reunions and memory

Last night I went to dinner with people I haven't seen in 40 years or more. We're all from Montclair, NJ.

Left to right, the people in the photo are: Tim Andre (who I didn't know very well back then) Mike Albouy (who lived down the street from us), me, and Aaron Myatt (whose mom was a nurse with my mom and who I've known since I was five or so). This is the second get-together like this I've been to in three days because Aaron (who never travels) is here in California for a Trikke training.

Tim just moved out here a couple of months ago from Hawai'i and Mike lives in Novato. On Thursday, Mike couldn't make it, but Anna Oneglia (who I last saw maybe five years ago did). Her oldest daughter just had a boy at her (the daughter's) home in Berkeley, so Anna was up here just be chance when Aaron was in town. She lives in Santa Cruz. That's Anna to the left there. On Thursday afternoon-evening, we got some takeout from Birite over by Dolores Park and sat and ate and drank wine out of a bottle. This weekend, perhaps coincidentally, there was the all years MHS reunion at Eagle Rock Park.

I am not sorry to have missed that, but am glad we all got together.

Summer

Laine and I were up in Weaverville last weekend. On Sunday afternoon we were sitting in the local bar, having a beer. Someone turned out some money in the jukebox and "Piece of My Heart" started playing in the background.

I don't know why, but there's a certain electric guitar sound I associate with summer time, summer and heat. Other summer stuff - cold beer in dark bars, full of regulars (where I'm not one), peaches, the smell of charcoal fires and gunpowder after fireworks, the smell right before and after it rains, fireflies right at dusk, corn and tomatoes and blueberries.

oh and the heat.

I Heard Cassandra Wilson Sing Last Night

it was at Yoshi's in Oakland. The place was packed. Laine and I ended up in a corner right near (fortunately) the percussionist. Fortunately because the man was amazing. Yoshi's is not a big venue, so it's hard to say there's a bad seat in the house. You can't necessarily see everything, like I couldn't see the guitar player most of the night, but you can hear everything. Cassandra Wilson stood right up in front of the band and we could see her just fine.

I ran into someone I know at the end of the first set and she didn't know anything about Wilson, had come because it was a going away party for a colleague of her wife. She was "pleasantly surprised" at the performance. Pleasantly surprised by one of the world's greatest jazz singers, well.

I wrote jazz singer there, but Wilson is really a jazz musician, though with jazz singers that's usually the case. Thinking about the great jazz singers of the 20th century - Holiday, Fitzgerald, Vaughn, Horn, O'Day, Staton, and Washington - they were all musicians, rather than just a woman standing up singing in front of the band.

I don't want to distract myself with an argument whether Ronnie Spector, for example, is a musician, (she is), but to think about what it is that makes Wilson so extraordinary. It's her voice, which is deep and like burnt umber, like bittersweet chocolate, rich-toned, with an edge. But it's also what she chooses to sing and what she's brought into the jazz songbook. I wrote a couple of years ago about her version of "Last Train to Clarkesville" and she so owns Neil Young's "Harvest Moon" that I had no idea it was ever his song. She covers Dylan and Mitchell. Last night she sang a song written by Harold Arlen and Truman Capote called " A Sleeping Bee" which I'd never heard of before.

Still, some of the most amazing work she does is with traditional blues. Your basic blues is pretty simple music, 12 bars three or four chord changes, simple rhythms. Wilson takes it and spins it into jazz and reaches into the emotion of the music.

Everyone knows the blues is sad stuff. But how often does a performer makes you feel the sadness of the words in a song like Son House's "Death Letter", really feel it*? The White Stripes covered "Death Letter", all gymnastics, amazing slide guitar work. He could be singing about a car for all the attention he gives these lyrics:

Got up this morning,
At the break of day
Hugging the pillow
Where my sweet man used to lay

White uses the song as a pretext for his (considerable) chops. Wilson shows the desolation of loneliness and loss. Her chops make that possible, which is the better art.

She ended with "St. James Infirmary" last night taking it from some dim city's morgue to the side of a sunlit river in Africa (or Mississippi). I don't know how she did it. We could have stayed for a second set. but I didn't need to.

*Thanks to Laine for making me notice .

Music Finds You Online

GS sent me a link to a blog on The Root about Janelle Monae's new CD. Well, the piece really isn't about Monae's new release. It's a long speculation about whether the gatekeepers of modern pop culture are going to allow Monae to become the big star she ought to be.

There's no question that she's not likely to get the insane press and hype of Lady Gaga. She can sing for one thing.

Ok, ok, I like Gaga just fine. But she's a phenomenon and Monae is way more that that. She's producing concept albums and working a vintage African American aesthetic, along with about fifty other things. And I think she's going to get huge success, not because she's going to get gigantic radio play, which is sort of the hub of the article in The Root, but because she's getting fans and getting known through the internet, because she's in the right place, with the right music to be viral.

I'm on the email list of this guy Bob Lefetz, who's been in LA for ever it sounds like and I can't quite remember how I got on this cranky, interesting guy's list. But he knows his stuff about the music business and all sorts of famous and behind the scenes people write him back to yell at him and thank him. He's pretty firm on the idea the the conventional ways of getting music to the people and money to the artists are dead.

He's not perfect. He's a little too strong on how wonderful Sirius radio is and loved this Eagles concert not long ago. But I think he's probably right about the change in the business.

Why? Because I didn't hear about Janelle Monae on the radio. I don't listen to the radio. Not because I don't love music. It's because I do love music that I can't stand most pop radio stations. Repetitious, no real flow, too many commercials. I used to listen to the radio all the time. But when marketing and market share stomped the last independent fm stations, I pretty much quit.

So how do I find new stuff? Online. People write about bands and I go and look for a YouTube video. A blogger will post a link. Emusic sends me email. 4AD sends me email. There's a ton of music and most of it's online. And music finds its way to every willing ear. I mean I saw Monae's "Tightrope" video on Facebook about month after I'd first heard about her from Black Nerds Network. If she's on Facebook, I don't think she needs your local Top 40 or Urban radio station to make it.

I'm going to find her album this week. I'm not downloading it from iTunes because I'm hating them right now. I bet I can find it somewhere else online.

Martin Gardner 1914 - 2010

Martin Gardner was the editor of the mathematical puzzles feature in Scientific American for more than twenty years. Although I rarely ever solved one of his puzzles, they opened my mind.

He was also one of the first skeptics I'd ever read. I've collected his books, found in second hand stores, for years.

He should be missed.

Feeling My Age

Well, it's probably past time that I should. And if I'm being honest, I've been feeling it in pieces for quite a while now.

I started wearing bifocal glasses when I was in my late forties. I've had arthritic knees for at least as long. I've had arthritis in the vertebrae in my lower back for about two years. My hair's been greying for at least ten years and I finished menopause five years or so ago.

But was I aging? Not in my mind. In my mind, I had the same body image that I had in my thirties, mirrors and clothes sizes notwithstanding. The thing that's really brought me to some sort of realization, oddly enough, is Facebook.

On Facebook, I'm friends with people I know because of my job, that I've worked with, that I've met in the last few years. but I'm also friends with a bunch of people that I've known since high school and before. I'm friends with a guy I've known since I was five and now I'm friends with a woman that grew up in the same garden apartment I did in Montclair, NJ. I've known her probably since I was seven or so, because she's a few years younger than I am.

There was a pack of about eight kids that played together. The age spread was about five years from the oldest to the youngest. I was probably in the older third and this woman, girl then, was in the younger third. I remember a couple of things about playing with her. Probably the thing I remember best, though not to my credit, was this time she was going to race off to the play yard. She yelled something like, "The last one there's a rotten egg," turned, took three steps, and ran smack into a tree. I laughed so hard -- it was just like a cartoon -- that I nearly fell over. She wasn't hurt and the play went on without her even going to the house.

So in my mind she's this round-faced kid, with braids and freckles. I saw a picture of her on FB and, well, she's still got the freckles.

And I still have this mole on my cheek, and pretty much the same smile from the time I was a little girl. But I'm not thirty or forty. I'm nearly sixty and cannot tell you how weird this is.

More Daddy Grace than Martin Luther King

I have been reviewing the salaries of the top administrators of LGBT advocacy organizations. (It's part of my job that would be tedious to explain.) The EDs of the big orgs, you know the ones, are bringing home the six-figure salaries. If they get less, sooner or later they're going to be looking for a new, better paying gay-for-pay job.

This is part of the overall professionalization of non-profit and service jobs. Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying that doing good work should mean living on bread and water and wearing sackcloth. I don't expect people to be Simone Weil. But when the cost of doing the work means paying huge salaries in this movement. I wonder about the return on investment.

We're possibly on the cusp of repealing DADT and maybe the trans-inclusive ENDA will get voted on before Congress scurries home for the summer and campaining. These are huge things. But was the motive force for these things the national LGBT organizations? It's hard to say.

More likely, it's the combination of a couple of things.

First the greater visibility of LGBT people (we're not so scarily other) and the increased sophistication of many Americans. This has come about because of a slow change in our culture. This change has taken place in one of the most conservative parts of the nation, the armed services. If the military has no objection to overturning DADT (and as far as I can tell, there's precious little resistance, high and low, except for some Pleistocene relics), then it's a change whose time has come.

Second, there's a center-left president in the White House who will sign the bills if they get to his desk.

Neither of these things is the result of X organization lobbying on Capitol Hill or schmoozing with elected officials. It was LGBT individuals, not organizations, meeting non-LGBT individuals, people knowing their lesbian neighbors or gay co-workers or transgender family members or bisexual friends. And the gays did not elect Obama. Not single handed any how.

When I think about Martin Luther King or Malcolm X (whose birthday it is today) I think they had comfortable lives. From the pictures, they had what pretty much look like middle-class African American homes from the middle of the last century. There wasn't a lot of money in social change then. There was (and will always be) a lot of money in selling people a story they want to believe. That's what Daddy Grace did and that's why lots of people gave him lots and lots of money.

To be fair, Daddy Grace also built houses and created a pension fund for elderly parishioners and ministers. And to be fair, the national LGBT organizations have done something in the struggle to social justice, but not nearly enough for the cost.

I Got Nothin'

Nothing much to say that is. I spent part of Mothers' Day with my sister, eating indifferent BBQ. But we're getting along much better and that's good.

I had some more thoughts about our dad. I was thinking about this argument I got into on Saturday night. I was thinking about music and Dionne Warwick sounds great to me now and how dismissive I was of her (considerable) talent when I was a teenager. I was thinking about how easy ear worms are acquired and how hard they are to get rid of, presently afflicted with Jerry Orbach's version of "Promises, Promises" from the cast recording back in 1964 or so. (What a good singer he was! )

Ideas and half-formed thoughts swirl around like dust bunnies and I think that I really need to sweep.

Promissory Note - What We Learn

Every once in a while I buy some good salami. I make sandwiches and I think about my dad, who taught me to like strongly flavored things.

Salami
Sardines
Hot sausage
Tabasco sauce
Lapsang souchong tea
Strong mustard


He didn't sit me down and make me eat or drink these things. But because he was my dad and because I loved him, I tried them when I got a chance and I like these things too.

I probably inherited an ability to ingest spicy stuff without pain. Neither he or I seem to be super-tasters. But I learned by watching and remembering.

Identities: Part Two - Mistaken Identities

I dreamed about Amanda Palmer a couple of nights ago. I never dream about famous, notorious, or widely known people. I rarely even dream about real people I know. I don't know why. It's just one of those things, like the fact that I dream in technicolor or that I used to have this recurring dream about a city.

But the Amanda Palmer dream was probably caused by this blog post on Tiger Beatdown. AP or AfP as she likes to style herself has been showing her ass a lot lately. I was pretty through with her following her critique of product placement in a Lady Gaga video (the extremely interesting "Telephone", w/ Beyonce). I mean it was fine for her to criticize the product placement. I'm annoyed at the way products creep into every possible medium, sitting quietly (or not so quietly) there in the background (or right up in the front row).

What was not so fine, however, is that when pushed by someone about her simple-minded critique, she went on to stick her foot in her mouth clear through to her small intestine by tweeting the following:

ironic product placement is only ok if you take no money & beyond that give all the income to something ironic. like the Klan

Excuse me? To the Ku Klux Klan? Aside from the intensely problematic use of irony here, who in her right mind could think that giving money to the Klan, for any reason in the known universe, is a good idea?

This is hipster racism. It's so common that it's (almost) not shocking. It made me decide that I'm not spending another thin dime on AfP's music. But she wasn't done.

A few months ago, I had read that she was doing this new project with Jason Webley, called Evelyn-Evelyn. They were presenting themselves as conjoined twins, playing an accordion, in a very late 19th or early 20th century style. At the time I thought it was creepy, but thought little more about it, until I read this post about ableism and this new act was clearly way worse than creepy.

AfP hears (I guess) about the post and rather than take the opportunity to act like a grownup and admit to getting something badly wrong, AfP called out the fan-mob, who harassed and threatened the blogger. But worse yet, she went on Australian tv to say that she was being harassed by disabled feminists.

Wait one minute. Aren't you a feminist, Ms AfP? Aren't you a member of this big crowd of folks who are interested in social justice? I mean, aren't you?

And I realized I didn't really know whether she was or not.

It's easy to read feminism or at least a woman's pov in her music and she's written on her blog about issues that seemed to be feminist, such as the huge variation in how women respond to abortion. But on the other hand there's some transphobic material too, like "Sex Changes" on Yes, Virginia. AfP seems to be someone who's engaged in the issues of our time, insofar as they apply to what she wants to do as an artist, but not someone who thinks about these things very deeply or care very much at all.

I didn't think she was not a feminist when she did the racist tweet, because sadly there are many white feminists who are fairly clueless about antiracism. But when she identifies her critics as "disabled feminists" that tells me that she doesn't see herself as a member of our big fractious assemblage and I was a fool and a fan to think that she was.

I'm probably still a fool about a lot of things, but I'm not a fan anymore.

Identities: Part One - Stories We Tell

So my pal, George, and I have this pact, that we'll both start posting on our blogs once a week. I promised that I was going to post more in 2010 back in January and you saw how well that went. But since this is a pact and all and since I don't want George to get the moral high ground here, I'm going to write.

I've been thinking about identities for a whole bunch of reasons that I'll spin out in the next few posts. I'm starting this one with stories, because the thing that got me started thinking was a story, a memoir, written by someone I know. I'm not going to name him and if you want to know what the book is, email me or something.

At any rate, this memoir covers his growing understanding, professionalism, and love of his work. It's also a political memoir, insofar as he links the (very worthwhile) work he does to his political consciousness as a left radical punk back in the eighties. It informs, as he tells us readers, the choices he makes, the way he goes about his work, even his choice of work. That's all very well and good and it makes for a nice, neat story.

I was reading the book over a weekend when Laine and I had gone up to Tahoe with some friends. They went skiing. I planned to keep the wood stove stoked and read all weekend. When I pulled out the memoir, one of them said, "Hey, that's X. I used to know him at Cornell. He went out with a friend of mine." *

I went to Cornell as a graduate student. Like many universities, Cornell has a pretty substantial lefty community. There are housing co-ops (I used to live in one). There is every shade of radical, enrolled and not, hanging around the campus. But there are very few poor kids attending the university. So X had gone to Cornell, had graduated from one of the Ivies, but didn't seem to feel that worth mentioning in his memoir.

Why?

Because it makes for a more complicated story. Rather than the working class guy (as he intimates, though never quite claims) who starts out ignorant of his new job, who learns and explores and becomes an expert through his hard work, he's a guy with some privilege who starts out ignorant of his new job, who learns and explores and becomes an expert through his hard work.

What's the difference? Privilege.

I've talked with working class whites who have told me about how hard it is to put themselves forward in a group (could be work, could be school) of upper class people. I know as a middle class African American (from the last century**) how hard it can be to feel at home among the privileged. How we second guess ourselves, how we're not sure of how to be, how watchful it makes us. How timid.

This is not to say that it's an impossible hurdle, that a working class guy couldn't have done it. But he'd have to push himself to take risks that the privileged never even think about.

The other reason X tells his story as a simple one, is because it doesn't occur to him not to. He doesn't notice his privilege because he's like a fish in water about it. He doesn't think about how some things are easier for him because he was a man who could go to Cornell, who grew up in Marin (yeah, he mentioned that, but I didn't take it as a marker of wealth because, believe it or not, there are poor people in Marin). He's good, as far as I can tell, on economics and on basic feminism and anti-racism.

He's a good man, but he tells himself a child's story about his life.

Does that matter?

Well, maybe not. It's not like he's trying to put something over on people, not consciously anyhow.

But maybe it does matter that we don't see ourselves completely, that we allow our blind spots to let us build these ideas about ourselves as simple people, with easy to understand motives. It's not true and it makes us shaky allies when we can't seen the borders of our privileges or even the privileges themselves.

Hi George! The rest of you, go over and take a look at his blog. It's a good one.


*It's a very small world.
**This makes a huge difference.

New Year's Resolutions - Blogging Again

It's easier if I don't think that each and every post has to be this long, well-developed essay, perfectly crafted, elegant. Not that they were that way anyhow, but I wanted them to be.

This year, I go for getting something down and worrying about the rest later.

Besides life is short. I heard on Sunday that someone I knew years ago walked into Lake Washington back in September. She had been depressed and felt that there was no one who would/could take care of her. I'm sad she did it, though I wish I could get rid of the nagging suspicion that she had shoved stones into her pockets.

People have the right to end their lives when they need to or want to, but mimicking a famous writer is a weird fangirl thing to do at the end.

Finally Food II

When I finished the first post on food, I knew that something was wrong, was missing from it. Not to mention that I hated that upbeat ending that sits there like a fake smile on a greeter at some big box store.

I show some pictures of people that suggested something about their relationship to food, slag Michael Pollan, talk shallowly about food security, and then wrap it all up with a big shiny ribbon. This is not finally anything. The piece that's missing -- considering that this is a blog and not an op-ed, or a research paper, or even a term paper -- is a person and that person is me.

Because I'm the person who has eaten Popeye's chicken and probably will again. And I am one of the people with enough disposable income to go to Slow Food 2008 and eat fabulous hand-crafted eats. And I am the person who sometimes (but never often enough) buys food from her local farmer's market (which is about three blocks away). And I am the person who joined a coop but never makes it there on Saturday to shop. And I am the person who thinks about buying organic and will if the price differential isn't too great. And I am the person who will spend hours making something that will get eaten in fifteen (ok, twenty) minutes. And I am the person who is pretty happy with the cheapest Chinese takeout (from that place on 16th near Capp).

My relationship to food and cooking and eating is complicated, which makes me a lot like many people in the USA. But I can only make sense of food in this country by making sense of my own feelings about and actions around food.

I'm not going to make an everywoman claim here. For one thing, I like to cook. Lots of people (even ones who like to eat good food) don't necessarily like to cook. And they don't have to. One thing about living in the twenty-first (and for that matter in the middle to end of the twentieth) century, is that you can eat pretty well without having to learn to cook. Before then, unless you lived in a city, you needed to cook or have someone in your house who cooked, if you wanted to eat. If you were a woman, you were probably the cook. All women don't love cooking. My stepmother, who I mentioned in the first part, hated it. Sallie Tisdale writes about her mother who, like my stepmother, felt she had to cook and disliked it. (Tisdale writes about a lot more, it's a great food book.)

But I came from a family of women (excepting my stepmother) who mainly did like to cook and were good at it. They also cooked for a living. My grandmother on my dad's side was a live-in cook for a family near Palmyra, NY. Her mother was also a cook. My great-aunt cooked for a restaurant in a bar in Harlem (among her many different jobs). My mom's mother cooked and her mother cooked. Through their cooking I learned to love eating. I had paella for the first time at my great-aunt's apartment. I had great southern breakfasts, with eggs, grits, fried chicken, and biscuits at my mother's mother's house in Philly. I ate I don't know how many roasts and desserts over years of holidays. I have my dad's mother's recipe cards.

But I didn't learn how to cook from them. I learned to cook, really cook, once I left home.

That's also where I started to care about where food came from, how it was prepared, and how it got on my plate. I've worked in health food stores, natural food stores, and in a natural food warehouse. I've learned a lot about food production. I'm not a naif about how meat is produced or how farm workers remain the most exploited and ignored groups of hard working people in this country. How does that knowledge affect my shopping/cooking/eating? It makes me do the right thing when I can and feel guilty for the times when I go ahead and buy or eat that thing that violates my values around food.

I'm not the only one. And this is why changing the culture of food is going to be so difficult. Even those of us who know better, don't always do better because we are part of a culture that wants what it wants, when it wants it.

No matter what it costs someone else. No matter what it costs the soil. No matter what it means in the long run because we don't think in the long run.

Food Finally

That image a couple of paragraphs down is from Slow Food 2008. I took it in San Francisco. On the left is a picture I took this April in NYC. The details are a little hard to see, so let me describe it. It's a line of people standing on 145th street in Harlem. They're lined up to get the Popeye's Chicken Special. I think it was a bucket of 9 pieces, with biscuits for $2.99. The line, though you can't see it in the photo, was pretty long. There must have been fifty people waiting on a chilly, dreary day for a cheap bucket of chicken and a pile of greasy (though I have to say tasty) biscuits.

These two photos say a lot about what it means to eat in the USA.

Food is not just feeding. Food is economics. Food is culture. Food is class. Food is tradition and innovation. If you want to read about sustainable farming (and the pushback from Big Ag), then go over to Eco-Salon and read Vanessa's piece. She's great and she knows what she's talking about.

This post has been percolating in my head for more than a year. I have tried to think about how to write about the problems with food and and money and people in the USA. I talk with people. I read things. And lately I've been listening to Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food (nothing better than audiobooks about food when you're cooking dinner). Maybe it was listening to Pollan that finally pushed me over the edge to writing because his book is not about to fix anything, but his attempt to fix what's wrong with food in the USA reveals a lot of the problems with even thinking about this whole mess.

At one point, Pollan is telling the reader how to eat, some specifics to follow up on the basic dictum of "eat real food, mainly fruit and vegetables, not much meat . . . " which had been repeated a number of times. After suggesting that we buy a big freezer and buy quarters of beef, he says, offhandedly, " I realize that not everyone can do this, but those of us who can should. " And there is the key obstacle to "fixing" the myriad and complicated issues of food in a nutshell. Personal, individual solutions are offered up for what are institutional, commercial problems. Not that food in America is a problem for business people, unless you seriously think that getting more people to buy poor-quality food is a legitimate sort of problem. However it is increasingly an institutional problem in a country where more and more people suffer from food insecurity, if not actual starvation and food-related illnesses and disabilities grow .

We all make individual decisions about how and what to eat. The people at Slow Food 2008 are opting for hand-crafted, scrupulously produced, and incredibly tasty food. The people in line at Popeye's are choosing uniformly manufactured, mass-produced, and kinda tasty food. There are businesses, smallish in the former case, immense in the latter, to provide them with the food they want and are willing to pay for. When the bulk of the infrastructure for food production and distribution is aimed at a mass-produced, uniform, and cheapish cuisine, our individual choices narrow, especially if we don't have the time or money to find alternatives. To eat well in the USA, the deck is stacked against all of us. If you follow Pollan (and many people do), the solution is to feed yourself and your family better, working in the interstices of a crappy system with as much of your disposable income as you can afford to spend.

But if the real problem in the USA is to get good quality, healthy food to everyone in the country, there's not much business in place to make that happen and not much institutional support for it either. There are food deserts in cities, places where there's no access to any food except what a corner store will carry (processed, shelf life measured in months, little fresh fruit, vegetables, meat and forget about fish).

But the logistics don't strike me as being the only hurdle to better eating in the USA. The hurdles are cultural and economic. And the cultural barriers might be the highest.

Although I'm not 100% with Polland, he does say one thing that I completely agree with and he hasn't thought through all the ramifications that follow it. There are different food cultures in the world and that's not just about whether your main protein is fish or chicken; whether your main starch is potatoes, rice, or cassava. Food culture is also about the preparation and consumption of food. That's something that both the people in the Popeye's line and the people at Slow Food 2008 have in common, something that marks them (and all of us) as American eaters.

As far as food goes, we expect to have what ever it is we want ready when we want it. It's obvious in the Popeye's case, but consider. At Slow Food 2208 nearly all the food (if not all of it) was prepared foods, wonderfully, artfully prepared food, but prepared food nonetheless.

To change food in the USA is a two-fold process. We've got to get real, whole food to everyone. And we've got to change our relationship to food and eating. It means more cooking, more planning, more time, and maybe more money. But the money is the least of it.

Because it will mean nothing if we got good food to people all over the country who don't know what to do with it or who see cooking as low-status drudgery (my stepmother did and she was an awful cook). Spending time choosing, buying, cooking and enjoying food is one of the most fundamental changes in our culture that I can imagine. But it could be the a key to making a lot of other things possible.

making movies I

A couple of weeks ago I got an email from M, asking me if I wanted to be part of Frameline's Generations Project. This project brings together youth (max age 23) and elders (min age 55) to learn how to make digital movies. She said they were short on elders. So I applied and I got in. This was my second weekend.

The first weekend was a potluck and a sort of get to know you session. There are a lot more elders in this group than youth. Nearly no one has any experience making films, though there are a couple of photographers (varying degrees of seriousness), a theater director, a part-time film critic for local Chinese newspapers, a couple of art students, a sound designer, a retired carpenter, and others whose work or ex-work I didn't catch.

There will be three groups of four or four groups of three making films that will be five minutes long. Unlike earlier years, the groups won't get to segregate by age. The themes for the films, the content is supposed to arise from the discussions the group has, not from any films that people have been dying to make, but have never (before now) had the chance.

I'm excited and worried.

I'm excited because I love learning new things and because this is making me think about how films are put together. Just this week we got this handout on cameras, about angles and movement and framing and how different shots have different effects. It's all about the visual conventions that enable storytelling. It's the stuff that signals and underlines and that we barely pay attention to most of the time (unless it's a really bad movie).

I'm worried because it's clearer than ever that film-making is a team effort. At this point, we're still all these individuals who are interested in making films and we're all lgbtqi, but that's about all that holds us together. The abundance of elders is a problem too because, in my experience, people don't necessarily get better about sharing as they get older. Already there's a tendency to talk over the less assertive. So I'm worried about us being able to make functional teams to make something special out of this incredible opportunity.

it's the little things and the not-so-little things

So right before the inauguration, I noticed that I was doing something I hadn't done in a long, long time. I was listening to the radio. I used to be a turn off the alarm clock, turn on the radio sort of person. I mean decades of this. I'm not a newspaper reader and I don't watch much tv. And before there was the internet, I got my news off the radio, public radio to be specific. The radio was my link to the larger world and whenever I drove cross country, I'd basically surf from one public radio domain to the next.

But by start of the Iraq War I had given up on the radio completely. I couldn't stand to hear one more piece of bad news or another equivocation out of that lying sack of shit, Scott McClellan. I didn't want to hear about yet another erosion, landslide of rights in the US. And I didn't want to hear the reporters dutifully taking notes, asking none of the hard questions that needed to be asked, that no one seemed to be asking offline.

I had had enough.

But then, I found myself listening first to the all-liberal all-the-time celebration on Sunday before the inauguration. Then I turned on the news on Monday to hear what was going on in the preparations for the inauguration and for the first steps of this administration. Then there was the inauguration, which I streamed and listened to as well. And for the last week, every morning when I get up, I turn on the radio and move it from room to room as I start the day.

I feel like a citizen again.

Then I read this. This administration is getting ready to defend John Woo against a suit from Jose Padilla. A suit brought by a man who's been tortured, held without charges, finally charged with some BS against one of men who chewed up or ignored the law, who made it possible for Padilla to basically be picked up and dropped down a dark hole. I've been finding out more and more about the enabling radical lawyers like Woo and Addington did. How their memos made it possible for the Bush administration to make a world so horrible I couldn't bear to listen to it on the radio. And I was lucky. I didn't have to live with the consequences, like the people in Iraq or Afghanistan.

If this new administration can't bring some justice to the real crimes that the Bush administration committed, maybe I won't be enjoying the radio for very long after all.

how the story works.

I'm addicted to fiction. I love stories. Any story, told any way. Tell them forward, tell them backwards, tell them inside out, tell them all braided up, I'm happy. When I was in graduate school, I hung out with philosophy majors and critical theorists (an ecologist needs distraction after all), so I started to hear a lot about narrative. At first I thought it was just a academically tarted up way of saying story. But narratives are sequences and stories aren't necessarily. Narratives inflict order and again, stories might or they might not. But the main thing I remember from hanging out, drinking beer and chatting is that narratives make sense of things.

Which is why they're so powerful. Which is why people depend on narratives to do a lot of work. Which also explains why people get upset when a narrative they're comfortable with is challenged or threatened. That's why people got so upset when a blogger suggests that maybe our Thanksgiving practices should include a moment of remembering how much the establishment of the USA, with all our wealth, cost the people who were living here when we got here.

I've been really mulling over the the story of civil rights for African Americans, because there's been a struggle about this on the blogosphere and even out away from computers. It came up in on this thread on my favorite blog a couple of days ago. There's a triumphant narrative to this piece of American history. Africans brought here in chains, the horrors of the slave trade and slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction and the backlash of Jim Crow, lynching and the anti-lynching work, then come the 50s and 60s and there seems to be a happy ending. Discrimination is illegal (though far from gone) in the USA.

There are other important struggles for rights in US history, the fight for unions, for women's suffrage, for farm workers rights, against nativist anti-immigrant laws and violence. But none of them seem to have captured the popular imagination the way that the fight for African American civil rights has done.

Maybe it's just timing. With the climatic acts and events coming early in the television age, many people could see the dogs set on peaceful demonstrators, see black kids spat at as they tried to go to school, see the huge march on DC. And then there are the speeches, the incredible speeches that King gave, that give me chills when I hear them now, not simply because I know this man is going to die, but because he's such an electrifying speaker.

But I think it's because the narrative says that ancient wrongs were righted, that justice did triumph and that right was done. The narrative suggests that since it happened once it can happen again. That things that are wrong now can be fixed, that rights that are denied now can be had sometime, some time soon. And because it's a narrative now and not the complicated stories that happened and are still happening, it looks as though it's all done, all over. It's not.

But, it makes perfect sense to me that when some LGBT people talk about our rights, they invoke the African American civil rights movement as a model. It's a perfect shorthand and it gives hope.

But when this happens something in me tightens up. As an African American who was a kid in the 50s, who knew that the story that was happening on tv was about me and about people like me, who was the same age as the four girls who died in that blown-up church, I feel like that story is mine.

But it can't belong to me, because once it's become narrative, it's off to do whatever work people can make it do. It's not a story any more and it really can't be mine. But doesn't stop me from feeling that I belong to it, that it owns me in a way that other people can never understand and it's that knowledge which gives me an unease about its casual and careless use that I just can't get myself over.

Another thing that that nags at me is how the narrative's been invoked about LGBT rights. I really started to hear it a lot after Prop 8 lost in California this November. This makes a sort of sense, because marriage is a right that strikes into people's hearts. It certainly struck into mine.

Still last year, when there was that struggle about a trans-inclusive ENDA, no one was writing much about the analogy with African American rights, how come? Employment protection, the right to apply for and keep jobs was an important part of the earlier struggle. But the discussion about getting the legislation pitted people who wanted the law to be inclusive even if there were little chance of the law passing (not that there was that much chance of the law passing anyway) against people who wanted a law they thought the powers that be would go for (as if).

It's this selective thing. When it came to marriage, then the narrative's invoked, But when it came to the equally basic right to work that one person might have and others don't, not a whisper. People have been surprised that many POC didn't vote for marriage rights. People should have been shocked at the number of LG people who weren't willing to fight for trans rights. Understanding that all our rights are connected and that we need to fight for every right for every person isn't something that comes automatically with your skin color or your gender or your class or any other part of your identities (or their intersections). It comes when you do the hard mental and emotional work to be a progressive. And that's more than any story alone can do.

reader, I

married her.

It's (I think) the amended beginning of the last chapter of Jane Eyre. I never thought I'd write that. For the record, I never thought I'd write,"Reader, I married him." either.

When I was straight, I could never see being that tied to anyone. Once I became a dyke, my relationships never lasted long enough or felt durable enough to be a marriage, regardless of the whole legal problem.

But today I married Laine Anne Snowman at the Alameda County Recorder's Office. I thought that it would just be a commonplace sort of thing, like getting a driver's license. The office has it all down. You fill out the paperwork on a computer, sign it when it's printed, and give them a check. Then they whisk you upstairs to a very nice room and someone in the office marries you and it's all official.

Two friends, Vanessa and Susan, came to be witnesses. They brought champagne and flowers and were the best witnesses ever.

I cried saying the vows.

If Jane Eyre had been a real person, I bet she cried a little when she wrote that line, despite her practicality and strength of will. Because this marriage thing is larger than you think and deeper than you expect.

Everyone should get a chance to choose it.

fighting words

Bill Wolfrum had post up on Shakesville this morning damning the Baby Boomers. It's been taken down, but the post is still over on his blog. I'm not going to link to either.

I weighed in on the thread a few times, but it wasn't until I went out to get lunch today that I realized that part of the problem with his post is that boomer isn't a neutral term. It's a pejorative and it's broad. There's no way to use it as a club, then say, "Oh, don't make it about you! If the shoe doesn't fit . . . " because boomer is about aperiod of time, a mythos (largely driven by commerce) around the age, and a demographic bulge. If you're born in the window, you're a boomer. It doesn't matter what your life has been like, what sort of work you have or haven't done, what sort of politics you hold, if you hold any, whether you marched for peace or beat up hippies, you're a boomer.

And just because Baby Boomer is a big, messy sack, making claims about the whole group is just wrong. And making an aggressive attack is on thei miscellaneous crowd going to piss people off.

And I am pissed off. I am pissed off at the commercials that play Classic Rock to sell luxury cars. I am pissed off that a junkie's song advertises a cruise line. I am pissed off at the concept of Classic Rock, FFS. I am pissed off that a demographic oddity, combined with advances in media, technology, and commerce has combined to form this monster called the Baby Boom.

I am annoyed at these generalizations that erase the real lives of real people.

competing narratives

When McCain's campaign announced that they'd chosen Sarah Palin for VP, most people (different flavors of lefties/progressives) that I talked with were delighted. What could be better? An inexperienced, extremely conservative, first-term governor of a small (population-wise) state.

Then the storm hit.

First there was the sexist ogling (from left, right, and center), then there was the motherhood concern trolls (from left and center, the right's supporting Palin on this one), and then there was the mass slut-shaming and mom-blaming (largely left) when it came out that Palin's daughter Bristol is pregnant. Some people think this is the way to attack Palin, to go after her for all her "failures", all the lapses, all the gaps between her life and the true womanhood rhetoric that the right has delighted in for decades.

And this will be an unmitigated disaster for the Democratic party in the fall because Palin is not running on her facts, she's running on the story that her life and her politics tell. George Lakoff describes her appeal and shows how clever the marketing around her candidacy is.

Palin is the mom in the strict father family, upholding conservative values. Palin is tough: she shoots, skins, and eats caribou. She is disciplined: raising five kids with a major career. She lives her values: she has a Downs-syndrome baby that she refused to abort. She has the image of the ideal conservative mom: pretty, perky, feminine, Bible-toting, and fitting into the ideal conservative family. And she fits the stereotype of America as small-town America. It is Reagan's morning-in-America image. Where Obama thought of capturing the West, she is running for Sweetheart of the West.

Ok, Lakoff could have done without that sweetheart. But the portrait of the working-class, hard-working, successful woman, who's not a radical (except that she is), who doesn't need feminism (even as she benefits from the last three decades of feminist work), who's even good-looking (even though that makes me puke, it's a factor) is a complete winner.


Progressives tend to like closely argued issues, well maybe we just like to argue. Still, most progressive sorts I know tend to read up on the ballot measures, look up voting records for candidates, and do some research before we vote. We have emotional reactions, but try to act rationally when it comes to voting. We are a minority.

And the Obama campaign probably understands that better than any Democratic campaign of the last twenty years, with the exception of the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary (after she ditched Penn). Obama is running on his own compelling narrative as he runs for president.

He's the bright son of a single, hard-working mother, grandson of the heartland, the biracial proof that anyone can reach for the highest office in the country. He's a loving father and husband, a pious, thoughtful, principled (decidely not radical) man.

Ok, with dueling narratives, who wins?

It depends on who's doing the listening. There are some people who will never swallow Palin's story. There are others who will never swallow Obama's. In both camps there are people who are true believers, who trust in Palin's stasis or yearn for Obama's change. But both of them are slugging it out for the center who wants to like the person they elect, who isn't ideologically driven, who wants to trust the executive to do the right thing, who wants to feel that the things they value are important to the people who run this country.

And at this point, it's a crap shoot whether this country is going to keep looking back over its shoulder at Palin America or forward to Obama's.

[Ok, no arguments that Obama's not a true progressive. His rhetoric of change is directed to the future, just as Palin's arm of the GOP is looking at a past that never was for any of us.]