in Houston, at Creating Change

That is not the picture of a conference. That is a picture of Houston from the 19th floor of the Hilton Americas.

It's also flipped because I took it on the camera on the computer and it thinks I need a mirror image (probably because most people use this to take pictures of themselves and these need to be flipped to be recognizable.

The reason it's a picture of the Houston skyline on a cloudy day, rather than a picture of the people attending Creating Change, is characteristic of the conference itself. At the beginning of the conference, before the keynote address Sue Hyde, the conference organizer, asked people not to take pictures of attendees without their permission. This deliberate protection of the attendees has two sources. The cynic in me ascribes it to the hyper-touchy-feely, New Age, hippie culture of The Task Force. But the part that is not a cynic recognizes that people come to Creating Change and expect to be safe here. There are people here who are not out, as lesbian, as gay, as trans*, at home. Maybe their boss doesn't know. Maybe their family doesn't know. The last thing they need is for someone to post their picture on Facebook or on some blog. The internet is so permeable, there's no knowing where an innocently posted image will end up.

This is a huge conference for the Movement. There will be 4,000 people here this weekend. (I thought that was enormous, but the nice bartender from our event last night told me that there's an oil conference coming in next week that will have 16,000.) There are hundreds of workshops and caucuses and institutes. I hardly go to anything. This year, I even meant to go to something yesterday morning, but felt crappy and spent most of the day in bed.

This meeting functions at several different levels at once. It attracts a huge number of young activists who fill the hallways and stay up all night. The funders are here, so there are a bunch of meetings between organizations who have money and organizations who want money. There are people hustling for their own businesses. (I talked with one yesterday.) There is a ton of networking and maybe that's the most important function.

This morning I heard someone playing the ukelele in the room next door. That room was the transgender youth reception room. It's open most of the day and despite pretty good soundproofing, I heard shouts and laughter off and on all the time I was in my room. People are here from all over, so some people will only see each other here, for four days.  It could make a huge difference in someone's life.

I bet it does.

I also bet that I have never seen so many skinny jeans/pants in one place.

when you heard it

This evening I was sitting in a Peet's in San Francisco, having a quick cup of coffee before a meeting started. As I was sitting there, checking mail, I heard the barista singing, "Stop Breaking Down" as he was working in the back, cleaning stuff. From the style, I could tell that the version of the song he'd learned was the Rolling Stones from Exile on Main Street.

I could tell by the phrasing. It's the first album I'd heard the song on too. I must have listened to it hundreds of times the year it came out. It's still probably my favorite Stones album, even though it's messy, has this dense, druggy production.

A few years after Exile came out, I bought a couple of records of Robert Johnson's music, King of the Delta Blues I & II. It had come out before Exile, but I hadn't really started to listen to blues then. It has the original (as far as I know) version of "Stop Breaking Down" on the second volume. Johnson's take is faster and funnier than the Stones: His vocal is more eccentric.

It's weird to think that I was the same distance from Robert Johnson's recording as the Peet's barista is from the Stones.

Earlier this week I was thinking about music and its context during a staff meeting. My organization is going to have a reception in Houston at the end of the month. I'm bringing a wi-fi speaker, but I told everyone that my musical tastes are not reliable enough to be the DJ.

It's the truth. I would put stuff like Poinciana on it and 21st century Bluegrass and funk and maybe even some electronica. I would be the only one enjoying myself. So one of my colleagues volunteered to bring her surefire four hours of Motown.

People will really like that.

It's the truth. Motown is pretty universally liked across race, age, class, and any other line you can think of.  The odd thing (to me anyhow) is that most of the people who love Motown, know it only as oldies music. Most of them weren't born when "Where Did Our Love Go" hit #1. I probably heard it first on a transistor radio sitting on someone's window sill. Or maybe I heard it at the beauty parlor on one of those interminable Saturday mornings, as I was getting my hair straightened. It was just summer music.

I don't know why the big hits were always released in the summer. It seems as though that still sort of happens. When I heard the music that's now known as Motown, though it might be from Indiana (Vee-Jay), New York (Atlantic), or Memphis (Stax), it was just soul music or R&B.  Calling it all Motown makes it an artifact. It's fixed in time and space. No one makes music that sounds like this, unless it's a quote or ironic. Even if someone hearing it for the first time loves it, there's no way that there aren't all these associations and cultural echoes built right into that first experience. They will never hear it as just one thing out of many on a lazy afternoon.

tours - grand and otherwise

It's been over a month since we got back and being in Europe is receding into memory's rearview mirror. I was going to post about the last stops - Dubrovnik, Corfu, Santorini, Mykonos, and Athens. But them I started thinking about tourism more generally and then I got back into my usual habits and so I didn't post anything at all.

Let me think about tourism.

From a bunch of historical fiction I've read over the years, I've gotten then impression that it was once essential to every rich, young, European man's education to take The Grand Tour. That meant hitting all the capitals of Europe by coach with an entourage or at least a tutor. The idea was that exposure is educational, that someone would come back with a broader view of the world, more cultured, or at least with some swag.

Now is not all that different, though travel is available to more than a tiny percentage of the population. People from all over the world come to Europe to, well to do what exactly? Some people spend long periods in a single place and try to get a sense of a particular culture, society, how people live. Others do a tour, by train, boat, or drive to see different cities, different countries. There's all that history. There are all these cultural markers. And so there are tons of us trooping dutifully through and over them.

The picture above is the Acropolis. It was a cool drizzly day. (It began to rain in earnest in a few hours. we got drenched.) There's was a crowd. Admission is 12 euros, about 15 - 16 bucks. There were people in loosely gathered clumps who were clearly on a tour together. (Guides hold little paddles overhead to keep their flocks in order.) There were families and couples and singletons. We all trooped up to the top. The marble on the top was nearly glassy with rain. It was strange to walk on the mainly red marble that was the matrix of the surface, not tiles or flagstones.

What do we get by standing on these places, in front of these things? What do we get by taking pictures, often selfies, at these sites?

I don't think it's education. To learn something takes more time than an hour or two, takes more focus than reading the helpful signs in multiple languages (but nearly always English). I think at its worst it's acquiring experiences, which is never bad. At best, it's making connection to people who, in most ways, were exactly like us.

trogir and split

Trogir and Split are both UNESCO Historic sites. I'd never heard of Trogir, but Split. The moment the guide said Diocletian's palace, I knew where I was.

One of the most amazing books written in the 20th century is Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. She wrote it just before the beginning of WWII. It was published in 1940. It's about a trip she and her husband make through Yugoslavia.  It's a huge book, over a thousand pages. She mixes history, politics, economics, traveler's notes, and personal anecdotes in a way bloggers only dream about. She's opinionated and some of the things she says seem incredibly dated now. But she's insightful and writes with so much engagement with the places she's looking at and a sharp analysis of how Europe is coming to war.

She talks about Diocletian in the section on Dalmatia. He was a Dalmatian boy who went to Rome and made good. He rose to be a general and then they made him emperor. He ruled from age for to age 60, retired in one piece, and moved back home to Dalmatia where he built this palace and died ten years later.

West wrote, "It is not, of course, remarkable as an example of Roman architecture. It cannot hold a candle to the Baths of Caracalla, or the Forum, or the Palantine. But it makes and extraordinary revelation of the continuity of history. Once passes through the gate that is squeezed between the rubbisheries on the quayside straight into antiquity. . . . the vistas have been filled in with people. Rather less than one-fifth of the population of Split, which numbers forty-four thousand, lives in the nine acres of the palace precincts; but the remaining four-fifths stream through it all day long because the passages which pierce it from north the south and east to west are the most convenient ways to the new parts of the town from the harbour."

This is still true and there's a huge market on the east side of the market.

istria

We arrived in Rovinj. We had been told that a local women's choir was going to meet us. But we didn't quite expect this.

It's a Croatian lesbian singing group. They sang an old love song that everyone (who's Croatian anyhow) knew, so the entire dock was singing along. (They'd changed the sexes of the people in the song, too,) They also gave us postcards and cookies.


They say there are two different soils on the Istrian peninsula - terra rossa (red dirt) and terra blanca (white dirt). The guide, who was from Rovinj, said the red dirt was stronger, made more flavorful vegetables.

Who knows? The soil was red as the dirt in Oklahoma.

The morning was cloudy on the way to Motovun, the first of several walled cities we'd see. They could have called this the Venetian Conquest Cruise. Every place we stopped the Venetians have held long enough to throw up a fortress, set up a double line of walls, and tag the place with the lion of St. Mark. Here the lion holds a closed book, meaning not open for business. The Venetian held it for a long time, then Napoleon, then the Austrians, then it was Yugoslavia for a short time, now it's Croatia. These histories are not unique. Nor is the city square idea, but there's something oddly modern feeling about the proportions in this one.

Motovun has this city and an annual film festival, but what the region really has is truffles. Some guy here pulled a 20 kilo one out of the ground and made his fortune. I've had them in pasta and had salads with the oil, but that was no preparation for the sheer funkiness of the real things a foot from my nose. There were like cheese and feet and inexplicably delicious smelling.

The Romans settled here.It's the oldest human settlement I'd seen until Athens. People often write about how much longer European history is than this US. It's undeniably true, but, after this trip I'm less and less sure what that means. More stable political systems? Hah. More tolerance? You should hear how Croatians talk about the Italians. Better healthcare? Yes, but I don't think that's about the age of a society and some modern European nations are younger than the USA. What the great age of these places show me is humans being humans, in all the ways we are human over a long, long time.

venice

I picked up a copy of Death in Venice for my iPad before I left town. I wasn't very careful, so it's a poor translation by some languages guy from Oxford. I should dig up the version I've had for years to compare. The writing is cumbersome, which is not what I remember about Mann at all, but I did remember correctly that he mentioned the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido as a hotel on the beach where Aschenbach watched Tadzio and eventually died.

We were staying at the Hotel Excelsior. From our window we could see the beaches, which in summer must be filled with people on the sand or under the little tents that lined the sand facing the sea. It is fall and it was raining, but there were people surfing in the morning, though the waves looked small and tame compared to the Pacific.

We only had one afternoon in Venice, so even though we'd been on a plane for over ten hours we took the hotel's water taxi over to St. Marks. It was completely worth it.

Venice is lovely, even when it's pissing down rain and there are a ton of people walking around taking pictures of the architecture and selfies and what all. We walked around the piazza and a bit into the city. The place is a combination of old beautiful buildings and Fisherman's Wharf-style stores. It makes sense. Every tourist in the world has to come here and there are great reasons for it. It's a gorgeous city and not like anywhere else (sorry Venice, CA). It feels both exposed to the public eye and incredibly private. I was standing on a bridge looking down a canal to take a picture, when I looked up to see a man in a cardigan looking down at me from a room two stories up. He waved and I waved back. Soon we were starving and ended up having indifferent pasta at a place not far from the piazza. The house facing me had lit up windows, though it wasn't quite dusk. At one point, I looked up to see a dark haired girl in a red dress reaching to close the heavy green shutters. She'd pushed aside the gauze drapes to reveal a room completely lit by chandeliers. It was wonderful, brief, and gave me a sense of this intimate side of the city, just a step away from the tourists.

Coming back through St. Marks on the way to the taxi, there were the first of these guys with the weirdest toy I've ever seen. Basically, it's a plastic, vaguely spherical thing, that completely flattens when smacked down on a flat surface. It slowly regains its original shape of a frog, or tomato, or whatever. I saw them in Croatia. I saw them in Greece. Darker skinned guys sold them and I never saw anyone buy one. There was also this LED toy that spun up into the air. And there was the woman with pigeons on her arm.

going to europe - it starts at the airport

So, we went to Europe for a ten day cruise. At the international terminal, we were through in less than twenty minutes and then into the spare, modernist Air France terminal. There were plenty of places to sit. There was some interesting food to eat. There were a bunch of people not speaking English or Spanish. There were unruly lines.

I knew we were headed into something new.

at a remove

We were headed back from Portland on the Labor Day weekend when the car started overheating. We limped into Yreka, CA on Sunday afternoon and spent the next day doing a lot of pleasant nothing in Yreka. On Tuesday, we went to the extremely well-recommended mechanic (Yelp loves him), who fixed the car and we were on the road by mid afternoon.

It took a while, so there was a lot of sitting and reading (for me), sitting, reading, knitting, and multiple walks (for Laine). At one point it was too hot to sit outside and I went to the tiny, dusty waiting room to get out of the sun. Next to me, on the magazine rack, was the Costco members magazine (picture to your right).  That guy with the white suit and the black hat is Tom Wolfe, who wrote a non-fiction novel called The Right Stuff about the Mercury Program and the beginning of space flight in the US. That was published in 1979.

A weak pun, but that's puns for you.

When I saw this, I thought something like, "How the mighty have fallen." Tom Wolfe was one of the stars of The New Journalism in the 70s. He, along with Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and a bunch of other writers whose names I've completely forgotten, were writing with these new, personal voices. It's commonplace now, but seemed revolutionary at the time. Wolfe wrote a bunch of essays, collected in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, and The Pump House Gang. His longest piece, in this period, is the book-length The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which is one of my favorite books. Wolfe cultivated a cool, sometimes sneering, distance from his subjects. It works fine in some cases, like Acid Test, less well in others. It completely sank him when it came to his novels, all of which are unreadable, imo.

But for this sneering dandy to end up on the cover of the magazine for the store of the masses, Costco? Wearing a hat that's too big (and black?) and a suit that probably fit him better at some point in the past? That's just sad.

just folks

I have been working on this extremely long term project of scanning all my dad's slides. He had two metal boxes of them that I inherited when he died back in 1998.

I've been dragging the slides around since then.

The first reason I had for not scanning them is that I didn't have a flatbed scanner. Then I got a scanner. But I still didn't scan them for a few years. Not until this April actually.

Why did I wait so long? Maybe it's a variety of grief. My dad died in 1998. His mother, my favorite grandmother, died in 2001, a few months before 9/11 of a heart attack at home. In 2009, my great-aunt Marjorie died. She had kidney failure. She died at home; my sister and I did hospice care for her for the five weeks she lived after they took off dialysis.

I have a huge pile of photos from those deaths too.

They live in plastic boxes to keep them dry and safe. For some reason, this spring I could start looking at them and wanted to preserve them digitally. This is going to take ages.

But that's not what I wanted to write about.

What I wanted to write about is how ordinary these pictures are. They are often out of focus, have weird compositions, heads cut off, big expanses of beach sand with tiny people in the center. There are pictures of incredibly skinny Christmas trees. There's one of me in a bunny suit for Halloween.

These are the pictures that any family takes of time together. Times at the beach, when the kid is in a performance at school, going to the cemetery, going to a petting zoo or a historical place. Ordinary people taking ordinary pictures. Just family life in the middle of the 20th century.

So why are we invisible? The image of African American life in the 50s and sixties are of struggle, heroic bravery, resistance, and violence. There's the Montgomery Bus Boycott. There are the Freedom Rides. There's the March on Washington. There are the Panthers. There are Newark and Detroit burning. And all these thing happened. And all these things are important. But this is big history and most of us have small lives

The small, normal lives of African Americans don't get much play in the public mind. We're often pathologized or presented in the same tired stereotypes that have made Tyler Perry a very rich man. We're assumed to be so outside mainstream American life that a commenter on a blog is surprised that a black guy is a Bon Jovi fan. Or people are surprised that we're geeks or sf readers or cosplayers or resounding ordinary.

Last month there was a #blackprivilege on Twitter. It was sad and funny. A ton of black people of all sorts of ages tweeted their experiences of being treated like some rare beast. A scary beast. A stupid beast. A serving beast, but nothing human. For all the changes since I was a kid, and believe me there have been a ton, there's still a way that the most American of Americans, African Americans, aren't seen as part of the mainstream, as unremarkable and unremarked.

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.