ASAP 2015 -- Greenville, S.C.

 I'd had to miss the last symposium of the Association for the Study of Arts of the Present, held in Shanghai, even though I was in China at the time, so I was glad to be able to get to this year's conference in South Carolina.  Well, mostly glad. I wasn't so happy about the small group of idiots marching down Main Street Friday evening brandishing Large Confederate flags. They also carried one U.S. flag, with no apparent sense of the ironic.

But the conference itself was great. There were TWO panels devoted to Claudia Rankine's Citizen. One panelist even insisted on reading the work as poetry.

I was there to present a paper on Joe McPhee and Amiri Baraka as part of a panel on Free Jazz, with presentations by Gregory Pierrot, Ben Lee and Paul Youngquist.