they're tearing down Cabrini-Green

They've been bringing them down for a while, from what I can tell. But I just started hearing about it a couple of days ago, probably because there are only two families left in building that used to hold 15,000 people. There's a lot of jubilation about these buildings coming down. Maybe jubilation is too strong a word.

But people are happy it's going. Why they're happy is something else.

It was built over deacdes starting in the 1940s, so by the time it became notorious in the national mind (the 70s and 80s) it was aging housing stock. It was also neglected, with trash (according to the wikipedia article) piling up to the 15th floor at one point.

It was dangerous. It was dirty. And it's probably a good idea that it's going away.

But some of the people who are happy about the end of Cabrini-Green seem to think that it had to fail, that providing low income housing means that you can't give "those people" anything. They say that public housing itself is a failed policy, rather than Cabrini-Green being a poorly thought out solution to a real problem. I'm not exaggerating, take a look at the comments section on NPR.

Public housing that is simply warehousing people is bound to fail. If it ignores, as Cabrini-Green did, all the work people like Jane Jacobs have done on what makes cities work and what doesn't, it's going to fail. Public housing that doesn't provide good basic services to its residents, that maintains the properties, that doesn't think of homes and communities, rather than housing has to fail.

When I was in graduate school, my office was right across from a dining hall on Tower Road. On a sunny day, by three o'clock in the afternoon, trash cans would be overflowing with to-go containers. Garbage was piled around the cans (which weren't tiny, believe me) and drifted over the grass for yards around the dining hall. By four o'clock it was all picked up and the area was clean. The university had a very busy (union and I hope well-paid) maintenance staff. The campus was cleaner than Cabrini-Green, not because these students were neater people, but because someone cleaned up after them. Someone picked up the trash.

But cities don't often clean up the trash for public housing or poor neighborhoods. Given that poor neighborhoods often have higher population densities, you'd think that there would be more frequent trash pickup than in well to do 'hoods. But in San Francisco, it's once a week, whether it's the Mission or Pacific Heights. Same with street sweeping. This even-handed approach leaves poor neighborhoods getting a lower level of service per capita than wealthier ones.

I guess what's bothering me here is that the failure of Cabrini-Green is being framed as a failure of its residents, rather than a failure of planning, a failure of our society to think about or deal with poverty in any useful way.

Crime and why gangs were able to establish such a presence there is a whole other issue and a whole other post, one that I'm not that likely to write.

Many of the families who have left Cabrini-Green have been moved into mixed income neighborhoods. That's probably what the solution should have been back in 1942.


One irony I hadn't expected when I was reading about these projects was that the initial mandate was that the building be 75% white and 25% black. It was an integration policy, innovative at the time.

bad feeling

I bought a Kindle last night, close to midnight.

I'd been thinking about it for a while. Initially, I swore I'd never get one for the petty reason that someone I didn't like was singing its praises. And it is true that I like the physicality of books. Then this summer a good friend who travels a lot (she's a musician) told me how much she loved her Kindle and I decided that I'd get one before Laine and I go back east for a week of seeing people, driving around upstate NYC, and hitting Rhinebeck. Normally for a trip this long, I'd be packing about four books, two of which would get read on the plane there and back. I'd probably end up supplementing this initial stash with some other books bought along the way. But with a Kindle I can pack all the books I think I want to read onto something that weighs about half a pound and takes up less room than your average trade paperback.

Even though I got the pricier 3G version, if I figure that the difference between buying a hardcover of a new book and the price of the book for Kindle is about 12 bucks and between a trade paperback and the Kindle version is about 9 bucks, I'll have saved the price of the device in eighteen books or so. If you factor in the books that I can get for free from places like the Gutenberg Project, it's even faster.

I don't feel elated. I feel guilty.

I'm not delusional. I know that it's not just me that's killing brick and mortar bookstores. I was still buying books when Stacey's and Black Oak went out of business. I was the faithful customer of Athena's Books in Marina, when it closed.The one or two sf books I buy a month is not going to keep The Other Change of Hobbit in business. But it feels like I'm betraying some idea about books and book buying.

The Kindle gives instant satisfaction. I can read things on it that I don't even think I can buy out here in the world (like some odds and ends of Louisa May Alcott's lesser known fiction, don't ask). But I'm never going to have the experience with it of wandering into a store and discovering a new author, the way I found Gene Wolfe years and years ago in Portland. This device isn't about the browse or discovery or surprise. You have to know what you want on it before you can get it.

Maybe that's what I'm mourning in advance. Maybe this is just nostalgia and that useless looking back. Still I'm going to be a different sort of reader from now on, not necessarily a better.

too many deadlines, too much craziness in the world

So a couple of weeks ago, I was running (and I do mean running) my org's annual meeting. There was a tiny break and now I'm back running to get caught up and get ready for the org to move to new, smaller, cheaper digs on Union Square.

The craziness is the news. Everytime I read the headlines or see/hear the news, I feel like ripping my ears off and my eyes out. People killing each other or just being as insane as they want to be. The whole "Mosque at Groundzero" circus, the "Anchor Babies" the "Terror Babies", the head-long dive to the bottom in our political culture.

Sometimes there's only one thing you can do and Nezua shows you how.

(hat tip to Jessamyn who posted this on FB.)

at the conference

Among other things, I coordinate our organization's yearly conference. Or at least I have for the last two years. It's sort of devolved to me as the organization has bled staff over the last couple of years. When I went to my first Summer Meeting I'd been working for the Federation for a couple of weeks. The admin guy had just quit and there were four of us. I did the registration and stumbled my way through the week

The next year there were seven staff and everyone was doing something for the Meeting. There was a lot of overlap and some confusion, but it all worked.

Last year we were down to four staff and only three went to the meeting. All the on-site responsibilities were mine. Which has pretty much been the same this year, only we're down to three staff and an ED who's leaving at the end of the month.

This is a meeting for Federation members, the state-based LGBT advocacy organizations that do a lot of the local heavy lifting for changing laws and ordinances for localities and states. I understand a lot more about this work than I did three years ago.

on the road

Over Monday and Tuesday I was in three, no four, different airports. Oakland, Atlanta, Cincinnati, and Baltimore. Atlanta has a nice MLK exhibit in one terminal I rushed through. Oakland has nothing to eat after ten o'clock at night. Cincinnati has a Peet's Coffee and seems to remember a past life as a hanger. I was a zombie by the time I got to Baltimore. All I registered was the heat and humidity and the long walk to the baggage claim.

I have loved flying, hated flying, feared flying, but this trip, it's just work.

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.