Michael

I first saw Michael Jackson leading the Jackson 5, live at the Michigan State Fair in 1971. The fair was just outside of Detroit and must have been a gig agreed upon before the Jackson 5 blew up. I say that because State Fairs are notorious for having the all and sundry with not a few “Rubes” as the Carney’s would shout out whenever there was trouble. The crowd, located in a tight outdoor arrangement, was as wide a range of people you’d ever want to be around. Michael, at a touchingly tender age, was admirably professional — as were they all. They had been greeted wildly and then listen to with devoted attention. The Jackson 5 were on a small riser, playing up into the audience that sat in a bleacher arrangement, the kind of seating from which you’d watch a softball game. And indeed it was in a field that ranged off in all directions. Behind the rear of the stage was a very broad expanse that served as broad back road and storage areas for the Fair

But they put on a full show, totally up to par. Towards the end of the set I noticed various members of the Jackson 5 slipping off. Michael was the last. As he walked off the other non-Jackson 5 musicians kept playing. There was a lot of movement in the audience, I was not quite sure what was happening until I looked up into the distance and saw the Jackson 5 running at full tilt being pursued by not a few fans. Up ahead of the 5 was, of all things, an armored truck, the kind that picked up cash from businesses and banks. It lumbered at a steady speed. It became clear after a moment that the armored Brinks-type truck was not going to stop. And then, that the 5 were running for in. And they made it, one by one, every one running at top speed. The last one was Michael. He was the smallest with the shortest legs, but he ran like a track star, and nary a hair on his head was touched by the pursuing fans as he jumped up into the truck and it sped off with its precious cargo.

At first I was puzzled by the use of the armored truck, but it would hit me sooner than later that the Jackson 5 were indeed the equivalent of cash money, of the highest denominations.

It was said on some commentary on his recent death that he was in debt $400 million. Well, he will make that back all right. In no time.

Someone so boyish to die so young. Certainly, if his life appeared as a fantasy to those who followed him, certainly anyone who appreciated Black music, R&B, pop music, anyone who danced as a serious part of their life, anyone who was involved in the huge explosion of Black popular music inspired by and often accompanied by rap and hip hop — that Michael was the man.

I remember Quincy Jones remarking that while they worked on “The Wiz” the Black theatrical musical version of that famous film, The Wizard of Oz, Michael knew everyone’s lines, all the songs, and was up to date on other inner and outer aspects of the production.

It would be after that liaison that Quincy Jones and Michael Jackson formed a partnership that resulted in two classic long-playing records: “The Wall ” and “Thriller.” while the former, done with the Jacksons doing harmonies and vocals and some instrumentation, it was clear that Michael, with his voice having seemingly magically matured from a shrieking kid, into a get down adult, he possessed a range of pure intonation and a natural vibrato that would be the envy of any singer.

The success of Thriller is a story in and of itself. That stellar production of Quincy Jones remains and continues to build as one of the greatest studio productions of the 20th Century. So much so that from when it was a big hit, through many dance parties, up until the requisite memorial overplay, I never tire of hearing this work. I knew a woman. Bunny Hull, who sang in the chorus on a couple of the songs. She was famous in my heart because of the beautiful harmonies she contributed to on that great work, She was a protégé of, Thelma Houston (“Don’t Leave Me That Way”) and pointed up the fact that L. A., Hollywood, was a big family with everybody pretty much knowing each other, from degrees of separation to connections at any kind of party, reception, screening, performance, get together, dinner, church and funeral. For Black people it was a family thing if only by vibe alone.

I remember helping a lawyer friend interview some folks about a legal situation involving Michael. I came through that with the distinct impression tha t Michael, as a child, had probably been molested by one of the parties (not a family member) to that particular lawsuit that ended up not going forward.

But it made me think back to how Michael as a child, as a boy, was so on point emotionally about feelings he was definitely too young to really appreciate – in my mind – as in the ballad, “Who’s Loving you,” recorded when Michael was 7 years old.

Since you been away, don’t you know I sit around with my head hanging down, And I wonder who’s loving you

Hearing him sing that song, a slow drag favorite of my teen years by Smokey Robinson, by a now comparatively forgotten singer who was overshadowed by Michael in his cover version. It seemed to come together that somehow this young perfectionist had found a way, perhaps a difficult way, to these adult feelings.

Because, indeed, he was like an elf, a boy elf, singing these beautiful adult songs in such an understanding way, to the same adults who adored him if only for rendering their emotions of love and loss so clearly.

I loved it when Quincy Jones referred to Michael as his little brother. That’s what the Jacksons became to me, to us, part of that extended family, somewhat dysfunctional, totally talented to the point of brilliance, yet deeply human, vulnerable, valiant.

I listened to the BBC and NPR’s utterly horrible programming in the immediate aftermath of Michael’s death. Both relying on the immediate staff and in house talent (that have few if any Blacks) these outfits, put together the worst type of bunk you would expect from them. The British (and I don’t understand why they all up in our business anyway these days) found some former music editor who was now in another department – finance, I think—who did an absolute horrid job of it. True to the Murdock doctrine they tried to make much of the legal difficulties he encountered with some of the boys he loved to host. For Michael, a boy who had no childhood, this Neverland/Peter Pan thing was a sad attempt to relive the boy’s life he had missed. I remember a revelation from one of the accusing boy’s parents who was so concerned about a quick and formidable financial settlement that it made me wonder about the origins of those complaints.

Could COINTELPRO still be alive and well?

Martin Bashear, a brown Brit who now is main man at ABC’s Nightline gave Jackson his due when he said that when he shot a documentary of Michael a few years ago that he never got any hint that there might have been any improprieties. That Michael was a gentleman in an almost classical way. And, he also pointed out, Michael had been acquitted of any charges in a court of law. Certainly part of the denial of Black folks right of citizenship is the denial of verdicts in courts of law from O. J. Simpson to Michael. Jackson The press and some of the public know what the jurors did not – that these men were guilty, if only by accusation. Something like a secret tribunal, the likes we witness in foreign policy and recently on the books in national law that challenge basic constitutional rights.

Michael Jackson is associated with so many music categories: Bubble gum music, the beginning of the boy group trend (New Edition, Boyz 2 Men, New Kids on the Block) Michael blew up along with hip hop. His connection to that movement was so clear to me. I remember seeing early videos of MC Hammer. He was just dancing. Sometimes alone, or with a partner, or a small group; they would just be dancing to the music and you could see and feel all that energy coming forward, building. So it was not surprising that MC Hammer would connect with hip hop and build such a formidable fortress from just, essentially, jamming to the music.

Michael put his dancing more and more forward in his performance. Dance is what unites all that Black music, it is the currency of exchange the universal fluid. Michael as a dancer became a wonderment. Praise by Fred Astaire did not mean a lot to a good many B lack folks, as it did mean a lot to a good many. But for Michael he had long been acknowledged as a preeminent dancer, of unusual class. I liked it when I heard someone say how he always ordered a dance floor to be installed in his hotel suites when he was on tour or simply moving his residence around all over the world. Dance for Michael was serious business.

Thank God he took dancing so seriously. Indeed it is at the core of the musical realm. I always laugh when I hear critics of hip hop complain. They do not dance to the music. If they loved dancing and have ever been at a party where there was a great DJ driving the crowd towards dance ecstasy, mixing R&B, Dancehall, Disco and hip hop then they would have known something else. Something that was at the heart of Michael’s song writing and star persona and master Quincy Jones’s most excellent musicianship and exquisite arrangements.

That there is a place where you can go that is so divine that it can hardly be spoken of — but it can be sung, and played and danced to, and if it is high enough then you are there. And you will never forget the feeling of that deeply mystical realm. That ecstatic place Michael is most associated with, and will always be.

© David Henderson 2009. All Rights Reserved

    by

    Bonny Finberg

    While the bombs fell between the 20^th and 21^st of April 1944, people prayed at the feet of the Crucifixion at Sacre Coeur. Montmartre was spared. I can’t help but feel it was their collective prayer that saved them rather than the stilled heart of a dead man, as full of grace as he might have been. There was no one then to pray for his salvation. He was betrayed. No one saw it coming.

I followed the Stations of the Cross, its brilliant mosaic transforming what must have been a messy business into a spectacle for the eyes. From the gleaming dome above, Le Seigneur, all cleaned up and risen from the tomb, bestows his blessing, substantiating triumph over death.

Once a year his betrayal is re-enacted. We all know what’s going to happen but we can’t do anything to reverse it. We can elevate it to sacrifice, feel better about the comparatively small betrayals we commit. We are all Judas. Only Jesus is the savior. His message was simple: Save yourself. But a game of telephone was in operation, and the road to dogma is paved with competing intentions.

Did he really die for our sins, or was he merely being consistent? Here, you can own another’s pain without having to really suffer it. You can be protected and forgiven. All human misery is swept under the shade of an ancient oak whose acorn happened to fall on good soil. 

A martyr chooses death. Jesus’ Passion might have been an unfortunate political accident. Or else Judas helped to ensure He carried out his destiny. Most of us die for no reason. Insight might come early or not at all. We may live rich, complex lives that are woven into a larger, ongoing narrative. Or we may be easily forgotten. How many bibles have gone unwritten?

    *

    Asylum

    At the entrance, security guards scan the crowd. A man directs people to the side aisles or the pews, depending on whether they’re coming to pray or coming to look. He repeatedly puts his finger to his lips—sshhhh! They have lots to see and say. Some are in awe. Some are making arrangements for later when they’ll go for moules frites.  Scowling, he continues shushing, pointing to his head to remind them to remove their hats, shaking his finger at the one-eyed monsters to put their cameras away. He protects the Sacred Heart with the authority vested in him by the Holy Fathers who take his confession and hand him the Eucharist. The end is always near. You try to see it coming.

    *

    Passion

    I thought the services would start at 5:30, so I was seated in the second row by 5:25. But this is Good Friday not a routine Vespers service. After an hour, a nun in a white robe and black wimple walks out to the front of the apse and sets up a microphone. She moves like an actress playing a nun. Men in lab coats come out and place the sacred objects and texts. A short, plump woman in a white lab coat appears with a rag and feather duster and tidies up. They have a brief conversation and walk back behind the apse. A handyman walks on, front left, with keys and a tape measure hanging out of his pocket. He looks around and walks off, leaving behind an odor of lubricating oil.  Another half hour goes by. The pews are filling up.

    A Black priest in a white robe comes out. There is anticipation, especially in the first two rows, where those who came earliest have been sitting longest. But then, behind the priest is the cleaning woman again. They file off to the right. Some people are talking, others are praying. Some of the ones praying tell the ones who are talking to be quiet. An irritable exchange erupts between the two women next to me, who have been chattering away, and the woman behind, who chastises them. A woman many rows back is talking loudly. People are trying to quiet her. She becomes increasingly belligerent and it slowly becomes apparent that she is not in her right mind. A few people smile indulgently. Two nuns come out and hand out the texts for the mass. Another ten minutes pass. The nuns come out and take their seats on the sides and the noise subsides a little. Another twenty minutes pass.

    I read the whole four pages of the mass. My eyelids fall closed and I drift into a mild state of meditation. The woman next to me stands suddenly. I jump up from my seat, surprised at my own reflex and realize that, although I never thought it possible, I have been hypnotized.  The procession has begun.

    A cardinal and three priests are in front. One of the priests is old and feeble. All kneel down and prostrate themselves before the marble Crucifix. When they stand, the two on the outside pull the old one up by his elbows. He stumbles to his feet, a tuft of white hair sticking up from his head. The angelic voices of the nuns sing about the Royal Kingdom of Heaven. I sing along, following the printed text, in exalted French. The Passion is read by three priests. The cardinal speaks the words of Jesus in a deep, commanding voice. We all stand and the nuns sing, in crystalline harmony, the adoration of the Wooden Cross:

    Voici le bois de la Croix

    qui porte le Salut du monde,

    Venez, Adorons!

    Here is the wood of the Cross

    that carries the Salvation of the world,

    Come, let us adore it.

    The Wooden Cross, carved in olive wood, is carried from the back by a procession of robed men.  When they reach the apse they hold it vertically so the priests and altar boys can each in turn come forward to kiss it. After each kiss, a priest wipes the spot clean with a handkerchief. 

    Then the nuns line up. They kiss the naked Jesus all over his stretched out body, under his ribs, his armpit, his thighs, his hands, his feet. They know how much he suffered for them, how much he loves them. And they love him back. The priest swabs each kiss with his handkerchief.

    After this the pews empty into the aisles. The line is slow and as I come nearer my eyes are ineluctably drawn to the loincloth. I sense a nudge from the devil but head for the foot. The priest points to the blank surface of the cross, indicating where I must kiss it, shouting, “Le pied! Le pied!”—and I begin to think my eyes have betrayed me. Or the priest has read my mind. I am convinced he is able to see transgressions before they happen. I walk past his finger and put my lips to the exquisitely carved toe, the tendons strained in agonized submission.

    The nuns sing:

O Croix, buisson ardent de la Revelation,

Vigne au Sang vermeil, Olivier de benediction,

O Croix, bois d’ombre et defraicheur ou murmure L’Esprit, nous t’adorons!

O Cross, burning bush of the Revelation,

Vineyard of ruby Blood, Olive Tree of benediction,

O Cross, dark and faded wood where the Spirit whispers, we adore you.

    Words so holy even the metaphors are Capitalized.

    *

    Walking back from the church I notice signs hanging outside many apartment windows that read, Vendu. The word ‘vendu’ means ‘sold.’ It also means ‘traitor.’  This seems serendipitous. We find ourselves inhabiting a world where the structures we’ve trusted to protect us have betrayed us. Time and space have become commodities beyond our means—The weak may inherit the earth, but the traitors have the best real estate. So at least here, in Paris, you’re safe from traitors if you pay attention to the signs.

              © Bonny Finberg, 2005, Paris

SUNDAY, July 5,   3 - 5:30 pm 
Paul Pinto:

My Very Special Recital

Gathering of the Tribes
285 E 3 St., 2nd Fl., (Bet C & D)
(212) 674–3778 info@tribes.org
Coordinated by patrick brennan & Steve Cannon

http://www.sonispheric.net/IdeaKitchen.html
http://www.myspace.com/ideakitchen

1st Sunday of each month 3 — 5:30 pm
a new guest composer each month

the project

This is an unfunded musician initiative for musicians & interested listeners to create one setting where musicians can share ideas & learn from each other, where compositional ideas get worked out in a public domain among a variety of personalities & dispositions. For listeners, this is about demystifying music & is especially oriented toward dispelling attitudes that creative & original musics are somehow “hard” to listen to.
invitation to composers

invitation to composers

“Composer” here means anybody who invents a way to generate music. This includes, alongside notated & head composition, methods & strategies for coordinating live composition (AKA improvising)

If you have something different for musicians to play, &, even more importantly, if it’s something that addresses how musicians might conceive & hear music differently, please contact patrick brennan at ideakitchenmusicmusic@gmail.com with your proposal.

invitation to players

Bring your instruments. Bring your music stands. If notated music is involved, parts & scores can be downloaded in advance from the webpage whenever possible.

equipment

At Tribes there’s some space, electricity, chairs & an upright piano. Percussion, amplifiers, music stands — are bring-your-own.

format

The first 1/2 hour, from 3 till 3:30 is available for each guest composer to perform with whatever musicians if she/he chooses. The exchanges with musicians would run from 3:30 -5:30 (or from 3 without a performance)

Paul Pinto: My Very Special Recital

An exploratory exploration of atunal longfibreous recitation, for strings, electronics, a reciter and the will to succeed

 This is my second “Special Recital” - a series of works which explore a sort of amateur music-making and identifying the “performer” rather than the “musician”. My Very Special Recital draws inspiration from open mic nights, Suzuki practice, feng shui, kung fu, Haydn string quartets, meditation and quantum mechanics.

 The linking element: At the start of this project, I knew very little about these things. The work begins as the reciter approaches each as a novice and by the end of the 40 minute work, an amateur.

 The premiere performance at the Gathering of the Tribes Gallery is part of the Idea Kitchen series and is an open workshop for this work-in-progress.

 New York native, Paul Pinto is quickly making himself known in the avant-garde music circles of the metro area as a “cutting-edge” composer, an exciting performer and founding director of the city’s freshest classical ensemble, thingNY. He led the premiere performances of several works of his peers and the noteworthy Scottish premieres of Gerard Grisey’s Partiels and his own ballet Miseke. The successful performances of the latter led to its DVD and CD recording and distribution throughout Great Britain by Learning and Teaching Scotland. Recently, Paul has collaborated with a diverse group of artists including Pauline Oliveros, the Panoply Laboratory, the Berkshire Choral Festival, animator Dan Pinto, Ken Silverman, Thomas Piercy and Pinky Weitzman, and his music has been performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano, the Royal Scottish Academy Chamber Chorus, ensemble loadbang, the Carnegie Mellon Concert Chorus and of course, thingNY. On June 20, ADDDDDDDDD (an opera written with the other composers of thingNY) will premiere at the Tank in New York. In July, Paul will curate the Comformer Perposers Series (a monthly laboratory for experimental composers) at the University of the Streets.                   

www.paulpinto.bravehost.com

by: Susanne Lee

Postcards from Beijing

Walls

My husband finally makes it to the Great Wall on his 3rd Beijing trip.  We negotiate with the driver from our hotel: 4 hours for $100 US in a Mercedes with seatbelts and air con, absolute necessities for the reckless drivers and the heat.
We stop at a roadside produce stand to pick up some bottled water and some of the ubiquitous watermelon.  Hardly any tourists come this way, to this China, the one not a part of the economic miracles.
The owner sizes the three of us up and asks me, as he points to my son & husband
“Are you their translator?”
I pause.  This is a new question.
“His mother and his wife.”  Son and husband wave to him, while eating watermelon.
“Your father, Chinese?”  Of course, he would want to claim my paternal lineage.
“Both.”  The man laughs, shocked.  My ability to shift from Mandarin to English dazzled him.

The Mutianyu section of the wall is much less crowded than Badaling, where most tourist buses go.  There’s hardly anyone there; we go because it was the only day it didn’t reach 100F.  We pause to take in the views and once we reach the end of the restored section, we ignore that sign and explore beyond where bricks, crumbled stones and dirt mark the remains of the wall.

On my first visit, I took the local bus with Chinese tourists to Badaling.  Besides the stunning vista and the bus driver’s insistence that I try basi juzi, candied tangerines, I remember that idiot tourist in hot pants and heels.

Duck

Duck tastes great after scaling the Wall.  We ask our driver go to the modern lean duck joint where I go brave & sample duck brain.
Another day, I must have traditional fatty style duck at the huge place off the main street, Wangfujing.  While waiting for our table, we watch a video loop of foreign dignitaries from the 70s chowing down on duck wrapped in thin bread.

My husband and I ate in the people’s side in the days of dual currency in the 80s.  There were no frills for the masses, but the food came from the same kitchen.  The locals admired his skill with chopsticks by toasting him.

Learning

Beida, or Peking University, is the epitome of higher education, a place full of dreams of success and mobility.  A uniformed guard with a bayonet stands at the entrance.  Notions of freedom of expression, questioning authority, challenging ideas?  Absolutely, not here.

The colleague of a friend meets us.  In her 20s, and a product of China’s one child policy, she is blissfully oblivious to 6/4, the Cultural Revolution, and mouths a string of government platitudes.  We end up talking about fashion and cosmetics on ebay.  Wow, propaganda really worked.
Peasants and workers bring their children to the campus where they pose them for a picture, believing something might rub off, working a bit of magic, as if  “one day, Xiao wang, you can come here.”
Mothers

I meet Professor Ding Ziling, a professor at RenDa, short for Ren Min Da Xue, Peoples’ University.  Her strength and grace strike me.  She is human rights activist and has sought government accountability for the shooting of its citizens on June 4th 1989.  She is eloquent and a passionate spokeswoman for the Tiananmen Mothers, a group of women whose children died that night.  The government would like her and her group to disappear and through age, they will.  Before I ever met her, I wrote many letters to Congress on her behalf.

For Professor Ding, the personal and the political are forever linked.  Her high school-aged son was shot that night.  Transformed by both her grief and rage at the government, she started the Mothers’ Movement.  She takes me to her son’s room where we talk.  Her statement, “I had him when I was 36,” lingers.

Students

In the waning days of the occupation of Tiananmen Square is thinning out and many students have returned to their campuses.  Wuer Kaixi, the charismatic Uighur student who has chastised then premier Li peng, had been in hiding, comes to see the Goddess of Liberty, a sculpture created by local art students.  He is a thin good looking kid.  I speak to him briefly on the street.  He says, “The people are behind us.”  Hundreds of exhilarated students leave their tents on the Square, and run after him, on Chang An, the grand avenue in front of the Forbidden City.

I would meet him after his escape from China, months later in New York, along with Desmond Tutu at an upper east side fundraiser, where I make the faux pas of calling Tutu by his first name.

Their handlers appear and shuffle us writers out a side door before the human rights activists are led to the tigers: tight-faced impeccably coiffed and painted Park Avenue matrons for a meet and greet.

Firsts

On my first trip, I am one of the few solo travelers.  One July afternoon, I meet a group of local college students and we toss a Frisbee in Tiananmen Square.

I discuss Shakespeare with a young teacher.  I ask her if she wants a postcard from San Francisco.  Reluctant initially, she then, writes her address in my book and in a sudden change of heart, neatly tears out that handwritten rectangle.  It’s the post-Cultural Revolution paranoia that caused her fear of traceable Western contact.

I stay in a dorm room at a hostel.  The other women guests adopt me since I am alone and dub me, “Xiao Li,” Little Lee.  When I start coughing, the hotel manager immediately sends me off to the infirmary, where the nurse on duty laughs, I tell her I had just come from Guangzhou, “You Southerners can’t take the heat.”  I get packets of lozenges and herbal tea.

The concierge, who is in his 20s and also shares my last name, teaches me advanced Chinese phrases, when he is not sneaking off with his girlfriend.

Old

Casey, my 7 year old son describes the hutong, the wandering maze of old streets linking ancient courtyards, as a “neighborhood from long ago.”  Seeing how the hutong have been demolished for the Olympics makes me nostalgic for the alleyways I wandered through on previous trips, little corners where old men smoked, women hung laundry from sticks, hole in the wall joints served hearty noodles.
We are both absorbed by the transience of water calligraphy done by older gentlemen with huge brushes on cement parks.  They appraise each other’s works and then, the words disappear.

Palaces
Casey is disappointed at the summer palace. Empress Cixi’s marble boat is now forbidden to visitors, so a snapshot from across the way must do.

On my first trip, I met a lady wearing round wire rimmed glasses, bobbed grey hair, a crochet bag dangling from her wrist and we spent the afternoon together.  She took me to her haunts, nimbly navigating the Summer Palace, where Manchu emperors fled the oppressive Beijing summers and periodically dropped English words into our conversation, “economics” “history,” learned from pre-Communist university days.

After she left, I climbed Cixi’s boat and meet a group of young PLA (that’s People’s Liberation Army) soldiers on leave.  Jolly and talkative, they decided that I could not be Chinese, but from Mian Dian, which the concierge translates for me, Burma.
Eat

On Autumn, I finally got to taste Tanghulu, candied crab apples on a stick and my husband and I sample moon cakes filled with lotus and sesame.  On our recent trip, Casey lives on noodles, handed-pulled and served in a spicy meat sauce.  At the night markets, I eat fried quail eggs on stick. After the worst version of tapioca tea in the entire world, Casey and I erase the flavor from our taste buds and share a Coca-cola, something I never drink in the States, but always crave overseas.

Spectacle

The Canadian friends of Beijing composed the ditty, “Good luck, Beizhing,” for China’s earlier unsuccessful Olympic bid.  When did that become the official pronunciation?  Folks, it’s Bay JING!  That has been a pet peeve and would be my chant during the games.

My friend Wong and I are watching the Olympic Opening Ceremony, directed by Zhang Yimou.

My friend from Hong Kong, Sam, says Zhang makes “Chinese movies for gwailo” (Cantonese for Westerners).  Zhang is the master of La Choy Cinema, gooey, sweet stuff that leaves you hungry and unsatisfied.  It all fits together neatly; the casts of thousands, martial choreography, over the top colors from Hero, and Curse of the Golden Flower (besides its display of Gong Li’s breasts) were just Zhang’s dress rehearsal for opening night.

Wong concludes that we were watching, “Triumph of the Will.”

***
Susanne Lee’s nonfiction on diverse subjects as Hong Kong Cinema, surrealism and blood sausage in Spain, and mehndi in Delhi has appeared in The Village Voice, Konch, SLAM and Giant Robot.  Her recent story, Vol de Nuit, appears in Pow Wow: American Short Fiction from Then to Now, edited by Ishmael Reed & Carla Blank (Da Capo Press).

Recently, while visiting the Los Gatos Museum of Art, I came across the work of Latino Torelli, an Italian painter now residing in Oakland, Ca.. The museum in association with the Los Gatos Art Association produces the Annual Open Juried Show, an organization comprised of bay area artists, Torelli’s painting, “Alley by the Portal, Oakland”, caught my eye, tucked neatly as you please, in a downstairs corner of the museum’s gallery; not a large painting , 24” by 24” , but one reminiscent of De Kooning’s work with its loose abstract qualities, buttery soft pinks and beigey palette . In following up my intense interest of this relatively unknown painter’s work, I contacted Torelli to arrange a meeting. He was very accommodating and personable with a slight no nonsense edge. Not suffering fools easily, Torelli grilled me to see what I was about and then we got down to business. 
Born in 1939 in Tuscany, Italy, Latino Torelli started painting in his teens. Influenced by his country’s rich heritage, Giotto, the 15^th century painters and his aunt’s urging, at age 13 he tried his hand. Suggestable and not too involved with painting in his youth he went on to study geology and hydrology earning a PH.D from the University of Illinois in 1973. After working for a water resources company in Italy, Torelli did some sheep farming in Umbria, 20 years to be exact. Torelli resumed painting in 2002 after the death of his first wife, his daughter’s urging and a relocation to the US.

Latino Torelli received an award for “The Columbia River At the Bridge of I-97” in 2007 from LGAA and when interviewed by newsletter editor, Kevin Kasik, Torelli  answered with  “how do I respond to the juror’s (Marian Parmenter) calling me a serious painter? – I guess that’s the best part of it. I just think of myself as a guy who paints, not a painter. After this prize maybe they can call me a painter.”  Torelli, no different than any painter worth their weight in paint, states: “The only thing is it must be coherent, always coherent.” Torelli, an interesting combination of philosopher and scientist spouts Spinoza’s theory of intuitive knowledge: to see things sub specie aeternitatis. Torelli also likens painting to transubstantiation: “In painting, space, light and time are the holy trinity. In a given painting we can only address a particular configuration of this truth. But if we do it right we hint to its essence, Eternity.” 

Torelli tells me he paints quickly as he says he can only paint for 2 hours at a time; the tension is too much for him.   “When I’m done with that one, I never put my brush on it again. Never on a dry surface; only in the moment, wet into wet.” “I try to be as free of  intentions as I can in order to make a good painting. When your intent is to make a good painting you never do.”  Torelli uses a light effortless coat of paint, not much struggle.  At first glance the paintings appear to be thick, dense but on a closer look they have an almost transparent quality, veils. Torelli exhibits some of Matisse’s qualities of an unbroken line of ease especially in his rare figurative piece such as, “Soon’s Garden” from 2004. A charming painting of a friend with his signature creams, beiges and peachy pinks as in her jacket with black hair and pants for contrast. The whitish yellow surface where Soon sits in her little garden chair bring to mind Van Gogh’s lively brushstrokes. Torelli paints on masonite, all 24 “ by 24” for the no nonsense reason that that is the size of the masonite sheets when divided into 8 squares. Torelli states that in Italy the sheets are a little larger so his paintings are 28 “ by 28” there, but of course! He states that the square gives him the right ratio between height and depth. “I mostly paint from the tip of my feet”, he quips and  “rectangular paintings are rare, only for self portraits”. Torelli works out of his apartment in Oakland , Ca in a cramped space but then for an artist space is a state of mind. I witnessed his new body of work, which is an extreme departure from the landscapes. But Torelli informs me it is all of the same thing to him and done simultaneously in his search for unity, unity coming in different colors and styles. The new work being of a flat coverage of one color each with a small tilted square strategically placed. For Torelli this tiny square afloat on a bed of color represents mankind’s struggle with dualism and perhaps his own, linking his disparate styles and ideas or subject/object together and presenting them as one. Torelli has an ongoing wrestling match or should I say fascination with dualism. Sounds pretty Human, All Too Human, to me. Torelli suffers the pangs of guilt over yearning to show the body of his work in a retrospective and then he says he will ‘hang it up’; I hope he quashes those demons.

Torelli tells me he paints only on the spot and “Red 23^rd” from 2003  “spoke to him of mortality”. A dilapidated piece of land between Potrero Hill and the S.F. bay; a whitish gray street atop an undercoat of pink, an oft used starting point for so many of Torelli’s paintings; stark whitish grey posts standing firmly atop the pink . The painting has a filled up luscious quality in spite of its bleak subject matter. 

Notable for me ,“Pine Trees at Albinia”, also from 2003; a forest of windblown trees with delicate bluish grey sky and one large pine tree in the foreground sitting atop a bank of creamy tan with dark brown overlaid every which way giving an energy to the scene; askew posts alongside  keeping the picture upright. Torelli adds a clear green to his beige palette in this one. 
   “ Painting is just being there. When you’re somewhere painting, what you see makes you live and you make live what you see. “   Latino Torelli

Neila Mezynski

Colson Whitehead

Doubleday

Reviewed by Sarah Goodwin-Nguyen

It’s fun to compare Colson Whitehead’s SAG HARBOR to another recent novel

about the life of a teenaged preppie, specifically PREP by Curtis Sittenfeld. Interestingly, the narrators of both novels are now in their adulthood, looking back at themselves as teenagers. However, PREP’s protagonist, Lee Fiora, is a Midwestern-Caucasion girl on scholarship in a New England boarding school, while SAG HARBOR’s Benji Cooper is an African-American boy who attends a mostly white prep school near his Manhattan home.

Whereas the reader of PREP inhabits the mind of a girl unable to “be herself” in a hostile adolescent environment, SAG HARBOR takes place in a situation where Benji feels most himself. You see, this isn’t about Benji’s life at school; it takes place in an all-black beach community in the Hamptons where Benji’s family spends summers . Though we get glimpses of Benji’s life in prep school, it seems far away and irrelevant (the way school often feels to a kid on summer break.)

Most readers will recognize themselves at fifteen in Benji. Like many fifteen-year-olds, Benji is socially awkward, too fond of junk food, and vulnerable to peer pressure. Benji will reach a few milestones that summer, such as getting his braces off and making out with a girl. He will learn a little bit about himself, and will become a little more the man he’s going to be. SAG HARBOR is not as cuttingly observant or bittersweet as PREP, relying instead on the narrator’s mostly amusing anecdotes about trying to score beer, buddy up to the guys with cars, and avoid losing an eye to a bee-bee gun.

That is not to say that SAG HARBOR doesn’t have its dark moments. Benji’s father is a drunk who is often verbally and sometimes physically abusive. Benji and his younger brother are left alone in the Hampton house for weeks at a time (it is assumed that the community will look after them;) the boys’ young lives are overshadowed by parental neglect. A surprise encounter with Benji’s estranged older sister, Elena, is particularly painful, as Elena’s hip, wise soul plays a foil to Benji’ sadly apathetic mother.

Sometimes Whitehead’s exuberant writing lingers too long and with too much hyperbole on minutiae. For example, here’s Whitehead’s narrator describing his younger self’s love for Coca-Cola: “How could one not be charmed by the effervescent joviality of a tall glass of the stuff–the manic activity of the bubbles, popping, reforming, popping anew, sliding up the inside of the glass to freedom, as if the beverage were actually, miraculously, caffeinated on itself. That tart first sip, preferably with ice knocking against the lips for an added sensory flourish, that stunned the brain into total recall of pleasure, of all the Cokes consumed before and all those impending Cokes, the long line of satisfaction underpinning a life.”

Overzealous rants aside, SAG HARBOR offers a convincing picture of what it was like growing up black in the eighties. Benj’s opinions on television, music, and clothes are a funky time-capsule of pop culture of the era. At first, Benji can only compare his life of affluence to the poor African-American families portrayed on shows like Good Times and Baby, I’m Back, noting “Me and Reggie and Elena tuned in, making room on the couch to verify that we didn’t exist.” Finally, The Cosby Show: “Who are these people? We said: People we know.”

There is little chance of SAG HARBOR joining the cannon of great coming-of-age literature in the vein of CATCHER IN THE RYE. Though Benji encounters some racism and bigotry in his life, SAG HARBOR is not about confronting these issues. Nor does it need to be: it is enough that Whitehead has given African-American youth a genuine, likeable voice in the character of Benji. This is really how teenaged boys think, act, and speak–and it isn’t always pretty or politically correct. There are inevitable moments of violence as Benji and his friends struggle with their identities as young black men, but none of them fall so far as to be unredeemable.

Overall, SAG HARBOR is a perfect light summer read with just enough depth to engage. It succeeds in reminding us of teenaged summers when anything seemed possible. You were sure you could change your life simply by wearing a new style of clothes, and you still had plenty of time to get everything right.

Max Bond Memorial / Cooper Union / May 12, 2009 /Remarks by Alice M. Greenwald

_________________________________________________________________________

I am deeply honored to speak today on behalf of my colleagues at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, in celebration of the life and legacy of Max Bond.

When I arrived in New York in the spring of 2006 to take on the directorship of the Memorial Museum, I found myself surrounded by architects.  We had architects for the Memorial, landscape architects for the Memorial Plaza, architects for the Museum Pavilion, and architects for the below-grade Museum.  Even a disproportionate number of my colleagues at the Foundation had been trained as architects, had long worked on various architectural projects, had parents and siblings who were architects, or were married to architects!   And, I’m not exaggerating!

As I began to orient myself to the many challenges of this project and tried to become fluent in the language of “architect-speak,” one individual stood out among the many impressive characters in our midst.  And, that was Max Bond.

At that time, we were all deeply involved in the Section 106 process: a conscientious effort to hear from a variety of consulting parties regarding this project’s proposed approach to the Federally-mandated preservation of landmark-status historical and archaeological assets at the World Trade Center site.   To say that these meetings were intense, passionate, and contentious, is putting it mildly.  But, inevitably, in the midst of the fury and the debate, Max would speak, and in his soft-spoken, gentlemanly manner, would zero in on the key issues, elevate the discussion, and move it forward in a productive fashion.  His was the voice of calm and reason, and when Max spoke, everyone listened.  This project is the better off for it.

Max’s personal commitment to our effort was palpable.  My colleagues speak of the gravitas with which he accorded the Museum program; how he could envision – even early on – the potential power of the visitor experience in this space; and, how he consistently rose above conflicting priorities of the multiple design teams to advocate for the greatness of the project as a whole.  Max had an unpretentious but keen and powerful intelligence.  He simply commanded your respect without demanding it.

When people speak about Max, they inevitably use words like “gentlemanly,” “courtly,” “gracious,” “elegant.”  And, these are all accurate descriptors.  But, I want to focus on another aspect of Max’s persona:  his fierce advocacy for the interweaving of civil and human rights into the social fabric of a city; his fundamental commitment, through his art and chosen profession, to the promotion of social responsibility.

Eighteen months ago, in conjunction with a nationally-touring exhibition about the Memorial, I traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, where I spent the better part of an afternoon at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.  There, an elegant building designed by Max Bond houses powerful exhibitions, a library, and meeting spaces dedicated to the history of the American civil rights movement, all meant to spur reflection on the imperative of fostering civil and human rights worldwide.

At the BCRI, you walk through a comprehensive exhibition that takes you from the Jim Crow South, through the violent suppression of the non-violent marches and anti-segregation protests that took place in Birmingham, led by the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and Baptist minister and head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.  Eventually, the path of the exhibition leads to a moment of powerful immediacy, with the screening of the historic film footage of Dr. King’s exalted “I have a Dream” speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. 

As you exit the core exhibition, elevated by the resounding words of promise you have just heard, you come into a light-filled room whose windows look out across the street to a city park on one side, and a church on the other.  The park, it turns out, was the location of the incredibly brutal treatment of young protesters at the hands of the Birmingham Police, who used high-pressure water jets and police dogs to attack hundreds of school students participating in the “Children’s Crusade” of May 1963. 

And, the church is the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where on September 15 of that same year, four little girls attending Sunday School were murdered when a bomb ripped through the church basement.  Within a year of that act of terror, President Johnson would secure passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In a surprising and understated way, the very building at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute becomes a lens onto the world:   admonishing us not to forget, and demanding that we place memory at the heart of our commitment to making change in the world.

The great Civil War historian, David Blight, has written about a conversation he had with Rev. Shuttlesworth some years ago, when they were both part of a committee planning the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.  Rev. Shuttlesworth, who listened quietly to an impassioned debate about how and whether a museum about slavery might be progressive and uplifting, spoke up at the very end of the meeting and only when asked what he had been thinking about so intently.  He said, matter-of-factly, “if you don’t tell it like it was, it can never be as it ought to be.”

I believe that Max Bond told it like it was…so that we might not just build impressive buildings, but so we might all continue to build a world defined by justice, inclusion, and mutual respect.  And, he told it not only in Birmingham, but in Atlanta at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and someday soon, right here in New York, at the National September 11 Memorial Museum. 

These buildings bear the stamp of the man who conceived them.  They are never strident, but always insistent.  They are not loud, but they are always on point.  They demand our attention and focus us on what matters.

And, they remind us of the privilege – and it has been my privilege – of having shared challenges and achievements, tragedy and triumph, with a true and gracious, one-of-a-kind gentleman: Max Bond.

*******

Max and Me by Jean Carey Bond

___________________________

My first encounter with LeRoi Jones was through the brother in law of Marzette Watts, Bobby Hamilton.  He told me that Roi was organizing a meeting at his home on East 14^th Street to discuss what was happening in terms of race relations at that time.  This was back in the ‘60s around 1962 and 1963. The last time I ran into Baraka was here at Tribes when he came to read here from his latest book of short stories Out and Gone.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since then and now.

The meetings were held at Roi’s apartment.  At that time he was married to Hetti Jones and they two little girls. The sessions amounted to nothing more than bitching and complaining, ranting and raving.  And the target of our art was discrimination, jobs and housing, etc.  The in charge members of the group were writers, artists and a few musicians.

People who stand out in my mind are the likes of Archie Schepp, the saxophonist, Charles Charles, the writer, Joe Johnson the poet and many others.  The group amounted to about twenty. 

The idea of the sessions was not to bitch and complain, but to figure out what concrete actions could be taken by the group.

Unbeknownst to us, similar groups were being formed in major cities around the country. 

Roi would hold court and all of our rage was aimed at the chair. 

But on a personal note, I was homeless at the time and moved to Boston for a year and then returned to New York’s Lower East Side.  By that time things had changed drastically. 

I found myself involved with poets like Ishmal Reed, David Henderson, Tom Dent, Lorenzo Thomas-the umber group.  On the sidelines were people like Calvin Hicks and his wife Nora.  By that time Roi had formed something called The Black Arts Movement and was in transit up to Harlem from the Lower East Side.

Half the poets, because of ideological conflicts, joined forces with him and moved up to Harlem with his group, while others stayed on the Lower East Side. It was around that time that Roi issued The Black Arts Movement Manifesto, calling on Afro American artists to take political action. And it was at this same time that Ishmael Reed issued the Neo HooDoo Manifesto, calling on Afro American artists to adhere to their tradition-pre-dating the blues.

Roi, who by this time had changed his name to Baraka, and his group were labeled Black Nationalists (Separatists).  And those in the downtown group were known as integrationists.  For the most part they were focused on diversity and inclusivity.

By this time I had resettled in New York on East 10^th street and Ave B and was working at a printing factory.  The poet Larry Neal who was part of the up town group would come down from time to time and keep me up to date with the events of the black arts movement uptown. 

From time to time I would go to their fundraisers where they would have the likes of Pharaoh Sanders and other musicians and poets to perform.  At other times I would visit the Truth Coffee Shop in Harlem, one of their hangouts. 

I was busy holding down a 9 to 5 and only free on the weekends.  I only kept tabs on what they were doing from time to time and in bits and pieces.  Larry Neal was my contact and he would come down to put everything into perspective.  They would update me on the ins and outs of the Black Arts Movement.  In other words, who was doing what to who, their conflict, etc.

But it was when Baraka published the essay On Revolutionary Writing and Afro American History that the shit hit the fan.

A forum was put together at Joel Over streets Gallery-Kenkeleba House on East 2^nd Street.  The members of the panel were asked to take positions as to whether they agreed or disagreed with Baraka’s essay.  The problem with this essay is that it left out such important writers like William Wells Brown and Ralph Ellison, among others.  Then again, Roi did not think of these artists as revolutionary but rather too “conservative” for his tastes.

Keep in mind the ‘60s was a rather riotous and noisy era.  A lot of shouting and screaming was going on at that time.  There were folks people accused of not being revolutionary enough and assassinations happening across the board.  Even Larry Neal ended up being fired upon. 

This was years after Baraka had his play Dutchman produced downtown, which caused quite an up roar.  He himself was always controversial and constantly ended up on the news.  For example, his poem Arm Yourselves or Harm Yourselves, which he published in the Evergreen Review, got him into trouble with the authorities.  And not mention his poem Who Blew Up America?, reflecting on the collapse of the twin towers, which caused a worldwide controversy.

Even the Jewish novelist Philip Roth made him one of his protagonists in the novel American Pastoral.  In the novel he is the instigator of the riots in Newark at that time.  If you were to ask Baraka about that period he would say they were busy going around picking up the wounded and taking them to the hospital.  Baraka himself was beaten up by the cops as well.

The Black Arts Movement dissolved in the late ‘60’s, early ‘70’s and Roi hid himself away in Jersey, which is now the base of his operation.

I only see him from time to time.  For the most part, I would go to Jersey for specific celebrations, poetry readings, and on evenings when we would celebrate his and other poets’ birthdays.   Over the years I lost contact with Baraka and his group in Jersey.

It was at a birthday party for poet Cruz at Baraka’s house that I encountered Max Roach.  After Larry Neal’s demise, Roi had taken it upon himself to write Max’s biography. 

Those were great moments because being in that environment I was able to catch up on the gossip of what I was missing.

And it was the funeral for James Baldwin where Baraka was the keynote speaker that he blew the audience’s mind.  Especially the part when he mentioned that James Baldwin was our man even with the knowledge of his sexual preferences. 

The most important thing that I loved about Roi then and now was that he has always been true to his convictions. And has shown passion in his endeavors. 

Thoroughly knowledgeable about Afro-American music and equally knowledgeable about contemporary American poetry, he’s never lagged or been sloppy in his analysis of the above.

Over the years, he’s proven himself to be a true poet who speaks the truth to power.  He has never been afraid to say exactly what is on his mind.

He is one of our rare geniuses and should be celebrated for his accomplishments.

Happy 75^th birthday!

      Steve Cannon (the blind guy)

      Executive Director of A Gathering of the Tribes

Thank you to Tribes supporters who have made direct buys of the New Edge/Fly by Night Press publication Spic Chic. We are in the process of ordering a second print run of the book to utilize on the upcoming twenty five city book tour plus overseas presentations of material from: Spic Chic “The Adventures of the Last Nuyorican.”  

Spic Chic Written by: Luis Chaluisan aka El Extreme. Published by: Fly By Night Press - A subsidiary of A Gathering of the Tribes, NYC. ISBN 1930083173 (100 pages with color photos). For filmed performances of material from the book please visit  www.newedgecabaret.com

“I think Spic Chic is strong stuff, right in the Nuyorican tradition. Poems and then stories back into poems that are often emotionally moving. A self exploration in a non-chronological history consistent in language and point of view, it is clearly a highly personalized work that is successful in the Nuyorican free-style genre and successful in the broader sense as well.” David Henderson, author, ‘Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky: Jimi Hendrix Voodoo Child

In late 2008, Fly by Night Press (a subsidiary of A Gathering of the Tribes, NYC) opted to publish a compendium of  poetry, photos, artwork, comedic essays and short stories dating back to 1975 under the title of Spic Chic (The Adventures of the Last Nuyorican), written by Luis Chaluisan (aka El Extreme). The term “Spic Chic” caused controversy in 1974 when it was used on the Bill Boggs mid-day talk show - then aired on Metromedia Channel 5 in NYC (now Fox Television). The offhand remark was offered by Latin NY magazine editors to describe the infusion of vivid colors by Latino clothes designers then making their mark on NY’s fashion world. The latter part of the promotional title (The Adventures of the Last Nuyorican) is based on a humorous quip in 2005 from Nuyorican poet Papoleto Melendez that “El Extreme represents the torn page” from the canon of previously published Nuyorican writers who flourished in the 1970’s and ‘80’s. Meanwhile, writer David Henderson (‘Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky: Jimi Hendrix Voodoo Child) is a bit more serious stating, “I think Spic Chic is strong stuff, right in the Nuyorican tradition. Poems and then stories back into poems that are often emotionally moving. A self exploration in a non-chronological history consistent in language and point of view, it is clearly a highly personalized work that is successful in the Nuyorican free-style genre and successful in the broader sense as well.” Both observations are welcomed by Bronx bred author Chaluisan - now residing in Brownsville, Brooklyn - who states, “I could have chased a traditional path in developing my work but I was having too much manic fun being off-beat and, besides, God had other plans for my creative life.” With the publication of “Narrative of a Hybrid” in the “Polemic” Anthology (1976, Straight Ahead Press – Amherst, Massachusetts) Luis Chaluisan joined the ranks of period Nuyorican writers that included Pedro Pietri (“Puerto Rican Obituary” 1973), Miguel Pinero (Short Eyes 1973) and Lefty Barretto (Nobody’s Hero 1976). Mentored by Black Panther cultural minister Ed Bullins and later by Young Lord Eddie Figueroa (founder of the “New Rican Village” on the Lower East Side of New York) Chaluisan was invited to join the NY Public Theater’s emerging playwright unit headed by Crispin Larengeira in the summer 0f 1977. A chance meeting with magazine editor-in-chief Soledad Santiago paved the way for Chaluisan to land a job at Latin NY magazine – the nation’s first successful long term English language monthly publication focusing on Latino (primarily Puerto Rican vis-a-vis Nuyorican) arts and culture. The nineteen year old Chaluisan rose up the ranks from reporter to music editor between 1977-79 under the tutelage of Latin NY publisher Izzy Sanabria which led to his being hired by WCBS network affiliate WFSB (Channel 3) in Hartford, Connecticut in June of 1979. For the next seventeen years he  worked as a TV investigative reporter, producer, writer and marketing executive for PBS (Bowling Green, Ohio), Telemundo (Tucson, Arizona/Yakima, Washington), WCBS Channel 2 (New York), and News 12 Long Island, along with stints at radio station WGB in Albany among other mainstream media outlets in the US. Upon leaving the news business in 1997 and resettling in Hartford, CT, Chaluisan (once again performing full time as “El Extreme”) began to disseminate work he had developed as a musical composer and poet/essayist with his own indie rock groups dating back to 1982 (Little Otis and The Upsetters, The Blankets of Doom, La Gran Orquesta El Extreme, Gang Bang Bang, and El Extreme’s Electric Cabaret.). The effort led to his inclusion in the National Slam Poetry movement as a State Slam Champion for CT. (1998/1999 in Austin, Texas and Chicago, Illinois.) His semi-final performance was captured on film by CBS’ Sixty Minutes and featured in the news magazine’s report on the tenth anniversary of the Slam movement. In 2000 he returned to NYC and set to work on organizing his written work and professional notes describing his media/educational experience which resulted in the off-Broadway play Spic Chic: S.panish P.eople I.n C.ontrol (initially a 2001 workshop at the Nuyorican Café in Manhattan with later runs at the Chelsea Playhouse and Spanish Repertory Theater). The performance at El Repertorio Espanol garnered the attention of producers for the 2004 Biennale Festival in Bonn, Germany where Spic Chic had its European premiere at the Bonn Opera House Theater. In the meantime, Chaluisan was approached by film director Henry Chalfant (“Style Wars”)  to contribute both content and interview source material to the award winning documentary “From Mambo to Hip Hop” which aired on PBS in 2006. In 2007, Chaluisan moved to Puerto Rico after the death of his father Federico Chaluisan to spend a year in mourning and soaking in the poetry/writer’s scene at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez, PR. With the help of University students and Professor Linda Rodriguez, El Extreme re-emerged writing in both English and Spanish. The rest is, as the pundits say, “underground history.”

Review by poonam srivastava

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire has won the hearts of so many. It has carried away Golden Globes, Oscars, and other prizes. The movie is a supposed feel good love story. I saw a horrific series of images of torture and extreme human degradation with no real explanations of their genesis or any real transformation of the characters or the situation, interspersed with greed and violence centered on the  desire to accumulate great wealth. The international applause seems to be mostly from those ignorant of the plot subject. This movie appears to me a contemporary case of the Emperor’s New Clothes.
Any one with a sense of story will have to suspend that in order to enjoy Slumdog. The hero, a boy named Jamal, and his brother, Salim, flee their devastated slum home along with girl, Latika, from their urban slum due to Hindu violence. The hero and the girl are in love. The three are somehow spun into a version of the three musketeers as they adventure into the jungle that is Mumbai. They are bonded by a nearly deadly Pinnochio-esque experience with a beggar mafia. The brothers lose the girl but save each other. Then when they go to find the girl again, suddenly Salim, the older (and darker) brother shoos off Jamal, the younger (lighter and more ethical one) with the same gun he had used to free her. (What?)
(There seems to be an internalized racism here.)
The character of Latika is stereotypical of a western idea of the poor suffering third world woman. She has no agency in this role. Latika, despite the energy the child actor brought to the screen becomes a commodity traded by men. However, her virginity is proclaimed as intact at the moment the brothers rescue her. Short lived as that rescue may be. Then when Jamal infiltrates the house of her captor to steal her away, she is concerned not with Jamal’s life but with the material means of their escape. “What will we live on?” she says. “Love.” he says. That is basically the insipid level of dialogue that is maintained through the film. Boyle and the people responsible for making this film had a wealth of strong women characters in other Indian films (Spices for example) and right in the slums they shot in. Apparently they weren’t looking. I can say that I have been in the company of the women of India that till fields and break the stones for
the roads by hands and they are not Latika.
The timing of the movie was painfully slow. We are subjected to an hour, or so it certainly feels, of an insipid flashback. The story starts at the point where the hero, Jamal, is taken from the television studio into police custody. We are immediately assaulted with images of electrocution and water torture akin to Guantanamo Bay. His crime, winning where others have lost, at a television game show hardly matches the level of suffering. It is unclear who called the police in. India is rife with police corruption, with payoffs, based on personal power. Dragging uninspired dialogue, “How would a chai walla know the answer to that?”, accompany the torture and are woven with scenes of great shock from a violent and impoverished childhood. Boy falls into shit hole. Boy gets hit in the head with a book. Boy runs with friends from cops carrying sticks. All this to show what? The way out of the slums is a television game show?
The child actors are the only bright spots in the film. They come on the screen there is a breath of fresh air. The constant expression of confusion and humility that the teen/adult Jamal carries through the entire film, the constant expression of rage that Salim carries, and the constant look of subjugation and sultry sexiness that the grown up Latika assumes is in stark contrast to the moving faces of these three child actors. The scenes with the children in Hindi with subtitle carry us through a reality that is harsh. Their resilient smiles point to the ineffable human spirit. We believe them.
Then suddenly they are teenagers talking in English to tourists. Jamal eventually finds work in a call center as a lowly tea server. There he answers the manager’s questions on British trivia and thus trumps the callers who are groomed in accents and culture of the first world they serve. The manager smiles. She knows he is knowledgeable and intelligent. Why then are we to trust that it is sheer mad luck that the game show questions are simply coincidence to his life experience? He has fools luck. Hurray. Dumb slumdog, gets lucky. Wins million, gets girl. Hurray!
Well, perhaps the public unfamiliar with India may forgive Slumdog for its many errors in plot and point. However, as one well versed in the subcontinent I have serious issues. The staging of the devastation of Jamal’s childhood home as a result of Hindu / Muslim riots is my first sticking point. Shantytowns in Mumbai tend more often than not to be run over by corporate greed and conveniences rather than religious riots. In fact it is the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation that recently demolished the homes of the actual slum residing child actors due to the demands of construction. Of course Danny Boyle did not know this. He knew nothing of India that is why he was eager to take on the project according to an interview he gave at Telluride Film Festival fall of 2008.
Also, why did the script choose to give the main character a strictly Muslim identity? The book Q and A on which the film is based strove to blur the religious element by having it’s hero named Ram Mohammad Thomas. Are the makers of Slumdog trying to once again, in the spirit of the East India Tea Company, pit Muslim against Hindu? Award.
Dev Patel who played the adult Jamal, says this in an interview to Screencrave: (about a)  “slum called Tal Aviv, which has got a population of 2 million and still growing. Coming from London, I had this stupid preconceived notion, a stereotype of what a slum would be… The day I woke up to go on this location scout, I thought, damn its gonna be a bloody hard day, I’m gonna be depressed. And I was so glad to be proved wrong…. When they’re there, all you get is an overwhelming sense of community. They call them slums, but they are colonies. Everyone knows everyone and they’re all working together in unison, like one molecule, like on cell. I remember there was this kid walking down the slum, he had this vest on, licking an icelolly and it’s all dripping down his top and there’s a group of three burly men. And one guy saw the boy and picked him up, put him next to him, and pulled out a handkerchief, cleaned him up, and pushed him along back
on his journey. And I was like wow. In London you can’t do that. Here they all look after each other. He didn’t know that kid.”
My experience with the Indian poor is absolutely in synch with Dev Patel’s observations expressed above. One does not find the community, cooperative vibe in the slum portrayed by Slumdog. No the kids are like dogs. They run wild and have no nurturing or oversight. The people are cruel and fight for survival. Dog eat dog. Only the sensationalist elements, the dirt, the chaos and violence, are strung together visually with a hot sound track. Poverty porn. No wonder the many protests in India over the film. The words stupid and preconceived seemed to stick in my brain.
Mr. Boyle and company had an opportunity to show the real face of Indian poverty and disenfranchisement as well as the resilience of human spirit, the specifically Indian face of poverty with it’s amazing entrepreneurial industrial cooperation that battles the very real concrete chronic systemic forces profiting from its continued existence.  Instead they offered us two hours of stupid preconceived cliché. Feel good? Not me. Even the happy ending was a huge disappointment. Bollywood was reduced to Broadway. The screen filled with finger snapping blandly dressed cast-members. Two streams of people parted and floated neatly away in trains. Where were the costume changes, the dancing in the rain, the juxtaposition of the Eiffel Tower after the village scene, the mandatory peeking from behind pillar or tree, and the heaving heavy breasts  that define Bollywood?
Slumdog Millionaire is a glorification of mediocrity and consumer culture. As a member of the audience I suffered. As a human being I suffered even more.

Observation Point

By Ava Chin

It happened on a walk. Like most transplanted New Yorkers, I did not understand Los Angeles and tried walking every place I could around my neighborhood—a shabby, rundown section of Koreatown, perhaps five years on the cusp of gentrification. It was there that I confused the neighborhood drunk, often asleep on the next door’s lawn, for a hard-working, down-on-his luck itinerant worker seeking shade from the too hot sun. It was there, whenever it rained, and I particularly sought out any relief from the oppressively perfect weather, that I would put on a well-worn hat and take to the streets.

It was on such a gloomy day that I headed north towards the hills—the kind of day where the snails emerge from the semi-arid Angeleno soil to rest on hedges like wild mushrooms after a storm. I was depressed then, having left a boyfriend in Brooklyn who did not want to make a commitment, a recently published book that I was having trouble promoting in my new town, and having arrived to a new academic department where the politics were as confusing as the publishing circles I left back home. I had just received the news that the sublettors in my Brooklyn apartment had tipped off the landlord, and I could already visualize the machinations of the eviction process starting to roll. I was living off of a school stipend, which while generous as free money goes, had pushed me right back down the economic ladder. I was officially considered by the utilities companies as being “low-income.”

All these things weighed down on my mind. I was having a melt down, but did not realize it. All I knew was that I was unhappy and my friends felt like they were thousands of miles away, as indeed they were. I was so immersed in my own thoughts that I did not realize that I had arrived, winded, in a new part of my neighborhood, on a slight hill near a palm tree (I was continually surprised by the fact that I lived in a place that had palm trees, even if they were, like most things in L.A. imported), and when I looked up, I saw it. There in the distance, sitting on the hillside like a painted backdrop, as if pasted by the hand of some invisible god, white and coppery and luminous from my vantage point, was the mosque-like dome of the Griffith Park Observatory.

*

The first time I saw the Observatory was as many did, in the 1955 film, “Rebel Without A Cause.” In my mind the domed, palace-like structure, which I confused at first for a Hollywood mansion, is inextricably linked to drag racing, James Dean, and the slouching, ready to spring look that only teenagers can convincingly pull off. I was a teenager myself when I saw the movie, and I watched fascinated by the scenes with cars, guns, and a quaint, vaguely innocent kind of violence that didn’t remind me of anything I’d seen in the neighborhood in Queens where I grew up.

In “Rebel,” the Observatory, situated by itself atop Mount Hollywood, surrounded only by dense shrubs, winding paths, and the lesser hills around it, is a site of both refuge and despair. Who can forget when James Dean and Natalie Wood take on the role of loving parents for Sal Mineo as they make a home in one of its cavernous hallways? When the police, those well-intentioned, dim-witted adults, arrive and Mineo races out onto the wide steps shooting, desperately trying to protect what small semblance of family the teenagers have built, who didn’t shudder, especially a teenager who considered herself as misunderstood as the ones portrayed on screen?

So perhaps it comes as no surprise, that the very first time I saw the Observatory, years later, as prospective graduate student on a campus visit, it seemed immediately familiar to me. Familiar the way many things in L.A. seem familiar because you’ve seen the image or heard the name mentioned a thousand times. I knew of Wilshire and Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, of Burbank and the Galleria and Hollywood High, long before I learned that the Sunset Strip was on the Westside and that Ventura was in the Valley, and that the Valley wasn’t cool the way that coming from Queens wasn’t cool.

That day, my cousin and I arrived at the summit of the Observatory only to learn that the landmark was closed for renovations. We walked around the plaza in front of the wide, open face of the building, surrounded by so much sky and panoramic views of downtown, the Westside, the ocean—the majestic Old Baldy in the background. Horizontal and flanked by two smaller sentinel-like domes, the Observatory was a palace, a mythic place like Xanadu, except through the years since it was built in 1935, the city had encroached upon its perch, obscuring the sky with light, rendering it virtually useless as a place to view the cosmos. Instead, the Observatory was a site to see Los Angeles, and became the kind of cultural icon the city celebrates and is ultimately enamored of: beautifully constructed, made famous by the movies, no longer serving its original function, a relic.

We stared for some time at the bronze bust of James Dean—Dean’s face an expression of ambivalent agony. I was impressed. Only in L.A., where even the poets were gorgeous, could you find a monument to an actor at a place of scientific inquiry. Later, when I had moved to the city and I was expressing doubts about having done so, my cousin said, “But don’t you just love the weather?” “It’s so great here, you can go to the ocean any time of year,” and “But what about the weather?” Having left my boyfriend and having lost the apartment in Brooklyn, my answer was blunt. No, I did not care about the landscape and the good living and the clear skies and the good weather. I thought of Dean’s bust and my own anguish. You see, I was already beginning to understand the dual metaphors of Los Angeles, the shadow to the sunshine, which anyone who lives in the city for any length of time begins to experience. The only solace I could take was that I could visit the Observatory, like a high point in a novel, and that by the time I was ready to graduate, the renovations would be finished and its doors wide open.

*

Nine months into living in Koreatown, I moved, saying goodbye to the drunk on the lawn, the sidewalks that turned into weekend Plazas where women sold old clothing and half-used bottles of dish-washing liquid for under a dollar, and headed north to a Melrose-style apartment with palm trees and birds of paradise. If I walked a half block or so along the avenue of my new neighborhood, I could see the Observatory, from this perspective larger than a postcard and now shroud in black scaffolding. A five minute walk, and I could be at the mouth of Griffith Park, where Armenian men stretched in jogging outfits and Korean ladies walked by in visors and long sleeves. Things had taken a turn for the better, I could feel the veil being lifted off my depression and I was no longer questioning if I’d make the right decision to leave New York. On my walk, I would smile at Latino families. The Armenian men and Korean ladies who passed me by. I would smile at everyone.

Though the zigzagging path up to the Observatory was officially closed, like many others I would wend my way up Fern Dell Road, passed the picnic stands and the dog park, on up to the dirt path, the where the silky soil got trapped in my sneakers and the rolled up hems of my pants. On days that the sun beat down on me, I would stop exhausted, until I learned to hike only early in the morning and with a hat. I would walk alongside the canyon, under the shadow of the hills held together by small trees and tall grasses. Along the steep climb, I often saw rabbits, snakes, and lizards the size of sugar spoons. Throughout it all, the Observatory was my main goal, and it peeked in and out along the path like an architectural version of peek-a-boo, growing ever larger in my approach.

I climbed the path nearly twice a week for the next three years, the white structure of the Observatory my goal as I arrived huffing and puffing up the mountain. When I was studying for my written and oral exams, before I left for trips to New York, whenever I’d return to L.A., I’d hike up towards it, always elusive, in sight one moment, hidden behind a shrubby hill the next. It started to take on the symbolism of remoteness, a metaphor for the city itself—changing, ever-fluctuating, always out of reach.

I discovered things about myself on those walks in the shadow of the Observatory that I never could back home surrounded by family and a slew of friends and acquaintances. Whether this was because of L.A.’s famous spread-out, suburban-supersized sprawl—indeed the other side of town felt like a different state, and I rarely saw my friends on the Westside—or because I was alone so much or simply because I wasn’t at home, it is difficult to tell. In “Letters to a Young Poet,” Rilke advises writers to embrace their isolation. I had never felt so isolated as I had those early days in L.A. and it allowed all the things that I was harboring from the past, which I had carried thousands of miles from Brooklyn to the East side, to finally come to the surface.

*

As the years went by, and I ascended further and further up the hill daring myself to climb higher, until I finally came up the Observatory construction gate, and could hear the shouts of the workers inside, I had many experiences along that path, even some crises—most of them valuable, all hard-won.

Once, having spent a long weekend with a poet I was in love with but barely knew, we hiked up the path together, and an hour after the walk, after learning he did not want to take the relationship further, I came home and burst into tears. That weekend we had walked around Venice, watched a film at Mann’s, and had dinner at Yamashiro where we watched the city glow in a blanket of fog. That morning, as we walked towards the Observatory, he talked non-stop about how great L.A. was, about applying for a screenwriting fellowship, how much he liked my neighborhood. But when it came time to leave, as we walked down the mountain towards Franklin Avenue, he didn’t want to talk about continuing things further. The crisis I entered after he left—a relationship that was so short, so brief, and which put me in touch with a grief I hadn’t felt since I was a teenager—was so disproportionate to what had gone on that I knew it didn’t have anything to do with the poet and everything to do with me and the extreme loneliness I felt living in L.A.

That night, I met a girl at the Dresden Room, a neighborhood bar featured in the film “Swingers.” She had been studying martial arts with an old, female master who berated her over her self-esteem issues. “You need an ‘I am important’ stick,” she told me. “What’s that?” I asked, envisioning corporate executives taking team leadership workshops. She explained that it could be any found object (in her case, a stick she’d found on a walk), which you imbued with the power to make you feel important. I thought it sounded too West-Coast hokey, but this girl was a former New Yorker with a no-nonsense attitude and not to be denied, so I turned the idea over in my mind. That weekend, I hiked up to the closest I could get to the Observatory, to an outcropping that over-looked Los Feliz, Downtown and Koreatown—the kind of dizzyingly steep drop upon which television directors like to stage fight scenes. There under a tree, I found the gnarled, section of a branch, shorter than a half-pool stick but thicker than my arm. I am important. It’s been with me ever since.

In my third year living in Los Angeles, I experienced my first encounter with peyote with a group of poets from Arizona and Texas. I swallowed a ball of “medicine” the size of a bead and a quart of peyote tea that one of the poets had brought off a reservation. As the night progressed, we carried a water drum and prayer beads on our way up the now-familiar dirt path, under the shadow of the hills, the Observatory obscured in darkness.

We sat to the high rise where I had found my stick, talking and singing with the glistening fabric of the city below us, the Observatory at our backs, while coyotes howled back and forth to each other across the hills. Later that year, one of us would die. But that night, we were all young and fresh and vibrant, and very high off the medicine. Someone wished me a happy birthday, and I thought of how lucky I was to be in this strangely wild city, where people traveled in search of fame and glory, only to find canyons, skunks, helicopters, waitresses. Perhaps it was the peyote, perhaps it was knowing that I had finally grown roots, but I was suddenly overcome with the feeling that everything was going to be alright. I was a New Yorker who had discovered parts of herself in L.A., and that was worthy of any novel or song I could send to my friends back home.

I carried this feeling with me as we walked back down the mountain, where we saw a snake; a disabled man lying on the ground, who refused our help. Later, as we neared the road, there were coyotes—one slouchy and red, the other brown, fleet-footed. The reddish one looked at us—its face caught in the lamplight—with an expression of assessment and terrible acceptance, before following its mate up the hill.

*

I became visually closer to the Observatory when I started dating a man I grew to love very much, a “legend” in late-night television writing. Being an outsider to the largest industry that fuelled the city, I had fun with him as a couple of reluctant New Yorkers-turned-Angelenos exploring a side to L.A. that I had never experienced before. Drives up the PCH. Weekend getaways in Malibu and Cambria. “White-Attire Only” parties where we were the only ones dressed in white. Steve had a penchant for funny, anthropomorphizing voices, saying things like “San Luis Obispo” and “Albuquerque” as we drove up unfamiliar stretches of road. He had a stunning view of the Observatory that I fell in love with on the first night I saw it. From across the canyon, I watched the Observatory in the twilight, dark under its scaffolding like a chrysalis in its cocoon.

Two months into our relationship, I landed an academic teaching job in New York in an out of the way borough. I asked Steve if he wanted to come with me. He said he thought that if we did that we should be married.

“Yes, and?” I asked.

But he felt it was too soon to say.

*

A job is a great impetus for finishing a dissertation. That Spring, in a state of ever-panic, I worked feverishly on my manuscript, got shoulder aches and pinched nerves, and took breaks from freaking out to hike up the now familiar path to the Observatory. Some days, I drove along the winding road up to the very top of Mount Hollywood—in this case, the most direct path really was the most oblique—and parked behind the landmark, by the George Harrison memorial. I would stand against the chicken wire gate (“Construction Workers Only”), fingers looped into the wire, my nose poking through, and peer past the trucks and Port-o-Sans to the Observatory, now polished and white and liberated from all its scaffolding. For those moments, I could pretend I was back on the plaza like when I first visited L.A., standing in front of the wide façade, open to all possibilities.

*

The truth is, I would never get further than that gate. The Observatory never opened later that spring or even that summer. I moved back to New York and Steve didn’t come with me, staying home with his funny voices, his deck, his white parties where people didn’t wear white.

If an observatory’s function is to observe its surroundings, for me, it was important in its inverse. Each year, as I became more and more acclimated to L.A. feeling like I understood it—I once described it to the public arts director at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a city that was like a beautiful child that had gotten into its mother’s make-up and then stolen her SUV—I looked at the Observatory and saw new things, rather like an artist observing a famous cathedral. How white it gleamed in the morning. How it seemed to absorb the light in the late afternoon. How picturesque and quaint it seemed from the parking lot of the 99 cent store.

Now, from some three thousand miles away, the leaves have already turned with the weather, and I travel several times a week to Staten Island across the drape of the Verranzano Bridge. These days, when I think of the Observatory, it’s as dream-like as the Taj Mahal. I know that it has long shed its scaffolding and temporary gates, has been lauded by the Mayor and the City Council at its reopening, and visited by journalists and photographers and sightseers who take advantage of its new façade. Recently, it was nearly engulfed in one of Southern California’s famous fires. But I can only imagine it from this end of the country, and remember the person I was when I first arrived in L.A., so new to the city, looking out from my perch in front of the open face of the Observatory, wondering about the lives down below and all the myriad possibilities.

September 5, 2007 - Kinshasa, DRC

A few hours after my first visitor arrived in Kinshasa from Los Angeles, I took him to dinner at Chateau Margaux, one of the nicest restaurants in town.  We sat in the casual dining section, on the outdoor wood patio under a majestic, artfully lit tree.  We started with a bottle of beautiful red wine, and then dined on crisp green salads, moist risotto, flavorful lamb chops, creamy asparagus soup, and homemade breads and sorbets.  My friend commented that it was “just like L.A.”, with an added hint of mosquito repellent gone astray from our hands to the dinner rolls. 

I hate L.A., and can’t be there for more than two days.  I love Kinshasa, and can probably continue to do so indefinitely. Though fully aware of the hypocrisy of my comfortable expatriate life here, I don’t like to be reminded that mine is a life of relative privilege.  In one of the biggest hoodwinks of philanthropy, aid workers from the “First World” and their friends and family back home are all in mutual denial, reinforcing and clinging to the illusion that international aid is actually noble.  I was soon able to re-establish all noble pretensions of a development worker’s life: I departed a few days later on mission to North Kivu, visitor in tow.    

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is experiencing a fragile peace after over a decade of incessant and brutal civil war. In North Kivu, located in the eastern part of the country, tensions between rebels, the Congolese government, and neighboring countries continue to be high.  Bordering on Rwanda and Uganda, and on the shores of the African Great Lakes, the area is a mishmash of Hutu, Tutsi, Ugandan, Rwandan, and Congolese loyalties and strongholds.  It is also rich in fertile soil, dense forests, gold, and diamonds.
General Laurent Nkunda rules over some parts of this territory and occasionally launches campaigns to expand his area of authority.  Since infrastructure and governance within the country are weak, the North and South Kivu provinces have closer ties to their neighboring countries than with the rest of the DRC.  Consumables arrive from or via Uganda. Restaurateurs hail from Rwanda.  The language of commerce is Swahili, spoken in East Africa, and not Lingala, which is spoken in Kinshasa and Western Congo.  But the relationship between North Kivu and Rwanda and Uganda is an uneasy relationship.  As one Congolese colleague noted, it is like one of an old married couple: you are forced to live together, and you try to make do.  By day, moto-taxis are the most common form of transport and people bustle around the market, conducting business as usual.  After the sun sets, trucks of blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers patrol the streets.  UN peacekeepers are all out in full force at night. 

The landscape of North Kivu is as temperamental and haunting as its recent history of civil strife.  Goma, the provincial capital, sits by Lake Kivu and on the Rwandan border.  An active volcano lies to the immediate north.   A few months ago a Chinese girl fell into the volcano’s crater, and died a slow death from breathing in volcanic fumes while rescue teams looked on, unable to reach her. News of this bizarre death reached my parents in their carpeted Queens, NY living room. They called me the next day with warnings not to go near any Chinese-girl-eating volcanoes, though they didn’t mention a word about potential encounters with dangerous rebels.  After the last eruption in 2002, much of the rebuilding accomodated the relics of the volcanic destruction.  Streams of hardened lava serve as roads through town.  Low walls of lava rock demarcate land plots. The old lava flow reaches to the beautiful Lake Kivu, deceivingly tranquil but dangerous to swim in because of powerful gas pockets.   
We bought tickets to hike the forbidden volcano, but by some unfortunate divine or maternal intervention my time in Goma was cut short by an opportunity for onward travel to my work destination.   Our free ride was a flight chartered by a team of election experts, on a twenty-seater plane with twenty-three passengers and twice as many bags. The two-man crew stood on the tarmac, hand calculating baggage weights for at least thirty minutes. The Russian pilot and plane had probably seen their best years in the Soviet ‘60s. The cabin door had to be opened and re-closed four times before the pilot felt safe enough to take off. 

One hour later, we landed on an airstrip of packed red earth in Butembo. Butembo is located just north of the Equator from Goma, at the foothills of the Rift Valley.  The security situation in this lively market town, a major commercial center of North Kivu, is so tenuous that it has been mostly abandoned by national government and foreign businesses.  Only a handful of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) remain.  Private generators create limited electricity; the town does not have enough funding to pay the security premiums companies demand to fix the defunct hydroelectric plant.  Wide unpaved streets become rivers of thick red mud during the rainy season.   With surprising success given insecurity and limited resources, residents’ initiative and personal pocketbooks maintain some order in Butembo.

I had been sent to Butembo on mission for our Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) program.  Our program focuses on the reintegration part.  Ex-combatants and members of the community work side by side for pay to re-build a stretch of road.  Ex-combatants then each receive a bicycle to help them demobilize, and to commute to the training center.  They each choose a skill to be trained in – e.g., carpentry, animal husbandry, tailoring, and baking. Upon completion of training each participant receives a starter kit for his or her new career path.  You’ll ask me how we know that our participants have in fact gone on to start their new vocations instead of selling their bicycles or four goats for instant money.  I wish I had a better answer for you.  This is one question I personally struggle with, but follow-up is beyond the scope of the mandate and funding from our donors.  The lack of monitoring and evaluation plagues many development projects, and is a fundamental flaw in foreign aid.  

I had zero to negative expertise in livestock purchasing, baker training, or general ex-combatant rehabilitation.  My role in all this?  The money mule. To purchase all these post-training reintegration kits, we needed money.  In the DRC the banking system is unreliable or non-existent outside of Kinshasa.  Therefore, we needed to bring the money for purchases with us from the capital. My boss carried about $100,000 USD in cash across the country in a leather satchel.  To account for what has been spent, someone like me was needed: completely unknowledgeable about market prices, where to buy things in town, the local language, or the quality of a sack of baker’s flour, but willing to take on the unwelcome responsibility of carrying large sums of cash in an almost lawless land.  With me came a locally based colleague Jean-Baptiste, who did all the hunting, negotiating, quality control, and logistics. I just carried, counted, and paid out the money. 

The highest commonly circulated denomination of local currency is 500 Congolese francs, about $1. US dollars are freely used for any transaction over $7, but people are very particular about the bills they will accept.  Bills must be printed in the year 2000 or later.  They cannot have rips or be tattered. One-dollar bills are frequently rejected.  

Many of my days consisted of counting out random sums like $7,368.23 in a mix of USD and Congolese francs.  I then handed the stack over to a colleague to verify that the new USD bills were not sticking together.  Then the store clerk counted the money, and thoroughly examined each bill in the light to see whether it was in an acceptable state of health.  I went through this process at each of the twenty places I visited in a day in order to buy the twenty different things needed for one type of rehabilitation starter kit. We only had one week to complete all the purchasing for about 800 kits.  We started to run low on money and my supervisor put in a request for an additional $20,000 from Kinshasa.  He did this reluctantly, for good reason:  anyone seen coming out of a transfer office is an easy target for robbers, and the money was given to us in five dollar bills which had to be verified and re-verified by all parties.  

I was in charge of the kits for the following vocations: hairdresser, baker, and tailor.  I also put in a few stops for animal husbandry, carpentry, and masonry. Each day I ran around town very visibly unloading large amounts of cash, quite possibly the only Chinese female present for many kilometers in all directions.  Soon Jean-Baptiste and I had an unhealthy following of two boys who suspiciously popped up anywhere we went offering to lead us to the best deal for our next purchase. We finally were able to lose them by day three, but I kept wondering when the rebel militia lurking outside town would finally come to extract their tribute.  

By the end of my mission, I had handed out 300 bicycles to ex-combatants.  I bought and distributed 720 goats and sheep at the veterinary station, which also served as a butchering ground.  I negotiated for planks of wood at the lumberyard.  I picked up fifty sacks of flour in a ratty truck (to the great astonishment of other Congolese walking around, who yelled at the driver for putting a foreigner in an old car).  I asked after and even learned something about the quality of various sharp instruments such as machetes, tile cutters, and razors.  I stopped by to see the ironsmith who made metal waffle presses over a fire in a straw shack in his front yard, and was falling behind on our constantly growing order. 
I often felt a sensation akin to that of the several times I’ve visited a large investment bank’s trading floor, when an unknown female presence enters into a testosterone heavy world of traders or lumberjacks, butchers, metalworkers, ex-combatants.  Stranger still was my dynamic with the younger male ex-combatants, some of whom are now barely 17 years old and tried to act extra tough and manly. They probably were in the trenches at the ages of twelve or thirteen.   There are even younger soldiers but they are not part of our program, and work instead with an NGO dedicated solely to child soldiers.  

Only upon returning to Kinshasa two days ago did I recognize what a peculiar position I had been in, and not just because of my strange identity as a young Chinese-American female.  While I had been in North Kivu, the security problems in the province had been quickly escalating.  Upon arrival in Butembo on a Sunday, I had insisted we go out dancing.  The next morning a co-worker told me that at 10pm that very Sunday night four people had been shot on a nearby street by either a military man or a rebel member, for no known reason.  I had wanted to go see the silverback gorillas in their natural habitat, about thirty minutes outside Butembo, but had no time to spare in the busy work schedule.  The day I returned to Kinshasa, I received news that the national park in which the gorillas live had been taken over by the rebel forces led by General Nkunda, to the great alarm of conservationists; more killings of the already depopulated gorillas are likely to occur.  I went with my visitor to a farm on the road between Goma and Butembo, about 1.5 hours outside of town.  We stocked up on veal, cured ham, home made cheeses, fresh honey and jams, and ate a home-made meal in a cozy room overlooking a tranquil landscaped garden.  On the way there we saw a man with a bandage across his face, covering a scar left by a machete slashing. 

In Noth Kivu, everyone is disillusioned with Joseph Kabila, the Swahili-speaking president from the East who had the full support of this part of the country ten short months ago during the expensive and optimistic October 2007 national elections.  Many people I talked to in Goma and Butembo said that Kabila has done nothing for them or about the rebels, and they will never vote for him again.  Some told me they want to vomit whenever they hear his name.  No-one has been certain whether the government troops or the rebel forces are in power over the past few days.  Killings, such as the one that occurred the Sunday night I went out dancing in Butembo, are attributed at times to national military, at times to ex-combattants, depending on who is telling the story.  In Kinshasa, everyone assumes the national government censors the news, and reportage about the renewed violence is minimal.  One Kinshasa newspaper announced the death of a prominent political figure one day, just to recant their story the following day.  Kinois and much of the country rely instead on “Radio Trottoir” – “sidewalk radio”, or word of mouth — which is often surprisingly quick and reliable in mood if not in nuance.  

This past Sunday, BBC reported that General Nkunda claimed the region was in a state of war.  Is this really what life in the midst of violent rebellion is like?  People go about their business in normal fashion by day, ear to the trottoir for news.  One part of the brain keeps stock of the latest number of killings from the night before, the number of villages abandoned, or how many kilometers outside of town the fighting is now taking place; the other side of the brain tracks how much a sack of sugar costs in today’s market – not surprisingly, prices are volatile.  (An estimated 170,000 people have been displaced from and within North Kivu this year. I purchased 50 kilograms of sugar at around $43, wholesale price.) I can’t pretend to know the feel and look of war based just on my short sheltered trip to Butembo.  Do I hope, dare I hope that one day someone will visit Butembo, sit in a nice restaurant, and be able to say for a fleeting moment: “This is just like L.A.!”?