John H. Sibley

First, let me say that this book is not, and should not be, an easy read. But it is a crucial read, in my opinion. Other reviewers have taken pains to point out that the title seemed a bit confusing, to them. I did not find it confusing, probably due to the fact that my father was called "The Professor" by his cultural cohort: fellow Black men of the Vietnam generation. So, I felt right at home with the idea of homelessness, which pervades this important work, when I started the book. I think that my Dad and the author would have gotten along very well, and I wish my father were alive now to meet him.

While the book itself was important, if a bit earthy, reading, I personally found the interview and list of references most interesting, after the book itself. That is likely in part due to the many similar gut-wrenching memories triggered for me while reading the experiences of a man similar in many ways to my own father, a light-skinned Black man in DC, experiencing alarmingly similar events in roughly the same historical period.

The author is clearly well-read and working to raise points that are not only ignored but also feared by our system. The facts the author presents relating the slave trade and 1860's market prices to current structural components of our American capitalist system are both taboo and inconvenient for those who benefit from our current economic arrangement. These are highly important things for all of us to look at squarely in the face, and to begin to shovel our own shit, as so much of the book does in metaphoric and literal terms.

Let's #EndPoverty & #EndMoneyBail by improving these four parts of our Public Domain Social Infrastructure:
#PublicDomainInfrastructure 4: (
1. #libraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare , and
4. good #publictransport )
Read, Write, Ranked Choice Voting for ALL!!!!, Walk !

#PublicDomainInfrastructure
ShiraDest
March, 12019 HE


… (plus d'informations)

Do not read this book, unless you’re prepared to lose your place in line, to have your applecart overturned, your ideas upended. Like the harsh Chicago wind, Lew Rawls clls The Hawk*, this book knocks over ideas like trashcans. Forget everything you thought about philosophy, art and “the homeless.” They turn out to be individuals, not a collective noun. Some are painters. Some, philosophers. This one is both, and a writer. Only this specific homeless painter could have written this book, a work with rising patches of genius, like the neck of a giraffe.

A penniless man fills with vast culture, more than the billionaire running the White House, who does not dine on water, on jazz, on Velasquez and on Caravaggio:
“While listening to Trane’s music and looking at the master’s paintings I was
swept into another dimension, which transcended my material impoverishment.
Sitting there, I thought, I could have been one of Caravaggio’s homeless
models. Or Velasquez’s Moorish assistant whose painting skill rivaled the
master’s”(42).

This Moorish assistant writes with more philosophy than all of D.C., starting with the idealist Berkeley, who lived three years in colonial Rhode Island near this reviewer. But Chicagoan Sibley’s homeless winter nights disillusion him with God, and lead him to Kierkegaard’s existentialism, his leap of faith from the absurd universe, from the dread and chronic depression experienced by modern mankind (68). (Or modern manunkind as e.e.cummings has it). Other philosophers come up like Schopenhauer and Korzybski.

Think you’re familiar with art? Expect to meet, up close, well painted, the unfamiliar with the famous: Basquiat, Emilio Cruz, Frederick Remington, Kerry Marshall, Maurice Wilson, Betye Saar, Pipin, Joseph Yoakum, Hayden, Cortor, Ed Paschke, Charles White, Pier Manzoni, Romare Berden, Norman Lewis, Renee Townsend, Warhol, “Doc” Towns, Venus Blue, Lucius Armstrong, Muneer, Karen Mzique, Stanley Kincaid, Gale Sheri Blackmore, Milton Roberts, Lorenzo Pace,Thomas Hat Benton, Art Green, Gladys Wilson, Judson Brown, John Yancy, Greg Brey, and Philip London. To name a few.
Up close, he sees at a Burger King years later a brilliant friend from art school, Maurice Wilson, Yale M.F.A., Seagrams Award winner.
“‘Maurice!’ I whispered… He looked at me, squinting, his face Sudanese black with shades of sienna and umber…’Sit down, Sib…they might see you.’ I sat down, wondering what they he was talking about. ‘Who might see me?’ I asked, puzzled as I looked around, slightly paranoid from his words. ‘The FBI, CIA, NSA. I tell you Sib, the muthafuggahs tryin’ to kill me.” I said in disbelief, “Why you, Maurice? It’s your imagination man. No one is after you…Maurice, you got somewhere to sleep tonight? Let me give you my business card.’ ‘No, Sib, I can’t take it. That card may have poison on it…’ I tried to shake the gloom that clung to me as I looked at a broken-down genius. A genius possibly like Friedrich Nietzsche, …who sat in a vegetative state in an asylum for more than a decade”(58). Fellow student Maurice follows portraits of his Art Institute teachers.
Sibley finds his route to homelessness c/o the American Court system paved by a couple of stereotypes: All Blacks Look Alike and the Jewish Lawyer. The latter urged a guilty plea because it would result in parole, but also because he did not know anything about his client, an Air Force Vietnam vet. Once he learned DocSib graduated the Chicago Art Institute School and painted, with a magazine article about his art, the well-intentioned lawyer regretted the guilty plea. As well he should, since the wrongful conviction in a cold 70’s December, for stealing $10 from a white woman, a felony, cost the writer his home and a career.
Some giraffe-like patches of genius. Leaving at 6PM every evening after working at a temp agency or doing street portraits, “south on State Street listening and feeling the seismic, metronomic whump, whump, whump of the Jurassic jackhammers…Everywhere I saw vehicles that looked like grazing Triceratops wallowing in mud. Giant cranes, bobcats and metallic Brontosauruses. The construction workers wore bright yellow hats and orange protective vests, grafting like soldier ants. They worked with gargantuan, metallic, robotic slaves.
“It was like gazing at a Jurassic subterranean nest. A vast pit of forgotten cultures, fossil records, landfills, and an ancient Indian burial ground…tribes like Chicago, Illiniwek, and Potowatomi, civil war soldiers, unknown murder victims, dogs, cats, and the homeless under the subterranean floor.”(69).

Additionally, Sibley builds an anthology of interesting quotations, from Orwell, “I wanted to submerge myself, to get down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants!”(Down and Out in London and Paris, 1933). To Renoir, reportedly, “A painter also has to paint with his balls”(63). To Julian Barbour, “Some people can pass a Cathedral and not notice it”(27). To Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action was White, how the G.I. Bill in NY and NJ funded fewer than .003% non-white mortgages. Or, back to Orwell, “There is something horrible about being homeless at night. The coldness, death lurking around every corner, the isolation”(Ch 4 epigraph 67).… (plus d'informations)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

If John Sibley's name sounds familiar, it's because he's the author of the over-the-top urban post-apocalyptic actioner i>Bodyslick, which I named a top Guilty Pleasure here in 2011; but it turns out that Sibley himself has had an even more sobering and fascinating life out in the real world, becoming homeless twice in recent decades even while pursuing higher-education options in creative fields. And now he has a memoir out about his experiences, Being and Homelessness; and while I'm forced to admit that it wasn't my particular cup of tea (I don't have much of an interest in the subject to begin with, disagree with Sibley regarding some of the political issues involved, and also found his writing style to be overly rambling and unfocused much of the time), let me also say that this is an unusually well-done book for this kind of topic and author background, and that those who have a greater natural interest than I in the intersection of art, philosophy and social welfare will undoubtedly find this a fascinating and worthwhile read. A meandering title that often makes its points in a roundabout way, some are bound to find this a clever and unique approach to the entire subject of "the homeless," while others are bound to tire of it quickly; this should all be kept in mind before picking it up yourself.

Out of 10: 7.8… (plus d'informations)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

I confess -- I so love the guilty pleasure of enjoying a book more than I probably should that I dedicate an entire best-of list to the subject here at the blog at the end of every year; and there's not much better of an example of what I'm talking about than John H. Sibley's Bodyslick, which to be clear is not much better than mediocre in actual quality, but that boasts a high concept I found irresistible, essentially day-after-tomorrow science-fiction meets blaxploitation film, set in a gritty futuristic Chicago and with there being not a single stereotype of "urban fiction" ever invented that Sibley doesn't love. And indeed, to be fair, in relative terms to the other kinds of projects in this vein, Bodyslick actually isn't bad at all, with writing that's essentially on par with, say, the average episode of the cheesy cable thriller Burn Notice, another big guilty pleasure of mine; but even while we can acknowledge something like Burn Notice as a lot of fun, we also must acknowledge that it's simply not that good from a technical aspect, something that's important to note with Bodyslick as well if you want a chance of enjoying it for what it is. A book that probably should've gotten a lower score than it's getting, but that got bumped up a little merely from Sibley's always gleeful embrace of over-the-top melodrama (and yes, I admit, half a point extra just for that outrageous front cover as well, which made me warmly laugh every single time I pulled it out in public this week and caught the looks of all the people around me), this is not only an official product of Vibe magazine's publishing wing but also feels many times like what The Boondocks' Aaron McGruder would come up with if hired to write a parody of Vibe magazine's publishing wing, and it comes specifically recommended to those who enjoy reading with tongue firmly in cheek.

Out of 10: 7.8… (plus d'informations)