Resist the Audio Archive
NIELA ORR: I just want to make a disclaimer for anybody listening to this: if I sound white, or a little bit restrained, or, I don’t know, stuffy, it’s because the computer and all recording devices are extensions of the white gaze. And so, this is the best that I’m doing under those conditions. [laughter]
SARA ORTIZ: That is today’s guest host, Niela Orr.
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During the recording of this episode, Niela joined us from her home studio - aka bedroom closet – in Philadelphia.
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SARA ORTIZ: Welcome to Black Mountain Radio, broadcast from the Mojave Desert. I’m Sara Ortiz.
NIELA ORR: And I’m Niela Orr.
ORTIZ: So, Niela, can we talk about the disclaimer?
ORR: [laughter] Yeah, we can. I knew we would.
ORTIZ: We should probably give folks the context here. We captured that unscripted moment—I love that moment, but it was very much an unscripted moment—while we were tracking your narration for the Toni Morrison segment, which kicks off this episode of Black Mountain Radio. I want to say it was your third recording.
ORR: Yeah, I believe it was the third recording. I was realizing that I didn’t feel entirely comfortable and I didn’t know why. I was still feeling very apprehensive about the recording process, honestly.
ORTIZ: Yeah. I hear you. And just so listeners know, we decided to begin with that unscripted moment because this episode is about performance. Who's watching, and who's listening, and how are they listening, with what intent? And how does that change the nature of the performance itself?
ORR: Yeah. I felt nervous. There was something that sort of locked up for me when I got in front of this recording device. I remember something the filmmaker Arthur Jafa said when he was making his documentary Dreams Are Colder Than Death. The audio from his interview didn’t sync with his images. The audio and the B-roll never correspond. In this documentary interviews Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, a bunch of prominent Black writers and thinkers. He was explaining that he didn’t have the camera turned on when he talked to them. He feels that the white gaze is pervasive in all these recording technologies.
ORTIZ: Mmm. That white gaze.
ORR: Even though I wasn’t technically in front of a camera, I was still in front of this technology that was going to record my voice and I had to put my best foot, face, voice forward. [laughter] And that was very daunting to me.
ORTIZ: There is certainly a particular way people tend to sound on radio—that NPR voice of sorts, right?
ORR: Yeah and—in addition to NPR voice, there’s a writer voice, too. So you got writer voice and NPR voice together. It’s just bad, [laughter] y’know?
ORTIZ: Yeah, I do know. It’s so interesting that you say that, because clearly at Black Mountain Radio we’re aware of that but we’re not trying to emulate it. These six episodes are driven by artists and focused on our Vegas community. And usually around this time of year, we’re only weeks away from our annual Believer Festival. This program will reflect an essence of that festival.
ORR: …. And we’re also celebrating BMI’s 15th Anniversary which is super exciting.
ORTIZ: Yes! [singing] Happy Birthday to us.
ORR: [laughter]
ORTIZ: I could do Las Mañanitas, but I won’t.
[RESET 1]
ORTIZ: So, when we first started sketching out this season, we knew we wanted to revisit the inaugural BMI Lecture delivered by Toni Morrison back in 2006. And because Niela, you and I shared an office for about a year, I knew about how Morrison was a pivotal figure in your life, so I suggested we reach out to you to talk about that lecture. And I’m so glad you agreed!
ORR: I’m so glad that you asked me because it really gave me this opportunity to talk about someone who means so much to me. I’m so excited to be thinking about her. She is a person who was not interested in writing for the white gaze. She spoke that very proudly. As a Black woman, she means so much to me. And I’m glad I got this opportunity to meditate on her life, her career, and her work.
I feel like the spirit of Toni Morrison is guiding this recording.
ORTIZ: I’m gonna try to channel that energy with me for the rest of this recording.
What follows next is Niela Orr navigating Morrison’s remarks about refuge and asylum.
INVISIBLE INK
[Languid piano plays. Niela Orr begins to speak as the music continues]
NIELA ORR: My life changed the summer of 2005 when I read Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon for the first time. I was sixteen, and I had never read anything like it. It was complex, and beautiful, and challenging, and it was entirely about Black life.
And the language felt “lived-in” to me, felt like real approximations of the kinds of things my great-grandmother used to say.
Morrison ends the book by writing: “if you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.”
[Languid piano continues to play along with slow, easy riffs from a saxophone. As Orr begins to speak, the piano and sax fade away.]
ORR: It’s a riddle I still consider to this day. Back then, I was particularly struck by the italicized emphasis on “ride.” It communicated writerly intention I hadn’t known was possible. The formatting of this one word demonstrated radical care that thrilled me.
Ride; the word’s slant, along with the rest of the sentence, suggested leaning into experience. All kinds of possibilities opened up for me with that reading.
I went on to study Morrison’s body of work in my last two years of high school, and then in college, and then in my graduate writing program. Now her books are friends on the shelf, immersions into language and the familiar points-of-view of my favorite characters, like Sula, and Nell, and Milkman, and JD.
I regularly pull them down to remind myself of some detail I'd forgotten, or to recreate the conditions of discovery. Leaf to a random page in a Morrison book, and you’ll find something alluring.
Morrison’s books demand to be re-read.
Back then, I took refuge in re-engaging them. They were a place to be, to hang out in after school. I was repeatedly edified by returning to the material. I’d find new things to appreciate each time.
I found immense value in the intricacy of Morrison’s writing, and her resistance to be easily understood, at least on the first read. Her books demanded effort, and I wanted to work.
In addition to providing a place to escape, Morrison herself was a model for the kind of professional I could be, as a writer and editor, and, more broadly, as an interpreter of my own interior life, and as a conceiver of my own liberation.
As she wrote in her book, Playing in the Dark, “my work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African American woman in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world.” In that same book, she said that her project as a writer rises from delight.
She found delight in reading, writing, and speaking publicly about things that mattered to her, whether at Harvard, or Princeton, where she taught for many years, or to the Nobel committee.
[The sound of an auditorium full of people cuts in]
Or to an auditorium full of bookish Las Vegans.
[We hear the distant voice of a man speaking into a microphone: “Please turn off all cellphones…” As announcements continue, Orr continues her narration.]
ORR: Fifteen years ago this month, on April 6, 2006, Morrison spoke to a crowded lecture hall on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
[We hear the grainy recording of voices from the lecture continue intercut with Orrs narration.]
CAROL C. HARTER [from archival recording]: To our immense pleasure and admiration I’d like to introduce our speaker…
ORR: The Nobel prize winner was at UNLV to deliver the inaugural Black Mountain Institute lecture to an audience of more than a thousand eager listeners.
HARTER: …one of the most lauded and accomplished writers of our time, Toni Morrison.
[Audience applause. The sound fades away before Orr narrates.]
ORR: Now, I have to warn you, the audio recording of the lecture is not very good. As you listen, you might find yourself straining to understand the full meaning of her words.
The tape is illegible, it sounds like it’s recorded by someone who was sitting in the back of the lecture hall who keeps fidgeting with the recorder.
[Sounds of white noise, audience applause, and the shuffling around of a recorder all at once.]
ORR: The tape mostly resists understanding, but not in the subversive way Morrison’s writing does. For this reason, I’ll be a kind of intermediary between 2006 Morrison and you, translating her speech.
[We can hear from the archive of the lecture that Toni Morrison has walked up to the podium and begun to speak. The recording of her voice is intercut with Niela Orr from the present.]
TONI MORRISON [voice & mic sounds]: … I would like to compliment this city, Las Vegas…
ORR: Known for her elegant prose, rigorous literary scholarship, and incisive, incantatory novels, that night, Morrison turned her brilliant imagination to the notion of asylum.
MORRISON: The Cities of Asylum takes care to ensure the life of writers facing peril, but along with that urgency, I want to emphasize that their absence…
ORR: She talked about the role Las Vegas would play as an emerging safe haven for persecuted writers and their families.
By that point, Morrison’s bona fides as a writer, editor, and lecturer had been firmly established already. But this appearance highlighted an underreported aspect of her legacy, that of an advocate for humanitarian projects, like City of Asylum.
MORRISON: … Inevitable because creativity in some ways, in ordinary ways, in extraordinary ways, in experimental ways, creativity, obviously, thrives here.
ORR: In her address, she engaged the idea of place-making, a core theme in much of her writing.
Las Vegas belongs to NANCA, the North American Cities of Asylum program, which, in turn, formed from the International Institute of Modern Letters.
Black Mountain Institute’s first executive director, Dr. Carol C. Harter, hoped BMI would attract worldwide talent and hoped to open its doors to writers seeking refuge.
MORRISON: The help we extend to them is a profound generosity to ourselves.
ORR: Morrison praised BMI’s initiative. Her address was global in scope. She wanted to discuss “the peril in which artists all over the world live, about the danger in some regions of simply practicing modern art.”
MORRISON: …in the efforts to censure, starve, regulate and annihilate it, were clear and effective signs that something truly important had taken place.
ORR: Eight months removed from hurricane Katrina, Morrison touched on the stark devastation there, and told the audience about how she had encountered a hurricane survivor in New York city.
[A plaintive saxophone riff fades in underneath the narration.]
ORR: He played a song on his saxophone, splendid music that, as Morrison put it, was “overwhelming in its refusal to be overwhelmed by sorrow.”
MORRISON: A musician, who, in fact, was from New Orleans, stood up and was introduced. He just stood up and played the saxophone…
[Toni Morrison’s voice fades away as the interlaced sound of a languid, jazzy piano and saxophone gets louder. We hear the instruments play for a moment before they fade away again.]
ORR: Morrison invoked the artists working near the “throng of military power or empire building.” But, as one might expect, the place she addressed most directly was Las Vegas.
“Las Vegas, as you must know,—
MORRISON: ...is a city that has lived in the imaginations of the entire population for as long as it has existed. Real and surreal.”
ORR: At just 116 years-old, Las Vegas is one of America’s newer major cities, and is still making itself.
In 2006, when Morrison visited BMI, her appearance helped Vegas’ literary community to better shape itself. Las Vegas Weekly laid out the project in an article called “Can They Build A Culture?” They, meaning BMI.
[We hear Morrison begin speaking before Orr translates the rough audio for us. As Orr speaks, Morrison’s voice floats in the background, echoing Orr.]
MORRISON: I would like to compliment this city...
ORR: “I would like to compliment this city, Las Vegas, for its participation in the network of City of Asylum thoroughly, initially pioneer-like in participating in this really extraordinary movement.”
Morrison’s voice fades away as Orr finishes her quote.
ORR: Morrison helped Las Vegas become a refuge by vouching for its legitimacy as an arts center and signal-boosting its participation in the City of Asylum program. As Morrison said in her lecture, “it is imperative that we accumulate safe environments, not only to save the writers, but to save ourselves.”
[We hear the same piano from before play a slow, meandering song in that same languid style. A saxophone joins in, riffing on the same notes. It fades away as Orr begins her narration again.]
ORR: Black Mountain Institute has maintained its mission, and since 2006, it has hosted three City 0f Asylum fellows and their families. In 2014, BMI’s City of Asylum fellow was Hossein Abkenar, a Cannes-award winning screenwriter and novelist whose work, which concerns Iranian history, revolution, and women’s rights, is banned in his native Iran.
He has spoken about the peace he and his son, Nima, had found in Las Vegas. He spoke of a room, a protected place to try out ideas.
“I am a writer,” he said. “For me, a small room, a table and pieces of paper to write on are enough. It does not matter where in the world this room is located. Tehran, Paris, Las Vegas ... I want to write in a state of peace and fearlessness.”
[Piano playing fades in]
ORR: Morrison highlighted the type of persecution writers like Hossein were fleeing from. When speaking about censorship and the erasure of other voices, she said, “it’s as though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.”
[Piano playing continues as applause from Toni Morrison’s lecture cuts in. Morrison begins to speak.]
MORRISON: So, it’s probably inevitable that leaders…
[Toni Morrison’s voice continues underneath the sound of Orr translating the audio for us again.]
ORR: “It’s probably inevitable that leaders in this community—with I’m sure some prodding—but nevertheless they agreed some years ago to become an asylum haven, inevitable because creativity in some way—in extraordinary ways, in experimental ways, creativity obviously thrives here.”
[A saxophone and piano play in unison for a moment before fading away]
ORR: Hi, Ahmed, how's it going?
AHMED NAJI: We are recording. Hi, Niela, how is it going? How’s Philly?
ORR: [laughter] Good. It's getting warm here.
[Naji and Orr’s conversation continues in the background as Orr narrates.]
ORR: Listening to Morrison’s remarks, I naturally think of my friend, Ahmed Naji, BMI’s current City of Asylum fellow.
NAJI: …and I was like, you know what? I can give you this article in 30 minutes. [Orr laughs] I have been writing the same article for 10 years now...
[Both Naji and Orr laugh. Their conversation continues inaudibly and fades away]
ORR: Ahmed is someone who I feel really lucky to know. Whether it’s texting him about a graphic novel he reviewed, or comparing notes on political talking head shows, I value his incredible personality and his iconoclastic way of thinking.
It’s possible to sip wine and laugh so hard at his stories that it becomes physically uncomfortable to finish your meal.
[The sound of Orr continuing to describe her memory with Ahmed fades away. As Orr’s narration fades, eerie ambient music starts.]
ORR: In 2016, Ahmed served 10 months of his 2-year sentence in Cairo’s Tora Prison for the charge of “violating public modesty” after a reader claimed he experienced heart palpitations while reading Ahmed’s novel, Using Life.
[Ominous music continues for a few moments.]
ORR: In an excerpt from his memoir, Rotten Evidence, which was published in The Believer in February 2021, Ahmed wonders if his writing was worth all the pain and suffering he endured during his legal ordeal.
Morrison’s line about invisible ink recalls an anecdote Ahmed mentions in Rotten Evidence. In the story, Ahmed describes a fellow prisoner at Tora, who spent his days writing his autobiography, only to have it confiscated and burned upon his release.
All of those memories documented, only to be destroyed. The man was presented with two options: to remember it all and start over again, or to live with the agony of writing a life story only to realize that the conditions of his imprisonment had rendered the memoir in invisible ink.
The man wept. And, later, he was carried out of the prison.
[Ominous music plays out.]
ORR: It’s not that Morrison understood the complexity of refuge and asylum because her work contains so many imaginings of it.
She started early in grad school. Her thesis was about “the alienated” in works by William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. In her writing, she manifested the rooms both Woolf and Hossein Abkenar considered necessary for their creative freedom.
Quite a few of Morrison’s novels interrogate the idea of sanctuary or asylum.
MORRISON: The very first book I wrote, called The Bluest Eye, was one where I was not really thinking about publishing or reviewers or other readers, it was a book I wanted to read, and I couldn’t find it anywhere...
ORR: In her work, she creates zones of hope and terror, places where her characters sometimes misguidedly think potential and violence are confined within. But Morrison’s work is partly about the inevitability of confrontation, both physical and ideological. It concerns the futility of escape. In her work, nowhere is truly safe.
[We hear sounds of birds, cicadas and voices from Beloved’s film adaptation. Dialogue from the movie plays:“Baby Suggs used to preach right here.” Baby Suggs says, “Let the children come!” and laughs. The sound fades away as Orr speaks.]
ORR: In the Pulitzer prize-winning Beloved, Black people gather in a protected enclave for the formerly enslaved, a Cincinnati forest opening called “the clearing.” A wise woman, named Baby Suggs, preaches in the clearing about the importance of self-love.
[Audio from Beloved’s film adaptation continues. We hear dialogue from the character Baby Suggs in a convictive preacher’s tone: “Let your wives and your children see you dance!” We hear affirmative hollers from a crowd of men. Then, the sound of laughing, hollering, and rhythmic stomping.]
ORR: The clearing is a hopeful hub. A place of respite nestled inside of an oppressive, anti-Black United States.
[As audio from Beloved’s film adaptation finishes, we hear men stomping in unison and cheer as Baby Suggs begins to hum.]
ORR: In April 2006, when Morrison spoke at BMI, she was probably at work on A Mercy, her masterful late novel on America in the seventeenth century. The novel focuses on this country before it had a name and an official ethos, even though then, as Morrison shows, it was still a troubled place.
Fleeing racism, sexism, colonization, slavery and smallpox, the indigenous and Black protagonists of A Mercy navigate a world where there is very little mercy to be found.
The world she described in A Mercy was, for all of its characters, the essence of the new world, constantly reinventing itself.
As I consider that cruel, inhospitable social environment and the dangerous wilderness of the early America described in A Mercy, my mind flashes to Las Vegas. It still retains much of that pioneer mentality, especially as the city stretches beyond its own limits.
[Archival sound from Morrion’s 2006 lecture at BMI cuts back in. We hear the echo and empty air of the auditorium as she speaks.]
MORRISON: “It’s really the essence of the new world—constantly inventing, outrageously welcoming, both surprising and familiar.”
[As the sound of Morrison’s lecture fades out, a contemporary lo-fi beat begins to play in the background.]
ORR: I lived in Vegas for a year and three months, and I discovered firsthand that it’s fun to walk down Las Vegas Boulevard, as I have done many times, both alone and with friends, to fall into a fantasy, a play self that sparkles under the thousands of bulbs in Strip signage. But just as in Morrison’s novels, there is no escape in Vegas.
What I’ve learned is that you bring yourself wherever you go. That was never truer than when I lived in the city. I already had family and close friends at home, but I found more of my people there, a community of writers and artists making work in the shadow of billboards and gigantic, fabulous resorts.
Some of my friends are homegrown talent, and others are transplants, like I was.
Second to finding more kindred spirits, I found a professional role that suited me, and a way to make a living at my chosen craft. In Las Vegas, I’ve learned that you don’t really escape; you just find more of who you really are.
It’s hard to find true silence or darkness in downtown Las Vegas, where I lived for most of my stay. But there’s the quiet you discover when you deliberately choose tranquility in a city the tourism board markets for its rowdiness.
The middle of the night in the desert is time to compose work and tap into a version of oneself that is at once both simpler and more complex—a self-critical mirage, but lured, nevertheless, by whatever shape it takes in twilight. A moon dog in the night sky; the distant star of an idea appearing more clearly in the dark.
In an essay called “Peril,” about artists under siege, Morrison explained that there are typically two responses to chaos: naming and violence.
But there is also a third response: stillness. “Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness,” she said, “it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art.”
[The sound of an old TV interview fades in.]
INTERVIEWER: ...when they went to bed, that silence in the house, you were very lonely. And I think writing must be brilliant if you’re lonely…
The sound of the interviewer fades away as she continues the question.
ORR: In a 1988 interview, she teased out this kind of quietude:
[The interview fades in again, with Morrison answering the question.]
MORRISON: The solitude is critical. People have said that unhappy childhoods make good writers because they tend to read because they’re miserable or escape. And the solitude, and the loneliness, or the aloneness in which you only have your own company. And if that isn’t sufficient, then you will invent other company, and that is what fiction is.
[Lo-fi music plays again]
ORR: When I broke up with my ex-husband in 2012, I found myself in a Morrisonian state. As a newly single woman, I was stuck between pain and possibility. Upset with the loss of a sense of permanence—of home—in that relationship, I felt adrift.
In my crisis, the only thing that I could rely on was my mother’s love, the support of friends, and words. Coddled by my mom and my girlfriends, I still wasn’t completely satisfied.
So, I ran to a tattoo shop in South Philly.
[The buzz of a tattoo gun starts.]
ORR: My friend, Tishaenah, came with me, and asked me, “are you sure you wanna do this?”
I don’t know if y’all know this, but it’s not a good idea to get tattooed when you’re in a vulnerable state, like after you get divorced. I assured Tishaenah that yes, I wanted to, and mindlessly stared at the designs on the walls, even though I already had a plan.
[The tattoo gun continues buzzing, shaking as it renders ink into flesh, and then finishes.]
ORR: A few hours later, two of my favorite quotes were immortalized on my wrists: the word “always” from Sula, spoken by a character who wanted to remind another of her everlasting spirit, which would remain even after she died. The other was “ride the air,” in honor of Song of Solomon’s closing line.
I know that the phrase is not the same as Morrison’s sentence.
And believe you me, I know it’s much less elegant. Okay, it’s a-heck-of-a-lot cornier. It sounds like a refrigerator magnet, or one of those “dance like no one is watching” posters you see in a guidance counselor’s office. But in its own way, “ride the air” has provided a kind of guidance to me and has been a grounding force in my life. I didn’t want the whole line anyway; I only wanted a few words that would act as an anchor in moments when I felt meek or afraid. I got the tattoos inked so that only I could read them.
Years later, in August 2018, a few months after I started editing for The Believer, I surrendered to a feeling in the air.
At the second annual Believer Festival, I leaned into my boss’s suggestion to come out to Las Vegas and spend time in the city, to get to know the people I worked with who lived there.
I appreciate bearing witness to that dream being refined fifteen years after Morrison’s lecture in this desert landscape. Las Vegas, where the ink, like the summer air, is desperately dry, dry, and incredibly visible.
[The saxophone and piano from before play again, this time more active and emotive than languid.]
Nine years after I got them, my own ink is dry; the black dye already becoming a faded grey. Still, the tattoos are an everlasting reminder of permanence during an unwieldy time.
They are a way of reminding me that words are my home, and that Morrison helped foster that feeling.
[The saxophone and piano play out.]
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ORTIZ: Niela, as you know, I’ve heard this piece a few times now, and with every new listen, I discover new information. It’s a lot like Morrison’s writing, the way you put it: her work demands effort. I really feel that your piece demands effort, meditation, and close listening. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.
ORR: Thank you. Thank you for giving me the space to talk about all these very complicated things I didn’t know that I felt until I started writing.
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ORTIZ: Hey Niela, do you remember back in the office—you know in the before time—when we were talking about Fred Moten? I believe I had just sent off an invitation to him, inviting him to be a part of The Believer Festival here in Las Vegas. Do you remember this conversation?
ORR: I do remember that. When I learned that Fred Moten was from Las Vegas it was just such a special moment to me.
I like listening to Fred Moten talk for the same reason that I like reading. I don’t understand everything I’m encountering and yet I want to. I'm encouraged to look things up, I’m inspired to research. Through seeing the connections and listening to the connections Fred Moten is making, I’m inspired to do the same thing myself.
ORTIZ: Yeah, he really is brilliant in many ways.
It was actually during recording in our digital sound booth, while we were recording him in conversation with Josh Kun, there was a moment where Fred was punctuating his speech by hitting his hand on the desk. It’s audible in the recording, and when we go back to that whole NPR quality sort of thing, it’s also a no-no, in radio. You don’t do that. Our senior producer, she interjected, and she reminded him that he was making that noise. And Moten just had this fantastic and interesting response.
FRED MOTEN: I hope you leave that in, I hope you leave that in ‘cause…JL Austin would call those mere accompaniments of the utterance. You know, this will seem like a totally different thing but it’s not...There’s this great, amazing thinker, critic, theorist named Sylvia Winter. The only time I’ve ever seen her, the only time I’ve ever been in a room with her in person, was in Dwinelle Hall at the University of California Berkeley in May of 1986, when she gave a talk. She was talking about something, theory whatever, and it got good to her in this way where she was patting her foot to her own speech, and all of a sudden I was like, “Is that Sylvia Winter or is that Ella Fitzgerald?” The rhythm of her own thought got into her body in this amazing way. And because of the acoustics of that auditorium, you could hear it all over the room. The tap of her shoe on that wooden floor. And I wouldn't trade the sound of the tapping of her foot for anything. So we try to create these clean sound vacuums for our speech. So I was banging my computer. Cause I was feeling what we were talking about.
ORR: That is amazing. I love that he said that.
You know, in the Undercommons he talks about Black study and the Black radical tradition and this notion of fugitivity. Of refusing to play along. It’s a hallmark of his practice—not adhering to rules and regulations. Working outside of those confines. And it's so funny too that there is this sort of metatextual thing happening here. Where Fred Moten is inspired by an experience he had with Sylvia Winter in a lecture hall. And I wrote about this experience of listening to this Toni Morrison tape of her at a lecture hall. And this sort of loop. You know, I don’t know there’s something sort of beautiful about that. Listening to our forebears and taking these unconventional messages from this ostensibly stuffy context of being in a lecture hall.
ORTIZ: Today, as we explore these various themes, we’ve invited 2019 Believer festival performer Josh Kun to sit down with Fred Moten. Josh Kun is a writer, curator and professor in the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. A 2016 MacArthur Fellow, he co-curates CALA Crossfade Lab and directs The Popular Music Project of the Norman Lear Center. Fred Moten is a cultural theorist, scholar, and poet creating new conceptual spaces that accommodate emergent forms of Black cultural production, aesthetics, and social life. He is currently a professor in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. In 2020, Moten was named a MacArthur Foundation fellow.
Their conversation kind of goes in many directions. We hear them talk about James Baldwin, music, loss, extraordinary listening, and–for Moten–what it was like growing up in Vegas.
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THIS CONTINUOUS SONG
JOSH KUN: I feel like this is like an episode of, like, the newlywed game, trying to see if we're getting we're going to get each other wrong.
[Jazz in style of William Parker - percussion, no vocals - plays]
KUN: My name is Josh Kun, coming to you from Pasadena, California. I teach in the Annenberg school of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California.
FRED MOTEN: Uh, my name is Fred Moten. I live in New York city. I teach in the department of performance studies at New York University.
KUN: As a listener, Fred is always—you know, you're almost like a key member of this invisible assembly of listeners that I feel like are always in my mind when I'm listening.
Like, there's this continuous song, this continuous musicalization of life that, when I hear something that moves me profoundly, or confuses me profoundly, or outrages me profoundly, one of the people I immediately think of who I want to share it with is Fred.
I've been listening a lot to this recent batch of William Parker recordings that the 10 recordings of Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World, that I wanted to talk to you about. But specifically, there was a track that jumped out at me in terms of our relationship, which is his track called “Baldwin” from the Majesty of Jah album.
[On cue, William Parker’s “Baldwin”, a lively jazz song with vocal riffs, percussion, hi-hats, and smooth brass plays. It plays for a few moments before fading out.]
KUN: But it just made me think about Baldwin. It made me think about you and William Parker.
And I'm just wondering what your feelings are about the role that Baldwin's legacy is continuing to play in this ever unfolding moment that we're in.
MOTEN: I guess in a way, man, it's like, you always have to take into account where the reception of Baldwin was when he passed in 1987. You know, the reviews that he had been getting for his last novels and his last essays, the claim was that he had fallen into a kind of bitterness; that's what people were saying.
And, you know, there was also a way that, maybe even just within the framework of the sort of black reception of Baldwin, there were other folks, there were other voices that had become maybe more predominant, but it was also maybe this feeling of like immediately, once we lost him, we began to try to come to grips with the magnitude of what we had lost.
And I think there was also, then, a way in which, as periodically, every four or five years, dominant institutions, for whatever reason, try, almost always unsuccessfully, to come to grips [short laugh] with their own problems, their own racism, their own anti-Blackness, their own exclusionary brutalities.
And Baldwin always feels like the convenient person for them to go to. It's as if there's something in the way that Baldwin thinks about love and in the way that Baldwin thinks about hope, that it allows generally unloving and [laugh-talking] unhopeful people to attach themselves to that just for a minute.
[Parker’s “Baldwin” plays again. Jazz vocalist sings: “James Baldwin to the rescue, to the rescue, James Baldwin to the rescue, again and again and again…” the music fades out as Moten continues.]
MOTEN: And by the same token— and this is an even trickier thing, right?— there's something about the intensity of Baldwin's anger that allows people who are not nearly as angry as they think they should be— they tap into Baldwin too. So, he becomes a proxy for all these feelings that the people who invoke him usually don't have, [laugh], you know? But I believe that some people do have those feelings, and I also feel like, man, certainly William Parker feels Baldwin, and you can feel that feeling in his playing.
[Parker’s “Baldwin” plays again. Jazz vocalist sings: “What do I see? What do I see? I see madness and sadness, and superficial gladness…”]
MOTEN: I totally understand why it is that the descendants of those who were stolen— I am a descendant of the stolen, you know? And I feel having been stolen in my own body, okay? Like, I feel it. It is, on the one hand, an experience that is not mine in a personal way, but it is my experience, somehow. It is the experience out of which I emerge, and I feel it, okay?
So, I know. I totally understand, because I am constantly exhibiting, myself, that move where one says, “I can't let you steal from me anymore,” [laughs], you know? “I can't let you steal from me anymore. I have to reclaim what has been stolen.”
[Instrumental jazz in the style of William Parker plays.]
[Bessie Smith’s St. Louis Blues plays. Jazz vocalist sings:“Like a man done throwed that rock down into de sea…” The song continues as Moten speaks.]
MOTEN: You know, what it is to listen is, in a certain sense, to be accompanied by other listeners, right? To be in the company of other listeners, and that those other listeners are in your head, with you. First of all, Baldwin is like an extraordinary listener.
And you can already hear it in Go Tell It on the Mountain. You can hear the intensity in the depth and the devotion of his listening, not only to music, but to speech, or to the music in speech, and in Black speech.
MOTEN: And, you know, it's something that he writes about in the nonfiction when he reflects on his own work as a novelist, that he had to listen to Bessie Smith in order to finish, Go Tell It on the Mountain.
[Smith’s St. Louis Blues plays out.]
MOTEN: Maybe the other thing is that his listening is inseparable from his looking, and maybe that's where the Buford Delaney connection comes in.
Baldwin's connection to his mentor, the great painter Buford Delaney. He talks about Buford Delaney teaching him how to look at things, how to see, but he also talks about Buford Delaney teaching him how to listen.
[Instrumental jazz in style of Parker plays]
KUN: It makes me think of a lot of things. The first of them is something you wrote, and I can't remember right now where, about the difference between voice and sound.
And that the voice is often always linked to the container of the individual. That the voice is meant to wholly and deeply represent someone individually versus sound, which has a broader envelope. And so, it made me think of James Joyce's “The Dead.” And there's a scene in “The Dead” that I've never been able to shake, which is when Gabriel is at the bottom of the stairs looking up at his wife, who is looking at the dance floor, and he's watching her listen to a voice, a sung voice, and he's full of love for her and that, and almost lust for her in that moment, but then realizes he's watching her listen to someone else's voice, and, in that voice, is her love for someone else.
[Instrumental jazz in style of Parker plays]
KUN: You know this question for me, Fred, of listening and what that means, you know— last year, at the very end of April, I suddenly went deaf in one ear, and my whole life seemed to just flip, which sounds so silly in hindsight, cause, you know, one lives through things like this all the time. But it philosophically upended me around everything I built my life around, which was this thing about the ear. You know, I have a whole chapter in, [laugh-talking], my first book on the ear and listening as linked to the ear.
And I've had to now try to figure out what, if anything, can listening mean if it's not through the ear.
MOTEN: I can't imagine what it would mean for someone who has lived so deeply and so brilliantly by ear, [laugh], as you. To, to have to confront that, that loss or that attenuation.
And I know it's deep, cause I know everyone's closest relations are structured that way, but yours may be even more so. Living with a musician, having that be a part of the intensity of your connection, and so, it makes your invocation of that Joyce scene so much more deep. But you've already given us in the image and the idea of a listener in your head.
But to know that the voices in your head, that the sounds in your head, are also experiences of listening. So that gives us a way of understanding how it is that sound and how it is that music remains for us. And it remains for us in these deep ways by way of the other senses too. Like, maybe that's the most immediate compensation.
[Instrumental jazz in style of Parker plays again.]
MOTEN: How do you have music now?
KUN: I'm learning new ways of thinking through this. You know, I have it in the conventional way still. I've got one ear that interprets music in the way that I've been used to interpreting music.
But the fear of losing complete hearing, coupled with one ear that can't listen in the conventional way, I think has, like you said, made me kind of dig deep into all this stuff I've taught for, you know, over two decades, but never actually— how little I actually understood.
But whenever I teach my classes on music, I always start with this question to students about how do you define music? And two of the definitions I always pull up, one is from [Walt] Whitman, who says that “music is not what comes from a flute, or a violin, or from a drum; music is what is already in you that the drum awakens, or that the flute awakens.” And then [Duke] Ellington,
[Piano keys tap away as Kun speaks. It’s an archival sound of Duke Ellington playing.]
KUN: you know, the famous, um, clip of Ellington sitting at the piano, and being asked to describe what he's playing, what kind of music he's playing, and he says, “this is not music, this is dreaming.”
[In the archive, Ellington continues to play soft, meandering music at the piano. Then he says, “that’s dreaming,” and plays a few more notes before the sound fades out.]
MOTEN: You also wrote a book called, [laughs], Audiotopia.
KUN: I'm telling you, I'm like, this is a cliche, Fred.
MOTEN: But it's not because— and I totally hear you about that thing where you write something and you think you know, and you don't know [laughs]. But it doesn't negate the fact that you wrote it and maybe it means, in addition to trying to figure out a way to catch up to Baldwin, sometimes we even have to catch up to ourselves.
Sound becomes place. Sound becomes this place that we live in. Another way of thinking about Audiotopia is as a kind of soundscape. And obviously, there's a utopian dimension that's given in the word that you coin.
[Ellington’s “Three Little Words,” a sleepy and nostalgic sounding song, plays underneath Moten speaking.]
MOTEN: And maybe that's the dreaming part that Ellington is talking about. We enter into an auditorium with other listeners where we dream of another place. But not in a passive way, not in a way that absolves us from the responsibility of making that other place.
And it's a feedback loop, isn't it? I mean, the feedback loop is between we as listeners who get to accompany the musicians who are also listeners as they dream another place, and then we get to work with them in the making of that place.
[As he speaks, Moten punctuates his speech with his hand. He taps on his computer several times to emphasize his points.]
MOTEN: I think about this especially with regard to Ozomatli and the way you write so beautifully about them as musicians, but also them as Placemakers, as a band, that had a very specific understanding of the place that they were trying to make with other people.
[Ellington’s “Three Little Words” fades in after Moten and fades away as Kun begins to speak.]
KUN: The history, both of Vegas and the casino world as being so crucial to Black musicians, especially at that time, in terms of just a pure gig economy, right? And, a source of employment, and money, and labor, of work, but also as a place that, if you weren't careful, would break your neck and dump you.
And I know you've got long history with Vegas and I would just love to hear from you a little bit about you and Vegas.
MOTEN: My mom came to Vegas in the late 1960. And she was, you know, immediately folded into a community of folks who had migrated, Black people. who had migrated there from the South.
And there was even a, a very specific community who had come to Las Vegas from the same town that she lived in. So, she had friends from high school who then lived around the corner from us my whole growing up, and their names were Eloise Bush and QB Bush. But I just cannot tell you how many times I sat around the dinner table at Mr. Bush’s house while he was talking about the Moulin Rouge.
[Live improvisational jazz at the Moulin Rouge begins to play. Drum beats snare, a bass thumps, bright brass plays, and a keyboard synchronizes. It’s both lively and moody. The jazz continues to play underneath Moten’s voice.]
MOTEN: He was always part of these groups who were trying to revive the Moulin Rouge, who were trying to— cause the Moulin Rouge was essentially run out of business by the larger hotels.
Partly because it was so good at what it did and so good at what it did, because part of what it did was absolutely tied up with the fact that Black people could be there. Right? That was where you went to hear music.
All the musicians on the strip would come to the Moulin Rouge to play after hours, right? The Moulin Rouge was taking business away from the strip and away from downtown because it was the place to be.
But the Moulin Rouge was always this dream up until the minute that they tore it down, okay? Yeah, I used to drive past the Moulin Rouge every night.
Anyway, I just remember Mr. Bush talking about the Moulin Rouge so much, and it really was a kind of talisman for the brutalities that Black folks had to suffer in Vegas. What it meant for Black people to be in this kind of horrific position of, on the one hand, being absolutely crucial to the gaming industry and the entertainment industry at the level of its basic infrastructure.
All my aunts on my father's side, all my father's sisters were maids at the Landmark, at the Frontier, you know?
To be absolutely crucial to the infrastructure of something that you were also excluded from.
[The sound of jazz fades out.]
MOTEN: The humiliation of the exclusion was not ameliorated by the fact that they also built these amazing social institutions for themselves. The clubs and the churches that were all embedded in the community that I grew up in.
Those churches and those clubs were amazing, and they were beautiful, but they didn't make up for the fact of that exclusion. I think, in some ways, the Moulin Rouge came closest to something like that, but it didn't either, and it was not allowed to survive.
[Parker’s “Baldwin” plays. Rhythmic drumbeats and a stand-up bass thump away.]
KUN: I was reading also that— I think in 74, 75— West Montgomery's brother, Monk Montgomery, founded the Las Vegas jazz society.
MOTEN: I used to go to his house all the time because my mom was like a charter member of the Las Vegas jazz society.
When Monk Montgomery moved to Vegas, he started the Las Vegas jazz society. They would have shows. They used to have a kind of standing show, that was played in the Golden Nugget. He let my mom one time play one of West Montgomery's guitars because he had some of them in his house. And they would have these big picnics and fundraisers and stuff for the Las Vegas jazz society cause, cause Vegas was a good jazz town.
A whole lot of people would come from LA to play. And on Jackson street, there were clubs, there was another hotel called the Carver house.
Joe Pass was really strung out on heroin, he was on Jackson street. Mr. Bush saw him all the time. Then he got cleaned up and he kind of moved back to LA, and then Norman Granz picked him back up and he made all those great records on Pablo.
But yeah, Vegas was like that. I remember my mom was a school teacher, [laughs]. A couple of her students, one in particular was really like my older brother, named Mike Davis. He would get up early and go to school.
[The jazz playing underneath Moten gets more livelier and louder. Now, a brass instrument has joined in.]
MOTEN: And he would walk past the clubs on Jackson street, and they’d still being there jamming, getting down. And he would sneak up to the boarded-up window, [laughs] you know, so he could hear that music, and I'll never forget, I actually put it in a poem. He said, “man, that music used to mess me up.”
People end up in Vegas, [laugh], or it used to be that way at least.
[Drums, bass, and trumpet play for a while before Moten continues.]
MOTEN: I guess when I was saying that people end up in Vegas, [laugh-talks], in a lot of ways the Nevada test site was one of the places where people end up. I mean, it's north of Vegas, you know, a couple of hours, north.
But I worked at the Nevada test site, say, from the summer of 81 through the spring of 82 because I flunked out of Harvard my freshman year. So, I had to take a year off. And one of my mom's best friends, who still lives in Vegas, is a great woman named Lavonne Lewis. She got me a job working as a janitor at the Nevada test site. And one of my coworkers was this wonderful person who grew up in Red Hook in Brooklyn, named Frank Fitzpatrick. And he was really like my mentor when I worked at the test site. And we were basically two people who had messed up, you know? He had messed up in a certain kind of way and he really got me through— him and Ms. Lewis, really— got me through that year of working at the test site. And what could have been a kind of disaster turned out to be really amazing. Like, that year was probably the most important year that I had growing up because, you know, I read a lot of literature on the bus and I realized that I should probably be an English major, you know, it was stuff like that.
[The jazz that’s been playing underneath Moten as he spoke continues before Moten speaks again.]
MOTEN: Yeah, the Test Site was, [laughs], it was something else. But that was definitely my Las Vegas.
[The song picks up in volume. “Baldwin” by William Parker plays. A jazz vocalist sings: “James Baldiwn to the rescue, to the rescue / James Baldwin to the rescue, to the rescue / again and again, again and again...]
ORR: Sarah—ooh.
ORTIZ: Ooh, what did you just call me? What did you just call me?
ORR: The formality of this whole enterprise just turned Sara into Sarah! If that is not the white gaze I don’t know what is! Let me do that again. Person who’s my friend and not just a name on the page.
[Orr and Ortiz talk over each other, laughing. Orr clears her throat. Ortiz continues, laughing]
ORTIZ: I’ll start from the top.
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ORTIZ: We truly hope you enjoyed this episode of Black Mountain Radio.
ORR: Black Mountain Radio is an audio project of the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. Sara Ortiz is the host and curator.
ORTIZ: And today’s special guest host is Niela Orr.
ORTIZ: Our senior producer is Nicole Kelly. Vera Blossom and Layla Muhammad are our associate producers. Scott Dickenshetts is our editor. Anthony Farris is our production assistant. Fil Corbitt is our sound mixer. Our guest musician is Jeremy Klewicki; art by Jesse Zhang [jahng]; graphic design by Lille Allen.
ORR: Very special thanks to Fred Moten and Josh Kun.
ORTIZ: And thanks to the rest of the team at the Black Mountain Institute: Kellen Braddock, Daniel Gumbiner, Haley Patail, Kristen Radtke, Summer Thomad, Michael Ursell, and Haya Wang.
ORR: Black Mountain Radio is supported by the Rogers Foundation and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Big thanks to our sponsors at Zappos who helped make this episode possible and who contribute to Las Vegas’s creative communities with playful, people-first approaches to arts and culture.
ORTIZ: A special, special heartfelt thanks to Nevada Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting Black Mountain Radio. And our deep gratitude goes to the Hank Greenspun College of Urban Affairs, the home of KUNV. Special shoutout to our engineer Kevin Krall.
Black Mountain Radio is broadcast from Southern Paiute land.
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ORTIZ: Thanks for listening.
ORR: Thank you, Sara.
ORTIZ: Thank you, Niela!