Spilling Whitney’s Tea

passportharlem:

After my Whitney post, I got an email from a someone who read it. She was in the middle of a debate about whether or not to it was too soon to discuss Whitney Houston’s sexuality, namely rumors regarding a relationship with her former assistant, Robyn Crawford. (Crawford’s response to Houston’s death can be found here.) The reader wanted to know my opinion on the matter.

It took me longer than usual to respond. Part of this is because I’m having the most random-ass mourning-a-celebrity experience ever. (I blame my mother.) I’m also deeply ambivalent about it, I think. Well, maybe. Anyway, this is what I said:

I appreciate your email. I generally respond much more quickly, but I had to take some time to think about this. I’ve been thinking about Whitney Houston a lot, in many different ways, and this part of her story is simply one of the myriad narratives we might draw from her life.

You know, I read Robyn Crawford’s obituary, and although it was restrained, it said so much. And I appreciated her loyalty—for whatever reason she decided not to say everything so blatantly—while still acknowledging their relationship. I think those who can see all that Robyn was saying about the extent of their relationship, will find it. Those who don’t, won’t. Their relationship was an open secret. Anyone who wants to know the tea, will. 

But what was also important about Crawford’s remembrance was the fact that Whitney made her own decisions. She was an agent, in charge. I say that to say that Whitney’s choice not divulge the extent of their relationship, in my mind, was probably not due to Clive Davis or someone else handling her career. I think she saw what she wanted, knew the image she needed to project, and behaved, more or less, accordingly. 

And I think her relationship with Bobby was real, and points to the fluidity of sexuality. (A fact that undermines the discourse of being “born gay,” which is at the core of this latest effort at GLBTQ rights.) I think acknowledging the authenticity of both of those relationships could spark a really interesting conversation about sexuality’s fluidity, but I’m not sure it’s one we’re willing to have—ask Cynthia Nixon. As such, the idea of saying something like, “Whitney was gay,” is really reductive—and dishonest. 

Furthermore, I’m gathering that your point that the “youth don’t know our history,” that this is a “cautionary tale,” relies on the idea that Houston’s drug abuse was because she was not able to be out fully? I don’t agree with that. I think other things, namely her genius and the demanding level at which people consumed it, probably compelled that kind of behavior. I mean it when I say that I don’t think Houston had a peer. And I think the kind of loneliness that comes with that kind of brilliance makes drug use a viable option and coping mechanism. (Way more folks have been way more destructive because of way less talent.) Or, she could just have daddy issues like every woman who has appeared on Intervention.

All that said, my response is that a post about Whitney’s alleged (homo)sexuality is something I don’t really agree with. I’m taking my cue from Robyn. If she’s not saying anything, I don’t think I have a right to beyond what I’ve outlined here. I’m not a fan of outing—even posthumously so. To more directly answer your question: It’s not that it’s too early to discuss. I question the impulse to want to discuss it at all. I question what we reap from it. I question the desire to continue to pick apart a life that has already been so unforgivingly dissected on front street. I think about an article about this very subject that appeared on The Daily Beast. An article that was so ugly I couldn’t get through the first paragraph; so ugly that if I ever see the writer, I might have to abandon pacifism. I don’t mean to suggest that same gender relationships are ugly, that they should not be talked about, that talking about this would tarnish Houston’s legacy. I say that because I want to think about the interlocuters of those conversations, their motives, etc. What’s the point of the conversation if the news just sounds like pornography emanating from gossipy lips? Besides, haven’t we found a more constructive way to validate ourselves? Our youth?

I’m rambling, but I don’t think, in this instance, that such ends justify the means. The evidence is there for those who are interested and invested in knowing the full case. But I’m not sure how it benefits us, even GLBTQ youth, in any way beyond having another, juicy factoid about an icon whose public persona obscured her real humanity. But isn’t everybody a more complicated version of their public selves?

I hope that makes some semblance of sense. 

I’m curious about other responses. I know many don’t agree. I’d love to hear those opinions. 

“It’s not that it’s too early to discuss. I question the impulse to want to discuss it at all. I question what we reap from it. I question the desire to continue to pick apart a life that has already been so unforgivingly dissected on front street.” 

and 

“…I say that because I want to think about the interlocuters of those conversations, their motives, etc. What’s the point of the conversation if the news just sounds like pornography emanating from gossipy lips?”

i’m with passportharlem … outing people is hella corny and it seeks to serve particular purposes, to assign blame or something. thanks for writing this!

“Eternal Life and Biopower” (Vatter)

“philosophy as a form of life must give up the ‘ascetic ideal,’ which understands the body and zoe as its ‘tomb,’ and, to the contrary, must begin to understand how it is that the body and zoe also philosophize” (220).

whitney: an attempt at tribute.

some scattered remarks, primarily from an email i sent to two friends today.

i’m still in utter and complete shock regarding whitney houston. floored. very saddened. i left church this morning with some seething hope that i’d hear “it was an internet rumor” or a hoax or something. the weird thing is, my parents didn’t allow my brother and i to listen to “secular” music growing up and whitney was no exception. but as i heard of her passing last night, i teared up a bit. i began to think that even with the injunction against nongospel music, i somehow still knew most of whitney’s, even when i was very young. her music made its way into school shows, everyone sang about children being the future, wanting to let them lead the way. everyone belted “and iiiii will always love you!”

but it was when she remade chaka’s “i’m every woman” that i got in trouble — a lot of trouble — for singing the song in my junior high school hallways. see, i must’ve been too flamboyant when i was 12 years old but i distinctly remember being reprimanded by my science teacher in front of the entire class when she said to me, without a hint of humor, “you’ve got some really feminine ways about you. if you don’t stop acting like that, people will think you’re gay” and she went along and finished her lesson or whatever. funny how some moments become etched in your mind.

i became not a little bit careful and surveilled myself with the hopes of repressing as much of those “feminine ways” as possible. but not knowing the grounds upon which my teacher made such a declaration, i was fighting a losing battle. anything i’d do could be, i’m sure, construed to be in the “feminine” kind of “way.” and so it was that one day, after watching BET videos — likely video soul — i found myself in love with this “new song” called “i’m every woman.” and so it was that i’d sing this new song in the hallways of my junior high school: loudly, with much excitement and not a little bit of irony. but it just so happened that my science teacher’s attempt at public shaming gave others the license they needed to participate in a similar surveilling of my activities.

and so it was that a friend of mine [i will, of course, never forget who it was] said to me in the middle of a line, “ooooh, imma tell ms. burke! you actin like a girl!” and could not wait to return to the classroom to tell her that, indeed, “ashon was singing a girl song.” she looked at me with not a little bit of disdain but also a hint of pleasure, “what did i tell you about that? people are gonna think you’re gay.” and that was that. it was an odd moment where the performance of gender, sexuality and song came together for me, even in a derogatory way. i’d been called a “faggot” in church for singing soprano but those school scenes — with classmates and teacher — seemed different. of course, i still love, and sing, the song … whitney’s version of the song.

i found at singing some non-gospel song that the relationship between queerness and song that had been worrying me since puberty began was not relegated to the church … but that the performance of someone like whitney could also tattle on you. so a choice had to be made: continue to listen to her background ubiquity with pleasure, to sing anyway; or to stop, become quiet, and withdrawn. i chose the latter for a very long while because i could not untangle my sense of erotic, libidinal difference from such songs — sacred or secular. but in the background, in the underground, underneath, all this music still moved me. moves me still.

whitney was just always there, always in the background singing clearly, an underground soundtrack for how performance pronounced all kinds of things about you, libidinal excesses or something. and her voice was always celebrated: they named a school after her in east orange, she continued to go to church in newark, my high school prom date sang background for whitney all of the time. i share in all of these tangential connections to her work, to her voice. and i realized last night, as i was struck with the desire to cry, that whitney’s voice, her unabashed tone and clarity, her playfulness and depth of character created a performative space for me to be … whatever that being was and was becoming. like nina simone stated about the song “feelings” at the montreaux jazz festival, similarly, i am not mad at whitney making contemporary for me a “girl song” that i could sing … rather, i am mad at the conditions [all those institutional -isms] that produce the necessity and demand upon my science teacher to respond to my singing whitney — to singing a presumedly “girl song” in a decidedly “heterosexist land” — with such dismissal and chagrin.

because i realize: in me is every woman’s voice that has come before me, their life, their breath, their force, their vitality. the love of my mother and grandmothers is all in me. every woman is in every child ever born, a materiality of the refusal of alienation. black folks know something about an injunction of having to “follow the status of the mother” … but though the imposition was through a horrific condition, we celebrate the mother anyway. because it’s right. every woman. in all. each of us.

so i’m just sad. thank you, whitney, for your life.

West, Harris-Perry & the Disconnections in my mind

this is a collection of meandering thoughts regarding the newest aspects of the CW/MHP controversy … personal, political, mean-spirited. some of this was said in private emails, others on facebook. i’ve tried to collect it and give it some semblance of coherence but i don’t pretend to have achieved it. so yeah…just some thoughts…

last year when the CW truthdig article was first released and MHP responded in The Nation with an attack of the character of CW, saying he was self-aggrandizing and whatnot. his truthdig piece said nothing about her at all, so i wondered then, as now, what the necessity of attacking his character was all about. it made possible an a priori dismissal of his critique of BHO because he talked about his “personal” .. because he lamented not getting tickets to the inauguration, because he stumped but felt stumped after the fact of BHO’s election. personal ish is never pretty…it’s always complex. so i’m ok with that. so though i found MHP’s critique of CW’s personal — without engaging the overtly political — to be strange, and “mean,” i then, as now, i defended her right to say ish about him that could be construed as “mean” … what intrigued me was how folks said that “the personal is political” and that though her piece in The Nation might’ve been animated by her personal, that it did not make her critiques unwarranted.

i do not wince at the personal nature of the argumentation…i think it is rather refreshing for someone to show that they were “hurt” by someone else’s actions, words, thoughts. so like, a genealogy of he CW/MHP thingy would take us back to 2011 when the truthdig article with CW was published. and it was cool because it held on to the personal aspect of his hurt while, at no time i think, letting go of the larger claims about the state of poverty and BHO’s refusal to do anything about it. it was on some “he disrespects me both on a personal and political level…” as evinced by the refusal of tickets to the inauguration and whatnot … the cool thing about personal lament is that they do not lend themselves to facticity, they cannot be examined as true or false, one has to enact a different modality of analysis.

i honestly feel that MHP’s critique did not engage with CW’s words about BHO in the truthdig article; it was a personal send-up of why no one should even engage with his critique in the main: because he’s privileged, because he’s classist. but i don’t agree. i don’t agree that this is about his privilege in the academe or on television, for example. i don’t think dude has been trying to get his own television show and it’s rather speculative and specious to reduce this to jealousy. when folks argued “ivy league privilege” last year, dude went to union theological seminary, pay cut and all. so it doesn’t appear that he’s simply tryna maintain some privileged position in academe, particularly given the fact that Michelle Obama is an alum of princeton…can’t have dude badmouthing BHO from the place they celebrate so much. it is important that we keep very readily in front of us the fact that CW might be the most well-known black leftist that is attempting to have a loud and sustained critique of BHO’s education, economic and jobs policies. the bus tour was lampooned by people, though it raised all sorts of awareness and was very successful. 

so i wonder: why the personal is no longer political. why is it possible for MHP to be mean and for it to be championed but when he is mean [and yes, i do believe he was mean…i believe it was an attack to say she’s a “fraud” and “fake” and a “liar”], it is only sexism, it is chafing because he no longer sets “the black agenda” [as if he ever did, or ever claimed to do so]. it becomes this very weird sorta biologically determined understanding of feminism and sexism…that ones with bodies constructed in certain ways can only speak from the place of sexism and others with bodies constructed other ways are only speaking from necessary critique. it’s weird. and i just don’t agree. 

the queer of color critique would really problematize the ways in which biological determinism allows for certain politics to be animated by personal claims while other politics cannot. if the personal is political only has utility for cis-gendered straight women, then it becomes impossible for others to ever engage in critique that is necessary and yes, sometimes mean-spirited. [this is not, however, a defense of meanness … but a desire for its utility to be applied equally or to be taken off the table as a possible modality of critique].

and then there’s the very quiet and accepted ageism that’s also foundational to a bunch of claims about CW being irrelevant, which i just find hella off-putting. he’s old. he’s done this for a long time. like, i’m unwilling to dismiss Bill Cosby because of his age even though i RADICALLY am opposed to his ideas about poor [black] folks, pudding and naming conventions. but somehow, these things get reduced to old men’s jealousies of some new generation. and is just feels…odd.

[i’m cool on Boyce Watkins because, well, i don’t really get down with him for a bunch of reasons; and i think he posted portions of the article for personal publicity. which is whatever. i *do* think folks saying that he’s “non-tenured” as some sorta reason he should be dismissed is rather … weird and is grounded in some sorta desire to be validated by a university, tenure-track that often is hella problematic. but that’s neither here nor there.]

“aesthetics” and pentecostalism

Aesthetics is

a form of cognition, achieved through taste, touch, hearing, seeing, smell — the whole corporeal sensorium. The terminae of all of these — nose, eyes, ears, mouth, some of the most sensitive areas of skin — are located at the surface of the body, the mediating boundary between inner and outer. This physical-cognitive apparatus with its qualitatively autonomous, nonfungible sensors (the ears cannot smell, the mouth cannot see) is “out front” of the mind, encountering the world prelinguistically, hence prior not only to logic but to meaning as well. Of course all of the senses can be acculturated — that is the whole point of philosophical interest in “aesthetics” in the modern era. But however strictly the senses are trained (as moral sensibility, refinement of “taste,” sensitivity to cultural norms of beauty), all of this is a posteriori. The senses maintain an uncivilized and uncivilizable trace, a core of resistance to cultural domestication. This is because their immediate purpose is to serve instinctual needs — for warmth, nourishment, safety, sociability — in short, they remain a part of the biological apparatus, indispensable to the self-preservation of both the individual and the social group. 

(“Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered” by Susan Buck-Morrs, p.6)

so i try to write a lot about the aesthetics of pentecostalism and Buck-Morrs gives me a way to be more precise in what i am thinking about. i write about shouting [as movement], singing [as rehearsal and abeyance, particularly during testimony and tarry moments], whooping [breath control during preaching and praying] and speaking in tongues. speaking in tongues, of course, seems the most likely candidate for an analysis of the prelinguistic, previous-to-meaning-ness of pentecostalism, given the theological-philosophical claims pentecostals make about this particular practice. glossolalia is not sensical, it is not logical; the linguistic enunciations do not have objects to which they are attached. and like “aesthetics,” it can be a cultivated practice [though few might admit to such “logic”] … the fact remains that the theology of “initial evidence” [that speaking in tongues is the sonic-corporeal proof of spirit baptism [how cool … that something immaterial can immerse … for another day, i suppose]] lays bare the productive potential of the prelinguistic, pre-logical, pre-meaningful. that such practices can not only be observed but can be enjoyed, can give pleasure, can be transcendent. 

but what of the others — of dance, of rehearsal and repetition, of breath control — can these also tell us something about the open-ended nature of the “body?” Buck-Morrs states, regarding the body, “Not only is it open to the world through the sensory organs, but the nerve cells within the body form a network that is in itself discontinuous. They reach out toward other nerve cells at points called synapses, where electrical charges pass through the space between them” (13). that which we call “the body” [the thing that Judith Butler problematizes by considering the discursivity of “sex”; by illustrating how any “the body” is a rhetorical, linguistic, philosophical flourish and assumption; and that behaviors in some bodies dematerialize them, make them un-mattered…or something like that] is likewise given to radical critique on the grounds of the “natural,” or the “biological” or what some folks prefer to think “scientific.” even in that realm, those things called bodies are not closed off but radically open to experience. the nerves reach out, the skin is the in-between of the interior and external world. curious how the desire to be a subject, a thinker, a scholar in philosophy parallels the desire to be a body, an individual, a closed system in other discourses. and also, enthusiasm as a theological-philosophical concept is about non-mediated experience with a transcendant world … it serves an immediacy similar to what the senses within bodies do, makes us available, open. 

so the question isn’t are some bodies open and others closed. on biological-scientific grounds, everyone is. the question is: who desires to forestall this openness; and who is open to openness? theological and philosophical traditions have, it seems, attempted ways to shore up against this openness through concepts such as the human, the individual, the self, the subject. of course, these all fail at what they attempt. but then there are folks who are open to openness, who are celebrate such open-ended life. it’s sorta like the phrase i’d hear when we’d close thursday night service and Elder Williams would ask the spirit to “flow…from heart to heart and from breast to breast.” a theological-philosophical tradition that makes explicit the movement of and within openness as a way of life, as a mode of critique of self-possession, of the “I” in philosophy, of the self as a closed system. 

and Buck-Morrs untangling of aesthetics makes me consider howdance, rehearsal and repetition, and control of breath — with glossolalia — presence the immediacy of instinctual [“biological, natural”] need “for warmth, nourishment, safety, sociability” (6). these things are not aesthetic because they have been cultivated and refined [even when folks attempt to cultivate and refine them]. rather, they are aesthetic practices insofar as they make present the immediacy of openness as a way of life, form of celebration and epistemological project. 

or, on a different register:

listen to the woman at 0:11/0:26 when she exclaims “oh! … yeaaaaah! yeah!” it is that moment when it feels like something external to you is pulling something internal in you out. it’s the sonic corollary to quickening [where quickening is understood to be a bodily, corporeal reaction to the spirit’s stimulation; quickening taking a multiplicity of forms: a hunching of the shoulders, the rounding-out of the back, the closing of the eyes, the frowning of the face, the movement of the head down into the collar area, the jerking of the head left, the throwing of the left arm out to the right … and all this with rapid, intense velocity, with speed. quickening is almost imperceptible but it happens repetitiously [look at Vernon Oliver Price at 3:55 for an example]]. when the woman in the clip says “oh! … yeaaaaah! yeah!” we get the sound of such movement. and it sounds like it was pulled out of her from some elsewhere. she was both opened in order for that sound to come out and open to that openness. 

moth’s powder [02.25.10]

from: a
to: a
Thursday, February 25, 2010, 11:39 PM
subject: Re: mp 

moth’s powder,

it’s like this:

to carry a service. to be underneath, underground, underwater sounding out and through. Background and surplus. the gift. this is nothing. not the absence but the overwhelming presence of that something. it wanders and precedes and follows, presences and flows. it sets atmosphere and mood and agrees and dissents. descends and ascends. at the same time. the very same time. arpeggiated creativity and sustained discovery. S P A C I N G and T I M I N G. triggers the mind, reflection. recollective holy. it’s there, it’s here. how to put it together? this is that nothing.

what are you playing

they’d ask before we’d sing…before the service would begin.

oh…nothing

i’d say, a bit with a smile. knowing that i’d moved them with this putting together of something that is called nothing. i’d say it with joy. undulated joy. both erstwhile and post. with each enunciative declaration of nothing is its underside, its truth, its improvisational meaning. improvisational and provisional. somewhere between those two words, those two concepts is where that nothing is. nothing as fullness, as birth, as L I F E. more abundantlylylyly. this service, it’s acoustemology comes from nothing but to know this nothing, you must come from and eternally return to that there. 

hold the foot pedal sustained…

play with the chords on top. make them sound different. vibrate variously in bodies, through pews and carpeting and wooden floors. because of sustained bottom, playful top. dramatic changes from loud to soft, the interplay of dynamics, intensely. and all this before anyone gets on the mic and says praise the lord anticipatory.

funny. funny how anticipatory and participatory are harmonic, the former waits and desires the latter as some such fulfillment. all this because nothing was and is being played, figured out, invented. something full is being emptied in order to be refilled. the organ, the hammond, the b-3 breathes. it exhales and inhales. fill again.

but. also. laying pretty-beautifully apparent: nothing is not ever true, it is always the index of the lack of some propriety or given structure or epistemology or center. even while being rehearsed from within a normative claim or mood. 

or something. 

i’ve been writing nothing all this time. like the music. not a song. a series of sounds attempting a feeling, a mood through astonishment, tension and release. it’s about how chords are put together, what occurs between two to make folks gasp for breath, clap, nod their heads, quicken, throw up hands and say ooooh, jesus! it’s nothing. but so full. full of content. some call it chord progression but that’s the ruse, one immediately, enthusiastically realizes that digression is foundational to this form of nothing. that word, curious, indexes faith, sonic substance of things hoped for, immaterial acoustic evidence of things unseen. faith is forward, futureward but so often is talked about through some sorta observed empiricism. not faith in the least.

faith is the uncapturable, though in standard testimony and theological reflection, it is put forth as a happenstance past event, always working through a tense situation. 

it’s like when mother smith would say

and if he NEVER does anything else, he’s already done what he’s said he would do!

or deacon jones would say

i know God is real because he saved me!

or we’d sing the song

look what god has done / mastermind is he!

what often is glossed over is the past-tense of such reflection, hindsight reflections about a past; they are empiricist judgments, they tend towards the ago, the gone. faith, however, is the antithesis of such claims to knowledge and is not an empiricist possibility. the enslaved had faith in a freedom they had not tasted but knew was both available and possible, and not based upon a past deliverance but a futureward contemplation and injunction of justice as necessary. faith is the soon of heidegger, how he argued that time is nothing but a succession of nows, always being approached by the soon, always receding into the ago. heidegger, i’m sure, wasn’t talking about anything i’d play in church, he wasn’t thinking about the pentecostal nothing music that would animating pretty much everything that happens in a service. but he picked up something, some nothing that the musician was already engaging. the musician in search of the soon.

that’s the nothing, the counterclaim of predestination, the interest in building as we climb or play or listen. that nothing is faithful, full of conviction of the not-yet, the irreducible agnosticism or something. sorry. i diverged. what i mean is this: it’s sorta like when paul would say that it wasn’t as though he’d already attained something but that he would press anyway, that he would strive and lift and move and ascend or descend or something. he pushed things behind while reaching before. iiiiiiiii’ll press! [really, though, it’s one of my favorite things preachers say…lol.]

anyway. or it’s like bishop seymour and bishop mason itinerating all over the country, not even primarily to preach…but primarily to seek, to find that greater, more in-depth experience. speaking in tongues. they kept moving all over the country because they wanted experience meaningful. this? this is that nothing. that search. that movement. their walking and sitting on trains and talking and eating with others? that’s what it sounds like. 

maybe something. or nothing at all.
a.-

getting dirty and the production of beauty

this is amazing!

i especially love hearing her breathe as she works. i especially love how clapping hands creates beauty. the moment of her clapping hands with blue paint make me revisit the efficaciousness of clapping in other contexts. 

so much beauty created by being unafraid to get dirty, to use the body as an instrument. 

on the joy of blackness pentecostal

a few concerns. i’ve watched this clip maybe 30 or more times in the span of two hours. and danced. with them.

• i appreciate how the bass and snare drums drop off at 1:00 & 2:00 … accentuating the clapping hands now steadying the rhythm … accentuating the voices of the choir and the angular arhythmia of hollers and sceams …
• i appreciate the abandon of it all: normally thought “reckless” but here? not reckless…or, recklessness has found utility
• i appreciate everything that happens in the corner after 3:00: the erotics, the sweat, the sociality of bodies being together, enjoying, praising
• i appreciate how everyone starts shouting with a smile. then they get hella “ugly” as they get into it … how “ugliness,” how the visage indexes a general concern for praise; how the face becomes serious and concerned with transcendence … most importantly, together with others … it’s a Harriet Tubman understanding of freedom as not occurring unless others are there with you
• i appreciate: mostly how i think about all the sorta injunctions against sociality of noisiness from Edmund Burke’s critique of the “shouts of crowds” that “excite the mind” to folks like George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards being against “enthusiastic” displays of salvation … to folks like Kant making arguments that black african negroes are nothing other than stupid or whatever. to folks like Orlando Patterson, with the implied critique of slaves and their descendants that they are nothing other than socially dead, having no occasion for honor, having nothing but “natal alienation.” i mean, this is a display against all that. mostly…it’s a display of joy. a philosophy and theology, a performative sociality of joy. and i’m all for it. the rejection of “honor” and “alienation” … the movement underground and underwater, not to recover some faulty notion of subjectivity but to dwell therein, and have the spirit indwelling within
• i appreciate, finally,  how great it is that how humor and seriousness exist in the same spatiotemporal movements: the occasion of praise *is* the occasion to laugh, to smile, to gather together …