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

See Cabaret at LaGuardia Community College

5/10/2008 8:00 AM

I went to see LaGuardia Community College’s production of Cabaret. Now I’m not much of a theatre aficionado, but I had a great time. I am strongly recommending that, should you read this before their run ends, you go and check the kids’ show out.

So when I went into the little theatre and heard Rashisda the Emcee start with the tune “Welcome,” which I had only heard John, the campy waiter from the Magic Pan sing before I was sold. I was ready for a new experience that resonated with the others, but was completely original. Ms. Rashida, in addition to singing well, moves marvelously, and her dance and stage presence was a fun thing to watch on top of the play. When she would do turns around the stage during different parts of the play she would invoke everyone from Groucho Marx to Cab Calloway (the swallowtail jacket didn’t hurt).

The cast was vibrant and real. Now, I know that a play must be “real,” but, what I was excited about was being in the room with the live, lively and alive performers out there giving it their all without a net. Was every note perfect, I dunno, I have a tin ear, but the whole show was perfect. I wanted to know whether Frauline Schneider would marry Herr Schultz, and there might be a happy ending for one or two characters (when I saw the swastikas I knew which way this one was going). It is odd that “the Old Man” and “the spinster” should have been so compelling in a musical so focused on youth and flesh. But so it was that Jamie Davis and Will Koolsbergen stole the show, emotionally and dramatically speaking, from the ample charms of the handsome and beautiful young leads and the breathtaking chorus line (another musical from the 70s). Of Course when Sally Bowles tells Clifford Bradshaw that she’s had an abortion, well that got my attention. Oh Yeah, And Will K. can turn, the little bit of dancing he did was amazing, in its octogenarian way.

I want to give a general shout out to every member of the cast, who I watched with constant interest. They were all wonderful to look at and hear, and I often found myself looking back into the chorus line and at the “extras” marveling at the wonderful courage and diversity of these LaGuardia CC students. Whether it was Mr. Footman as the cabby looking for his money, Jocelyn Catasus as Frauline Kost (cost) and her many sailor/suitors, Mr. Ochoa as the drag queen, or any of the lovely lads and ladies of the chorus line, there was plenty of multi-cultural-multi-talented “eye-candy.” I am far too repressed to admit how beautiful all of the young women are and too homophobic to admit the same about the men. I also have to say that I love hearing live music, and the production got a lot of mileage out of the horns, keyboards and drums they had tucked away above stage. This was a great way to Spend a Friday night, and I highly recommend catching it if you can.

Ernst, the Nazi who opens the play was a surprisingly convincing actor and I have to say, though his role of scoundrel was exposed in the second act, his bonhomie from the first act made him hard not to watch, even when he was the Nazi, in a krystalnacht redux, beating down Darryl Sorrentino as our Harrisburg Hero Clifford Bradshaw (who was good in his role as the idealist cuckolded by the torch-singer Veronica Palazzo as Sally Bowles).

The voices were all good, the show was really exciting, and since I had never seen any version of it before, neither the Queen Latifa version nor the Joel Gray jammy, it was fresh and I really wanted to know what was going to happen. Now, I’m not sure that having the plot spoiled by previous versions would have stolen anything from this show because, like I said, the music and actors were all really present and engaging.

The cast was vibrant and real. Now, I know that a play must be “real,” but, what I was excited about was being in the room with the live, lively and alive performers out there giving it their all without a net. Was every note perfect, I dunno, I have a tin ear, but the whole show was perfect. I wanted to know whether Frauline Schneider would marry Herr Schultz, and there might be a happy ending for one or two characters (when I saw the swastikas I knew which way this one was going). It is odd that “the Old Man” and “the spinster” should have been so compelling in a musical so focused on youth and flesh. But so it was that Jamie Davis and Will Koolsbergen stole the show, emotionally and dramatically speaking, from the ample charms of the handsome and beautiful young leads and the breathtaking chorus line (another musical from the 70s). Of Course when Sally Bowles tells Clifford Bradshaw that she’s had an abortion, well that got my attention.

I have to confess that I have never seen Cabaret in any of its guises before. I remember back in the 70s when it was a play and all of the theatre majors from Emerson College with whom I worked at The Magic Pan would go about belting out the tunes from the show while we did sidework. Then I recall the movie coming out and another surge of popularity, and hearing the tunes “Cabaret” and “Money Makes the World Go Around” floating into my pop-culture-world. I think there was a disco version of the $$ song (it was right about then that NY NY with Robert Deniro and Liza Minelli; Frank Sinatra stole the song from the film, but that’s another sad, sad, story).

It was a great pleasure to see Cesar Mack, a student from my ENG101, Professor Raven Blackstone and, most of all, Gail Mellow who is always there to support our students. IF you can, go ask any of them how they liked it, and I’m sure they’ll say that this show is a Must See.

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”

In my annual calender, on the page I started the poem were these two “bon mots:” “the truth broke my uniqueness” (3.22.7) and “My ability stand pain diminished” (4.2.7). I’m not sure why I wrote them down, who said them, or why they matter, but I’m digitalizing them.

I saw a huge chunk of wood in traffic on Queens Boulevard the other day and the traffic was slowly dissolving it. I though about it and I want ed to write a poem, and this is what I started last night as Erin (M) spoke.

“Queens Boulevard Driftwood”
A six foot block of 8” by 10”
Aged for a century deep in
A warehouse that held barrels of oil
That 2 floors down became pens

Flame de-industrialization
For cold steel replacement buildings:
To fill with pressboard furniture
Covered with white and birch veneer

The rubble of that factory
Trucked away thirty cubic
Yards at a time to a depot
Lashed to barges along the River

The illegal that packed the charred beam
In the 30 yard dumpster lashed loose
The blue plastic tarp containment
Disposable archeology

Too fast turn by stallion carting
Out flew bricks, rubble and plaster
The beam that held up 100 years
Of hard work and new things fell out

Wave after wave of traffic rolls
Over and over the charred cedar
Crumbling and shaving the wood cut
A century ago by dagos

Yellow, then red and green again
The pulsing of the traffic thuds
Over and over the charred cedar
Gnawing away on the old beam

Smoothing the remains of the tree
Felled so long ago in mountain woods
A century hidden in red brick
Supporting piece-work now done by

Dominicans and Poles and
Koreans and Fujianese
And Hondurans and Mexicans
With bleary eyed efficiency

When I see the board dissolving
Under the waves of rush hour tires
It smoothes along the rough grain grown
When Lincoln debated Douglass

The grain shows like the tree itself
Fell down in a cold mountain stream
And was worn away gently in
The most tranquil of rural deaths

Waves of cars on Queens Boulevard
Lap over the wetback hewn board
Eroding it like the bowsprit
Of a shipwrecked sail freighter

Made redundant by steel and steam
Wave after wave on the freezing verge
Wears away the tree cut down quick,
Casually, when Queens was built

By dawn there is only a smooth
Core, the size of a root, halo-ed
By splinters worn off, car after car
Queens Boulevard Driftwood

This poem, on reconsideration, reminds me of this shit.

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)

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.

Above the Taco Truck

Almost 4 Years ago I lived for a time with my mother-in-law on 46th St in Sunnyside, Queens, NY. The block we lived on had a Discothèque, an after hours spot, and two Taco Trucks. After Jaleo and Club Noe Noe, the Discos, closed sending shards of young men and women out into the night there would be a drunken brouhaha in an orderly line waiting for tacos. To parody Hemingway it was a Movable Donnybrook, with high spirits, under the influence of spirits.

Club Tidepool

The yellow streetlight drops them in a pool:
An algae’d aquarium out the window.
I watch these tipsy drunks like Jacques Cousteau;
Filthy ether distorts human desire.

Three clubbers swaying in the pre-dawn air;
The unsteady kiss twists two together.
From right behind the woman the other,
Blinded, is too drunk to look away.

As I’d get up at 4 in the morning to grade papers I would be privy to the slurred inner lives of the same young people whose papers I was grading. There were passionate comparisons of the relative merits of various países latinoamericano. As someone would lose the argument on the eloquence trajectory they’s usually jump to the y-axis of VOLUME:

“¡Viva México,hijos de la chingada!”
(Tomates,Cebollas, y Chiles)

It is very easy to romanticize the hard working facts of these young people, so I did:

Shift Change

Underdressed for the cold of this rainy morning,
They look strange in their clubbing clothes
In early drizzle-gray.

Starched, oversized, faded, denim-gelled hair, laughing
Swaying about the women, long gone
Into the darkest night

Don’t move aside or apart for the bundled braving
On their frigid way to work
Just after dawn on Sunday.

Churchians will to the Assembly of praying,
‘Round the corner past these sidewalks,
Missing the hist’ry of now

Dedicated pre-dawn streets: partying and working
Devoted craft of good time: or work
Or both a long hard day

Working up to a life in America not needing
Sleep-eyed, rooster-time tasks;
Sparking and posing hold no sway

These are the sons of the workers power-walking,
Hunched, backpacked, clutching shopping bags,
Towards a corner of their own

Clucking and cooing rare birds crowding sidewalk crowing
An unsteady conclave relaxed
Don’t see the salt of the earth pass

Ballasted by tools they march to the train, trickling
Past unsteady upright peacocks:
Stagger men their boys’ll be.

These are the same men, on different days of the week, drinking
On different corners, in different rags
The revolving door of the poor

I was both once, dog, drunk and industrious, working
Before I drank the collegiate Cool-Aid™
That was a long-long time ago

Ghetto-licious Chandelier

 

The reason I booted up today is that I wrote a poem, and have an idea for another.  First the poem (it is a continuation of the one about zen-ization of apartment sounds):

The quiet clatter of bamboo chimes

Are better suited to richer lives

Whose cars, closets and lawns

Cover up the working dawns

 

All the feng shui,

Gravel gardens,

Herbal nostrums

And acupuncture leaching

 

Only work when

Money lets you run

To the wooded country

That favors trees over WE.

 

3/21/5

I was mugged by my muse again this morning: Here is the poem that I wrote and the ideas that it spawned

My Zen Retreat

 

Quite feng shui wind chimes tinkling

Compliment the babble gurgling

Gentle breeze like trees’ leaves rustling

 

That whoosh is from the radiator

The dribble, a missing toilet bobber

And clatter, a ghetto-licious chandelier

 

So what I’ve been thinking about with this whole poetry thing, and I guess that this applies to any theoretical fiction writing also, is that I need to elaborate on the right details. I have to explain, describe or elaborate on the part of the story that brought the whole thing up in the first place. So I was turning on Choi’s (my wife’s Mother, with whom I was living when I wrote this) lamp in the living-room when it clattered and tinkled and I thought how it was like wind chimes, and then I noticed the hissing of the radiator. These two reminded me of the people (like my Mom) who coo and go-on about that commercialized, Orientalist Zennishness.

I reckon that the western ideal has been doing this as a sort of “Other-Mania” for at least 150 years (More the French Impressionist painters then Joseph Conrad), but it is the last 30 or so that has the burr under my saddle. I think that I wanted to lampoon the phoney hypocritical zen-mania of the hippy generation best exemplified by Ram Das and the Harvard Square Gurus that marshaled cults from the 60s and 70’s onward.

So the poem, on one level, is perfect the way it is. On another level it is just a beginning on the ideas I just wrote in the last paragraph. How do I write a poem, or extension to that poem, that captures the othering of the harmless oriental. Which I think is in direct inverse proportion to the absence of subjectivity. What are the details I want to focus on? Wealth, power and race are all obvious signs of this phenomenon, but I need more concrete details. What is as real as “a ghetto-licious chandelier?”

I have been thinking about the love of the American middle class (over-class, upper-class, meddling-class?) to adopt causes with no local subjectivity. It is OK to be pro-Tibet because there are no Tibetan ghettos in their ken.

It is like the ardor that America felt for the civil-rights movement of the 50s and 60s, when, since there was near absolute segregation, there was very little actual expression of Negro subjectivity outside of popular culture. Once Blacks got a piece of the rock, were mixed into the local culture as much as the popular culture, you had the same people saying (advocating, instigating, silk-screening t-shirts) “disco sucks,” because this was an actual hybridization of pop-culture. When “disco-sucks” was the rallying cry they would play dance hits from across the spectrum on “disco stations” and in discos like Boz Scaggs, and John Denver’s “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” Once the “pitiable other” started dancing with their sons and daughter, having palpable impact on their own culture, the Negro was no longer a worth cause célèbre: roll out the Vietnamese.

Once the South Vietnamese were too real, that is when the boat people showed up in California public schools and opening nail salons and restaurants, attention, again, shifted. Next it was the Cambodians whom Pol Pot was massacring who fell in and out of Orientalist vogue. They are still the most ghetto-fied Asians in California, living in projects and generally under-performing in myriad ways (because of their subaltern position in Asia?). I heard something on NPR on Sunday about some white southern do-gooders who were intent on rescuing the Bantu of Sudan, who had been enslaved about the same time as the niggers amongst whom they live in South Carolina. For some reason the fact that it was an Arab (Orientalist) power structure that has been marginalizing them for the last 250 years kept them from being the garden variety blacks whom they seem unconcerned about helping. All this is why vegetarianism and animal rights have stayed in vogue, animals have no real subjectivity because they are not sentient (which is the same reason we’ve always eaten them): they’ll never date your precious pink daughter.

So what are the details that will make the meddling class concrete? If I call them “the meddling class” it will be a tired didactic exercise worthy of minister Farrakhan and the coked up remnants of the Black Panthers. Perhaps the distance of the television would clarify it.

Strange History

I found this “This Day In History” report below on the internet today and there is some sort of strange resonance in these three facts that I can’t just name now. I just wanted to get into your head.

Today is Tuesday, Oct. 9, the 282nd day of 2007. There are 83 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On Oct. 9, 1967, Latin American guerrilla leader Che Guevara was executed while attempting to incite revolution in Bolivia.

On this date:

In 1446, the Korean alphabet, created under the aegis of King Sejong, was first published.

In 1701, the Collegiate School of Connecticut — later Yale University — was chartered.

In 1776, a group of Spanish missionaries settled in present-day San Francisco.

Quickly Kids

Chandler at 12, 2 years out of Cali, took the subway to and from 7th grade herself today. She and Aneka were escorted to the subway by Aneka’s Hijabed mom, who had decided that nothing eventful was going to happen on the way to or from school to our talented daughters. The last couple of times is was my turn to escort them I was little more than an afterthought. They spent the whole time on the way to school discussing the layers of the atmosphere for a science test. They know the way and they never looked back for me, assuming I’d be alright. Chandler reported that on the way back they had fun, buying icees and talking with their friends on the N or W and 7 all the way home.

Lennox (5) is writing lots of letters, cards and books to my dad, whose birthday just passed. The image is of one of her ice cream cone calculations (how many scoops, how many flavors and how high it would be, etc.). Kindergarten seems to agree with this little scholar.

Mason’s soccer team, which I coach, is 3 and 0, and Mason is tied for the team lead with 6 goals. This week was a bye-week and I actually missed schlepping out to Greenpoint for the Tuesday night practice. We’ve got to work on “running off the ball.” In the last game one of Mason’s goals was particularly nice. He got the ball with a defender right on him about 2o’ from the goal. He pulled it back and to the right to get a shot around the defender and nailed it to the far side of the goal (passed the goalie who was out of position).

We are all good, and I miss all of you.

Kiko and Mike V

 

 Holla at me. Here Kiko continues to re-meet Mike, which is how things start 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.

Second were the bikes hanging upside down in the loft, they were thin and light like Mike’s.  In fact, thinking back to where the egg white feta omelets go they were like spider webs floating gently over the thin strong woman who over-tipped him in that loft.  There was so little bike there that he thought that they probably floated up to the ceiling, rather than hanging there, Kiko thought.  But were those webs a trap for a fly like him, or the fairy-dragonfly wings spouting out of the back of the omelet-bicycle lady?

And finally, he wondered how he had beaten Mike, on his sick-slick-skinny-little bike and funny clothes, up and over the Queensboro Bridge.  Kevin had also asked how he went so fast.  Kiko just knew that he could ride well, but he had no idea that it was phenomenal, and Key-Vin and Bridge Mike’s attention just made him self-conscious and suspicious.

On Sunday, Kiko’s day off, after a fair amount of negotiation he agreed to meet mike and go for a ride.  According to Mike Central Park was too busy, so they met out on the LIE service road and rode out of Flushing towards Long Island.  It was there that Mike had a proper bike, “una bicicleta flaca muy bonita, Gracias.  Estás seguro?”

Reassuringly, “yeah, sure Kiko, this is one I no longer use,” as he took out an allen key set and adjusted the seat and handlebars to Kiko’s height.  Mike explained the mechanics of a proper fit on a bike in Queens English that went by far too fast for Kiko to understand: “The heel of your foot on the pedal when your leg is stretched out will keep you from rocking…  Bent over enough when in the drops to stay out of the wind while not interfering with your breathing… Head-up, shoulders down….”