« October 2000 | Main | December 2000 »
November 28, 2000
Detritus: Meant For A Long-Running Unfinished Work
Today we found a working pencil sharpener in class-- one of those objects which draws attention as if it were an enchanted carpet or broom. The sound of it grinding away elicited a deep urge in all of the kids to come get their own sharpened. Narovi appeared with a perfectly functional pencil. She smiled brilliantly up at me, and bit off its tip as I watched. She held out the damp stump. I had no choice.
* * * * *
The wolf-stare-- he did it too. You do it with Rufus, and I did it to him and he stared back, and we didn’t talk at all, just battled with gentle teeth: that’s how we ended up together. You understand. It doesn’t mean as much as you think, all that focused attention, but it is easy to read so much into it.
* * * * *
I have no excuse for even asking him out... I know why I'm doing it, though. He reminds me of [Julius,] who I miss. And I bet in the long run I will find this new one is not half the man Julius is, not half the dreamer or joker or passionate naif. (Wow. I don’t think I knew that’s what Julius was... does anyone but me know it's what he was?... Even [Mike], who seems willing to weigh so much on his big literary scale, asked me why I’d dated these guys after a few anecdotes... I know I don’t explain these boys well, I do not do them justice, and it’s a damned shame, because they don’t advocate for themselves all that well either. Where do I get these x-ray glasses? Where did I get this abalone knife?... I know it’s not just that I pick bad ones, or ones that are bad for me. I pick insufferable ones, yes, but that’s the good part too. I like opals and their cracks.)
I bet I will find this new one has a tiny little shriveled-pen!s soul and nothing more to him than the stringy meat he’s got clinging to those bones.
I’ll take that bet, Andrews; you’re on. I bet he has a feral secret, a whole unblemished passion left somewhere in that ribcage.
See-- there is a part of me which still wants to gamble. I like that part.
Posted by me at 1:06 AM | Comments (0)
November 27, 2000
Victoreeee!
The Popo Village project, which I started a year ago in an attempt to make the Annotated Hypertextography Of My Interests (i.e. collection of links) more interesting, is FINISHED and UP and now you can always visit it by clicking the "Return to Popo Village Map" or Return to My Room links in the left margin.
I guess it was inspired by Glyph's Twisted Matrix system and his crazed ravings about how text-based games are great and not as dead as everyone thinks, and also by Joel Hodgson's (sadly deceased!) Gizmonic Antsite. I do not claim in ANY WAY to be as technically sophisticated as either project. In fact, if you have tips on how to make this site more sophisticated, please let me know. Otherwise enjoy, and come back often-- I should be updating links, adding pictures, etc.
Posted by me at 2:03 AM | Comments (0)
November 24, 2000
Detritus: A Luaka Bop P0rn Thanksgiving, In Which I Address Celebrities
I'm not really sure what the fuss is about Thanksgiving. So many people I know dread having to be with their families for a whole meal. Despite my family's divorce (two generations of it on one side), Thanksgiving has never had that tension looming over it. I would have loved to be home with my family, either side of it, to remember all the little weird things about Thanksgiving at my house, like the way the twins and I used to create holiday centerpieces with our toys. For a few years we had Caltech grad students over; I always enjoyed the crowd and the opportunity it afforded to move in and out of circles of adults, surreptitiously hanging on the stories they told about people I didn't know, both living and dead, to make themselves laugh.
I do vicariously enjoy others' disaster-Thanksgivings, though. One guy in our improv troupe at Hampshire-- short, barefoot in all seasons, with a predilection for pajama bottoms and flaming shirts-- would use the first practice after a holiday as his own private primal-scream-therapy session. You could bet that when he came back from vacation you were more likely to be jumped on, screamed at, humped, or bitten in a rehearsal than in subsequent weeks (though the risk was always there). His parents came to a performance once. They seemed like perfectly normal people. I have no idea what could possibly have gone on in their house.
* * * * *
My own Thanksgiving this year was nice, a standard dinner-out-and-political-argument-over-dessert affair with the Edels, a pinko family down the block who were my Ellis Island into this city. Then we had an awful Victorian movie based on a Wilde play, and then we ended up watching some ostensibly-not-p0rn on a free trial of HBO. It was a documentary about str!ppers. I say ostensibly-not because a) of the documentary format and b) it was during such hours that I don't think they were supposed to be showing full-front^l nud!ty, but they were. It was an interesting piece, despite the fact that the camera took these bodies in as leeringly as the men in the audience did. I was really absorbed in what these women were saying about themselves and their work and in the shots that were occasionally thrown in of the men watching. It's not the kind of thing I usually get to see.
You should go to a str!p club sometime, if you're interested in this, Gareth told me. He and Steph know girls who do it all the time. The str!ppers talk more to the girls than to the men in the audience. Apparently having women in the audience makes a place feel less sleazy for all concerned. I don't know, though... I think I need the mediating influence of the camera there to be able to really get a good look at what was going on. Gareth didn't seem to pick up on the fact that visiting a str!p club might be a different experience for a 130-pound woman than for a 190-pound man.
The documentary made me contemplate bre^sts. (yes, I feel the need to modify that word to get it past the NetNannies... I know AOL blocked it in chat rooms at one point, so I wouldn't be surprised if everyone else was. Heck, the Scient0L0gists won't let you view a site which uses the word "p00dle" if you're using their browser...look guys! p00dle p00dle p00dle! that should just about fry your brainwashed ^sses... but I digress.) There are other eras and other situations in which I might be more likely to see more of other women's bre^sts, but I don't end up in locker rooms much and I'm not bi enough to actually act on any of my impulses, so I don't. Other women's bre^sts are funny, is the conclusion I came to. They're not nearly as big or round as you might be led to believe. Not even the str!ppers' bre^sts.
I went home and took a good look at my own. I lean forward and they hang down separately, like pit bull teats. So much for bre^sts.
* * * * *
While I'm on the subject of bodies, I might as well say: Nobody wants to hear about your pen!s, Mr. Lopate. There are those who get paid to write p0rnographic material, and those who masturb4te publically, and do it with brio; there are those who write medical manuals, and those who write diagnoses, and do it carefully; you are none of the above. For having the audacity to be paid, as an Essayist In The Grand Tradition Of Montaigne, to coolly contemplate your navel, fingers, legs, and penis (and then your divorce) in public, you're being called an important writer of our time?-- ok, ok, so I have some lingering resentment over being assigned to read Portrait of my Body at one point--
* * * * *
Either I've just been too dumb to find it, or websites really do spring up in the dead of night like mushrooms-- there is an official David Byrne website, right in the heart of Luaka Bop Land. There are albums I haven't heard of, despite my frantic scrabbling for something new to listen to on Napster, and the site also has a clip of his interview on Space Ghost, something I saw in a bar at one point and had forgotten I needed in my life. (The .mov file is heinously long and difficult to download-- if you manage to get it into someplace I can FTP it from and let me know, I will love you forever.)
Yes, Mr. Byrne, I download your songs on Napster. I apologize. In my heart I feel this is revenge on the radio, which never EVER plays anything at all that I like, and I like good music. I will continue to steal from the six corporations which are choosing to clog my airwaves with as many Michael Bolton tracks as they can dig up until they wise up. I hope that artists like yourself and They Might Be Giants who have expressed displeasure with this system will find some way of circumventing these behemoths which do not want to play your music and getting it directly to those of us who do not want a 24/7 IV drip of N'Sync. You have more power in this matter than we do. All we can do is steal.
Posted by me at 5:05 PM | Comments (0)
November 23, 2000
Rats.
So if I don't start improving my sleep patterns, I'm going get steadily dumber? stands to reason, I guess. So much for the Fight Sleep campaign.
Posted by me at 11:54 AM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2000
The White Girl Imagines For A Moment That She Can See The Future And It Is Just As Jimmy Santiago Baca Has Said
I'm starting to hallucinate in the afterschool program.
the world is melting...
Another Monday. My co-teacher is in college Mondays, and the Language Arts teacher never showed, so I was left alone with the little darlings. The director was missing.
There is a shift in the atmosphere in the cafeteria, a low-pressure zone where the director usually stands-- the electricity before a storm which makes animals run around like they're touched in the head.
Things started to fall apart from their moments with their neon-yellow and pink yogurt onwards. I had to chant each name five times to get attention. Lined up, the boys pushed each other chest-to-chest and stared each other menacingly in the eye.
They have shiny green plumed tails and hard talons. They wear doo-rags on their heads. I hear their fathers urging them to be men, and beyond that, a ring of white men howling for a Battle Royale.
They lined up and then fell out of line again, wandering off talking or hiding behind the play equipment. I couldn't move them. It was literally like herding cats. Someone had a pumpkin, and it was thrown and shattered. There were tears, and then the boy with the pumpkin was slouched against the wall, refusing to move. I scooped up the shards. A mouth-breathing fatboy stooped to pick up the seeds.
I took the caved-in pumpkin to the principal's office, and left it on his desk as a warning like a beaten head. Tomorrow I would have his own head on a pole. The next day I would have a school where every smiling, earnest third-grader could analyze DNA and explain to you the nuances of the Cultural Revolution.
I didn't have the guts. I saw the principal, though. In a moment of bad judgement I sent a helpful boy with a crew-cut down the hall after him with the broken gourd. The boy returned without reaching the principal, his question for me written all over his face. The principal returned.
He glared at them like a basilisk, and shook his own green tail.
When we had them in the room, I held out the pumpkin pieces to him. Could you throw this away, please? No, he said, put them in the garbage here. I tried to explain that the kids already had too many demands on their attention, what with hunger and feeling unsafe and advertising and noise from their peers, and they were already complaining that the smell of pumpkin was a distraction. The principal frowned.
He got the point.
One boy who is reserved but violent began to move the furniture around. Another began to develop what looked like pinkeye as I watched. A third pulled out the same homework he has done for the last three weeks, and started grinding blobs of ink into the page. The girls whose teachers had pulled them away returned like starlets, screaming. I asked them to lower their voices. We can't hear you! they shrieked. I tried again. We can't hear you!
I looked at the one with the impish face, and her belly swelled. She got her way, and it was ready to have its way with her.
I coughed up phlegm from lungs which had been clear an hour before. My voice was fading in angry static. To call order, I dragged in a teacher from next door. You are so embarrassing, he told them as they listened in divine silence. You are so embarrassing, I think we should keep you from your next activity and sit you down in here and be quiet and make you copy an essay off the board about why you should not disrespect your teacher and why you are being punished for what you have done.
And they did. They wrote carefully and poignantly. And then, chastened, they lined up straight afterwards and didn't say anything. No, no, I must be hallucinating. What really happened is they sat down right there on the storytelling rug in their grey numbered jumpsuits, and refused to eat, and banged the commodes and chanted, We want water! We want justice!
We climbed the stairs like they were Himalayas and we were Mongols unhapppy to be in service of the Khan. Upstairs there was no cooking class anyway. Upstairs the teacher who was supposed to be helping the cooking class said she had thought she wasn't needed so she was helping the principal instead. The head teacher was ill. A fifth grader who didn't know us took all our pictures, then took them again. Everyone but me posed.
We went downstairs too noisy so the assistant director said the kids would all be punished by sitting in silence in the cafeteria and reading. We opened the door of the cafeteria: cacophony, monsoon. The smartest kids said they couldn't read; the slow ones asked for crayons; the spoiled girl with the puckish face screamed How old are you?, gauging if I was old enough to outrank her mother. I told her I was one hundred and fifty-five. Books were thrown and torn. Everyone grabbed The Very Hungry Caterpillar and started reading it upside-down.
They looked around them and saw which way the wind was blowing and started chanting: Hulega! Huelga! Huelga! The whole room took it up. Then I pulled out my guitar and sat at the cafeteria table with them. We all sang We Shall Not Be Moved.
Outside, the country was still undecided about who should be president. Big drops of slush fell from the sky, slicing at my cheekbones.
I really can't say, I think I laugh to keep from cryin
so much goin on, people killin people dyin...
--Q-Tip
Posted by me at 11:46 PM | Comments (0)
Sandra Cameronites And The Big Lindy Goodbye
I returned last night to the swing scene after more than three months' absence (I'm not counting the lovely evening I had at the Supper Club with the Squirrel Nut Zippers and the cute Canadian grad student). The venue was St. Jean Baptiste's Church at 76th and Lexington, not a bad scene all told. The Delegates were playing. They've grown more confident since the last time I saw them at Windows on the World, though they still tend towards the slow stuff. My shoes had somehow lost the patina of grit I worked up dancing at Central Park over the summer, so I was wobbling through turns like a floor-mounted punching bag, but a few of the leaders didn't treat the swingout like I was a slingshot, so I survived. I had a very long conversation with a very nice vegetarian uptown native who seemed to be an interesting person as well as a good leader, a rare combination! except of course among Pasadena Ballroom-trained Caltech students. ;)
Also of note was a prim, pale, balding man who at first seemed to be another average Joe with a few Sandra Cameron lessons in his recent past... He eventually moved on to a more imaginative routine, and proved to be so slick and so precise that I knew he was from out of town. When he spoke up he had an accent. I eventually inferred that he was from Sweden, where they Lindy like maniacs and hold some of the best competitions in the world. He told me that in Sweden, swing has been a fad since the 1970s. It probably was the impetus for the rebirth of swing in California six years ago.
That's a little embarassing. So much for the staying power of the American cultural attention, right? Can you think of any craze which has lasted over a year here? Sure, music and clothes get revived, but not without being forgotten, shunned, or regarded with heated embarassment for a decade. Swing, too, is fading. Clubs close because swingers don't drink alcohol. Among the younger set only the die hards keep coming back, and besides them there are only the old batchelors looking for a cheap grind. I miss the days when I'd visit a small town and find eager, sweaty high school boys in fedoras scheming to get fake IDs just so they could drive hours to a joint where they could practice their aerials and drink water.
This time I am not going to blame it entirely on MTV. I pin the rap for the destruction of swing, at least in New York, on the Sandra Cameron Dance Studio and its cadre of painstakingly trained yuppie drones. You can tell when you're at a dance lousy with Sandra Cameronites. At first you have the pleasant impression that you've found a cache of really good dancers. Then you sit out a dance, Lady Day sings out a stop-and-go scat, and a thrill goes up your spine as you watch every couple on the floor pull into alignment and do the exact same pose on the swingout. This is not a pleasant sensation like listening a toddler sing to herself. It's the oh-good, I'm-not-going-to-get-mugged-here kind of feeling you get when you wander into a gated community.
Swing, for me, is about big, messy exuberance which must be intuited, not taught. If Sandra Cameron students are going to be the last ones on the floor I'll start haunting tango halls instead. I will join the starved old women in their stiletto heels and gypsy skirts and never look back.
* * * * *
I was going to write more tonight, because I had an interesting week last week, but I wiped out that last bit accidentally the first time around and had to rewrite it completely. No more composing in Blogger for me! eesh. And now it's time for bed. further bulletins as events warrant.
Posted by me at 2:03 AM | Comments (0)
November 13, 2000
Blogging
I finally got around to reading the article in the New Yorker about Blogger. It wasn't as bad as I'd thought. In fact, it was kind of frivolous; felt like a return to the bad old Tina Brown days. I guess that was intentional. It was a light fluffy piece which didn't come to a point... form follows function, I suppose, as this was an article about the software which makes posts like the following possible/ubiquitous:
Friday, November 10, 2000
Last night i went to see Charlies Angels with my friends Jami and Pat. Right now im on the phone with my friend. Im sooooooooo bored and my mom wants me to clean my room. Tommorrow i have to go to a bat mitzvah for my friend Allie. There is going to be only a few people that i know. I better look good, lol! Well w/e
Ilana
posted by Ilana H at Friday, November 10, 2000
(from 220 Kelvin, someone else's blog. next entry begins "I'm bored.")
Somehow I was cowering in the fear that the New Yorker would ream Blogger for the way it trivializes the written word... well, I spose it doesn't need to; all it needs to do is gesture in Blogger's general direction with a knowing smirk, which is essentially what it's done; a bear can swallow all the bees it has to.
so, I was cowering? yes. Too much of my ego rests on my writing, no matter where I put it. I'm enjoying having a means to self-publish-- it's gotten me to write more regularly than anything but email. At the same time, I am always aware I'm standing in public, a self-consiousness I wish I could overcome. I feel the need to be all-knowing and all-saying. I had the same reaction to this feeling when I was writing for the Omen at Hampshire: I tend to write rigid, unimaginative essays with a pedantic tone.
I'll admit it: it's because I have this desperate drive to be Remembered, or for the moment, Known. I'm casually spreading the link to my site around wherever I can. I was delighted when people from the IMC suddenly started poking at this site without my telling them it was there; I realized it was because people were using the link in my sig. I have this stupid fantasy... Mark Hugo sits around hatching wild get-rich-quick schemes which involve Winnebagos and wrestling and porn, maxing out his credit limit, and me, I stay up way too late typing and hoping someone will see this and give me a job doing John McPhee work without my having to work my way up through a string of nasty proofreading positions.
Ultimately this comes down to not wanting to be erased, not to die without having somehow meant something to the stream of history. Does everyone feel this way? I'm not sure I'm dealing with it in appropriate ways.
OK, no more meta. Not for a while.
Posted by me at 11:54 PM | Comments (1)
Everything Sank
En ti se acumularon las guerras y los vuelos.
De ti alzaron las alas los pájaros del canto.
Todo te lo tragaste, como la lejanía.
Como el mar, como el tiempo. Todo en ti fue naufragio!
--neruda
I'm frustrated with the fact that I still haven't found a person to settle down with. It's not that I'm eager to get married; it's just that I know three men who seem to be exactly the person I want, with varying shades of sense of humor, intellectual engagement, and extracurricular interests, but I can't seem to get through to them. One is too far away to see regularly and is just about permanently committed; the other two seem to have estranged themselves from me. I have known these people for years, and it's taken me a while to figure out how good they are. I don't want to keep looking for anyone new; it strains the soul to always hunt.
It is not easy to reconcile myself to knowing the people who are so good for me are unattainable. It makes me lose faith in love. I value these guys above most people I know, but that means nothing. They will move away, or lose contact, and I will be left to start over. Putting all my eggs in one basket under these conditions seems profoundly ill-advised; I'd be better off living in a commune with friends (or, as Lauren used to say, with a vibrator and cats).
I think we only believe in love so we can anchor our hormones to something more constant than they are, namely that comfy-old-shirt feeling you get when you have lived in proximity to someone a long time and banged out and rearranged and fussed over everyday irritations. Love is a ridiculous conflation of these two human impulses.
I'm listening to a David Byrne album on continuous repeat:
If love is alive, why can't I touch it?
Does it feel like jello, or a fire?
I can tell by the taste it was not poison
but it sure did mess up my insides.
There's nothing else like you on my planet
you see me now in my true form...
I have had a handful of medium-length relationships, from six months to three years long. Getting out of relationships like that tears at you. I don't want to do it any more. I was both hormonally attracted to and comfortable with my former partners, and would probably still be with one or another of them if we hadn't exhausted ourselves by shuttling back and forth across the country for work and school and home and by picking at each other because the unlimited possibilities of our liberal arts educations made us unsure of what we wanted our lives to be about. No amount of flirting and foreplay and casual sex and build-up to whatever's coming next will compensate for not having the sum of those years embodied in one person who I can still come home to and confide in and sleep with anymore.
Tonight I've re-exposed the raw parts left by the end of my last relationship, which wasn't so long ago. He came over for dinner. Being around him makes me feel off-balance, like I have an inner ear infection. I'm still drawn to the many parts of him which I can't puzzle out. He still makes me angry; every question I ask elicits the same response: I don't know. His sense of humor is still the one I mimic reflexively, reveling in its absurd statements of the obvious. Whenever I come within feet of him I want to touch him, to slide my arms around his belly or root into his neck. He's still stubborn in his provincial tastes. Every time I see him, he shuffles his feet and hugs me and apologizes for not being the person I need. His continued concern for me makes me forget the old paranoia over why he never called (he calls regularly now) or the panic because there was never anything we wanted to do together (there still isn't, because there is nothing he wants to do).
She put the scar on the side of his face
when he disappeared for three days
They say that they are in love
He took her cocaine when she was asleep
Friends say he gave half away
They say that they are in love
When I reconsider all my relationships I try to write a story about them, a piece of fiction. It is about a boy who is hopelessly introverted, and a girl who is tragically extroverted. I worry I'm binging on stereotypes. I can never get the nuances correct.
Posted by me at 2:21 AM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2000
Down For The Recount
Something worth writing about happened today. What was it again? Ah yes. The election recount protest which went on in Times Square today. Or actually, not the protest, but a few specific moments. At one point, having exhausted my film, I ran into one of the ubiquitous overpriced camera stores of the Tourist Zone, leaving the outraged Democrats and handful of opportunistic Socialists and Greens (some of whom were clearly trying to hold their gorge down about being associated with Gore supporters, but most of whom were trying to get the recount fanatics to look at something more meaningful than Florida) howling on the designated protest island that had been established by the police. (There was no way these GODLESS ANARCHIST MANIACS were going to be allowed to interfere with a SHOPPING DAY! One of these toddler-carrying L.L. Bean-wearing lunatics might be just itching to get back to the window-smashing job he started in Seattle!)
anyway. In the store I confided to the tan-skinned clerk that I was a little too late in reloading-- the police had already hauled off the rabble-rouser in the red shirt who had screamed himself hoarse over the bullhorn. "Good," said the clerk. "I hope they all get arrested. They are going to start a civil war." I asked him where he was from. "Syria," he said. As he counted out my change I tried to assuage his fears... I wanted to tell him that these people specifically were not going to be starting any trouble-- they were waving Gore/Lieberman signs, not red and black flags-- but what came out was a vague platitude about there being a long history of nonviolent protest in the U.S.
I went back and took more pictures. The protest eventually dissolved. The guy who set up the website at the center of all this spoke to the assembled over a bullhorn the police handed him, telling us there was another protest at the Federal Building downtown on Monday.
Then things got surreal. A middle-aged white policeman with a moustache took the bullhorn back. He thanked us all for coming. "Your next protest will be at the Federal Building on Monday," he reiterated. I don't know what in hell was going on-- he'd helped cuff and remove the red-shirt rabble-rouser not half an hour before. No policeman is ever supposed to encourage protests, except maybe as an agent provocateur. Maybe he was just a sympathetic Democrat himself? I think he was just enjoying the bullhorn-- his next step was to announce some sports scores to the remaining throngs.
"Arrest that man!" I yelled out. "He's using a bullhorn without a permit! That's what you just dragged the other guy off for, right?!" The officers near me chuckled. Across the street, the older man turned the wide end of the cone towards me. "I'm losing my voice," he said, "I have to use it."
Posted by me at 3:12 AM | Comments (0)
November 11, 2000
My Life In The Bush of Gore
I began Election Day by voting, in Queens. I actually managed to drag myself out of bed and into one of those industrial-grey booths earlier than I usually manage to get up for work. This was the first time I have ever voted in a booth. Previously I have only gotten absentee ballots. Those usually came late, so it is quite possible this is the first time my vote was ever counted.
The turnout in Sunnyside was reasonable, though I was surprised to find that the majority of the voters in my very Latino neighborhood at that hour were white, some Asian. When it was my turn I registered my irritation over the lack of information about the ballot with the poll staffer for my district. I really was shocked to find I was supposed to vote on appropriations for public transportation. Somehow, I thought, New York must have some system where representatives and not voters end up voting for new propositions. I hadn't seen so much as a lawn sign for a proposition. In California, you get a practice ballot and two booklets itemizing not only each party's position on each initiative, but also a statement from the state treasurer or something which lays out exactly what this measure will cost and where the money will come from. I didn't even see any ads. Every veteran New Yorker I've said this to has responded with frustrated sarcasm: Heavens-- why inform the electorate about such things?
The unannounced appearance of this proposition was the first event in what is now stretching into a week of vertigo-inducing lessons on what democracy really looks like. Later that day a Green Party campaigner and friend of mine told that in Brooklyn, whole polling places full of those tanklike voting machines, with their regulation right-side-up flag decals on the side, turned out to be broken. Some wiped out hours worth of registered votes. Some only half worked, prompting poll-site volunteers to tell voters to vote half the slate on the machines, half on paper. The volunteers did not monitor to make sure people did not vote twice. An hour after I heard this story, Florida was recalled.
Anyway, I voted yes on the transit proposal; everyone (and I don't just mean New York residents) should have a train as reliable as the 7. I flipped the lever for Hillary Clinton and some other Democrat under the Working Families slate (New York has this weird rule saying parties can endorse each others' candidates... seems to me to discourage the parties from being imaginative, but hey.) I looked at the Presidential lever and my stomach sank. This is too scary, I thought. One wrong move and I could vote the school where I volunteer into permanent cesspoolhood. I finished off the rest of my levers, intending to come back and flip the Big Lever when I'd gotten my courage up. In the end, I'm not sure whether I voted for president or not. Don't blame me, I voted for disorganization.
I spent most of my day presiding over the distribution of free clothes we got in at work. This was satisfying; I am always happiest when I am connecting people to resources they need, especially if it won't cost them anything. It was also a Sisyphean effort, though. I would spend an hour sorting and folding the old jackets and blouses only to have a hoarde of women descend and return the room to a state of polyester entropy, unevenly perfumed with detergent and stale cigarettes. When the stock on the tables had shrunk there was more, so much so that you couldn't see the floor of the large stairwell where we were keeping the unopened bags, and the pile was as high as my head. I went wading in it. The soft black trashbags sucked at my legs. Women would walk away with two or three large bags of clothes for themselves and their families, and still there was more. Among these gleaners I saw the final stages of the cycle of charity which I wrote about in my Salon article... the truth seems to be that the clothes we discard encourage a few people to be just as greedy and bloated with disposables as their social "betters," and does not reach others at all.
That night I found myself with an hour to kill before a Surveillance Camera Players performance. I wandered around the Rockefeller Center area, making a vague mission of informing the resident homeless population about the clothes at WHEDCO. The first man I encountered was dumping a bag of cans out on the steps of a church. He apologized when I interrupted him. "I'm not with the church," I told him. "I couldn't care less if you dump the cans here. I just wanted you to know about some free clothes, if you need them." "I don' need no clothes," he said, emphatically. "I have everything new at home, all new. Just work so hard I have no time to use." He grimaced. I moved along.
Northeast of Rockefeller Center there is a surprising amount of "public space," big glassed-in gardens and atria on the ground floor of office buildings where ostensibly anyone can hang out, though the sterile slate walls and floors and the security are such that nobody can really feel welcome there. On election night, there were a few vagrants napping in the uncomfortable patio furniture. Around 52nd street, men of all ages and races played speed chess, clocks clacking. In a narrower space between 55th and 56th street, men in suits and yarmulkes clustered outside a club around a velvet rope and sipped red wine. Heading north I found another "public space" adjacent to the Newseum, Niketown, and further into its maw an impeccable marble shopping arena-- I had wandered into Trump Tower. Its elevators are gilded.
I returned to Rockefeller Center, where though it was eight in the evening it was bright as day. The disembodied voice of Tom Brokaw issued from every corner-- the gold statues, the ice rink with its mostly white skaters, the holiday flower arrangements, the red and blue spotlights, the huge banks of television equipment and the flags set up for a broadcast supplementing the election coverage with happy patter from Katie Couric, live from the all-American, mom-and-apple-pie hamlet of Manhattan. Stars jerkily rolled up and down and around the NBC logo, which was being projected on its home, the G.E. building. Some of the surveillance cameras around the Rockefeller Center moved like the stars as the Players passed them, our "Just going to work, officer" signs held over our heads.
Afterwards I went down to the Green Party headquarters on Houston for Nader's victory party. My friend-- the one who had heroically beaten his way through crowds to bring paper ballots to Brooklyn spots where voting machines had broken-- collapsed in a chair and wept as the last results came in and it became clear that Nader didn't even get the five percent he'd need to get the Greens matching funds for next time. I didn't feel as upset. Unlike him, I hadn't been putting my life on hold to campaign for Nader; I was also steeled for the worst. More importantly, I was in a room filled with energetic, beautiful young people, many of whom I recognized from elsewhere-- Puppetistas, associates from the IMC and the Church of Stop Shopping, my friend at FAIR, various organizers and rabble from assorted movements, a guy I'd met swing dancing. The frustration of being cheated out of our matching funds by reactionary Democrats was a setback, but we would still be here. The next day we would go back to the trenches of whatever fight each of us was fighting and settle in for the next onslaught. In the best anarchist tradition, Nader is not our leader; he is our spokesperson-elect, and we will continue to work together for justice with or without him, and that is what counts.
I left the party around 1:30 in the morning, with the candidates still neck and neck. Between the Houston stop on the F and the 5th Avenue stop on the 7, the train stopped completely, and everything went very quiet. I thought it was in observance of the tipping of some balance. When I got back to Sunnyside and turned on the TV, Peter Jennings was smiling and delivering his smarmy wrap-up speech, announcing that Bush had won.
And yet the next day everything had been taken back, and the vote was undecided. I felt Manhattan floating above the water like the Magritte painting of the kingdom perched atop a huge boulder. The light was brilliant and strange. For weeks I have finished every lecture on fighting to my students by saying "In twenty years, you won't remember who called you Juan Bobo or Nutty Professor; you'll remember who was elected President." The past few days, it's felt like we won't ever know who is president. We can't celebrate or accuse anyone in the wake of this election, can't set our sailing course by the eventual decision because we realize that the map was made way, way way before accurate navigational tools. It makes me a little giddy, like I just got out of school because of a bomb threat. Other people are going to have to start thinking about this, and talking about it, and I feel like I don't have to worry so much anymore about pointing out the government's flaws. Such an impossible moment in history, when the machine has simply started to malfunction without getting jammed by a wooden shoe!...
Posted by me at 3:08 AM | Comments (0)
November 6, 2000
Chat Rooms
I have been using chat rooms and other written forms of electronic communication for seven years now, but every now and again the openness of the medium makes me giddy. I enter a chat room: what does that mean? I can be connected to the forum for hours without saying anything. I can evoke images of entering quietly or with a big cape-swirling flourish. I can write myself as a squirrel-fox which pads in and curls up around the ankle of a complete stranger, or enter with a huge sword and jovially hew a friend in half with it.
I know. I gross myself out with the Dungeons and Dragons of it too. But I love the freedom of it, and the possibilities for play. These things are still in the pidgin-culture phase-- customs surrounding this communication are still made up as we go along-- so there's none of those restraining social structures that bug me.
I'm waiting, of course, for the day when we'll all have avatars to represent ourselves visually. Though I don't know... if I had known it was coming I wouldn't have wished for TV and the way it makes everything be about appearance.
Posted by me at 12:27 AM | Comments (0)
November 5, 2000
The Leadership People/ Halloween and the Great Uninterested
I went in to work today for what was ostensibly going to be a conflict resolution workshop. I was kind of excited about this; there had been a conflict resolution and peace studies course at my high school which I wanted to take because at the time I was starved for leftist perspectives on international affairs, but I never managed to make it.
The workshop I attended today did not live up to my hopes. I guess I'd hoped for a program which would incorporate Said and Chomsky and the like into a curriculum for my afterschool kids, a tall order to begin with. But the workshop fell short of even a street-smart approach to getting teenagers to stop insulting each other. In fact, it was almost exactly identical to workshops I have attended for Hampshire orientation leader training, another conference where we were asked to "vision" Hampshire as we wanted it, sex-ed classes I helped lead in Holyoke, and the training for the government program I am currently in. It's not unlike a meeting at the IMC, for that matter. There was a facilitator with a flip chart. We did get-to-know-you games, trust and communication exercises. At the end, we filled out evaluation forms.
I knew this "leadership" culture was pervasive-- the Chronicle of Higher Ed noticed it a few years ago, pointing out how divorced it is from traditional academic thought, among other things-- but I was surprised to find it in a relatively hippie stronghold like conflict resolution. There is an industry out there which is training people to run workshops like this. A folder full of xeroxed truisms and a few hours spent "brainstorming" and falling into each others' arms to demonstrate trust is its prescription for everything from strained labor relations to troubled youth. It didn't even bother me as we wrote yet another set of ground rules or unconstructive words or whatever it was on little notecards today. I have been through this routine so many times that the very familiarity of the featureless fix is almost comforting to me now.
But I will resist. It is useful to talk about communication problems, and set ground rules, and get to know our co-workers. But this-- this-- it's just weird. Why do we have to have a stranger come into our midst in order to talk about our unspoken goals or hatreds of our community? How is it the Leadership People can peddle the same fix to a college alumni board or a corporate human resources office or a high-school model UN? And does everything have to be so sterile? I swear, even the bland pasty bagels that get served at leaderhsip workshops must be from a central Leadership Training Bakery somewhere. Don't eat the Leadership Bagels. They're people!
Maybe I'm just overreacting... I've had a few too many experiences lately with flip-charts. But seriously: I don't see the use in a culture of workshops which is only marginally sensitive to the specifics of a given situation and tends to be brought in to patch a problem rather than arising out of conflicts to solve them.
(While I'm at it: I also don't see the use in holding Hampshire College alumni events in the same sterile conference rooms one might rent to hold a leadership seminar. Hampshire alumns are spooked enough already by the effects the college has had on their egos and careers; we don't need our alienation compounded by reunions like the New York one held this week, with food that evoked the dining commons. It was almost painful to watch how much distance my fellow alumns were trying to keep between themseves and the an elderly ersatz crooner the college hired to pound on a synth in the corner. The Alumni office thinks that an atmosphere like this is going to entice us to pass on the scant cash we make as artists and social workers? Where did the funk bands go?)
* * * * *
Enough enough. New York has made me happy in the past week. New York has actually made me completely overstimulated, but that passes for happy when you're manic-depressive.
I went to the Greenwich Village Halloween parade expecting that I would watch, since I couldn't muster anyone else to join me. My prediction was that the parade would be the closest thing anywhere to Hampshire's Halloween party, with its fireworks and queens and music and drugs, glitter and glowing things and people in costumes you have to guess at for a little because their meaning is complicated. I was right and I was wrong. I spent the first hour trotting through the audience looking for friends I'd promised I'd meet. Something wasn't right about the scene in the crowd. There was no music, for starters. Most people had only gone so far as to buy flashing plastic devil horns from a vendor. Nobody was really in costume.The police were hemming the crowd in, telling them not to cross streets. The barricades evoked the same visceral fear of entrapment in me that's been popping up ever since I got arrested. This led me to decide I'd get into the parade, even though I was feeling awkward and conspicuous (I was wearing my Star Trek uniform, which everyone needed to identify out loud, as if they were playing a huge game of car bingo. "Beam me up," the police catcalled. "Star Wars!" shrieked some tourist behind me.)
The moment I was past the first wave of giant puppets I started feeling more at home. The Bread and Puppet van was there, its hippies lined up with their papier-mache skeletons. I passed the Squirrel Nut Zippers warming up on a float down a side street. Jimbo Mathus, the front man, was wearing a hat with a shed snake-skin for a band, shaking a skull-encrusted stick. Someone nearby was riding a behemoth beige larva crazed with blue neon tubes. Fleets of identical aliens and gold-masked unknowns slid by.
I headed for the source of the loudest noise. It turned out to be two samba bands sandwiching a beleaguered Korean drum ensemble down the road from a techno float. The sound was incredible. I had never been close enough to a samba ensemble to feel like my rib cage was being pummeled, so I stayed. Ahead of me I could see my friend Randy. He was dressed as a minuteman, waving a sign atop the Road Rocket, a polka-dotted bus that his company, Rumpus, takes on promotional tours. They handed out toys to the kids in the crowd, flanked by a giant camel and a number of people in period dress.
I ended up marching with Reverend Billy's black-masked Ravenettes, the folks working to save Edgar Allan Poe's house. We were probably the saddest little bloc in the parade, despite our capes and masquerade beaks. We didn't have enough people to stretch across the street. We were also the only ones working. (well, I suppose the annoying people in Tyvek suits from MTV's Pop-Up Video and the Rumpus crew were really working too; we were just being serious, and not encouraging people to enjoy consuming an entertainment product while doing it.) We didn't have chants. The Rev was not up to preaching that night, though he admitted, as we went along, that the possibility for free press was too good to pass up. "Save Poe House, children!" Billy yelped, somewhat incongruously as he was in his street clothes. Some NYU fans on the sidelines, seeing our NYU Sucks posters, booed.
The bystanders made a wall of the unmitigated black winter coats which are regulation in New York City. I was amazed by how many onloookers there were. Not that it surprised me that the city was able to disgorge so many people. What didn't make sense to me was that they suffered the barricades at all. Weren't they New Yorkers? They stood there with no costumes, in even more gridlock than usual. I had imagined that the streets would be washed over in a sea of gyrating, sparkling citizens, who would change the bodegas and phone booths with their sheer presence as they went. I thought it would be a mobile Hampshire Halloween. Why would anyone want to watch this parade? This was a time to reclaim the streets from the tourists! This wasn't like the Rose Parade, where the non-resident marchers are determined months in advance and are interspersed with expensive horses and huge floral arrangements. Anyone could head down to the wellspring of the Halloween parade and join in. The joy was in the moving!
'spose that will have to wait for the Unpermitted Parade on Decemer 3rd.
Posted by me at 12:42 AM | Comments (0)