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September 30, 2000
A Morning with The Billionaires
There was a rally for Nader this noontide in Washington Square Park. It was mostly the usual suspects there, both for the park (scruffy-looking poor and crazy people) and the protest (scruffy-looking college-educated people). I hope there was at least a little cross-pollination. Susan Sarandon spoke, and she was great but as usual the first thing that we all remembered is that we've seen her in her underwear.
There were about six of us who showed up to do our bit for Billionaires for Bush or Gore; bit of a small turnout, but we chanted loud enough to make up for it. There were a couple of old Commies who just didn't get it, and followed us around heckling us for supporting BushGore. One grizzled fellow looked genuinely smug, as if he expected Nader to win in a landslide. I wonder if he was as isolated from Nader-naysayers as I am. I try to keep perspective tho.
The Bills had gotten a late start finding each other; each of us had spent a quarter hour scrutinizing any well-dressed person in the park for signs of affiliation. It was genuinely hard to tell. I went running towards a table of suit-wearing men at the west entrance of a park until I got close enough to realize what I thought were signs were actually religious-looking tracts in Russian. Another time, a man in a tremendous, immaculate fake-fur coat, miniskirt, and tights passed, and we didn't stop staring at him until he was halfway across the park from us. He could have been a Billionaire, really.
Towards the end of the rally three middle-aged white guys in suits showed up right next to us. These ones were clearly the real deal. I like to give those types a pain, and so I made nice to them like we Billionaires were kindred spirits, to let the suits know we Greens didn't like assholes on our turf. Once I started talking to them I got confused. They were kind of sympathetic. I felt bad for a minute, because I had forgotten they might be legal observers, who often show up to these events sticking out like well-scrubbed thumbs-- I have a clear memory of the first one I saw, a very clean-looking guy at a DC anti-war rally who was, incongruously, sucking on a ring-pop-- but the more I talked the less I was able to pin these guys down. They were predicting that Nader would pull less than 1% of the vote (they hadn't heard about the 13% in Oregon, and when they did they insisted that was just the mountain vote) in a tone of voice that said though they thought this was a long shot, they admired Nader for trying and thought his candidacy brought something they'd missed. They wished us luck as they left. Maybe they were closet Libertarians?
Posted by me at 8:16 PM | Comments (0)
September 21, 2000
JOY! GLEE! I finally
JOY! GLEE! I finally figured out what was wrong with my blog. Stupid stupid technical problem. Hurray! I'll be posting much more frequently now, seeing as I have a blazing-fast new iMac with a functional browser.
Posted by me at 7:52 PM | Comments (0)
September 9, 2000
Quoth The Raven, La Puebla Unido Jamas Sera Vencido...
Today the Reverend Billy staged a performance at the Edgar Allan Poe house on Thomson St. This is the house where Poe wrote "The Raven." It is apparently the last remaining residence of the author. A house across from it, the Judson House, is apparently also historic; some call it the birthplace of modern art, as a very important early gallery was there. Both buildings are slated to be torn down by New York University soon to make way for a 17-story law school building. This edifice will block out sunlight to a substantial part of Washington Square Park, which is already thrown into obscurity by other NYU buildings.
So I found myself on the scaffolding between Judson and Poe Houses today, clutching my accordion to my chest and trying to keep my black kimono from catching on the razor wire separating us from the street two stories below. Getting there was a very cloak-and dagger affair; we snuck in the back way through a nearby church. It took us a moment to fiddle with the church lock. There were about a dozen of us trying to look inconspicuous -- we were wearing all black and should therefore have been indistinguishable from any other group of New Yorkers, but we were also wearing large cardboard raven hats and carrying a ladder.
A woman and two little girls stood by on the sidewalk as we worked to get in. One daughter asked her a question which I didn't catch; all I heard was her reply: "I want to see what happens." God bless the mothers of this country, the ones who can spot an art experience before it happens, the ones who keep their daughters around to see rather than hurrying down the sidewalk! I hope she was among the crowd of about a hundred people who milled around a grocer's on Thomson St. as we got the performance under way.
I had never seen the inside of a squat before, only heard stories from friends more adventuresome than I. Chalk grafitti covered the walls between the two buildings. Much of it had to do with flight, peppered with a few declarations of love. Despite this motif I don't presume the occupants knew the history of the houses.
I regret to report that Judson House is in bad repair. The walls and ceiling are falling in, the stairs are crumbling at the edges. One of my fellow performers, who Billy dubbed "The Ravenettes" for the day, swore it was a shame to see monuments treated this way as she stepped over another pile of rubble. I presume Poe House has received similar treatment.
The Rev railed about the impending destruction. He was in good form, not as loopy as he sometimes gets. He mentioned the "Sea of Identical Details" repeatedly, one of my favorite of his homilies. This is what ties the Poe House to the other things Billy preaches about, the myriad Starbucks and the Disneyfication of Times Square: the obliteration of history and neighborhood character by new, personality-free buildings and the gargantuan organizations which build them. This is why I joined up with the Church of Stop Shopping. Neighborhood preservation is often a bourgeois pastime; I'm more worried about the ongoing colonization of cultures.
Bill's friend Tony, clad in a black polarfleece poncho and one of the cardboard raven hats with the huge ugly yellow beaks, read a little Poe over a loudspeaker. Below, the gathered crowd yelled "NEVERMORE!" back up to us, cheerfully. I don't know if they could hear me or the other muscians-- a saxophonist, a tuba player with thick glasses, a thin guy on an unamplified synth and another drumming on a bucket-- at all. Across the way, a grey-haired gent aimed a video camera at us. The sky glowed. I turned my face up to the drizzle and grinned, honking my accordion.
Eventually there came word that the police had arrested our legal observer, which isn't ever supposed to happen, so fearing for the normalcy of our lives we hurried out the way we'd come. Turns out our haste was unwarranted; for maybe half an hour after we slipped out, the police were still trying to figure out how we'd gotten in. When they did, they took Billy away and began cutting the strings of our huge vinyl signs. "Shame! Shame! Shame!" the neighborhood chanted. A woman next to me shouted out in anguish as the huge black-and-white sketch of Poe she had drawn by hand was pulled into the arms of a round policeman. I don't know if we're getting that back.
epilogue: Billy and the legal observer were released after three hours and have a trial coming up soon. Judson and Poe houses are still standing, but the city has refused to bring the matter up with the state landmarks committee. They will come down as soon as NYU says the word. Billy's body will be between the houses and the bulldozers. Email the Rev if you want to be there too.
UPDATE: Today, 10/3/00, I got word that the hearing for Poe House had been denied. Billy wrote us all saying to expect the house would be down by lunch, but to try to make it to Washington Square Park by noon anyway. I couldn't (can't protest on company time...)
Posted by me at 9:20 PM | Comments (0)
IMC Process Paper
I have written a document with some thoughts on mission statements and suggestions for a somewhat more concrete plan of action for
the IMC. It is here. I am proud of it. I am also thrilled that I summoned up enough energy to breeze past my usual intellectual "crash" hours (11:00 pm, and again after 2 in the morning) with fingers flying.
Posted by me at 3:17 AM | Comments (0)
September 8, 2000
Castro Is A Fairy-Tale Knight
Castro's speaking in Harlem tonight. We've got webcast. His voice is older and reedier than I might have thought. When I tune out and let his speech spool through the back of my mind, I start thinking I'm listening to an old French movie. His inflections don't quite sound Spanish.
Castro says he turned down a speaking spot at the UN and a good hotel to go to Harlem. My friends are in Harlem, he says. People are applauding him heartily. He talks about low birthweight in third-world countries, hunger, medical schools where the Cubans are educating Haitians and other folks.
"He sounds like the Pope," grumbles Patty. I don't care. After a diet of empty-calorie reports on Gore's position on the environment and Bush's position on children and Lieberman's commitment to Moral Issues, Castro seems too good to be true. I can't believe he's a real person, a real leader, and he's actually speaking, blocks from where I sit.
Posted by me at 11:14 PM | Comments (1)
September 7, 2000
Turlets
as the plumber I've been negotiating with so charmingly calls them.
The seats of the toilets at work are invariably spattered if not flooded wwith urine. This is in the women's room, mind you, not the men's. Apparently it is the habit of the people who come through our clinic to suspend themselves above the seat. This makes their aim so inaccurate that the underside of the raised lid is even liberally dampened, sometimes.
My take on the matter is that these are women who are so marginalized by American society, especially social service agencies such as our own, that they trust nothing, not even the toilet seats. Nat and the rest of the girls in my office have other theories which are not so forgiving. I think they probably know better than I do. Still, I cling to my hypothesis.
Posted by me at 10:28 PM | Comments (0)
September 6, 2000
Birth Announcement: IMC-NYC
Well! I'm spending all my time after work this week at the New York Indpendent Media Center, which is finally looking like a real IMC. I don't judge this by what we've managed to produce; the measure of an IMC is never really how many stories we produce, and it certainly ain't about quality. But people are at the space about 24/7 now, and more to the point the first round of communal food has been served. Excellent Indian food, really well-spiced mottir panir.
I'd have more to say but suddenly I'm very tired. I think I'll go home, though my impulse is to crash on one of our sofas. Soon I will post something about how we came by this space to begin with, and a little meditation on what the IMC is and what it should be. That will have to be once my new iMac arrives-- at the moment I'm using a Performa at home which has no browser on it at all, and it is of course ill-advised for me to do anything from work. I guess this is more of a place-filler than anything else, to assert that the Dancing Sausage Web Journal is still alive and kicking and will continue to be so in the near future.
Posted by me at 10:52 PM | Comments (0)