home free until he gets the right talent around him and persuades the recording industry to release the kind of record he should make. My nightmare is that he may end up a Blake Lewis-esque novelty also ran, who was much more interesting on the show than after. Of course, Adam can always go back to Broadway, and he probably should, but not immediately. I want to see him bend the music industry over first, and spank it a little.

Luckily, there seems to be so much respect and support from him, and he’s so much of a canny pro already, that he just might do that. He could be the first contestant to actually take the whole bloated Idol machinery and turn it immediately to his personal advantage.

My two cents? Get Linda Perry to write, get out of the teeny bop Idol summer tour as soon as possible and get back to center stage, find some way keep doing surprising things with old rock gods (like show up as a guest vocalist on Slash’s album?) and, most important, use the public coming out to cut the Idol cord sooner rather than later. If he does it soon enough, like next week, it might even upstage Kris’ win.

And yes, I actually think coming out matters. The fact that “everyone knows” Adam’s gay makes it even harder for him talk about it, which is the paradox of the open secret everyone knows but no one is supposed to admit they know. I’m sure the reason he won’t want to talk about it now is that everyone will ask him if its a reason he didn’t win, and he is too much of a gent to dwell on sour grapes. But part of what could be “transformational” about him, as Ann Powers likes to say, is that he could be an out pop star that openly appeals to fans across gender and generation, not because “sexuality doesn’t matter” but because he could transform the way sexuality actually does matter in pop.