“I’ll Take You There”

Mavis Staples “took us there” last Friday night at a benefit for the Outpost Performance Center in Albuquerque. The “us” were the folks over 50 who grew up listening to Pops, Mavis, and sisters, known as the Staples Singers; the “there” was the place that only live music by one of the great R & B singers of all time can take you. We’re talking Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Laura Nero, Patti LaBelle, and potentially Beyonce, who now says she wants to get back to her “roots” and be a “real” soul sister instead of an MTV playdoll (see "Reflections on the Super Duper Bowl").

Mavis came out with a cane, having “blown out” her knee, with an amazing band that’s been with her as she’s resurrected a career that got a little off track through the eighties and nineties. Even though I could count on one hand the 20, 30, or 40 somethings at the concert, there are a few in the know who helped in her new career: Have a Little Faith was produced by Jim Tulio and You Are Not Alone by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy.

These guys know their R & B history. And there must be others out there who know their jazz, but they don’t come to the concerts at the Outpost, either. When I go there to hear Ravi Coltrane or Bill Frisell or Oliver Lake, gray hair and wrinkles predominate.

What’s going on? In the May 27 New Yorker George Packer quotes a Silicon Valley start-up engineer talking about his techie cohort: “They’re ignorant, because many of them don’t feel the need to educate themselves outside their little world, and they’re not rewarded for doing so. . . . People with whom I used to talk about politics or policy or the arts, they’re just not into it anymore. They don’t read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. They read TechCrunch and VentureBeat, and maybe they happen to see something from the Times on somebody’s Facebook news feed.”

Notice we’re not even talking about reading the New Yorker or Andrew Soloman or Zadie Smith currently on the newstands and best seller lists at Amazon. Ever heard of Edmund Wilson or Twyla Tharp? Janet Frame or Werner Herzog? An entrepreneur Packer interviewed told him he went a few years without reading a single book. Yet these are the guys (and it’s mostly guys, and they’re mostly white) who call themselves the “Best and the Brightest.” Do they even know that’s the title of David Halberstam’s book? Do they really want to be identified with the academic policy wonks in the Kennedy administration who were responsible for the Vietnam War?

But according to Packer’s article, they have no interest in politics or the history that contextualizes it. When they do decide that for whatever reason—good PR? bad conscience?—it might be a good idea to give some of their billions to non-profits and charitable foundations Bill Gates ends up supporting the educational policies of Michelle Rhee, teaching to bad tests, and Mark Zuckerberg wants to reform immigration by bringing in more educated foreigners to work as engineers and designers.

It’s not just the techies, of course, who have no interest in politics, art, literature . . . . but I’m beginning to sound like a broken record (see "Jamaica Kincaid"). It seems a generation of people who knew at least a little about a lot of things is fading away while a generation that knows about nothing but one thing is the future. But hey, the one thing they do know about, social media, is how they’re going to “entertain each other and interact with each other and do things for each other much more efficiently” (as one of Packer’s interviewees waxes poetic). That what they’re doing so efficiently has no content doesn’t seem to matter. 

Springtime in New Mexico

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It’s been a lousy spring in northern New Mexico: freezing cold (except for a few days when we were tantalized with 70 degrees); incessant wind; and negligible rain. I lost all my fruit except for a few plums and sour cherries; the sweet cherry blooms were starting to form and then disappeared after three nights of 15 to 20 degree temperatures. The apples never formed blossoms at all. I know the folks down in Albuquerque are thankful that the ninety-degree days have yet to begin, but unless it’s hot in Albuquerque it’s still winter up here.

Right now I’m experiencing the juxtaposition of sitting by the fire before going out to check the irrigation water in my fruitless orchard. While the run-off from the high country snow has yet to come (Jakob was up skiing the chutes and measured five feet of snow) my first-in-line village is using the mid to low level run-off to jump start the hay fields and orchards that will all too soon be thirsty. The dismal monthly predictions issued by the Natural Resources Conservation Service have most watersheds at less than 50 per cent of normal snowpack, and the farmers in southern New Mexico are pumping the aquifer to keep their crops alive because there isn’t enough water in Elephant Butte Reservoir to release for irrigation. Texas is suing New Mexico claiming non-delivery of Rio Grande Compact water because, as we all know, groundwater and surface water are inextricably entwined. Looks like dismal spring will segue into dismal summer, especially for those whose livelihoods are threatened by this terrible drought exacerbated by climate change.

I can still grow some vegetables in my garden and hoop house and go to the grocery store for the rest. Living off the land is more an idea than a reality for me (much less a necessity, of course). That’s not to say, however, that my attachment to, and appreciation of, this place where I live isn’t foremost in mind even as I complain. I have a warm, homemade adobe house, small courtyard of grass and flowers, orchard, garden, hoop house, fields of hay, two acequias, and one river as my “place.” I can’t imagine who I might be in a different place. Half my time is spent dealing with it: irrigating the hay fields; pruning the trees; rototilling, planting, and then weeding the garden; weed whacking the orchard grass; waging war against the burdock down in the bosque; trying to figure out why Jack the horse has lost hair on two patches of his back; cutting firewood for winter. Speaking of winter; that’s when I have to split the firewood and kindling, bring it to the house, make and sustain a fire every day, shovel the driveway and deck, and feed the horse.

What else would I be doing? Writing novels? I’ve written two of them plus a collection of short stories (all in the bottom drawer of my desk, as we used to say before computers). Working at a real job? The only ones I ever had were as a seasonal employee of the Forest Service in a fire lookout or patrolling the mountains by truck or on foot. Now my job is to harangue the Forest Service in the pages (actually, on the web) of La Jicarita, which I can do without ever leaving my “place.”

How long I can keep doing this remains to be seen. I figure if I’m lucky I’ve got ten more years here by myself, with a little help from my friends (like cutting the wood) and mother nature, with a little more rain and snow. Then what? I haven’t lived in a town for 40 years. Albuquerque? Too hot, in water crisis mode, and there’s no guarantee Jakob and Casey will still be there. Santa Fe? Unaffordable, bourgeois, also running out of water (although busily importing agricultural water to make up for it). Wherever Max ends up? Doubtful; we may talk on the phone all the time and have fun together, but does he want to live with his mother? Nah.

So back to just being here, day by day, until I can’t be here. Then I’ll be there, wherever there might be. I’ll worry about where is there tomorrow.

In Memory of Shulamith Firestone

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Over the years I occasionally googled (shame on my laziness, depending solely on google) Shulamith Firestone, wondering what became of this second wave feminist who wrote the Dialectic of Sex, a brilliant, ground breaking, and sometimes wrongheaded (in my humble opinion) book that profoundly affected me, only a few years younger than she. I found nothing beyond the mention of the book: no other publications, no political activities, no personal statistics about where she lived, who she lived with, how she spent her time.

Yesterday, in the New Yorker, I found out. Firestone died last August, alone, suffering from mental illness, in the 10^th Street apartment she’d lived in since the 1970s.  I cried as I read Susan Faludi’s account of Firestone’s life: stifled and expelled by an Orthodox Jewish father; abandoned by a mother who failed to defend her; and betrayed by a sisterhood that descended into chaos and power struggles unable, as Faludi describes it, “to thrive in the world they had done so much to create.”

I’ve often written of the internecine fighting that ruins movements and demoralizes its movents, but the radical feminism of the 1960s and 70s was so powerful and so necessary that despite its failures and destroyed lives so many of us would not be who we are today without it. That’s what makes Firestone’s story, and others like her, all the more tragic. Faludi quotes from feminist Kate Millet’s essay, “The Feminist Time Forgot,” about those who had “disappeared to struggle alone in makeshift oblivion or vanished into asylums and have yet to return to tell the tale.” Firestone was one of those who “vanished into asylums,” many times, diagnosed as schizophrenic. Several times support groups were organized by one of her sisters and women friends, but in the end she died alone and poverty stricken in her tenement.

As I said in my Marriage blog, I recently reread the Dialectic of Sex. The idea of cyber babies she posits as the means to free women “from the tyranny of their reproductive biology” makes me laugh. Other readers will object to any number of other views that “take on the world,” as Millett thought her book did. That’s what a revolutionary book does, and Shulamith Firestone was indeed a revolutionary. I suppose I’m glad that I finally found out what happened to her, but I’m also profoundly sad. Rest in peace, “Shulie.”

Only in France

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In the New York Times Style section there was an article about the French debating gay marriage in “Their Fashion.” The kind of conversation they are having hasn’t taken place in this country since the 1970s. Only the French would still be objecting to gay marriage “because they [gays] want a bourgeois life.” That sententious statement was made by fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who dresses the bourgeoisie (and whose punk couture is featured in a new show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York). His comrade Frédéric Montel explained that marriage is “a conservative movement, about stability in society . . . and becoming rather ordinary.”

The article also quoted a feminist historian who thinks the movement for same-sex marriage is “a project for gay men, not lesbians.” Back in the 1960s Julia Kristeva, also French, described the institution of marriage as “identification by women with the very power structures previously considered as frustrating, oppressive or inaccessible.” (Women’s Time)

When conservatives in this country get behind gay marriage as a family value it’s time to get back to the conversation (not about the bourgeoisie, heaven forbid, a term absolutely censored in American discourse) about why we’re doing all this work to prop up an institution because we can’t be part of it. It’s like the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell solution to gays wanting to serve in the military: why in the world should we be fighting for the right for anyone to serve in the military? Why in the world are we fighting for the institution of marriage when half of them (the heterosexual ones; since the other kind exist only in a few states, we can’t get statistics) end in divorce? Why are we letting this issue distract us from far more important issues not only in the lives of women but to all of us?

Last week the call in show on KUNM was about gay marriage, specifically the ACLU’s lawsuit against the Bernalillo County Clerk for refusing to issue marriage licenses to two lesbian couples. The lawsuit claims that the New Mexico marriage statutes and the New Mexico Constitution do not bar same-sex couples from marrying, and therefore the state should issue civil marriage licenses to any same-sex couple that applies for one.

The KUNM producers, in their knee jerk attempt at “objectivity” had fundamentalist preacher Glen Strock on the telephone as their token reactionary. He spewed his venom about homosexuals as an “abomination” and how they need the rest of society’s help because of their “mental illness, promiscuity, and drug addiction.” While no one brought up the divorce rate and the havoc that brings to Strock’s society, several people at least tiptoed into a conversation about the institution by making the distinction between civil unions and marriage: the first, sanctioned by the state to everyone who applies for a license; the second in a church or private ceremony to reflect the individuals’ beliefs or need for some sort of public recognition or rite of passage. It doesn’t do much to enhance the conversation about monogamy, the nuclear family, the impossible expectations, all the questions the institution raises, but at least it would protect the legal rights of those who wish to form a union.

But as Yasmin Nair questions in her blog (thanks, Terri, for turning me on to this), what legal rights are we talking about? The right to heath care benefits? As Nair points out, there should be universal health care for everyone, regardless of marital status. The gay-marriage-as-legal-right argument buys into a neoliberal agenda that requires state sanction of what should be our inalienable rights. Again, Nair: “Let us, queers who understand the problems with gay marriage as an economically and socially conservative issue and our straight allies, begin to dispense with the silly idea that there has ever been anything about gay marriage that could even vaguely be described as left/liberal/progressive.  Rather, progressives, liberals, and self-described lefties would do well to echo Republican Jon Hunstman, and speak the truth plainly, that gay marriage is a conservative cause.

And so it comes full circle: Karl Lagerfeld, maven of the fashion industry, who disdains gay marriage because it’s a conservative movement, and Jon Huntsman, a Republican presidential hopeful, who embraces gay marriage because it’s conservative. Only in France, but maybe only in America, too.  

 

Jamaica Kincaid

I had one of those days recently when I really missed Mark. I’d just read a review of the new Jamaica Kincaid novel, a scathing, sometimes fantastical recounting of her marriage to William Shawn’s son Allen Shawn and how he left her for a younger woman. I somehow had forgotten this interesting fact, that the two of them were married, amidst all the other lore I’d accumulated about the rather strange but intriguing Shawn family: that the seemingly staid William Shawn, longtime editor of the New Yorker, had secretly conducted an affair with his colleague Lillian Ross for many years; that Allen’s twin sister Mary, who was autistic, had been “put away” by the family; and that Wallace Shawn, the funny looking younger brother had turned into a consummate stage and screen actor. In fact, “My Dinner With Andre,” in which Wallace stars with Andre Gregory, was one of Mark’s all time favorite movies. Boy, did I really want to talk about all this with him and run right out and buy Kincaid’s book.

But I was spending the weekend with my kids and neither one of them had ever heard of William Shawn or ever seen “My Dinner With Andre,” so my story lost its punch. At least Max, who graduated last year from Claremont McKenna College, where Jamaica Kincaid now teaches, had some interesting gossip to relay about her, but which I will refrain from retelling.

Mark’s and my accumulated knowledge, born of 34 years of accumulated experience, is now reduced by half. Without access to the full percent, the compartmentalization of my other relationships becomes more obvious. While this doesn’t diminish their value, it intensifies my loss.

With my neighbors in El Valle I share our sense of place, our desire to be buen vecinos, our delight in the mitote and craziness that gets played out in this tiny village. My political relationships, born of thirty years of activism and community organizing, extend to concentric circles of concern that rarely intersect with my personal circles of engagement. I maintain intimate relationships with a few friends and family members who come close to being with me in that holistic world: music, books, movies, art, politics, personal revelation. But they’re an effort, a phone call or e-mail away; they’re not sitting across the room from me as I’m reading the New Yorker: “Listen to this!”

A lot of this has to do with age, of course. Who still gets off listening to Steely Dan? Who wants to read Middlemarch every year? Who wants to talk about the Vietnam War, Watergate, the fall of Allende, and the Iran-Contra scandal? Who wants to hear Mark’s story about how he got out of the draft by crying? Who wants to hear my story about hitchhiking north out of Albuquerque and sleeping on the floor of Ulysses S. Grant’s commune in Placitas? At the end of 34 years Mark and I didn’t want to hear each other’s stories either (listen to This American Life podcast, #226 Reruns, March 10 for the very funny stories of the way couples listen and don’t listen to each other) but we knew the details, the context, and the meaning without the words, as no one else ever would.

So I’m still looking for someone to talk to about Jamaica Kincaid’s novel.  But I’m also glad I don’t have to participate in one of our hackneyed routines: his lament about the UNM Lobos (they just lost in the first game of the NCAA tournament) and my refrain, I told you so!

Reflections on the Super-duper Bowl

Let’s talk Beyoncé. Was it singing? (and I’m not talking about whether she was lip syncing); was it dancing? (in thigh-high boots with 5 inch heels I’d call it stomping); was it an excuse for pyrotechnics?; was it spectacle? Was it . . . 75,000 tweets for CRAP?

I didn’t know until recently that she can really sing because I always dismissed her as a entertainment package, not an R & B singer in the tradition of Aretha, Etta and Laura Nyro (who was finally inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame) who stood up on the stage or sat at the piano and sang with their souls. Now we have Beyoncé and Lady Gaga and Destiny’s Child (with Whitney Houston, RIP, kind of in the middle) who prance around the stage in a little bit of satin or leather and it’s really hard to know what they’re doing.

Michael Jackson and Prince, our androgynous links from the Detroit, Philly, and Memphis R & B days, also crossed over to pop but they made it clear they could actually sing and dance. In his new book Telegraph Avenue Michael Chabon, in the voice of one of his characters, also laments the loss of R & B talent, not to pop but to rap: "But face it, a lot has been lost. A whole lot. Ellington, Sly Stone, Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, we got nobody of that caliber even hinted at in black music today. I'm talking about genius, composers  . . .  knowing how to play the fuck out your instrument."

I think it was Madonna, though, who really fucked things up. When I went to Wikipedia to peruse her profile—one of the longest I’ve ever seen on that site—she’s quoted as saying she wanted to grow up as a “black kid;” Prince was one of her idols. Apparently she also wanted to be a gay one: my friend Terri says she thinks Madonna’s early style derived from the New York gay bars before AIDS. So the lack of her talent as a singer/dancer/actress converged with desires of who she wanted to be and voila, crossover R & B as pop spectacle via MTV was born: shake your booty and you can be whoever or whatever you want.

Some academic feminists (and men) would be aghast at my assessment. Many have found that Madonna is the perfect political icon talked about by the famous Judith Butler in her book Gender Trouble because of her reconstruction of identity. The infamous Camille Paglia wrote that Madonna liberated sexuality from its Puritanical roots. That is, until she also wrote about how old and plastic Madonna was looking and how unseemly it was that she was still shaking her booty. And then there was the critic who asked the question, “Is Madonna a glamorized fuckdoll or the queen of parodic critique?”

But really, what the whole thing reminds me of is Elvis, minus a few pounds. We watched him rise from a rockabilly white boy to a soulful crooner of love songs to a icon of Las Vegas glitter. Only now the glitter isn’t confined to Las Vegas; it’s at the Grammy’s, the Emmy’s, the Oscars, and, of course, the Super Bowl. I wonder if it all could have gone anywhere else, what with MTV, rap producers who have shoved aside the likes of Jerry Wexler, and the fact that making millions of dollars is the common denominator of 21^st century modernity.

I thought about watching the Grammy’s to see if they could prove me wrong until I got my Sundays mixed up. If I’d known Amy Winehouse would have been there . . . maybe I would have remembered.

The Phenomenon that is Scottsdale/Phoenix

This time I went to visit Max in Scottsdale, where he moved after living in Los Angeles, where I also visited him and described in my existential/fear and loathing blog post . The impression ones gets of Scottsdale is distinctly suburban, with wide, tree lined streets bordered by meticulously manicured lawns of grass—green grass in the middle of the Sonoran desert—cacti, ornamental cedar, pine, and palm trees, and bougainvillea.

Yes, there was bougainvillea in bloom in December, along with green-leafed deciduous trees and poinsettias lining driveways and porches in the Christmas spirit. There were also trees full of green and yellow parrots, jumping around and cackling to their hearts’ content. I assume that, just like in the movie “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill,” which tells the story of the quirky man who fed the San Francisco flock of parrots generated from a few stray birds that escaped their cages, these Scottsdale parrots share the same origin story. Except there didn’t seem to be anyone around to feed these birds; the only people I saw outside were the gardeners and plumbers and electricians who were working on the ranch style houses in their manicured settings.

All I could think about while walking these streets was what it must be like five months of the year when the temperature is at least 100 degrees, and sometimes 115, and how much water it takes to maintain the grass and flowers and hundred-foot tall palm trees and backyard swimming pools (I saw those from the window of the airplane when I flew in). The water comes from the Salt River Project, an enormous system of dams and canals that first brought water to this former farming valley. Starting in the mid 19^th century farmers built canals to redirect water from the Salt River; in the early part of the 20^th century they used their land as collateral on loans that resulted in the construction of Roosevelt Dam, 76 miles northeast of Phoenix.

Back in the 1970s water irrigated 80,000 acres of citrus orchards: that landscape is now reduced to about 20,000 acres. The remainder is filled with the sprawl that is greater Phoenix: Scottsdale, Mesa, Tempe (location of Arizona State University), Glendale. You only know you’ve passed from one community to the next when the sign on the side of the road tells you so.

So actually, the amount of water necessary for lawns instead of lemons, oranges, and grapefruit is already available. But I want to know what, besides cows, can live on green grass? I can assure you there are no cows grazing the Scottsdale suburbs to supply the local restaurants with grass fed beef. There are only people and palm trees and the occasional parrot, which until the Salt River goes dry can enjoy their aberrant existence in this Sonoran oasis.

But while we wait for the inevitable drying out, it seems the area is losing some of its oasis status for people, especially visitors. Since the passage of the 2010 immigration enforcement law (SB10170), which allows the police to determine the immigration status of anyone “stopped, detained, or arrested,” if there is “reasonable suspicion,” convention bookings have dropped by 30 percent. In a recent Arizona Republic article the mayor of Phoenix was quoted as saying, “What you may have read about our Legislature, don’t hold against the rest of us. The rest of us, we’re normal. We like diversity.”

Max and I decided not to spend any more time checking out how normal the Phoenix folks are and we drove to Albuquerque, another town that certainly appears to like diversity, although the New Mexico governor, like her Arizona counterpart, is doing her best to make it appear otherwise: at top of her agenda is overturning the law that allows undocumented immigrants to get drivers licenses. Albuquerque is also another sprawling western city, like Phoenix, dependent upon imported water to sustain its population.

But the good thing is that it’s situated in the high desert instead of the low desert and shortly after we got there, nighttime temperatures dropped into the teens. Which means there aren’t that many tourists who require resort hotels and golf courses and conventions centers like those of Scottsdale and Phoenix, which also means that Albuquerque has managed to retain some funky soul. Just ask Brian Cranston.