Is That Supposed to be Funny?

It’s time to take on the New Yorker cartoon contest (and I don’t mean with alliteration). I’m certainly not the first—or last—person to do this. When I googled “New Yorker cartoon caption,” the second entry, under the New Yorker website itself, was this: “Every week, the New Yorker has a caption contest. Every week, it would be way funnier if they just talked about sucking dick. By Nate Heller & Emily Heller.”

For example:

"I made this wall so we have a place to hang those artsy photos we took of you sucking my dick."

On the other hand, the caption my son Max and I came up with was this:

“I couldn’t find an iron curtain.”

Succinct, subtle, allusively political, brilliant, no? The three finalists: “Which kid do you want?”; “I think we should stop seeing each other?”; and “Happy anniversary!” Pedestrian, trite, unimaginative, yes?”

Film critic Roger Ebert once complained that he submitted approximately 2,000 (or some such outrageous number) captions before one of his was chosen. I’m sure there are many Roger Eberts out there who ask themselves, on a weekly basis when their cartoon isn’t chosen, “What the f*#! do they want” and “Who the f*#! chooses the winner??!!”

I was going to ask the New York Times a similar questions last year about the couples who appear in Weddings in the Sunday Styles section but someone else beat me to it. This is what she/he asked the Public Editor: “How do editors select which announcements to publish, and why don’t editors make a sustained effort to include different types of couples?”

The editor answered that essentially those who are profiled are the ones who manage to make their way out of the herd and end up at the “top of their medical school class at Yale or Stanford.” I proceeded to write a profile on my blog, Unf*#!ing Believable, of a couple who defined a different kind of achievement, and thoroughly enjoyed my endeavor.

I’m assuming most of us who submit these “Succinct, subtle, allusively political, brilliant” captions think that the opposite criterion, i.e, “in the herd,” applies to the New Yorker contest. So I’m inviting all of you who want to express a different kind of achievement than what gets chosen for the cartoon caption to submit your “Succinct, subtle, allusively political, brilliant”—or whatever— caption to my blog. Send it to kmatthews1018@gmail.com and if it’s fit to print—and funnier than “suck my dick”—I’ll post it on my blog for my many (not!) loyal readers to enjoy.

New York, New York, It Used to be a Wonderful Town . . .

Every few days there’s an article or essay in the media about why someone is thinking about leaving New York City, why they’ve already left, or why they think their friends should leave. This is nothing new: the complaining has been going on for years, but at first, when the wealthy pushed out the poor, people said, well, maybe it’s not so bad, now there won’t be as much crime and I won’t have to feel guilty about all the homeless sleeping on the streets. Now that the wealthy have succeeded in pushing out the middle class, the complaining has gotten louder.

I decided to go see the city for myself on what I figured would be my last visit. Mark’s uncle Bernie, the “favorite” uncle, died at the end of the summer after suffering many years with Alzheimer’s. His daughter, Marian, who lives in Los Angeles, and his son Jamie, who still lives in Greenwich Village, asked the family to meet in NYC for an informal memorial: spread Bernie’s ashes, talk about our relationships with him, and have a party with some of his former colleagues and students (he was a professor of psychology at New York University).

The last time Mark and I had been in New York was to see Marian and Jamie’s mother Lorrie, who was dying of lung cancer. Bernie had already been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and Lorrie was heroically trying to get him into an assisted living facility before she died. If that wasn’t depressing enough for Mark, just walking from 22^th Street, where Bernie and Lorrie lived, down to Jamie’s condo on 10^th street, was more than he could handle. (Bernie and Lorrie had only recently moved to their overpriced apartment on 22^th Street after he retired and they were forced to vacate their NYU apartment on Bleecker Street.) None of the ethnic restaurants Mark used to frequent were still there. None of the record stores or bookstores were still there (not that they’re anywhere). New dorms and office buildings owned by NYU towered over the apartments where lower and middle class people used to live.

Mark was born in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg. While his family moved out of the city when he was very young, he came back often to visit his grandmother, who remained in Williamsburg, to visit Bernie and Lorrie in the Village, and to briefly live on 2^nd Street between Avenue A and B, the lower east side. Those were the days when bathtubs were still in the kitchen and Thompson Square Park was the center of the heroin trade. How he ended up in rural New Mexico is a story unto itself, but he observed the changes to the city on his forays back and joined the chorus of complainers lamenting its lost soul.

So I knew my visit was going to be a bag of mixed emotions, and it was. Getting there set the tone: my early morning flight out of Albuquerque was cancelled and while running to get on another flight I left my cell phone on the TSA conveyor belt. Ten or twenty years ago, flying all over the country or to Mexico or Europe, I managed to do just fine with no cell phone. This time, I panicked. The phone numbers of everyone I was meeting in NYC were in my phone and I knew none of them by heart. Fortunately, I do know my kids’ phone numbers so when I got to Phoenix (I know, I was going the wrong direction) the airline let me use a courtesy phone and I called Jakob, who called Max, and they called and e-mailed Marian and my brother-in-law Mike to let them know I was going to be late.

It took me two hours to get from JFK airport via bus and cab, to Spring Street, in Soho, where we had rented an AirBnB. If you had asked me what an AirBnB was a year ago, I might have guessed it was some kind of gun that shoots air instead of BBs? (Which would have been a nice switch for the Florida State University football players who’ve been running around shooting real BBs at people and property.) But now I know it’s an apartment that Marian had rented online, to house Mike, his partner Betty, Marian and me during our stay in the city. It was actually quite lovely, just below street level, fully furnished with two bedrooms, large living room, kitchen, and bathroom, except that the toilet didn’t flush all that well, there was no hot water in the kitchen, and on Friday and Saturday nights, our first two there, every hipster in Soho was out partying. Marian and I, trying to sleep in the rooms closest to the street, ended up wearing our iPod ear buds with pillows over our heads (after dropping a few Valium as well).

Was it really that long ago that the streets of Soho or Noho or Lodo—I have no idea what distinguishes these neighborhoods from one another—were lined with factory warehouses sheltering a few galleries and lofts where struggling painters set up shop? People were already starting to complain of gentrification back then, but my friend Lucy Lippard got a great deal on a loft that, if I recall correctly, cost under $10,000.

There was a real estate office a couple of doors down from our apartment. As out-of-towners are wont to do, we looked at the prices of places listed in the window. Now, I remember being flabbergasted by prices in Telluride, Colorado, and Point Reyes, California, but let me tell you that in the Spring Street window there was no listing for anything less than a million dollars. Actually, the lowest price there was $1.4 million for a 450 square-foot condo. Four hundred and fifty square feet. That’s the size of my living room in El Valle.

Onward to Brooklyn.

 Bernie grew up in an apartment on Driggs Avenue, in Williamsburg. On Saturday we took the subway into Brooklyn and found the apartment, still there although no doubt renovated, at the juncture of what appeared to be a Latino neighborhood and the beginnings of gentrified Williamsburg. As we walked further along we entered a re-creation of Soho: bars, restaurants, twenty and thirty somethings out on the street partying down. At a bar we bought cocktails for $13 and small, finger foods for significantly more. It all tasted great, which it better, in what must be a cutthroat market.

Bernie and Lorrie first lived together in Crown Heights, on the far side of Prospect Park from Park Slope, headquarters of the baby industrial complex and the authorial Jonathans. That’s where we headed on Sunday, to scatter Bernie’s ashes comingled with some of Lorrie’s that their kids had held onto. The scene in the park could have been anywhere USA: ducks begging for handouts from kids on shore; couples holding hands; joggers with kids and dogs. When I’m in these environments, though, full of people who obviously have lots of money, I wonder who they are, how they got there, and what they have to do to stay there. One of the complainers who wrote an editorial in the Daily News had a different take, however: The ones jogging in the park and feeding the ducks are probably doing the only fun things they can afford instead of going to Yankee Stadium or Madison Square Garden or the Met or out to eat because all their money goes towards paying their rent and buying food.

We ended the day at a lovely Italian restaurant that Bernie and Lorrie used to frequent, around the corner from their apartment on Bleecker. There, colleagues and former students told stories and shared memories, and the family sat around afterwards with our own stories. The trip home wasn’t much easier than the one going, but the cab driver who took me to Grand Central Station to catch the bus to JFK found out I was from a rural village in New Mexico and asked me all kinds of questions about what it was like: Did I grow things, did I have animals, how many people lived in my village, etc. And every time I answered he sighed and said, “Oh, that’s so nice,” or “Oh, I wish I could live there.” I asked him how long he’d been in New York: 40 years he said.

I had to wait until the next day to get my phone back from the TSA people who had it at their headquarters in Albuquerque. Then I drove home, and as the cab driver had put it so simply, it’s so nice—damn nice—to be in El Valle.

“Get out of the new one [road] if you can’t lend a hand for the times they are a changin’ . . . .”

I’m bombarded daily by e-mails from the Democrats—Tom Udall, Barbara Lee, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi—asking me for 5, 10, or 25 dollars to fund their “Paint the South Blue Program” or fend off the Republicans who are targeting Udall as “one of the most vulnerable senators,” although I suspect a majority of New Mexicans don’t even know the name of his Republican opponent (Allen Weh). The e-mails convey a sense of desperation—I’m scared of a Tea Party takeover myself—but there’s also a strong component of righteousness: we’re the good guys and we’re going to do the right thing.

But Udall has come under some heavy criticism lately for his position on Israel—uncritical support—and his promotion of nuclear weapons production at Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories. Not surprisingly, the La Jicarita article I wrote on the Santa Fe protest at Senator Udall’s new office on August 2 generated more comments than any other posting on our website. All of the commenters are appalled by the devastation of the Israeli attack on Gaza; most of them also agree that protesting the assault is a moral imperative (Zionists either don’t read La Jicarita or don’t want to waste their breath). What they don’t agree on, however, is what kind of protests they should be, what kind of strategies and tactics are most effective, and what constitutes private property or open meetings.

At the Santa Fe protest Udall’s staff, in reaction to the morning’s protest at his office in Albuquerque during which some folks inside loudly voiced their disgust with Israel, was on high alert at the union building that houses the office. They asked everyone to sign in and at first told activists that they couldn’t distribute any literature regarding the assault on Gaza. That limitation then morphed into telling demonstrators that they couldn’t come in the building at all, that it was “private property.” Jeff Haas, one of the organizers, was allowed to read a statement from the podium but only before Udall and Senator Al Franken, a well-known Israeli supporter who I assume was either chosen as a fund raising partner before the anti-Israeli demonstrations heated up or, more cynically, because of his Zionism, showed up. Democratic solidarity must reign in the presence of the senators. However, the jeering and booing that emanated from the audience when demonstrators tried to interrupt Udall and Franken during their speeches revealed how tenuous that solidarity is between progressives and party stalwarts over Israel.

I’ve always had a cordial relationship with Udall—Mark and I interviewed him several times for La Jicarita and worked with his New Mexico staff on land grant and acequia issues. But at the protest I felt compelled to get his attention and confront him about the complicity of the senate in arming Israel. I had no desire to be “polite,” as some commenters believe the protesters should have been. I finally pushed my way to the front where he was shaking hands with constituents—and listening to a few others who also wanted to talk about Gaza—and got his attention:

Tom: Hi, Kay, how are you doing?

Me: Why won’t you have a dialogue about what’s happening in Gaza?

Tom: We are talking about it.

Me: When?

Tom: With our constituents who we meet around the state and who come to the office.

Me: We’ve come to your office. Why aren’t you having a conversation here, with us?

He moved on to the next person.

I’ve also been after him about his calculated support of the nuclear mission at LANL and Sandia. In an August 25 e-mail his office sent me there’s a picture of him sitting at Sandia with Senator Richard Durbin, who chairs the Defense Appropriation Subcommittee, talking about their support of the B61 Life Extension Project, a GPS guided 50-kiloton mini-nuke bomb that is, as he calls it, “important for our national security.” They also talked about the great “tech transfer” programs at the labs that will supposedly create businesses and high tech jobs in New Mexico.

An article in the Santa Fe New Mexican during the same week talks about the push to increase the production of plutonium pits, the triggers for our stockpile of nuclear bombs, from 30 to 80 by 2030. After Rocky Flats near Denver, Colorado was shut down in1989 the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which runs the nuclear labs for the Department of Energy, has looked to LANL as the only possible site to produce the pits, even though its primary function has been research and development and it lacks a facility large enough—and more importantly, safe enough—to manufacture such an increase in pits (between 2007 and now 30 pits have been produced). La Jicarita has covered the abysmal history of the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Nuclear Facility, originally intended to house the production, which was finally put on hold after a cost overrun of billions of dollars and concerns about the seismic potential of the Pajarito Plateau, where LANL is situated. The NNSA now wants to use an unnamed modern pit facility that consists of tunnels from the plutonium facility (PF4) to the Radiation Lab (RULAB), from which six or eight small labs and workrooms will branch off.

Greg Mello of the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) wasn’t “polite” in his pointed debunking of the longstanding claim of politicos that without LANL’s economic engine New Mexico would grind to a halt. We’ve been stalled for years even with the billions of federal pork flowing into the labs:

“As lab spending rose over three decades, the state’s relative income rank fell dramatically. Over seven decades, there has been no major “tech transfer” from the labs here, especially from Los Alamos National Laboratory. Our economic potential is now limited by our human development policy failures, exemplified by Udall’s choice to promote nuclear weapons at the expense of human and environmental needs. Unless we change those priorities, why would any (non-exploitative) business locate here?” (See LASG’s July 2006 analysis Does Los Alamos National Lab Help or Hurt the New Mexico Economy?”.) 

While most of Congress is hopeless on the issues of Palestine and nuclear weapons production, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be out there confronting politicians like Udall, whose reelection is a given. He could step out from under the cudgel of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose formally bi-partisan flow of money on Capital Hill now flows to the right as it allies with the Likud Party in Israel, and as the senior senator from New Mexico he could push mission change at the labs. 

Let’s not spend any more time arguing over “being polite,” “not pissing people off,” “not creating a backlash.” Night after night the protesters in Ferguson, Missouri stayed in the streets to vent their anger and frustration at the killing of the unarmed teenager Michael Brown and night after night the police department met them in camouflage with tanks and assault rifles and tear gas and rubber bullets. Protesters in Albuquerque faced off against the same militarized police force on the streets and their administrative enablers in the city’s offices to decry the use of unnecessary force on the citizen population (for those of you who haven’t heard, the bogus felony battery charge against protester David Correia, my co-editor at La Jicarita, has been dismissed). Other acts of police violence have been protested and posted on Internet sites across the county. Finally, a conversation has begun about the American militarization of the police that began in the 1970s and has escalated today to epic proportions: millions of dollars worth of surplus military equipment from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan given to police departments; soldiers trained to use this equipment to shoot and kill a foreign enemy are now police officers who see American citizens as the enemy.

It’s extremely hard to maintain the momentum these kinds of movements require to remain effective. If you’re not prepared to join in the struggles—in the multitude of forms they may take—don’t sabotage them with internecine bickering. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, just get out of the way.

Rocky Mountain High, Colorado

I just spent a week in Colorado driving around, visiting friends, experiencing the Rocky Mountain high. My impression? Too much of everything: water (I’ll explain this in a minute); traffic; bikers; hikers; rafters; ATVers; tourists; pot (there’s a glut).  Welcome to the capital of eco-entertainment bourgeois consumerism.

I started out in Cañon City, which may be best known for its prison fortresses, state and federal, where both New Mexico’s Manny Aragon did his time and the Unibomber is still doing time. But it’s the mighty Arkansas River that is the real distinguisher. The river’s irrigation system, which winds throughout the entire area, used to water fields of alfalfa and grains, orchards and vegetables, but now flows in little canals along the streets in front of houses, and everyone who lives in those houses has a water right and an irrigation pump. I’ve never seen so many green lawns in my life. When I arrived the temperature was 99 degrees and it hadn’t rained much all summer, but the river was still running high from winter snow melt and the pumps were busily delivering it to the grass.

The other ubiquitous water use in Cañon City is recreational: running rivers in large inflatable rafts, plastic kayaks, fiberglass kayaks, inflatable kayaks, inner tubes, etc. From its headwaters in Leadville, Colorado through Buena Vista (which the locals pronounce “Byewna” Vista), Salida, the Royal Gorge, to Cañon City these rafters infuse money into the economy, traffic onto the highways, and bodies in the river: there have been 10 deaths so far this year on the Arkansas. 

The Arkansas Valley through Cañon City would be the perfect place to create George Sibley’s “post-urban” culture or “basin-centric cultures capable of watering and feeding themselves” that I wrote about in La Jicarita on July 17. It’s not too late for Cañon City folks to replace their lawns with vegetable gardens and berry bushes; fortunately, the real estate developers are not knocking down the door and the rural nature of the community remains intact. Coupled with the money generated from rafting and tourism, maybe the economic base is there. Beware the real estate developers in the front range cities, however; I suspect they will always see water as commodity for sale to the highest bidder.

In Leadville, the rafting business, along with four-wheel drive tours, bike competitions, and mountain climbing have transformed the old mining town into a tourist haven of renovated buildings full of restaurants, bars, and boutiques. A lot has changed since my El Valle neighbors lived there many years ago to work in the silver, lead, and molybdenum mines in the mid-1900s. There is also a large Hispano population in the area, immigrants who commute to Vail, over two mountain passes, to work in the ski and summer resort industry. When I stopped to gas up in Leadville, which I passed through at the end of my trip, I heard Spanish being spoken for the first time since I’d left New Mexico.

After visiting my sister in Colorado Springs, that bastion of family values, I drove north on I-25 towards Denver. Fortunately, my friend who lives up Boulder Canyon in Rollinsville, told me about a bypass around Denver. But that didn’t save me. From the Springs north to Castle Rock, which is located in Douglas County (I recall that it was the fastest growing county in the U.S. for awhile), traffic was bumper to bumper on a Saturday—no accidents, no road work, both sides of the highway. What were all these people from the Springs and Denver doing out there? Escaping their urban confines to recreate . . . in Castle Rock? Shopping at Ikea, one friend suggested.

I finally made it to Rollinsville, which sits right in the middle of Rocky Mountain high country; Rocky Mountain National Park is just a few miles away and the Indian Peak Wilderness and Eldora Ski area are 15 minutes down the road. Some new recreationists have recently joined the bicyclists, skiers, runners, and mountain climbers: Black Hawk and Central City, former mining towns half an hour away, are now home to gambling casinos. 

Rollinsville also sits right in the middle of a lodge pole pine forest that is being ravaged by the pine beetle. The previous decade’s forest fires caused last year’s floods to wipe out entire mountainsides and houses in Lyons, Ward, Estes Park, and Jamestown. These communities are mostly home to urban commuters who work in Boulder and Denver (the hippies are still there, though, in Ward and Nederland) but recreate at home. The commuter traffic up and down Boulder Canyon is phenomenal, particularly in the winter. When the floods hit the canyon last year and caused its shutdown, commuters had to find alternative routes through other dangerous, beetle infested canyons that may be the next to flood.

The recreational traffic is also phenomenal. When we went out to hike in the Indian Peaks Wilderness area we had to navigate entrances guarded by officials in orange vests with notebooks issuing permits and directing us to a parking area that would have added a mile to our hike. My savvy hiking friend lied and told the guards she was only dropping me off and drove through the barrier. We found a parking space someone had just vacated.

When I complained to her that I hated all the regulation and permitting required to go for a simple hike in the woods, she remarked that if they didn’t control the traffic the place would be overrun with cars trying, just like us, to get to where they want to go. There are hundreds of thousands of recreationists from Boulder and Denver, as well as locals, using these trails every weekend.

In part three of his series on the politics of sustainability, La Jicarita editor David Correia explored what he calls “bourgeois primitivism,” a “magic act . . . to fashion forms of consumption that appear to reduce environmental impact without requiring any sacrifice of class-based luxuries.” Or, “environmentalism as self-improvement via an urban lifestyle.” In the world of recreation, this translates to driving many miles over paved roads to participate in a bike ride over mountain passes, raft a river, or run the Leadville ultra-marathon. It also translates into an enormous amount of money spent on high tech bikes, kayaks, skis, jeeps, and ATVS.

In a recent High Country News article, “The Death of Backpacking,” Christopher Ketchem talks about finding it increasingly difficult to find anyone to go backpacking with him. There’s no one under 40, which is his own age, willing to join him in that “wretched fun.” Instead, what he finds are “gearheads,” or those who are out there trying out the latest technological toys—daypacks, bikes, carabiners, rafts—on day trips that have comfortable beds and beer instead of tents and freeze dried food at the end of the day. That’s where the money is: lots of mechanical stuff to purchase and maintain, apps to guide you to that equipment, paid professionals to guide you on the actual adventure, and motels and resorts to rest your body.

So, my final assessment? I’m glad to be back in New Mexico where there are fewer people, no 14,000-foot peaks, more funky soul. But we’re headed in the same direction as Colorado: water brokers keep trying to move water to Santa Fe and Albuquerque to underwrite growth; city fathers want to expand the Taos airport to shuttle in more people to Taos Ski Valley (recently bought by billionaire Colorado hedge fund and real estate developer Louis Bacon) and Santa Fe’s eco-bourgeoisie are just the latest manifestation of colonialism. Fortunately, however, by the time the b and b’s reach El Valle, I’ll be dead.

Fun and Fear at the Baseball Stadium

My son Max and I went to the Isotopes game on Saturday night of the 4^th of July weekend; the stadium was packed. Unfortunately, there was a game delay because of rain in the 4^th inning and we left; fortunately, our tickets were a gift.

It’s the story of what happened while we were leaving that I want to tell. First, let me set the stage. When we entered the stadium, a little after the game started, we had to walk around a group of about eight Albuquerque Police Department cops who were standing in a line a few yards in from the gate, doing nothing except talking and laughing with each other. Max and I figured they were there for “crowd control,” which will become a very ironic supposition as this story progresses.

I was feeling like an ice cream so we walked along the mezzanine where all the food booths sell every kind of fast food—and beer—you can imagine: hot dogs, pizza,  cotton candy, etc. When I finally spotted what I thought was ice cream I saw that it was made up of some weird kind of colored dots that looked like sprinkles, dubbed “Dippin’ Dots.” I declined. Just imagine if those food booths had been in India or Palestine or Mexico: tandoori chicken or curried rice; lamb kebobs or humus; tacos al pastor or guacamole. You know, tasty, healthy (in my humble opinion), real food.

In our seats, ice-cream-less, the view of the Sandias was spectacular but I couldn’t help reflecting on what the stadium was like 25 years ago when we went to see the Albuquerque Dukes. All the parents with little kids sat up in the bleachers and looked down on the seats with backs where the leisured class paid a whopping ten bucks to sit; we paid three or four. The kids ran around the bleachers playing and tracking down the snow cone man while we drank the beer we brought to the game in our backpacks before Homeland Security invaded our privacy. When the Dukes came off the field after the game the kids were there hanging over the railing next to the dugout waiting for autographs, which the Dodger farm team players, many of whom later became famous, graciously supplied. 

Back to 2014. We had just settled into the flow of the game when the rain began. The officials quickly called a rain delay and the workers laid out the plastic rain tarp over the field. Max and I got up, along with just about everyone else in our section, and climbed the stairs to the covered mezzanine where we all stood around trying to decide, as The Clash put it, “should we stay or should we go.” After a few minutes of this indecision we realized we’d better start heading for the stadium exit in case we decided on the “we should go” part of the equation. But then we realized that getting to that gate was not going to be easy, partly because everyone else was milling around, undecided as well. And the crush of people kept swelling with more undecideds coming up from their seats as the rain intensified.

Suddenly we snapped: this scenario could be a set up for the ones you always hear about in soccer stadiums when suddenly people trample each other to get out the gate. Already, a woman came pushing through the crowd, followed by her children, saying “I’m going to be sick” and we went right after her, Max leading the way (he’s a big guy from all his weight lifting), me holding on, saying, “If I die I bequeath everything I own to you and Jakob (my other son). Sell the house and split the proceeds.”

There wasn’t a cop in sight, either in the crush of humanity or at the exit gate, doing “crowd control.” We finally burst out the gate into the rain. As we walked toward the parking lot several ambulances came careening down the street. I never found out if they were there for injuries people may have sustained in that crush, but what I’d really like to know is just what the fuck those cops were doing during that scary time. Or then again, maybe their absence was a blessing; we’re all more afraid of what they’re capable of doing—lasers, batons, guns—than we are of the scary situations.

Play That Rock Guitar

I was walking down the corridor to the common room in North Hall at Antioch College when I first heard the opening guitar strain of "Gimme Shelter" and I thought, “Oh my god, what is this music?” Years later, Mark and I were driving down the highway in northern California when “The Sultans of Swing” came on the radio and we said to each other, “Who is this, is this Dylan?” and then we heard Mark Knoefler’s guitar riff and we said, “This is not Dylan.”

At the Sunshine Theater in Albuquerque we danced in our seats as Buddy Guy danced down the aisle with his guitar. And there was the sad day when we came out of San Pedro Parks Wilderness and heard on the truck radio—over and over—the soulful licks of Stevie Ray Vaughn. We turned to each other and said: “Oh, no, he’s dead.”   

A couple of weeks ago in the New York Times Magazine  Saul Austertliz wrote about the current phenomenon in music criticism called “poptimism,” the term used to counterpoint “rockism”: “disco, not punk; pop, not rock; synthesizers, not guitars; the music video, not the live show. It is to privilege the deliriously artificial over the artificially genuine.” Austerliz, a music critic himself, explains that other critics have bought into poptimism to not only be in touch with “the taste of average music fans” but to atone for their past mistakes of buying into white male rockers who basically stole their licks from black blues and soul music.

But I have to say, bless you, Saul Austerlitz. I’m a child of the sixties who is guilty as charged: I love punk; rock; guitars; live shows. But I also I love Marvin Gaye, Martha Reeves and Little Richard as much as I love Bob Dylan, Janice Joplin, and the Rolling Stones (not such a fan of the Boss, who he places in this cohort). There weren’t just “white” guitars, remember: we had B.B., Buddy, and Jimi.

Austerliz describes a music critic retracting his initial disappointment with Beyoncé’s new album saying “If you don’t like the new Beyoncé album, re-evaluate what you want out of music.” I think Beyoncé could be an Aretha or Patti LaBelle in another time and space but I’m not going to reevaluate the lousy records she makes now.

Indie rock, jazz, regional American music—not part of a “poptimism” that Austerliz suspects is actually an attempt to “resurrect a unified cultural mainstream” that those of us who are, need I say, old, once shared. I still listen to jazz (Charles Lloyd and Bill Frisell live in Santa Fe–wow!), Texas blues, and world beat along with my compadres, my “shared musical mainstream” who remain open to anything else we deem good (how about Amy Winehouse and Alabama Shakes?).

Finally, though, I have to disagree with Austerliz’s contention that “poptimism” only applies to the world of music, not that of literature and movies. A recent article in the New Yorker reminds us that techies are too busy making money to read books or magazines other than TechCrunch. And in a New York Times “Vision of the Future” graphic one of the interviewees lists the Professions of the Past:“Higher education” and “Diamond mining.” Jeez, we get to liberate both body and mind in the pursuit of our highest calling: capitalism.

Orwell Lives

Not surprisingly, there has been a resurgence of interest in George Orwell. But actually it began long before the release of the NSA documents. My favorite provocateur Christopher Hitchens, who never really lost interest in George, wrote a book, Why Orwell Matters, in which he sets up Orwell as the bulwark against postmodern relativism. Adam Hochschild wrote a homage to Homage to Catalonia in the New York Review of Books, reexamining Orwell’s participation in the Spanish Civil War and his commitment to the social revolution in Catalonia, crushed by the Soviet Union.

And then there’s Edward Snowden. In a Christmas message recorded in Russia he says the massive spying by the NSA was far beyond the thought police described in Orwell’s 1984: “The types of collection in the book — microphones and video cameras, TVs that watch us — are nothing compared to what we have available today. . . . A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalysed thought. And that's a problem because privacy matters, privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be." Read more here. 

Coincidentally, I was rereading 1984 and the day after I heard Snowden on the Internet I read this passage in the book:

“By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act, and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking. Even the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages was tolerant by modern standards. Part of the reason for this was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.”

While the methods have become more efficient, both Orwell and Snowden decry the “watching,” which translates into the loss of privacy and the manipulation of public opinion. But who exactly is doing the watching? Is Orwell’s Big Brother the same as the NSA? According to the French philosopher Saint-Simon, any differences are negligible as they’re both members of the technocratic elite who must govern the rest of the masses (there’s some Nietzsche here, too), the low class illiterates, incapable of improving their lot. This “double morality” of Utopian socialism is the only way to progress, to be well governed. While Orwell’s rendering of this kind of governing in 1984 is truly chilling, the NSA’s gross surveillance is also Saint-Simon’s philosophy in action, just other form: corporations, the military industrial complex, and the state using technology to protect us, not from terrorists, but from ourselves.

Knowing what happens to Winston when he rebels against the Party in 1984 it’s no wonder Snowden fled the U.S. once he released the documents revealing the extent of the NSA surveillance. Ironically sequestered in Russia, Snowden asserted individual liberty in defense of the “greater good”, addressing the age-old dilemma of personal freedom versus the “social contract,” as Rousseau named it. Obama and cohort, who have prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations, profess belief that the American definition of the “greater good” justifies unrestricted access to our personal lives and retribution against those like Snowden who question how that greater good is achieved.

Institutionally defined, then, it doesn’t allow much room for individual interpretation. Big Brother knows best.

Total Noise

I write much better than I speak. In her book What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness Candia McWilliams describes this attribute as “What comes down my arm and not out of my mouth.” I’m not sure how it does this—comes down my arm—but I’m very thankful it does, because otherwise I’d appear a blithering idiot.

I always marveled at writers who would say their books just “wrote themselves,” which I never believed, but it does seem there is a connection between your arm and your creativity that sometimes eludes your consciousness. Somehow, the act of writing distills a jumble of information that lacks any coherent structure and comes out valuable.

David Foster Wallace, in his introduction to The Best American Essays, 2007, calls this jumble “Total Noise: the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding too much to even absorb, much less to try to make sense of or organize into any kind of triage of saliency or value.” He goes on to say that the essays he’s chosen for this anthology respond to the “tsunami of available, fact, context, and perspective that constitutes Total Noise by serving as models and guides for how large or complex sets of facts can be sifted, culled, and arranged in meaningful ways—ways that yield and illuminate truth instead of just adding more noise to the over all roar.”

I’m not putting myself in that category, the “illuminating truth” one, and besides, it sounds like way too much work. What comes down my arm is more serendipitous and at the same time more rote: all those words and their arrangements in all those novels, essays, biographies, treatises, magazines, and newspapers I’ve read over the years have provided a pattern for my own. I’m also trying to find a way, like Wallace, through the “tsunami,” but how successful I am is where the serendipity comes into play.

Every few months someone writes in The New York Times or some magazine that you can’t really teach someone how to write. You can help them make outlines, critique their word choice, or laud their imagination, but you can’t identify, much less offer, that secret ingredient—intelligence, creativity, sheer fortitude?—that creates value.

Christopher Hitchens said that if you can talk you can write. Although I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, Max and I listened to Christopher (he hated being called Chris, so I keep referring to him as “Christopher” in the voice Adrianna used when speaking to Christopher Moltisanti in the Sopranos) read his memoir on CD on our long car trip to Chicago to deposit Max at grad school. Christopher, or “Hitch” as he became with the literati, certainly could talk and proved he could write as well.

Max tells me that I write like people talk, which is a twist on what Christopher says. I guess that means I use the pen/computer to have a conversation, which although one-sided, has at least the time on my part to be prepared, edited, rewritten, and finally flung out into the world. It may leave me somewhat removed, but at least it doesn’t leave me blithering.