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.

Entering the Affordable Care Act

“There are eight million stories in the naked city” . . . or there are 20 million stories about trying to sign up for the Affordable Care Act. (OK, you have to be 50 or older to think this is clever.)

I got a letter yesterday from the New Mexico Income Support Division telling me I’ve been approved for Family Planning Medicaid, which covers only “medical services for family planning: to prevent or delay pregnancy or to manage family size.”

I’m really glad to hear that this service is being provided through Medicaid. But seeing as how I’m 63 years old, I have two children aged 32 and 25, and a 4-month old grandchild, it’s unlikely—impossible—I’m going to need these services. Every time I look to buy anything on the Internet there’s an immediate ad on Facebook trying to sell me the same thing from a different company, but the Income Support Division doesn’t know how old I am?

I already know I won’t qualify for regular Medicaid under the ACA. But I had incredible luck —right time, right place—when several years ago an insurance program in New Mexico called State Coverage Insurance (SCI) rose from the ashes to provide coverage for folks like Mark and me. We’d never had any health insurance, ever: we traded various products and services for bills—pot for one of the kid’s birth, ski lessons for Mark’s hernia—or we paid $50 a month for 10 years. Miraculously, the SCI program that targeted those who made too much money to qualify for Medicaid but too little to possibly afford private insurance saved my sorry 55 year-old butt. That’s the age when it seems our baby boomer bodies start to fall apart: knee replacements, hip replacements, autoimmune disease, high blood pressure, the dreaded cancer . . . .

Now I have to buy a private insurance company policy that without the tax credit subsidy from the federal government would bankrupt anybody: five, six, seven hundred dollars a month for health insurance? Do I gamble and hope I won’t end up in the hospital this one year I have to buy insurance—before I’m of Medicare age—and go for the high deductible, low co-pay plan? Do I play it safe and take the low deductible, high co-pay for those doctors I unfortunately have to see fairly often knowing that like many others my age hospitalization is probably on the horizon? Maybe I’ll just close my eyes and wherever I click is what I’ll get.

I’m far better off than younger folks who will be faced with high premiums for many years to come. We all know this is a paean to the insurance companies, an extension of the already privatized health care business with some concessions for coverage. Even Mexico, for Christ’s sake, implemented universal, single payer health insurance last year. While we continue to send junk food and subsidized corn their way maybe they’ll export some health insurance al norte.

So, my friends, LOL, in all its ambiguity: lots of luck (or lust), laugh out loud, laugh on Lipitor, or lean on levity but don’t spend too much time trying to figure out why this country is so fucked up.

Alabama Shakes

I’m in love. With Alabama Shakes. With Brittany Howard.

I was completely depressed by my fight with the politicos in Taos County over water rights and needed some relief. So I put on Alabama Shakes, turned up the volume, and fell in love. How could I not, listening to Brittany sing, “Bless my heart, bless my soul, I didn’t think I’d make it to 22 years old.” And then she sings, “I’m not whom I used to be.”

Who is this Alabama child? All I know from the internet sites is that she started playing guitar in high school, went to another guitar player in high school and said, hey, want to play guitar together in high school and write some songs? Add a drummer, a lead guitarist (although Brittany is lead any time she wants) and somehow, these twenty something southern post high school band mates are the bomb.

It’s kind of R&B, kind of blues, kind of white southern rock, with a twist of female angst that takes it someplace else. She’s soulful, she’s sassy, she’s big, she’s beautiful, “she’s black, she’s white” (as one fellow Alabaman described her), she’s rock ‘n’roll! 

Some in the media have been comparing her to Janis Joplin, but she defers from this and rightly so. While they both have that raspy voice, Brittany rocks out with something equally primal but with more cool than angst. In one interview she talks about singing at the Grammys with Mavis Staples (see I'll Take You There) and how unique Staples’ phrasing is in any genre: gospel or blues or R&B. Maybe we’ll be saying that about Brittany, too, as she starts off on a career that will hopefully take her wherever she wants to go.

And along with the voice she can play that guitar. I carry many guitar riffs around in my head—the opening strain of “Gimme Shelter,” Mark Knopfler on “Sultans of Swing,” Eric Clapton on “Layla”—and now I’ve got the driving garage band guitar on “Hang Loose” and “I’m Not the Same.” And it’s a woman doing the driving! Keep hanging in there, Brittany, we’ll be with you every step of the way.

Having Babies

My daughter-in-law Casey recently posted an article on Facebook “The Unnatural Mom” by Krista Infante, who reflects back on the birth of her son and the guilt and inadequacy she felt when the experience didn’t replicate the “birth plan” she formulated. It’s a common story, but one that needs to be repeated to remind mothers, and fathers, that every birth story is different and is only one chapter in the longer story of being a parent and loving a child.

As a member of second wave feminism my own opinions about childbirth were a reaction against its cooption by the male ob-gyn industry that developed post World War II, confining our mothers to hospital beds, replacing breasts with bottles, and raising the percentage of caesarian sections to levels beyond the need to save lives to the desire for “efficiency” and to insulate against lawsuits. We wanted to make the decisions about home versus hospital, midwife versus doctor, drugs versus no drugs, which were really options, not clear-cut choices, in a world of few certainties except the overriding need do whatever is necessary to have a healthy baby.

As pendulums often do, this one swung quite far in the so-called quest for a “natural” birth that over the years grew to include birth plans, birthing classes (which replaced Lamaze classes whose “hee-hee-hoos” breathing techniques proved to be largely useless, to which I will attest), bath tubs, birthing balls, doulas, and every conceivable consumer product the baby industrial complex could invent.

In recent years the Google and Yahoo post-feminists have declared war on “natural” and are rallying to swing the pendulum back to their version of the days of ob-gyn supremacy, C-sections, and formula, all with the goal of paying as little attention to that bothersome work of “producing” a baby so they can get back to the all important work of producing cell phones and surveillance.

So what’s a mom to do? I can only tell you that Casey, who fell into the “natural” category in preparing for baby Lucia, magnificently proved, over the course of four days, that we do whatever we have to do to safely birth a baby, and everything else flies out the window. After three days of labor at home, bad enough to deprive her (and Jakob and me, to a lesser extent), of sleep but not bad enough to enter the hospital, where the midwives waited, she was exhausted. Then, over the course of the next 24 hours, so many decisions had to be made during so many unexpected events that at one point I found myself saying (to myself), I can’t do this, I don’t think I can do this, and I wasn’t having the baby. But Casey focused and persevered as labor periodically stalled, as the epidural that was supposed to relieve the pain didn’t work, as her blood pressure rose and the baby’s heart rate dropped trying to get the epidural to work. When someone raised the option of a C-section, she announced to all of us that she did not want one, and despite the exhaustion and pain she would continue to labor. When the midwife finally said it was time to push, Casey did so for four hours with every ounce of strength she possessed, and finally, at the end of four days, there was little Lucia, who, as I said in my previous post “Waiting for Lucia”, will now consume our lives forever. You did good, Casey, and now you have a birth story that is all yours. Have fun telling it.

Waiting for Lucia

While waiting for my grandchild Lucia to be born doesn’t bear the absurdist burden of waiting for Godot—who never shows up—it does require distraction. How this distraction fits into daily life is where the anxiety comes in. Do I start a new article because I know I need something for next week’s La Jicarita or because it’s going to make the time pass until the phone rings and Jakob tells me, “Casey’s in labor”?   Do I need to make time to water the houseplants and hoop house and flower garden RIGHT NOW in case the phone rings and I have to get in the car and go to Albuquerque (my bag is already packed)? Do I dare take a hike? Should I write a blog post because I can’t really focus on anything else? Obviously, the latter possibility prevailed.

I went to the neighbors’ house for dinner last night—Jakob knows the number (no cell phones in El Valle)—and with several generations of mothers present the talk naturally turned to birth stories. When we were younger, having our kids, we told our birth stories over and over again, partly to delight in our shared experience and partly to reaffirm in our own minds that we actually did this, we birthed these little creatures who would go on to consume our lives forever.

Now that we’re grandmothers, or impending grandmothers, we get to tell our stories all over again. And what a diversity of experience they reveal: a homebirth where the midwife had to walk up the impassable muddy road because of the spring mud; 12 hour homebirths with older kids in attendance; first births that came in two hours; induced labor births that ended in c-sections. When the discussion turned to the option of epidurals when complications or extended labors demand relief, the dad who was listening in said something about difficulties that may result from a spinal. He was quickly put in his place when his wife said if she’d have had access to an epidural during her long labor—she delivered at home—she’d have taken it in a heartbeat. Casey will soon have her own story to tell, and it will be fascinating.

I’m reading a book of essays by Elinor Lipman, who is mostly known for her novels of “Austen-like wit.” In one essay she writes that her son “is the best idea we ever had.” That bold claim seems absurd when put in context. I worry about Lucia being born in a time of NSA surveillance, climate change, unquestioned technological change, increasing income disparity, and on and on. Of course, my kids were born during the Reagan administration, which set the course for the neoliberal agenda that is the cause of much of what I’m worrying about for Lucia. I was worried then, too, but I still had my babies. Maybe we keep having them because they help allay these fears through both their need and their gift: parenthood. I’m very glad I didn’t miss it.

The fact that they’re now having babies—or one of them is—is mind boggling. It won’t really register until I’m in the delivery room holding my granddaughter. So I’m waiting, Lucia, as are your mom and dad. Please let them know it’s time for the phone call.