Curators of Surprise – Event Review
ArtsforArt OUT Fest Poetry Reading – Saturday, March 1, 2025 – 5 pm Artists Space
“He seems like the kind of guy you don’t hand the mic to because he’ll talk way longer than you’ll want,” my friend commented on our way back to the subway stop in Chinatown. He wasn’t wrong. We had just come from a poetry reading featuring two legends of their fields, including avant-garde and Free Jazz bassist William Parker, who often ends his musical performances with long, unscripted ruminations on creative approach and musical transcendence.
But the fact that Parker talks a lot is the appeal of his performances; not only do you get to linger after his spirit-rattling music making, you get to hear the wisdom and artistic philosophy of a second-wave New York Free Jazz pioneer. Thus, a chance to see Parker read his poetry should not be taken lightly.
The reading was part of the OUT Music Festival put on by Parker and dancer Patricia Nicholson across New York City’s legendary Free music venues from February 27th-March 5th, 2025. Housed in Artists Spaces’ basement, every tightly-packed seat numbering in the hundreds had someone sitting in it, and many latecomers sat on the floor.
Reading several selections from his 1999 stream-of-consciousness work, The Mayor of Punkville, Parker traded his post-performance orations for a story, an epic poem for our time. The Mayor of Punkville is an account of fictional Bob Jefferson’s rise to mayoral leadership and contentions with corrupt real-world capitalist and racist politicians. Though written nearly 30 years ago, Parker’s parable felt as urgent as ever. Liberation, in the poem, comes at an ever-probable price: all the wealthy and powerful launch themselves into space, leaving behind a dying world for the rest of the population to contend with—and they seem better off for it.
Parker read with the lucidity and surefootedness of his bass playing, alternating between trance-inducing repetition of syllabic rhythms and bold surges of intensity. Reading the introduction of the work, he said, “A word is a sound. On paper it is an image that is both Black and white and in color at the same time. The Mayor of Punkville is a tone poem about the future of yesterday. It speaks about the salvation of humanity through music.” Parker’s a curator of sustained surprise: even after an hour of listening, I never found that my mind wandered. Rather, it hung on until he presented the next strange and staggering image with practiced showmanship—an experience similar to watching him pull out a medieval chanter after playing bass for an hour.
It’s always heartening to see a packed house for something involved with Free Jazz. But mid-reading whispers and false-ending claps coming from those who arrived early enough to snag a seat near the front made it clear they didn’t necessarily come to hear Parker’s poetry. Granted, Parker read for a long time, but I suspect those lured by the celebrity name added to the bill at the last minute—Marina Abramović—were anxious for him to get on with things. Perhaps they didn’t know who he was. I couldn’t help wondering what Abramović herself was encouraging as she indiscreetly murmured through the last 15 minutes of Parker’s reading. At least we had the time to bask in her presence, because Abramović didn’t even really read poetry: she spent at best 20 minutes giving us a barely-audible reading from her 2023 work Nomadic Journey and Spirit of Places, her collected notebooks that reminded us of all of her famous works. I like her as much as the next cultural fanatic, but this felt more like self-indulgent advertising than a celebration of the poetry’s connection with performance.
Amidst a capitalistic arts economy where creators are incentivized to brand themselves with a few memorable works, an artist’s commitment to craft should surpass inclinations to showboat and wallow in their fame. Or, at least, artists who want to surpass marketing-level discourse and expand the creative and intellectual conversation. This is the genius of Parker: even amidst his legendary status, he’s always finding new ways to innovate, to surprise a crowd, to invite emerging voices into his world. This rare reading from Parker shows his respect and commitment to poetry—his first artistic medium. So, at least when Parker “has the mic,” we know what will happen. It’s never just about him. He’ll remind us of the universal power of creative exploration.
More Than Suffering: The Success of Peasant Revolts of the 14th Century – Op-Ed
We can learn a lot from protests in Medieval Europe if we expand our imagination beyond misery.
August 2024
By Melanie Moyer
True, the long, often uneventful period between 500 and 1500 was not the best time to be alive. Oppressive feudal economies, a power-hungry church, unsanitary living conditions, and low age expectancies made medieval European life difficult and, frankly, gross: I am grateful not to share a bedroom with the family cow.
However, many historians and economists have long pointed out that this period of slow global transition laid the bedrock for modern democratic ideals and the globalized capitalist system. Most notably, the 14th century was rife with class reforms that birthed our current capitalist system, offering lessons applicable to our contemporary fight for class equality.
In February, journalist and military historian Max Hastings wrote for Bloomberg about the lessons we can learn from 14th-century Europe, naming the Little Ice Age in the Northern Atlantic hemisphere, a corrupt Catholic Church, the Black Death plague, the Hundred Years’ War, and conflict between local lords as pieces in the collage of general misery throughout the century.
Hasting draws a notable connection to the dangers of governing through gun violence and militias in the Middle East and the rise of fascist-ambitious politicians such as Donald Trump and the Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán. “Hundreds of millions of people subsist and suffer in places where the gun is king, where the strong prey upon the weak,” he claims.
I agree, the widespread misery as a result of unstable government systems and subjugation through violence calls back to the conditions in 14th-century Europe. We should treat the 14th century as a time we strive not to be like. Yet, their struggles against oppressive systems can also inform our path forward.
A straightforward comparison between the 14th and 21st centuries is, of course, the experience of a pandemic. The Black Plague wiped out two-thirds of Europe’s population, and surviving peasants were emboldened with bargaining power as a result of the new scarcity of labor. This led to the rise of a wealthier merchant and farming class, which we know today as the first glimmer of the middle class.
As a symbol of upward mobility out of serfdom, the emboldened middle class in England understandably terrified the ruling classes of kings and lords. So, heavy new taxes were imposed to cripple their wealth accumulation and then spent on pointless military attacks that had no tangible benefit to the people who suffered from subsequent economic depression (yes, I am still talking about the 14th century).
Eventually, class tensions boiled to the point of revolution: the Peasant Revolt of 1381. The movement marked the first English uprising by commoners not seeking personal political advancement. Instead, the unified effort called for freedom and equality of the people. When 30,000 rebels marched on London, destroying noble buildings and terrifying the young King Richard II and his court, he promised to abolish forced labor, expensive land, and heavy taxes.
Thinking about the common folks unifying under shared principles of equality, freedom, and self-governing calls to mind the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Racial disparities in healthcare access and economic stability, along with violent policing practices, were exposed and exacerbated during our own pandemic, highlighting long-standing oppressions of Black Americans.
Modern vaccines and medical technology allowed the 21st century to sidestep mass suffering and death of Black Plague proportion. Still, we too will likely see the emergence of a changed society in the following decades.
Throughout history, the most dangerous threat to the ruling classes is the unification of the general population around democratic ideals of the freedom to live and economic equality. Despite touting these as our national values, Americans are beginning to realize they are more remote to the working and middle class, with race and gender compounding them further.
Ultimately, the Peasant Revolt ended in failure. Claiming that he made the promises under duress, King Richard II repealed many of the promises he made to the peasants. The feudal system would not be abolished for another 275 years.
Similarly, many popular brands and celebrities—our monarchs in bourgeoisie capitalism—have cloaked or retracted their claims for furthering diversity and promoting equity. “Liberal” politicians like Kamala Harris struggle to call for police reform or reparations for the descendants of enslaved Black Americans.
In true medieval European style, the heads of the revolt leaders were marched through London on wooden stakes. However, the impact of 60,000 peasants fighting for the rights of modern democracy would eventually lead to the fall of feudal society and pave the way for our current capitalist governing system. As imperfect as it is, these early freedom fighters teach us that the freedoms and rights of modern democracies are worth the long-term struggle. They demonstrate that class unity and organized effort will inevitably lead to powerful social change.
—Caliban and the Witch Book Review
Silvia Federici. New York: Autonomedia, April 2004. 243 pages.
September 2024
By Melanie Moyer
History has proven that there are two ways to become a witch: you can self-declare it, embracing magical or personal alignments with witchiness; or, the state and church can travel to your village with your name on a list and falsely accuse you, and the next thing you know, you’re coming out of a torture chamber to be burned alive in front of your children, family, and friends.
The state-sponsored witch hunts of Europe are largely ignored as part of modern society’s development. Silvia Federici articulates its prominent contribution to the rise of modern capitalism in Caliban and the Witch, exploring the Great Witch Hunt of Europe and its function to suppress the rebellious peasant class whose protests ended the feudal system.
Tracing her way through the tumultuous 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries in Europe, Federici recounts a European history marked by the suppression of peasant revolts and the erosion of working-class rights after the forced implementation of a capitalist system, proposing that, “conscious forms of social transgression constructed a powerful alternative not only to feudalism but to the capitalist order by which feudalism was replaced, demonstrating that another world was possible and urging us to question why it was not realized.”
Tackling the histories of marital power dynamics, the patriarchy of the wage, the family, reproductive contraceptives, abortions, midwives, obstetrics, and sex work, Federici deftly explains and explores each topic while leaving the reader wanting more by the end of the text. Experts in historical studies and casual readers alike will revolutionize their notions of class history and witch hunts by the end of the text.
Complex in its central arguments, Federici’s text provides a refreshing analysis of European class history through the lens of feminist and anti-colonial history. Unlike many Historical Materialists, Federici ties the rise of capitalism to the patriarchal oppression of the female working class, justified and enacted by the long-misunderstood and widespread witch hunts by Enlightenment thinkers and Protestant reformers. She expertly challenges the most prominent voices in social theory, from Karl Marx to Michel Foucault, in their gender-neutral analyses of capitalist accumulation and body politics, proving that new great theorists can walk among us.
As an integral voice of the Italian Operaismo or Autonomist movement during the 1960s and 1970s, Federici’s 2004 work captures a historical rationalization for reorganizing the proletariat and demanding wages for housework through a universal welfare system. Caliban articulates that proletariat women’s free reproductive labor creates a surplus for the owning class to sustain their a male workers, tracing the historical conditions in which women become enclosed in the home and separated from female communities and wisdom during the transition into capitalism during the 15th century.
Yet, those looking for a comprehensive history will not find it in this 250-page work. Federici’s selection of a broad historical and geographical focus poses immediate limitations, seen in her tendency to lump entire centuries into single claims and exclude diverse geographical dynamics in her analysis. Though it’s portrayed as a European focus, Federici mostly hones in on occurrences in England, France, Italy, Germany, and sometimes Spain, with one to two mentions of Eastern European dynamics.
And, though she purports it as a dual-focus to her feminist lens, her anti-colonial analysis also falls short of any meaningful contribution, and is often treated as a chapter’s afterthought. Her short statements about the witch hunts and similar rhetoric in the colonized Americas are meaningful in her network of ideas, but accounting for the different modalities of Indigenous life after colonization are worthy of their own book.
Nonetheless, her claims about present-day issues in the decolonial struggle are the most moving part of her conclusion. She claims. “If we apply to the present the lessons of the past, we realize that the reappearance of witch-hunting in so many parts of the world in the ‘80s and ‘90s is a clear sign of a process of ‘primitive accumulation,’ which means that the privatization of land and other communal resources, mass impoverishment, plunder, and the sowing of divisions in once-cohesive communities are again on the world agenda.”
Thus, as we lament the world that could have been possible after peasants liberated themselves from monarchs, only to be reconquered by a more oppressive bourgeois ruling class, Federici shines a light of both hope and warning about the consequences of female oppression on working-class rights.
—The Green Knight (2021) Film Review
Directed by David Lowrey, A24
October 2024
When A24 announced David Lowery would direct and write an adaptation of the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I feared the worst. The plotline of the original poem itself is straightforward and digestible, divided up into four “Fitts” or sections, but the descriptive elements—such as birds crying out from pain because they’re so cold or a fantastically adorned Green Knight terrifying King Arthur’s young court—can only see justice in the realm of poetry.
A golden rule for fervent readers of the classics is never to watch film adaptations. Most of the time, whether it’s due to sloppy portrayals of a well-known story or over-indulging liberties made by the director, they are often not good. Though cinema is a potent medium for visual story-telling, two hours is often insufficient for literature’s complex plotlines, character development, and literary devices. My first disappointment: Chris Weitz’s 2007 interpretation of Phillip Pulman’s classic young adult fantasy book, The Golden Compass, in which performances by Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig weren’t enough to rescue a film that falls short of the fantastic world Pullman pulls his young readers into.
As a Gawain scholar, I’ve translated many of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’s Middle English and share a considerable intimacy with the story’s wild tales of honor, seduction, and power. The Green Knight is a central figure in my scholarship, as an enormous, muscular, and beautiful take on the pagan mythological Green Man. As soon I saw Lowrey’s big tree man reminiscent of Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy, I wrote the movie off as missing a central quality of the original work and decided never to watch it, even if it did star Dev Patel.
That is, until a respected colleague sang the film’s merits. They convinced me to watch Lowery’s Green Knight with them, and I enjoyed it. Sure, it sacrifices time to focus on plotlines not found within the medieval text and then skims over what I think are the “important parts” of the story—and I won’t even go into the injustice done to the Green Knight—but the cinematic quality of the film and 21st-century revival of some of its implications offered an exciting and sometimes refreshing take.
Though he wasn’t the young, beardless Gawain of the source text, Dev Patel’s performance masterfully captured the boyish grappling with power and honor of the original text. Surprisingly, I was more sympathetic to his character than the Gawain-poet’s sometimes flat main figure.
I found myself correcting many of the liberties the film takes from the original plot, which were notable and frequent, but some breathed new life into the nearly 700-year-old text. The 14th century was replete with sexual repressions and religious authoritarianism, which Sir Gawain and the Green Knight reflects. My frustration with the text is its inability to represent the sexual tension at the center of the third Fitt, in which the Lady of the manor Gawain stumbles upon in his quest for the Green Knight fiercely attempts to seduce him, even though Gawain must give his host and husband of the Lady, Bertilak, the same in return. However, now, in a less-repressed time, Lowery masterfully captured the eroticism of these scenes.
A striking part of the film was its commitment to representing a legendary story. Everything from the opening moments, where raspy whispers expound the mythology of the tale, to the depiction of an early medieval village complete with its aging lords, sorceresses, and sex workers, was mindfully done to make viewers feel as though they’ve stepped into a twisted Arthurian legend. It retains an aesthetic quality of the text in telling the story of a young knight’s coming of age in the wild and paranormal British Isles. I found it fun to be transported into the mystical world that Lowery creates through Gawain’s adventures in the wylds, a moment skimmed over by the original text.
Would I, a medievalist and Gawain-scholar, capture this story differently? Yes. But Lowrey knows his 21st-century audience and pulls new enthusiasts into the mystery of the Green Knight’s challenge to make for a great rendition of a much-beloved tale.
Melanie K. Moyer 