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September 24, 2001
Notes From Around New York
Chinatown
Friday night the cops' interest in passers through the Canal Street boundary line cooled a little. Still we had trouble getting our speakers in for the panel discussion we were doing on Walker Street -- they'd been at a peace vigil at Times Square with some 4,000 other people, and had been herded into a trap by the police up there.
There were hoards of Mormons cruising the streets, heading deeper into the deserted downtown from the boundary line. They were handing out tiny brochures to anyone who made eye contact. Soul-vultures. It was another night when the air got as bad as Quebec City during the April protests. It smelled just like tear gas, like a shower curtain on fire. One of the speakers we invited began her segment by saying it smelled just like Gaza, and that we should remember there are parts of the world where people live with this kind of smell every day.
Central Park
There are so many things in Central Park to heal the soul. Dogs, kids, saxophone players, middle-aged rollerbladers dancing, popsicles, horses. Usually meetings of tango, capoeira, African drumming, and other groups, but Central Park was a little quiet under the smoky marine layer yesterday. One tenacious group of breakdancers was performing at the southeast corner outside the park. They stood on their hands and held their legs like hieroglyphs above their heads, a testament to the continuing strength of our bodies.
There was only one candle at the John Lennon memorial yesterday, alarmingly low for the most cluttered shrine in the city. This, combined with the knowledge that radio stations were being asked not to play Imagine and any number of other songs (not to mention the fact that Leonard Peltier, Phillip Berrigan, and other activists in jail have been segregated from other inmates since the attacks) made me worry what kind of crackdown is afoot. Then I realized the asphalt around the memorial and for yards down the paths leading to it were splattered with candle wax.
Upper West Side
I saw Tom Hanks walking down Amsterdam yesterday evening. His face had worry lines all over it, as I guess it might if you'd been making a lot of epic war movies and something like this happened.
Sunnyside, Queens
Sunnyside is completely placid and quiet, and was even as the towers collapsed, and for days afterwards.
The Bronx
My friend Natalie has a cousin in the Air Force, whose husband is also in the Air Force. The cousin, a cheerful girl who I knew from work, just found out she's pregnant but isn't talking to the family. Natalie also has a brother who is itching to go over and fight. Natalie doesn't want a war. She doesn't even want to talk about this anymore.
The Subway
Someone tried to push a former co-worker of mine onto the subway tracks because she looks Muslim.
My own biggest fear: anthrax. I am always watching for people about to drop lightbulbs.
I guess I stay up this late and write because I don't know if I'll be able to tomorrow.
Posted by me at 1:26 AM | Comments (0)
September 23, 2001
My Essay On Flags
Flags aren't as dense here as they were around Boston when I visited James last weekend, but lots of people still have them. Stores have prefab flag posters cut out from local newspapers in their windows. They make me think of mimeographed school art assignments or pinups from teen magazines. Cabs have standard-issue flag stickers on them and my driver last night appeared to be from the Middle East but wasn't displaying his name the way he's supposed to. I wanted to ask him if people had been giving him trouble but I haven't been able to muster the voice to speak up in public lately.
I want to wear a flag upside down, because it is the official symbol for your ship being in trouble, but someone will probably kick me in the back if I do because people are ignorant. They think they can tell who is Muslim by looking at them and as a result they have been shooting Puerto Ricans.
I don't want anything to do with flags right now. All of them make me cower in dread because they're hung as thickly and thoughtlessly as Third Reich bunting around here. I hate to play reductio ad Nazism, because our inability to face the fact that anything could ever be as bad as the Holocaust is probably why we’re in such trouble right now, but I feel like America is threatening me right now that people like me, we ought to shut up about not wanting war or go be citizens of some other country.
Posted by me at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)
September 22, 2001
Something Better To Do: Read Stuff By Eqbal
Yahoo linked to Dawn, Pakistan's English-language newspaper. I like their editorial section. (If I felt like I had any kind of control or authority over information at the moment I would say something other than I liked it, and that it seems more less full of religious dogma than American news (who knew?!), and that it's heartening simply to hear comments from another country as deep in sh!t as we are right now, but I feel like I have a tenuous grip on everything at the moment.)
Eqbal Ahmad wrote editorials for Dawn, which is why I went and looked. I desperately miss Eqbal. I didn’t really know him well when I was a student and he a teacher at Hampshire. My first encounter with him was during the first semester of my second year. I must have been about as depressed then as I am now; at the time my work with Michael Lesy was causing me a great deal of pain.
Anyway, I was standing in the Greenwich laundry rooms when this small man with a face like a Boston terrier's comes in and starts loading his whites into one of the machines. And I’m standing there staring at my own machine, like a goof.
You’re just going to stand there and watch the laundry? Eqbal asked me.
I have nothing better to do, I said. Eqbal gave me a look of reproach. It wasn’t until I later watched him at the post office putting stamps on a large envelope crooked, then realized the package was addressed to Noam Chomsky, then saw Chomsky and Zinn and Said and later Kofi Annan speak to honor Eqbal’s career, that I realized what that look was about.
I remember feeling terrified when we lost Eqbal, because he knew so much about the history of South Asia and the Middle East and he seemed to have inspired so many people to think critically about nationalism and international policy. My terror at losing such a center of knowledge has now been renewed.
I found some good essays in the course of tracking down a solid link on Eqbal. Here's an interview Eqbal did with David Barsamian on India, Pakistan, and Bosnia; an essay Edward Said wrote about Palestine; more about Eqbal and Palestine from the editorial section at Dawn. These articles are good just because they are by Said and by Eqbal, both of whom spend more time making their prose writerly than any other academics I know.
I feel better now that I’ve linked to this stuff. Please digest these articles thoroughly and take the smarts they give you to your communities, for the sake of the peace activists you know. We're all of us a little overworked right now. Remember, you can’t learn to be a firefighter overnight, and they won’t let you help out in the rescue efforts if you go downtown, but the struggle for peace will love you for helping even if you don’t have any special training.
Posted by me at 4:07 AM | Comments (0)
September 21, 2001
Comedy and Liberty
They told us to get back to work... but there weren’t any jobs available for a man under his desk in the fetal position... which I gladly would have taken... –Jon Stewart
I'm sitting here listening to the Daily Show as I type. Jon Stewart gave an unhumorous, bewildered, tearful opening monologue for their first show back on the air after the crisis... I started bawling like a baby, because it's so hard to see someone whose facade of irony is usually so impenetrable dissolve in tears -- saw Denis Leary doing it the other night too -- and I found myself begging Jon not to betray us too and knuckle under to belligerent jingoism.
I don't know why I expect so much from him or the Daily Show, really. I was thrilled in a wicked little way when they gave some air time to the Republican Convention anti-globalization protesters last year. I feel like most of the time when you scratch the show’s surface it’s got a good radical heart, as I think all comedy does. I think back on what Joel Hodgson said about MST3K being “about liberty, in a small goofy way,” and also remember my blissfully naive worry, when Clinton first got elected, that the Capitol Steps would run out of people to make fun of with Democrats in office.
I do think comedy is important. I watched Martin Espada use it to soften up audiences, I saw how many “regular guys” Mike Moore was able to speak to with his shows. I get fed up with some of the humorless communists I work with. They criticize the Simpsons and the Daily Show for not going far enough, for selling out, but who the hell are they reaching? People who already agree with them. The real art of information transfer is in flipping binary switches and turning people on, and that’s not accomplished with dogma. We’ve all been talking about this, me and various friends, and the ones I like better say they’re tired of dogma, they can’t deal with it now, the means can’t always match the ends immaculately. I think subtle political commentary slipped into comedy is what prepares legions of kids to listen for the messages of activists when they first arrive at college.
Jon did OK this time. He talked about silly memories of where he was when Martin Luther King was shot; he talked about how privileged he felt to be "allowed to sit in the back of the country" and make snide comments about everything; and then he said after the crisis is when Martin Luther King's dream begins, because we start judging people based on character... and that made me cry harder, because a lively and kind woman I know from my job last year was attacked on the subway and blamed for the terrorism, and it's just so wrong to mistake firefighters for the rest of the US... but then Jon talked about how blowing up things was a stupid, easy way out, and then he closed by saying his apartment's view of the WTC has now been replaced by one of the Statue of Liberty. He didn’t come to any other conclusions. It’s the people who come to conclusions who make me most nervous right now, because I’m not coming to any myself.
* * *
Clearly we've all got to take this bird by bird. I had been trying to put together a piece about the day the towers came down, and in doing so I forgot a vital truth I learned in ol’ Professor Frankel’s class, which is that trying to organize strong emotions into writing at the flash point not only makes for bad writing but also complicates the emotions themselves. So I’m not going to try to write something for publication, or to try to make perfect art out of my angst, or even to try to avoid some of the weblog vices I traditionally try to avoid. it’s back to in-the-trenches spewage, for me. watch this space.
Posted by me at 2:14 AM | Comments (0)
September 12, 2001
The Gus Sindex, Special Edition
percentage of my outgoing email subject lines since 9:00 a.m. Tuesday which have contained the word "ok": 45%
number of forwards I have received in the past 24 hours which have included a clause instructing me not to disseminate the contents of the mail as they fall under attorney privilege: 1
number of friends of mine from Hampshire who were in the vicinity at the time of the World Trade Center collapse: 4
percent of those friends alive and accounted for: 100%
ratio of magazines I have worked for in the past month, above to below the 14th Street dividing line: 0:2
ratio of those magazines who do to those who don't owe me money: 1:1
number of major network television stations I received prior to the collapse: 6
number I receive now: 3
percent of those stations which are being rebroadcast by smaller UHF stations: 33.3%
number of friends I was unable to entice to visit New York by promoting our newest attraction, the Giant Smoking Hole In The Ground Center: 2
number of those friends who had previously planned to come to New York this weekend: 2
amount I paid the last time I went to swing dance at Windows On The World, the restaurant formerly at the top of One World Trade Center: $0
Posted by me at 10:37 PM | Comments (0)
September 11, 2001
the day before, I was watching TV....
all the ads -- all of them -- were for political hopefuls -- for mayor, for city council, for public advocate, for comptroller for g0d's sake, democrats and republicans, everyone talking about how they stood up to the mayor or fought for more cops or to keep incinerators out of Brooklyn; I Fight For You, I Work For Seniors, I Want To Be Tough On Crime, I Have A Record That Is Unparalleled. it got so the one or two commercial commercials would stick out for their selfishness. What has that Mitsubishi done for my community? you'd wonder.
...et nous voila ce soir.
Posted by me at 11:30 PM | Comments (0)
September 10, 2001
Portrait of Midday, Unemployed
Awake at eleven into a total communications breakdown. Not the kind you have with your loved ones; my sister and I have great conversations; the love life is percolating happily; Dad and I are on better speaking terms than we have been in years.
No. The cel phone is holding itself hostage until I pay bills I thought it wanted to pay itself. I thought it wanted to have a little romantic dinner with -- no -- that it wanted to cruise by in its dark Cadillac of e-commerce and ask my credit card to turn tricks whenever it, the cel phone, was feeling its oats. The college server is also going down like a two-bit wh0re. Two ISPs I don't use anymore have been picking my pocket for one yuppie food stamp ($20) a month for years and I didn't notice.
Didn't notice?!
Downstairs in the kitchen I stare at the almost empty cabinet and whine to myself that the world is asking me to be a grown up, but I don't have any of the organization skills yet.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs is posted on the wall by the still-compliant blue orb of my iMac. It tells me I should be securing Food and Drink before I worry about Self-Actualization or even Belongingness. I'm in denial that I seem to be developing an allergy to milk and need to change my eating habits and I don't want to go shopping. (I'm saying No a lot.)
I had to pencil in "shelter" on the hierarchy; it had been left off. Today the seventy-year-old guy who is supposed to fix the windows around the house came by to tell me that he was putting the project off, once again, for a few weeks. He wondered why I was home. No job, I snapped. What, the contract fell through? he asked. No contract, I was doing academic piecework. Well, what are you going to do? Are you going to be here over the next month?
How could I explain to him that right before he'd yelled "Anyone home?" up the stairs I had finally gotten excited about something -- that I'd decided next Tuesday I would leave for Washington, DC and live in a squat for three weeks while I helped set up communications systems for the IMF protest at the end of the month? What kind of sense does that make to a man who asks me if I have a contract? Does he know the unemployment rate is rising?
His eyes are blue and wide, like mine. I have called the landlady a hundred times to tell her he still hasn't done a day of work for the thousand dollars she's thrown at him to fix the house. His eyes are filmy, and I can't read any fear in them.
I don't know. I don't know where I'll be. I don't know if I'll have any work. I don't know.
The cel phone says On your knees, b!tch, the waiting time for the next available Sprint PCS operator is half an hour. Outside it gets suddenly dark and rumbles; there is no way I'll make an end run around my food neurosis and get to the supermarket on foot before it rains. There is no way I'll make it downtown in time to get any kind of sensible work done for the ex-hippie who is paying me under the table to do internet research.
I wonder if I will get my money back from the ISPs. I think, There are so many jobs out there which advertise they want someone who can juggle multiple projects. Is there anyone who says, It doesn't matter that much, we'd be happy with someone who tends to get monomaniacal, someone with a one-track mind?
Is there will anyone who will pay me to write, right now?
My editor hasn't called me since Thursday. I have to call this what it is now: not freelancing; I haven't got the courage for the unbearable trapeze act of freelancing, I can't hold out faith every day.
And now there's a bang at the door. The mail always comes at 2:30 and I know that now because I am -- say it -- unemployed.
I put down the cel phone and trudge down the stairs and off to the side from the bills there is a manila envelope, a fat little manila envelope, whose back has been lovingly hand-strapped with cellophane tape and whose front bears the return address I couldn't hold out hope to wait for -- praise god, my query got forwarded straight through the publisher without being stopped by a censorious hand:
2nd MAINE MILITIA
P.O. BOX 100
PARSONFIELD, MAINE 04047
NO PHONE/NO FAX/NO PAVED ROAD
a fat little envelope, a hope of redemption from a total stranger in the state where I was born. I can't even bear to open it. it, like the whole past month, might never become an article.
* * *
p.s.: Carolyn says yes, the place where the Beans lived is, in fact, named after the road where my best friend lived when I was a little baby in Raymond, Maine.
Posted by me at 4:40 PM | Comments (0)
September 7, 2001
Dispassion and Distance
I need to start writing about things I hate.
I knew this, in the pit of my heart. When there started to be trouble with the Dance Dance Revolution article I did for the Village Voice -- when it was put off for a few weeks, when the ber-editor killed it behind my immediate editor's back -- I started feeling uncomfortable with the way I'd written the piece. I told my immediate editor I could rewrite it, if they didn't like it. I didn't like it. Over email I could sense her draw herself up. I expect my writers to do their best work for me, she said, bristling at the implication I'd turned anything second-rate in to her.
Tell her it's a matter of the passage of time, Mom said when I told her about it. You know, you grow up, you look back at something you've done, you know you could have done better.
Today I talked to the editor about the possibility of pitching it elsewhere. (One of these days I'll write something up about editors who have been truly wonderful to me. This one is definitely up there.) I don't know why the big boss didn't like it, she told me again. And then, gently and simply: I think you needed to maybe be more dispassionate about it.You were too into it, and you came off as a little naive.
I don't write well about things I love. My Division Three and the crown jewel piece I wrote for Lesy's class -- a piece about the stables at Smith College, which I later took to Bread Loaf -- felt great at the time, but going back over them now evokes the kind of queasiness you get from reading love letters from someone you broke up with in high school. I get much more satisfaction in going back over pieces I wrote about people who I thought were unacceptably prideful, or the video clips I shot of women in fur coats saying "Welfare sucks."
It's hard. I cringe when I think I might have to view things with more irony. I went out last night with an embittered friend who's breaking into the comedy scene, and I found myself almost not speaking at all, because he was so sarcastic I never knew when to take what he was saying at face value. I've distanced myself from a lot of my pinko-fellow-travellers, because they talk about going to protests like going to cocktail parties -- whether the affair was a crashing bore or not. They lose the element of hope.
I don't think I want to view things more scientifically, either. I mean in the way that journalism and social sciences so often aspire to being scientific. I don't think a person can transcend the limitations of human ability to collect and process knowledge. Social sciences do better than journalism at that, anyway. The omniscient tone of traditional journalism is so hopelessly bankrupt. I can't believe it's still such a fixture even despite the New Journalists.
Was I wounded by the editor telling me I was naive? Maybe that's what this is all about.
Maybe I need to go back to working in schools. Kids, at least, maintain hope. Maybe I should go work for the forest service, and not think about irony for a while.
Posted by me at 12:20 PM | Comments (0)
September 5, 2001
Special Abilities
I am over at the Edels' house the Edel boys are depressed even Sokin he doesn't live there but he's one of the brothers (special ability: living in spite of depression). Sokin says this place will burn. (Sokin special ability: seething anger. Philosophy +10.) Gareth says it won't it's my personal hell; it's made of asbestos I say (special architectural ability!) Gareth says those stacks of books aren't stacks of books hey they're a special kind of asbestos for keeping the hell in. (special ability: improvisational comedy Yes And, +1.)
Gareth leaves the house maybe twice a week he has taken to role playing the sixteen-sided dice are all over the table I say this is called Depression, my friend, he says No it's not I can show you the clinical definition of depression (weaponry: DSM IV) and Stephan says and you meet it (witty rejoinder -2) it's called Denial my friend I say (special ability: dramatic capitalizations; gentleness -2) and Gareth invokes the DSM and we are all stricken with wonder whether Denial is actually in there. We all talk vaguely about what we want to do (ambition +2, focus -2) and we all say graduate school and someone says Culinary school is only six months long (weaponry: croque-monsieur!) and I can't do that because I'm vegetarian No Stephan says Heather did a vegan culinary program and I think jo-jeezly-eezus, there's a school for black mages: Incantations for the total destruction of sensory pleasure.
Sometimes I think, I say and I end the sentence and let my head loll to the side and let the pause go on too long Please finish that sentence Stephen says it sounded interesting (earnest flattery +2) I explained how I develop pauses to make my little sister laugh (special ability: absurdist comedy) and then how I almost got into role playing with Wendy Winet's older brother Evan (special ability: charring Hello Kitty in protosatanic backyard rituals) but never did because when they told me I could get special powers for handicapping my characters I was so taken with the idea (monomania +10) I gave my characters crooked legs and paranoia and dwarfism and elephantitis and kleptomania until the sun went down (obfuscation 100%) and by the time we tallied up the scores we didn't have time to play I said all this is by way of explanation.
What I really mean is sometimes I feel like as a leftist I'm just adding handicap after handicap to my success.
That's too deep a thought for this time of night said Stephan (special ability: TMI-guard) -16 for using the term Leftist said Gareth, progressive progressive (special ability: dogma). Wasn't there a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist skill you could choose in Superspies and Ninja Masters? asked Stephan yes it was so you could infiltrate communist governments, if you were part of a federalist government they just presumed you couldn't get along in a communist society and what are the advantages and drawbacks well I don't know we can only guess (biotech +100, literacy +80, sense of humor -100).
* * *
Is there a way to love someone only in print? Is it a pathology when it happens, or is it a yet-undiscovered art form? Will it raise our defenses, to help us or harm us?
Posted by me at 1:02 AM | Comments (1)
September 2, 2001
Terrifying Celebrity Encounter #1: Campaign Season
I saw a sign advertising Mike Gioia for City Council today as Roger and I and James were heading out into Queens. "How do you like Green for Mayor?" I asked Roger. Roger figures Green as a center-right liberal, and says Ferrer is just a politician with his finger in the wind. Roger's not up for anyone much, he says, although he would gladly vote against Giuliani if he was running again. I haven't taken a good look at the solid records or positions of the candidates, though I have been drowned in vicious smear ads from the Sunnyside/Woodside city council candidates, so I don't really know who I'm voting for.
Then, like a jack-in-the-box, Mike Gioia pops out of the darkness next to me. "Aha, but who do you want for CITY COUNCIL is the question!" he says, lunging at me with a clipboard. I run down the street in terror.
The borough is awash with advertising, flyers in store windows, giant banners, one-sheet glossy brochures telling me that one candidate has never done a damn thing for the neighborhood, or another doesn't care about education, jammed in my mailbox. As I settled back into my skin and continued down Roosevelt, having a candidate materialize on the sidewalk next to me came to seem like the next logical step in campaigning. How do I feel about people who care so much about a city council race? It makes me feel I should get as invested in local politics as I should have been in Hampshire College politics: i.e., not at all.
(I know I have a tendency to hyperbolize, but I promise you, I'm not exaggerating this one bit.)
Coda: the man's name is Eric Gioia, I didn't even remember it right. So much for your campaign, Mr. Gioia! I'll be voting for your cousin Mike! Or rather not voting for anyone with your name at all, because I checked out the voter info handbook we got and frankly, ain't no motor in the back of your political Honda.
Posted by me at 12:38 AM | Comments (0)
September 1, 2001
Detritus Peripatetica: Nothing To Report But Little Moments Of Social Brilliance
Scene: stoplight on South Lake in Pasadena.
I pull up alongside two young guys in an SUV. They start making little dog-whistles, in the way some guys do just to get you to turn and look at them. I hate that tactic. I shake my head slowly.
They get frustrated. "Yes," the one on my side says, "you are hot."
I laugh, and the light changes.
* * *
Scene: the Frying Pan, a sunken and raised ship which now serves as a club, Chelsea Piers.
Rob Domingo and I have the good fortune to have placed ourselves right in front of a fan before the floor gets packed. I am playing with the possibilities of the sloped iron floor, the breeze and my skirt, and my shadow as I dance.
Now the floor is packed. A wild-armed Indian guy is dancing nearby. (Give me an awkward Indian man dancing over an American one dancing anyday -- they know there's more to dancing than your legs.) I catch his eye and he comes over and flails around right in my face. Then he pulls close because he wants to tell me something.
"You are happening dancer!" he exclaims.
* * *
Scene: Bus on the way back from the Frying Pan.
A group of Black men gets on the bus behind us. Most of them talk ghetto, but a voice whiter than Mr. Rogers' rises from among them. I turn around and find it is, in fact, one of the black guys speaking in this voice which sticks out so much from his peers. He is going on at length about animated programs. He tells his friends who did the voices on the Thundercats, that Bernadette Peters did the voice of Slappy Squirrel. He says his "source" tells him Bill Cosby lives in Chelsea. "Your 'source,'" snorts one of his friends. His "source" also tells him Gregory Hines lives in Chelsea, and has two teenage kids. Then he goes on to talk about breast size, and rattles off a number of starlets who have had breast reduction surgery, all in the same affectless tone.
The question, which is often the question: nerd or savant?
Posted by me at 4:57 PM | Comments (0)