The third way.
Empiricism, p-idealism, and Islamism, which is somehow neither: heck, even John Fowles saw the wisdom of Den Beste, 16 years and an ocean away—
It took me many years to realize the great abyss between the French and English traditions of language use, or rhetoric: the pervasive influence of the metaphorical on the first, and of the literal on the second; life perceived through the intellect, through forms and concepts, and life perceived (more or less) as it appears; words as pure algebra, words as practical and Euclidean; as carefully bred garden pansies and as, in Lévi-Strauss’s pun, wild heart’s-ease. No doubt expert comparative linguists will cry in outrage at such a crude distinction, and I must, if I am forced, retreat behind the subtitle of this book [Studies in Anglo-French Cultural Relations: Imagining France]. Such an abyss, wrong though I may be to suppose it, forms very much a part of my own imagined France.
Or, well, maybe not. Fowles has kept in mind that old chestnut about fighting monsters and gazing into abysses and what that does to the fighter and the gazer; and, much as we (O, that royal, unholy “we”) have kept up the torture rooms and the rape rooms and maybe even God help us the mass graves we so righteously went in to wipe from the face of the earth, well: it’s left to any astute-enough observer of the current Yankee Zeitgeist to determine which side is in the end the more likely to use words as algebra; whose X is truly able to mean whatever they want it to mean at the time. (Which necessarily excludes those observers who’ve somehow miscast themselves as Matt Damon, holding Minnie Driver’s phone number up against the window and yelling “How do you like these apples!” to a bar full of Harvard smartypants. —He later dumped her on one of those late-night talk shows. Broke her heart. I read about it in one of the glossier magazines.)
Man, just think: if Derrida had gotten up in front of the country and declaimed, “I did not have sex with that woman”...
Empiricism, p-idealism, an exquisitely tailored Manichean mirror-dream—I want a different third way. Rabe‘a Al-Adawiyah will do for a start, a Sufi mystic who did Diogenes one better: she wandered the streets with a torch and a bucket of water, to burn the gates of heaven and douse the fires of hell, so she could see who truly loved God for God. “Oh my Lord,” she said, “if I worship you for fear of your hellfire then throw me in it, and if I worship you in greed for your heaven then forbid me from having it, and if I am worshipping you for your generous face then forbid me not from seeing you.” And it may seem to those who squint that we’re right back where we started, and maybe the gates of heaven are daily polished by the p-idealists, and it’s those Others in the mirror that stoke the fires of hell, and maybe there’s something joyously empirical to blindly feeling the face of God with our fingers, but Rabe‘a sees what Den Beste misses, if I may be so blasphemous: the whole point of a trialectic is to position yourself just so, smiling sweetly, saying, “Let’s you and him fight.”
Urban remedies.
Oh, hey, Mark Lakeman is running for City Council.
Boy, I’ve been paying attention to local politics.
This is another Anodyne article. The footer at the bottom of the clipping I’ve got says April 1997, which means the damn thing was written seven years ago. It’s a piece I’m more happy with than not from back in that particular day, even if me-then glares at how me-now wants to smooth out the more embarrassing hyperbole. It’s about Mark Lakeman and the T-Horse and the Moonday T-Hows and Intersection Repair and City Repair and it’s about why I’m going to vote for Mark Lakeman, though it might not be why you’d vote for him. Or against him. And I guess beyond noting that while Hands Around Portland didn’t quite work (for at least the idea of completing an actual circle, much like Hands Across America failed to make it actually across), Dignity Village is working (for at least the idea of doing something concrete to help the homeless), and that’s the more important of the two, you ask me, well, beyond noting that, I’ll just get out of the way. —Oh, yeah: Juliana Tobón took some photos, which I’d show you if I could, but hey, you know: seven years.
Whether you blame it on disrespect for family values or rampant corporate greed, all of us here in fin de siècle America agree on one thing: life sucks. Our problems are legion and getting worse, and any conceivable solution seems hopelessly out of reach. It would have to do so much, speak to so many people, regardless of age or race or class or sexual preference or crackpot creed. It’s all too big, too abstract, too much—how can we find a solution when we can’t even agree on the problems?
Mark Lakeman believes he has a solution—and a lot of people are starting to agree with him.
The first part of the solution looks pretty damn ungainly as it negotiates the narrow paths of Couch Park at night. It’s a blue Toyota pickup truck, well-used, with a camper over the bed and an immense heap of sticks and plastic sheeting rolled up on top. It settles in the darkest corner of the park, as far as possible from the poisonous pink sodium-vapor lights. People gather round. Some of them start unloading the truck, breaking that pile of plastic and sticks into separate bundles; some of them are bringing food, trays of desserts, pots of chai and tea; some of them are standing around scratching their heads.
Those bundles, once unrolled and hefted up, attached with ties and braced with struts, become high, wide awnings, one each for the front, back, both sides. The plastic sheeting, unfurled, catches the light, looking like the paper wings of a Leonardo da Vinci glider.
“It’s a butterfly,” says one of the head-scratchers suddenly. He grins.
Rugs are spread beneath the wings, and pillows, an assortment of thrift-store styles and colors. Candles are lit and hung from the struts. Two people climb in the back of the truck and busy themselves with cups and plates. “The T-Horse is open!” they call, and desserts and cups of tea start issuing forth, all for free. People flop on the pillows, chatty, friendly, smiling. Kids and dogs play on the fringes. Someone starts to play a drum or two.
“What is this?” more than one person is asking, unsatisfied with the poetry of the butterfly answer. Well—it’s a mobile café, a free space for the people of the neighborhood to gather, a place for them to meet and hang out for the night; putting it simply, it’s a T-Horse.
It’s also a seed, an activator, a catalyst; a means to an end. It’s the fourth T-Hows.
Mark Lakeman doesn’t want to be called an architect, though it runs in his veins. His father is Richard Lakeman, the first head of Portland’s Planning Bureau, who fought for Waterfront Park and Pioneer Square; his mother is Sandra Davis Lakeman, a design instructor and architectural historian whose specialty is light and its interplay with public space. Lakeman himself trained as a corporate architect, though he never got his license. “I left in protest,” he says. “I didn’t want to get my license. I don’t want the sanction of an organization that puts technology over history and culture.”
He was utterly disheartened by a sordid little incident involving a local construction firm, a major building, the EPA, and hidden barrels of sludge (the sort of thing that’s far more common than we want to admit). He knocked about for a time, traveling to Europe to help his mother with a study of the piazzas of Italian hill towns, seeing ancient architecture, buildings that were works of art, that expressed something.
Returning to the States, he took a long hard look at the immense sculptural things he’d been trained to build. He didn’t like what he saw.
“Look at this,” he says, pointing to a picture of a skyscraper. “This is trying to say aspire, be all you can be—but at the top of every skyscraper is nothing but a mechanical system. What is that saying? The only thing being expressed here is ‘growth’.”
Something fundamental has gone wrong in how we build for ourselves, and Lakeman set out to look for answers. His search eventually took him all the way back to the beginnings of building, and of human community—the Hach Wynik, quite possibly the last unassimilated indigenous people left in North America.
In 1994, Lakeman spent two and a half months living in a village of approximately 120 Hach Wynik deep in what little remains of the Lacandon rain forest, on the border between Mexico and Guatemala. He ostensibly went in to conduct an anthropological study through painting; he never painted a stroke. Instead he spent all his time learning, or rather unlearning—everything about what makes family, community, human interaction, about what is and isn’t possible. He describes the process as “unmaking,” and still finds the whole experience somewhat distant, jumbled, hard to lay out—but it all crystallized around an otherwise ordinary conversation one day in the forest when his companion reached out, casually, and with one hand performed a neat and intricate little dance with a butterfly, then, just as casually, let it go.
Something had happened which isn’t supposed to happen, call it magic or luck or delusion or what you will—but the effects were very real. “I felt a profound physiological crisis, like hitting a computer with a virus. Seeing something so beautiful, and so profound… I’d have given everything I knew to have that rapport with nature.”
Coming out of the forest, he spent some time trying to reconcile what he’d learned with what he thought he knew, what he calls “two different ways of seeing.” He spent some time on a porch in San Pedro, a town on the shores of Lake Atitlan, in Guatemala, and, trying to recapture some of the community he’d felt in the forest, he began to leave his cookstove going 24 hours a day, offering up food and drink and space to whomever was passing by.
The first T-Hows was born.
“That was the remaking process,” says Lakeman. “I discovered I enjoyed facilitating gathering. And I began to see food and drink as a means of pulling people together.”
He brought this principle with him when he returned to Portland, setting up in a tent in a friend’s backyard in Northeast Portland. This second T-Hows served about 25 people a night and ran through August and September of 1995—but there was something more to be done, something bigger, something better, something to reach out to more people.
The Moonday T-Hows (to give it its full name) is slowly but surely entering the mythic landscape of Portland. Built during the winter of 1995 out of recycled doors and windows, plastic sheeting, and stormfall, it sounded for all the world like a post-apocalyptic shack. It was, instead, a lovingly crafted tea house, built around and through the trees on a yard at the corner of SE 9th and Sherrett. Divided inside into ten different spaces, decorated by ten different artists around themes like the Heart, the Soul, the Best Friend’s Stage, and Grandmother’s Porch, the third T-Hows opened on March 21, 1996, and every Monday thereafter served up a potluck. Though designed to hold 80 people, it drew at first only curious neighbors—but word of mouth began to spread. By the middle of the summer, when the band Gypsy Caravan put on an impromptu concert, two or three hundred people spilled onto the streets, dancing. Over five hundred people came to its last night, August 19, when it was dismantled.
Contrary to previous reports, no small-minded city bureaucrat reluctantly or otherwise ordered the T-Hows destroyed. There were some concerns over lack of insurance, and over the use of recycled materials in its construction (a strict regulatory no-no, by the way), but the city was supportive from the start, and issued a 6-month temporary permit, though a full year could have been theirs for the asking. It wasn’t necessary. The original idea had always been to last only from March 21 to September 21, from equinox to equinox, and when the T-Hows came down on August 19, it was, quite simply, because its time had come, a little earlier than foreseen. “It had matured,” in Lakeman’s words. It, too, was a seed, a catalyst, a means to an end.
Towards what end, though? What are these seeds trying to grow?
For a glimpse, head back to SE 9th and Sherrett.
Near the end of last summer, as the T-Hows was drawing to a close, Lakeman attached a simple string compass to the manhole in the center of the intersection and drew a big circle cutting across all four corners. He then asked the property owners if he could plant flowers in the grass berms along that circle, and three of the four agreed. Lakeman built a small tea station on one corner, to keep the spirit of the T-Hows alive, and supplied it with cups, bags, and thermoses of hot water kept filled at all hours of the day and night. A produce stand, for surplus vegetables from neighborhood gardens, and a chalk station soon followed, all built with the help of neighborhood kids, all with the blessing of the corner property owners. (The fourth eventually came around, once he saw what was happening.)
He began doing these things out of an inchoate desire to mark the neighborhood in some fashion—“I really don’t understand how it started,” he says—but Lakeman soon realized what he was trying to do was fashion a piazza from a common residential intersection.
He called it a piazza, but he could have called it a square, a commons, a green, a forum, a plaza. Throughout the world, wherever people build neighborhoods for themselves, where two paths meet, something happens. A place where people meet, converse, sit and enjoy the light, maybe shop for a trifle or two; a public space, a special place.
Except here. What do you see on a typical American residential intersection? Houses, and more houses. Houses as far as the eye can see. When space does open up, it’s never space for people to meet, but space for cars to meet: commercial strips, highways, parking lots, minimalls. The crucial difference is that we didn’t design our neighborhoods; developers did, people who weren’t concerned with livability but with the bottom line. Public spaces use up valuable lots which could be sold as houses. Why bother? The reason we no longer know our neighbors is because we no longer have a place to meet them. The reason our communities are falling apart is because we’ve left them no place to be.
When Lakeman realized what he was trying to do, he drafted a manifesto and sent it out to his neighbors—Intersection Repair, he called it. He pointed out what he saw as missing, and what he hoped to do: repair the intersection, and transform it into what it should have been all along, the crossroads for their community. Already enchanted by the T-Hows, his neighbors responded enthusiastically; meetings were held, the manifesto hammered into shape, and a block party planned to celebrate. And on September 8, they all went out and marked their otherwise anonymous intersection, serving notice to the world at large that they were claiming it as public space.
They painted the street.
Giant concentric circles, which tied into the circles of sunflowers Lakeman had already planted. Lines radiating off these circles down each of the four streets: red, white, yellow, and black.
The Bureau of Transportation responded almost at once. You can’t paint the street, they said. It’s against the rules. It’s already done, said the neighbors. We all like it. Can’t you grant some sort of exemption?
Hell no, said the Bureau. Strip it up yourselves, or be prepared to pay a $1000 fine. And you’ll be liable for any accidents caused by your illegal markings.
The neighborhood prepared to do just that, while they worked every possible angle to keep their space. In November, just before the Bureau’s deadline, Lakeman made a presentation to a couple of aides from the offices of City Councilors Charlie Hales and Gretchen Kafoury. He told them about his experiences in the rain forest, and about what he’d learned; he showed them the T-Hows, and what it had done; he told them about piazzas, and how he hoped to grow one in Sellwood. He never finished his proposal. The aides began talking animatedly about the possibilities of this Intersection Repair project. The Bureau was told to grant an exception while the merits of this interesting proposal were studied.
Everybody’s happy, right?
“It looks,” said Janet Conklin, “like the slum areas outside of Bombay. It is garish, it is unsightly, it is an eyesore.”
The City Council held a hearing March 19 to determine the final outcome of the Intersection Repair project. Conklin was the lone voice of dissent; twelve people, from within the neighborhood and without, spoke in favor.
Conklin lives nearby, and owns a condominium at SE 9th and Weber; she has had to drive through the intersection several times a month. She wants the City Council to reject the permit. According to her testimony, Conklin isn’t against the community-building aspects of the project. The potlucks are fine, the block parties, the ubiquitous tea. But it’s a question of “fundamental æsthetics,” affecting a neighborhood “on the brink of renovation.” She suggests a community garden as an alternative to painting the street.
I haven’t personally seen a Bombay slum, so I can’t speak to that comparison, but I didn’t find the intersection to be unsightly, or an eyesore. But I’m not a property owner, with visions of renovation dancing in my head. I do note that there is no space anywhere available for a community garden.
The tea station, gazebo, benches, historical marker, all have a certain rough-hewn quality, but that’s of necessity. This is an “emergency piazza,” as the proposal puts it. The street is painted and these installations built out of found materials because there’s no other place to put it, no money set aside for it, no other way to do it—and yet this is something so vital, something so amazing to the neighborhood, that they went ahead and seized this intersection despite the rules and laws against it. Call it eminent domain by guerilla tactics.
Petitions were circulated in the immediate neighborhood, garnering 88 signatures in favor. Surveys were taken: 87% thought the neighborhood was safer now; 87% thought that communication between neighbors had improved; 81% thought traffic was safer and 90% thought it had slowed—traffic calming without speed bumps; 81% thought the neighborhood had become more livable.
The City Council voted unanimously to allow the project.
Portlanders are constantly told how lucky we are, what forward-thinking urban planners we have, what a progressive City Council, what a livable city. Here at least is an example of that: some hooligans deface public property, the Bureau of Transportation objects, a property owner frets about property values, the City Council grants the hooligans a permit.
But it’s easy to lose sight of our good fortune. Look at the damned US Bancorp Tower, or the sprawl along 82nd, or Burnside, or Sandy, or the horror stories about the Portland Building, or those horrible condominiums that just went up by the Lloyd Center, or the Lloyd Center itself. We just opened up the Urban Growth Boundary to more development of the soulless big box mini-mall suburban hell variety—and every month sees a new parking garage. It’s discouraging to realize that Portland is considered so livable merely because everywhere else is worse; it’s hard to know what to do when all the relevant decisions are made by groups so distant from our everyday lives.
Which brings us back to where we started, with the T-Horse.
When the Moonday T-Hows was dismantled, its ten rooms where dispersed throughout the city, to start ten new T-Howses. The Kitchen ended up in the back of a well-used blue Toyota pickup truck.
The T-Horse made its first appearance, sans wings, on Friday, December 13, 1996, in Pioneer Square, dispensing as always free tea and desserts to whomever stopped by. Ever since January 6 it has been working its way widdershins about the city, traveling from park to park, a new one every Monday night. It had grown wings, a heart-shaped canopy, and rugs and pillows and candles, and crowds—as many as a hundred a night as it neared the top of its Northeast arc. This is in the rain and chill of January, February, and March; imagine what it will look like in April, May, June.
The idea is to make at least two circles of the city, the second a little wider and more dispersed than the first, between January 6 and June 21, the summer solstice—and with the solstice comes City Repair.
City Repair is going to be a giant human circle which will link hands at high noon on June 21, along the route the T-Horse followed through the city. It’s also going to be a massive tea party and potluck to be held that evening, when the circle collapses and converges on Pioneer Square.
This is your chance to participate. The T-Horse is drawing people in, spreading the word, letting us all know something is happening. Like the initial outlaw street painting at 9th and Sherrett, City Repair will serve notice: we are seizing this space as ours. What happens next is up to us.
“Some bureaucrats are nervous,” says Lakeman, “concerned about the precedent being set.” No wonder. Lakeman would like to see no less than a city full of repaired intersections, residential neighborhoods clustered about their emergency piazzas, herds of T-Horses roaming the city—public spaces created by any means necessary. He’s seen how simple it is to start community, where before there was none: all it needs is a little food, some drink, a space, and the people will come. He’s seen the profound effect it’s had on his neighborhood. He wants the whole city to feel it.
“It’s funny,” he says. “People talk all the time about saving the rainforest, but this—this is coming out of the rainforest, to save us.”
We am a camera.
Why have I got it in for the novel? Because it has been shifted away from life, whatever, as Wittgenstein put it, is the case, these last fifty years. Circumstances have imposed this shift. It is not the novelists’ fault. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel was at one remove from life. But since the advent of film and television and sound recording it is at two removes. The novel is now generally about things and events which the other forms of art describe better.
All the purely visual and aural sequences in the modern novel are a bore, both to read and to write. People’s physical appearance, their movements, their sounds, places, moods of places—the camera and the microphone enregister these twenty times better than the typewriter. If the novel is to survive it must one day narrow its field to what other systems of recording can’t record. I say “one day” because the reading public still isn’t very aware of what I call mischanneling—that is, using the wrong art form to express or convey what you mean.
In other words, to write a novel in 1964 is to be neurotically aware of trespassing, especially on the domain of the cinema. Of course, very few of us ever get the chance to express ourselves on film. (Having one’s book filmed is equivalent to having a luxury illustrated edition; it is not expressing oneself on film.) So over the novel today hangs a faute de mieux. All of us under forty write cinematically; our imaginations, constantly fed on films, “shoot” scenes, and we write descriptions of what has been shot. So for us a lot of novel writing is, or seems like, the tedious translating of an unmade and never-to-be-made film into words.
—“I Write Therefore I Am,” John Fowles
A charge that all of us who sell film rights have to answer is that we wrote our books with this end in view. What has to be distinguished here is the legitimate and illegitimate influence of the cinema on the novel. I saw my first film when I was six; I supposed I’ve seen on average—and discounting television—a film a week ever since; let’s say some two and a half thousand films up to now. How can so frequently repeated an experience not have indelibly stamped itself on the mode of imagination? At one time I analyzed my dreams in detail; again and again I recalled purely cinematic effects: panning shots, close shots, tracking, jump cuts, and the rest. In short, this mode of imagining is far too deep in me to eradicate—and not only in me, but in all my generation.
This doesn’t mean we have surrendered to the cinema. I don’t share the general pessimism about the so-called decline of the novel and its present status as a minority cult. Except for a brief period in the nineteenth century, when a literate majority and a lack of other means of entertainment coincided, it has always been a minority cult.
One has in fact only to do a film script to realize how inalienably in possession of a still-vast domain the novel is; how countless the forms of human experience only to be described in and by it. There is too an essential difference in the quality of image evoked by the two media. The cinematic visual image is virtually the same for all who see it; it stamps out personal imagination, the response from individual visual memory. A sentence or paragraph in a novel will evoke a different image in each reader. This necessary cooperation between writer and reader—the one to suggest, the other to make concrete—is a privilege of verbal form; and the cinema can never usurp it.
Nor is that all. Here (the opening four paragraphs of a novel) is a flagrant bit of writing for the cinema. The man has obviously spent too much time on film scripts and can now think only of his movie sale.
The temperature is in the nineties, and the boulevard is absolutely empty.
Lower down, the inky water of a canal reaches in a straight line. Midway between two locks is a barge filled with timber. On the bank, two rows of barrels.
Beyond the canal, between houses separated by workyards, a huge, cloudless, tropical sky. Under the throbbing sun, white facades, slate roofs, and granite quays hurt the eyes. An obscure distant murmur rises in the hot air. All seems drugged by the Sunday peace and the sadness of summer days.
Two men appear.
It first appeared on March 25, 1881. The writer’s name is Flaubert. All I have done to his novel Bouvard et Pecuchet is to transpose its past historic into the present.
—“Notes on an Unfinished Novel,” John Fowles
There’s more; enough to make me want to go back to A Maggot, especially since it wasn’t because I wasn’t liking it that I ended up putting it down. —I’m not saying I agree, mind, but I don’t disagree; Fowles is appealingly cranky, and here I am at the end of a long day thinking about Scott McCloud’s point that comics as a source of Saturday-morning glee no matter how well done face an uphill battle against the goshwow that movies (and videogames) can supply today that they couldn’t in the far-off Golden and Silver Ages, and I’m not saying I agree with that, either, but I don’t disagree, which is I think what I mean when I say “I’m thinking.” I mean, I’m thinking of other stuff, too. Anyway. Wormholes: my current commuter book.
New frontiers in comment spam.
First it was zombies; now it’s doppelgängers.
One stupid move, two stupid move—
Boycott Disney, sure. I mean, since they’ve decided to kill their legendary 2D cel animation department, all you’ll be missing is stuff like Gnomeo and Juliet. Small sacrifice, right?
Because really, this sort of crap is shameless and unforgiveable:
WASHINGTON, May 4 — The Walt Disney Company is blocking its Miramax division from distributing a new documentary by Michael Moore that harshly criticizes President Bush, executives at both Disney and Miramax said Tuesday.
The film, “Fahrenheit 911,” links Mr. Bush and prominent Saudis — including the family of Osama bin Laden — and criticizes Mr. Bush’s actions before and after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Disney, which bought Miramax more than a decade ago, has a contractual agreement with the Miramax principals, Bob and Harvey Weinstein, allowing it to prevent the company from distributing films under certain circumstances, like an excessive budget or an NC-17 rating. [...]
Mr. Moore’s agent, Ari Emanuel, said Michael D. Eisner, Disney’s chief executive, asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Mr. Emanuel said Mr. Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where Mr. Bush’s brother, Jeb, is governor.
“Michael Eisner asked me not to sell this movie to Harvey Weinstein; that doesn’t mean I listened to him,” Mr. Emanuel said. “He definitely indicated there were tax incentives he was getting for the Disney corporation and that’s why he didn’t want me to sell it to Miramax. He didn’t want a Disney company involved.”
Disney executives deny that accusation, though they said their displeasure over the deal was made clear to Miramax and Mr. Emanuel.
A senior Disney executive elaborated that the company had the right to quash Miramax’s distribution of films if it deemed their distribution to be against the interests of the company. The executive said Mr. Moore’s film is deemed to be against Disney’s interests not because of the company’s business dealings with the government but because Disney caters to families of all political stripes and believes Mr. Moore’s film, which does not have a release date, could alienate many.
“It’s not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle,” this executive said.
But you might also consider writing to Jeb and asking him if he’d really use the power of the state to exact such petty revenge on a person or corporation exercising their First Amendment rights to report facts that might make him personally feel a little uncomfortable. (Extra points if you can keep a straight face while doing so.)
—Nathan Newman has a partial list of the Disney tentacles to be avoided, unless and until. Otherwise, ladies and gentlemen of the secular West, PABAAH! will have won.
I wish I believed in Hell.
LIMBAUGH: Exactly. Exactly my point! This is no different than what happens at the skull and bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You of heard of need to blow some steam off?
‘Well, I’m back,’ he said.
Okay, so it was only two and a half days in Ocean Shores, Washington. But the Shilo Inn had no wifi and no broadband and none of my dialup numbers was a local phone call away. It was horrible, I’m telling you. Appalling. Unbelievable.
Really. It was. Had to walk on the beach and everything.
(At least the Spouse abided.)
This is what pro-life looks like.
Barry has marshalled the facts and figures to prove what anyone truly committed to reducing the number of abortions performed ought to do: support the full legalization of abortion and liberalize its access. —And taking advantage of the mystic secrets of bloggery, he presents his arguments in two forms: a Catholic version (tailored to the current [atrociously unfair and staggeringly ill-informed] debate on John Kerry’s status as an adherent in good standing to his faith), and a catholic version, for your more general-purpose debating needs. —Yes, Kerry is a bucket of warm spit. Yes, it would be nice if in all this “polarization of the body politic” there were anyone out there who was actually over here with, you know, us, the liberalish other to the left of what anyone with an ounce of perspective would consider the tepidly cautious corporatist center. Yes, it would be fucking wonderful if we all had ponies. But our prisoner’s dilemma has come down to yet another evil of two lessers, and in the final analysis, a douchebag is better than a Coca-Cola douche. Hardly a snappy rallying cry, I know. Lemme give it some thought.
By way of an apology.
I know you told me at one point or another that I had to listen to the Magnetic Fields and I put you off. I know I did. I’ll get around to it, I said. I’ve heard the song about the bunnies; it was funny. I liked it. But I was too busy chasing after the Divine Comedy and Momus which, you know, I’m not going to give up, no, I’m committed, but that was what I was doing instead of going out of my way to track down something by Stephin Merritt, that and you remember the Hindu Love Gods cover of “Raspberry Beret”? I went looking for that, and there was this and that and some other stuff from the largehearted boy, and there was this great sci fi jazz album done by the guy who did the voice for Mr. Ed that Spinooti pointed out, and the wild 5/4 jiggy reel that Fairport Convention does on House Full that I think is “Toss the Feathers” which I’ve now got in a couple of different versions like the one by the Corrs but not that one. Though I did find the song Lindsey Buckingham does that’s in that Northern Exposure episode where the ice breaks, and I found that Joni Mitchell song from Ladies of the Canyon, and the last track from Welcome to the Pleasure Dome was on iTunes, can you believe it? And also I was looking for that song from Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack for The Mission where all the themes come together in this soaringly melancholic thing that Kim and I played over and over again and danced to on top of the tables in the upper lounge of Asia House for no reason now that I can fathom, and I was also looking for the Indigo Girls’ cover of “Tangled Up in Blue,” which I’m blasphemous enough to like even better than the live version Dylan does with the Band, so sue me. But that’s what I was doing instead of hunting down the Magnetic Fields until now, tonight, when I plugged the name into Limewire on a whim, since I do have the song about the bunnies, and it is funny, and here I am now and I’ve played the same four or five songs over and over again for, well, a while now, which is going to fuck up my Audioscrobbler profile, I bet, and anyone who tells you filesharing doesn’t sell records is a goddamn fool, and I’m sorry. You know. When you told me that I should listen to them, I should have listened to you, and I didn’t, not right away. —So when I tell you that you need to listen to the Books and the Aisler’s Set, you have to understand it’s just a start at trying to make it up to you.
Federal Comstock Commission.
“So, can we say ‘suck’?”
That’s what Fresh Air co-executive producer Danny Miller asked attorney Steve Schaffer. Miller was calling because emerging star Nellie McKay uses the word in a song excerpted in the program’s review of her album Get Away From Me.
No, said Schaffer. No “suck.” Though McKay was insulting somebody and not talking about sex, the word’s sexual connections make it a no-no in the new landscape of media regulation. Miller cut out the offending word and spliced it in backwards, leaving alert Fresh Air listeners to wonder why McKay would think something “skcus.”
Schaffer, like many communications lawyers, was wary of the FCC’s rapidly shifting use of indecency and profanity rules, signaled by its March 18 decision on an NBC broadcast of the 2003 Golden Globes.
—“What the #%@& is off-limits now?” Current.org.
If Myra Breckinridge arrived in bookstores in 1968 at a time of cultural and political upheaval in America, Myron came about in 1974 at a time when this upheaval had been muted by a conservative-led malaise. Richard Nixon was president—although soon he would resign in disgrace—and the US Supreme Court had refused to protect the absolute right to publish “obscene” material. Rather, the Court ruled that “community standards” should determine what is obscene. So a book that is perfectly acceptable in one town might be banned in another town.
To combat the Supreme Court’s “mad way with the First Amendment,” Vidal decided to remove the “dirty” words from his book and replace them with “cleaner” ones—the names of the Supreme Court justices who participated in the ruling. Thus “to fuck” becomes “to burger,” after Chief Justice Warren Burger. A “pussy” becomes a “whizzer white,” after Associate Justice Byron White (nicknamed “Whizzer” in college because he was a speedy football star). And a “dick” becomes a “rehnquist,” after William H. Rehnquist, an associate justice in 1974 who became the Courts chief justice in 1986 when Burger retired from the court.
Myron remained in this form for a decade in paperback editions. But in 1985, when Vidal published the two books together as Myra Breckinridge and Myron in a new hardcover edition, he decided that “Myron should conform to Myra.” Thus he removed the “burgers,” “rehnquists” and “whizzer whites” and restored their more graphic anatomical meanings.
—“Myra Breckinridge & Myron: An Introduction,” Harry Kloman.
Plus ça change, I suppose; at least it keeps the printers busy. —We already know what “santorum” is.
So what’s a powell?
Thin blue race.
Portland bloggers Ethan Lindsey and Christopher Frankonis (the One True b!X) are both typing up blow-by-blow coverage of the public inquest into the shooting of James Jahar Perez by Portland police officer Jason Sery. It’s the first such inquest since police officer Gary Barbour applied one of those once-popular “sleeper holds” to Lloyd Stevenson in 1985.
Against the backdrop of Stevenson’s senseless death, two officers spat in the face of a city trying to grapple with these questions. On the very day Stevenson was buried, officers Richard Montee and Paul Wickersham sold as many as 30 T-shirts in the East Precinct parking lot, depicting a smoking gun and emblazoned with the slogan “Don’t Choke ‘Em, Smoke ‘Em,” indicating that they—and the officers who bought the shirts—believed Pantley and Barbour hadn’t erred in killing Stevenson but had erred only in their method.
It’s been just under a year since Kendra James (a worthless waste of a crack-ho whose type comes and goes, apparently) was shot as she attempted to drive away from a routine traffic stop. Tensions were understandably a little enflamed; they’ve roared up again, and again, understandably. The Oregonian has done its part, reminding us with two front-page stories that Officer Sery was “a gentle and patient family man. A spiritual person, dedicated to Christian teachings on morality and compassion. A tireless and inventive cop who is natural at working with the public,” while Perez surprised three scientists selected by the paper to go over the medical examiner’s report, by having “a high level of cocaine in his blood but no sign that his body was metabolizing it. [..]
“I have never seen a case that has that much cocaine and no cocaine metabolites present,” said Washington State Toxicologist Barry Logan.
“A lot of dealers keep their stash in their mouth, and if the cops show up they swallow it,” Logan said. “If he had just swallowed some, and died within a few minutes” those test results might happen, he said.
That level of cocaine in the blood is “extremely high,” [Miami-Dade County toxicologist George] Hime said. “We would normally not associate that amount of cocaine with someone who would be . . . conscious.”
Hime said that “someone under that much influence could be very aggressive, maybe very confused, hyperstimulated.” People generally start feeling effects of cocaine soon after taking the drug, especially if it is smoked or injected.
Of course, they also had to report the fact that only 24 seconds elapsed between Sery’s initial call on the traffic stop, and his call indicating shots had been fired.
Portland police have something of a checkered past when it comes to brutality and the covering up thereof. One of the more recent incidents involved police officers kicking Eunice Crowder, a blind 71-year-old woman, to the ground, pepper-spraying her, and tasering her four times. When her 94-year-old mother tried to rinse the pepper spray from Crowder’s eyesocket, police shoved her against the fence and accused her of planning to use the water as a weapon. The city’s paying Crowder $145,000 because there is a risk that the city might be found liable. No apology is forthcoming. No admission of wrongdoing. As far as the police are concerned, that is how things ought to have gone. —Ditto Kendra James. (Her family has filed a $10 million lawsuit against the city, and rejected a $250,000 settlement offer.)
Ditto, one presumes, so far, James Jahar Perez.
Perez was black, of course. So was Kendra James. So was Lloyd Stevenson. Eunice Crowder’s race isn’t mentioned anywhere, so I’m assuming she’s white. —Of course, she also lived.
Is it trite and simplistic to chalk it all up to racism? Yes, if you think by doing so you’ve diagnosed the problem; on to the slogans! Policing is a dangerous business, and the most innocuous situation can explode without warning into fodder for a Fox special. But to respond by assuming that any deviation from an unknown script, any reaction other than utter and abject submission, is a threat that must be put down with sudden and overwhelming force (with kicks, pepper spray, tasers and gunshots)—it’s destructive, and not just to the bodies of the people subdued. It isolates the police, pulling them out of the community they’re supposed to work with and protect and transforming them into a tribe of their own, one we all fear. When cops sell T-shirts making fun of a Good Samaritan they killed by mistake, when unarmed victims of police shootings are written off as useless crack-heads and acceptable collateral damage, when the only official response to the beating of a 71-year-old blind woman is to insist that’s how things must be, the only sane conclusion to draw is that we’re merrily destroying our village in order to save it.
Of course, to dismiss racism from the picture by presuming police malfeasance affects us all equally would be equally trite and simplistic. To say nothing of naïve. And wrong.
When we (Amp, Elkins, Jenn, Chas, Matt, myself) first moved to Portland back in 1995, we rented a house pretty much on the corner of 25th and Killingsworth—up in “the ’Hood,” some folks called it. (Still call it, despite the gentrification.) Our neighbor to the south was a dealer. Perfectly nice guy as neighbors go. His uncle (I think) had an informal gentlemen’s club he ran out of the garage behind the house, which meant the walls were covered with jazz albums and a couple-three old buddies would sit in recliners in the sun and shoot the shit. His clientele got a little insistently spooky, especially when they’d mistake our house for his. But the biggest nuisance was the cops: cruising slowly down the street at night, shining their spotlights into houses, pounding on his door late at night, knocking on ours (and everyone else’s) to ask us questions about him. Every now and then they’d take out their frustrations by ticketing every parked car they could dredge up a violation for—three tickets in one year we got, and since then? One, I think.
One night coming home from something or other we found squad cars parked at one end of the street and saw cops out on our neighbor’s lawn. One of the cops waved us to a stop, marching toward us, his big flashlight held up over his shoulder, shining into the car. He got one quick look at us—just one—and instantly, his whole demeanor changed. He relaxed. Stopped marching. Smiled. Shrugged a little. Waved us on.
Our neighbors, of course, were black.
We were white.
(Much like the cop. Much like a fair chunk of our neighbor’s clientele. And if one of us had reached for our seatbelt? Wallet? Cell phone? Not that we had cell phones. But. If we had, would we have been shot? Tasered? Pepper-sprayed? —I don’t think so. The cop had sussed out all the pertinent evidence and made his gut call: we were on his side. He was safe.
(So were we.)
Synchrondipity.
Yeah, it’s hardly an original insight, but all in one morning break, it amused. —On the one hand, I stumbled over Esquire’s septuagenarian attempt to figure out the best story they’d published, and while they liked Norman Mailer and Thomas Wolfe and John Sack (who? Oh—), the one that got the nod was Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra has a Cold.”
Yet it would have been unwise for anyone to anticipate his reaction, for he is a wholly unpredictable man of many moods and great dimension, a man who responds instantaneously to instinct—suddenly, dramatically, wildly he responds, and nobody can predict what will follow. A young lady named Jane Hoag, a reporter at Life’s Los Angeles bureau who had attended the same school as Sinatra’s daughter, Nancy, had once been invited to a party at Mrs. Sinatra’s California home at which Frank Sinatra, who maintains very cordial relations with his former wife, acted as host. Early in the party Miss Hoag, while leaning against a table, accidentally with her elbow knocked over one of a pair of alabaster birds to the floor, smashing it to pieces. Suddenly, Miss Hoag recalled, Sinatra’s daughter cried, “Oh, that was one of mother’s favorite …”—but before she could complete the sentence, Sinatra glared at her, cutting her off, and while forty other guests in the room all stared in silence, Sinatra walked over, quickly with his finger flicked the other alabaster bird off the table, smashing it to pieces, and then put an arm gently around Jane Hoag and said, in a way that put her completely at ease, “That’s okay, kid.”
And on the other hand, Friday is Poem in Your Pocket Day. From which I surfed on over to this little W.H. Auden ditty:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
Bowdler old skool.
Thomas Bowdler thought of the children, and rewrote the distressing bits of Shakespeare and the Bible to gentle them for civilized folk. Anthony Comstock, who got his start harassing saloon-keepers who violated Sunday blue laws, made his name by poring through the mails and the penny-dreadful press, confiscating and burning anything obscene. In Saudi Arabia, pseudonymous blogger Alhamedi Alanezi tells us they use magic marker:
One of the few pleasures in life is to go to the larger bookstores here and buy a copy of an English-language newspaper. Usually it’s one of the British papers, occasionally the IHT or USA Today. They come on that very thin airmail paper. And invariably, they’ll contain apparently random splotches of black. Closer inspection reveals that a young western lady was showing some leg or shoulder, but has been “Magic Marker’d” vigorously, and of course it soaks thru the thin paper to obliterate the other side as well. My wife gets especially annoyed because her copy of Good Housekeeping suffers even worse; all those adverts for showers and “ladies’ things”, you can imagine.
So who’s responsible for poring thru the tens of thousands of magazines and papers that come into the country? Well, in the north of Riyadh there is a certain college of theology, the The Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University.
Read, as they say, the whole thing.
I loves me some Spinooti.
Just click through for a burst of Monday-morning joy.
(Camera Obscura is over at Girlamatic now. In case you were wondering. Is it a comic? Oh, go ask Alice or something, I’ve got to get back to work. —Joyfully, though. Thanks, Spinooti!)
In which, out of a desire to leap aboard a train after it has left the station, I cite the Gospel According to Mark.
And he said unto them in his doctrine, Beware of the scribes, which love to go in long clothing, and love salutations in the marketplaces, And the chief seats in the synagogues, and the uppermost rooms at feasts: Which devour widows’ houses, and for a pretence make long prayers: these shall receive greater damnation.
And that is Atrios’s basic point, and it’s a God-damned shame he then has to explain himself at such length. —But since the only King James we have in the house is the Barry Moser, which is big and bulky and almost as much fun to consult as our OED, let’s go ahead and bag another Bible verse, because this, I think, is what Messrs. Drum and Nielsen Hayden and Currie and the Rev. Brill are getting at (if an especial a-theist may be so bold as to quote scripture for his purpose)—
Though I speak with the tongues of men and angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
(Which is not to say one must always have charity at all times. You will slip; it’s to be expected, but not celebrated. —And you can also launch a broadside with charity, and most charitably dismast those who work against you, even burn them down to the waterline, with charity. Why are there no progressive religious voices in the mediasphere? Why has the reflexive definition of “religious” become “fundamentalist”? That’s the nut to crack. Everything else is just a game of let’s you and him fight.)
Negative space,
or, Why I don’t trust æsthetes.
Which is funny, y’know, since I’ll forgive an artist almost anything if they can give me a clean pure hit of what it is I’m jonesing for. —This has been kicking around the back of my brain for over a week or so, ever since Miriam swore off Orson Scott Card, books unread. (And that has been kicking around for a while—ever since at least that Salon interview, y’know?) A discussion spawned; hell, a discussion went on a mad bender and woke up the next morning in Tijuana with a donkey because, you know, politics and art, and so trying to keep track of it all goes rapidly by the board. And anyway, the sort of person who says things like—
I’m perfectly willing to accept the label of “æsthete,” although I know it’s meant to be a term of horrible abuse. Speaking as one of these aberrant creatures, I will state categorically that my expectation that art will be “æsthetic” has no political content at all. None. It’s not a disdain for politics, just a recognition that politics and æsthetics aren’t the same thing. I have political views about politics and æsthetic views about art. You can mix the two if you wish, but don’t tell me that in refusing to do so I’m doing it anyway. And I don’t have any political views that are covert or unconscious. They’re all out in the open (in the appropriate forum), and I happen to feel strongly about them. The assertion that they must be unconscious is just Freudianism smuggled into politics.
—keeps showing up, and I end up shrugging and walking away, because, you know, it’s a perfectly alien point of view; I’m sure he’s a nice chap, puts his pants on just the same as anybody else, loves his significant others and doesn’t kick dogs in public, but what are you going to do? How can you respond?
Well, a couple of ways. First, you can point out that science fiction is largely a fiction of setting: the bulk of the iceberg that’s unseen, underwater, is the act of world-building, and in that act, politics is paramount. (One is building a polis, after all.) (Oh, hey, look! World-building again!) —Therefore, it’s all-too-appropriate to keep in mind an author’s politics when considering their science fiction: an author who, say, considers homosexuality to be an aberration, is un- (or perhaps less) likely to build a world that would appeal to a reader who does not. There’s an assumption clash: one of his fundamental, foundational bedrocks is abhorrent to me, and vice-versa.
One can respond: well, yes, but there’s nothing about aberrant homosexuality in Ender’s Game, so how can it clash? Heck, there’s nothing in that book about homosexuality at all! And I will resist the urge to say oh, you think so? and I will even resist the urge to say precisely! (It profits us not to contemplate the implications conscious or otherwise of Spartanly sexless boys playing at war; we will be accused of reading into the text that which manifestly is not there, and again we would have to say oh, you think so? and precisely! and it gets us right back to who’s on fucking first.) —Instead, I’ll allow as how there’s frequently large gaps in the jerry-rigged polis left as exercises for the reader: one can hardly describe every kitchen sink, after all; one must make assumptions, and count on the reader doing likewise (which among other reasons is why fan fiction [and slash fiction] is so popular in science fiction). But that’s precisely why when those assumptions suddenly clash, it’s unsettling, even violently dissonant; as an admittedly extreme example, it’s why Bill Lind’s militant musings are either utopia or unthinkable hell, with very little room in the middle for a take-it-or-leave-it reading.
But Lind’s polemicising; it’s the sort of political art Green is dismissing above, when he thinks he’s dismissing the point of view that says all art is political. Politics as she is spoke is just another map: it’s what we say is our understanding of how we all get along with each other, and as with anything we say, we lie, we cheat, we fuck it up, we contradict ourselves, we project and dissemble and misspeak. Art is one of the ways we get over ourselves: this is what we mean when we twitter on about fundamental truths and the like. We all have a little polemicist in us, some more, some less, and if it ever comes to a fight between the author and the polemicist I’m going to root for the author every time, and this is why you can read and enjoy and fiercely love art created by artists whose politics you abhor.
But that’s hardly accepting the term “æsthete,” and recognizing that politics and æsthetics aren’t the same thing is hardly asserting that never the twain shall meet. To so rigidly divide politics from art, to blind oneself so willfully to the political connotations and consequences of art, is as short-sighted and foolish as to insist that all art must agree with one’s own politics or forever be damned. Miriam isn’t looking to validate her world-view, after all; she just wants a pleasant reading experience (for several values of “pleasant”), and she thinks such a blatantly homophobic author as Card is less likely to provide that experience, and so why bother? Thus does she winnow her chaff. (And anyway, there’s some nice socialist realist stuff out there. Recontextualize it; you’ll see what I mean.)
But what I really wanted to do before I went on too long was quote some Delany, and so that’s what I’m going to do, dammit, at the risk of landing us right back on first again: I love my significant others, after all, and I know how to put my pants on both legs at once, and I never kick dogs in public, but this, this—
...for the poststructuralist critic, this oppositional tale between thematics and deconstruction is an old story. It is the story of two opposing forces whose right and proper relation is one of hierarchy, of subordination, of supplementarity. It is the story of the battle of the sexes, the antagonism between man and woman whose right and proper positionality is for woman to stand beside, behind, and to support man. It is the story of the essential opposition between white and black whose proper resolution is for black to provide the shadows and foreground the highlights for white, for black to work for white. It is the story of evil that finds its place in adding only the smallest of necessary spices to a pervasive, essential good. It is the story of nature and her cup-bearer, the primitive, posing a bit of relief for the rigors of civilization and its flag-waver, culture. It is the Other as the locus, as the position, as the place where the all-important Self can indulge in a bit of projection (i.e., can throw something forward into the place of the Other—or simply hurl things at the Other). It is the story in which the frail, fragile, and erring body is properly (as property, as an owned place) a vessel for the manly, mighty, and omnipresent mind; where masturbation (or, indeed, homosexuality or any of the other “perversions”) is a fall-back only when right and authentic heterosexuality is not available; where the great, taxing, but finally rich literary tradition, with its entire academically established and supported canon, occasionally allows us to give place for a moment to those undemanding (because they are without the power to demand) diversions (those objects we find when we turn from our right place of traditional responsibility) of paraliterary production—mysteries, comics, pornography, and science fiction. It is the story where the conscious and self-conscious subject occasionally discovers (i.e., uncovers the place of) certain inconsequential, or even interesting, slips of the tongue or sudden jokes that can be explained away by an appeal to an unconscious that is little more than a state of inattention. It is the story of the thinking, speaking, acting subject for whom the way to consider objects is as extension, property, tool; of presences merely outlined and thrown into relief by the otherwise secondary absences about them; of the authoritative voice that knows and speaks the truth, prompted by a bit of suspect writing whose proper use is only as an aid to memory; of primary creative work that, from time to time, may rightly, if respectfully, be approached through some secondary critical act; of the mad who can be heard to mention as they shamble past a few amusing or even shocking truths, here and there among their mutterings—truth that, alas, only the sane can really appreciate.
And you might say, why, that’s riddled with nothing but political assumptions! And I’d say, oh, you think so? And I’d say, precisely!
In other comics news.
Well. That last bit ended up somewhat more… messianic than I’d expected. Um. Anyway, I wanted to note a couple of other things:
- 24 April is 24-Hour Comics Day. What is a 24-hour comic, you ask? Simple. Sit down with 24 pieces of paper and a marker. Eyeball the clock. Start writing and drawing a 24-page comic book. 24 hours later, stop. There you go. Scott McCloud invented them back in the day, and they’re one of those things everybody should do at least once, like skydiving, or dropping acid: it’s a kick-ass shamanic rush. (See also: 24-hour plays.) —The Spouse has a bit more information; I’ll join her in saluting old friend Paul Winkler for making it into the seminal 24-hour comics anthology that marks the occasion.
- Barry’s going to be doing a weekly strip for Girlamatic called Hereville. Hey—we all loved his political cartoons, but the man is a storyteller, first and foremost, so yay! It starts 6 May—sign up now, and tell ’em Barry sent you! (Or Jenn, if you like. Or just catch the free page every week, if you don’t want to pony up the $2.95. Cheapskate.)
- Jenn’s finishing up the third chapter of Dicebox this week. Two years, three chapters done, and the prologue’s over; now, she says, the main story can begin. —Well. After a bit of a break. Chris Baldwin—who’s currently trying to launch his unutterably charming daily strip, Little Dee, will be doing a back-up Molly and Griffen strip for a couple of weeks, to give Jenn some time to rest and recoup. (Which is good. I’ve missed her.)
