summers

Laine and I spent three and a bit days in this converted stable or garage in Rhode Island. Susan Morgan and Tom Lawson had rented it for two weeks and since we were in the area, they invited us to stop by. Susan's been talking about Rhode Island for a few years now, saying it's like Nantucket was in the 70s. That's when Susan and I met, btw.

Is Rhode Island like Nantucket was back in the day? Well, it's a lot easier to get to for one thing.  There's no ferry schedule to figure out for one thing and you're not jamming on a boat with a bunch of other people.

We did get lost.

It was dark and the people living around Little Compton seem to have the attitude that if you don't know where you're going, you don't need to know where you're going. There aren't signs for every street. Some are nice and easy to read reflective white on green. But others are hand-lettered black on white, small signs way up on the side of a tree. They are invisible at night.  The street sign we were looking for was even better disguised, blue-grey, at knee height. We did get directed in by Tom after I figured out that I'd been calling the wrong phone number for hours.

Is it like Nantucket? My memories of Nantucket are so intertwined with my memories of being young and figuring out who I was (or who I was going to be) that it's really impossible to say. It is the Northeast and it was summer. So Rhode Island is like Nantucket forty years ago and it's like Cape Cod fifty-odd years ago and it's an archetype of summer for me.

Here in California, in August, there are a bunch of Naked Lady lilies blooming behind the house. I'd never seen them until I moved to Monterey to teach at CSUMB, but now they're a familiar sign that summer's coming to the close. Rattlesnake grass is another reminder than the days are getting shorter. The color of the sky seems cooler, further away.

But we went to the Cape in August every summer when I was a kid and then it seemed that summer would last forever. Summers when I was in my early twenties also lasted longer than any two or three months. And there was that summer on Nantucket.

When it comes to thinking about it today, I find myself circling around the memories, not really able to get all that close to the young woman I was. It's like glimpses through a scrim, through sliding frames. Maybe it's because it's fall now and summer has slipped away.

the prescience of sf writers

Last week, the big buzz (after Limbaugh) was the Invisible Children video to get indicted Uganda war criminal Joseph Kony prosecuted. The 30 min video has gone viral with more than 70 million views tonight (March 11).  There are lots of criticisms of the video as an effective tool, but one thing's undeniable. This video raised a lot, a lot of money.

The sf point? Nicola Griffith in Slow River, 1995 (jeez, 1995) has her protagonist put together a video to raise money for a made up cause. In this book's future, young, wealthy people compete for who can send the most money the quickest to any online charity solicitation.  They don't necessarily care about, or even know, what the charity's about; it's an intragroup competition.

I do think the people contributing to Invisible Children's Kony2012 care about the horrors in Uganda and are generally interested in doing something to help. But as I read about the video (and watched about half of it), I was reminded that there's an abstract quality to this giving. We're tossing money from over here, with the faith that it's going to do some good over there.

This seems to be my week for worrying about the complex and hard to solve problems of this world.

nothing beneath you but air

One disadvantage to having a computer/internet/communications sort of job (which is pretty much like a lot of people) is that if there's a storm on the tubes, there's pretty much no way to avoid it. So with everyone else, I've been deluged by this Rush Limbaugh mess. I think it's interesting that as much bile and hate that Rush has spilled over the years, it was this particular bolus of hatefulness that's captured our fleeting attention and imagination. It's probably timing, what with the Komen debacle earlier this year, the Santorum ascendance (and the dubious pleasure of hearing his beyond retro attitudes about women and sexuality), and the tone-deaf (but highly dog-whistlely)  "No Girls Allowed" panel in the House.  I guess the only sort of surprise I've had is how stupid or disingenuous mainstream media has been about it. (I was not surprised that Bill Maher thought liberals should back off, since Rush faux-pologized.)

But this whole sad, predictable mess has been only a small distraction from something that's been bothering me for a few days. Last weekend I finished reading Katherine Boo's Beyond the Beautiful Forevers. It's about a group of slum dwellers living on some undeveloped land near the international airport in Mumbai. Reading it, you see what a fairy tale Slumdog Millionaire was.

Not that I've got anything against fairy tales, now.

But the reality of the lives that Boo writes about is that very few escape and that escape may mean capitulation to the corruption that permeates the institutions that the slum dwellers interact with. There's no good way out and usually there's no way out at all. It's hard to put my finger on what is staying uneasily with me ever since I finished the book. Partly it's knowing/suspecting that the only people who could do anything about these people's lives won't. (The impact of charity - precisely nothing - is made extremely clear).

Still the thing that nags, the thing that is about life here where I can do things, is how vulnerable these lives are. People die of jaundice. People die because cuts get infected from the sewage lakes they walk in. People die from desperation and eating rat poison. People die because they get hit by a car and people walk past them all day long until they finally die. People die because they get beaten to death, either by security cops or drug dealers. (Nobody knows and nobody but their friends care. The cops will call it something else on the death certificate and that will be that.) Now people die here in the USA all the time too. People die from preventable diseases and kill themselves out of of despair. Homeless people die unattended on the street and people get beat up by the cops. But people don't die here because they've gone to a hospital and the doctor will only give the medicine if they pay her (like right now) for it. They don't die because the medicine's no good at the hospital or because if they don't get taken care of by someone, usually a relative, there's absolutely no one else.

We are so safe.

It's not that horrible things don't happen, that there's no abuse of power, no poor people, no violent cops, but in the main? USians, even the poorest, expect some variety of justice, rely of some sort of medical help, even if that means the emergency room, and most don't worry that they'll starve to death, despite high levels of food insecurity among the poor. People expect to go to school. If they end up in court, they don't have to listen to a judge translate their complex testimony into monosyllables for the court stenographer. They can get a lawyer for free. There are institutions that often work, but maybe more important, we expect them to work. And we get pretty upset and make noise when they don't.

Maybe the thing that bothers me most about libertarians (or at least the ones I see roaming in packs on the internet) is that they want to take this away. They have fooled themselves into thinking that if we got rid of government, which would mean getting rid of these flawed, vital institutions, we'd be in the New Jerusalem.  We wouldn't. We'd be in slums made out of decaying wood, glass, stone, and steel, rather than ones out of cardboard and crumbling hand-made bricks.  There would be a few people living behind compound walls protected by those security guards, guards who will kick the poor to death and leave their bodies in the manicured lawns outside the walls for someone else to clean up. This is what makes me crazy about the politicians that pander to these poisonous fantasies. It's not just the lie, it's the vision of a feudal world with cell phones, where the rich are so very rich and everyone else struggles just to keep from falling.

how I got over

I left the church when I was 16.

It was not a rational decision.

I guess I should explain.

I was born into a family of believers. My dad's side of it was pretty lackadaisical, Christmas and Easter Christians. But my mom's side was very devout. I had two great-uncles who were preachers under the National Baptist Convention. One had a tiny congregation in a storefront in West Philly (He and my great-aunt ran a grocery store. The church didn't bring in much.) The other was a scholarly sort who taught religion at some university. I went to Sunday School every Sunday of my young life,  meeting in the basement and then the annex of Union Baptist Church in Montclair, NJ. I memorized books of the bible. I listened to stories. I sort of cruised along as a young believer. I hated getting up early on Sunday, hated getting dressed up in those dresses and crinoline slips designed to slice open the backs of my thighs as I twitched in the pew. But church was church and Christ was Christ and that was that.

Then my mother died.

My dad had a fight with the minister and we left Union Baptist right after the funeral. He switched us, my sister and me, over to St. Luke's, an Episcopalian church. He didn't attend, but he threw a coat over his pajamas and drove us over every Sunday.

If you've never attended many churches, you might think they're all the same. They're not and I don't think my dad could have found a bigger contrast than Union Baptist and St. Luke's. Of the two, I think Union Baptist probably had a larger congregation, but the church was small, with light colored walls and stained glass windows not that much larger than regular windows in a house. St. Luke was huge, several linked grey stone buildings, with enormous stained glass windows and high Gothic arches. It was always cold in there, at least in my memory.

St. Luke's was cooler in other ways as well. Union Baptist, though not as wildly fervent as Pentecostal churches, was an emotional place. Sermons built to cathartic moments. There was a great choir that my aunt sang in for years. I remember it as full of color and sound. St. Luke's was a high Episcopal church, very stately, lots of measured ritual, with sermons that were appeals to our minds as well as our hearts. The colors there were ecclesiastical garments against cold stone, rather than the brilliant hats an dresses of Union Baptist's congregation. There sermons there were intended to persuade, rather than move. I listened and after four years I heard something I didn't like.

It was a sermon on Mary and Martha. The minister was telling about how it's this holiday and Martha is getting the house ready and Mary is sitting outside listening to this itinerant preacher and not helping out. Martha is annoyed, goes out to get Mary (guests are coming, stuff needs to get done!) and is reproached by the itinerant preacher (Jesus). The minister goes on to talk about how we have to recognize when grace is at the door, blah, blah, blah. But I'm stuck on this whole incident.

I'm an older sister. I know what it's like to feel responsible for things. I know what it's like to feel like you're the only one paying attention. Why couldn't Jesus see that? Why couldn't he see that she was only doing what she thought was right? Where's the compassion for her?

I thought, "That's not fair." And I decided not to go back to church. I told my more religious grandmother I didn't believe any longer. She told me to read the bible. I did. I still didn't believe.  I still don't.

I became a rational atheist some time long after that. That means that I've thought about why there's no good evidence for a deity or deities. This beautiful universe arises from natural forces, not supernatural ones. It wasn't made for one species on one small planet out in the cosmic boonies. That's as it should be.

But the start of my atheism was an impulse to fairness, a good beginning all around.

* The title? It's a gospel song, a really good one.

reading

Sometimes I read as though I'm drowning.

The act seems desperate, as though stopping would mean something bad would happen. I've been trying to think about why this happens, what trips me into reading like this and I haven't figured out much besides the fact that I can only do it with pretty simple narratives, straight-forward styles. I did it with The Hunger Games trilogy over the holidays. I gulped it down, then because I'd read it so fast the first time through I missed some things, read it again.

Nearly as fast, to be honest.

The book doesn't have to be bad (not to say that trilogy is bad, it's just not much of a much). I do this drowning thing with books I like too. But they have to be plot-driven, just stories. It's like a habitual behavior and not the deep pleasure that reading can be.

I'm thinking about this because I just finished two books that reminded me what reading's like for me when it's good - China Mieville's Embassytown and Emma Donaghue's Room. Mieville's is science fiction and Donaghue's mundane, though not ordinary.

Both drew me into their respective worlds. Mievliie does it by this wild imaginative leap (he does this a lot), creating an alien species so shaped by language that a specific spoken performance affects them like heroin. They become addicted and their society goes to shit. (Of course it's a lot more complicated than that and how the situation turns out (I don't think you can call it a solution actually) shocks and intrigues.

Donoghue writes about a woman who's been kidnapped to be a sexual slave and does it through the eyes of her five year-old son who shares the living space (Room) with her. As Donoghue says on her website, part of the strategy of having the protagonist being the boy keeps the focus off the salacious details of the situation, though it doesn't make it any less horrible. If anyone's planning to read this, all I'll say is that they do get out about half way through the book, which tells you something about her intent here, very different from Fowles' The Collector, which she's clearly read.

So to my new year resolutions, which I'm completely superstitious about writing down, I'm adding this - less drowning, more pleasure.

And more walking. The picture was taken on a walk with Laine on Boxing Day.

music of the diaspora - an intermittent series

I had intended to write something about the things we fear. But a friend posted Earth, Wind, and Fire's "September" YouTube on FB today and I went out and bought The Eternal Dance collection today. I ripped it to my computer and have been listening to it.

I was a fan of EW&F, had a few of their albums (vinyl) and even went to see them when I lived in Seattle. It was in the mid 80s, so getting towards the end of their lifespan. It was a great show, with glittering Egyptian-pan-African extravaganza staging. They were a funk band, a great one.They always were about dancing and had incredible rhythm sections.It's next to impossible to sit still listening to them.

Until I sat down tonight to listen to them, I hadn't realized that EW&F is a lot like Parliament, pushing the transcendent, transformative power of music. It's less sexual than George Clinton's various bands, though plenty sexy. It's less sweaty, less gritty, less psychedelic. But EW&F's swinging hard and like Clinton, there's this sense of a better world that we can dance ourselves into, a heaven of love and funk.

There are two things that really make EW&F for me, there's the elaborate orchestrations allied with on-the-one funk bass and rhythm and there's Phillip Bailey's voice.

I've been thinking about falsettos lately, listening to TV on the Radio and some Ashford and Simpson after Nick Ashford died recently. Bailey's voice is sweet, melodic and like counter-tenors (which is what he is, a man with a great, well-developed head voice) it's high, not feminine. Actually, most African American counter-tenors aren't particularly feminine, though Jimmy Scott's voice is working the midline in interesting ways. Bailey's voice has a lot of silken power. It seduces.

So I know where this weekend's going. Kicked back and rediscovering some great music.


[What do I mean by music of the diaspora? It's the music made by or influenced by Africans taken from the continent and spread over the western hemisphere by the Mid-Atlantic Slave Trade. Much of American popular music is diasporan. I'd argue for a lot of pop, a substantial slice of rock, all R&B, nearly all jazz, and the blues, natch.]

rock gods

Laine and I went to Art and Soul in downtown Oakland yesterday. It;s your usual street fair, music, food and other vendors, great people watching. We go if we think about it in time. It's easy to get to with BART and this year they added free parking, maybe as an incentive because the weather has been so crappy this summer.

We were wandering around and ended up at the Women Gig stage, because it's easy to find a seat there; it's in the sun; and there was some singer-songwritery sounding act that Laine wanted to hear. Sort of boring girls with guitars. But the next act, Sistahs in the Pit was something else altogether.

Imagine it's sometime in the late 60s, early 70s. Hendrix isn't dead yet, or Led Zepplin repetitious. Sistahs is a old-school power trio and they played like, well, like rock gods.

They were loud. They were good. And they'd just finished giving a class at Bay Area Rock Camp, teaching girls to rock out too.

It's not a perfect world, but this makes me feel good.

anger and the gasoline

I'm sitting at SFO, getting ready to fly to Chicago, sit for three hours, then fly to Madison for the Federation (Institute's) Summer Meeting. I've been so busy concentrating on getting the logistics for the meeting lined up and dealing with last minute, over the transom requests from attendees and presenters, that the riots in Tottenham had sort of passed me by. I mean I'd heard something was going on, but had no idea of the extent of the rioting. The pictures over at the Boston Globe are amazing.

I first wrote shocking, but that suggests that a certain horror at the destruction. I've never seen a riot do such damage to property. But I guess I'm not shocked at the fact that it happened. A man is shot in a poor neighborhood and it's a reason and a pretext at once. Reason because of the anger and anti-police feeling nearly endemic to poor neighborhoods, driven by how police operate in these places. (I'm guessing that the situation in Britain is pretty much like it is here in the US and the way it was outside Paris a couple of years ago.) And pretext, because of the looting and destruction of small businesses.

There was the same dynamic in Oakland after the Oscar Grant verdict, though the Oakland police tightly controlled and monitored the situation. After it was over, they reported that most of the people, mainly young, that were arrested were not from Oakland and had come in specifically for the protest/riot.

Where am I going with this? I'm not sure. There is a lot of anger, justified and not. There's a lot of hopeless too. I wonder whether someone who's in their twenties now feel like it's the morning of the world. Right now, I doubt it.

Rioting has spread to three other cities as of this morning (August 9th). The commentator on MSNBC is making a link to the 1980's race riots in London, but from the pictures, this is a pretty multi-racial event.

Sitting in Madison, WI now (the day after the Dems almost took back the legislature), I've had a chance to do some more web-research on the London riots. There is one story and this time I mean shocking. The BBC had Darcus Howe on for his take on the riots and the interviewer kept trying to play gotcha with him, disregarding and disrespecting his opinion and experience. (BBC later apologized.) There's a good story in the Guardian on the make up of the crowd. Finally there's a good piece in the English version of Al-Jazeera on the essentially political nature of these riots.

Some other articles point out the failing economy in Britain, the lack of jobs for youth, and the fact that the major political parties there are closer together than they've ever been. There's not any way for the poor, the variously disenfranchised to have a political voice. And I have little doubt that's not a factor in the burning cities.

lifetime

My iPod Touch is on its way out. I bought it two years ago for a trip to NYC. I can't figure out whether I want to get a new Touch or go crazy and just buy a iPad and have done with it. There's really nothing I need an iPad for. the Touch is the right size for notes, keeping my address book in some sort of order, keeping nearly all my logins in one accessible place, holding all the audiobooks I might want to listen to, and carrying too many time-wasting games. So I don't need an iPad, but man is it tempting.

I bought the Touch to go to New York because my great aunt was in the hospital again. My sister had called me and said I should come out. My great-aunt had been in and out of the hospital for the past couple of years. She'd been mainly living alone, with a woman who slept there at nights, made food, and ran errands. There had also been a woman who came in to do the cleaning on the weekends.

But when I came back two years ago, it was to watch my great-aunt die.

She did, taking five weeks for to say goodbye to a world that I think she loved to the very end. The doctor said it would take 10 days to two weeks once she came off dialysis, but she was never one to do the expected. She'd lived nearly ninety-five rich years, a beautiful woman for all of them. She lived through incredible changes in NY state and city, had two husbands and a boyfriend up to the time she was in her mid-80s. She would have left many friends behind her, but had outlived most of them. One of her oldest friends, a woman who had been a Cotton Club dancer came to see her close to the end. She held my great-aunt's hand and sang "Margie" into her nearly-unresponsive ear.

My sister and I sat on either side of the bed as she died, a tiny, dark woman in the white sheets.

where we're coming from

I haven't seen most of these women in 25 years or more. We were all members of an all-women natural food distribution collective called C.C. Grains. Grains started around 1976 in a warehouse in Ballard, Washington. By the time I moved to Seattle in 1979, it had moved to a space in the industrial area of the city, south of downtown, on E. Marginal Way.

It was a worker's collective. That didn't mean a management team, with everyone else doing the other work in the business. We made business decisions in meetings every Thursday afternoon, closing down the business for the entire afternoon. We made decisions by consensus, which meant those meetings could go for hours. They often did.

We all made the same base salary, $5.00 an hour, which was ok back in the late 70s and early 80s. But women with children got an additional sum, based on the number of children. We all agreed to this (not always happily, there were always grumbles from women who didn't have kids). But we kept it that way because we all knew that raising kids costs money and that kids are important, even if they're not our own. Grains must have supported close to twenty kids at some point. We had full health coverage, including one mental health day off a month.

When I've talked about this in the years since, it's a simplified narrative. I talk about how I was a warehouser , then a sales person, then inside sales manager and then tell how I quit because I was tired of hassling with a customer about one more spoiled cup of yogurt. Then the story moves quickly on to how I went to get a degree in biology, then off to graduate school.

This is all true and not true.

What I leave out is how much I loved this job. How I would bicycle down to the warehouse on the weekend to do the inventory, because I wanted to (and because I'm a control freak who didn't think others would do as accurate a job). I loved working with women who were (for the most part) as committed to the work as I was. We worked harder than seems possible. Those business meetings were sometimes horrible because everyone cared so passionately about what we were doing. We didn't always like each other (and there was this dykes versus straight women dynamic that could be poisonous) but we trusted each other. I leave out how this job fixed for me an ideal of what work could be. How I wouldn't be who I am today without it.

Of the 20 to 25 women who had either been collective members or worked for Grains, 18 of us made it last weekend. When we got to Che's house we spent some time just hanging out and chatting, getting caught up. But then we sat in a circle (natch) and told what we've been doing since Grains. We talked (collectively) for over six hours. It was intense, emotional, and nearly impossible to describe. We've all done ok, really more than ok. There were a surprising number of care-givers, counselors and social workers. Some of us have had hard times in the intervening years. Some of us are fragile, some tough. Only one is still working in food.

But the surprising thing is how much we were still connected. I'm not going to ignore the power of nostalgia, of looking back to a time when you were young. It happens all the time with veterans, at college reunions, with any group of people held together at some time, But I can't help thinking this was something very different. Maia reminded us that to get into the collective, you had to answer the question, "Why do you want to work here?" with one of three things: you wanted to work with women; you wanted to work in natural foods; or you wanted to work in a collective. Just wanting a job wasn't enough. So something connected us at the outset and connects us, still strongly, now.

And we made money. We were a successful business until we merged with the local produce collective and hired an outside manager and left behind what we'd been. Maybe we would have succumbed to larger, better capitalized businesses at some point, but maybe not. But for a few years, we did good business and did a good job in the world and that was, and is, rare.

(In the photo from left to right, top row: Kerry Shaunessy (Cinnamon back in the day), Jude Harlan, Lara Morrison, K.J. Woody, Margaret Bartley, me; middle row: Che Arsenault, Uli Johinson, Kathleen Wilson, Dimawi Wilds, Bear Dyson; bottom row: Shemayim Eloihim, Sylvia Spady-Viney, Devorah Oppenheimer, Maridee Bonadea, Maia, Cynthia Anderson.

Gil Scott Heron died yesterday

And I think my heart has just broken a little.

the thinnest pretext

Shortly after everyone heard that Osama Bin Laden had been killed by the US and all the stations were showing two crowds of celebrating young people at the White House and in NYC at ground zero, this meme started to make its way around the internet. Purporting to be a quote from MLK, it's a mashup of a line from a woman writing on Facebook and a snippet from a 1957 sermon by King. When it started getting sent around, the quotes got dropped out so that it read like this:

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.

And it went viral.

And it's annoying me along with the number of people who've jumped to their keyboards to use the death of Bin Laden to whinge about the crassness of American culture, to point out that there's still a couple of wars on, to pile on Obama, to chastise the people shouting U-S-A, U-S-A on Sunday night.

A couple of things are bugging me. First, as far as I've been able to tell, there wasn't mass rejoicing in the streets. Although it may be crude to rejoice at someone's death, as I look at the people in the pictures, I see young people whose lives have largely been led in the shadow of 9/11 and the great changes that day brought to our country (not for the better). Osama Bin Laden has been this looming bad guy for nearly a decade and they're like the Munchkins in the Wizard of Oz (movie version) singing, "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead." Because that's what he's been, our national bad dream and bogey man.

Second, I'll be honest. I'm glad he's dead. Regardless of the forces made this son of privilege the determined enemy of the West, I think the world is a better place without him. That's not rejoicing, but I'd be lying to say that I'm sorry.

Thirdly, making this event the hook to every other agenda and issue in the US. This country has huge problems and having one man dead doesn't change that one bit. But his death is about his death and maybe about the "war on terror" and the two wars that brought about. It's not about the economy. It's not about the budget. It's not even about the friggin' election.

Fourthly and finally, it's that faux quote. I can't fault the woman who first wrote the post. She said what she was feeling and supported it using a quote of a man she admired. The people who've been sending it around ever since are not writing their own feelings. They're cutting and pasting this appeal to authority. The implication, as I read it, is since King said it, it has more weight than a random individual on FB. And that just bothers me. A friend of mine wrote that she's disturbed at the celebration of the death of someone who was once an innocent baby. Now, I'm not convinced by that, but at least it's her thought, not someone else's. It's not trying to acquire value, realness, or gravitas by invoking someone that people respect.

Jeez.

There's another point I can feel building up about death and how not every death affects all of us. Most don't, John Donne, notwithstanding, but for me to write that here and now is well, a thinner pretext yet.

the best song I ever heard

You know, I think I wrote about this before, but I'm way too lazy to go through my posts to see. I was in my weaving class last night and someone had an oldies station playing on the radio. Everyone was having fun because one thing you can depend on with oldies stations is that everyone knows the songs and everyone sings along.

You can especially count on this when you've got a classroom full of Boomers. Most of the women in the class are my age give or take a couple of years. Sarah, who is probably more opinionated than I am, started holding forth about how the best pop music ever came from the 60s. I started with my usual contrarian response about there being good music in every period. I believe that, but as I was riding on BART this morning, I was wondering what exactly it is about Boomer period rock/pop that has given it such a stranglehold on the popular imagination. In part it's ubiquity. These songs have been getting pretty constant play since they first hit the airwaves and most of them were written and performed during a time when people listened to radios and radios were playing every where. I may have a distorted view of this, growing up outside NYC, in a radio-dense area. But there were a ton of stations and lots of them were playing rock, pop, and soul music. Also radios were public music. I know 60s music, not because I bought all the 45s, but because the music played in stores, in the beauty parlor, out people's windows, and in cars.

I remember an ad in Rolling Stone back in the 80s with a young woman wearing headphones and listening to her Walkman contrasted to a guy heaving a boom box over his shoulder. Music became a lot more private with personal players. There is less of a public space for sharing music, the internet notwithstanding. But that's not enough to explain why these songs stick around so much.

In part, it's because they're good, singable songs. Even if you've got just an ok voice, you can sing along with just about any Beatles song, any Temptations song. These are easy melodies, with simple and straight-forward lyrics and choruses. But on a deeper level, I think these songs hold a certain position because that period codified the pop song (rock and soul versions). Just about every pop song ever since follows the same pattern. The only really breakouts there have been in popular music since say the 70s are electronic music (with all its flavors) and hip-hop/rap. It's like the way that the American Songbook became codified through the middle third of the 20th century. The pop songs of the 60s and 70s set the mold, established the form.

Of course one big reason why the women in my class love those songs is because they were the soundtracks of our adolescence and youth. They're going to be special for those reasons, even if they were crap.

And there is great music now, great new stuff all the time. I've been listening to Florence + The Machine for weeks now and think "Howl" is the best song I've ever heard (for now).

palm fronds

Today was Palm Sunday. The only reason I know this is that I saw a palm frond folded into the shape of a cross. It was lying on a bench near the local farmers' market. There are several churches in the area.

When I was a kid, I went to church or Sunday School nearly every week. I liked Palm Sunday for the palm fronds that were given out. We'd take them home and give them to our grandmothers (one for each) and the fronds would be put in a tall vase and there they'd stand, yellowing, until next year.

Seeing the one today, I thought that I prefer the unfolded one. The plain frond is a reminder of Jesus' final entry to Jerusalem and how he was welcomed. All of which puts into motion this week's drama. The origami version seems to be jumping ahead in the story, prefiguring the tragedy of Friday, putting the emphasis on that climatic afternoon, rather than letting the story tell itself, going from triumph to tragedy to apotheosis.

I may an atheist, but I know it's wrong to jump ahead to read the end of the mystery.

stories

I've had this idea for a blog post wandering in my head for months. It got started by two different events or maybe observations is more accurate. The first was after the Renegade Crafts Fair last summer. Laine had gone to get the car - I've got these crappy, inconsistent knees - and I was sitting doing some people watching there by Fort Mason. Aside from the hipsters and other folks who had been at the craft fair, after a while there was a trickle, then flood of people who were going back to their cars after this country western concert that had been going on that afternoon. (The music had been faintly audible all day.)

The people walking past weren't all that different from the people leaving the crafts fair, maybe a little older, less pierced, but the big difference was the clothing. Here's a shot of people at the fair over there to the right.

Lots of the plaid and ok, the fedora annoys the crap out of me, but you get the idea. The people walking away from the concert were rocking a different aesthetic altogether. As you can see over here on the left hand side of the screen.

Those are leather chaps and it wasn't that cool a day.

Both groups had a lot of denim, but not at all the same denim. Hats, but it's fedoras versus cowboy hats. Here are people who are dressing for their respective communities, though the crafts fair folk are probably (just probably) more likely to look the same way in their everyday lives. But the clothes signal a certain membership to different groups saying, "I am this; I am not that."

The other thing that has been floating around in my mind about this came from the Natalie Merchant concert Laine and I went to last year. I am not a big Merchant fan, but a couple of my friends (one from high school and the other from Ithaca) were playing in her band last summer. We got free comp tickets to the show. I hope she pays them a butt-load of money because she must be a complete pill to work for. She was completely a pill to watch perform. Even though the songs were pretty good/interesting, there was so much "Me, me, me, me, me, glorious Me!" about her performance that I've rarely wanted something to be over so badly. But the thing that fits into my thinking here is that for a song about China (I really don't or can't remember the details) she pulled out this paper lantern (looked antique and probably quite expensive) and started looping and bending around the stage in what she clearly thought was an appropriately "Chinese" way.

Man, it was embarrassing.

But what it has in common is that she was signalling something here, something about exoticism, about the "East", about femininity (seriously, she would have done something completely different had she wanted to butch it up), about otherness. She' took on an identity here, even if she tossed it away for the next tune.

All these signals, all these costumes and accessories are ways of telling stories about identity, about marking identity for people to see and recognize. And it makes me think.

Identity is a story we tell ourselves, that other people read, and that they tell about us. The problem, maybe, is that we have t0 believe some sort of story in order to be in the world. There's no natural, unmediated self.

I wrote problem just there. Do I really believe identity is a problem or that narratives are problems?

No. But I am thinking that we need some skepticism, especially when we start treating them as natural.

3 am all over the world

My internet has shrunk to a tiny community of complete fanatics, called head-fi. This is what I read when I'm in between things or just feel like surfing. It's all about audio equipment. There are people (guys mainly as far as I can tell) who are looking for a replacement for their Skullcandy headphones in that jamming camo pattern (I'm serious). There are people with multi-thousand dollar home set ups who swear by cables forged by blind virgin Vikings out of pure silver and unicorn hair.

I'm not serious about the blindness, virginity, Vikings, or unicorn hair, but there are some very interesting (and completely mystical) threads about cables that are eye-opening about human credulity and the predators waiting to take the credit card numbers of true believers. There's no swearing allowed (you'll get banned) and no politics (ditto). I've learned a lot about digital audio, bought two new in ear monitors (iem) and a portable amp. I'm planning to get custom iems sometime this spring. It's relaxing to just read opinions about audio gear (no matter how heated).

So why am I in this backwater of the internet? Because the rest of it increasingly reminds me of the days (nights really) when I'd be reading soc.culture.african.american back in the 1990s. A pleasant conversation would be going on and then some lunatic would jump in writing the most inflammatory, racist flamebait. The whole convo would be completely derailed for the troll (predating the term), which was, after all, his/her point.

This type of interaction wasn't limited to just that group though. I remember this long, crazy fight I got into on Sappho with this woman who insisted (against all evidence) that western (meaning European) classical music was the oldest and best music ever!!111!!!!!. These things would happen late at night or early in the morning and there was usually an uptick in the crazy whenever aol sent out a new CD or when a new technology made it easier for people to get online.

Now internet access is ubiquitous and cheap(ish). As a result, the comment threads of any site, unless tightly regulated, is dominated by the ramblings, rants, paranoias, and obsessions of thousands. And they're increasingly mean-spirited.

Why would someone on Ravelry (a, scratch that, the knitting site) write, "Yuck!" after a woman wrote to say how happy she was to get a holiday card from the White House with the First Dog's pawprint on it?

Why would someone post this in response to NPR's story on the (always interesting) Oxford American Music collection?

But no ...
Enlarge your horizons. Listen to music from Bulgaria, Macedonia, Norway, Sweden, especially Falu Spelmanslag; now that's sound! Have you ever heard Ethel Raim and Martin Koenig's Nonesuch record from Macedonia? Try music from Slovenia. Try Tabla rhythms by Alla Rakha. Learn something about Middle Eastern music, but please spare me the BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM ...

The story was about Alabaman performers, jackass. I happen to like Macedonian music too, thanks to Laine, but I don't go on about it when the subject's Beethoven's late quartets.

It's this arbitrary insistence on foregrounding opinion, presenting preference as law, disregarding context and audience that has sent me into the quiet contemplation of sound quality and improving my music source files.

Tell me when it's morning.

happy 2011!

People all over the internet seem to be happy that 2010 is gone. I can't remember it being especially awful, except for Haiti's earthquake, which was a public rather than a personal disaster. There were the midterm elections, but I guess I expected the Republicans to take more seats as this country has the nuttiest ideas around balance. Also Obama's election and continued residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has driven a considerable portion of our most vocal citizenry right out of their minds

Maybe I've been luckier than most.

I'm not making any resolutions about posting more, though writing more is definitely on the agenda for 2011.

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.)