[We don't rise to bait, certainly not rotten bait. Sometimes we receive what I call "rocket" emails, inflammatory or needling missives, entirely fictional and by anonymous authors, designed to get some kind of rise out of us, some post foaming with anger and indignation. Not long ago some bozo with a made-up name, which I'll change to Edsel Farkblather, harrumphed for a couple of padded paragraphs about my credentials as an art critic: did I spend the requisite three summers in Europe, for example? Well, I tellya, I nearly swallered my toothpick. That one was funny and pathetic, and I was tempted to have fun fisking it, but then I decided it was just elbow-jiggling designed to distract us from our larger interests, so I ignored it.
But this latest pseudonymous email cruelly exploits human death and Cuba, and it's probably by some local yokel, so I'll post about it, since we won't be writing about the local art scene for at least three months, and probably much longer. It's an appropriate sayonara.]
by Jerome du Bois
It isn't often you receive suicide emails. Never, in our experience, and that remains the case, because the one we received a couple of days ago is a crude, cruel fabrication, made more cruel since its crux is Cuba, the country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world (hat tip to Babalu). Over one hundred thousand Cubans have committed suicide on that island over the last fifty years; around 2,000 per year, though we suspect the graph describes an ascending curve, as despair overfills more souls.
Two days after we posted one of the most powerful sections of our Cuban novel so far, we got this tacky, sophomoric, lugubrious email about one of the Cuban artists we referred to in one post of our Cuban art series over a year ago, on April 7, 2004. He was an unfortunate young man named Pedro Alvarez, who killed himself in Tempe, Arizona, by jumping from his fifth-floor hotel balcony, while his paintings stood in a solo exhibition at ASU Art Museum across the street.
Then the author of the email, "Juan Huerta," (whose sitemeter hit traces to Bern, Switzerland, go figure) announces his own impending end --to us, total strangers. Riiight. This is a high-school level psych-ops outing by (a) someone jealous of our writing, or (b) someone who is angry that when you google "Kathleen Vanesian," we're still at the top. (The whole email is reprinted at the end of this post.)
But that post was not a review of Pedro Alvarez's artwork, nor a take on his death; it was called "Over His Dead Body: Kathleen Vanesian, Neo-Colonialist," and it was about liberals' attitudes towards the embargo, using Ms. Vanesian's own words. And the dead body in the title didn't necessarily refer to Pedro Alvarez. As I put it then:
. . . the prisons fill, the people die. Did you think my title referred to Pedro Alvarez's dead body? Maybe. Or maybe I'm talking about Lorenzo Copello Castillo, or Bárbaro Sevilla García, or Jorge Luis Martínez Isaac -- all three summarily executed for the nonviolent hijacking of a ferryboat. Maybe I'm talking about each unharmful, gentle soul, misplaced inside a jail, who killed himself or was murdered and nobody knows or will know as he rolls away unrevenged.
The whole point of the Cuban Art Series itself was to show the hypocrisy of Cuban artists and those who support them; and how their actions reinforce and try to legitimize castro's regime, and how they all pocket lots of what's green and folds.
Pedro Alvarez, every moment while here, was one step from freedom as well as from death. All he had to do was go ask for asylum --and then, if he needed it, therapy. (Fifty Cuban dancers asked for asylum earlier this summer, and they already have a new gig.) He was as dryfoot as he could be. While he was here breathing the free air of America, hundreds of innocent Cubans tried to breathe the thick, stinking, fetid air of their cells, their living coffins, teeming with insects and flies. He never said a word for them, as far as I know. He never stood up for them. At least, he did not go on record doing so.
Instead, he jumped into a black hole and escaped from life and its responsibilities. And, like all suicides, he selfishly left a mess for others to clean up. Suicides always piss me off. I've lived twice as long as Pedro Alvarez has, I've scraped bottom more than once, looked lovingly into the abyss more than once. But just facing every damned day as it comes trumps every alternative, so here I am, kicking ass more than ever.
Then along comes this truly boneless, spineless gusano -- another anonymondo, weeping and moaning:
I am writing to you now because I am considering suicide myself and I am sure I am not far at all from a prompt and happy departure; however, I had to write to you before taking my own life just to tell you that you were not fair to Pedro Alvarez. You owe him one.
I already gave him one. I acknowledged his death, posted his photo, and wrote "another one done too soon." He should still be here, I made clear. Now, I had never even heard of the guy when he was alive, but my position on his hypocrisy doesn't change just because he's dead.
I wonder if the psych-ops anonymondo sent similar suicide emails to people like Kathleen Vanesian and Marilyn Zeitlin, who knew the dead man.
a prompt and happy departure
The Cubans who commit suicide do it promptly but not happily --"hanging, wrist-cutting, jumping out windows, a shot to the head"-- actually, I'm surprised at the latter: where do they get the gun, and then the bullets?-- because they can't afford pills, for example, or any kind of gas for a monoxide job. They can't lie back like Petronius in his warm-water, rose-scented marble bath, surrounded by his household gods, with a goblet of wine and a blade you can't even feel. No; they go out ugly, broken and twisted, and where?
anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
I don't care to speculate on the identity of the author of this cruel email. Too many in the Rebarb fit the profile. Hell, Catherine and I came up with list of about two dozen locals before we could finish a glass of wine. Local or wherever, such a cavalier attitude toward such a profound act reveals once again the sociopathic shallowness, the cackling laugh at sincerity, that marks the ragged end of Decadence.
But the zombie's laugh is always hollow. We work to silence it.
CODA:Here's that clown's email:
You wrote about Pedro Alvarez not too long ago and I just got disgusted with your lack of almost everything. I must say the only thing you have is a blog and a name that will pop up if you google it, which I know makes you really, really happy. I can actually picture you googling yourself several times a day just to make sure you're there.
You didn't give Pedro the opportunity to talk about his work. I don't know and I don't care about the what kind of grudge you're holding on to the folks that somehow got to do with his work. And let me tell you, you might be right or wrong about them ˆ but I don't care either.
I just think that you didn't give Pedro the opportunity to talk about his work, and his life.
You really wish your lousy drawings and pieces of writing were as good as Pedro's.
I read your article by mistake, about a year ago. I felt bad, but since I don't care about you, I didn't post any comments at the time. I do care about Pedro though; just thinking and smiling about the good ways in which, calmly, he would have put you in the right place with just a couple of words.
I am writing to you now because I am considering suicide myself and I am sure I am not far at all from a prompt and happy departure; however, I had to write to you before taking my own life just to tell you that you were not fair to Pedro Alvarez. You owe him one.
You owe him one because you know little about him, his art and Cuba. You think you know, but you don't. Now, go ahead and keep on talking and writing about things you don't know. Go ahead and keep on talking and writing about people who cannot talk back to you and give you the right answer. Go ahead and keep on showing your nature, what you are made of.
Juan
p.s.: Yes, just Juan, because I am trying to save you time from googling me, as you always do. I am not there dude, and I won't. By the way, consider me gone.
Of course he doesn't get the last word. Just one thing. People can talk to me anytime. Email is always open. Go ahead, as the dingaling said, and quote me big chunks of Pedro Alvarez's wisdom. Catherine and I have a novel to return to.
Happy trails, anonymondo.
Posted by Jerome at October 3, 2005 10:40 AM | TrackBack