a world of _

Last weekend I went with a friend I've known for close to forty years to see the Mark Morris Dance Group at Zellerbach Hall on the UCB campus. It was a good performance. The first half were older English songs and some comedic songs by Ivor Cutler, the latter full of odd juxtapositions and surreal imagery. The second half was a lot of Morris thinking his way through the pas de deux or couples dancing which was interesting and lovely in parts.

The audience was fill of white and grey haired people, my age and older. This happens more and more. Sometimes I think it's just because you tend to notice more people like you than not. Sometimes I think it's because of when I'm usually out in the world, times when it's only the retired or unemployed tooling around. When we rode BART from the airport Saturday night it was full of young people because it was Saturday night, you know? 

With the Morris performance though, it's likely because most of the people there discovered Morris when he was a young choreographer and they were young or youngish too. There is a way that we can move through the world surrounded by people of approximately our own generation, sharing an aesthetic and world view, a world of geezers.

I saw the Vice News documentary on IS earlier this week. It showed a very different and oddly homogeneous world too.

A world of men.

I mean it. I think I saw maybe two veiled, shrouded women in the entire documentary and in one case, one of the sharia law enforcers told the woman's husband, not the woman, that she should have a thicker veil. It's a hard world for me to understand. In an abstract way,  I can sort of understand the romantic appeal for some men. Here's this unambiguous, all-embracing war against evil. What I don't get is wanting to live in a world so restricted and so reduced. It is a world of strict laws and stricter punishment. It is a world with only co-religionists and a limited number of them. It is a low information world, where reality is strained through the interpretation of other men. It might be a safe world, but that safety comes at a huge cost.

A cost that some are willing to pay.

I wanted to link the video because I think everyone should see it, but it's gone now.

images

So this weekend Laine and I took a mini-vacation down the Monterey coast. We stayed at a not very fancy motel on Fremont (where all the not so fancy hotels hang out), went to the Monterey Aquarium late Saturday afternoon and again on Sunday morning (one of the benefits of being members).  We also found a nice brew pub, an ok breakfast place, and discovered that one of our favorite places had come back from the dead. I haven't lived down in the area for more than nine years and so it was fun to see what had changed and what hadn't.

When we were at the Monterey Aquarium, I took a lot of pictures with my phone. I've only had it a couple of weeks, but the iPhone does a much much better job of taking pictures in low light and decent video than my old, recently deceased Samsung Galaxy 2. Like this photo of squid.

Or this of jellies.

Lots of people bring their cameras and phones to the aquarium to take pictures of the animals and their families in front of the animal tanks. We're all in each other's ways with all these pictures.

At first I was going to write this huffy post about people taking pictures that they'll never look at again and rail about how people take flashes in the rooms with the animals even when there are signs all over the place telling them not to do that.

I was going to sound very high-minded.

I was going to be very wrong.

In my office at home I have boxes of pictures that my great aunt kept. I have another box from my grandmother. I have two boxes of slides from my dad that I'm maybe halfway through digitizing. All of these pictures were animated by the same impulse driving the people who were in my way or making flashes or just being annoying at the aquarium.

We all want to remember. We want to remember that good time when we were together or when we were having fun or when we saw something new or something beautiful. That it's digital now and that everyone with a phone can do it makes no difference.  And maybe its even better that there's this relative democratization of picture taking and family portraits. It's good that everyone can have their memento of that great time. That everyone can do this:

what it means to write

This past weekend, Labor Day weekend, Laine and I spent time with a bunch of friends, many of whom write. I admitted that I had this blog and two people asked me why a blog, especially since I don't have a ton of readers. (My readership may have jumped up to five after this weekend.)

I mean, I could just write things in longhand, in a journal and leave them there. I could write on a computer, print them out, hand them to Laine to read. (Or not) I could just write on a computer and leave the writings on a hard drive, where no one would ever read them, but nearly nine years ago, I started this blog.

If I think about it, I think that I made this quasi-public place to write because it would make me think about an audience. Thinking that I have to write to someone, means that someone, even if imaginary, has to understand what I'm writing. This enforces a certain sort of discipline.  I have to be clear, if I have the assumption that someone is going to read this and won't have a chance to ask me what I meant.

But to be honest, I use blogging as a place to think. I found that insight in a 2007 observation when I was apologizing to who knows what for not blogging more.

I guess that if it's a place to think, the person I should apologize to is myself. And I should do it more often.

on an imaginary hero

“She still has her mother. She wasn’t experimented on as a child. She can laugh. She has real friends. She even wears a dress every once in a while.” – Olivia Dunham in Concentrate and Ask Again

This is a blog post I should never publish. There should be some lower limit to nerdiness, but I have been obsessed with Fringe for months.

(Spoilers follow.)

Fringe played on Fox from 2008 to 2013. It was originally supposed to end after the fourth season, but fan pressure produced a fifth season of ten episodes.  There’s a natural end with the end of the fourth season, but the fifth season has its own logic and fits as an alternate ending to the series.

There are a lot of alternatives in this series, which is part of its charm.  I once called it “The Garden of Forking Paths” for tv and I wasn’t wrong[*]. Part of the appeal for me is this idea of different endings, of variant lives. But at the end of the day, my interest centers on Olivia Dunham. It’s not that she’s an FBI agent. It’s not that they don’t sex her up (at least after the pilot and maybe the first third of the first season). I think what fascinates me is that Fringe shows the making of a superhero from a flawed human being.

Because, seriously, Olivia is fucked up.

What makes her a superhero is also what helps fuck her up in the first place and she is never quite ok, despite reaching a happy ending. This is a time for PTSD heroes.

She’s not my first. My first sympathy for this sort of hero showed with my choice of Batman as my favorite DC hero. I like Green Lantern’s power the best and that oath (“By Brightest Day or Darkest Night, No Evil Shall Escape My Sight . . . . .”).  Still I have always felt something very compelling about the Batman.  Here is a boy who sees his parents shot down in front of him, who grows up committed to fighting crime. He’s not all right. He can’t be. And everyone knows it.

Miller and Burton and Nolan and Arkham’s Asylum

Lots of people have interpreted Batman. He’s actually a pretty cheery dude in the original Detective Comics from the 1930’s. But that’s sort of DC’s original style. As we move into the end of the twentieth, the Batman is more treated as a disturbed guy, from the mildly neurotic version by Tim Burton, to the flat-out psychotic in the comics of Frank Miller and Grant Morrison. The latest iteration (Nolan) is less obviously unhinged than the Miler or Morrison Batmen, but probably a little more nuts than the Burton. In all cases, here is a man who has suffered immense trauma as a child, who grows up to be a functional, even exemplary, in some respects, adult, and is immensely damaged and fragile.

This is the template for Olivia Dunham.

Magic and How it Doesn’t Help

“Can you make him stop hitting me? Please?” – young Olive Dunham, Subject 13.

Her powers come from a magic potion, called Cortexiphan, but what makes her powerful is childhood trauma and how she’s coped with it. It’s a unique combination of love, terror, and control. Olivia is the abused child of a mother suffering domestic violence. And even when the abusive partner is out of the picture (because 10 year old Olivia has shot him[†]), everything is not ok.

Her mother dies. Let me tell you, that is no fun at all.

My mother died when I was 12 and I feel the repercussions of that event 50 years later. The worst about losing a parent for kids like me is the responsibility that descends way too soon.  Childhood ends with a parent’s death. But Olivia’s childhood has ended long before that with an abusive stepfather that no one is protecting her against. She is the one who protects her mother, however inadequately. There is no one who will save her. It is this knowledge and this isolation that makes her who she is and the superhero she will become.

 The Other Cortexiphan Subjects

They can’t cope. No, really. Presumably, there’s nothing in their lives that make them have to be as tough as Dunham, as resilient, and eventually as powerful. It’s not clear why it’s this way. I mean it doesn’t have to be after all, this is just a tv show. Still it’s clear that exposure to Cortextiphan had bad effects on the lives of all of the children in the tests, but only Dunham manages to come to control and survive the talent.

Becoming

“ I don’t know what’s happening to me, what I’m becoming. I’ve got this power inside me that terrifies me because I don’t understand it and I just, I just want it out.” – Olivia Dunham, Brave New World I

“You’ve had the power all along.” – Nina Sharp, Brave New World II

The immensely insecure, complexly uptight Olivia Dunham comes into her powers, becoming a much greater figure than her more normal alternate world counterpart. But it’s not easy for her. Nothing is ever easy for her.  And she doesn’t want this. She wants a simpler life. She doesn’t get it for a while.

By Brave New World II, Olivia can catch bullets and power the merging of universes. She’s a pawn in the great game William Bell is playing. She can thwart him, but everything hinges on her finally, finally believing in her own powers and taking that leap into the unknown (or at least unseen) with Peter. She has to trust and she has to act.

That act doesn’t quite wrap things up all by itself. Like September’s prophesy foretold, she has to die and is brought back by Walter to end Bell’s monomaniacal new Eden. That handy Cortexiphan makes it possible for her to come back and have the family she’d wanted and feared.

In season five, the game is reset.

Something new is going on in season five, which is about loss and reconciliation.

“Simone, you have a gift. You can see things other people can’t.  I don’t doubt that . . . . . It’s simply an anomaly. I know that because I’m an anomaly. I’ve moved things with my mind. I’ve lit things on fire. I’ve caught bullets midair. I’ve seen things that people only dream about. I’ve seen the seams between universes ripped apart; things that humans shouldn’t see. People make up explanations; assign meaning to things without knowing because it’s reassuring. It’s comforting. But I can’t do that, because I know too much.

It’s all just numbers“ – Olivia Dunham, The Human Kind

Olivia says this to Simone, the head of a group living on barter of industrial stuff in Litchfield. She’s at low ebb here. Peter has inserted the Invader tech into his head and is moving away from her. Etta’s not long dead.  What she has is her sense of duty and the will to keep doing regardless of what or how she feels. It’s the strength of the abused kid again, pushing her through the hardest stuff because there is no other way but forward. This is not all of her strength, but it’s the core of it.

Ending

The final season is all resolution, but to make it happen, Olive has to cross worlds and crush an Observer. But to do that she takes a final massive dose of Cortexiphan.  This is what power costs, but she also sees (shows us) the ends of some might-have-beens and closes off the alternate universe stories.

In theory, the drug is burned out after those last jumps, , but there’s enough left to make a final crucial move. Is this the Cortexiphan or is this the hero? She pulls the electromagnetic energy out of a city to crush Windmark. I say hero.

The end, what’s the end? The real end of the show is about sacrifice and love, though not romantic love. Olivia isn’t actually at the center of the story for season five, even though what she does is crucial to the final destruction (prevention) of the Observers.  What she has become is complete. She knows her own strengths. She has a place in the world that she’s made. She can stop.

---

[*] ”The Garden of Forking Paths” is a Borges story about a novel that explores all the possible developments of a plot. It’s wonderful, and like any Borges, well worth reading.

[†] Olivia says that she shot him, but didn’t kill him in season two. In the season four universe reboot, she had killed him.

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.