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December 22, 2001
We Stand For The Neighborhood (A Fantasia on Songs From "The Capeman")
Good. One more thing James and I have in common... I bet we're the only people of our generation who know what "The Capeman" was, and actually care, and cared enough to end up each of us with a copy of the soundtrack, which is actually more sung by the despised musical's creator, Paul Simon, than the actual cast. (The musically omnivorous Mack Elder is lurking out there reading this, and is about to discount my claims of exclusivity on this count, I just know it.)
So we're cooking in the kitchen, James and me, and Tito Rojas is playing and I'm trying to teach James salsa... I like to convince myself he'll eventually pick it up ok even though he's a white boy from the Upper West Side and New Jersey... right now he's got problems with the hips, though. They don't go on their own.
I stir the spaghetti and James says Question:, as he often does. I say Yes? and he asks if the music in The Capeman is authentic. I grab my little IWW flag and jump up on the podium shouting Boricua Hasta La Muerte! and my eyes are still blue and I scoff at James for being so unsophisticated. I take it as a good time to repeat the lesson about West Side Story. As I learned it from the revolutionary comrade Martín Espada: Leonard Bernstein musta been deaf or something, because that ain't Puerto Rican music, it's Mexican music in "America." That, and Bernstein's Sharks are still hot Latins, crimes-of-passion types.
Meanwhile, The Capeman sounds like a bunch of gang members growing up in Paul Simon Doo-Wop Land. There was a big controversy over The Capeman, I never followed what it was. But it's probably much the same as the West Side Story: it has only a minority of songs which even pretend to be in the musical tradition of Puerto Rico, and the bolero is about how menacing the local gang is.
Then I get off the podium, and I admit: The Capeman is still an important part of my life. It's one of those things that's worked its way so far into the soundtracks of my personal history that I can't listen to it right now for fear it will dredge up the settled emotions of my early days in New York like so many silty tons of PCBs. I love it, and everything by Paul Simon since Graceland, and I love David Byrne and to a lesser extent Peter Gabriel. My ears would not be open to African or Caribbean or Brazilian music if it wasn't for them.
I love the whiteboys who introduced me to this music. When I am being honest with myself, I know I have more hope of understanding them completely than the people whose music they're stealing. I understand in each of them, and in me, is a selfish little Columbus, excited by the idea I might be the first to see something nobody I know has ever seen, conviced I can make that difference part of me. Not to give up on understanding, or solidarity, but no lie about our cultural savvy alone will save us. It will not sew up the jagged edges of anger.
(Could someone let me know if I've written this rant before? I feel like I have. Thanks.)
Posted by me at 12:14 AM | Comments (0)
December 2, 2001
Working Undercover Against The Man: Report From The Walk For Capitalism
I showed up early today for the Walk For Capitalism, which turned out, unfortunately, not to be a joke put on by rtMark -- at least in New York City; I still have my suspicions that Prodos, the head of the Prodos Institute, Australian organizer of the Walk, who lists his occupation as “street performer,” is an rtMark plant, and I expect to find out tomorrow that the Australian Walk dissolved in paroxysms of banner hangs and pies-in-the-face of the lions of industry. (Get a load of this Prodos guy. Is he S.K. Thoth’s evil twin, or what?)
But I was prepared for this contingency. I’d overdressed a little, wearing a blazer and a lot of makeup, for credibility. (I had doubts in my ability to do girly things like sit with my legs together and toss my hair fetchingly, though.) I had a sign reading “PROFITS BEFORE PEOPLE” and a head full of soundbites promoting things guaranteed to cheese off your average American (“What we’ve got to remember now is that businesses, not people, are hurting. We’ve got to do away with laws prohibiting layoffs NOW, and send more American jobs overseas. It’s what’s best for capitalism.”)
By 11:40 two other people had arrived at the feet of the New York Public Library’s lions. The younger of the two, a blond guy who couldn't be too much older than me, seemed impressed by the credentials of the other guy, whose name was Paul. Apparently he talks a fair piece on the local objectivist mailing lists.
At this point he was talking a fair piece about compulsory service, which tends to mean community rather than military service to libertarians. This kicked my personal, non-lying mind into gear. I mentioned the expansion of AmeriCorps I've been writing about, which one longtime Corporation for National Service employee has suggested will mean a draft of all American youth into either military or community service. Paul scowled in agreement; this can't possibly be a good thing.
But he had more to say about all the good coverage community service was getting in movies and TV. Just about every teen sitcom has done an episode about it, he said, and there's been no critique of it at all. "The Princess Diaries," a recent Disney flick, drew considerable heat from Paul for its ending. The princess gives up her nobility to help others, he said, disgustedly. And her father had done the same thing -- left her mother and his princehood to help others. Young Blondie nodded assent. Heaven forfend we help anyone else, I thought to myself. They continued to talk about Disney and how awfully politically correct it was. They thought Pixar films were an exception.
A young, heavily made-up woman had stuck to the crowd next to me. She'd found out about the walk from her sister in Nebraska, who was a big objectivist, she said, and since there was not going to be a walk in Nebraska, and her sister couldn't get off work anyway (elaborate roll of eyes which appeared to have arrived from the scene of a gruesome accident involving a peacock) her sister was going to experience the walk through her, by proxy.
When I turned away from her I found Paul was taking out his signs. "READ AYN RAND'S ATLAS SHRUGGED," said one, taking its cues in self-promotion from the Sc!ent0log!sts. The other read "LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF MY OWN HAPPINESS."
At this point the number of people had grown to about a dozen, and I started to feel pangs of guilt about disrupting the march. The group ultimately didn’t grow any larger than 30 people, more comparable to pickets at Pacifica than the hoardes of thousands attracted by the anti-globalization protests to which the Walk for Capitalism had set itself up as an antidote.
These weren't the high-rolling captains of the local economy; Trump and Bloomberg and the banking moguls were nowhere to be seen. Men like that didn't need to get out and march; they have other ways of getting things done, which are best served by clandestine settings. This was just a small bunch of scruffy-looking libertarians, representatives from a world of mailing lists and Ayn Rand Institute classes which is ultimately as marginal as the American leftist counterculture.
We were reaching critical mass; it was time to move out. A group of kids at the periphery of the gathering in front of the Public Library pulled out their signs. “Privatize This Public Library!” read the first one I could see. Really, the group of Vassar students had done a poor job of infiltrating; only a few had bothered to minimize the piercings and fashion choices which were bound to make them stick out. They weren’t talking to anyone else, either. Huddled in a circle, they stood backs-to-the-wind like yaks. Way to go, guys.
Their signs were pretty smart, though. Alas, they were small. Like many students at protests, these ones were spouting pure academic rhetoric, so jargon-heavy they were having a hard time holding their own in debates with the libertarians. One of the students had a poster with a homeless guy on it which said “Get A Job;” when confronted by one of the “real” marchers, she kept trying to tell him that this guy’s “socio-economic status” was keeping him from presenting employers with marketable job skills. “I don’t know anything about this guy’s status -- what’s his status?” the libertarian countered.
The best part about infiltrating an objectivist march is they can't tell you to go away. A number of my libertarian fellow-travelers expressed their worries that my poster reading “PROFITS BEFORE PEOPLE” wasn’t getting across the message they thought I wanted to convey. I explained that I was just subverting the messages of the anti-globalization protesters. “But it’s not profits we’re after, just happiness,” countered one old fart. (“Happiness” was repeated with a vague, Moonie-like enthusiasm throughout the course of the walk.) After a few minutes of worried questioning, he gave up, because ultimately, his philosophy dictated I was to be allowed my own free will and free speech. Ha ha! Stupid libertarians! Learn to violently squash dissent in your ranks, like the Marxists do! You bunch of Milquetoasts! Your movement is weak! It lacks totalitarian unity!
A young African-American policewoman approached the organizers and introduced herself. “Four of us will be walking with you today,” she said. The organizers acquiesced. I was mildly surprised. Weren’t these the same libertarians who railed against government paternalism? “I don’t really mind it,” said a guy next to me. “It’s the law. They do this for everyone.”
The incongruities of the march were starting to catch up to us. “Isn’t it kind of weird to be marching for capitalism? We don’t really look like capitalists,” remarked a professor from the Ayn Rand Institute.
“Well, I don’t know,” said a totally ordinary-looking guy a little ahead of me. “I feel pretty revolutionary.”
”We ought to be engaging in corporate takeovers,” I replied. The people around me laughed uneasily.
The only reporter present apparently thought my quip was clever, and wrote it down. I thought I’d really scored -- I was disappointed that my original plan, planting myself in front of a TV camera to give a soundbite about our patriotic duty to bring back slavery so we could keep shopping for cheap, was foiled by the pathological lack of interest in protests that the local television media exhibit. Getting through to a New York Times hack who proudly described himself as “the only libertarian at the paper” (I suppose if you can’t have objectivity in journalism, you might as well have objectivism) was going to have to do.
In retrospect, the quote the reporter got from me didn’t stick out as crazy enough, so in the balance it’s probably for the best that when he started questioning whether I was a serious participant, I got too cocky and said, “yeah, and there’s this great bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.” I’ll bet I don’t make it into the article.
The police escorts started asking people to take the sticks off the little American flags that had been handed out, the logic being that they could be used as weapons. Everyone complied. It was discovered that the flags bore that old patriotic motto, “Made In China.” A pair of Cuban exiles eagerly rushed to get a picture of a the motto spread out on someone’s lapel.
It was a trap. I should have known it was a trap. Curiosity led me right into its pointy little teeth, and my well-honed leftist reflexes triggered the spring.
”What does it mean to be a Cuban and to notice a flag is made in China?” I wondered out loud.
”It is wonderful -- it means the markets are opening up,” said one of the men, who could well have been John Leguizamo doing a parody of that old lady with the huge glasses on the Old Navy commercials. “As Americans, we need to educate them for capitalism.”
“That’s a good thing?”
Way to go, Andrews. My cover was blown entirely to pieces in a raging discussion comparing the Cuban and American health and educational systems. They screamed at me not to listen to the communists who had told me the Cuban health system served everybody. They yelled that in Cuba, you are educated to serve Castro. I dragged a libertarian into the fray on that last point. “Isn’t it true we have compulsory education here in the United States too?” I said. “Yes,” he said.
But the Cubanos were blinded by rabies at that point. “Obviously you are some kind of communist,” they loudly concluded. If I hadn’t been entirely estranged from the marchers before, I was then.
All was not lost. I think we managed to obscure the pro-capitalist message with a great deal of static.The combined message of the protest today, as seen by New Yorkers (not heard; they didn’t work up any chants) would have been:
WWW.WALKFORCAPITALISM.ORG
PROFITS BEFORE PEOPLE (backed with “US JOBS OVERSEAS”)
PRIVATIZE THIS PUBLIC LIBRARY
READ AYN RAND’S ATLAS SHRUGGED
LIBERTARIANS FOR CAPITALISM
WHAT WOULD JESUS DO? HE’D MAKE LOTS OF MONEY, OF COURSE!
LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF MY OWN HAPPINESS.
Voila! Disinformation! From across the street (and we took up most of the sidewalk, so that was the only place to walk) how are you going to know who’s who? You’re not going to get a chance to talk to the “protesters,” presuming you feel so inclined.
In any case, the libertarians didn’t figure that Americans have grown to look at any protest as promoting the suspect if not threatening ideas of wackos. By marching at all, they may have been hurting their cause.
You should have seen the Sunday strollers turn down literature. The Vassarites had produced a clever flyer promoting the creation of an Ecumenical Holiday Celebration to stimulate the economy -- basically a merger of Christmas and Hanukkah. The reaction I got while handing them out was priceless -- passerby would take the flyer, walk a few steps reading it, then turn around and give it back, looking troubled.
A man selling art on a corner caught a glimpse of the flyer’s headline. “I hate capitalism,” he growled under his breath. His accent explained as he spoke -- he was Russian; he had left in 1993, so he hadn’t been seeking amnesty. His name was Vitaly.
”You like communism?” I asked.
”The idea of communism is a good idea,” he said. “Stalin messed it up.” He explained that he detested Yeltsin for the mess he had made of his country. He spoke fondly of the former USSR, where he had had a guaranteed job and medical care.
Unlike the Cubans, he saw similarities between the States and the USSR. He ticked off a list of the “themes” used by newscasters since the September 11th disaster -- America Under Attack; America: A New War; America Fights Back. “We Russians know propaganda when we see it,” he said.
We were at the end of our tour by that point; the organizers had draped their banner on some prominent bushes in a sqaure; the Randites had set up a table and were selling books and audiocasettes. Some wag accustomed to tweaking the noses of communists tried to point out “our” hypocrisy, but corrected himself before he got his first words out. “I guess if you’re supporting capitalism you don’t mind selling books to support your cause,” he mused, and left.
That was about it. I did have one last prolonged discussion with a man who does objectivist walking tours of New York. It was decent enough, much more civil than my skirmish with the Cubans. He told me some interesting things about the internal divisions in objectivism. Apparently there’s one school which believes if you don’t follow Rand’s books to the letter, down to your personal take on Mozart’s music, you can’t call yourself an objectivist, while the other disagrees. (I find it humorous that a philosophy which posits itself as so strongly anti-dogma would have a faction so devoted to a single set of texts.) We argued about some points, and came to agreements on others.
To tell the truth, I have much less problem with people who first and foremost call themselves libertarians than I do with people who call themselves Republicans or capitalists. Recent years have seen a number of young libertarians working side by side with young leftists on various projects: promotion of open-source software, objection to police surveillance, legalization of marijuana, preservation of a woman’s right to choose, abolition of government handouts to large corporations, etc. The libertarians I've gotten to know tend to consider the moral ramifications of things, unlike the aspiring corporate lawyers I've met. They’re always good for a debate. I might say I’m more aligned with them than parts of the Left when it comes to free speech.
Sometimes I think that in the ideal, their ultimate goals for society are just as worthwhile as Marxist ones. But I still think they’re fscked up in the head when it comes to righting inequality in order to get to those ideals. Their suggestions for how to solve the problems of hunger, education, housing, and health care are weak (“Everyone should rely on his own native resources,” a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of philosophy) to nonexistent.
We probably ought to be working together to accomplish the things we mutually agree on. Carolyn Chute seems to be working along these lines. What else is there to say? Dogma is a very bad thing. (Dogme 95 produces some good films, though.)
(P.S.: Ananda Gupta, if you’re out there: I miss you, dude. Let's talk.)
Posted by me at 6:46 PM | Comments (0)
December 1, 2001
Step
Listening to Frankie Ruiz, La Leyenda, disc 1. As "La Rueda" unrolls, I find myself thinking that salsa is really an ingenious dance, really perfect for the music it goes with. In its "street" form (as opposed to its performance form), it's so subtle -- step and center, step and center. No big strutting steps, very subtle sexual hooks put into your partner... well, this is as I've danced it with kids my age who've mostly learned it from friends, which is what I take to be the street form, and I haven't spent as much time in salsa clubs as I have doing swing or tango... I'm going on a hunch here; bear with me.
Think about it: if you danced to follow those flamboyant horns, or with the vocals, the dance would be totally over the top. But you usually dance with the drums, which tend to move forward with the piano and bass at a casual walking pace beneath the horns. It keeps the dance from becoming something ridiculous, like, say, ballroom quickstep. Or cheerleading moves.
And this is why the steps produced by Dance Dance Revolution are so garish and awkward as a dance form (while making for a really good video game). I can't think of any other dance, actually, where you dance to the vocals, and yet DDR asks you to do it regularly, especially at the higher levels. Witness:
etc. I wonder if there's a study of social dance which specifies rules like this (don't dance to the vocals) the way linguistics does.
Posted by me at 7:43 PM | Comments (0)