Perigee

JoYin Shih interviews Maia Cruz Palileo The Cuchifritos Gallery is a pocket gallery tucked into the entrance of the Essex Market, at the gritty corner of intersecting neighborhoods—Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Artist Maia Cruz Palileo’s show, “Lost Looking,” was on exhibit this past winter. Upon entering, my gaze scanned the brightly lit studio before settling in for closer examination. Eyeing familiar images (a box television, a sleeping cat) and vibrant colors that conjure nostalgia, there was an instant presence of the real and unreal, a sense of magic realism, emanating from the images. As the title of the show aptly implied, the dozen paintings, selected by curator Jordan Buschur, reflected the integrations of Palileo’s Philippine ancestral homeland and her own Midwest American roots, recovered family lore; and objects and the emotional power they contain. Palileo walked me through the paintings, sharing the history that fueled each piece. Maia Cruz Palileo [MCP]: I was really excited to have a show at Cuchifritos Gallery. Part of their mission is: “to show exhibitions featuring the work of emerging and underrepresented contemporary artists with particular interest in exhibits that convey relevance to the local community.” I like the inclusiveness of this...

Fiction

Reading in Private: An Interview with Rivka Galchen

Apogee Journal

29 Mar 2015

Rivka Galchen is the author of American Innovations, a collection of short stories speaking in conversation with “classic” short stories from a female perspective, and Amostpheric Disturbances, a novel. Staff writer Joseph Ponce corresponded with Rivka via email about the dangers of “familiar” language, intentionally de-railing plots, and misconstrued emotion and characters. She will be reading as part of the First Person Plural Reading Series, along with Mya Green, Patrick Rosal, and a screening of the Field Niggas and Antonyms of Beauty, a film by Khalik Allah, on Tuesday, March 31 at 7:00pm, at the Shrine World Music Venue in Harlem, NY. Joe Ponce [JP]: American Innovations at times seems to be a commentary on the restrictive and even oppressive nature of language. Do you feel like the language you use in American Innovations is, in a way, a rebellion against old fashioned or constrictive language (the lazy language of idiom)? Rivka Galchen [RG]: I do think my characters, on the spectrum, find phrases particularly magnetic, even talismanic. They’ll try on a phrase as a way to feel, they feel obliged to try and feel the way that language suggests they ought to. It doesn’t quite work, of course....

Uncategorized

Who Deserves to Die?: On Rationalizing Murder

Apogee Journal

23 Mar 2015

Who Deserves to Die?: On Rationalizing Murder Elizabeth Wright I hear sirens and helicopters outside. Crowds of protesters march down Grand Avenue and I-580. They’re yelling, throwing bottles, and fighting. I am doing laundry. I’m not out in the streets tonight, but I feel no loyalty to this country. Never have. It’s a common symptom of being African American. I feel nothing but a certain sense of partial belonging, comfort, and familiarity, but no allegiance. *** On November 24th, St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch, announced the following: From the onset, we have maintained and the grand jury agreed that Officer Wilson’s actions on August 9 were in accordance with the laws and regulations that govern the procedures of an officer. Law enforcement personnel must frequently make split-second and difficult decisions. Officer Wilson followed his training and followed the law. (Reilly) *** Michael Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden said, “You’re not God. You don’t decide when you’re going to take somebody from here.” But someone, certainly, is playing God. *** “Come on guys.” That’s what Officer Wilson claims to have said when he politely asked Michael Brown and Dorian Johnson to get out of the middle of the...

Fiction Poetry Uncategorized

Goldsmith, Conceptualism & the Half-baked Rationalization of White Idiocy

Apogee Journal

18 Mar 2015

Goldsmith, Conceptualism & the Half-baked Rationalization of White Idiocy Joey De Jesus Kenneth Goldsmith’s so-called “uncreative” editing of Michael Brown’s autopsy report into his piece, “The Body of Michael Brown,” is an appropriation of black suffering under the waving standard of “conceptualism.” Is he aware that his appropriation of black death contributes to a long and living history of racism? Probably. Still, he opens his mouth to release his vipers into the growing snakeyard of white supremacist liberalism and its literature. Though Goldsmith has committed to donate his speaker fees to Michael Brown’s family, and has asked Interrupt 3 to withhold the video and transcripts of the event, his wavering attempts to placate the public do little to restore to Michael Brown’s family any decency after commodifying Brown’s body into cultural capital while simultaneously communicating his own sense of supremacy. His apology-via-Facebook does nothing at all to reconcile the deeply racist practices upon which he has grounded his aesthetics of conceptualism. In “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” Cathy Park Hong’s says, “The avant-garde’s ‘delusion of whiteness’ is the specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised...

Poetry Uncategorized

New Work by LiraeL O

Apogee Journal

06 Mar 2015

Rumination On How I Don’t Give A Fuck LiraeL O in order to understand the ice beneath i must investigate the receptors of feminine and female energy in the atrium of the cisgender (straight) man. in the chalky landings of a school staircase or perched playfully atop a whiskey ginger, i will eavesdrop and ingest the male in the grass where he pisses on his property, where he speaks openly about the women who satiate his hungry and vasocongest his most prized vessel. the food court sesame chicken jiggles down your esophagus when she walks by. it’s summer and she’s beady and you watch, precum pushing out your pupils and instantly you’re lost in the slow rhythm of her adipose in direct conversation with bone, muscle, gravity, sunlight, pheromone… she’s the kind of girl you jerk off to in hell, she’s the kind of girl whose mouth you want to spit in, kind of girl who’s sad but you don’t care cause sad girls fuck the best and you love fucking sad girls, she’s the kind of girl who you could see yourself impregnating in a landslide, the kind of girl who you can watch Netflix with in a...

Uncategorized

The Lover or the Fighter

Apogee Journal

16 Feb 2015

The Lover or the Fighter by Ian E. Toledo It happened during either my sophomore or junior year as an illustration major. I was still struggling to overcome my middle school rep as both shyest and quietest student and was taking a course called Sequential Illustration. The course was taught by a professor who I’ll call Mr. V, an elderly man that’d had a modestly successful career as an illustrator and was pretty well known and respected in some circles. One day Mr. V. gave us an assignment to do a series of comic pages on whatever subject we wanted. Despite the fact that I adored comics, nothing immediately came to mind. So when he came around to check my sketches I looked up at him helplessly, hoping that he would share one of his idea generating methods he had acquired from his career as a successful illustrator. Mr. V’s sage advice was, “Why don’t you draw something about food? Why don’t you draw egg foo young?” Then he looked at me and proceeded to laugh in my face. I was shocked that someone in such a position would say that to me or anyone. A flood of Weltschmerz...

Visual Art

Bayete Ross Smith: An Interview with the Artist

Apogee Journal

02 Feb 2015

Bayete Ross Smith is a Harlem-based multi-media artist who explores constructions of identity and representations of African-American culture with his practice. Apogee Visual Arts Editor Legacy Russell spoke with Bayete on the occasion of his work being featured as the cover image in Apogee’s fourth issue. Legacy Russell [LR]: Tell me about your background. Where did you begin your relationship with photography? Bayete Ross Smith [BRS]: I began photographing in high school. I took a black and white photography class and I just fell in love with the concept of re-creating and archiving my view of the world. It’s a typical beginning for many photographers prior to the digital SLR, I suppose. I continued photographing as a hobby throughout high school and into college. I never really thought of it as a career. Then when I was entering my junior year of college, when I was studying business administration, I realized becoming a corporate executive would be a miserable life for me, so I switched my area of study to photography and began studying photojournalism. I got my start as a newspaper photographer for the Knight Ridder Newspaper Corporation. I worked at the Tallahassee Democrat, the Philadelphia Inquirer, which...

Fiction

Sam, by Alexandra Watson

Apogee Journal

23 Jan 2015

Sam by Alexandra Watson He grows exhausted of her: the way she squeezes toothpaste from the top instead of rolling up the bottom, how she references literature in their fights to remind him of her education, the slight click in her jaw when she chews, the rusty taste of her mouth. Before they were minor things, now they are all she is. They’d met in the teacher break room at the high school where he’d subbed for years; she’d taken a spot in the English department a little under a year ago. He didn’t get called in today, so he sits watching the Twilight Zone marathon and drinking ice cold beer, occasionally lighting the same joint he rolled right after she left that morning. She gets home early that afternoon and finds him in the kitchen, sliding the last empty beer bottle into the twelve-pack box. She looks weary in a way he recognizes; a tiredness from too much noise and too much fighting, not enough windows and not enough textbooks. When she sees him, she grabs the back of his neck to pull him towards her mouth. He recoils, as if the kiss has sent a static...

Nonfiction

Stagnant Blackness and the Modern Race Drama

Apogee Journal

17 Jan 2015

Literary Editor Chris Prioleau has an essay up on The Awl this week: It feels as if, where the modern race drama is concerned, we’re not as firmly central in our own stories as one might think. These stories are still coming from the same set of antiquated notions that wrote Hattie McDaniel’s speech for her, notions that dictate that a dramatic non-white narrative is only successful in so far as it speaks to the good-intentioned but ultimately reductive theme of racial progress, which in this case is a euphemism for proving one’s worth to the white population. Read the rest here.

Poetry

Undocupoets Petition Against Contest Discrimination

Apogee Journal

16 Jan 2015

We are proud to publish a petition from Undocupoets, the group fighting to end citizenship-based discrimination in poetry publishing and contests. Too often, the submission guidelines read “Proof of US Citizenship” or “Legal Residents Only.” This small, but powerful, statement serves to exclude 11.7 million undocumented people (according to the Pew Research Center Hispanic Trends Project in 2013) from participating in a multitude of poetry opportunities—from first book contests to applying for major grants. Most documented poets and organizers justify this discrimination by saying something along the lines of “large poetry organizations cannot include undocumented people because they (the large poetry organizations) receive government funding and must follow government regulations.” But this should be no excuse for exclusion. We must strive, as a poetry community, to allow ALL of our comrades the same opportunities that documented poets are afforded. No poet should have their opportunities limited because of their immigration status! What we are asking for is simple—give us the best poems (regardless of the author’s citizenship)! It should be the duty of poetry organizations to find ways to support poets, not to mimic the nation state. The immediate action which we would like to see take place, is this:...