Hope Wins

Where to begin?  I was up and at the polls before they opened and there were 20 people there waiting at 5:45 am.  By the time they opened the polls in Woodside, where I vote (at 6:08, don’t get me started), there were 100 people there.  Excitement lit up the foggy pre-dawn darkness.

The machines were cranky as they started and the people in the 47^th district had to wait until the most experienced blue-haired old lady came and jiggled a lever on the back just so to get the machine back into order.  I was seventh in the 47^th district, 007.  You’ve seen the picture.

Teaching and grading papers all day there was a strange air of camaraderie and hope.  Spike’s dad put it into words as we watched our kids practice soccer last night before the results were in: “It’s like Nine-One-One, everyone has feeling of secret connection.”

Indeed, as the kids played soccer at McCarren Park two Hasidic men came up with their gloves and joined the Latino guys who were playing softball in the warm November evening.  Only in New York do you see Orthodox Jews shagging fly balls with strangers.

As Mason and I drove back to Queens NPR called Pennsylvania for Obama, and one of the wags said: “I can’t imagine a path to the Whitehouse for McCain that doesn’t include Pennsylvania.”  Before we got over the Greenpoint Bridge they were calling Florida for Obama, and Mason took my cell and excitedly texted Linda that news (and Dole’s SC Defeat).  I came home and ate with supreme hope.

During the day I got an email on my phone from a friend from the 70s who had lived with me in Boston and known me in my messenger days.  We had been through a fair amount together and he contacted me out of the blue as a way –I assume– to reach out of his white New England life and celebrate with a dear old friend (of color).  I had similar calls and emails from Australia, Ireland and Northern California.

This impulse, this digital coming together is, for us progressives, like coming out after a storm.  The last 8 years have been hard.  Personally, I have felt “occupied” like I did as a young non-white man in Boston in the 70s.

So these contacts made because of the HOPE of the Obama campaign feel especially good.  To be reminded of the good and decent whites who were my dear friends during the horror of bussing in Boston in the 1970s, the people who reminded me that I was a man, a friend, a  person of value “un-adjectivized” (not a black man) has begun the thawing.

Before Mr. Obama’s election I was still in my shell.  I was a bit jaded and cynical about friends from the “way-back-machine” contacting me and asking me to drink the Kool-Aid.  I didn’t want to HOPE because I didn’t want to be disappointed.  I have been stand-offish.  But their naïve enthusiasm was touching.  It reminded me of going to anti war marches and Pete Seger concerts with my parents in the 60s.  I don’t think that the 60s, in light of the Republican avarice we’ve lived through from 80 onward, were all that great.

SO last night, and all day yesterday I felt like we had finally become a nation again.  I felt the possibility of Human Companionship.  On September 11^th, 2001 we all receded to our livingrooms to watch our lives and country on television.  We got the “Dulce et Decorum Est” romantic version of America.  All of those grand Ken Burns PBS documentaries seemed more real than playing baseball or listening to jazz.  I feel like our nation slipped into a massive communal state of DuBoisian double consciousness, alienated from ourselves by our image of ourselves as something else.

When Spain was attacked on March 11, 2004 the nation came outside together.  After 9-11 we went into our living rooms and isolated.  They re-established their humanity in the most basic way.  I have been jealous of that European land for these four years.  Yesterday we came out.  We came out in the millions.  We got a 9-11 mulligan and we chose to participate instead of isolate.  The contacts from Europe, Australia, California and Vermont are contacts from our higher place.  America can stop fearing.  We can HOPE again.

One of my colleagues has called this the moment that America becomes Post-Colonial.  We have stepped (a little bit) beyond the colonial and imperial traditions we’ve inherited and begun to live up to our constitution.  The whole world is breathing a sigh of relief because we can choose someone who has a vision of a greater America that doesn’t have the 1945 and 1992 unipolar American power in mind.  “We don’t have to subjugate/ in order to be great.”

America has returned to the dream by electing Mr. Obama.  From Dakar to Dushembe, from the steppes of Mongolia to the factories of Viet Nam there are people who are seeing the America of FDR, JFK (neither of whom were angels), the America of hope and individual opportunity, the America of the Great Society, the America of freedom to be (not to earn), for the first time.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

Times Square Ikea (Rough Post)

12/21/07 06:11:58 AM

SO I slept late today and I have not particular interest in writing, but I’ll just update things. I guess that there is a lot of news. And if I get my flow on I’d like to write about the profound alienation that I felt shopping yesterday. First I was struck by how shopping at Ikea is like going to Disneyland designed for or by Martha Stewart. There is something comforting about going to Ikea. It is like the video section of Costco: the symbolism supplants the reality. The reality is that there are dozens of Hollywood movies of dubious merit there for vaguely affordable prices. The semiotic or symbolic value is that each of these DVDs represent two hours of sitting around and doing nothing but consuming ideas (of wealth, love, revenge, and power). In Ikea all of our houses and apartments, our living spaces recede to the semiotic, where they can be clean, safe and convenient with the purchase of some trifle or another. The prices, individually, are cheap, but the bill is always huge.

So the shoestand that will tame our jumble of shoes at the entryway represents, symbolizes, effects a tidiness that will never exist. When we look at the dishdrainer that is so under-priced and cool we never see the dishes that must be washed to make it functional heaped in a greasy cold sink. We don’t imagine the roaches that might run behind it (none spotted in our new house yet). And we certainly don’t imagine the underpaid third world worker who assembled them around dangerous machines at a dizzying speed. What we see is the affect that the cool Swedish showroom puts these gewgaws, trinkets, and gizmos in. When I buy a curtain rod from Ikea I hope that my house will get the “windowtreatment” of the Ikea showroom. I am not buying something to hold the curtain in front of the window I am buying the feeling of neatness, cleanliness, tidiness and service that the blue and gold of the Swedish standard (and helpful employee shirts¹) represent.

Ikea becomes a virus that I hope will infect my house. I want to catch the Martha Stewart cooties from the clean consumer experience. I don;t just want things, I want order and clarity. I want a domestic situation that will make me feel good when I am in my home. I want to live in this world where the dishes are always washed, the clothes always folded and people are always welcomed to come visit (and are duly impressed when they do).

Second, I hate the M&M Store. The M&M Store is branding and consumerism run amok. It is like Scott’s comments about the early MTV, it’s all commercials. Commercials for bands (Videos) mixed with commercials for products. Times Sq, in that regard, has become solipsistic; only the brands and chains are provable (or can afford the rent). I guess that in that regard Times Sq. has followed in its long traditions. First, it is the “crossroads of the world” as it was after WWII when it became institutionalized in the world consciousness (V.E. Day Kiss Photo). Second, it was always a party area, where the young folk would go out and eat, drink and make merry. Third, related to 2, is when it became a red-light district in the 70s and 80s; young people partying can often get seemy (remember the kiss photo had a sailor, a profession whose like to the “oldest profession” is legendary). I am sure that there are pierceling tatooine young burlesquers that will someday be respectable Kansan grandmas clicking their tongues at the behaviors that pleased them so much when they were young running around Times Sq. (or The East Village or Williamsburg). (OK, so I got on a little role here, but this is a great essay that has been free-written, but not really written.)

On Sunday the Bhatia Lin’s will be coming to NY for 4 days before a month in India.

1 a marked contrast to the red jerseys of underpaid Target workers, who seem the rawer and redder face of the globalization game.

Prophet Housing

12/18/07 04:56:38 AM

So our new lives in our new apartment have started. I took Chandler to meet Aneka at 46^th Street on the seven train. We were there so early Chandler has renegotiated for an extra 10 minutes of sleep today. I was a work by 7:30 and If I continue to do this I’ll have time to go to the gym in morning. Apparently Lennox and Mason’s drop off also went well. Linda and I went to Costco to buy a TV, which I think we’ve put off in the hopes that we can buy the kids more of what they want this “holiday” season. Funny thing about that ironic use of quotation marked holiday.

I found a copy of Khalil Ghibran’s The Prophet (that I had bought on telegraph avenue used) and in it was a bookmark. The page it marked was the Prophet’s response to the Mason. “’Ironic,’ thought I, it is addressed to my son.” But the opening line is “Then a [M]ason came forth and said speak to us of Houses” (34). So, since I spent the evening unpacking my seemingly endless supply of things and assembling them I was intrigued by the synchronicity of the bookmarking.¹ This is the electronics (and modern) version of feathering my nest. We’ve got to get all of the twigs and grass just right so that the chicks and their parents will all fit comfortably. I imagine a bird’s nest of wires, surge protectors, USB cables and transformer power lines in which we comfortably cuddle together. (God, how I digress.)

The first few “stanzas” were pure anti-city, and I’ll include a bit here as an illustration: “Would the valleys your streets and the green paths your alleys… [and] In their fear your forefathers gathered you too near together” (35). These nods to the bucolic piss me off. Besides the fact that the human condition is social, and there would be no wilderness if we spread people out like that, even in 1922, I just want to dissent a bit further on this romanticization of the bucolic.

(Digression Alert) I remember one week when Scott and I lived on Maui. This was before we got food stamps, in deed it might be why I got food stamps. We had “no visible means of support” and we had alienated those off of whom we could beg. But there was a mango tree and an avocado tree that were in season near where we were camping. We could fill ourselves nicely on these huge trees for the cost of a climb. Guavas, I think were also ripe in a pasture a couple of miles away. Before seven days had passed I was crazy and hungry though my stomach never went empty. There is a reason that we are a social and agrarian species. The hunter gatherer thing is too much work. (I think it is also why we are omnivores, but that is another rant.)

Then the prophet gets to why I am writing this now:

Tell me have you [peace, remembrances and beauty] in your houses?

Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as a guest, and becomes a host, and then a master?

Ay, it becomes a tamer, and with hook and scourge makes puppets of your larger desires.

Though its hands are silken, its hear is of iron.

It lulls you to sleep only to stand by your bed and jeers at the dignity of the flesh.

It makes mock of your sound senses, and lays them in thistledown like fragile vessels.²

Verily the lust for comfort murders the the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

But you, children o space, you restless in rest, you shall not be trapped nor tamed.

Your house shall be not an anchor but a mast. (36)

Moving Impotence

12/14/0710:46:52 AM

So the movers are packing away and Linda is away at the other apartment cleaning and accepting deliveries of new furniture. “The game is afoot,” as Holmes often said. Things are happening fast and I’m not sure how much I can write here. I am useless now that I’ve washed the dishes and tightened the cheap Ikea chairs that are always falling loose. There is a feeling of impotence that accepting (or paying for) help causes. I want to have meaning in this whole process which I don’t seem to feel just paying for it. I am too 19^th century. I feel like if I don’t put my shoulder to the wheel in this move I am not actually helping. Of course that is ridiculous because Linda and I are the “first movers” of this whole show. These three strong Latinas would not be here if we were not paying for them to be here.

It is strange having people in your house touching all of our stuff. Now I don’t know these women in our house singing away to the popular music they have thumping from our boom box as they yell questions and comments back and forth. I guess this adds to the strange feeling of helplessness that I feel not helping. Here are three total strangers doing what in the past only our dearest (and most willing) friends had done. But they are not Richard Heller, Joel Stanger, Trevor Turner, John Mercer, or any of my Berkeley friends who helped with the last three moves. Interestingly the last move here we were helped by Miss Misti H and the one two moves ago involved Dennis Wolf. Both of those people are out of reach to me now and I am sad that they have been replaced by paid professionals.

Neither am I participating physically (no heave-ho), nor am I intimate with the workers. I am slipping out of my life during this move. In this journal, a sign of my increasing alienation from my life, I am recording my increasing feelings of alienation from my life. The skrittch of packing tape sounds like fingernails on the blackboard of my life as I sit in a house with people working incredibly hard as I sit here and diddle on the computer. I guess the root of it is that I am uncomfortable with and unused to my new status as bourgeois middle class sub-gentry (I can’t even own up to the fact that I am indeed a well paid middle class professional with a post graduate degree and a good union job [I'm prayin' for tenure]). I want to live in my imaginary hey-day of a working class youthful messenger. Sigh. If it was that good I’d have never gone to college.

If I insist on continually romanticizing my youth I will always be unhappy, looking over my shoulder at some thin hungry horny bachelor. The truth of the matter is that he was miserable and empty. I was lonely and bored except when I was misbehaving and in grave peril. The life I fantasize about was the life of a young man with few coping skills and a lot of misused down time. I guess I should be proud of one thing. When I was bored, lonely and venal I at least painted and wrote and some of those drawings and writings still exist. Two moves ago, from one place in the village to another I went through my “archive” and looked at lots of my letters and paintings (that wasted time alone justifies the cost of this packing). Up in the attic are two huge tubes of my work from the early 1980s that are testaments to the fact that there might be something to this nostalgia thing. But if you count out how much time I’ve lived and subtracted the time I “created” you’d still have each and every waking hour of a misspent youth.

So I think, against my better judgment I’ll post this now because I’m tired of writing.

 

When I was trying to stay out of the packers way I thought of a poetic way to characterize our move, but I think I’ve lost it: “from the intimate proximity of the gardens to the phallic modernity of the Big Six. ”

 

Hijabed Air Force ROTC Cadet (Poem)

 

We’re moving tomorrow and I found two poems I had written that I thought I had keyed in.  I’ll key ‘em in now.  The first was about the shy young woman I saw heading to Aviation HS one morning.  Refined and restrained, though she was obviously one of the kids, she seemed apart.

Hijabed Air Force ROTC Cadet

High school phalanx / A boisterous wedge
Tumbling Down / Off the concrete EL

Unapproachable / In stylized youth
A garden of  / Performed individualism

Petals and thorns / Of hidden beauty
Instant adolescent / Fauna wilderness

In the rigid  / Individualism
Is a patch of / Conformity

We’re all sad and scared about moving. I’m nervous as hell. I’ve been snapping at the kids and crabby with Ms. L.  We love it here and I want to spill my guts about it, but I found these poems instead, so I’ll post them and see where it leads.

Kiko Meets Mike I

I finished Harry Potter the Seventh. I think that that with class ending, will mean that I have more time. I’ve been playing with Kiko’s story a fair piece, perhaps inspired by a good Novel (Harry Potter). I think that I want to read Marius’s Book next.

This is an attempt at illustrating the broad daydreamy expanse of riding in New York City, with constant stimulae shaping and deflecting your daydreams. If you ride in NYC -without headphones- this is what happens, it is an altered state afforded to the hearty. Holla at me. Here Kiko meets Mike, which is how things tart to happen in a linear way again. I want to speed up the pace. And of course, if you want to start from the beginning, go here.

But, every morning Kiko would look forward to the ride that began his day. To start it was hard to make it to Manhattan in an hour, but after a week it was easy to make it there in 50 minutes. He learned the tangle of traffic, cutting through the places which initially slowed him down or stopped him. Before he knew it Kiko had fallen into a rhythm, daily and 90 times a minute. Daily, he’d wake up looking forward to a ride, the space that had daunted him before he started riding home, was now a great open sea of possibility, where he could be alone and outdoors for some time. Fuera aparte de negócios seculars. He was free from the worries of the day for that hour or so, he could meditate on his family and life back home when he had saved up enough to move back and buy a house and a semi-trailer truck or some other business. That hour was a broad sheet made up of 90 revolutions per minute that passed as regularly and as silently as a mouse’s heartbeat. The tracks on this space were un-marked by anyone, but made up a texture and meter so fine that only Kiko could appreciate it.

It was on one of these predawn rides that he met Mike scrambling through the labyrinth that protects the Queensboro Bridge from people in a vain attempt to make it efficient for cars to crawl over it. Kiko had just made it past where Northern Boulevard becomes Jackson Ave as it crosses Queens Boulevard after the bridge over the rail yards. These blocks are the most stressful of his ride because of all of the blindspots the girders create. At 20 miles an hour it feels like running through a forest with the steel supports that are actually 30-to-60 feet apart seeming packed together. To ride through in a car, with a dedicated lane is stressful, but to ride through it searching for a safe lane or line is a lot like a slalom, on asphalt, between immovable columns, that obscure traffic. Often in the wee hours of the morning these girders have pedestrians hiding among them trying to evade the reasons that they are out on the Boulevard alone before dawn.

Kiko and Kevin

7/31/2007 6:26 AMI played soccer with Mason yesterday morning (and the day before) and twisted my ankle really badly. I was OK yesterday, with a brace, but this morning it really hurts. I hope that I don’t have to go visit the doctor about this.

Here’s the latest installment of Kiko’s Tale, and he’s back. I’m self conscious about dialog, and I’m trying broken English, so let me know if it sounds too much like a minstrel show. There’s more the pipeline, though if I don’t start getting some feedback… (It’s hard to keep going without hits and feedback, of course it is possible that it sucks.)

And of course, if you want to start from the beginning, go here.

“Señora Choi, she like watch me like I bad movie,” he continued, “everything need fix. But she happy to see me go. Bring out food, carry dollar back.” Thinking, Kiko continued “I like go, I like outside, I like ride, I like Señora Choi no watch me, no fix me, and I like tips.”

They both smiled in secret agreement of the importance of both getting out of the bosses sight and earning money that was their own: “I like tips I no share,” Kevin said explaining how he was expected to pool his tips with the other cooks while the waiters only gave them 5% of the real money.

“I like tips” Kiko agreed, thinking more kindly of Señora Choi, since she just let him keep his.

Kevin, as they told each other where they worked and got back on their bikes asked Kiko if “You evah see bike race? Fast. Many-many ride bikes close-close fast-fast. Tight-bright-picture-writing-clothes! Funny clothes.”

And Kiko thought of the man on the bridge that morning. On his way back to the shop, where there were two more lunches packed up tightly in brown paper bags by Santiago waiting to go out, he became more aware of riding. He thought about how he rode, which way he went down an avenue, when he shifted gears, how he leaned and turned. He thought about riding as an activity for the first time and was a bit more aware of his pleasure as he rode. And of course he was happy to be the one who did all of the deliveries where he worked, and to protect that he had to keep moving. He came back and got the two deliveries and went to the Fire Station on Murray Street and the office up on Duane and Broadway where he had to sign in.

Kiko’s Patron (Reindeer Games III) and a Walk in Woodside

We had so much fun at Coney Island.

But First, A Walk in Woodside with my best girl

Yesterday was an amazingly nice day. I took the kids to school early because they had a field trip. After I dropped them off I fixed up the bike I found for Lennox, finding that the tires held air and the rust came off of the handlebars. The chain seems to be much better now that it is oiled, so all is good. After I dropped them off Linda and I futzed around for a an hour talking, in the nice satisfying way that married couples can. I talked Linda into walking me to the hardware store, bike shop and the 99¢ store. Though she was reluctant we had a grand time once we got out, playing “what if-“on where we should live and other things that otherwise stressed us.

If we move to Woodside (which is where we ended up walking) we would or could save huge amounts of money. After I got my bike out of the shop and training wheels for Lennox’s little pink bike we came across a terraced garden with water storage, drip irrigation and PVC Plumbing trellises for the beans to grow on behind the fence above the Woodside LIRR Station. There was an older man holding sway over the 2000 feet of arable land tucked behind the fence above the tracks at Woodside Ave and 63^rd street. Tons of hot peppers, beans and other ‘crops’ I couldn’t discern were in terraced plots the size of mattresses (infant, twin, king and queen) climbing the right-of-way between the platform above the tracks and the fence. There was one farmer/gardener with that kind of plot in the Garden in University Village, but he used “black fertilizer” so we were a bit afraid of him.

Next we met a couple of guys after the meeting who both live in Big Six. They both sang its praises, and pointed out the benefits of living there, in spite of the recent problems (corruption, fee increases). John, who looked about my age, said he was retiring (one of the luxuries of low rent) and told us that he complex actually has fairly big cash reserves, so it should be OK right now. Jim, with the ponytail and amazing complexion, said that he thinks it is safe, doesn’t worry when his 24-year-old daughter walks from the subway late at night, has a dog and a cat, but can’t seem to get a storage space (he’s been on the wait list for storage for a “big six” years). John said that he doesn’t have a parking spot, but usually gets parking whenever he comes home within a building or two of his home.

Finally we went to La Flor Café and had a nouvelle Mexican lunch worthy of Picante or Jimmy Bean’s. The vegetable Tacos were freshly sautéed and sprinkled with a wonderful piquant queso fresca with a strong flavor. The marinated pork steak (whose proper name I forget) had a wonderful citrusy aftertaste. It was a sandwich, called a torta, that blew our minds. We shared an excellent Chocolate Chocolate Chip cookie for desert and it was like being back in the Gormet Ghetto of Berkeley again, except we were under the El at 52^nd St and Roosevelt.

I came home and put the training wheels on Lennox’s bike and took it up to her daycare to pick her up. When I gave her the neck-chain with the keys to her bike her face lit up like she had been ambushed by Christmas. She told Elexa and Christina that she was going to ride her bike home proudly. Needless to say after dinner we went to the park and she rode around the play structure, benches and park building endlessly. It was a good day!

Here’s the latest installment of Kiko’s Tale. He will be back soon, but I’ve got to set up the bike racing, which I’m still waiting to hear feedback on. If you ride, formally, with clubs and packs check this for realism and send me a line. And of course, if you want to start from the beginning, go here.

“Well, shit, it’s like this,” he confessed. “On the way here this delivery guy, on his delivery bike, wearing delivery guy clothes, came past me as I climbed the bridge. I mean, that’s where I rule. I was holding my like pumping up the bridge at a great clip and this freakin’ Spanish guy on a cheap bike with a chain locked around the seat-post breezes past me like I’m riding Barney in front of a drugstore.” Thinking, he added, “I don’t even think he was breathin’ hard. I mean, hell, I was beaten.”

There was a lot of disbelief, and none of the pack thought that he was serious. They had ridden together for over two years and they knew each other pretty well and to a man the pack thought that a) Mike must have lost his girlfriend and b) that the Spanish guy was a figment of his dumped and tortured imagination. Delivery-guys do not beat bike racers up hills. Especially not the guy who had led them, gasping, up most of the hills that morning. Not possible. Period.

On the ride home he thought about the kid he’d learn later was named Kiko and worked delivering food in the Financial district. This kid, no, not kid, man, only a man could make that piece of shit bike glide up the bridge he was now climbing so effortlessly. He could see the rear-wheel suspension bouncing as he pumped the pedals and hear the basket rattle as they went over the expansion plate. The bike was like a mechanical bull bouncing up and down under the rider as he passed him. Everything about the bike was loose and rattled. It sounded like it was held together by a second-rate-duct-tape-force-field rather than screws, nuts and bolts.

Bike Story (Manhattan Before Dawn I)

I actually got a comment, two if you count the email from one of my former students, so I give you more here now. It started, much less ambitiously, back here. (Are my smatterings of Spanish working, or do they sound tinny? Does it bother you if you don’t understand Español?)

Off of the bridge he just sailed down 2^nd Avenue, keeping the lights green he made it all the way down to Houston. The sparse traffic kept him company as he pedaled the bike down the avenue. Kiko liked the speed and space. Having cabs and cars and trucks on the road gave him a pace that, while hard, comforted him. When he paid attention to the parked cars and pre-dawn pedestrians he was passing he was made aware of his speed and got nervous. In the East 20s a young woman in a small dress staggered out between two cars and hailed the cab next to him. Even at that speed he could tell she was crying and he wondered how she had had come to be out so early and so unhappy. She pulled a rich coat around her discrete figure as she saw Kiko speed by, wiping tears and snot in the left lapel as she denied the stranger a glance at her form.

The cab’s sudden turn and deceleration made him aware of his own speed and vulnerability. He was one mistake away from being like the crying woman who had carefully put on that tiny dress some hours before as he had taken his boss’ bike home last night. The dress and the bike were supreme acts of optimism, each meant to somehow improve the lives of their “owners.” Little did he know, just as the dress had come to rule the woman in it, soon the bike would become Kiko’s hard master.

He made it to work on time, though he was sweaty. Kiko declined with a smile the customary cup of coffee that Mrs. Choi offered the men as they arrived before dawn in her daily act of kindness. She and Santayana seemed to move in slow motion as they prepared for the day’s rush. After the 12 mile ride from Jamaica, the spaces in the basement kitchen seemed so small. After the climb up the Queensboro Bridge there was no resistance in the lifting, cutting, boiling, pouring and mixing that it took to make the food for the day. His knife cut through the salads, vegetables, fruit and produce like they weren’t there. Even the cáscara de la sandía which used to give him blisters after just two just fell away leaving seed-filled watery red cubes. The flank steak for the house specialty, which he and Santayana would fight to avoid, practically cut itself on the dull knife his cycle-charged hand held. Riding through New York before dawn on a bike, swift, silent and invisible, made the hard work of an underground industrial kitchen seem like child’s play.

Riis Beach Family