It's been a while.
Gardening and election season took over, for the most part. (And of course various and sundry personal travails.) We ended the summer with about 3 dozen mason jars-full of canned tomatoes, pickled everything (cucumbers, green tomatoes, green beans), some frozen string beans, and homemade chili oil.
The election brought the city-country contrasts to a head. Our country county has typically gone almost 3 to 1 Republican--this is guns and Bibles country. This year of course it was different. Between my house and the county seat, you'd see yard signs like proclamations, house by house. The Obama-Biden supporters staked out their intentions as an act of courage. In the end, the county went 53% to 44% Republican--a tremendous "win" for the Democrats. And, of course, Obama won PA by 10+ points.
I voted absentee in the Bronx and spent three days, including election day, canvassing in PA. Pax put on his Obama-Biden outfit ( a yard sign fitted to his hunting vest) and was a hit. One day I went out with three local women--white women in their 50's, who started out as Hillary supporters but eventually got on board with Barack. One of them was defying her very Republican husband. I learned that this was a common pattern. "You never know how they'll vote," she said, meaning, wives go with their husbands publicly, but once they're in that voting booth...
It was eye-opening, and a privilege, really, to talk to people face to face about their choices and opinions. People were definitely engaged and paying attention (sometimes too much attention--disinformation definitely seeped in); and I appreciated more than I ever have the distances--cultural, social, political--that many people in this country had to cross in order to ultimately embrace Barack as their candidate.
Anyhoo. Here we are.
Snow flurries this morning in the city. Forgot to drain the pipes in the country. Hoping, hoping I won't go back to a pipe-bursting disaster. Winter is here.
Showing posts with label Race. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Race. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Sunday, January 20, 2008
The Campaign Trail (2)
No TV here in the country, so we check in periodically to CNN and NY Times online for election results. A victory/non-victory for Hillary Clinton last night in Nevada, attendant media spin about which victory – Clinton’s popular victory, or Obama’s delegate victory – counts more.
Last week, a Times Week in Review article about the “firsts” of this Democratic race – first woman, first black man. It’s weird to be a woman of color at this particular moment in history; identity politics are interestingly, disorientingly scrambled. An article speaking to this on today’s op-ed page: Whitney Terrell writes about living on the fault line between blacks and whites in his Kansas City, MO district, where the white senator endorses Obama and the black Congressman endorses Hillary Clinton. Terrell writes: “With bad times brewing, black voters seem worried they can’t afford to vote for Mr. Obama’s optimism and lose. ‘I like him,’ said one of my longtime neighbors. ‘I just don’t think anybody’s going to let him be president.’”
I have been frustrated (though not surprised, really) in finding the prevalence of this sentiment among fellow people of color. My two most intense and ongoing conversations about Democratic politics right now are with two close friends, one a black woman, one an Asian American woman. F. is black, born and bred in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, loved/loves Bubba, and has been a Hillary supporter all along. She is cautiously glad to see Obama’s ascent as a viable candidate, but isn’t a supporter (yet). She’s expressed a conviction that he will be “eaten alive” by the white political establishment on the political level, along with worry for his basic safety, on the physical survival level. “It ain’t gonna happen,” she has said. “There’s just no way a white country is going to let a black man be president.” And if they do, (she implies), it ain’t gonna be pretty. She says it in a you silly girl kind of way, in a you don’t know what I know kind of way. I respect that – that I don’t know what she knows about being black in America; but I’m frustrated still, because who are “they” if not “us”? We are voters, and black people are voters, not to mention participants in a democracy that, it seems to me, is desperately trying to revive itself, make itself real again, via the Obama candidacy. Of course Obama won’t get elected if skeptical/fearful black people vote for the elite/perceived-powerful white woman! But this feeling, that Obama – that hope in an optimistic black candidacy cannot be “afforded” – this is what I think is hugely at stake in this election.
S. was the most radical idealist I knew back in our college days. And she wasn’t just talk either – she has worked in Palestinian refugee camps, Mother Teresa’s home in India, and has done death penalty defense work in Alabama (she’s an attorney). For years, she rejected the institution of marriage. Until… she met her current husband. They now have two little boys, and she’s frantic with child care and financial responsibility and sleep deprivation. I was shocked (and yet sort of not, because I now have so many friends with small children, I am learning the all-consumingness of it) – to hear her say that she was voting Hillary, and for this reason: “I don’t want any idealism or ideology, I just want someone who can manage the office, do the job.” In her voice, I could hear her exhaustion, her I’m-just-trying-to-get-through-the-day exasperation with “ideas” and “hope.” Again, Obama seemed an expensive luxury to her.
[Interesting that no one is worried about Hillary, as a woman, getting eaten alive. I suspect that having Bubba by her side as her bouncer is no small factor.]
Youthful idealism specialist Dave Eggers (author of (mark the ironic but not ironic youth-inspired title) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) writes, on that same op-ed page:
How can hope be false? the young idealist might ask. Hope is the only horse these young people have in the race. And wasn’t it the other Clinton who liked to quote from “The Cure at Troy,” Seamus Heaney’s version of Sophocles’ “Philoctetes,” which seems ludicrously apt right about now?
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
Both tactically and substantively speaking, I think Obama would do well to invoke Dr. King, emphatically and often. There was nothing that seemed more unaffordable to black Americans in the ‘60’s than non-violence, forgiveness, conciliation; but, as only an effective leader can, he sold those impossible luxuries to his movement as both ideal and strategy: do this because your dignity and humanity are at stake; do this because it will work. Dr. King wasn’t perfect, but he was more right – and more leader – than any major American public figure in the last 40 years. He made world-changing activists out of raging, downtrodden citizens, made them to understand that what seemed most unaffordable was exactly what they could not afford to reject.
Last week, a Times Week in Review article about the “firsts” of this Democratic race – first woman, first black man. It’s weird to be a woman of color at this particular moment in history; identity politics are interestingly, disorientingly scrambled. An article speaking to this on today’s op-ed page: Whitney Terrell writes about living on the fault line between blacks and whites in his Kansas City, MO district, where the white senator endorses Obama and the black Congressman endorses Hillary Clinton. Terrell writes: “With bad times brewing, black voters seem worried they can’t afford to vote for Mr. Obama’s optimism and lose. ‘I like him,’ said one of my longtime neighbors. ‘I just don’t think anybody’s going to let him be president.’”
I have been frustrated (though not surprised, really) in finding the prevalence of this sentiment among fellow people of color. My two most intense and ongoing conversations about Democratic politics right now are with two close friends, one a black woman, one an Asian American woman. F. is black, born and bred in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, loved/loves Bubba, and has been a Hillary supporter all along. She is cautiously glad to see Obama’s ascent as a viable candidate, but isn’t a supporter (yet). She’s expressed a conviction that he will be “eaten alive” by the white political establishment on the political level, along with worry for his basic safety, on the physical survival level. “It ain’t gonna happen,” she has said. “There’s just no way a white country is going to let a black man be president.” And if they do, (she implies), it ain’t gonna be pretty. She says it in a you silly girl kind of way, in a you don’t know what I know kind of way. I respect that – that I don’t know what she knows about being black in America; but I’m frustrated still, because who are “they” if not “us”? We are voters, and black people are voters, not to mention participants in a democracy that, it seems to me, is desperately trying to revive itself, make itself real again, via the Obama candidacy. Of course Obama won’t get elected if skeptical/fearful black people vote for the elite/perceived-powerful white woman! But this feeling, that Obama – that hope in an optimistic black candidacy cannot be “afforded” – this is what I think is hugely at stake in this election.
S. was the most radical idealist I knew back in our college days. And she wasn’t just talk either – she has worked in Palestinian refugee camps, Mother Teresa’s home in India, and has done death penalty defense work in Alabama (she’s an attorney). For years, she rejected the institution of marriage. Until… she met her current husband. They now have two little boys, and she’s frantic with child care and financial responsibility and sleep deprivation. I was shocked (and yet sort of not, because I now have so many friends with small children, I am learning the all-consumingness of it) – to hear her say that she was voting Hillary, and for this reason: “I don’t want any idealism or ideology, I just want someone who can manage the office, do the job.” In her voice, I could hear her exhaustion, her I’m-just-trying-to-get-through-the-day exasperation with “ideas” and “hope.” Again, Obama seemed an expensive luxury to her.
[Interesting that no one is worried about Hillary, as a woman, getting eaten alive. I suspect that having Bubba by her side as her bouncer is no small factor.]
Youthful idealism specialist Dave Eggers (author of (mark the ironic but not ironic youth-inspired title) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) writes, on that same op-ed page:
How can hope be false? the young idealist might ask. Hope is the only horse these young people have in the race. And wasn’t it the other Clinton who liked to quote from “The Cure at Troy,” Seamus Heaney’s version of Sophocles’ “Philoctetes,” which seems ludicrously apt right about now?
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
Both tactically and substantively speaking, I think Obama would do well to invoke Dr. King, emphatically and often. There was nothing that seemed more unaffordable to black Americans in the ‘60’s than non-violence, forgiveness, conciliation; but, as only an effective leader can, he sold those impossible luxuries to his movement as both ideal and strategy: do this because your dignity and humanity are at stake; do this because it will work. Dr. King wasn’t perfect, but he was more right – and more leader – than any major American public figure in the last 40 years. He made world-changing activists out of raging, downtrodden citizens, made them to understand that what seemed most unaffordable was exactly what they could not afford to reject.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
The Wire
"The Wire" is the sort of show that draws die-hards or none at all. It's hard to be luke-warm about it. It's also (in my experience) a bit of a slow burn; you give it the whole season or likely you move on. As creator David Simon has said, it's conceived as a novel - a near-epic one, I'd say - not a short story. (Reasonable comparisons: Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, THE GODFATHER.)
There's probably little I can say that hasn't already been said. There is a budding "scholarship" developing about the show's evolution (and now denouement, as the final season, Season Five, has wrapped and will air in 2008). You know the phenomenon has fully "broken," arrived on the arts and culture scene, when The Profile shows up in The New Yorker (and lo and behold, see the Oct. 22 issue).
I've never in my life paid for cable, so I've seen "The Wire" - Seasons One, Two, and Three (eagerly awaiting the release of Season Four next month) - on DVD. I've watched each season three times. This may sound obsessive, but really, it's more a testament to the nature of the beast; it's a novel, remember (or a series of novels, really), conceived with the idea of depicting the life of an inner city, in all its complexity. From its inception, five seasons were envisioned, each delving into a different aspect of city life (though not as compartmentalized as that sounds). "We were always planning to move further and further out, to build a whole city," Simon says. Academic courses can (and will) surely be designed around it - sociology, criminology, anthropology, urban planning, media arts, screenwriting (the dialogue!), literature - you name it, and TV dramas will forever struggle to measure up to its standards.
What makes it different from a novel, though, is its hyper-realism. Simon has said that he writes/directs for the people who appear in the show, not the "general reader" (the show is apparently very popular in poor black neighborhoods of West Baltimore, circulated on bootleg DVDs). Simon is my hero in this way; he has stayed true to the audience he cares about, but has succeeded in sucking in viewers far beyond that, like myself (viewership is appropriately modest, by HBO "hit" standards; the show has been vulnerable to cancellation at the end of each season, but will survive through the end). He is also a phenomenon and an inspiration of local-ness, in a world of increasing global "flattening" (Thomas Friedman, etc.): a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, Simon has created and evolved "The Wire" without ever leaving Baltimore - physically, psychically, intellectually, morally. Everything that appears in the show, including many of the minor actors and extras, are Baltimore-based and Baltimore-grown - sometimes as composites of multiple issues or characters, but always based in actualities (his writing partner and co-creator, Ed Burns, is a former Baltimore homicide detective).
"The Wire" is, I'm a bit embarrassed to admit, a significant part of my life. I see my own city differently as a result, I trust it as a semi-comprehensive urban education. Following "The Wire" is like learning a new language and culture, it's immersive. It's also a kind of true music - the language of the streets, the drug trade, police culture - melodic and dissonant at once, perhaps even more "authentic" than rap or hip-hop, because it lacks the posturing, the glam, the beat-box stylization. It's people talking and hustling and living; and it really gets under your skin the way music does. It's also high literature in its deft weaving of irony, comedy, tragedy, plot convergences, and complexity of character - its insistence on a universal humanity, our motivations and survival mechanisms uncannily parallel, whether we are a cop or a drug dealer or a politician or a mother.
I am not easily drawn to violence-oriented media, but there is really nothing gratuitous in "The Wire" (save just a bit of nudity and sex that struck me as cheap eye candy; but hey, life is sex is life, and at the end of the day, "The Wire" is on HBO, not PBS). The thing is equally serious about its form as its content, and not a word or a character or a storyline is wasted.
At the risk of sounding overly didactic... my feeling is that the difference between art and mere entertainment (something can achieve both, surely) is that art changes you, your engagement with it evolves you in some way. So I'm trying to think about how "The Wire" has changed me. Its brilliance is that it is somehow both hopeful and despairing - not sequentially, i.e. a despairing story is told but then in the end there is hope (a conventional arc); but simultaneously. Artistically, Simon is like a Cubist, showing the forces in motion all at the same time, on a single plane, mirroring and refracting one another (the "business" of drug-dealing like the "business" of politics like the "business" of law enforcement like the "business" of media). The ways in which the ugliness of city life - its corrupt leaders and mercenary criminals, the repeating loop of corruption-breeding-crime and 'round she goes - is pretty hopeless, and Simon and Burns soften not the message. People with consciences usually lose; an impersonal system, i.e. institutions which have replaced/displaced any humanism that may have birthed the institutions in the first place, prevail. There is no one person or institution to blame, which is in itself a kind of hopelessness, because without demons and enemies, how to fix the problem?
So where's the hope? I suppose it's something like this: each character is driven by a powerful instinct to survive and, in their own (compromised) ways, flourish. How they go about it is of course questionable on all levels, but with negative forces bearing down on just about everyone, any moral judgment you might be tempted to make becomes dizzyingly complicated. It's that instinct to survive that persists across the board - black, white, poor, rich, old, young, powerful, powerless, gay, straight - and the show's writers and actors and directors do an amazing job of "teaching" the viewer to admire and root for that instinct. Horrible horrible things happen to these characters, and they do horrible horrible things to one another; and yet there is no one whose demise you really want to see (perhaps there are a few minor characters who are portrayed flatly, in order to advance plot; this we forgive). And so, I suppose "The Wire" is indeed teaching me, growing in me, a new impulse: to root for people, and to see people, divorced from the institutions which shape and confine and bear down. And to recognize that, while following your conscience may very well get you nowhere in terms of results, the instinct to fight the losing battle (a la Chris McCandless!) is one you can - you must - preserve. It's a spiritual message, really, worthy of Dr. King. And in that sense, watching "The Wire" is empowering in the face of a city life that feels paralyzing in its complexity and incomprehensibility.
Boy, it sounds kind of cheesy as I read over what I've written. I guess you have to have experienced the grit of the show to appreciate the incongruousness of the above analysis relative to what you're actually watching. Let me just say that when a certain heartless drug-dealer (who has betrayed his best friend/partner in one too many ways), for whom I have no natural or logical reason to care, gets his in an episode at the end of Season Three, I was physically wrecked by the time the credits rolled. I was completely outside myself - devastated, appalled, incredulous - looking around the room for...for... something to hit, and a shoulder to cry on, at the same time. Changed. Man, that's good TV. Will I weep for every drug dealer who gets his from now on? 'Course not. But I think I have slightly different eyes now...
And, to the degree that I continue to grapple with how one lives a life worth living as a participating citizen of the world's leading (though waning) capitalist power, "The Wire," which Simon has said is about how "raw, unencumbered capitalism" devalues human beings, is a pretty solid and unflinching education, a useful touchstone, in what that looks like in everyday urban life - for the powerful and powerless alike.
There's probably little I can say that hasn't already been said. There is a budding "scholarship" developing about the show's evolution (and now denouement, as the final season, Season Five, has wrapped and will air in 2008). You know the phenomenon has fully "broken," arrived on the arts and culture scene, when The Profile shows up in The New Yorker (and lo and behold, see the Oct. 22 issue).
I've never in my life paid for cable, so I've seen "The Wire" - Seasons One, Two, and Three (eagerly awaiting the release of Season Four next month) - on DVD. I've watched each season three times. This may sound obsessive, but really, it's more a testament to the nature of the beast; it's a novel, remember (or a series of novels, really), conceived with the idea of depicting the life of an inner city, in all its complexity. From its inception, five seasons were envisioned, each delving into a different aspect of city life (though not as compartmentalized as that sounds). "We were always planning to move further and further out, to build a whole city," Simon says. Academic courses can (and will) surely be designed around it - sociology, criminology, anthropology, urban planning, media arts, screenwriting (the dialogue!), literature - you name it, and TV dramas will forever struggle to measure up to its standards.
What makes it different from a novel, though, is its hyper-realism. Simon has said that he writes/directs for the people who appear in the show, not the "general reader" (the show is apparently very popular in poor black neighborhoods of West Baltimore, circulated on bootleg DVDs). Simon is my hero in this way; he has stayed true to the audience he cares about, but has succeeded in sucking in viewers far beyond that, like myself (viewership is appropriately modest, by HBO "hit" standards; the show has been vulnerable to cancellation at the end of each season, but will survive through the end). He is also a phenomenon and an inspiration of local-ness, in a world of increasing global "flattening" (Thomas Friedman, etc.): a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, Simon has created and evolved "The Wire" without ever leaving Baltimore - physically, psychically, intellectually, morally. Everything that appears in the show, including many of the minor actors and extras, are Baltimore-based and Baltimore-grown - sometimes as composites of multiple issues or characters, but always based in actualities (his writing partner and co-creator, Ed Burns, is a former Baltimore homicide detective).
"The Wire" is, I'm a bit embarrassed to admit, a significant part of my life. I see my own city differently as a result, I trust it as a semi-comprehensive urban education. Following "The Wire" is like learning a new language and culture, it's immersive. It's also a kind of true music - the language of the streets, the drug trade, police culture - melodic and dissonant at once, perhaps even more "authentic" than rap or hip-hop, because it lacks the posturing, the glam, the beat-box stylization. It's people talking and hustling and living; and it really gets under your skin the way music does. It's also high literature in its deft weaving of irony, comedy, tragedy, plot convergences, and complexity of character - its insistence on a universal humanity, our motivations and survival mechanisms uncannily parallel, whether we are a cop or a drug dealer or a politician or a mother.
I am not easily drawn to violence-oriented media, but there is really nothing gratuitous in "The Wire" (save just a bit of nudity and sex that struck me as cheap eye candy; but hey, life is sex is life, and at the end of the day, "The Wire" is on HBO, not PBS). The thing is equally serious about its form as its content, and not a word or a character or a storyline is wasted.
At the risk of sounding overly didactic... my feeling is that the difference between art and mere entertainment (something can achieve both, surely) is that art changes you, your engagement with it evolves you in some way. So I'm trying to think about how "The Wire" has changed me. Its brilliance is that it is somehow both hopeful and despairing - not sequentially, i.e. a despairing story is told but then in the end there is hope (a conventional arc); but simultaneously. Artistically, Simon is like a Cubist, showing the forces in motion all at the same time, on a single plane, mirroring and refracting one another (the "business" of drug-dealing like the "business" of politics like the "business" of law enforcement like the "business" of media). The ways in which the ugliness of city life - its corrupt leaders and mercenary criminals, the repeating loop of corruption-breeding-crime and 'round she goes - is pretty hopeless, and Simon and Burns soften not the message. People with consciences usually lose; an impersonal system, i.e. institutions which have replaced/displaced any humanism that may have birthed the institutions in the first place, prevail. There is no one person or institution to blame, which is in itself a kind of hopelessness, because without demons and enemies, how to fix the problem?
So where's the hope? I suppose it's something like this: each character is driven by a powerful instinct to survive and, in their own (compromised) ways, flourish. How they go about it is of course questionable on all levels, but with negative forces bearing down on just about everyone, any moral judgment you might be tempted to make becomes dizzyingly complicated. It's that instinct to survive that persists across the board - black, white, poor, rich, old, young, powerful, powerless, gay, straight - and the show's writers and actors and directors do an amazing job of "teaching" the viewer to admire and root for that instinct. Horrible horrible things happen to these characters, and they do horrible horrible things to one another; and yet there is no one whose demise you really want to see (perhaps there are a few minor characters who are portrayed flatly, in order to advance plot; this we forgive). And so, I suppose "The Wire" is indeed teaching me, growing in me, a new impulse: to root for people, and to see people, divorced from the institutions which shape and confine and bear down. And to recognize that, while following your conscience may very well get you nowhere in terms of results, the instinct to fight the losing battle (a la Chris McCandless!) is one you can - you must - preserve. It's a spiritual message, really, worthy of Dr. King. And in that sense, watching "The Wire" is empowering in the face of a city life that feels paralyzing in its complexity and incomprehensibility.
Boy, it sounds kind of cheesy as I read over what I've written. I guess you have to have experienced the grit of the show to appreciate the incongruousness of the above analysis relative to what you're actually watching. Let me just say that when a certain heartless drug-dealer (who has betrayed his best friend/partner in one too many ways), for whom I have no natural or logical reason to care, gets his in an episode at the end of Season Three, I was physically wrecked by the time the credits rolled. I was completely outside myself - devastated, appalled, incredulous - looking around the room for...for... something to hit, and a shoulder to cry on, at the same time. Changed. Man, that's good TV. Will I weep for every drug dealer who gets his from now on? 'Course not. But I think I have slightly different eyes now...
And, to the degree that I continue to grapple with how one lives a life worth living as a participating citizen of the world's leading (though waning) capitalist power, "The Wire," which Simon has said is about how "raw, unencumbered capitalism" devalues human beings, is a pretty solid and unflinching education, a useful touchstone, in what that looks like in everyday urban life - for the powerful and powerless alike.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
An Orchid Grows in Beaune (Part 2)
So last night, it all sort of caught up to us. You can’t really escape your life, the realities of your how’s and why’s – not even on vacation. Over dinner (Thai food, a decided break from the rich cuisine Bourgignone), we got into a bit of a melee over matters of money, personal and global. Being in France, we of course notice a different attitude toward the world and one’s place in it, toward values which we Americans take for granted, toward globalism and capitalism and international politics, and the notions of profit and progress in general. A Tunisian shopkeeper in Paris – well-spoken in English – had engaged us in a late-night discussion about French complacency v. Chinese industriousness. The Chinese, he argued, are willing to do what is necessary to progress, to move forward economically. More and more, they are being brought in to foreign countries to build and produce; they are seen as the best bang for the buck, they are willing to move and adjust to a new culture. The French, on the other hand, are staid, aloof, nostalgic. They love all things of the past, they are not interested in participating in the future, the way the future is going. They will – they are – falling behind.
At dinner, J. argues for free-market capitalism and globalism. It’s what there is, it’s the only path of innovation and progress. Competition is the driving force of humanity; laziness looms as our downfall. I am here, he argues, enjoying this vacation, these experiences, because a multi-national corporation has offered me credit, at an interest rate I couldn’t refuse. Company X competed for my business and got it. The credit market makes the world go ‘round.
Yes, yes, we are all complicit… but still…it’s predatory, I argue. I have been snookered by credit card companies before. With this particular card, I made three different phone calls to three different customer service agents, documenting the terms over and over, presenting each one with different scenarios, to make sure I fully understood the terms. This, after receiving in the mail a 10-page document (tiny print) describing, supposedly, terms and changes in terms and disclosures. “You need a f*&%ing PhD in economics to understand all this,” I said at the time. I was mad then, and I’m mad now, talking about it. (I am gesticulating and spitting and the madame Thailandaise keeps coming over and smiling and asking if we are all right, as if I am going to murder J. in cold blood with a butter knife at any moment.) I am an educated, middle-class, fairly critical thinker, and there’s no WAY I am going to understand the terms of a credit card document. And the folks defaulting in the sub-prime mortgage market, they also got snookered; their lenders knew damn well that a critical mass would default, that they were borrowing beyond their means and it would catch up to them. The structures of the lending packages were designed with that percentage of default built in, part of the business plan; or else they never would have offered them so freely. Health insurance terms are similar: people profiting off of other people’s vulnerability and limited means – not incidentally, but by design. (At this moment especially, as a foreigner in a land where I speak the language not-quite-fluently, I recognize how vulnerable to fine print are those in the US without fluent English-language skills.) This is progress? This is the American ideal? Capitalism in all its glory? Corporate profit momentum and get-up-n-go towards what exactly?
(Grotesquely, it occurs to me sometimes that George W. Bush does in fact intend for us all to put food on our families.)
Ok, so what’re you gonna do about it? J. challenges (holding his own butter knife). This is his way. If you don’t like something, fix it.
No, I think. It’s too big, and I’m too tired. Corporate message and consumer hegemony honestly wear me out. (I once had something like a panic attack – short of breath, dizziness, emotional surge – standing at the foot of the Great Wall of Utensils at Bed, Bath & Beyond. What was I looking for? A spatula maybe? Whatever it was, there was a Great Wall of them, all over-priced, and none of which really fit what I needed). Maybe I can get up the gumption to holler at customer service people on the phone now and again (poor Indian souls, earning their wage, they don’t know what's got me all riled up), but then what? Class action suit? Economic literacy courses? Nah. I’m moving to France, like John Berger and R. Crumb. Or Canada. I’m leaving the city, the States, the whole damn thing. Am I just lazy? Well…
No, I don’t think that’s it, quite. Generational malaise? Likely. Too old to be a Deanie Baby, too young for a Baby Boomer. I want to make a difference, but a real one, which somehow to me means a small one. It’s all I can really envision, in the face of so much I cannot get a grip on.
The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims.
--Emerson
I’ll keep up with the news. I’ll go to the polls. I’m donating. I will live a minimal-footprint life in the country. I will recycle and drive a gas-efficient car and grow droopy plants in the Bronx. I will always aim to be kind. Boy, it’s not much to speak of, is it.
At dinner, J. argues for free-market capitalism and globalism. It’s what there is, it’s the only path of innovation and progress. Competition is the driving force of humanity; laziness looms as our downfall. I am here, he argues, enjoying this vacation, these experiences, because a multi-national corporation has offered me credit, at an interest rate I couldn’t refuse. Company X competed for my business and got it. The credit market makes the world go ‘round.
Yes, yes, we are all complicit… but still…it’s predatory, I argue. I have been snookered by credit card companies before. With this particular card, I made three different phone calls to three different customer service agents, documenting the terms over and over, presenting each one with different scenarios, to make sure I fully understood the terms. This, after receiving in the mail a 10-page document (tiny print) describing, supposedly, terms and changes in terms and disclosures. “You need a f*&%ing PhD in economics to understand all this,” I said at the time. I was mad then, and I’m mad now, talking about it. (I am gesticulating and spitting and the madame Thailandaise keeps coming over and smiling and asking if we are all right, as if I am going to murder J. in cold blood with a butter knife at any moment.) I am an educated, middle-class, fairly critical thinker, and there’s no WAY I am going to understand the terms of a credit card document. And the folks defaulting in the sub-prime mortgage market, they also got snookered; their lenders knew damn well that a critical mass would default, that they were borrowing beyond their means and it would catch up to them. The structures of the lending packages were designed with that percentage of default built in, part of the business plan; or else they never would have offered them so freely. Health insurance terms are similar: people profiting off of other people’s vulnerability and limited means – not incidentally, but by design. (At this moment especially, as a foreigner in a land where I speak the language not-quite-fluently, I recognize how vulnerable to fine print are those in the US without fluent English-language skills.) This is progress? This is the American ideal? Capitalism in all its glory? Corporate profit momentum and get-up-n-go towards what exactly?
(Grotesquely, it occurs to me sometimes that George W. Bush does in fact intend for us all to put food on our families.)
Ok, so what’re you gonna do about it? J. challenges (holding his own butter knife). This is his way. If you don’t like something, fix it.
No, I think. It’s too big, and I’m too tired. Corporate message and consumer hegemony honestly wear me out. (I once had something like a panic attack – short of breath, dizziness, emotional surge – standing at the foot of the Great Wall of Utensils at Bed, Bath & Beyond. What was I looking for? A spatula maybe? Whatever it was, there was a Great Wall of them, all over-priced, and none of which really fit what I needed). Maybe I can get up the gumption to holler at customer service people on the phone now and again (poor Indian souls, earning their wage, they don’t know what's got me all riled up), but then what? Class action suit? Economic literacy courses? Nah. I’m moving to France, like John Berger and R. Crumb. Or Canada. I’m leaving the city, the States, the whole damn thing. Am I just lazy? Well…
No, I don’t think that’s it, quite. Generational malaise? Likely. Too old to be a Deanie Baby, too young for a Baby Boomer. I want to make a difference, but a real one, which somehow to me means a small one. It’s all I can really envision, in the face of so much I cannot get a grip on.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.
--Annie Dillard
--Annie Dillard
The day is always his who works in it with serenity and great aims.
--Emerson
I’ll keep up with the news. I’ll go to the polls. I’m donating. I will live a minimal-footprint life in the country. I will recycle and drive a gas-efficient car and grow droopy plants in the Bronx. I will always aim to be kind. Boy, it’s not much to speak of, is it.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
Race, Racism, & Racialism
I recently made a confession of a racist attitude to some folks at a gathering. Korean D. and Cuban R. (married couple), and Chinese C. and Filipino S. (another married couple) and I were talking about a raucous sidewalk BBQ that occurred outside D. and R.'s apartment building in a Dominican neighborhood uptown. They were pissed, because it was floor-shaking, head-banging loud (salsa music and sub-woofers) and it was clearly not a permit-ted event. R. called the PO-lice, who came and broke it up.
We were talking about racial groups, and racial-group habits. Loudness is something we often attribute, consciously or unconsciously, to certain racial groups. Of course, there are generalizations and there are specifics, and the damage is most severe when we lapse into generalizations-only thinking, which then manifests in our behavior; and depending on the context and our reach of influence (if you are, say, the Presidenet of the United States, or a Supreme Court Justice; or even a corporate executive or a community leader), these behaviors can be globally catastrophic.
(There is no talking or thinking about city and country and suburb without talking about race. The lens of race is second-nature to most people of color, I dare say; typically a more conscious effort for White folk. This is what I mean by racialism. In this country, you know that you are not White, and that White is a category of power (or at least "centrality"), before you know your ABCs.)
I had had a couple of drinks by this time in the evening, so my discretion was apparently compromised. I guess I'd been thinking about my dirty life, and I confessed that I was most bothered by people who throw their garbage around. And, I added, I am convinced that this is not a social class thing - poor does not equal dirty - this is a cultural thing.
I recently read that there are steep fines in Singapore for littering (and chewing gum).* Japan is of course known for its immaculate subway system and urban sanitation in general. I have also been very struck by my experiences in Korea over the years.
The local Korean bath house is one of my favorite outings when I visit. There are hot spring mineral baths and saunas and steam rooms and jet therapy and shower areas where men and women and children of all ages (grandparents and grandchildren together are a common sight) take the time to relax and thoroughly self-care. The shower areas include stools for sitting, abrasive washcloths, and hand-held shower heads (showering is a sit-down affair for Koreans, time to scrub and rinse and massage with care). The bath house ritual is good for the skin, the circulation, the heart, and the soul. There is also, at the end of your wet-and-moist therapy, an opportunity to visit the sleep rooms - big, dry open spaces with heated floors, pillows, and complementary cotton pajamas (the bath areas are single-sex, and all are naked).
A day at the bath house costs about six American dollars and is a once or twice weekly habit for many Koreans. The sleep rooms are open all night, and the poor and homeless will sometimes sleep here (men with night jobs, for example, will come for a few hours rest). They do not take advantage, i.e. somehow it is understood that one night of recuperation at a time is the limit. But it's also understood that everyone is entitled to be clean - deeply, thoroughly clean and rested. The old women who clean the subways and station areas do so with incredible industriousness; there is no question about whether the working-class and poor who rely on public transportation "deserve" a clean ride or not.
It's an opinion I seem to hold pretty firmly in my mind somewhere - that black and brown people have messier, dirtier cultural habits. It's a half-baked, un-evolved thought, of which I am partially ashamed and yet partially feel is a reasonable question to pose - i.e. why this seems to be the case, how the perception is formed in the first place, and how it might be corrected; because I don't think I am the only one to think it (my passionately anti-racist black pastor back in Seattle told the story of his father referring to Mexicans as Messi-kins), and perhaps current immigration controversies would look differently if these perceptions did not exist.
I think about my lack of exposure to the home countries of Latin and Central Americans, my sketchy understanding of immigration patterns and the way racism eats away at people, generation-by-generation (I think of K., an African American matriarch who keeps an immaculate household and herself complains about young black people's lack of self-respect and sense of civic duty), the overall limitations of a middle-class viewpoint. In the Philippines, poor children forage in garbage dumps regularly. In India, lack of sewage and clean water systems is a persistent national crisis. This morning, an article in The NY Times about Palestinian children trolling trash piles for items they can sell in order to eke out "a living," and an article in the Times Mag about environmental injustice, i.e. high pollution levels in poor communities: "...disproportionately high pollution levels continue to plague poor communities, and race often correlates with which populations are hit the hardest: African-Americans, for instance, are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in areas where air-pollution levels pose health risks..." These are clearly not "cultural" habits. And yet even with these bits of knowledge, my under-the-skin reaction to garbagy streets is still there, i.e. my people would never live like this.
Clean and dirty are complicated. Don't elect me to office (maybe don't even be my friend), at least until I can get my head on right about this. Ironic, isn't it, that a large portion of the house-cleaning workforce in the tidy suburbs are Latin and Central American immigrants. Maybe some cultures simply do have different standards when it comes to cleanliness, maybe they simply have different priorities, perfectly valid ones, which other people need to understand and accept. J. is Chinese American; my mother seems to think that the Chinese (among the East Asians) are kinda "dirty." J. gives me a hard time about showering every day. "Why d'ya gotta shower every day? What's wrong with smelling your own smell once in a while, letting the body's natural oils do their job. Soap is not even good for your skin, and shampoo will make your hair fall out eventually. Shower when you're actually dirty." Hmm...how European.
*an article today about Singapore reveals a complex social-economic history and environment which led to the no-littering policies. There are some cultures, or sub-cultures, which seem to embrace the notion of "look the part," i.e. if you want to be lifted out of poverty and third-class citizen status, then look like you do, clean up. Very Booker T. Washington, I guess.
We were talking about racial groups, and racial-group habits. Loudness is something we often attribute, consciously or unconsciously, to certain racial groups. Of course, there are generalizations and there are specifics, and the damage is most severe when we lapse into generalizations-only thinking, which then manifests in our behavior; and depending on the context and our reach of influence (if you are, say, the Presidenet of the United States, or a Supreme Court Justice; or even a corporate executive or a community leader), these behaviors can be globally catastrophic.
(There is no talking or thinking about city and country and suburb without talking about race. The lens of race is second-nature to most people of color, I dare say; typically a more conscious effort for White folk. This is what I mean by racialism. In this country, you know that you are not White, and that White is a category of power (or at least "centrality"), before you know your ABCs.)
I had had a couple of drinks by this time in the evening, so my discretion was apparently compromised. I guess I'd been thinking about my dirty life, and I confessed that I was most bothered by people who throw their garbage around. And, I added, I am convinced that this is not a social class thing - poor does not equal dirty - this is a cultural thing.
I recently read that there are steep fines in Singapore for littering (and chewing gum).* Japan is of course known for its immaculate subway system and urban sanitation in general. I have also been very struck by my experiences in Korea over the years.
The local Korean bath house is one of my favorite outings when I visit. There are hot spring mineral baths and saunas and steam rooms and jet therapy and shower areas where men and women and children of all ages (grandparents and grandchildren together are a common sight) take the time to relax and thoroughly self-care. The shower areas include stools for sitting, abrasive washcloths, and hand-held shower heads (showering is a sit-down affair for Koreans, time to scrub and rinse and massage with care). The bath house ritual is good for the skin, the circulation, the heart, and the soul. There is also, at the end of your wet-and-moist therapy, an opportunity to visit the sleep rooms - big, dry open spaces with heated floors, pillows, and complementary cotton pajamas (the bath areas are single-sex, and all are naked).
A day at the bath house costs about six American dollars and is a once or twice weekly habit for many Koreans. The sleep rooms are open all night, and the poor and homeless will sometimes sleep here (men with night jobs, for example, will come for a few hours rest). They do not take advantage, i.e. somehow it is understood that one night of recuperation at a time is the limit. But it's also understood that everyone is entitled to be clean - deeply, thoroughly clean and rested. The old women who clean the subways and station areas do so with incredible industriousness; there is no question about whether the working-class and poor who rely on public transportation "deserve" a clean ride or not.
It's an opinion I seem to hold pretty firmly in my mind somewhere - that black and brown people have messier, dirtier cultural habits. It's a half-baked, un-evolved thought, of which I am partially ashamed and yet partially feel is a reasonable question to pose - i.e. why this seems to be the case, how the perception is formed in the first place, and how it might be corrected; because I don't think I am the only one to think it (my passionately anti-racist black pastor back in Seattle told the story of his father referring to Mexicans as Messi-kins), and perhaps current immigration controversies would look differently if these perceptions did not exist.
I think about my lack of exposure to the home countries of Latin and Central Americans, my sketchy understanding of immigration patterns and the way racism eats away at people, generation-by-generation (I think of K., an African American matriarch who keeps an immaculate household and herself complains about young black people's lack of self-respect and sense of civic duty), the overall limitations of a middle-class viewpoint. In the Philippines, poor children forage in garbage dumps regularly. In India, lack of sewage and clean water systems is a persistent national crisis. This morning, an article in The NY Times about Palestinian children trolling trash piles for items they can sell in order to eke out "a living," and an article in the Times Mag about environmental injustice, i.e. high pollution levels in poor communities: "...disproportionately high pollution levels continue to plague poor communities, and race often correlates with which populations are hit the hardest: African-Americans, for instance, are 79 percent more likely than whites to live in areas where air-pollution levels pose health risks..." These are clearly not "cultural" habits. And yet even with these bits of knowledge, my under-the-skin reaction to garbagy streets is still there, i.e. my people would never live like this.
Clean and dirty are complicated. Don't elect me to office (maybe don't even be my friend), at least until I can get my head on right about this. Ironic, isn't it, that a large portion of the house-cleaning workforce in the tidy suburbs are Latin and Central American immigrants. Maybe some cultures simply do have different standards when it comes to cleanliness, maybe they simply have different priorities, perfectly valid ones, which other people need to understand and accept. J. is Chinese American; my mother seems to think that the Chinese (among the East Asians) are kinda "dirty." J. gives me a hard time about showering every day. "Why d'ya gotta shower every day? What's wrong with smelling your own smell once in a while, letting the body's natural oils do their job. Soap is not even good for your skin, and shampoo will make your hair fall out eventually. Shower when you're actually dirty." Hmm...how European.
*an article today about Singapore reveals a complex social-economic history and environment which led to the no-littering policies. There are some cultures, or sub-cultures, which seem to embrace the notion of "look the part," i.e. if you want to be lifted out of poverty and third-class citizen status, then look like you do, clean up. Very Booker T. Washington, I guess.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Dancing Egg Whites
Reading over a previous post about the 4th of July in the Bronx, I noticed an embarrassing spelling error: I meant to refer to merengue (Latin dance music) and instead wrote meringue (fluffy, peaked egg whites).
Funny, because both play auspicious roles in city and country life, respectively.
The history and origins of merengue are interesting; there are controversies about the dance's origins and evolution, directly related to the geopolitical histories of and relationships among the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba (and the colonial powers of Spain & France). Merengue is a type of music that I may never have encountered if it weren't for Latin immigration patterns and my living in urban areas populated by Dominicans. However, ironically, it appears that authentic merengue currently exists only in rural areas of the Dominican Republic.
Meringue has a kind of international (and debated) history as well. We know it is a French dessert, but, according to Wikipedia: "It is believed that meringue was invented in the Swiss town of Meiringen by an Italian chef named Gasparini (legend varies in regard to the date of invention, between 1600 and 1720)."
As I think of it, merengue and meringue connect for me in the universe of pleasure. That is, pleasure as opposed to entertainment, which is a kind of city-country theme I've stumbled upon in these posts. There is a sense - loosely, over-generalized - in which I associate suburban culture with American culture, and, I admit, the worst of stereotypical American culture: fast food, TV-addiction, processed/packaged/fabricated everything, and passive experiences of entertainment (American Idol, etc.). One of the things you encounter when you travel or meet people from other countries is a very different - healthier and more natural, I think - relationship with the body: the natural, untormented ability to experience physical pleasures which are neither addictions nor guilt-ridden; a more intuitive sense of what the body wants and needs; how to engage and address those needs deeply; and when it's enough.
I've always admired cultures in which dance is a regular, organic activity. In the (white) suburbs, little girls go to dance class, but rarely do folks go out dancing. (Maybe more so in the suburbs of the '60's and '70's?) I loved this about the American South; in New Orleans, in a regular ole family restaurant, people are eating crawfish etouffee, the Zydeco band is playing (France again! Haiti!), and couples, young and old, just get up to dance. Men just know how to dance, they grew up in it. You can see how far Americans have fallen away from the mind/soul/body connection when you look at the popularity of yoga these days. (I see yoga centers in many of the small towns in the country as often as I do throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn.) I do yoga myself, and yes I find it pleasurable; but yoga is a very individual-focused practice, and for Americans at this particular cultural moment, I think it's a kind of corrective (managing stress, realigning from too much desk-sitting, etc.), as opposed to a pleasure. It doesn't get to this pleasure principle, i.e. movement as relationship and sensuality and community.
I'm not a big fan of meringue, frankly. I'll pick chocolate mud cake over key lime pie anyday. But here's an interesting exchange, from a Web page titled "Making Perfect Meringue":
QUESTION: I have tried many times over many years to make meringue. When I lived in Northern PA. I use [sic] to bake as a teenager and my meringues were beautiful and big. I now live in southern Pa. and my meringue stinks. It comes out of the oven, huge and nice, but give it 5 minutes out of the oven and its [sic] flat as a pancake. I've tried under beating, and over beating, and all types of recipes, but it's always th[e] same. I know it's always humid down here, but this is ridiculous. I've lived down here for 30 years now and it never changes. HELP.
ANSWER: Humidity affects a meringue's texture. Damp, humid days may cause it to be limp and sticky. Check the weather outside before you start. You can not make crisp meringue on a humid day. Meringue should be made on dry days. The cornstarch mixture helps them hold up under humid conditions, but to ensure success, plan to bake when it is less humid.
Sultry merengue, arid meringue. This "southern" baker should try some merengue.
Funny, because both play auspicious roles in city and country life, respectively.
The history and origins of merengue are interesting; there are controversies about the dance's origins and evolution, directly related to the geopolitical histories of and relationships among the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Cuba (and the colonial powers of Spain & France). Merengue is a type of music that I may never have encountered if it weren't for Latin immigration patterns and my living in urban areas populated by Dominicans. However, ironically, it appears that authentic merengue currently exists only in rural areas of the Dominican Republic.
Meringue has a kind of international (and debated) history as well. We know it is a French dessert, but, according to Wikipedia: "It is believed that meringue was invented in the Swiss town of Meiringen by an Italian chef named Gasparini (legend varies in regard to the date of invention, between 1600 and 1720)."
As I think of it, merengue and meringue connect for me in the universe of pleasure. That is, pleasure as opposed to entertainment, which is a kind of city-country theme I've stumbled upon in these posts. There is a sense - loosely, over-generalized - in which I associate suburban culture with American culture, and, I admit, the worst of stereotypical American culture: fast food, TV-addiction, processed/packaged/fabricated everything, and passive experiences of entertainment (American Idol, etc.). One of the things you encounter when you travel or meet people from other countries is a very different - healthier and more natural, I think - relationship with the body: the natural, untormented ability to experience physical pleasures which are neither addictions nor guilt-ridden; a more intuitive sense of what the body wants and needs; how to engage and address those needs deeply; and when it's enough.
I've always admired cultures in which dance is a regular, organic activity. In the (white) suburbs, little girls go to dance class, but rarely do folks go out dancing. (Maybe more so in the suburbs of the '60's and '70's?) I loved this about the American South; in New Orleans, in a regular ole family restaurant, people are eating crawfish etouffee, the Zydeco band is playing (France again! Haiti!), and couples, young and old, just get up to dance. Men just know how to dance, they grew up in it. You can see how far Americans have fallen away from the mind/soul/body connection when you look at the popularity of yoga these days. (I see yoga centers in many of the small towns in the country as often as I do throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn.) I do yoga myself, and yes I find it pleasurable; but yoga is a very individual-focused practice, and for Americans at this particular cultural moment, I think it's a kind of corrective (managing stress, realigning from too much desk-sitting, etc.), as opposed to a pleasure. It doesn't get to this pleasure principle, i.e. movement as relationship and sensuality and community.
I'm not a big fan of meringue, frankly. I'll pick chocolate mud cake over key lime pie anyday. But here's an interesting exchange, from a Web page titled "Making Perfect Meringue":
QUESTION: I have tried many times over many years to make meringue. When I lived in Northern PA. I use [sic] to bake as a teenager and my meringues were beautiful and big. I now live in southern Pa. and my meringue stinks. It comes out of the oven, huge and nice, but give it 5 minutes out of the oven and its [sic] flat as a pancake. I've tried under beating, and over beating, and all types of recipes, but it's always th[e] same. I know it's always humid down here, but this is ridiculous. I've lived down here for 30 years now and it never changes. HELP.
ANSWER: Humidity affects a meringue's texture. Damp, humid days may cause it to be limp and sticky. Check the weather outside before you start. You can not make crisp meringue on a humid day. Meringue should be made on dry days. The cornstarch mixture helps them hold up under humid conditions, but to ensure success, plan to bake when it is less humid.
Sultry merengue, arid meringue. This "southern" baker should try some merengue.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Independence Day 2007
Uh-oh. The buds are starting to shrivel and fall off. A few blossoms are also withering. A little research reveals that "certain fumes in the air - methane or ethylene - may trigger bud or flower collapse." Temperature, water, and light all seem fine, so... darnit. J. just bought an air purifier, because we know that we live in "the asthma capital of New York." There are probably "certain fumes" in the air.
Speaking of beautification and greenery... we spent the afternoon at a film wrap party in Brooklyn. The owner of the rowhouse has made a lush oasis of his backyard - a gorgeous garden, with stone paths, a gazebo, and the most enormously excellent charcoal grill you've ever seen. Something out of "Little Shop of Horrors," a giant kettle drum of a grill, you could lay a whole pig on this thing. It was a nice afternoon, a rainy, green, urban afternoon. Someone brought bratwurst from Chicago, and the party - a very casual affair of about 25 people - was actually "sponsored" by a well-known liquor company, compliments of a friend of a friend. Good stuff.
Back in the Bronx, the rain had chased away many of the BBQers, but the die-hard PR families gathered underneath the Triborough Bridge. It's real garbag-y down there, and the kids were splashing around in mud puddles, but... oh well. Freedom! US of A!
At 9:20, S., the super of our building, who lives on the block with his mother and wife and teenage kids - they've lived on the block forever - rang the bell to make sure we knew the fireworks were starting. So up we went, to the roof. It's cold and wet, it's just us, S. the super, the couple upstairs, and the cute blonde-family-with-infant with Kentucky plates on their Honda. We're Korean and Puerto Rican and Chinese and Italian and Filipino and Irish, the fireworks are big as ever over the East River, there's meringue music blasting somewhere nearby.
I wonder what happens in Wayne County, PA, on the 4th of July. Maybe no meringue.
(*Click here for a later follow-up to this post.)
Speaking of beautification and greenery... we spent the afternoon at a film wrap party in Brooklyn. The owner of the rowhouse has made a lush oasis of his backyard - a gorgeous garden, with stone paths, a gazebo, and the most enormously excellent charcoal grill you've ever seen. Something out of "Little Shop of Horrors," a giant kettle drum of a grill, you could lay a whole pig on this thing. It was a nice afternoon, a rainy, green, urban afternoon. Someone brought bratwurst from Chicago, and the party - a very casual affair of about 25 people - was actually "sponsored" by a well-known liquor company, compliments of a friend of a friend. Good stuff.
Back in the Bronx, the rain had chased away many of the BBQers, but the die-hard PR families gathered underneath the Triborough Bridge. It's real garbag-y down there, and the kids were splashing around in mud puddles, but... oh well. Freedom! US of A!
At 9:20, S., the super of our building, who lives on the block with his mother and wife and teenage kids - they've lived on the block forever - rang the bell to make sure we knew the fireworks were starting. So up we went, to the roof. It's cold and wet, it's just us, S. the super, the couple upstairs, and the cute blonde-family-with-infant with Kentucky plates on their Honda. We're Korean and Puerto Rican and Chinese and Italian and Filipino and Irish, the fireworks are big as ever over the East River, there's meringue music blasting somewhere nearby.
I wonder what happens in Wayne County, PA, on the 4th of July. Maybe no meringue.
(*Click here for a later follow-up to this post.)
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
The First Post: An Orchid Grows in the Bronx
I brought the orchid home a week ago. I'd been wanting an orchid for a long time; but they're expensive, so I kept putting it off. Last week we were in Flushing, in Chinatown/Koreatown, and we found a plant store that sold healthy, inexpensive orchids. So I got one. I'm not sure of its botanical name, the species, but I'll find out.
The urge to beautify has been growing. Six months here in the Bronx - a mostly uninhabited area, treeless with lots of medium-to-heavy industry (waterproofing, metal workers, plumbing, sanitaton, marble, newspaper, electrical, auto) - and the intensity of concrete and machinery and mystery warehousing gets to you. Not to mention the garbage on the street and the air quality.
The few houses on the block and the next block over are owned or rented by families who've been here a couple generations at least - Puerto Ricans and Italians. A few weeks ago, I was on the roof (we have a great roof), and I noticed it: the roof-deck garden growing two doors over. The matron of the house was growing everything you could imagine, huge lush climbing plants - green beans, tomatoes, lettuces - a veritable family farm. She uses contractor buckets and halved burn barrels as containers for these gorgeous plants. I was inspired. Time to bring some green, some life, into our place.
The first was narcissus. Bulbs given to me by a co-worker. They bloomed quickly, and died down just as quickly. Next, I brought home an herb planter - basil, oregano, and rosemary - for the window sill. So far, so good. Then, I discovered something called Cuban oregano, a fuzzy-leafed fragrant herb which is supposed to flower, but is also lovely just as foliage; and is apparently used in cooking and, most notably, in Mojitos, in Cuba. Also happy in the windowsill. The day after we got the orchid, J. brought home a compact flowering cactus. So we're enlivening the place, little by little.
Last night I worried, irrationally, that the orchid might be harmed... by the eardrum-busting building alarm that went off for hours across the street. It's sitting on the sill facing the street.
I should mention: I live here only part-time. The other part-time, I live in an 1840 farm-house in a rural area of northeastern Pennsylvania. There is no cell service, no high-speed internet, no postal delivery (I have a PO Box at the local general store), and no noises at all in the middle of the night...except for crickets and the occasional moth flying into the window. The house is on two acres, mostly wooded, and we recently built a garden (by "built," I mean a fence, to keep out the deer and bears). I live there half the week, and in the Bronx the other half.
It is a life in contrasts, to say the least. But not uninteresting. From this place - these places, shifting perspectives and vastly different experiences, week to week, day to day - is born this blog. Tales from the city and country.
The urge to beautify has been growing. Six months here in the Bronx - a mostly uninhabited area, treeless with lots of medium-to-heavy industry (waterproofing, metal workers, plumbing, sanitaton, marble, newspaper, electrical, auto) - and the intensity of concrete and machinery and mystery warehousing gets to you. Not to mention the garbage on the street and the air quality.
The few houses on the block and the next block over are owned or rented by families who've been here a couple generations at least - Puerto Ricans and Italians. A few weeks ago, I was on the roof (we have a great roof), and I noticed it: the roof-deck garden growing two doors over. The matron of the house was growing everything you could imagine, huge lush climbing plants - green beans, tomatoes, lettuces - a veritable family farm. She uses contractor buckets and halved burn barrels as containers for these gorgeous plants. I was inspired. Time to bring some green, some life, into our place.
The first was narcissus. Bulbs given to me by a co-worker. They bloomed quickly, and died down just as quickly. Next, I brought home an herb planter - basil, oregano, and rosemary - for the window sill. So far, so good. Then, I discovered something called Cuban oregano, a fuzzy-leafed fragrant herb which is supposed to flower, but is also lovely just as foliage; and is apparently used in cooking and, most notably, in Mojitos, in Cuba. Also happy in the windowsill. The day after we got the orchid, J. brought home a compact flowering cactus. So we're enlivening the place, little by little.
Last night I worried, irrationally, that the orchid might be harmed... by the eardrum-busting building alarm that went off for hours across the street. It's sitting on the sill facing the street.
I should mention: I live here only part-time. The other part-time, I live in an 1840 farm-house in a rural area of northeastern Pennsylvania. There is no cell service, no high-speed internet, no postal delivery (I have a PO Box at the local general store), and no noises at all in the middle of the night...except for crickets and the occasional moth flying into the window. The house is on two acres, mostly wooded, and we recently built a garden (by "built," I mean a fence, to keep out the deer and bears). I live there half the week, and in the Bronx the other half.
It is a life in contrasts, to say the least. But not uninteresting. From this place - these places, shifting perspectives and vastly different experiences, week to week, day to day - is born this blog. Tales from the city and country.
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