LUZ SP 2018 by Club d'Art

LUZ

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TAKING ACTION WITH DR. REAGAN ROMALI

Alex Kawano 13

MARCH FOR OUR LIVES George McCullough

PHOTO ESSAY: MARCH FOR OUR LIVES Jenny McCullough

A DIFFERENT VOICE Brian Alexander

THE IMPORTANCE OF CIVILITY TO UNITY George McCullough

CARNEY Y ARENA

IN CONVERSATION GERARDO MONTERRUBIO

Jason Farago, Ben Davis, and Nick Venden

PORTFOLIO - LBCC STUDENT ARTISTS

PHOTO ESSAY: UNCERTAIN Jhuztine Abustan

SPOTLIGHT: PO NWAR Jonah Coloma

EVERETT BABCOCK - LBCC ALUMNUS AT UCLA Alex Kawano

JOSE SIMINIG - CLUB D’ART SPRING 2018 SCHOLARSHIP RECIPIENT Jonah Coloma

LBCC’S FAMOUS FACULTY AND ALUMNI

Frank X. Gaspar Black Notebook, #5, Lisbon

Ed Moses In Memoriam

Visions of Waves: Undercurrents Opening Reception Adrian Barreras

Praxis and Pedagogy Fall 2018 Faculty Art Show Marvin Basham

JEFF EPLEY’S POETRY WORKSHOP/ INTERVIEW Nick Venden

POETRY

51 54

With Nick Venden

VISUAL & MEDIA ARTS EVENTS

HOW FAR?

Vanessa Beckrum CAN GOD MAKE SOMETHING GOOD OUT OF SOMETHING BAD? Terralee Pettinger

MACBETH IN THE MODERN WORLD Lila Orshefsky

NONBINARY COLLECTIVE/ZINE: ADDRESSING STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE VIA ART AND LIVED EXPERIENCE Jayvien McNeill, Danny Shultz, Vin Olefer, Michael Roberts, and Abel Avalos

NOT YOUR AVERAGE ART SHOW Rafael Lumang

KHMER CUISINE IN LONG BEACH Andria Antoniader

A TOY AIRPLANE THE LAST DAY OF SAIGON Brian Doan

L U Z M A G A Z I N E is a periodical publication made possible by Club d’Art of Long Beach City College (LBCC). LUZ Magazine exists as a unifying voice of inspiration for the greater LBCC community and beyond, with the hope of serving as a professional student resource as well as a community outreach tool. This particular deluxe edition was made in collaboration with all of the arts and humanities departments on campus. The goal of this issue was to engage in interdisciplinary dialogues that unify and heal, and to provide a place for students to express their opinions in a civil manner. The beautiful diversity of Long Beach’s community allows for polar opposites to coexist and thrive within the same shared realms. We hope that in these pages you will find the spirit of harmony and respect towards which every community, city, and nation ought to strive.

FOLLOW US! instagram.com/clubdar t facebook.com/lbccclubdar t For inquiries contact: info@clubdar t.org CLUB D’ART Long Beach City College Liberal Ar ts Campus 4901 E Carson Street Mailbox B6 Long Beach, CA 90808 www.clubdar t.org

E D I TO R-I N - C H I E F Alex Kawano A R T D I R E C TO R Jonah Coloma A S S O C I AT E E D I TO R S Nick Venden Lila Orshefsky

C O N T R I B U TO R S Jhuztine Abustan Brian Alexander Andria Antoniades Abel Avalos Everett Babcock Adrian Barreras Marvin Basham Vanessa Beckrum Adam Cardenas Jonah Coloma Ben Davis Brian Doan Jason Farago Saul Ruiz Hernandez Loren Ashley Lowrey Rafael Lumang George McCullough Jenny McCullough Jayvien McNeill Patricia Miramontes D. Hideo Moriyama Lily Nguyen Vin Olefer Lila Orshefsky Terralee Pettinger Kobe Price Michael Roberts Nicholas Roberts Danny Shultz Jose Siminig Nick Venden Ricardo Vidana Cassidy R. Whitsett Rose Yoon

A DV I S O R Brian Doan (front cover) Jose Siminig, Obstructed Shapes, 2016, steel, 96x59x32”. (inside cover) Everett Babcock, Meat, Cage, Man, Bird, 2015, Acrylic, graphite, conte, charcoal, collage, 48x36”. (back cover) Saul Ruiz Hernandez, Poetry, 2018, Lumen/cyanotype, 8x10”.

This special edition of LUZ Magazine was made possible by the Long Beach City College Associated Student Body’s Grant Program, and Long Beach City College Board of Governors and the Foundation 2018-2019 Grant.

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Dear Friends, “There can be no peace without understanding.” — Nuer proverb “Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t hard to do Nothing to kill or die for And no religion too Imagine all the people Living life in peace You may say I’m a dreamer But I’m not the only one I hope someday you’ll join us And the world will be as one” — John Lennon

Every passing year seems more emotional, more tumultuous, and more intense. In March 2018, inspired to take action by the tragic shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that killed 17 people, thousands marched in support of gun control. Every day there seems to be a new pertinent issue in our privileged country, the United States of America. Constant unrest and division amongst the people make one feel as if this is the worst it can get. Yet, looking at other nations around the world, there is still an active slave trade in Libya, an exodus of one million Rohingya in Myanmar, and consistent threats of World War III breaking out. Despite the problems around the world and the continued systemic problems here in America, I would still say that we are lucky to be here and have the chance to be part of such a diverse community as Long Beach City College and the City of Long Beach. The arts and humanities have a way of bringing to light things that have yet to be articulated in a comprehensible form. LUZ Magazine has been a unifying voice and a source of inspiration for all of us, and we hope to be part of the solution to the daunting issues which face our world. The spirit of love and unity through civic discourse is contagious, and we are hopeful that we can carry that spirit with this magazine. A special thankyou goes out to Professor Brian Doan, our caring and supportive Club d’Art and LUZ Magazine advisor. As an educator, Brian has always put the students first, and we are forever grateful. Like Brian, the faculty at LBCC provides the support needed to help students succeed both in and out of the classroom. We’d also like to thank all of the volunteers and contributors who have dedicated their time and efforts to putting this project together. It’s been a pleasure working with students and faculty from many different clubs and departments, a rare opportunity to bring together so many people at LBCC. This has been no easy task, but with the power of community and collaboration, we were able to produce a work that we can be proud of. When the status quo has been indignation and division followed by apathy, I hope that LUZ Magazine provides a reminder that embracing thy neighbor, listening, and sharing thoughts with civility is power in its highest form. Have a great summer, With love,

ALEX KAWANO Editor-in-Chief

TAKING ACTION WITH DR. REAGAN ROMALI AN INTERVIEW WITH LONG BEACH CITY COLLEGE’S DISTRICT SUPERINTENDENTPRESIDENT BY ALEX KAWANO We were lucky to sit down with Dr. Romali, as we felt it was essential that her students and our readers hear from our president. Dr. Romali has done a great job in her first year as president and we wanted to know about her experience here at LBCC, some of her goals, such as fully implementing the school’s success plan, and her thoughts on the current climate in the United States involving school safety.

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Illustration by Michael Ellsworth, Dr. Reagan Romali, 2018, graphite on paper.

“Don’t just talk about it on Facebook. Do something! ... If every single person does one thing and take one type of action, the world can change.The world gets changed if every single person does one thing and takes one type of action. The world can change.”

A L E X K A W A N O ( L U Z ): Why education? Was it a passion you realized early in life? How did you get to where you are today? D R . R E A G A N R O M A L I ( R O M A L I ): There’s something magical about using the talents we’re given and the learning we’ve acquired to help others achieve their goals. One of the things that I wanted to do with my life was to leave the world a better a place than I found it, and choosing a career path in education allowed me to come to work every single day and positively impact someone’s life. Even if I don’t know the student’s name, or they don’t know my name, I can help them along their path. I think that being a teacher is the noblest profession in the world. Whether we’re administrators or staff members, the president, or faculty members, we’re all teachers. To share knowledge that helps others expand their minds and see the world through different lenses is incredibly powerful. It changes the world, and we get an opportunity to change the world one student at a time. L U Z : You were born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, received your Bachelor’s degree at Rutgers University, your Master’s degree from the University of San Diego, and your Doctorate in Education from Walden University. You’ve had the chance to experience almost every region in this country. Do you have a favorite region? If so, why? R O M A L I : Honestly, it’s my goal to be a world citizen because that means understanding my own culture from the outside looking in, and self-examining who I am and where I can improve and expand myself. I’ve lived all over the world. But honestly, Long Beach City College in Southern California is my favorite place. There’s something about the diversity of California that speaks to me; there’s an inquisitiveness

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in Californians, a rebelliousness. Californians are the thoughtprovokers of the nation, open to new ideas, willing to try new things, and vibrantly creative. I’ve travelled all over the world and I had a great time, but I came back to raise my family. I love being here. I’m home. L U Z: Statistically, the city of Long Beach is the most diverse city– R O M A L I: –I love that I can come to one place and meet people from different world cultures, languages, religions, familial backgrounds, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Maybe because of that diversity and array of backgrounds, the students here have to overcome much more than I’ve had to overcome in my own life. I respect them so deeply. I had my share of adversity, even though I came from reasonably good circumstances. But that was nothing compared to the adversity that our students go through. They have resilience that inspires me to keep going. You’ll often find me gazing out my window watching them. I’m watching them with their backpacks, their yoga mats, their notebooks, and hope in their eyes. They’re not walking slowly, they’re walking with intent towards their classrooms, serious about their success, interested in learning, and excited about the future that LBCC is going to bring them. They know that LBCC is the best value in town. They know that employers recognize, value, and will pay for the LBCC degree that they’ve earned. I get to see that every day, and I feel like the luckiest person in the world. L U Z: The college has a new strategic plan to drive success rates up for students of color. Please tell us more about that and why it’s so important. R O M A L I : A b s o l u te l y. I n t h e “ H o u s e of R o m a l i ,” e ve r y b o d y

counts or nobody counts. Everybody has a seat at the table. To accomplish that, LBCC needs support systems in place which will bring students to a level playing field. One of the great equalizers is math, so we’ve put in place a Math Success Center that helps students pace themselves through difficult portions of the math courses. We’ve put in place specialized tutoring and accelerated math courses. The Math Department is also working on specialized math, meaning, if you’re a liberal arts major you can take different math courses than those required for an engineering major. That way math is customized towards your career path choices. That’s a great equalizer. We’re getting ready to open the Wellness Center component of our Health Center so students can get mental health counseling, tips on smoking cessation, HIV testing, and things of that nature. It will also offer help to those simply combatting the day-to-day struggles of being a student. We have a Veterans’ Center which serves our large student veteran population. We have the fantastic Umoja and Puente Clubs specifically designed to help certain ethnic groups. We have services specifically for our disabled student population. The problem begins with understanding who the population actually is. Fifty-nine percent of our students speak Spanish. We have large Cambodian and Arabic populations. Some students need signage and materials that are understandable to them when they come to us for an education, and staff members who can understand them. So we have a company that is going to do multilingual mapping online, so that students will have resources in their native tongue. You shouldn’t have to speak English to get educated in the United States of America. We’re a multicultural country, and it’s time for us to realize that. L U Z : Because the internet is accessible for everyone, a lot of other colleges are pushing towards online learning. Do you think that online learning is a good way to implement your plans? R O M A L I : Online learning certainly has its place in education. It can be excellent when delivered properly. It is great for a highly prepared student who doesn’t need a lot of on-ground support. However, there are students for whom on-ground classes might be better. LBCC already puts a lot of resources online: teaching videos, self-testing software, and software for deaf or blind people who can read or listen to information online. There are many heavily resourced online courses already in place. For students who are landlocked by the L.A. traffic or time-locked if they work certain hours, our online learning is great. For students who think that education

is not available to them, online courses reduce barriers. Reducing barriers increases equity, and the more people with equal access to education, the more level the playing field is. L U Z : There are certain things that would keep somebody from doing even online learning; we have a 10 percent homeless student population and 18 percent live in poverty. How exactly is this population a part of your plan? How do you plan to improve those numbers? R O M A L I : In a variety of ways. We work to get resources for homeless students through local agencies. There is a no-questionsasked food bank at our Student Health Center. We have computer labs with internet access and printers on campus so students can come here and take online courses. Being homeless should not prevent anyone from getting an education. There’s also a tremendous amount of financial aid available, offering money for living expenses, an apartment, or food. The financial aid system is how I got through college. It gives you a roof over your head, proper nutrition, and proper safety so that when you walk into a classroom you’re in the right frame of mind to learn. L U Z: I know that safety is one of your big concerns. There’s a lot going on in the country concerning school safety. I know that no individual can fix the entire problem, but what would be your opinion or plan of action to alleviate this current issue? ROMALI: I see things a bit differently than most people. I see a country blaming one man, our president, for the situation that exists in America right now. One man didn’t turn us into who we are, one man merely held up a mirror to who we are and the mirror is reflecting back to us our own bad behavior, bad habits, and bad thoughts. So I think what this man has done is given us an opportunity to examine who we are and make the changes that are clearly necessary in our society. Our job as educators is to teach about different cultures, religions, thought processes, and ways of seeing the world in order to understand other people. When you undertstand others, it’s impossible to hate them. There’s this preposterous dichotomy phenomenon in America right now which says, “If you don’t hate Donald Trump you’re wrong,” or, “If you don’t love Donald Trump you’re wrong.” Academia teaches you that there are many ways of looking at the world and none of them are necessarily wrong. It’s our job to educate and prepare mature, healthy, reasonable individuals to go out into society and exhibit strong civil behavior. So that’s our number-one goal.

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Our second job is security. Should an incident occur, are we prepared to handle it? I just got back from a tabletop exercise for what to do in emergencies. We have continual training for our employees so that should an incident occur, they know what to do. We have a team in place called a Behavioral Intervention Team who are brought in should warning signs be seen in a student, employee, or anyone else on campus. We partner with the Long Beach Police Department who are well-trained in how to respond to incidents. We’ve just recently put in safety features such as cameras outside and increased lighting. We’ve even put building numbers on the rooftops, so if a helicopter has to come in, they can navigate the campus easily. God forbid an incident were to occur, but we’re already trained and ready in how to respond. But our job wouldn’t end with resolving or preventing an incident; we have mental health professionals ready to help people. We’re interested in each person’s whole life and wellbeing, not just the time they are here on campus. LUZ: Club d’Art as a whole represents so many different parts of this country. There’s a Nuer proverb that we’re quoting in our magazine, “There can be no progress without understanding.” So,– ROMALI: –That’s it. That is the heart of it. LUZ: I now have a more personal question. We greatly respect you as a single mother and a great leader. What message do you have for us about reaching goals while balancing rigorous responsibilities? ROMALI: Action! Don’t just talk about what you’re going to do, don’t put it on Facebook, don’t think about it, or pray about it. You know, when I was in college, I worked a full-time job from 8:00 in the morning until 5:00 at night. I drove from my part-time job to school and I went to school from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. I did that Monday through Friday and then I worked all day on Saturday and Sunday. I could have, and did on some occasions, allow that to make excuses for me. “I’m tired. I’m hungry. I don’t have any money. I don’t have any money for books.” Don’t allow life to put excuses in your way. Life puts things in our way—a baby, hunger, no money—to test us, to see if we’re strong enough, gritty enough, and to see if we have it in us to think our way around it, or to ask for help with the way around it. That’s where LBCC comes in, we’re here to provide that help.

a scholarship for books. LBCC will help remove barriers. Life is going to test you, but don’t give up on it. Don’t allow anything to stand in your way. Always take action. What frustrates me about the United States today is there’s a lot of talking and no action. I packed my bags, flew halfway around the world to a country I’d never been to, picked up a child who was 13 years old, a complete stranger to me who didn’t speak my language, and I said, “I’m going to bring this little person home, feed them, and give them the last name of Romali.” Take action even if might turn out badly; even if it could be a mistake, try to change the world. Don’t just talk about it on Facebook. Do something! March with a sign, exercise your rights. If every single person does one thing and takes one type of action, the world can change. Every time I go to the grocery store I pick up one extra thing—maybe a can of beans, granola bars, mac ‘n’ cheese—and I bring it home. When I get a little bag filled, I send it over to the food bank. Imagine if 2,300 people spent one more dollar when they went to the grocery store; there would be $2,300 a week to feed our homeless student population. One dollar. One person taking a small action leads to big results. So you might say, “I don’t have the money to go to China to adopt a child in need.” Fine. Do you have one dollar? So I want to tell the students who are struggling that we stand with you. We are here because we love you and want you to be successful. We have the resources in place to help you. But ask! Don’t be afraid or ashamed to call and say, “I need help.” Don’t let anything stop you from getting your education because education solves the problems of inequality in this country. Education stops crime, it stops poverty, it stops homelessness, it stops broken families. Don’t let anything get in the way of your education.

You come to us and say, “I’ve got a kid. I don’t have money. I’m hungry.” Great. We’ve got some food over here in the food bank, we’ll hook you up with some child care services over here, we’ll hook you up with some financial aid, we’ll get you some tutoring over here, we’ll get you

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ROMALI 11

Nicholas Roberts, Watching, 2016, stone lithography, watercolor on paper, 10x14â&#x20AC;?.

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MARCH FOR OUR LIVES LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA PERSHING SQUARE TO CITY HALL SATURDAY, MARCH 24, 2018 George McCullough Photography: Jenny McCullough

This event started at Pershing Square at 9:00 a.m. At the park there were numerous vendors selling different kinds of paraphernalia, mostly pre-printed signs espousing gun control and iconic liberal wear like pussy hats and T-shirts espousing anything from socialism, Planned Parenthood, disparaging the NRA, the president, etc.… Walking to City Hall from there, we noticed a lot of families with small children already leaving the march.

A large group of gun control advocates gathered threateningly around them, and the police formed a picket line around them to keep them safe. As they were speaking about the 2nd Amendment, the larger crowd from the main event repeatedly shouted them down, not letting them speak. As the larger crowd grew angrier, the police shut the counter-protest down and escorted them to their respective cars and kept everyone away from them.

On our way to City Hall we interviewed several people. One man named Danny stated, “I’m here protesting the NRA.” I asked him what the NRA had to do with the march and he said, “The NRA lies to everyone, to its membership, and to the population as a whole. The NRA lied to Congress and got them to back down two years ago on stronger gun control laws because they have them in their pockets. It is the NRA’s fault that we have school shootings.”

In another situation, a preacher approached the main body of the crowd with a sign and a megaphone, espousing the benefits of embracing Christianity. As he spoke, several women who were passing out literature about the benefits of communism verbally attacked him and the police then had to form a line around him for protection. He was repeatedly shouted down by the crowd and eventually had to leave.

We interviewed another woman who was speaking to a group about the advantages of socialism and the evils of capitalism. I asked her to address the failures of socialism in the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, and other socialist regimes and she stated, “They simply did not go far enough, and we have the ability to get the job done right.”

It is hard to estimate the total head count for the march, but my guess is that there were at least 10,000 people at any given point in time and the total attendance may have been at least 20,000.

Once we arrived at City Hall, the rally was well underway. Mayor Eric Garcetti was speaking on the sound stage declaring that, “This is a historic day led by the future leaders of our country.” He also championed the fight California is bringing to President Trump with California’s ban on assault rifles, bump stocks, and waiting periods. He suggested that these policies be used as the model for federal legislation. The sound stage was elaborate, with colorful lights and speakers that filled the city streets with speech and music. Between speakers were musicians who played rock & roll and folk songs like the one Rita Ora performed, “For What It’s Worth,” a 1960s protest song that got a big round of applause from the activists. Comedian Amy Schumer, Senator Chuck Schumer’s cousin and a well-known actress, spoke about recent shootings, saying that we all have to stand together for these senselessly slain students, and the madness has to stop. Other speakers espoused gun control and gun confiscation, including a young lady who had been wounded in the recent Las Vegas shooting. The whole event was like a carnival. There were booths selling BBQ, ice cream, and drinks. There were people dancing to the music, and signs everywhere espousing everything from gun control to communism. There had to be at least 60 port-o-potties on site and booths espousing everything from the Communist Party, socialism, the Green Party, California separating from the United States, and a host of other liberal causes to pick from. This event cost a lot of money, and a lot of money was being raised by the vendors for a variety of different causes. The event was mostly peaceful, but there were a few exceptions. First, we noticed a small group of counter-protesters across the street from the main event, maybe 20 or so people supporting the 2nd Amendment.

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MARCH FOR OUR LIVES PHOTO ESSAY BY JENNY MCCULLOUGH

Photo: Jenny McCullough

“What struck me about the NRA members with bull horns—who needed to be safely cordoned off from the crowd— was the number of them who would not show their faces, but chose to wear red-white-&-blue masks like bandits, or worse, terrorists.”

A DIFFERENT VOICE BRIAN ALEXANDER Criminal Attorney and Public Defender

Some Club D’Art members were accompanied by retired criminal attorney Brian Alexander who served as a public defender in Los Angeles, Orange, and Tulare Counties court systems. In his work Attorney Alexander heard countless stories of gun-related crime, studied crime-scene and forensic photos of tragic incidents related to gun violence, yet he defended criminals because, “Everyone deserves defense, a humanizing voice in the courtroom.” Attorney Alexander has an altruism and generousity towards most things except mindless conservative thinking, the death penalty, and America’s nearly unregulated gun ownership policies purchased by the NRA. About his photo (opposite, above) Attorney Alexander said, “I wanted to capture the strength and resolve that a ‘Former NRA Trained Hunter and Member’ can show in support of gun control.” About his photo (opposite, below) he stated, “The smile on the face of the ‘Gun Owner for Gun Control’ reads as an expression of a personal epiphany or a display of simple sanity. The smile was an example of the joy and solidarity felt by nearly tens of thousands rallying Los Angelenos.”

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Photo: Brian Alexander

“At the rally in front of L.A. City Hall, Mayor Eric Garcetti led the crowd in a call-and-response chanting, ‘Whose streets?’ to which the crowd roared, ‘Our streets!’ ‘Whose lives?’ ‘Our lives!’ ‘Whose nation?’ ‘Our nation!’ “I saw the same fringe crazies at this rally I saw at the Women’s March a month earlier—the proselytizing religious zealots, the well-meaning socialists, the profiteering opportunists selling buttons and flags with slogans. What struck me about the NRA members with bullhorns—who needed to be safely cordoned off from the crowd—was the number of them who would not show their faces, but chose to wear red, white, and blue masks like bandits, or worse, terrorists.”

Photo: Brian Alexander

[see J. McCullough’s photo opposite page, top]

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THE IMPORTANCE OF CIVILITY TO UNITY George McCullough

Editor’s Note: In the interest of an open, civil dialogue, we offer Mr. McCullough’s article. He shows the rich diversity of American political voices. However, without citations, we can only offer this article as his political opinion. All too often in today’s political and social environment civility is sacrificed and instead polarization is the result. Our two great ideological tribes are in constant conflict. On the right, on-line dialogs go to mocking mainstream conservatives as not being willing to do what it takes to win. They mock those who will not engage in the same tactics as their left-wing brethren. It seems that many on the conservative side of the spectrum seem to lean towards “losing gracefully” instead of being seen as lacking in manners. The right has their talk radio and Fox News. These outlets spew their own narratives, often at the expense of the truth, turning news into a dialog of self-righteous narrative eschewing any counter-narratives on the left. This further deepens polarization and is counter-productive to engaging those with other ideas, further pushing the two ideological tribes apart. The leftist “social justice” activists scorn engagement and civil dialog as respectability politics. They instead favor shout downs, boycotts, on-line shaming and other unproductive methods to eliminate nonconforming dialogs. The left has virtually all main stream media to support and to enhance their ideals.1 ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, NEW YORK TIMES, LOS ANGELES TIMES, NEW REPUBLIC, and a host of other stations, magazines and newspapers are constantly defining leftist narratives and publishing their vitriol daily. Truth is a secondary concern; the primary goal is to publish their propaganda to promote their agenda of crushing the right. In short, the media is not civil, and does not promote unity. In fact, it promotes divisiveness regardless of which side of issues one is on. This is counter-productive to the goal of unifying society, and that seems to be the goal on both sides of the political spectrum. This type of “news” is a major factor in our polarization. A case can be made that we no longer have news, but just running commentaries on political agendas, which makes it very hard for the average person to identify truth from conjecture. Defending principles with honest dialog appears to be a lost art when it comes to the media we rely upon. There are important issues that need to be addressed. DACA for one is something that most American citizens agree on. We want this injustice righted. These people had no choice but to follow with their parents when they decided to cross the border, and they should not be held responsible for the actions of others. Even this issue is paralyzed 1.

Editor’s Note: As of this writing, there is merger pending which will give conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group access and control of news broadcasts into 72 per cent of American hourseholds. Reuters Apr 12, 2018: Twelve U.S. senators on Thursday asked the Federal Communications Commission to investigate Sinclair Broadcasting Group (SBGI.O) for “deliberately distorting news” and asked the commission to pause its ongoing review of the company’s proposed $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune Media Co (TRCO). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tribunemedia-m-a-sinclair-ma/twelve-senators-seek-fcc-probe-of-sinclair-newsscripts-pause-in-tribune-review-idUSKBN1HJ2VC

in the depths of the politics of polarization. The Democrat party wants to hold onto this issue as a wedge narrative for the mid-term elections. The Republican Party wants to eliminate the issue altogether by offering amnesty covering three times the number covered by Obama’s executive order, but the Democrats in congress will not vote for the solution, not a single one of them. The truth is that neither of these ideological tribes has the true answer to our issues. They both spin their arguments largely for selfaggrandizement and acquisition of power. There is no altruism in their hearts. The polarization has caused them to grow further apart, and we are in the middle, being fed their alternative realities and becoming more polarized and angry ourselves. Nothing in this mix promotes unity, and it is definitely not civil discourse. Is civility a virtue? Not always. There are times when one needs to stick to their principles. There is a time to be nice, and at times one needs to fight for what they believe to be right. Civil discourse is not giving up one’s principles, not giving up one’s moral center, and definitely not bowing to the opposition just to be nice. Jesus, someone that most think was the nicest person on earth, cleansed the temple of Pharisees and money lenders with his whip. Even God has his limits. There are cynical calls for civility all the time. Even though both sides of the coin seem to be tolerant of their most radical oppressors, they are completely repulsed by similar actions on the other side. It is a very cynical double standard. Those that criticize Michael Moore’s latest “documentary” are absolutely engaged in conservative radio and Fox News. Conversely, on the opposing side, love Michael Moore, the mainstream media, and cannot even consider making a case that Louis Farrakhan is worth condemning. Civility calls are often very cynical. Every time there is a shooting, the left blames the result on conservatives, and calls for them to find civility and agree with them that the reason for the shooting was conservative politics. In fact, few if any of these shootings are the results of political ideology. On the other side of the coin, conservatives make a call for civility when the left aggressively goes after a social justice issue, saying that the behavior is untenable. This type of call for civility is exploitation rather than true lamentation. Civility is not surrender. You do not have to surrender your values. Our moral obligations are both dependent on and independent from the listener’s response. Truth is the obligation of all of us in our discourse, even if it will make someone feel bad. No one should want to harm the other, that is not the goal. One has to realize that the act of persuasion may enrage an opponent.

THERE ARE THREE KEY ELEMENTS TO CIVIL DISCOURSE: Humility – Even though you believe you know the truth, you may not have the skill to communicate it succinctly. Don’t be self-righteous, it doesn’t work and will turn off your opponent. Express your ideas with conviction. Understand that your opponent may be brilliant and at the same time wrong and stand up for what you believe. Do so in a respectful manner that is not meant to hurt or enrage, even though that may be the end result. Do not under any circumstance make up evidence to support your position. Honesty is not only the best policy, it is imperative in civil discourse. Lack of honesty in effect will kill the conversation and promote division rather than civility.

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A person of conviction is relentless in expressing their ideals. They are also flexible, and undeterred by threats and verbal abuse should listen to the opposing side and analyze their line of logic. Understand that facts trump emotion and be prepared for those that would accuse you of lying or hurting feelings. That is just not an intellectually honest argument that would be put forth. Understand that everything is not a “national emergency” and should not be infuriating. Thoughtful concern is something that can win arguments, or at least tone down the opposing emotions. Remember, the goal is civility. If we treat each other respectfully, engage to listen more than to talk, and weigh each argument for what it is worth, we will be on our way to having a more civil discourse in our society. In fact, we can learn from each other and endeavor to find that vast grey area of civil compromise between our ideologies. When we get there, we can come together and move our society on to greater heights. If not, we do nothing but become more divided. If we are to work towards making our nation a better place for all to live, we need to work hard to get along respectfully. Unity is a virtue that we all must ascribe to. Without civility, we cannot have unity. Without unity, we cannot long have a country. “I now make it my earnest prayer, that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection, that he would incline the hear ts of the C i t i ze n s to c u l t i va t e a s p i r i t o f s u b o rd i n a t i o n a n d o be d ie n c e to G over n m en t, to en te r tain a b rothe r ly affection and love for one another, for their fellow Citizens of the United States at large, and particularly for their brethren who have served in the Field, and finally, that he would most graciously be pleased to dispose us all, to do Justice, to love mercy, and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion, and without an humble imitation of whose example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy Nation.” –George Washington, circular letter of farewell to the Army, June 8, 1783 “Civility costs nothing and buys everything.” –Mary Wortley Montagu “Civility means a great deal more than just being nice to one another. It is complex and encompasses learning how to connect successfully and live well with others, developing thoughtfulness, and fostering effective self-expression and communication. Civility includes cour tesy, politeness, mutual respect, fairness, good manners, as well as a matter of good health.” –Pier Massimo Forni

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Alejandro G. Iñárritu, right, directing the virtual-reality project “Carne y Arena.” Photo: Chachi Ramirez

CARNE Y ARENA ALEJANDRO G. IÑÁRRITU’S VR + ART INSTALLATION + RE-ENACTMENT Jason Farago, Ben Davis, and Nick Venden

LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART — After weeks in the desert, dehydrated and afraid, refugees and migrants who are apprehended crossing the United States-Mexico border are regularly locked in what are called las hieleras (the freezers). They are meant to be short-term holding cells — they have no beds — but they also exact a kind of extra-judicial punishment. As revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request in 2015, migrants are trapped there for nearly two days on average. Children are separated from their families; detainees are deprived of food. Sometimes their skin turns blue. The cold of las hieleras is the first thing I feel in Carne y Arena (Flesh and Sand), a groundbreaking hybrid of art exhibition, virtual reality (VR) simulation and historical re-enactment by Mexican film director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. I enter a cold-storage chamber, spare but for a few industrial benches, and am instructed to remove my shoes and socks. Dusty slippers and sneakers recovered from the border zone litter the floor. I wait in the cold. Then barefoot, I exit the cold room and enter a larger, darkened one, its floor covered with sand. Attendants equip me with an Oculus Rift VR headset, headphones, and a backpack holding a computer. The darkness gives way, and I find myself on the border and in danger.

In the darkness I make out an old woman who has broken her ankle, moaning in Spanish for help; a people-smuggler, or coyote, complains in English that they’re slowing down. I’m able to walk through the sand to get close to them, since my headset is equipped with a motion detector. But soon a helicopter appears overhead, its spotlight bearing down on me, and wind from its blade is in my face. Border agents with guns and dogs order me in two languages to put my hands up. With a rifle in my face, I instinctively throw my hands in the air. Politically urgent and technically accomplished, Carne y Arena is the first virtual reality installation to screen in the official selection of the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. It opened at LACMA and the Museo de Sitio Tlatelolco in Mexico City last summer. It opened March 30 in Washington D.C. courtesy of the Emerson Collective, a social justice organization. It is being offered as a transformational intervention in the political debate. Fans of Iñárritu’s achievement are daring President Trump to experience it—the implication being that the man who started his campaign by calling Mexican migrants rapists might be convinced through the magic of tech-induced empathy, to rethink his entire worldview. Respectfully, I think this is probably not in the cards.1 1

Ben Davis, ArtNetNews, March 30, 2018.

The 14 performers are the actual migrants themselves. So that you can perceive them from every angle, they performed on a sensor-equipped soundstage and have been rendered digitally in three dimensions. Carne y Arena composites their stories into a brief seven minute VR narrative fiction. Photos: Alfonso Cuaron, stills from production video documentation.

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narratives, the creators must keep in mind that the person inside the headset will ask, “Who am I?” It isn’t scene building, but world building—a world minus you, the viewer. One reason the experience of migration and helplessness feels so potent in Carne y Arena is because you experience it alone. Oscar-winning cinamatographer Emmanuael Lubezki and Mr. Iñárritu’s Birdman was filmed like a 118-minute, unedited stream-ofconsciousness, perhaps the closest thing in cinema to a VR experience. However, Birdman was still composed and controlled by framing images; in VR you are the framing device. Consequently, in Carne y Arena you are morally implicated by where you choose to stand.

YOU ARE MORALLY IMPLICATED

Inarritu wove this woman’s story, of breaking an ankle during her border crossing, into his Carne y Arena VR experience. Here she is volumetrically scanned to create her digital double which is then used as the target for elaborate motion capture. Inarritu has forbidden images from inside the VR headset to be published; we only have production and rehearsal stills.

The D.C. opening date faced off with the opening of Ready Player One which presents VR entertainment as escape from an intolerable real world. However, Carne y Arena is not a film, and certainly not an escape from reality. Although Mr. Iñárritu’s VR project has a political resolve similar his California-Mexico Babel it succeeds by acknowledging that virtual reality is a wholly different medium.

In Iñárritu’s 360 degree immersion the helicopter landing is deafening and terrifying. The ground vibrates. The border patrol agents point guns and yell, “Get down!” It’s noisy and chaotic as cops pull migrants out of hiding, wrestle them to the ground, and drag them away. You can simply walk over and join the armed border guards, backlit in the headlight of the Immigration & Customs Enforcent (ICE) vehicles, but I was compelled to hang back and kneel down with the migrants. Just as the border guards were screaming at the migrants (and me) to kneel in the sand, I felt a gun go off and looked instinctively at a little girl in the group. Then the light took on an eerie quality and smeared across my vision. The officers vanished, and a strange dream sequence began:

YOU ARE THE DIRECTOR, CINEMATOGRAPHER, AND LEAD ACTOR Anyone attempting to create 360 degree immersive VR must accept different theoretical and narrative challenges. Editing, essentially, is gone. Framing is gone too. Characters must be positioned in three dimensions, not just two. The medium is almost a hybrid of a video game and live theater, and to excel, the creators have to choreograph narratives in 3D space rather than in 2D frames. They must also calculate for a constantly shifting point of view. When you wear a VR headset, you become the lead actor, but you’re also, in a way, director of photography, and the camera operator as well. When writing VR

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Photo: Alfonso Cuaron, stills from production video documentation.

ESSENTIAL TERMINOLOGY OF NEW MEDIA The coyote is sitting on a truck, reading a book of poetry; the woman with the broken ankle is humming a lullaby at a long table that has materialized in the desert. When you move to the table, its wooden surface star ts to deform. A cavity appears, containing a capsizing boat — an evocation of another refugee crisis. This mournful reverie serves to humanize people we still think of mostly as ‘the others.’ 2

With this one single edit, Iñárritu accomplished two things: he damped down the rhetoric and kept me from ‘re-coding’ what was becoming intolerably real; he short-circuited my desire to disengage, to shut down my heart.

RE-CODING YOUR BRAIN There have been human test subjects who couldn’t remember if the immersive VR experiences they had were virtual or real. It’s believed that the brain ‘re-codes’ and installs immersive VR experiences in the same part of the brain that hold memories of real experiences. If this is true, potential for abuse is enormous. As resolution of hardware displays increases, realistic photogrammetry replaces traditional 3D modelling, fully dimensional ambisonic audio becomes the norm, and haptic devices allow us to touch and feel, we can expect to be transported, psychically transfigured, and perhaps even damaged by VR. I’ve been a Unity 3D and Oculus VR developer since late 2012, and Mr. Iñárritu has created the first experience which profoundly moved me. I was on my knees in tears as the guards approached through the glaring headlights of the truck waiting to haul me away to las hieleras. Carne y Arena is not striving to be, or fit into, a genre; it is striving to contain and communicate the fabric of human experience itself— perhaps even supersede it.

GROUNDBREAKING TECHNOLOGY “I did not know technically how to solve this,” Iñárritu said. “The amount of data and rendering is huge. They had to develop new Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) computer systems that would allow this.” “As filmmakers, none of the grammar tools apply. A film is about frames, the length of a take, the juxtaposition of edited images. With cinema, that little hole you see through, I give you 20% as director and you figure out the other 80%. That’s the dialectic. With Carne Y Arena I give you 360 degrees,” he said. “In this way, ironically, you have the control. I give you the way, with light and sound and all, but you act unilaterally. It reveals who you are.”3

Jason Farago, New York Times, May 17, 2017.

“Why Alejandro González Iñárritu is the Director Who Finally Got VR Right — Cannes 2017,” Indie Wire. May 20, 2017.

AUGMENTED REALITY (AR) is an overlay onto your normal vision. The most sophisticated AR glasses, Microsoft HoloLens, have built-in cameras which scan your environment to create a 3D model of whatever you’re looking at. The program can then use this 3D model in real time to accurately position virtual object, calculate effects, etc. through a process called SLAM (see below).

DATA GLASSES - simple see-through glasses which can, for example, show incoming phone numbers sent from your mobile phone and other useful information sent from a body pack computer. MIXED REALITY (MR) - Light-field glasses and Magic Leap are two manufacturers’ names for variations of the basic technology. Several systems have sub-millimeter accuracy so the positions of virtual objects and hand-held props coincide precisely. PHOTOGRAMMETRY - A camera-based process which builds 3D objects and their surface textures from hundreds of individual photos. These 3D objects can be ported into VR, AR, and other immersive technologies. Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) is the computational process of constructing or updating a map of an unknown environment while simultaneously keeping track of an agent’s location within it. Depth-scanning cameras must be built into AR glasses to accomplish this. PERSISTENT CLOUD (or AR Cloud) - Unlike SLAM, which must scan and construct a digital model of the environment each time you enter a new space with your AR glasses, the Persistent Cloud can hold a previously scanned model that can be downloaded or streamed to your AR mobile computer and used immediately in AR/MR. There are several advantages to this: multiple users (players) can access an identical model simultaneously and share the same virtual world; the model’s geometry is more accurate (GPS is only accurate down to seven meters while the AR Cloud can anchor virtual objects with centimeter accuracy. Why build a real-time, 3D map of the world that machines can understand? These virtual models accessed through the AR Cloud will comprise “the single most important software infrastructure in computing, far more valuable than Facebook’s social graph or Google’s PageRank index”.1 WARNING: The Persistent Cloud will soon be the software infrastructure onto which art and new media entertainment are built.

Edward Miller, “Building the ‘AR-Cloud’: Part One” Medium Online Journal, Dec 18, 2017.

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Illustration by Michael Ellsworth, Gerardo Monterrubio, 2018, graphite on paper.

IN CONVERSATION

GERARDO MONTERRUBIO WITH NICK VENDEN

N I C K V E N D E N (L U Z ): Let’s begin with the exciting artist residency program you’ve initiated here at LBCC. Your studio seems to be more than just a classroom. It’s highly energized because of the presence of a working professional artist, Meghan Smythe. For instance, beginning students witness Meghan hand-building large classical Greek style sculptures, a male nude in one case. What are your ambitions for this residency program in the future? G E R A R D O M O N T E R R U B I O ( G M ) : Having professional artists work among students is something I always wanted to implement in this studio. The students learn invaluable lessons by witnessing devoted and talented ar tists gradually create work. I would like to keep the residency program as part of this learning environment. As I tell my students, I want them to think of this not as a classroom, but to think of this as an art studio, a place for unlimited creative possibilities, a laboratory of art– L U Z : –an atelier, a workshop– G M : –full of creative individuals of all skill levels. And I want the students to see the extensive techniques these ar tists use with clay, beyond the traditional and functional. Not to copy them, but be to be inspired by them. Inspiration can have profound transformative effects, and those effects are ver y hard to capture in data. The long-lasting impact of inspiration is hard to capture in grades or assignments. L U Z : One gentleman you’ve invited is a performance ar tist w h o a l s o w o r k s w i t h c e ra m i c m a t e r i a l s . E x c i t i n g . G M : I do have a performance artist coming, Armando Cortes, but there are also two painters, Tam Van Tran and Narsiso Martinez, who have no idea how to work with clay, but they’re going to come and use their creative talents to make amazing work anyway. Not only that, we’re having an exhibition this summer at The Long Beach Art Exchange with works by these artists. LBCC students are not only learning the basic techniques of how to

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work with clay, they’re witnessing an artist create a body of work, deal with the material in many different ways, transport these very delicate structures into a kiln, package them, and display them. One of the artists already hired one of my students as her assistant. The idea of this program is to create bridges between students and professional artists from different practices in the creative economy. So it’s more about building relationships, strengthening the community, and in the end, making a reputation for this institution. Reputation is important for any art institution. There is no reason why a community college can’t have an artist residency program just like a university or a private art school. Even here at LBCC our students should have the same access to professionals in their field as students at any university or private school. This year I’ve invited ten very different artists to LBCC, and I’m hoping to find the funding to bring artists here next year and the following year as well. If it were up to me, this residency program would become something permanent, because I see it as an equity issue. L U Z : An equity issue? G M : Yes, an equity issue. Our students deserve to be exposed to and learn from the best in the field, from performance artists working with clay, to sculptors, to commercial ar tists. Our students need access to all that their field has to offer and to witness the work of talented professionals who are, in some cases, only a few educational steps ahead of them. I see the classroom as representing only the beginning of what students can learn. When I was an undergrad at Cal State Long Beach, I witnessed what being an artist was like by being around successful artists with diverse practices from all parts of the world. I witnessed the creation of incredible works of ar t. As students in a BFA

Meghan Smythe, artist in residence, at LBCC’s ceramics studio.

program, we also par ticipated in educational travel to China, Korea, South America, and Europe—the Venice Biennale was an incredible transformative experience. Bringing a group of professional artists to work among the students can have significant influence and impact on their careers as artists. Gerardo Monterrubio has invited ten artists to work in residence in the LBCC Ceramics Department: 1. Meghan Smythe - currently working 2. Joakim Ojanen 3. Tam Van Tran (painter) 4. Narsiso Martinez (painter) 5. Ben Jackel 6. Samuel Jernigan 7. Armando Cortes (performance) 8. Anna Juarez 9. Alexander Anderson 10. Julia Haft-Candell __________

L U Z : In the Design District last fall you presented Towards la Zona Pellucida, large, shouldered forms which act as vehicles for text and drawing. Their surfaces have enormous complexity and tension. As I walked around them, I read them as one might read narratives in a graphic novel. There seemed to be intentional conflict—a dialectic

Gerardo Monterrubio, De Mala Muerte, 2015, ceramic, underglaze pencil on porcelain, 17x21x13”.

between my expectation of ceramic objects and these objects which appeared to be “authored” rather than “fabricated.” Correct? G M : Yes. As opposed to drawings on two-dimensional surfaces, three-dimensional surfaces incite the viewer to walk around the form to try to make sense of the suggestive narrative. Although in most cases, each image can hold its own, the juxtaposition of various scenes insinuates a continuous narrative, similar to that of a graphic novel. However, the narratives are often intentionally unclear and rather suggestive; they flow in and out of clarity leaving room for interpretation, imagination, and speculation. L U Z: Tell us more about that approach. G M: By taking this approach, the work invites the viewer to spend time, to ponder, and to speculate. There are signifiers in the work, including titles, which are key to the meanings behind the imagery. On closer inspection, other images gradually appear, adding to the experience. I love the sense of wonder that archeological objects bring. My work gives homage to that engagement. L U Z: What was your starting point? G M : The starting point for Towards la Zona Pellucida was a move away from a previous body of work in which the imagery had a direct relationship to the form. By making these torso-like structures which reference the ceramic vessel, I created blank spaces on which the imagery had no commitment to the form, giving me the freedom to invent and compose as I went along. L U Z : What about this notion of “authorship” vs. “fabrication?” G M : I often imagine an author’s creative process as they write

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“I like to think that my pieces do take on a personality, a life of their own. I never repeat pieces that I make ... It would be like writing the same story again and again.”

Gerardo Monterrubio, Work in progress, n.d., porcelain.

fiction. I see my process in a similar light. Sometimes I have the whole story in my mind—in my case, a set of images. On other occasions I have an unclear idea in mind that needs to be worked out through the creative process. L U Z: Did you have any intent to make social or political commentary? G M: I don’t want my works to be didactic. I don’t have an agenda. The only commitment I have is to the creative process with the goal of making good art. LUZ: There were some aspects of your art that were boldly sexualized. Did you get any pushback from anyone, like the gallerist? GM: No. If I did, I wouldn’t have worked with them. LUZ: Oh, okay. GM: I only work with people who accept what I do. __________ LUZ: Tell us about your life-sized white porcelain Madonna. Does it link to a personal religious impulse? Does it link to your family? GM: The piece was inspired directly from a sculpture I saw on top of a gravestone in Ireland. I was mesmerized by its form and its partial decay. I took several photographs of it knowing I wanted to incorporate it into a body of work somehow. When I finished working on a vessel, Puño de Tierra—which references my grandmother’s passing and her rituals and beliefs about death and the afterlife—I thought about the Madonna I saw in Ireland. This piece is the beginning of my next body of work. I am planning to create a set of deities that will explore different beliefs systems.

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L U Z : Is it done “straight?” Is there any kind of interpretation of a classical Madonna?   G M : It’s straight from those models. L U Z : So there’s no critique of Latin Catholicism? G M : Not necessarily Latin, but with the deities series, I’m exploring belief systems that are the products of the vast human imagination; I’m interested in exploring how the human imagination has attempted to make sense of the unknown in an effort to explain reality and to rationalize and regulate behavior—an attempt to create something grandiose beyond our simple mortal existence…and that is art. L U Z : So there’s no cynicism, irony, or satire . . . yet? Your motivation was strictly from your encounter with that tomb? G M : Yes, for that one piece, that was the initial spark. Now I’m doing some pieces based on the Peruvian Moche Civilization. I might do something with other deities but the content will come later. So I couldn’t tell you now if there’s any cynicism or not. The way that I’m approaching this body of work is the way that I approach a blank piece where the texture of the piece instigates or invites a response. So my response through the dieties is just my curiosity and fascination with what human imagination has created around existential ideas. L U Z : And what they might mean as a group? G M : They’ll clearly take on different meanings when they’re assembled in a group.

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(left) Miguel Barcelo and Josef Nadj, Paso Doble, installation and performance. (below) Gerardo Monterrubio, Juquila, 2009, underglaze pencil on porcelain, 16x14x8”. (opposite) Gerardo Monterrubio, Puño de Tierra, 2016, underglaze pencil on porcelain, 25x17x17”.

__________ L U Z : You’re also interested in the potential of clay as a base element for performance. You spoke about Paso Doble by Miquel Barceló and Josef Nadj 1 in which the artists use clay as archetypal materials for live sculpting. There is also Heather Cassils’ stunning Becoming an Image, in which Cassils, a transgender body builder, pummels several tons of fresh clay in slowly flashing strobe light while nude. Is this in your future? G M : [laughter] No, no. Barceló and Nadj’s Paso Doble is just something that I admire. I’m always looking for things that feed my creativity and keep me alive as an artist. __________ L U Z : In a way, this brings us to the work that brought you to attention here in Los Angeles: the project about your grandparents. Tell us about that. G M : Well, I think I’ve been making work that references people like my grandparents for a long time. One of the fir st piec es that I did w as Juquila , a vessel in the for m of a cactus with an image of my grandparents and our yearly pilgrimage to a rural town in Oaxaca. Now that I think about i t , i t w a s a b o u t t h e i r d evo t i o n to re l i g i o n a n d i d e a s o f t h e afterlife in their belief system. And so with Juquila, it was not necessarily exploring just their belief system, but the 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhUWkEqYPt0

traditions and the values I learned from those experiences of religious pilgrimage as a child. My grandparents show up in a lot of my pieces because they were a par t of my most v i v i d f o r m a t i v e m o m e n t s . W h e n yo u ’ re a k i d , yo u l e a r n a l l kinds of ideas and beliefs. A lot of my work borrows from my childhood, the source of imagination. I think the later piece that you might be talking about is a reference to the passing of my grandmother. And that piece is the one that I think sparked the next body of work because

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o n i t s s u r f a c e I p a i n t e d a n i m a g e o f t h e p ro c e s s i o n to m y grandmother ’s burial among other images related to ideas about death, including one of a Mimbres bowl, which had a hole in its center. L U Z : Mimbres? G M : Mimbres pottery directly references ideas of the afterlife. It’s thought that Mimbres bowls were placed on the heads or faces of the deceased. A hole is pierced through these bowls so that the soul of the dead could move up into the heavens. It’s believed that the bowl was a dome that represents the heavens. With these bowls I’m also exploring the belief systems that we have about the afterlife, about the meaning and value of life. __________

LUZ: Although you’ve been educated at UCLA and have taught extensively at CSULB, do you still identify strongly with your Mexican roots? GM : Yes and no. I feel I belong everywhere I am and everywhere I go. LUZ: Does that give you your voice? GM: I cannot get away from identity, especially in a country such as the U.S., with a history of racial division from its inception, where the color of your skin affects the way that you exist in society. Racial identity is always going to be a part of who I am; and a part of who I am is always going to influence the art that I make. Right? I’ve lived in L.A. for 28 years, so the art that I make reflects that. My art would be very different if I’d grown up in, say, Tennessee as a member of the white community there.

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L U Z: Here are some questions about process which may relate to your work. There are art school clichés such as “Form is inherent to the materials” (Charles Eames), or in film editing, “The rhythm of the film is inherent to the raw video clips themselves” (Walter Murch). However, a more useful doctrine might be, “The vital principle of organic development—or development of ceramic form in your case—derives from immaterial spirit.” This sounds very Latin American and mystical. Out of that Mexican mystical heritage, do you attribute conscious life to inanimate objects or to natural phenomenon? To put it simply, do your pieces ever take on a special life or a spirit of their own? G M: [laughter] L U Z: You laugh? G M : Okay, well, yeah, I like to think that my pieces do take on a personality, a life of their own. I never repeat pieces that I make. I could never repeat some of my favorite pieces. I just can’t. It would be like writing the same story again and again. But about Mexican mysticism, I try to see beyond that to find more universal, ancient expressions of the human imagination, not specifically Mexican– L U Z: –or Magical Realist as in literature. It’s something more vast– G M : –well, Magical Realism has had a profound influence on the content of my work. It has a lot. L U Z: Carlos Fuentes and– GM: –Gabriel García Márquez, the way his writing takes you to distant worlds that intrigue the imagination. The writings of Octavio Paz, El Laberinto de La Soledad is one of my favorites. . . what I try to find in my work is something deeply embedded in the human psyche—the need to

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invent or the need to compose. The work is just basically a product of human imagination. There’s mysticism in that alone. It doesn’t need to be defined by a genre or historical period.

why I told you all I could about my Deities body of work, because in the process I’m going to discover what the deities mean. That’s the exciting part about it. Deities are such a rich source–

L U Z : Is that your curse? That you’re driven to compose, invent, author? G M: [laughs] I don’t know if it’s a curse. It’s definitely magical, but it’s not always pleasant. Because once you have an idea, that idea might be really, really fresh, exciting, and new. And then you hit the studio, and you think you’re on a cloud. Then the next day, it’s silly, not even relevant, or it’s just the worst idea that’s ever happened.

LUZ: –the cult of the Madonna, for instance, is vast and complex. GM: Plus, it’s frustrating physical labor.

L U Z : That’s probably true in every discipline, certainly music composition. G M : And that’s what I mean by it’s not the most pleasant or the most– L U Z: –but nonetheless, you find a way to enjoy the process. G M: It’s enjoyable to kind of dig yourself into a hole that you then have to dig yourself out of, or to find solutions to problems that didn’t even exist before you put them there. And so it’s always this beautiful fight– L U Z: –and an opportunity to solve some technical issue. G M: But the technical issue is finding a solution to a narrative that you don’t even have control over at that moment. You just have to trust this creative flow, for lack of a better word, or energy, trusting that at the end of this creation it will make sense. Does that make sense?

LUZ: What’s coming up for you in the future? G M: Ok, this summer my work is in a group show at the Riverside Museum; in August my work will be in an exhibition with the Arts Council for Long Beach; in September at Peter’s Valley, New Jersey, in a group show of the artists that received the American Craft Council Award; in December, the Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusets is hosting the work from the exhibition that you saw in The Design District, L.A. In October of 2019 I have a two-person show with a painter at the Riverside Museum of Art again. And then I will have work in a ceramic biennale at CAFAM in 2020. After that, in the summer of 2020 I have a solo exhibition at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. And I think I’ll have some work in our faculty show at ArtExchange-ArtX this September. My work is very slow, so I have sleepless nights ahead of me.

LUZ: Yes, it does. Trusting yourself is such a huge part of the process. G M: And it’s weird how that happens after-the-fact. You know? That’s

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Rose Yoon, Paradox, 2015, silver and bronze, dimension variable.

PORTFOLIO

Lily Nguyen, Untitled, n.d., oil on canvas, 18x24â&#x20AC;?.

Loren Ashley Lowrey, La Petite Morte, 2017, porcelain, 11x4x3â&#x20AC;?.

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Patricia Miramontes, Teacher, Mother, Secret Lover, 2018, digital print.

UNCERTAIN Jhuztine Abustan

Photography is an insightful expression of how an artist sees the world. For years, through this medium, I have been documenting the journey of my transition. With this ongoing project I wish to share with the viewers the life experiences that transgender people are going through, experiences that have personally taught me so much. Even though I have struggled in my past, I have used those hardships to build me up, guide me, and shape me into the person I am now. As an openly transgender man, I want to use my knowledge and experiences to become an advocate for the LGBTQ community in the future. I want to reach out to individuals, however they identify themselves, and let them know that it is okay to be who they are. No one must ever change that. “Don’t let anyone change you, because you are you…”

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Po Nwar, Le sommeil de Nova, 2018, digital painting, 30cmx30cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

SPOTLIGHT: PO NWAR

Po Nwar’s graphic, flat figures offer another dimension to the magnification of black beauty, but this time, originating from a tiny French territory just east of Madagascar, Réunion Island. Interview with Jonah Coloma

J O N A H C O LO M A (L U Z ): Please tell us a little about yourself. P O N WA R (P N): I’m a French artist who lives and grew up on Réunion Island. I left a few years ago to study art in France and expand my vision. I decided to go back to find my roots and devote myself to projects that are important to me. L U Z : What is it that you do? P N : Right now I’m focusing on my creative work. I’ve set myself a reasonable time period to try my luck in the artistic world. If it doesn’t work, I will pass the graduation requirements to become an art teacher. I had the opportunity to teach last year and the experience really appealed to me. But first I want to give myself the opportunity to live my passion.

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L U Z : What has shaped your artistic mindset to produce your classical paintings is the seemingly frozen postures of the figures as present works? relating to the whole of the scene, which exudes a great energy. P N : I thought of shaping [the work] around a solid culture of art, but even though I gathered as much information as possible on L U Z : You mostly focus on a female form. Does she have a name, the subject, I quickly realized that I cannot find all the answers in and what is her story? the books. After my degree in fine arts I decided to take a little PN: Ç’est vrai que les femmes ont beaucoup de place dans mes décors. distance from the artistic community and take the time to live and (It is true that women have a lot of place in my decorations.) The female see other things. I, who was born on a rock, needed to feed my character came to me spontaneously probably because there is a little— curiosity! One of the things that marked my arrival was the sizes actually, a lot of me in this figure. Originally, I wanted to create a bird-woman. of the cities and the excitement in the streets. I spent a lot of For the bird aspect, I set my sights on the Zoizo la Vierge, the “Virgin bird,” a time walking the cities where I lived. There is an atmosphere that small bird found only on the highest parts of the island. It is desired if one does not lie. My passion for street art was surely born from this! seeks it. The male has the upper half of [his] head delimited by black, like It’s amazing, all the stories that are told on the walls. After giving a mask. From there, I started to create a bird-woman whose head would myself time, I nourished my personality and my aspirations be masked. Then I added a form of story referencing the mythology and I towards [creating ar t pieces] evolved [from] privileging the refined my character. She is a bird-woman, but she doesn’t have a name. authenticity more than the technical performance. It had become vital for me that my identity be reflected in my drawings. LUZ: What is the significance of the black skin in your artworks? My return to the island strongly favored this momentum. I could PN: Black skin is important. It’s even my professional artist name because add to my work all that I needed in order to be true to myself “po nwar” means “black skin” in our Creole language. I was saying a little in everything I do. bit before that my experiences shaped my mindset; the ones I faced in relation to my skin color dotted my way. There was the confrontation with L U Z: I look at your pieces and try to stem it from Réunionese art sense, racism during my student life in France, and ironically, also with the racism to no avail. But there is a sense of mythological roots to your works. Do that one encounters within one’s own island or family. Because with the you base your stories on local mythology? legacy of slavery, the black skin has been inscribed in local beliefs as an P N: I’m inspired by Greek mythology and classical paintings. I find that obstacle to social progression. We talk a lot about our island as a peaceful these forms of art synthesize the concepts well, and mythology itself land where all people live in harmony, but that’s only partly true. I am also is a form of storytelling full of powerful symbols. Regarding classical embarrassed by the dominance of visual representations of the island painting, I appreciate the concept of composition found there. What that show it in postcard format, because it’s not only a postcard paradise; is paradoxical when we look at frescoes from the ancient periods or there’s more to it than that.

SPRING 2018

As I said just before, we have a history of slavery, and this historical burden clearly imbues the energy on the island. Fortunately, some very talented local artists helped to create a visual repertoire more in line with this true energy. I believe that it is essential to allow our people to identify with a local artistic culture that values its history. If you observe my compositions, you will see that I place the characters, as often as possible, in advantageous postures or ones that highlight their power. The use of symbolism attached to elements such as water, fire, etc. follows this approach. I want the young generations to associate black skin with positive values such as fighting spirit. I am convinced that people need positive and striking visual identity landmarks to build themselves up. I will always remember this fine arts teacher who pointed out to me that I “didn’t paint black people.” In hindsight, I understand that they said that because I had not yet evolved visual references which represent my culture. Now I can contribute and I hope to do it as best as possible. LUZ: I need to create a context for my previous question. I follow you on Instagram, and one of the factors that struck me and led me to follow your work was the abundance of black skin and the glory that comes along with it. It reminds me of looking at Kerry James Marshall’s paintings, wherein his subjects are painted with deep black skin. His premise may be different than yours, but one cannot deny that he too is proud of his black skin like you are. PN: I have known of the work of Kerry James for about a year. I was immediately struck and moved by it, struck by the innovative strength of his pictorial techniques, and by the benevolence he gives to his characters. His desire to glorify the black skin is obvious, especially since he claims the militant part of his approach. I cannot say that I was motivated, like him, by an ideological commitment, but where I join him is when he says that his work is not an argument for anything, but an argument for something else. He does it masterfully, using his knowledge of Renaissance painting to offer a canon of black beauty. For my part, I think that I wanted to draw a story of black mythological value to rid myself of negative connotations that were passed on to me unconsciously or not. It reminds me of an anecdote with my mother. I once asked her why I was black and she told me that God had several pots of colors at his disposal and that when he distributed them, I arrived too late and that there was only the black color remaining. This little story perfectly reflects this conflictual relationship that some Réunionese have with their black identity. I think that Western countries have been able to impose their power partly because they have been able to expand their cultural influence, first by the force and violence of colonization, then by means of soft power that conveyed a certain ideal vision of art, so that history has been centered on European culture. It is this same culture that gradually accustomed our eyes to a visual universe in which we are represented in a secondary, pejorative, and often devaluing way, as the black maid in Manet’s Olympia was. And even if this history of art centered on the West is a distorted view of our reality, we still accept it. I am not sure that in the history of the art of African cultures there are works representing or glorifying significant historical events for the black people that have benefited from real international visibility. And if there are, unfortunately I do not know of them. I think it is important to highlight and create works that black people can rely on to legitimize their place in this globalized world, works that would carry soft power of the cultures of underrepresented minorities. In my opinion, history gives consistency to things and to humanity, and is the guarantor of values that is incontestable by the majority of those who write it. The underrepresentation of an ethnic group in the visual arts field inevitably affects their ability to position themselves in that field, since as they fade into the background, history loses its consistency and becomes too biased. I want to reclaim my identity by drawing a historical fantasylike past in which I can project myself with pride. The stylistic codes of ancient art seemed to me to be an adequate medium for attributing nobility to concepts too often mentioned in the West as represented more negatively. We must remember that in its symbolism the black also evokes

“I think it is important to highlight and create works that black people can rely on to legitimize their place in this globalized world, works that would carry the soft power ... of under-represented minorities.”

(above) Po Nwar Meteor, December 2017, digital painting, 21cmx29.7cm. Image courtesy of the artist.

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power, constancy. My work is more therapeutic than militant because I use creation to feel legitimate and serene in my status as a black woman. LUZ: Can you name an artist or artists who inspired you? PN: My sources of inspiration are multiple and are not restricted to the world of drawing and painting. I listen to a lot of music (with a preference for electronic music) including Bonobo, Toro y Moi, Nicholas Murphy a.k.a. Chet Faker, and some melodies that particularly awaken my imagination, like a song by Alabama Shakes called “Sound and Color,” which inspired my “Astral Loreleï.” My references in the art world are numerous and mostly male, but I will not mention them all to save the space that is devoted to me in your magazine. One of them is Cleon Peterson. At first glance, one can appreciate his graphic style of beautiful sobriety, mainly through the use of solid colors, but his characters are nonetheless expressive and terrifying. I imagine seeing the shadows of enraged souls projecting onto the walls at nightfall. For me it manages to associate in an intelligent way “the writing” of forms and lines to express in a synthesized way the force of the emotions. Moreover, when I was looking for a graphic technique that could be read to represent black people, I remembered his work. Piet Parra is also a great source of inspiration. I find that he, like Peterson, is clever in composing his paintings, but that his universe is more offbeat and his women are very sensual. LUZ: What would you most like for us to know about Réunion and the art scene there? PN: The island as a whole deserves to be visited. You must know that it was formed following the emergence of two volcanoes, one of which is one of the most active in the world, the Piton de la Fournaise (the Peak of the Furnace), and is therefore a must-see site. The consecutive flows of the lava have shaped the island’s many landscapes, and despite its modest surface area, it has a breathtaking range of biodiversity. We have what we call “cirques,” natural sites comparable to amphitheatres by their vertiginous height, which are in the heart of the island. Accessible only by foot or by helicopter, these sites served as refuge to many runaway slaves who built villages that still exist there today. The “circuses” bear the names of the clan leaders of these brave refugees. Now they have become a very popular playground for top athletes and curious hikers, eager to immerse themselves in a unique natural setting with a large number of endemic plants. These unique and lush landscapes earned us status as a World Heritage Site from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 2010.

Our island also shines with musical talents such as Danyèl Waro, a militant of Réunion culture and a worthy representative of the Maloya music that is part of our traditions inherited from Africa. It is a rhythmic music with percussions including the “roulér” which is played while sitting on the instrument. One of my visuals, The Sun’s Awakening, where we see my cock man sitting on the Sun, is actually a nod to the players of this instrument. In another register I will mention the contemporary composer Jérémy Labelle, whose music filled with electronic sounds revisits with modernity the local musical repertoire for a dreamlike and captivating result. Her second album, “Univers-île,” was born from collaborations between very talented artists in their respective discipline such as the singer Nathalie Natiembé and the duo of artists Kid Kréol & Boogie, who took care in particular of the realization of the cover. I also like the world of the figurative painter Jimmy Cadet who produces works that I compare to still lifes of a surreal genre. LUZ: What are we to expect from you in the future? P N: My main goal is to make a living off of my art, and to try to do this, I plan to open an online shop and sell works already visible on my Instagram. I will reflect on variations of my graphic universe to exploit for commercial purposes and group this set of products under the name of a brand. Despite the profusion of communication tools that allow us to be seen and shared around the world, living as an artist is not an easy thing and I think that the artist must also assume his or her entrepreneurial role without shame, even if we are not trained for this initially. The career of an artist is a succession of challenges. At this present time, I would consider it naïve for an artist not to take into account the ever-growing roles of media and marketing in the modern creative process. Modern media such as Instagram bring artists today a visibility such as that which I’ve had the chance to share with you, my universe. I had some requests also for orders of my work, and recently one of my visuals was retained to be part of the calendar of a magazine in the Netherlands. Art is no longer confined to museums, it spreads on different media whether we consider it noble or not, and I have the desire to make mine live in all possible forms as long as it is expressed consistently. 1

Follow Po Nwar on Instagram @Po_Nwar to see more of her work.

SPRING 2018

PO NWAR 41

Everett Babcock, Schizo-mystic, 2016, etching, 15x11”.

EVERETT BABCOCK-

LBCC ALUMNUS AT UCLA A L E X K AWA N O (L U Z ): How has LBCC helped your transition to a top-tier university like UCLA? E V E R E T T BA B C O C K (E B): Being at LBCC helped me slow down and figure out a conscious choice for what to do with my life and career. LBCC gave me a strong work ethic and the ability to effectively research my interests while making my work. LU Z: Were there any teachers, students, or people at LBCC in particular who were especially impactful? Why? E B: Coleen Sterritt, Christopher Chinn, Stas Orlovski, Linda King, Brian Doan, Carolyn Castano, and Trevor Norris come to mind when I think of the faculty. They had immeasurable impact, recognized my drive, and fostered my ambitions with meaningful and insightful challenges. They all have a genuine care for their art practice and pedagogy. I also had an amazing and inspiring group of peers including Angel King, Anthony Sok, Erwin Papa, Hyung Mo Lee, Jose Siminig, and Rodrigo Lopez. L U Z: Have you faced any major difficulties at UCLA that you didn’t previously encounter at LBCC? E B : The quarter system is much more fast paced and intensive. The amount of required reading is much greater. The exams are never multiple choice. The advanced art classes have fewer project parameters. And there is a much heavier conceptual leaning rather than a focus on skills and material exploration. These are all things I expected to encounter before I transferred. They have to be met seriously through time management and hard work.

L U Z : Can you describe the effect of being around such prominent artists and teachers such as Jennifer Bolande, Barbara Kruger, John Baldessari, and Catherine Opie? E B: I’ve had class with some fantastic artists. Both full-time and adjunct faculty have been a pleasure to work with. They know how to talk about my work and how to help me see it and articulate it in new ways. Rodney Mcmillian, Lari Pittman, Nikolas Gambaroff, Jeffrey Vallance, Benjamin Weissman, and Kelly Nipper have all helped push my work in new and exciting directions. There can be tension and an air of celebrity to deal with, but I think it’s mostly generated by the student body wanting to impress the faculty. If I’m serious about the work and make an effort to communicate, I’m met with friendliness and professionalism. L U Z: Has there been any major changes in your process since getting to UCLA? E B: I have begun to conceptualize my work a lot more. This institution particularly calls for that, but I don’t let that stop me from creating things before I [actually understand them. I try to privilege neither concept nor process]. I’ve also started to incorporate elements of body movement and public performance into my sculpture and painting practices. L U Z: UCLA has the funding and reputation to bring notable lecturers and visiting faculty? Has there been anyone in particular that has sparked your interest? E B : The entire Fall quarter was lined with visiting artist lectures because the department was looking for two new hires. Artists like Candice Lin, Shahryar Nashat, and Rebecca Morris were all awesome to hear. I also saw Chelsey Manning speak. This combination of people and events doesn’t happen anywhere else. L U Z: Anything about LBCC or Long Beach that you miss? E B: I miss the pace and I miss Coleen Sterritt’s badass sculpture class. L U Z: Have you picked up anything beneficial at UCLA that you think the LBCC Art Department has the power to adopt? E B: The amount of space and resources at UCLA is extremely helpful. I’m not sure the [LBCC] art department alone has the power to acquire more resources, but perhaps the administration and the board of trustees can help. L U Z: After you graduate from UCLA, where do you see yourself five years from now? E B: With an MFA, MAKING AND SHOWING WORK, teaching, and/or working in museums, studios, or galleries. L U Z: Any additional comments? E B: A HUGE thank you to the LBCC Art Department!

LUZ: Any advice for your fellow peers looking to further their education? E B: Show up physically, mentally, and make work even when you don’t want to. Also, consider the realities of choosing a career in the arts. Study up on which art world or worlds you’ll be getting into. And get deep into the Art Department while you’re at LBCC, get as involved as possible.

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Jose Siminig, The Industry Standard, n.d., paper, speaker, cardboard, welding mask, steel, 57x43x39”.

JOSE SIMINIG-

CLUB D’ART SPRING 2018 SCHOLARSHIP RECIPIENT

J O N A H C O LO M A (L U Z ): What’s your background? J OS E S I M I N IG (JS): Before creating sculptures, I mainly concentrated on drawing and painting. I did a handful of observational paintings and drawings. I tend to approach each subject with a realistic interpretation. I also have experience in traditional black & white photography and developing the prints in the darkroom. L U Z: Well, congratulations on receiving the Club d’Art Scholarship for Spring 2018. How do you plan to utilize the award? J S: I plan to put the resources towards school expenses and materials for future art projects. L U Z: What motivated you to become an artist? J S: I would say that a major motivation for being an artist is the idea of doing something I love for the long run. Seeing successful artists inspires my ideas, influences my work, and motivates me to one day reach their caliber. L U Z : Can you name a particular artist who does that to you? J S: Two artists I think of right away are sculpture/installation artists Jessica Stockholder and Marc Andre Robinson, but honestly, I do not have to look very far. Our faculty at Long Beach City College (LBCC) are comprised of excellent artists in every area, from drawing and painting, to metalsmithing and sculpture, to graphic design and printmaking, to ceramics.

that reveals in the end product a definite trace of realistic references within the sculptural forms. L U Z: Your works can be challenging to observe and analyze due to their formal complexity. What does your work aim to say? J S: Honestly, I do not have a clear answer as to the specific meanings, but my work is process-based and not developed around a certain concept. For every project, I put my materials through an intensive process, in which I have to think quickly about the possibilities and how far the limitation of the material is. In a way, this taps into my past, and the influence of my surroundings while growing up. We are constantly surrounded by materials of all different textures, properties, etc. Process-based works allow for the subconscious exploration of all these materials we come into contact with every day. L U Z: That makes sense, and your statement regarding the intensity of your process is indeed reflected in your works, which are rather like visual mazes that the viewer treads through, easily getting lost while searching for their own unique understanding and connections. Your work also contains strong reminiscences of Arte Povera, which is a mid-20th century avant-garde art movement that took place in Italy and which also emphasized process and found materials. Has the LBCC sculpture program’s history of assembling found objects directly influenced your methodology? J S: Absolutely, the idea of using found objects and non-traditional art materials is a uniquely different way of artistic thinking and creating art. In addition, art material can be expensive. The challenge of using found objects lies in the transformation of the objects from what they once were into something completely different and new which reveals itself to both the artist and viewers at the end of each project. L U Z: Excellent! So what is your plan after you graduate from LBCC? J S: I’d like to transfer to a good university for my Bachelor’s degree and possibly afterwards aim to get my Master’s. L U Z: As you continue to progress through life, how do you see your role as an artist significantly impacting your career? J S: I’d like to think that art will remain a part of me forever. The idea of working towards a goal and achieving that goal no matter the hardships is what gives me motivation to keep going forward. Therefore, I want to create work that would sustain a long-term career as an artist and enrich the art community around me.

L U Z : Your portfolio mostly consists of sculpture. Is there something about sculpting that resonates with you more than other art disciplines? J S : A majority of my 2D works are realism based on observational study. However, with my sculptures, it is the opposite; I base them on the process, the materials, and the transformation, an approach which inherently results in more abstract pieces. L U Z : Do you delve into other disciplines as part of your practice? J S : Yes I do. The various art disciplines I have explored through learning and practice are illustrated in my sculpture. My ideal goal is to incorporate drawing, painting, and photography into my sculptural work in an organic manner. L U Z : That sounds interesting, because you mentioned that your 2D works are representational and your sculptures are abstract. Any ideas how you can incorporate these representational works as elements in your sculpture? J S : I have some ideas that I plan to try, but I tend to work in a way

SPRING 2018

LBCC’S FAMOUS FACULTY AND ALUMNI FRANK X. GASPAR

LBCC’s celebrated (and much loved) teacher of poetry and fiction until 2010, recently was named the 2016 Ferrol A. Sams Distinguished Chair, Writer in Residence at Mercer University. He now teaches in the MFA Writing Program at Pacific University, Oregon, and is currently at work on a new collection of poems and a novel.

BLACK NOTEBOOK, #5, LISBON

by Frank X Gaspar (from Late Rapturous)

Where sleep kept itself across the room like a long sheet of glass, and he lay on the white bed sifting through the ashand raking over the cinders of one burned-out dream or another, as if he would ever find a shy feather from the angel’s wing there, no sweet or bitter powder to stop all the circling in his head, all that grinding over and over, yielding up nothing, and down in the street some marvelous and bejeweled girls calling out to one another, and car doors slamming outside the trendy club with its drift of icy music. They had gone looking for Pessoa and found him on coffee mugs and tee shirts, they had gone singing for Eça and Florbela and found cobblestones and tiled walls and the bayonet rails of the crimson trolleys. How far will any voyage take you? You can follow Roget and see how the slap is the first glance toward murder. You can misread the physicists and believe that hope and despair are the same string vibrating. Love what you will quickly. You can never stay. Deliverance never looks like itself. Weary and homeward, then, outbound, the hard-won tickets, and the baggage groaning with holy books in every language, the great Atlantic cloud cover, glacial and complete, showed the curvature of the round earth and they all wept in at least one of the rooms of the heart, for they were all leaving something, each of them, unguessable and sovereign in the deepest vault, or profound in those arcane inner whirlwinds of marvel and fatigue. How much later then, in his little canted rooms, home, still with the delicacies and caresses of his own descent in the November sun. Now the nodding maple crowning in his high windows, boughs pressing in on him, like the nose of a lost cat against a door, all hope and resolve that the house and its joys will open. In that moment of common fusion he saw himself reaching through the windowpane and petting its leaves, already cold and mortal, and the south-facing limbs easing into their final rusts and crimsons. As if he could pass through anything, he put out his hand but then only laid the flat of it against the glass. It was deeply cool, surprising in the drench of westering light, and he left his palm there for a while against a billion molecules, once opaque and blind but now because they had joined in fire he could look through them clearly as if through one single bright jewel, and he believed in this way he could see many pieces of the scattered world. Reprinted with permission from Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh. Also available: five poetry collections, Poemas em Português, and two novels “Stealing Fatima,” and “Leaving Pico.”

____________ Ed Moses (1926-2018) was born in Long Beach and studied painting under the Art Department at LBCC. He told ARTnews, “When I catch onto something, I push it a little bit, and sometimes I get lucky. I say, ‘Wow, how did you make that?’ If it has the wow factor, I’m okay.” Paint and chance were his mediums. Moses, whose prolific body of work expanded the possibilities of abstraction while synthesizing American and Asian aesthetics and radically experimenting with chance, has died at 91. In interviews, Moses said he knew he was destined to become a painter, noting that, as a baby, he would smear his excrement on the walls, causing his aunt to exclaim that he would one day be an artist. (He had an irreverent sense of humor up to the very end of his life; in a 2016 interview, he described himself as a “retired playboy.”) During World War II, he became a surgical technician for the U.S. Navy. After the war, he got his M.F.A. at the University of California, Los Angeles, where Craig Kauffman introduced him to Hopps, setting Moses up to become one of Los Angeles’s most important artists at the time.1

ED MOSES LBCC Alumnus, Pioneering L.A. Painter and Paragon of the California Art Scene, Died on January 17, 2018 at age 91.

Alex Greenberger. “Ed Moses, Pioneering L.A. Painter and Paragon of the California Art Scene, Dies at 91” ArtNews (online magazine), 01/18/18 6:42 PM

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VISUAL & MEDIA ARTS EVENTS VISIONS OF WAVES: UNDERCURRENTS OPENING RECEPTION Adrian Barreras

PRAXIS AND PEDAGOGY FALL 2018 FACULTY ART SHOW

From an Interview with Co-Curator and LBCC Professor Stas Orlovski Marvin Basham

Former Visual & Media Arts faculty member Larry White, recently gathered the art of surfers and ocean-environmentalists into an exuberant collection for the LBCC Art Gallery. These artists took everyday yet edgy materials—plastic flowers, tinted acrilyic resin, garish flourescent paint on black velvet, and found objects (all the materials of kitsch) and triumphed. It was a raucous, “salty” opening night. Sea-weathered K E VIN O’SU LLIVAN stood in front of black velvet paintings by his surfing mate BRIAN BE NT. “Jay Z,” 2010. (Acrylic, black gesso, & ceramic paint on Mexican black velvet). NOL AN HALL’s surfing photography series Sea Level was bound into modestly designed books published by Deadbeat Club.

The 2018 LBCC Faculty Art Show will be a comprehensive visual and media arts exhibition. Thirteen LBCC artist-educators will present recent painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, ceramics, video, film screenings, and historical art essays. During question-and-answer panels, the featured artists will share their art praxis and pedagogy. The show may also include multidisciplinary New Media and hybrid experimental work. The finest artists feel that teaching is an integral and essential part of their creative work, and Los Angeles has traditionally been the home of world class artist-educators such as John Baldessari, Lari Pittman, and Mike Kelley. LBCC’s faculty rank among the very best of these. Come, witness, and be inspired this fall, from September 7 - October 28, 2018, at the Long Beach Art Exchange. Check ArtExchangeLongBeach.org for reception and artist talk dates. 356 East 3rd Street, Long Beach, CA 90802

Sculptor and ceramic artist AMY YAO brought her joyful “Fleurs,” which I’d seen at Art Basel Miami in 2016. Imagine an oversized, bare-wood orange crate stuffed with plastic flowers from Michael’s Art Supplies; quick, improvisatory sculpture. However, her roughly hewn ceramic vessels occupying pedestals seemed like misplaced spiritual totems. N O L A N H A L L’s “Alex Kopps: Scorpion Boy,” 2007 (C Print) stood out boldly, his photography genuinely capturing surf culture. G R E G M A R T Z , a surfboard fabricator for Waterman Guild, used his poured resin and wood craftmanship to stunning artistic effect. His large-scale pours had the quality of archaic Japanese ukiyo-e (floating world) paintings, complete with wabi-sabi flaky fractures within the wood, like in CXXVIII, 2018. (Resin, wood). Look up these artists online!

(top to bottom) 1. Kevin O’Sullivan in front of Brian Bent, Jay Z, 2010. Photo: Courtesy of LBCC Vikings 2. Nolan Hall, SeaLevel (detail). Photo: Courtesy of Deadbeat Club Publishers 3. Amy Yao, Fleurs, 2016, mixed media, 72X61”. 4. Greg Martz, CXXVII, 2018, resin on wood panel, 72x72”. Photo: Jeff Devine 5. Greg Martz at work - Watermelon Guild Photo: Jeff Devine

SPRING 2018

JEFF EPLEY’S POETRY WORKSHOP/INTERVIEW Every Wednesday afternoon Professor Jeff Epley leads an egalitarian, round table seminar on the magic of writing poetry. The ekphrastic, the epistolary, the Arabian ghazal. Sound academic? Wrong!

Photo: Jeff Epley, “Self Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man.”

If you want to explore the legacy of Bay Area hip-hop, if you have a political voice, if you just want to bring beats and seriously disturb the monthly readings (pictured above), the LBCC Poetry Workshop listens.

They say RAP stands for “Rhythm and Poetry.” Listen now to Common’s poetic verses.

“Black church services, murderers, Arabs serving burgers As cats with gold permanents, move they bags as herbalists The dirt isn’t just fertile, it’s people working and earning this The curb getters go where the cash flow and the current is It’s so hot that niggas burn to live The furnace is, where the money moving, the determined live We talk shit, play lotto, and buy German beers It’s so black packed with action that’s affirmative The corners” “The Corner” - Verse #3 by Common

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(top) Nas, illmatic, 1994.

“This rhythmatic explosion, is what your frame of mind has chosen I’ll leave your brain stimulated, niggas is frozen Speak with criminal slang, begin like a violin End like Leviathan, it’s deep well let me try again Wisdom be leaking out my grapefruit troop I dominate break loops, giving mics men-e-straul cycles Street’s disciple, I rock beats that’s mega trifle And groovy but smoother than moves by Villanova Yet still a soldier, I’m like Sly Stallone in Cobra Packing like a rasta in the weed spot Vocals’ll squeeze glocks, MC’s eavesdrop Though they need not to sneak My poetry’s deep, I never fell Nas’s raps should be locked in a cell It ain’t hard to tell, 20 years” “It Ain’t Hard To Tell” - Verse #3 by Nas

F R O M A N I N T E RV I E W W I T H N A S A N D E L I S A N E W, P R O F E S S O R O F P O E T RY, H A RVA R D U N I V E R S I T Y: 1 E L I S A N E W: What does it mean to “dominate break loops?” That’s the beat, right? N AS: That’s the beat. Break loops are a piece of a record, usually it’s the break down part. There’s a piece in every record that’s just the drums. So they looped that part. “Break loop” is another way of saying you loop that part. So I “dominate break loops.”

E L I S A N E W: But this is what poetry does; masters pattern. Why are academics such as Elisa New fascinated with Nas? Because street poetry, hip-hop, and rap are an exciting new form of literary expression! And it was born, like jazz, out of parade bands on New Orleans streets and in America’s amazing African-American communities. There’s so much to explore in critical contemporary poetry!

E L I S A N E W: It occurs to me that its another way of saying there’s this underlying formal “given,” the thing that somebody else made. N A S: Right. E L I S A N E W: All poets inherit forms. Forms are given to them and poets have to learn to make the forms their own. The English poets will use iambic pentameter or other centuries-old rhythmic forms. And I hear you saying, “Give me this form, this beat, and I will dominate it!” N A S: Right. That’s exactly what I’m saying. E L I S A N E W: “Giving mics men-e-straul cycles” are those cycles in any way metaphorically related to the loops? N A S: Now it is since you said it, but I didn’t think of that. [laughter]

1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdmtQDSZS5I

SPRING 2018

IT’S A FETISH THING (LOUANN CHIN) Ricardo Vidana

Inside this nicely lit space and the level measured hung pieces I feel a little under-talented. All I’ve got to offer this place are the from-on-high words of the lowbrow gutter fiends and their dirty syringe pen strokes. So I took a walk outside. Oh outside in the dark corners of the courtyard and behind dirty glass Louann Chin shows me that it’s a fetish thing. Now this is more my speed. Dirty sludgy speed with all its red spandex, leash and collar.

I tell myself “Rick you don’t need a surfboard you can’t even swim. To ride what you need is a safe word, one that’s long and hard to say when begging for forgiveness thinking of all the good-bad decisions that led you to this.”

And then the leather hits. The whip-smack of jubilance. Dear lord Satan YES. Is there a painting for that? Better yet are there photographs of that?

BLAME THE BODY (THE CORPOREAL NATURE OF MAN) Adam Cardenas

People change because the brain’s fluid, they say, like carbon. Perhaps. But I see the brain, not as an airy entity like a dream, but a crystalline structure with inclusions. Harder than bone. Bone’s the brittlest thing about you: a not-so-immutable trapping to bind that identity, so ethereal it’s a wonder it could ever be wrought in something physical, too. A skeleton is a place where all experiences can be seen (in stress fractures) unlike in the poker-faced nature of the rills through the squishy thing that actually “does” you. So I’m trying this out, putting “me” on page. But by then, as a shore and wave, life beats and I’m already somebody different… yet the same I was at fourteen. People don’t change, really. Otherwise why live generation upon generation making the same mistakes repeatedly.

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I FEAR THEY ARE DROWNING AS I’M ALLOWED TO SWIM Lila Orshefsky

Amid a sea of faces in these academic halls, I hear fragments of woes and worries swell From passing lips as they softly recall Their young children waiting at home for supper, lest the pantry shelves be bereft, Lovers past and present ripping into their hearts and leaving but empty shells, Laboring endless hours ‘til for their studies they have no strength left; And I glance up from my books at precious souls Who strive by my side to build futures grand, But whose troubles usurp mine tenfold; For from ancient epochs, we may be solidly sure That from Chaos, drawing any creative strand, Is toil oft’ cancelled by pain forced to endure; O’ innocent Children, lest your bright, curious minds Be stifled by the scores of gripping demands Of Civilization, on let your wonder shine! O’ virtuous Parents, lest your sons and daughters be ever-trapped In a tiresome mechanical cycle which offers too thin a chance To scale rungs which ‘round them like chains are wrapped, Quench seedling Knowledge with sweeter waters each year ‘Til it grows ceaseless ‘neath your daughters’ shining hair And to your sons’ wide eyes gifts the old poets’ tears! O’ mighty Government with your tangled puppet strings in hand, Lest the penniless multitudes grow, sort out your petty affairs Or see your “great” nation fall from empire to carnal land As my brilliant peers, one by one, Their strong bodies aching, To your traps succumb, Vanishing around me, leaving these poor, proud academic halls With fewer lonely young scholars and foundations breaking, Needs of Industry and War leaving crumbling our walls!

DEAR SOCIAL ANXIETY, Cassidy R. Whitsett

I want to kill this part of me This ugliness This detrimental mess Be killed from society How I wish you’d go away silently But oh, the irony Of me wanting you to be gone so quietly I’m sorry, It’s my social anxiety…

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Now here I am apologizing Because my voice isn’t loud enough But that’s just gravity What a catastrophe! It is for my words to be stuck between My lips, tongue, and teeth like a cavity

LETTER TO AN OL’ FRIEND Kobe Price

Can’t listen to the lies you say We used to be bros now you fake I still think about them good ol’ days Feeling like a nightmare but now I’m awake I miss them AAU days trying to make a way It was us against anyone and everyone But high school changed us a whole ton I haven’t talked to you in a minute tho How’s the fam man, how they living bro You still getting punked by yo brother mo It’s okay, I figured I’d just write to you I been so focused with this thing I’m trying to pursue Life moving so fast while we figuring out what to do Lately I been feeling so empty but what’s new There are more real issues going around People see it but aren’t making a sound It’s messing me up because I’m seeing my people hitting the ground With no heartbeat, hearing they mothers weep They not even giving us fresh food in our community I don’t even know what they feeding me I want to save my people, but they call it corny When in actuality, they’re the people who’s phony I’m here writing my feelings, and they writing bologna Sincerely, Gouda

XIII D Hideo Maruyama

what would it mean to be killed? It would mean nothing. Nothing would change except being erased to Form more white space

a sheet of paper.

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HOW FAR?

This Sacramento Police Department infrared surveillance video still is a chilling reminder of how military-grade equipment is used against unarmed American civilians.

Vanessa Beckrum

How far have we advanced in the last fifty years? I decided to do some research to see how far we as a nation have come in terms of race relations, and was not surprised when the information was disappointing. I looked into economics, cross-comparing household incomes as well as weekly incomes of white Americans and African-Americans. In addition, I researched incarceration patterns and updates on three well-known cases of police brutality against African-Americans. Below are the daunting results I discovered about our society thus far. ME DIAN HOUSE HOLD INCOME

In the fourth quarter of 2017, the wage gap4 between white and black workers compares as follows; white men working a full-time job earned a median of $982 each week while black men working a full- time job earned $681 in a week. White women earned for a full-time job $791 per week while black women earned for a full-time job $654. INCARCE R ATION 5

In 1972, the median income2 for white households was $10,318. The median income for black households was $5,938, a little over half as much (58%). Current (2016) statistics show that the median income for white households is $65,041 and the median income for black households is $39,490, 61% as much. Though inflation has raised the cost of living and salaries, black households have gained almost no progress towards equality with their white fellow Americans in the latter category, and consequently, the ability to comfortably afford the former. The proportionate gap in wealth, and as this indicates, of opportunity and wellbeing, between the two races has remained disturbingly constant. 1

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income- poverty/ historical-income- households.html. Note: I use 1972 instead of 1968 because there is no information on white non-Hispanic median incomes for 1968.

Unfortunately I was unable to locate information on 1968 wage gaps between white full-time workers and black full-time workers.

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M E D I A N W E E K LY I N C O M E 3

The total number of whites incarcerated in 19786 was 157,208. The total number of blacks incarcerated that year was 143,375. Today, 106,699 whites are incarcerated, vs. 69,394 blacks. African-Americans make up 1213% of the USA’s population, but make up approximately 40% of the USA’s prison population. There are root causes ingrained in our society which through many indirect paths result in this disproportion. These causes have stemmed from a long history of persistent, underlying racism.

3 https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf. 4

Unfortunately I was unable to locate information on 1968 wage gaps between white full-time workers and black full-time workers.

Prisoners in 2015. By E. Ann Carson, Ph.D., BJS Statistician. And Elizabeth Anderson, BJS Intern. December 2016. Bureau of Justice Statistics. https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp.

No race or ethnicity statistics were collected prior to 1978 pertaining to incarceration rates.

Vanessa Beckrum, Urban Pieta, 2017, archival pigment print, 11x17â&#x20AC;?.

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P O L I C E B R U TA L I T Y: A LTO N S T E R L I N G U P DAT E “Officer of the law” Blane Salamoni who murdered Alton Sterling, who was unarmed, was NOT convicted with murder on March 27, 2018, but was merely fired from the Baton Rouge Police Department three days later. The official reason for his dismissal was that he violated the “use of force”; and “command of temper”; regulations. It was a determination based “on facts, eyewitness testimony, and recommendations from board members,” stated Police Chief Murphy Paul. I’m not sure how they could determine that Salamoni should be fired based on these “truths,” but no federal, local, nor civil charges have been filed against him, even though he ought to be held accountable for his crime. P O L I C E B R U TA L I T Y: P H I L A N D O CA S T I L E U P DAT E 7 On the Philando Castile “investigation,” the officer in question, Jeronimo Yanez, was acquitted of all charges. In addition, he received a payout of $48,500 in a lump sum for leaving the police department he “served” in, and up to 600 hours of accrued and unused personal leave pay minus applicable deductions and withholdings for state and federal taxes. Yanez’s annual salary at the time of the July 6, 2016 shooting was more than $72,600, not including overtime pay. This is more than twice the median yearly income earned by a black male working a full-time job in 2017, $35,412, in accordance with the previously mentioned Median Weekly Income statistics. P O L I C E B R U TA L I T Y: M I C H A E L B R OW N U P DAT E 8 In the case of the murder of Michael Brown, an UNARMED 18-year-old boy, cop Darren Wilson was not indicted by the grand jury. There was a “Wrongful Death” lawsuit/settlement against Darren Wilson brought forth by the city of Ferguson and former police chief Thomas Jackson. The settlement was ordered and sealed by U.S. District Judge E. Richard Webber. Judge Webber stated that he thought the amount of money Michael Brown’s parents would be given was a “fair and reasonable compensation for this wrongful death claim and is in the best interests of each plaintiff”—as if any amount of money could ever begin to make up for the wrongful death of their son. Additionally, Judge Webber stated, “Disclosure of the terms of the settlement agreement could jeopardize the safety of individuals involved in this matter, whether witnesses, outside parties, or investigators. The public policy to consider records open is outweighed by the [potential] adverse impact to Plaintiffs.”

would want the entire world to see all the records and documents pertaining to the death of Michael Brown if there was nothing to hide. Prior to the settlement, the “request for admissions,” which is seen on the Joint Notice to File Exhibit “A” To Plaintiffs’ Response To Motion To Compel (Cause No: 4:15-cv- 00831-ER W Doc #165) reveal suspicious contradictions made by Darren Wilson in his accounts of what happened that day. __________ There have been countless atrocities committed against people of color for prejudice’s sake, from the viciousness of slavery, the evils of segregation, the Jim Crow laws, and rancid racism and hate crimes such as the horrific murder by lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 to the rogue cops thoughtlessly and impulsively gunning down people of color with NO accountability for their actions, not to mention the egregious economic disparages practiced against people of color. So how far have we come? As it turns out, many of the same issues that have plagued people of color in America fifty years ago still plague us today. What is the answer? People of color have consciously and actively practiced and advocated peace thus far, but is that enough? As I write this in the 50 th anniversary year since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., young Stephon Clark, a 22-year- old UNARMED African-American man has been murdered by Sacramento cops, shot eight times mostly in the back in his grandmother’s backyard. Four days, later Danny Ray Thomas, another UNARMED African-American man who was suffering from a mental health crisis was shot and killed by a Houston cop within thirty seconds of first seeing him. So what should we practice now? How may we get across a message of peace, respect, and unity that will last and spread, and will leave young black men free of the fear that they may be shot and killed any day by police officers whose job it is to protect citizens, but whose collective actions have induced fear among them instead.

Here is a question: Why would “the safety of individuals involved” be at potential risk if the terms of the settlement were revealed to the public? It seems to me that someone has something to hide. I would think that if what actually happened on August 9, 2014 was legitimate, there would be NO need to conceal any information from the public. I would have thought that the Ferguson Police Department, former police chief Thomas Jackson, and especially the accused Darren Wilson 7

USA Today; Amy Forliti, The Associated Press Published 10:16 p.m. ET July 10, 2017; Updated 11:16 a.m. ET July 11, 2017

Michael Brown: https://www.npr.org/sections/thewo-way/2017/06/20/533738274/michael-browns-parents-settle-wrongfuldeath-lawsuit-with- ferguson-mo

KMOV.com, Case: 4:15cv00831-ERW Doc. 165 Filed: 12/28/16 United States District Court, Eastern District Of Missouri, Eastern Division, Michael Brown Sr. And Lesley McSpadden vs. City of Ferguson, Missouri Former Police Chief Thomas Jackson And Former Police Officer Darren Wilson.

http://www.kmov.com/story/34900285/court-docs- may-show-contradictions-in-darren-wilsons-account-of-michael-brown-shooting https://docs. google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=http://KMOV.images.worldnow.com/ library/8dd8a209-aaf6-4996- a6fd-0bd6161d0341.pdf

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HOW FAR? 53

CAN GOD MAKE SOMETHING GOOD OUT OF SOMETHING BAD? Terralee Pettinger

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

– St. Paul, 58 A.D. (Romans 8:28)

These are difficult words to hear if your life isn’t going well, and if you’re an 11-year- old boy who has just been taken away from his family forever, the words would not ring true – but could they be? Olaudah Equiano was an Ibo born in Benin, Africa in 1745. His father was one of the village chieftains. This status meant prosperity for him and his family, who had captured prisoners from other tribes serving his family. One day when the adults were off in the fields, two men and a woman broke into their family compound and kidnapped Olaudah and his sister. They were bound and taken into the woods. Olaudah was separated from his sister during the trek to the sea and also was sold several times to different slave dealers during his sixmonth journey to the seashore. He had never seen the sea or a ship and was terrified by them both. The white crew also frightened him. Olaudah would become the best-known enslaved African because of his autobiography, “The interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.” 1 His description of his voyage on the slave ship provides a graphic and horrifying account of the Middle Passage, which he thankfully survived. He was sold as soon as the ship docked. His master took him to Jamaica, Virginia, and then England where he was left with a family who treated him kindly, provided some education, and also had him baptized as a Christian. He later went to sea as a captain’s assistant (still as a slave) and served in the Royal Navy during the Seven Years’ War. At Portsmouth after a battle, his master urged him to read, study, and learn basic math. His attention to these studies proved to be of great benefit to him later in his life, after he was sold to a Quaker Robert King of Philadelphia, for 1.

whom he worked as a clerk in his warehouse. Olaudah also worked as a longshoreman who loaded and unloaded the ships, and when he was at sea, he acquired navigation skills. Most importantly, King paid him for the work that he did. Olaudah also bought and sold goods in the islands and at ports on the mainland. He was able to purchase his freedom in 1766, at the age of twenty-one – ten years after he was captured in his West African village. He returned to England and learned to play the French horn and learned hairdressing from tutors he paid. He also worked as a merchant seaman. In 1789 he wrote his autobiography. It is clear from his own words that he saw God working in his life. He ends his narrative: “ I e a r l y a c c u s to m e d m y s e l f to l o o k a t t h e h a n d o f God in the minutest occurrence, and to learn from it a lesson of morality and religion; and in this light every circumstance I have related was to me of importance. After all, what makes any event important, unless by its better and wiser, and learn ‘to do justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly before God?”2

To those who are possessed by this spirit, there is scarcely any book or incident so trifling that does not afford some value, while to others the experience of ages seems of no use; and even to pour out to them the treasures of wisdom is throwing the jewels of instruction away. 2

Slave Narrative Classics, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Signet Classics, p225

Full original text free to download at: https://archive.org/stream/theinterestingna15399gut/15399.txt

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MACBETH IN THE MODERN WORLD Lila Orshefsky

What lessons of life may 21st century students gain from Shakespeare? Though the English language we speak now sounds quite different, powerful messages embedded in those immortal, poetic lines ring true through the ages. To bring Shakespeare’s genius into our contemporary world, enter Anthony Carreiro of the Long Beach City College (LBCC) Performing Arts Department, creative force behind the brilliant Spring 2018 production of MacBeth. Professor Carreiro is a seasoned actor, director, and fight choreographer of Shakespeare, participating in festivals up and down the West Coast and in New York. In fact, the LBCC MacBeth troupe has been accepted out of hundreds of applications from colleges nationwide into the top 25 productions to be performed at the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF), and to those who caught a showing, it is clear why. The minimalistic, unpretentious yet stylish stage scenery, the multimedia effects of light, projection, and sound, and the overall conception came together flawlessly to convey the underlying messages. The gifted LBCC actors’ tireless work was evident as their Shakespearean prose was delivered with such passion and clarity that one felt suspended between past and present, between the turmoil of medieval Scotland of MacBeth and the turmoil of our society today. This sinister parallel is hinted in the playbill when it describes the setting as, “Present…[in] a country much like America.” In the first moments of the play, the audience was enveloped in darkness, then suddenly faced with two opposing armies illuminated with the flash of a strobe light, leering menacingly across the battlefield at each other. They charged in slow motion into a perfectly choreographed battle sequence, and the audience was seized with the first chills brought on by MacBeth’s central themes: bloodlust, war, and the darker impulses of the human soul. Is violence innate in humans? Must we shed blood to feel strong? Apparently so, as in Scene 2, when a wounded, bleeding captain was brought from a battle, he was pried for news before receiving any aid for

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his injuries. He shared news of Generals MacBeth and Banquo’s worthy and macabre defeat of a traitor to their king and of two enemy armies. For cleaving the traitor’s body in half from jaw to belly button and then displaying his severed head on the castle battlements, MacBeth and Banquo were hailed as heroes. The poor, bleeding captain shared more details of the onslaught before finally being led off to be cared for. We are reminded by this scene how passively humans can look upon the pain of others, and that pure politics aims to avoid suffering at all costs. Tactics based purely on vast armies treated like dispensable weapons who then lay siege to the “enemy,” without mercy or reason behind their show of power, only brutality and hunger for dominion, are detrimental to our world. In the slain traitor’s case, though his actions led to his own demise, MacBeth and Banquo showed no greater virtue by reveling in decapitating him and impaling his head as their bloody trophy, but carnal bloodthirst. When faced with unavoidable conflict, seek to remain good and leave your soul untainted by spite, even in the darkest of times. Traditionally masculine displays of domination have historically manifested themselves in countless wars, quests of conquest, manto-man duels. We often wonder these days if another world war is not far away. We have seen nations fall to their knees at the mercy of conquest and greed. U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton dead in 1804. In Scene 1, three wise old witches prophesized approaching chaos and asked each other if they should next meet “In thunder, lightning, or in rain,” and decided to do so “When the hurlyburly’s done / When the battle’s lost and won.” They already knew the terrors which will soon unfold for the sake of human ambition. They had seen it before and they acted as guides as the inevitable doom played out and order was restored for the time being.

Michael Martinez as dead Macbeth. Photo: Lila Orshefsky

The association of masculinity with power, and of power with violence for the sake of dominance, has wrought havoc on the Earth for centuries past. To spare future generations, let us examine our ideas of masculinity and femininity, and of what it means to be powerful. This is what Professor Carreiro’s production of MacBeth encourages, based on ideas that emerged during an enlightened conversation with his family. In this postmodern era, we are seeing changing perspectives and the glorious breaking down of barriers which have, for long enough, separated us from each other by means of shallow generalizations and blind, unthinking cultural acceptance of traditional norms whose subtle, vicious fallacies disarm us and turn us against our fellow humans. These fallacies are easily veiled by the ignorance ingrained by passing time. To move forward, we must unveil them and reveal them for what they truly are: discrimination and hate which runs deep in our society. We are a nation, a continent, a hemisphere, built on the bones and ruins of people whose ancestors claimed this land thousands of years ago, on exploitation of masses of people. This is an agony which weighs heavily on the historically aware and morally virtuous American. How may we build a positive future on a mournful past plagued by all forms of hatred humankind is capable of inflicting on each other? Like the symbolism of Charles Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil, let darkness lead to light. “Let good cometh out of evil.” Lady MacBeth, portrayed by the lovely and refined Celine Castro, showed in detail how the feminine soul, traditionally associated with innocence and passivity, which is a “natural” assumption both inaccurate and underestimating, may tend toward a masculine ideal when seized with hunger for power or angry rage. Lady MacBeth, while coaxing her husband

MacBeth, played by LBCC graduate Michael Martinez, a remarkable performer, into murdering Queen Duncan in order to take her crown, fell into a rhetoric which prayed on his sense of manliness to convince him to commit an act of violence, taunting him, “What beast wasn ‘t, then, / That made you break this enterprise to me? / When you durst do it, then you were a man; / And to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the man.” She denounced him to animal status if he did not have the courage to go through with the evil plan which struck fear into his sensitive heart. To kill a loving and gracious queen in cold blood, one must be strong like a man! Indeed, when Lady MacBeth first read in a letter of the witches’ prophecy that MacBeth would be king, she immediately hoped he would fulfill his “fate,” but fretted, “Yet do I fear thy nature; / It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness…” She presented mercy and kindness as symbolized by mother’s milk again when she asked for strength so she could become more like a man in order to do what must be done, saying, “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood…. / Come to my woman’s breasts, / And take my milk for gall, you murd’ring ministers.” MacBeth as her foil was portrayed as effeminate for feeling conflicted about murder while Lady MacBeth strove for masculine strength in her cold-heartedness. The switching of gender roles illustrated the misconceptions embedded in our society that Professor Carreiro wished to shed light on-- the generalization that women are weak and men are strong. No matter one’s gender, they should always reserve room in their heart for mercy, and not label it as weak or feminine, for this is a damaging stereotype that leads to suffering.

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Celine Castro as Lady Macbeth. Photo: Lila Orshefsky

MacBeth’s emerging enemy, the suspicious thane MacDuff, also brought feminist discourse to center stage with her actions, as Professor Carreiro made the conscious choice to cast an African-American woman for the traditionally male role, giving a relevant representation of power dynamics. Karen Owens expertly delivered the strong role of the one whose destiny it was to restore moral order by killing King MacBeth before he could take any more lives. She said in an interview, “I loved the idea of women moving forward as leaders. At first, to prepare for the role, I looked up other productions of MacBeth with female MacDuffs. But then, I decided to forget all that and just go with the facts: MacDuff had a wife and son who she loved, she was a powerful soldier and thane, and she was the first to sense something amiss when Queen Duncan was murdered. In trying to do what she felt was right, she made her most fatal mistake. In seeking to defeat MacBeth, she left her family unprotected, leading to their downfall.” Professor Carreiro explained further that MacDuff as a woman revealed a side of power not often shown in literature and art: the angry mama bear who would do anything to protect her family. MacDuff killed MacBeth with a fury which burned deep in her heart after he caused the murder of her beloved family, displaying fierce power women are capable of wielding, especially when they and their loved ones are attacked. Professor Carreiro reminded us with his conception of MacBeth that from female politicians and celebrities to victims of domestic abuse, women must stand together in this modern world to gain recognition and respect for their fearsome, beautiful strength.

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MACBETH 57

Danny Shultz, Duality, 2013, archival pigment print.

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NONBINARY COLLECTIVE/ZINE: ADDRESSING STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE VIA ART AND LIVED EXPERIENCE Jayvien McNeill, Danny Shultz, Vin Olefer, Michael Rober ts, and Abel Avalos

NONBINARY co. (NB co.) are a transgender (trans)-led group of activists, academics, students, artists, and writers who aim to collaborate via community-based art, events, and engagement in Long Beach’s rich, arts-based, LGBTQIA+ community. Founded in 2017, the collective is currently focused on increasing visibility for people with non-binary gender identities, first by getting to know each other through spaces of support and discussion. Their aim is not to dismantle gender binaries, but to show that gender is not just binary; it is a non-linear spectrum of potential embodiments that the collective hopes others recognize within themselves. Embedded in NB co.’s approach is a commitment to sharing lived experiences of in order to educate people on the day-to-day realities of living in a cissexist society. Non-binary identities have not only been historically excluded from cisgender1 society at large, but specifically have been excluded from the greater transgender community on the basis that non-binary identities cannot “actually” be classified as transgender. The reasoning which sustains this exclusion regards the belief that being transgender requires identifying as either a man or a woman (e.g., trans woman, trans man). The reasoning also posits that gender/sex transition, in the form of hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) or gender-affirming surgeries, is required to identify as transgender; however, not all people can afford to transition, nor transition safely.

theorize; connect with other trans people; organize resources; circulate positive affirmations; disseminate scientific research. For teenagers and young adults, the zines have assisted with the process of coming out and have served as tools in counseling sessions. The collective aims to expand their membership in upcoming years as each individual in the community embarks on their own journey. Cisgender individuals are those whose intrinsic gender identities match their assigned sex at birth. Cis-sexism is thus the idea that cisgender individuals are more valued, “normal,” “natural,” or “right.” This is reflected in society’s binary gendered expectations of everyone in public and private institutions (e.g., sex-segregated bathrooms to imprison trans women in men’s quarters). Gatekeeping encompasses a wide range of practices exercised by those in power over certain populations. Institutions like the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and those responsible for psychological classifications are exemplary of historical gatekeeping behavior responsible for the hyper-surveillance and classification of transgender people. Institutions like prison systems, hospitals, and even private health care practices should also be held accountable for gatekeeping access to necessary health care for transgender people of all classes.

The prospect of transitioning for most individuals in America is bleak. In addition to the historical gatekeeping 2 of the access to hormones and surgeries by health communities and institutions, the cost of transition is extremely expensive. According to Abel Avalos, a member of NB co. and a writer for the Long Beachbased, youth-led newspaper VOICEWAVES, 3 transitioning can cost “upwards of $75,000.” In addition, many trans people—especially trans people of color—defer their physical transition in order to maintain their personal safety from poignant amounts of violence based in multiple institutions and systems of oppression (racism, hetero-/cis-sexism, the prison and medical industrial complexes, the current government regime and its legislative consequences, etc.). According to a national report of discriminatory experiences faced by 6,456 trans people in the United States, 57% of respondants were abandoned by their families; up to 59% experienced work discrimination or violence; 60% were denied health care, and well over half, 64-78%, experienced violence at school or work. NONBINARY co. aims to call attention to these pervasive issues through their future work. The development and distribution of NONBINARY co.’s three zine issues have thus far served as a way to: process violence-based traumas; address harmful work against trans and queer communities; share art; 1

Key findings from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality.

Haas, A. P., Rodgers, P. L., & Herman, J. L. (2014). Suicide Attempts Among Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Adults: Findings of the national transgender discrimination survey. 1-18.

NONBINARY Zine is available through queer and trans-lead zine distro Brown Recluse Zine Distory based in Olympia, Washington. https://www. brownreclusezinedistro.com/

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NOT YOUR AVERAGE ART SHOW

RAW ARTISTS SHAKING UP THE INDEPENDENT ART WORLD Rafael Lumang

“There’s got to be a better way to get my work out there.” Editor’s Note: I came across RAW Artists (RAW) after meeting Alma Hernandez, a RAW Artist curator, and I was impressed with the altruistic mission of RAW. There are so many talented individuals out there, but many lack the resources and platform that an organization like RAW might provide. A platform like RAW is relevant to many of our readers and we wanted to give them a look at what RAW is all about. H E I D I L U E R R A began her clothing line by selling original pieces at swap-meets—feeling like a small fish in a big pond, questioning what she could do to get her work noticed. Now, especially in the midst of our social media era, where many creative voices are eclipsed by those with a higher follower count, it’s even more difficult for her to be seen and heard. Equipped with a mission to provide a platform and resources to talented artists like Heidi who simply want to be noticed, RAW was born. Immediately after the first RAW event, a web developer, Matthew Klahorst approached Heidi about combining these art events with an online community for artists. From this collaboration came the next evolution of RAW: promoting artists and creating a community both online and offline. RAW has expanded to cities across the United States, first spanning international waters to Australia in 2012, and then opening locations in Canada and the UK. Now, RAW hosts events and showcases independent creatives in over 70 cities across the globe. RAW isn’t your typical art walk or white wall gallery. Every other month, RAW combs the local underground scene and invites local artistic talent in visual arts, fashion design, film, music, performance art, cosmotology, and photography to share their work. RAW strives to present artists who wouldn’t otherwise have an opportunity to showcase their craft. With artists from all genres coming together at every show, RAW’s events form dazzling one-night circuses of creativity.

Upon entering a RAW event you might see projections and screenings of films made by passionate indie filmmakers. Then, strolling along the edges of the venue, you might find yourself surrounded by colorful canvases and prints hanging on panels from illustrators, painters, and photographers. Wandering further, you may discover tables covered with gems and jewelry, perfect gifts for loved ones; or find stickers and pins, which might come in handy when accessorizing the old denim jacket that needed some sprucing up. While fixated on the art, your ears will be filled with original music from local emerging musicians, or you’ll see dance mixes from performers on the main stage. Then, topping off the night, the stage evolves into a runway for the grand finale. Models catwalk gracefully in clothing the likes of which you’ve never seen before, along with bold hairstyles and brilliant makeup. Before you know it, you’ve just seen over 50 artists in a single night! RAW artists have full creative control over what they want to present. Every artist has the opportunity to learn how to promote themselves, ask for support, and watch their showcase come together. RAW’s fulltime Artist Experience Department helps guide each artist through the showcase process, ensuring they are set up for success. RAW provides a plethora of perks for each independent artist who embodies their mission: tools, resources, education, and exposure. How do you become a RAW artist? Easy: Visit www.RAWartists.org and submit work in just five minutes!

LUZ

KHMER CUISINE IN LONG BEACH AN OVERVIEW OF CAMBODIAN FOOD FOLLOWED BY A LIST OF MY FAVORITE PLACES, AND THEIR SPECIALTIES, SO YOU CAN EAT YOUR WAY THROUGH THE 562 hangrybinch, aka Andria Antoniades

Cambodian food is bright, saucy, hand-held, crunchy, cool, vegetal, fermented, and best eaten on the floor with family and friends. The geography of Cambodia features flat plains, floodplains, rivers, and coastline wetlands; Cambodian cuisine reflects this varied environment. Rice can be steamed, processed into rice noodles, roasted for seasoning, or used for porridge and desserts. Frogs, watercress, catfish, freshwater shrimp, lotus, water spinach and other aquatic/semi-aquatic foods are common in Cambodian food. Shrimp is either grilled, cooked in soup, or ground up into a preserved paste. Lotus seeds, roots, and stems are also used in Cambodian cuisine. Refreshing papaya salad—shredded young papaya mixed with lime, chilis, and sometimes freshwater crab—is often served with satay, marinated and grilled meat on a bamboo skewer. Other fruits include mango, starfruit, dragonfruit, small bananas, jackfruit, and lychee. These are often eaten alone as dessert or with chili, salt, or sticky rice as a snack.

S TA R BA K E RY 1207 Gardenia Ave, Long Beach, CA 90813 Noum Crowrp, a soft and chewy dessert made of homemade mung bean paste soaked in jasmine scented syrup. S O P H Y ’S 3240 E Pacific Coast Hwy, Long Beach, CA 90804 Larb, ground meat salad with herbs such as mint and galangal eaten with raw lettuce. Thai eggplant. LITTLE L A LUNE 2054 E Pacific Coast Hwy, Long Beach, CA 90804 Hot bakwan, fried bread you eat with noodle soups. HAK HAENG 2041 E Anaheim St, Long Beach, CA 90804 Beef broth soup, a clear consomme served in a small bowl alongside regular entrees.

Sour ingredients include kaffir lime leaf, lemongrass, and tamarind. Salty ingredients include soy sauce, fermented pastes from fish or shrimp, and fish sauce. Sweet ingredients include palm sugar, cane sugar, and coconut. Kreung combines these flavors in a paste made of lemongrass stalks, shallots, soaked chilis, kaffir lime leaf, galangal, garlic, turmeric, and salt. This brightly colored paste is used as a base in soups such as Somlaw koko or marinades. Other cultures have influenced Cambodian food. For example, the colonial French brought pâté and baguettes. Strong coffee is another post-colonial food. Indian curry is an influence in Cambodian food; however Cambodian curry is less thick. Similar spices are used as well including turmeric and ginger. The service style is communal. Typically all dishes including soups, salads, and proteins are served at the same time. There is no definite hierarchy of dishes; they can be eaten in any order. People typically eat on the floor or on low tables on small stools. Sauces are often served on the side to increase the flavor of dishes. These seasonings include fish sauce, bird’s eye chili in fish sauce, salt/pepper, and chili sauce. The food can be eaten with the hands in combination with rice or raw vegetable. Vegetables include sliced lao eggplant, romaine lettuce, or cucumbers. Vegetables with high water content provide a cooling effect on the often spicy and salty dips, and cut the oils of fish dishes. Steamed white rice is served at every meal as starch. Long Beach, my hometown, has the largest population of Cambodian people outside of Cambodia. Cambodia Town lies on Anaheim Street between Atlantic and Junipero, and is home to some of my favorite restaurants and specialty dishes.

SPRING 2018

A TOY AIRPLANE

The Last Day of Saigon A Memoir by Brian Doan I still remember that morning. It was an early spring day and the new year spirit seemed to echo in the air, to reflect off every smiling face at our small Catholic school in Quang Ngai—a little town in central Vietnam famous for its barley sweets and special cinnamon treats.

Quang Ngai, New Year 1975. (left to right) Mr. Le (driver), Brian Doan, brother Huy.

BRIAN DOAN

Mentor and Advisor, LUZ Spring 2018 Born in Quang Ngai, Vietnam in 1968, currently teaches in the Visual & Media Arts Dep. at Long Beach City College.

A month before that spring morning, Dad returned home from a trip to Japan. During a transit layover in Taipei he bought me a gift from the PX shop—a cool toy airplane. I don’t need to tell you that kids at school got jealous and insane over my new toy, and I suddenly became the most popular boy during playtime. My teacher let us out early to the playground that morning. My older brother and sister were also attending the same school but we normally didn’t go on break at the same time.

By the time I got there, almost half of the school staff were outside, anxiously staring at us. The driver slowly made a wide U-turn around the flagpole to the entrance gate. I ignored my brother who kept reminding me to sit down and put on my seatbelt. I crawled back and looked through the rear windshield to where my classmates, my teacher, a few staff members, and Father Thomas—in his foreverblack outfit with white-collared shirt—stood motionless behind the flagpole.

Around noon, Father Thomas, who usually worked in his principal’s office during that hour, strode onto the playground and called my name. For a moment I thought I was in a trouble because my classmates were being so loud as they ran to and fro, “flying” my toy airplane in the air. Father Thomas, the padre of our town, was a handsome man in his early 30s. He was also my dad’s tennis partner. His face seemed weary. With a soft voice he told me, “Your family driver is waiting. You must leave school immediately.” Looking through the playground fence, I could see our white car parked by the flagpole. It was unusual to park a car there because it was a restricted area used for morning prayers and salutes. I could see Mr. Le, our driver, helping my brother and sister into the car.

In that very moment, looking into their faces I realized that my youth, my innocence, my hometown—and the first beautiful toy airplane I ever owned—were lost together and forever. Years later, after the war, as I travelled to different countries, I’d pass schoolyards and stop to look into the grounds. Once I spotted a paper airplane left behind by a kid, probably a young boy. The plane’s folded paper wings were faded and weathered by time. Who was that boy, and where was his home now? April 30, 2018

LUZ

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