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.!”?

New York, January 22, 2009—PEN American Center praised President Barack Obama’s quick action in signing executive orders closing Guantanamo Bay and other secret detention facilities and explicitly banning torture, actions the organization has called essential to restoring respect for the rule of law in the U.S. and around the world.

“With today’s actions, President Obama has once again put the United States on the right side of American and international law, which guarantees the rights of every human being on earth, without exception, to due process and humane treatment,” said Francine Prose, president of PEN American Center. “We applaud his decisive leadership, and we thank him for sending this clear, strong message to governments around the world that the foundation for justice is respect for our most basic and inherent human rights.”

The orders come less than two days after President Obama’s inauguration, where he announced that “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” That night, he signed executive orders suspending the military commission proceedings against a handful of detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Under the orders he signed today, the detention facility and other secret detention sites elsewhere in the world are to be closed within a year, and an investigation will be launched on detention policies in general and individual cases in particular. The president also signed an order requiring all interrogations by U.S. personnel to be conducted under the auspices of the Army Field Manual, which explicitly bans all forms of torture and abusive treatment.

Joining Francine Prose today in celebrating the signing of the executive orders were PEN’s two immediate past presidents, Salman Rushdie and Ron Chernow. Together, the three have led PEN’s Campaign for Core Freedoms, which has been fighting since 2004 to reverse post-9/11 policies that undermine freedom of expression and human rights in the U.S. and around the world.

“It’s good to see the new American administration, on which so many of our hopes rest, beginning so well, and to see the United States regaining the moral strength which it so rashly set aside in the last eight years,” said Salman Rushdie, PEN American Center president from 2004 to 2006.

“How splendid that President Obama is prepared to use the power of our ideals, and not just our military might, to combat global terrorism,” said Ron Chernow, who was PEN American Center president from 2006 to 2007. “His executive orders to dismantle Guantanamo and abolish torture show that the U.S. Constitution isn’t an obsolete parchment but a living presence in our national life, even in the most dangerous of times.”

PEN American Center is the largest of the 145 centers of International PEN, the world’s oldest human rights organization and the oldest international literary organization. The Freedom to Write Program of PEN American Center works to protect the freedom of the written word wherever it is imperiled. It defends writers and journalists from all over the world who are imprisoned, threatened, persecuted, or attacked in the course of carrying out their profession. For more information on PEN’s Campaign for Core Freedoms, please visit www.pen.org/corefreedoms

#    #    #

PEN American Center
588 Broadway, Suite 303
New York, NY 10012
Tel. (212) 334-1660
Fax. (212) 334-2181
www.pen.org

stevie stevie stevie (rascal),
You did an amazing job with tribes. We did an amazing job with Tribes. I
learned so much. You gave me the much appreciated opportunity to get
experience running an arts organization. My friends from Christie’s  were all
answering phones for galleries and here I was running a gallery, meeting and
booking folks in the arts, and putting out a magazine. Tribes got invited to
press previews at the MOMA, first night for members at the Whitney, and got
invited to NYC dept of cultural affair events. Steve and I for Tribes went to
a few suppers at NYU. The experience was a privilege that I earned with my
work and your help.

I agree with your take. I arrived at Tribes and chased out the parasites.
Tribes office computer and phones were not going to be used for free. We would
tell people to use a payphone or go to a Kinko’s. We put a lock on the office
door.  I told Steve to charge for the Friday poetry workshop - The Stoop. I
wanted folks to only have a gallery show after they got funding. And have the
curator stay around for the show and not leave the work unprotected and
holding Tribes responsible for the cost if anything was damaged or stolen. If
Steve was going to the Knitting Factory to listen to Butch, I would tell the
folks that they should have money to pay their cover charge.  Why was Steve
picking up the tab?  I had a constant battle of folks exploiting Tribes and
Steve.  I had to wonder what all the alleged friends were doing about Steve’s
health, hygiene, expense of the place, and not stopping folks from exploiting
him? I still laugh about the time I sent Steve to the Nina Clinic dentist
office next door for a teeth cleaning. I dropped him off and got a call when I
got back the office. They were laughing. Steve had false teeth and would need
denture tablets. The folks hanging out and waiting at Tribes had known Steve
for years and done nothing. I got into clean up mode after meeting him.    I
would confide to the board members, Vipen, good listener Norman, Hal Sirowitz,
Kathy Arnoldi, David Henderson, Bob Holman, Samantha Coerbell, Jenny Seymour,
Patricia Winter, and Al Loving and his wife about how Tribes was being used.
You had trust fund bohemians screaming poverty - asking for a Tribes event
booking-and doing nothing about getting funding. They took but NEVER gave
back. I remember telling Steve that Vibeka had something on a website and she
mentioned Tribes. We gave people chances and I thought that out of gratitude
and having some class, that they would thank Tribes. Only the talented
established ones did. I wanted some new writer to be booked for tribes and in
the magazine so when their books got published, Tribes publishing an excerpt
would be mentioned. I wanted Tribes to establish credibility.  Folks would
keep performance places hidden from us yet request that they use Tribes for
their work. Steve and I would question why the person never mentioned the free
use of a space. Steve would be itching to write a play and use that space. And
then you would have folks insisting that we give someone a show or put them in
the magazine just because they wanted to be booked by that person for their
event.   I did want some charlatan not accepting their lack of talent or not
having a career in the arts and using Tribes as a platform.  Their work would
cause Tribes to loose credibility and having invited someone with their check
book to help be put off with the event and not offer to help. We went to black
tie art events and without the interference from someone not accepting that
they could explore other outlets, Tribes could have been well funded long ago.
I got tired of the egos, fighting, and fighting with Steve. I wanted Tribes
to be the cool hip place where new and established folks in the arts showcases
their work. It takes courage to put your work out there but you have to be
realistic. Using Steve and begging Steve for a poetry reading or to be in the
magazine or have a show or curate a show should have been earned or have the
person respect the refusal. Tribes was not the only place to showcase in NYC.
I remember asking Steve who he really thought had talent and he mentioned
people who are thriving in the arts today. He asked me who I never saw around.
I would mention the folks who I liked and knew that if their names were booked
for a Tribes event, we would get credibility and a crowd. And then Steve said,
they were the ones with talent. They were not hanging out at Tribes. They were
away working ,writing, and creating art.

as Steve would say blu blu blu blah blah blah …Thanks. Take care. Renee

Excerpts from the GLBT Center Lecture on Street Sexual Harassment and the Dyke experience.                                   by Chavisa Woods

 

In conversations on the subject of gender, sex, sexuality and public interactions, when speaking with some seemingly liberal minded, artistically inclined, gay friendly heterosexual men, I have on more than one occasion come upon these general ideas and specific statements regarding the relationships of gender identity and gender relation.

 

1. Men’s sexual urges and desires are much stronger than women’s.

 

2. Testosterone is a sort of drug that affects sexual desire and ego in men in a way that women can never understand.

 

3. It takes a much larger amount of will power for a man to control his urges than it does for a woman to control hers.

 

4. Men’s urges are barbaric and primal. (implicitly excluding the primal from the feminine)

 

5. Most rapes occur because a woman is dressed provocatively. Most women who are raped were dressed provocatively when they were raped.

 

6. When upset, women cry, men kill.

 

7. I feel a sort of allegiance to other men and would not try to fuck their girlfriend, would not hit on her in front of her boyfriend. If a woman is with another woman, I see no real reason not to pursue that woman, or both women openly.

 

8. But you don’t look like a lesbian.

 

9. “Yeah, sure. My girlfriend likes women too. But it’s not the same thing. My desire for women is stronger than hers.”

 

10. Men are biologically more sexual than women. It is a scientific fact.

 

11. I think a lot of women don’t think they like being cat called, but when they get older, and it stops, they miss it.

 

12. And again. It is a scientific fact that male sexual desire is stronger than female sexual desire, which is a notion that runs through all of the statements.

 

 

The notion that it is a scientific fact that a woman’s sexual urges are not as strong as a man’s I find laughable, when taking into a consideration that for hundreds of years it was a scientific fact that women did not have orgasms. It seemed logical; the female orgasm was not needed for reproduction and women on the whole did not openly display strong sexuality, again for socio-psychological reasons. On the subject of scientific facts of biological sexuality I would also like to point out that the discovery of and research into the effects of estrogen began in the 1930’s, while the discovery and research of testosterone began in 1803.

 

 

When we approach something as interpersonal, psychological, sociological, and also biological, something as complex as sexual desire, it is inherently ruinous to approach the concept beginning with the question of strength. The question whose sexuality is stronger immediately mars and marks the deconstruction by implying that one side must ultimately take legitimacy over the other.

 

When using the question of strength, another problem arises. On what do you base the definition of strength when speaking of sexual desire? For too long it has been based on a simple fact of a physical urge, disregarding any notions of strong emotional or intellectual sexuality. A woman’s sexuality is therefore delegitimized as the emotional on the basis that the emotional is not linked to the instinctual, the primal, the physical.

 

This concept has no logical basis. Emotionality does stem from the instinctual and primal urges as much as the physical, although human emotions, over time have grown much more complex than animal emotion as we have become conscious of our emotions and are able to ask ourselves why we feel what we feel. Animals display a range of emotions too, albeit in a simplistic form; anger, guilt, sadness, playfulness, loyalty attraction, dislike, the need to nurture their young, fight, some species war and of coarse, the urge to reproduce. These all, at their base, are instinctual, simplistic emotional urges. Animals simply do not ask themselves why they feel these “emotions” and their emotions have remained basic, instinctual, less complex.

 

As the emotional sexual indicators have grown more complex in humans, so have physical sexual indicators. Thinness as a physically attractive concept is a very complex sexual indicator, as primaley, animalisticly, thinness would indicate sickness and weakness and make a female appear not to be a healthy mate or offspring bearer. In humans, typically, the woman is considered more attractive if she dresses colorfully, flamboyantly, showing off her body, wearing bright colors, flowers, make up etc. In most animals we find it is the males who display the flamboyant dress, and coloring, large feathers, bright reds and greens in lizards, birds and fish. Although among mammals the sexes are more homogenous. So even this idea of basic physical attraction in humans as purely primal and simple, does not take into consideration that human physical attraction, however immediate it may seem, is a very complex physiological process influenced by a societal evolution, that is now actually as far divided from animal territory as the emotional sexual response.

 

 

Also, I would like not to exclude the possibility that women’s physical sexual desire and enjoyment is as physically strong as a man’s, but that we process it, communicate it and act upon it differently, for biological, and socio- psychological reasons. This possibility cannot be overlooked. But it has been for generations. And that possibility many men still find laughable, and most likely threatening.

 

 

I can’t think of any other such marginalizing and outdated concept that is so widely accepted about a group of people in mainstream sociality as the conceit that a man’s sexual urges are overall, inherently, biologically STRONGER than a woman’s.

 

Again, this simple concept and the use of the idea of stronger is what inherently infects our idea of sexual desires. Exactly how the biology affects an individuals sexual desire is complex, may never be fully determined and shifts depending upon the psychology of the individual. I will say that a man’s biological make up is obviously different from a woman’s. And many studies have shown, or lead to show that a man’s sexuality and ability to enjoy sex is based more on basic physicality than a woman’s. But this idea that that basic physicality is more primal, more animalistic, again excluding or even neutralizing the role of female animal sexuality in nature, gives legitimacy to men over women as sexual creatures and takes a very naive and narrow view of nature, animal female sexuality and sexuality in general.

 

This concept seems to me to be not so different from the concept that blacks are biologically inclined to have better rhythm, be more sexual, violent or less intellectual due to the effects of melatonin.

 

Why does all of this matter?

 

 

 

This pervasive idea that a man’s sexuality is stronger, uncontrollable, is what allows men a sort of out, an excuse if you will to sexually harass and assault women on a daily basis with no danger of retribution. If this idea were not accepted, at least subconsciously by most of the population, would it be common place for an onlooker to take no action, to walk by as if nothing were happening, as a woman is being cat called, harassed and harangued? I don’t think so.

 

 

I live in Bedstuy Brooklyn. Although I encounter sexual harassment, cat calling etc, in every neighborhood, in this neighborhood, the level of aggression and frequency of cat calling  is noticeably higher in my neighborhood. I am not just called out as a dyke and as a woman; I am called out as a white woman. Men have yelled terms like snow bunny, snowflake, white bitch, white trash whore tap that white ass, as I walk by, and when I pass without acknowledging them, I am a white trash bitch, just a white bitch, and all sorts of other things.

 

On the surface this appears to be a racial and class issue. On some level it is. The subconscious need to subvert one’s own subjugation by subjugating another minority. But at it core it is definitively a sexist issue. These men see a white person as a representation of the former master and/or present oppressor; I have no doubt, and this feeling is not unfounded. But I have walked down these same streets with my white male friends in complete peace, while when I walk down the street with my female friends and my partner, it never fails to occur. Ultimately, I have concluded that these men view white women as white man’s property. Though they dare not “fuck with the master” in a public setting, they have no problem fucking with what is viewed as his property. The problem comes from viewing women, all women as someone’s property.

 

I do not eman to imply that these men do not also harangue and harass women of color. Of coarse they do. I’ve seen it. This is simply my experience.

 

The breaker came for me two weeks ago, when the cat calling, which I have always understood not as a sexual act, but a violent act, an act of aggression took on the form of full-blown assault. My girlfriend and I were walking down the street on a Sunday morning, heading to the deli on our block to get a bagel, and a man walked by, without saying a word and punched my partner in her stomach.

 He then went into the liquor store, bought a bottle of gin got into his car and sped away. I had my phone out to call the police, bit we were shocked and didn’t get his license number. There were other people on the street who had seen it. They did nothing except continue walking. One homeless man showed some sympathy, saying he had seen what had happened and was sorry. As we were speaking to this man and visibly upset, two other men dressed in their Sunday best walked by us and said flirtatiously, “good morning lovely ladies.” When we didn’t respond they scoffed and glared at us. I felt like was in a war zone, like I was possibly even a initiating the war, just by walking down the sidewalk without a man.

 

In one of her earlier poems, Adrian rich wrote that walking down the street visibly pregnant, was the first time in her life that she did not feel guilty walking alone as a woman.

 

That describes the feeling well. What are we guilty of? Of being a woman, alone or without a man. We are still guilty of being women un-owned by a man.

 

So dykes must be doubly guilty. We are not owned by men, some of us, to play with the term, are owned by and owned other women.

 

Now comes the issue of the dyke experience of harassment. I have been told by straight women, not to get so upset about cat calling. Some have even looked at me as though I was bragging when I complained about sexual harassment. And again I have heard from str8 men that they believe, while it annoys women, they miss it when they get older and cat calling ceases- That they worry that men no longer find them attractive.

 

I am not concerned with men finding me attractive. When I am walking down the street holding hands with my girlfriend and a man calls to us and implies that he would like to join us, I feel, not complimented. I feel “emasculated;’ for lack of a better term, humiliated, homicidal. 

 

You know the term can’t live with them, can’t live without them? I can live without them.

 

It is not only in the street that men invade my relationship, but in everyday conversation, at social functions, gallery openings concerts, etc. Men see no problem flirting with a woman who is in a relationship with another woman in front of the partner, when, If one of those women were male, they would never dare to do so. After being harassed on a beach, I spoke to a man and his wife who had witnessed the harassment and was concerned, but ultimately his concern veered into this mind boggling statement. “Well, you have to be careful, you are three women alone.” I was on the beach with two other female friends.  Now I have to ask you, how is it possible for us to have been alone when we were three people together? This implies that all women are alone without men. And it was not the first time I have heard such statements.

 

 

 

 

Group discussion began

 

Women were asked

 

How many have been sexually harassed? All

 

How many view cat-calling as sexual harassment?  All

 

How many of you have been physically assaulted: over 80%

 

Sexually assaulted: Over 80%

 

Raped: Many woman shared stories, one I have heard too often from lesbians, being raped by a casual acquaintance who claimed he was going to “fuck her straight.

 

One woman spoke of cat calling, ‘” I feel powerless. I shouldn’t have to deal with this kind of aggression every day of my life. I feel like I have my anger under control, and then, I don’t know, I feel like someday I might just freak out, explode and hurt someone, and that one guy is going to pay for every day, of all these years, of all these other men…”

 

Some statistics:

 

 ( I looked for statistics outlining the percentage of women raped who identify as lesbian, or percentages of lesbians who have been sexually assaulted. As of yet, i have found no statistics on that. If anyone knows where I might let me know)

 

·          One in 4 girls are sexually assaulted by the age 18

 

·          Of adult American women who are raped, 31.5 percent are physically injured, but only 35.6% of those who are injured received medical care.

 

·          According to a study conducted by the National Victim Center, 1.3 women (age 18 and over) in the United States are forcibly raped each minute. That translates to 78 an hour, 1,871 per day, or 683,000 per year.

 

·          According to the U.S. Department of Justice, an estimated 91% of the victims of rape and sexual assault are female and 9% are male.

 

·          Rape or sexual assault was the violent crime least often reported/ Only 16% of rapes are ever reported to the police.

 

·          7.7% of college men reported perpetrating aggressive behavior which met the legal definition of rape.

 

·          The rate of rapes and sexual assaults against lesbian and gays rose 13% nationally in 1995-1996, approximately twice the 6% rate for all violent crimes.

 

·          16% of male students surveyed by the Ms. Foundation who had committed rape, and 10% of those who attempted a rape, took part in episodes involving multiple perpetrators.

 

      -1 in 15 rape victims contracts a sexually transmitted disease as a result of being raped.  1 in 15 rape victims becomes pregnant as a result of being raped.  (Koss, Woodruff & Koss, 1990, A Criminological Study.)

 

_______________________________________________________________________________

 

 

Discussed means of activism.  This recent Trail was brought up. The case of the new Jersey four. (below)

 

Discussion lead to why this case has not had any real attention. Conclusion, because these were four black women, who were lesbians.

 

Many women in the room voiced their disappointment with the gay male community for not acting in solidarity with lesbian problems, when many lesbians have devoted much of their time as activists to issues directly affecting gay males. Women are harassed in the street as well, beaten and killed, but more often raped or threatened. They discussed the role of feminism in the lesbian community and the need for a greater understanding of feminist ideas.

 

Trial case details below:

 

ATTACK OF THE KILLER LESBIAN  GANGS ( as Bill Oreily put it)

 

“Or they defended themselves so you put them in jail.”

 

On August 18th, 2006 seven young African American lesbians (ranging from 19-30 years old) from New Jersey were verbally threatened, sexually harassed, and physically attacked by a twenty-nine year old man as they walked down the street in the West Village of New York City (the West Village is “the” gay spot in NYC. It actually pre-dates San Francisco as the ‘gay meca’ & is where queer youth from all over the country come to when they are ostracized from their communities. It is the site of the famous “Stonewall Riots” which sparked the gay rights movement in the late 60’s. And currently, 40% of the homeless people in the West Village are queer youth of color).

The man, Dwayne Buckle, approached the girls/ women saying he wanted to “get some of that” pointing Patreese Johnson’s vagina (Patreese was 19, but she looks 12). She said she was gay & not interested in men, in fact was arm & arm with another girl. He proceeded to tell them he would “fuck them all straight,” he said they were “nasty” and many other sexually assaulting and homophobic slurs.

They responded to him verbally . He flicked his cigarette at them & then spit in Renata Hill’s face. She spit back. He then punched Venice Brown in the face. From there a fight broke out. The girls would try to get him off one person & he would grab another. He pulled dreadlocks straight out of a girl’s scalp, extensions out of two others & chocked two of them until they changed color in the face.

Two men standing by jumped in to defend the girls. One took off his belt & whipped him repeatedly in the head with his belt buckle. The second guy is thought, by some to have stabbed him in the stomach. The attacker was allegedly stabbed in the stomach, and spent five days in the hospital with no long-term wounds. When these two men joined the fight, the women were able to get away. At one point on the surveillance (there were two cameras that caught different parts of the fight on tape) camera you see the girls walking away & the man Buckle waving hair he pulled out of their head at them & following after them for a moment.

 

The police came to the scene. The women had entered a Mcdonald’s a couple of blocks away. The police arrested the women.

The 7 women were initially charged with attempted murder. Those charges were dropped, but they were all charged and convicted with Gang Assault in the Second Degree and then various degrees of Assault (which are all felony convictions). Three accepted a guilty plea bargain and received six-months & five years probation. The other four, who became known as the NJ4, plead not-guilty and received sentences ranging from 3.5, 5, 8, and 11 years (Terrain Dandridge, Venice Brown, Renata Hill, Patreese Johnson). The two men who jumped into the fight were never looked for nor questioned.

The man who initially harassed them is charging that the girls took part in hate crime against straight men, and has a website and organization which now collects donations to prevent hate crime against straight men.

 

The media coverage was outrageous. Everyone from the NY Times, Bill O’Reilly, The Daily Post, the Washington Post, etc, had headlines ranging from, “Attack of the Killer lesbians,” “Petit But Ornery Lesbians Stab Admirer,” “Lesbian Gangs are taking over the U.S.” “Growling Lesbians,” “Wolf Pack of Lesbians,” etc. The media was blatantly homophobic, racist, sexist and classist. They used criminalizing language and likened them to animals, using only the picture of one of the butch lesbians in all of the papers. They also questioned “if they could even afford to be in NYC”.

For more info visit http://www.myspace.com/isupportthenj4

After a lot of back and forth last week I finally made the firm decision to vote for Barack Obama for president of the United States. This was not an easy decision for me as I am 45 years old and have never in my life voted for a major party candidate for president. Why did I make this decision? Basically, it comes down to three factors: race, culture and a series of conversations that I had with my daughter who is in college and expressing her political opinions quite passionately and articulately. A little over a year ago she sent me a link to a clip of Barack Obama, asking me what I thought. Here is the unedited response I gave to her at the time:

“Hey baby! what do i think? well, first of all and most importantly i think its great that you`re paying attention to the world and listening and thinking critically. as for the video, well, hmmm, how should i say this…

in the united states electoral politics is like an annual festival…something like the christmas season but only longer. a lot of packaging and ritual and rhetoric and flags and cheers and collective rallies. the truth is that none of what obama is saying is new to me. i`ve heard it over and over again from politicians since i began paying attention to the game. i`ve learned not to listen too closely to the words…all the chatter and cheerleading and such. its not that rallying emotions isn`t an important part of creating change…it is. and it isn`t that i don`t ¨like¨ obama more than hillary, whom i actually detest. but i`ve learned to look at politics from an institutional and corporate perspective. the rules and regulations that govern the american political process are so corrupt and entrenched that participating in it is absolutely the wrong way to go about effecting meaningful change. i have absolutely no confidence that barack obama, a member of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY, will be able to mobilize his own constituency, let alone the house and senate, let alone the imperial judiciary, let alone the american body politic, to effect anything like the extremely radical changes that are needed to steer the united states corporate, financial, military and state establishment in a significantly new direction. unless we begin to talk about serious constitutional changes that empower people…for instance, the ability for citizens to organize a:

pleb·i·scite [pleb-uh-sahyt, -sit]

–noun

1. a direct vote of the qualified voters of a state in regard to some important public question.

2. the vote by which the people of a political unit determine autonomy or affiliation with another country.

….all this rhetoric is simply a way to channel people`s hopes and dreams and potential energy AWAY from direct action, direct democracy and political empowerment into a system that is inherently disempowering. worse, it leaves the citizenry with the illusion of having participated in the process that is MOST responsible for their disempowerment. its really perverse when you get right down to it because at the end of this entire:

cha·rade Pronunciation[shuh-reyd; especially Brit. shuh-rahd]
–noun

1. charades, (used with a singular verbYour browser may not support display of this image.) a game in which the players are typically divided into two teams, members of which take turns at acting out in pantomime a word, phrase, title, etc., which the members of their own team must guess

2. a word or phrase acted out in this game.

3. a blatant pretense or deception, esp. something so full of pretense as to be a travesty.

people will not have examined the platform or oppressive history of the DEMOCRATIC PARTY, the very party who brought us slavery and some of the worst, most racist, imperialist, genocidal, corporately beholden administrations and policies the world, yes, the world, has ever known. i defy you to point to a moment in time when this shameful track record was significantly altered or reformed. for obama to be running for executive office under this political system is like a jew running for the head of the nazi party, like a queer trying to be pope. already i see the subtle changes coming over obama as he struggles to fit himself into an impossible, obtuse posture that can both appeal to the living human fabric behind his rhetoric and the literally hundreds of millions of dollars — dollars that will only expand exponentially as he ¨wins¨ more votes for the system and which do not belong to him but are ¨donated¨ to him by powerful corporate and lobbying interests with very, very specific agendas of their own…not to mention the material means to enforce their will.

i am almost more worried by obama`s charisma than i am inspired by it. one good thing that i can see coming from an obama presidency is that it may escalate the painfully slow process of people`s disillusionment, which, counter to his claims, is a given in light of the enormous crisis the united states and world is facing in this day and age. only then might we begin to take the concrete risks (including the emotional ones…attachment to country, race, money, etc.) which will open up a new world of opportunities for everyone. i also think that there is a measure of racial conciliation going on among a selective group or class of people that can be, potentially, rewarding in the long and short run. but don`t expect these fruits to play out in the political arena. mostly they will take place in the home, the schoolyard, the street, the music, etc. in other words, the socio-cultural sphere which is, at any rate, inherently political in its own way.

i have so much to say about so many things that i`m bubling over. life just keeps sweeping me along.

miss you like crazy and can`t wait to get back to the states for a live-hug and a long, endless conversation in a japanese garden over sushi and hot tea.

you kick ass.

xxoo

dAddy”

So what has changed that would make me go into a voting booth and cast a ballot for a democratic candidate for president? In one sense, nothing. In another sense, everything.

To begin with, over the past year or so I have continued to be organized by my daughter. This was a new and phenomenal turn of events. I had always seen myself as a guiding force in her life, an articulate spokesperson for certain very important political ideals bordering on an ethical philosophy. But here I was being asked to listen to and be led by my own child. It is not unusual for us to spend between 3 to 5 hours a week on the telephone discussing life and politics. At first, I responded by expanding upon and reinforcing the arguments which I had detailed in my letter. Most of us, I am sure, are familiar with these points of view and they have been eloquently put forward by members of the hard left in different forums. These are, essentially, the principles which I have adhered to for the past 28 years of my politically conscious and active life. But as the campaign progressed and her persistence continued, I started to question this argument I was having with my own seed. My position began to sound more and more like a rigid dogma, an inflexible and ideological platform as opposed to a fluid, flexible and nuanced political perspective. I began to ask myself a very basic, fundamental and anti-utopian question: would my “group”, my tribe so to speak, be moved forward and empowered by an Obama election. Would having him as president and his wife and his daughters put forward as leaders of the country, shift the terrain of race relations in the United States? Would they help to awaken and mobilize black youth and make them more organized, motivated on the grassroots level? Would it help community efforts to take on the prison industrial complex with a sense of purpose and potential and invested self-interest even if obama himself never supports the effort or says a word about it? When I debated these types of questions, very tribal questions based on self interest and power, I began to say yes, it would. Furthermore, this is a very different answer than I would come up with had I been asking the same set of questions regarding a Gore or Kerry vote. On the real. I’m thinking and talking about race, community and inter-generational legacies.

My daughter is feeling passionate about politics. My daughter is telling me what she thinks might work or AT THE VERY LEAST be a meaningful step in the right direction for her life. Given that reality, who am I not to support her? And no, I can’t imagine her, as a young woman of color, stepping to me with the same passion (different from conviction, which seems to imply certainty in outcomes which my daughter isn’t so naive as to claim) for a Gore, a Kerry, a Hillary Clinton. My generation of purist, idealist, anti-establishment political resistance, essentially, fucked it up. I’m not arguing that the struggle is over or that I/we have been wrong in the courage of our convictions and the stances we’ve taken. I am proud and unrepentant that I not only didn’t vote for Clinton, Bush or Gore but that I was on the streets in Washington DC putting my body and voice on the line at his inauguration. I am proud of every minute and hour and day that I have spent in jail as a result of direct action against this exploitive, criminal political system and virus of capital in both its local and international forms. We’ve made a mark and had some high points, and I do not think that I/we have been, for the most part, on the side of the people who have done the screwing up of things. But our inability to mobilize an effective resistance to local and global forces of domination does sort of make me feel like I should at least have the humility to listen to the youth…the generation whose shoulders will bear the burden of my/our ineffective political strategies, strategies which have allowed the ushering in and continuance of domestic and international fascisms. I include in this critique my/our to date failed anarchist strategies of divestment from any direct involvement and thus complicity in the state be it through voting, visible and verbal forms of affirmation of the system and/or rejecting every-day “normalized” forms of hegemonic subordination to its rule (not paying more taxes than absolutely necessary, using situationist artistic interventions, etc.) In other words, I believe there is a social movement dynamic to Obama’s campaign that on many days, or at certain moments at any rate, transcend him as a politician or any of his given policy positions. For me, supporting and encouraging this “new” alignment is worthy of my affirmation and, yes, vote.

The other major thing that has changed for me is that I recently moved from the North-East to the state of Ohio. As many of you know, this is considered a “swing” state. They will tell you that it represents the middle of the road America, the 50/50 America, the heart of the “real” America. In truth, this is a deeply conservative, racially divided and I would go so far as to say racist state. It is racist in the old-school, segregationist way. The Sundown Town and lawn jockey way. Although I am not naïve and have lived and passed time in many parts of the country, being here has allowed me a unique window into just how deeply race is still being used to mobilize the right-wing, conservative base of American populism.

I can assure you that here in the North Mid-West, and particularly on campus, the energy being stimulated by the Obama campaign is practically the ONLY collective action and social movement inspiring and mobilizing the youth on a large scale…which is the level we are talking about when it comes to presidential politics. The campaign is providing a platform for an interracial alliance that is largely middle class but is also trans-class and trans-racial. In other words, like it or not, this is where the action is at the moment. I wish it weren’t so, but it is. Right now, I can’t imagine starting a campaign on this campus to for instance, try to get the military recruiters and ROTC off of the school grounds. Now, it’s true, most certainly, that Obama sure won’t come out and support such a campaign, but the question remains if I think that the experience of tearing down this monumental race barrier in a presidential election through the kind of political mobilization these kids are launching, can translate into other forms of direct action? Out here in Ohio, voters who come from a line of republicans dating back to Goldwater, and most certainly Nixon and Reagan, are either voting Obama or seriously considering it. Whites who have NEVER been in social situations with black folk are beginning to dialogue around issues of economic justice and U.S. foreign policy. And again, I do think that it’s about more than simply Obama’s political platform being so right wing: Although that certainly doesn’t hurt. I think it comes from a moment of shock and dawning awareness among many varying sectors of American society that previous ideologies and processes are broken, founded on lies, deeply corrupt, etc. These are, most certainly, things, realities, observations, facts, whatever, which “we” have been arguing since Emma G. stood up in Union Square and the IWW barnstormed across the nation. But, again, let me say that my own personal belief is that for whatever reasons (and I, as I am sure you do as well, have many ideas about why this is the case) our alternative programs have not been able to gain traction either within our local communities or across the nation. We have not been able to mobilize the creative and political imaginations of a critical mass of folk. I do sense, however, that we may be witnessing the beginning of a process across the nation which is manifesting in alliances that at this moment are coalescing around Barack Obama and his campaign. There is no guarantee that all of this energy will end with an Obama victory, and for me this is almost beside the point, but my question is whether an Obama election and the type of organizing work that is being done on the campaign itself will move this energy forward, help people recognize the power of collective action and their ability to break down walls that once seemed impervious.

One of the most powerful reasons that led me to my decision to vote for Obama concerns this history of white supremacy and its deep-seeded role in mobilizing the American electorate. While an Obama presidency will not end the war in Afghanistan, it may begin to signal the fracture of one of the most important political struggles, wars in point-of- fact, that have been waged over the racist nature of American populism and this country’s nativist alignments in regards to national politics. Although we may not always have worked hand-in-hand, this struggle unifies white radicals, the poor, immigrants, black Americans, Native Americans and citizens overseas who feel the brunt of “our” hostile frontier warrior culture. On Friday I taught a lecture on the history of white militia violence in the 19th and first half of the twentieth century. In it, I sought to demonstrate the relationship between the state and capital in bringing about the ethnic cleansing of the land and the social, political and economic disenfranchisement of people of color. I show some rather brutal images of lynching and the remains of racially cleansed black communities…towns like Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1921 and Springfield, Illinois, where Obama launched his campaign in honor of Lincoln without mentioning the brutal, savage events of 1908 that witnessed the murder and exodus of its black citizens.

In the United States, race is political and domestic racial politics has international consequences. Racism comprises the foundation of a white populism that has driven the American political system ever since the slave owner Thomas Jefferson wrote his racist screed, Notes On the State of Virginia with quite possibly the very same quill pen he used to compose the Declaration of Independence…all while maintaining a 38 year interracial relationship with a black slave which began when she was 14 and with whom he had five children. Racism, slavery and genocide were the foundation of Andrew Jackson’s particular brand of Populist/Nativism in the 1820s, 30s and 40s which unified the white colonial population at the expense of intensifying laws and acts of violence against rebellious slaves and the forced removal of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans — the Chickasaw, the Choctow, the Creeks, the Seminole and the Cherokee — from their homelands in the American southeast to Indian Territory in what is now the state of Oklahoma. After the civil war, white Nativism and populism formed the basis of the racial terror used against blacks to insure their exclusion from the political and economic resources of the nation. These same white, racist populists were the foot soldiers who were called upon to execute the massacres, i.e., the genocide of Native Americans during the entirety of the 19th century, peeking with the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and continuing through multiple forms of subordination and genocidal policies.

For sure, no doubt, make no confusion; this racist populism/Nativism was and remains absolutely central to the construction of U.S. Imperialism. In the late 1890s and early 20th century populist Nativism mobilized the white domestic population to gather behind Teddy Roosevelt’s “Rough Riders” who charged up San Juan Hill in Cuba and to support the imperial expansion into Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam and the Caroline Islands in the Pacific. It was behind the taming and theft of Panama and Central America. A white populace unified around racialist ideologies formed the rank-and-file, the bulwark of Woodrow Wilson’s imperialistic expansion during and after WWI. It is no mistake that Wilson gave DW Griffith’s wildly popular racist propaganda film Birth of a Nation a stunning endorsement and refused to stage any meaningful intervention into the escalating practice of lynching and the campaigns of ethnic cleansing being carried out by white nationalists. Officially, nearly 4,000 blacks were killed during this reign of racial terror, but we know the figure is much higher. From the 19th century until at least the mid 1950s, illicit white racist organizations were integrated into mainstream political and civil organizations from the chamber of commerce to local police departments. At least five U.S. presidents — President Warren G. Harding, President Woodrow Wilson, President McKinley, President Calvin Coolidge, and President Harry S. Truman – were members of the Ku Klux Klan. Not until the civil rights movement did this overt structure of white power, of white supremacy begin to crack. And even then, it saw a dramatic yet rhetorically more subtle resurgence with the neo-conservative movement which emerged in direct and proportional response to the Civil Rights Movement. It began with Barry Goldwater’s racist, red-baiting and xenophobic campaign of 1964 and grabbed a measure of respectability and political power with the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. We must be clear about understanding that the rise of the New Right was a direct result of the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts which occurred during the Lyndon Johnson Administration. The passage of these acts fractured the Democratic Party and fed the dominance of the New Right. Although this New Right saw its fortunes wobble briefly in the late 70s, white populists regained their footing with a vengeance, giving rise to the ascendancy of the Reagan regime, AKA administration. This power block of right wing fundamentalists, militarists and racists mobilized the domestic population to retrench affirmative action, begin the construction of the prison industrial complex, sever the social contract for health care and domestic infrastructure and, as we all know, launch particularly aggressive military campaigns against people of color around the globe.

This is the legacy I believe the Obama campaign has the ability to challenge and I see my vote in these terms. I am not so naïve as to believe that an Obama administration can completely overturn this history or that it will necessarily even try to do so explicitly. These issues are bigger than Obama or the specific policies he will initiate over the next four years…although his decisions and actions will certainly not be inconsequential. But in observing the reaction of the right wing of this country I have noticed a desperate, almost panicked appeal to a very old, tried and true Nativist rhetoric and sentiments that rest upon the foundation of militant white supremacy. And no, I do not think that a black candidate like Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell would elicit the same sharp reaction among whites that we see being expressed by the prospect of an Obama presidency. We may, just may, be witnessing the slow dying pangs of this radical right movement and I, for one, want to help usher it into the grave. I’m not sure if this is true, of course, but the prospect of it being so is certainly worth my vote for this particular election cycle.

I cannot emphasize enough how effected my family — the Jones’, the Browns, the Senters, the Jacksons — have been terrorized and dominated by the domestic reality of racial dictatorship. It is not an abstract history but a deeply personal one. In the past I have only, and this even rarely and ambivalently, voted for third-party fringe candidates. I remain a deep critic and opponent of the United States government’s policies at home and abroad. When I see the American flag, it often makes my stomach churn. In my mind’s eye I see it waving over the cavalry who slaughtered my people, the Pamunkey, the Chikahominy and Cherokee Indians. I see it legitimizing the slavery and Jim Crow segregation of my African American ancestors. I hold it and the white populists who bore it accountable for the ongoing economic, psychological, intellectual and physical violence I see in segregated and militarized neighborhoods of color throughout the country. I hold it accountable for the mental illness that took my mother, who was born under legal apartheid, from me as a child. This year I buried my grandmother, our matriarch, who was born in Memphis Tennessee in 1915. While she was alive, she told me of the hardships she endured as a light skinned woman of color growing up in this country. Her husband, my grandfather, who was born in St. Louis Missouri in 1908, made his living first by working as a steward on the railroads…you’ve seen him before, the one in old movies from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s whose white coated arm reaches into the frame to hand the white lead characters a glass of wine or something. After moving north he and his brothers made their living shining white people’s shoes and handing out towels to white patrons in the restrooms of fancy New York City nightclubs like the Copacabana for tips. A man of incredible dignity and poise, he was forced to make his money bowing, smiling and subordinating himself in a bathroom for a living. Both of my other grandparents were born in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the southern confederate government during the civil war. When I consider what my elders would say if I asked them how and whether to vote in this election, the answer is clear and unequivocal.

As someone with deep roots in THIS country I see my struggle as being not only against the government, but against the white, racist, nativist, xenophobes who are at this very moment struggling to rearticulate themselves into a power bloc and who I can see are in a state of near panic over the new demographic alignments that have taken place in U.S. society since the hard earned passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This act laid the legal foundation for overturning the exclusive, white European basis of immigration policy which is now so radically altering the ethnic composition of the nation. My decision to vote for Obama is a response to this war for the domestic heart and soul of the United States and not an endorsement of the United States government itself. On the bright side, I hope that this means my politics are not dogmatic, ideological and rigid; that they are flexible and can adapt to changing political realities and circumstances. At its darkest, it may mark a capitulation to a power structure which I loathe; an exhausted betrayal of a value system that honors autonomy, direct action and local, grassroots consensus based decision making.

In the meantime, let me just repeat that this is not an endorsement of Obama for president. It is merely my explanation for why I have decided to cast my skeptical vote for him this time around. You may or may not agree with my decision. I completely understand.

In solidarity and struggle,

voice AkA dAlton

Susan Scutti

Out of nowhere, I’d suddenly begun to wear my hair, my unruly curls, pinned in a tight bun. At the same time, I became a fan of a peculiar shade of purple lip gloss and heavy eyeliner. I wore jeans and over-sized shirts with button-down collars, which I bought at the co-op. My uncertain style amounted to a common-law marriage of punk and preppie — but I was neither, I was just another financial-aid student fumbling my way through Yale.

Of all the places to study on campus, I preferred the L&B room in Sterling Library. I felt drawn to the luxurious green leather armchairs, the antique brass lamps, the casement windows and the huge oil-painting hanging above a fireplace. Now this is Yale, I’d thought the first time I wandered into the room. By comparison, the contemporary plastic style of Cross Campus Library seemed ordinary, familiar.

One evening during the Fall semester of my Junior year, I pulled my notebook out of my book bag, rushing to write down all my thoughts that came in a sudden gush and just as quickly ran out. As I closed my notebook, the syllabus from my history class slipped onto the table top. I was taking American History that semester, 1865 to Present, and under the heading “Additional Reading,” a couple of sociology titles were listed on the syllabus. I put my backpack on my chair to save it and went to the card catalog.

I took an elevator up to the stacks. I found each book on a separate dusty shelf, then returned to my armchair in the L&B room. I opened the first book, which exuded a delicious scent of old paper, and began to read. My attention quickly drifted from the words on the page. I put aside one book and picked up another, skimming along until I came to a comparison of Italian and Irish immigrants. My attention focused. The book said Irish families felt comfortable with a mother working outside the home (the familiar Irish maids of the early 20th Century). But in Italian families, the mother generally stayed at home. This gave rise to women doing piecework from their kitchens, and frequently becoming seamstresses. (Uncomfortable, I shifted in my chair. My grandmother’s treadle Singer sewing machine still sat in her living room.) Although these differences were established before WWII, some sociologists attributed their prevalence after the war to other causes, including internment of Italian-Americans.

Puzzled, I re-read the last sentence. Internment? I opened my history book, read the table of contents, the index, then skimmed the text, but found nothing other than the usual facts and dates surrounding America’s entry in World War II. I sat up, vaguely wondering as I glanced around the room. All the chairs were filled with students striking the familiar poses of study. I stood, stretched, walked to the card catalog. I searched and found a few titles. I took the elevator into the stacks, and found one of the books. I sat down right there in the aisle, opened the book, read the table of contents, found the right page, and began to read.

After Pearl Harbor, America had declared war on Germany and Italy as well as Japan. Most Italians had arrived in America in the period between the world wars. Several hundred Italians who were legal immigrants but not yet citizens found themselves in an internment camp in Missoula, Montana. (Reading, I felt the pulse of my blood at different points along my body.) Similarly, alien Germans were placed in internment camps, one in New Jersey. A total of about eleven thousand Germans from the states as well as parts of Latin America were interned. Two thousand were traded back to Germany for American Prisoners of War. (An ancient-looking man, who looked at least six and a half feet tall from my vantage point on the floor, turned the corner and nearly fell on top of me. I pulled in my legs and mumbled a shocked apology before re-reading the sentence he’d interrupted.) The numbers of interned Italians and Germans were not as large as the number of Japanese, but in the case of Italians on the West coast, the government took additional steps. Fishermen had their licenses revoked and Italian families whose houses sat on coastal property, were forced to move to the interior. Radios were confiscated, neighbors warned and frightened.

I felt a kind of ringing, both a sound and a sensation, in my ears. I read everything again, then carefully placed the book, like a brick filling a gap in a wall, back on the shelf.

Why didn’t I know this?

Outside, the carillon bells began to ring and I glanced at my watch. I’d be late. I took the elevator downstairs, rushed to the L&B room, assembled my notebooks and pens in my backpack and left my chair, which was immediately taken by a waiting Asian student. (My Japanese-American roommate had informed me the term “Chinese” was frequently incorrect and “Oriental” completely unacceptable. I listened much more than I spoke to my Japanese roommate, who grew up in a wealthy town less than sixty miles from my own.) On my way out of the library, a security guard checked my backpack, then I pushed open the massive door, heavy, built for the strength of a man.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” It was Wednesday before Thanksgiving, I’d arrived home for the break just two days after I’d read about the internment camps. We sat at the dining room table, my parents facing one another from opposite ends, Nancy, Ann, Jim and I were there. Dana and Teresa were living on their own by that time, they were not.

My father didn’t answer me, didn’t even look at me, silently continued to eat.

“You didn’t think it was important to tell us that the government took away Uncle Dom’s fishing license?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat.

Her fork poised above her plate, my mother said, “Who told you that?”

“I told her. And Dana told me,” Nancy said.

Twirling his spaghetti, Jim said, “What happened?”

“Pass the cheese,” Ann said, nudging Nancy.

My mother cast a withering glance at Nancy, then pronounced, “It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters a lot,” I said to my mother, then turned to Jim. “The government took away Uncle Dom’s fishing license during World War II.”

Frowning his next question, Jim glanced at my father.

My mother sighed and turned her attention to my father. Following her gaze, I remembered the time — I was watching him change a lightbulb in the cellar — the one time he told me he never learned English until the white kids beat the Italian out of him at school.

Without lifting his eyes from his plate, my father said, “America was at war. We did what we had to do. I don’t want to hear any more of that crap you learned at that liberal college of yours.”

Finally he looked directly at me and I saw the anger flash through his eyes. My jittering leg jerked to a stop beneath the table.

After dinner, washing the dishes, my mother said, “It’s the past, Emily. There’s nothing you can do about something that’s in the past.”

Nancy rolled her eyes at me. I said, “Oh, Mom, that’s what you always say.”

“It’s the truth,” my mother said with a sigh. Then, she told me that in Newark, German men never walked the streets alone for fear of being beaten up by gangs of Americans. “One of your grandfather’s cousins was badly hurt,” she said shaking her head.

I withdrew my hands from the warm, sudsy dishwater. “Are you serious?”

Nancy nodded. “Grandma told me that, too.”

“It was the same during World War I. Your grandmother’s neighbors stopped talking to her. Their parents told them not to play with the German girl. That’s what they did in those days.”

“That must have left a scar,” I said.

Nancy snorted, picked up another dish to dry. “I’m sure it did.”

“What about you, Mom? What happened to you during the war?”

“We were living in Florida, then, in a small town. No one bothered us. It’s not like anyone suspected us of being a… terrorist cell or something.”

Nancy laughed, spinning to open the cabinet with the dinner plates.

I said, “Nance, you never heard about the internment, right?”

She shook her head. “Dana told me she remembered something about it from history class senior year in high school. But I don’t. Ann doesn’t remember learning about it either.”

“I know we never learned that. We learned about Japanese internment, but never Italian or German. They must have rewritten the books by our years.”

“What does it matter?” My mother said.

“Dad always says that quote about ‘those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’”

“Santayana.” Nancy said, filling in my knowledge gap.

“I mean, what if you never even learn your history? What if it’s been… deleted? How can you help but to repeat it?”

My mother frowned. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s done, gone. Forget it. You can’t do anything about it.”

In that moment, for the first time, I thought of myself as a kind of child of war. Not a baby conceived before battle and delivered by Red Cross nurses, but the result of two people who gut understood one other because they had been similarly defined by a nation at war. My parents met just one month after my father returned from serving in World War II. He must have felt both grateful and intensely happy that night as he walked through the shining streets. The downpour had just stopped when he saw my mother stepping off a bus. He followed her to the same dance he was going to himself and after watching her for a few minutes, he stepped up and introduced himself. Later, when she gave him her number, he didn’t write it down. My mother told me although she thought he was good-looking, she assumed he was just another “smoothy” who had no intention of calling.

“Just after we got married,” my mother said, interrupting my thoughts, “Your father’s mother visited. The entire time, she refused to sit. She stood in a corner of the room. No matter how many times I asked her, she wouldn’t sit down! After that, we always went to her.” Shaking her head, my mother turned on the faucet, rinsed her hands, then wiped them on her apron.

Feeling her gall, I glanced at Nancy, who widened her eyes. “Oh, Mom,” I said, placing my hand on her back. “She was just…”

“She was impossible!” My mother said.

Not even five feet tall, my Italian grandmother had warm brown eyes and a sweet smile. Yet in public she always remained utterly silent. How quickly the stories of internment and interrogation must have passed through her Italian community. Just as quickly my grandmother learned that words in imperfectly accented English might cause trouble, that a meek smile could be her only response.

Despite his own Italian-ness, all his life my father thought of himself as American, only American. Well, why not? Like Alzheimer’s Disease, which empties the mind of language, memory and culture, assimilation is a process of forgetting.

End

“3 months since”

 

 

May 29, 2008

Today is another ordinary BORING day without Tina.  Since February 29th, this whole house has been nothing but a depressing hell hole.  Now I have to become the woman Tina always told me to be, and try my hardest to support my mom in the best way I can.  When the cops knocked on my door, the first thing that popped up was james’ whole name.  Before they even spoke, I knew something bad happened.

 

DETECTIVES: “tina has been assaulted & the both of you need to go to the hospital.”

MOMMY: [ in ASL ] “what wrong Tina? sick again? what happen?”

DETECTIVES: “your mom has to come right now. No questions asked.”

MOMMY: “cant. me wash clothes. i finish then see Tina.”

DETECTIVES: “NO! it’s very important for the both of you to go see tina. She’s in bad condition. She cannot move and she cannot speak.”

MOMMY: [ looks at me confused ].

 

For a 15 year old girl, it wasn’t really a WHOOP! WHOOP! to hear any of that.  I stood home finishing up the laundry while my mom went to the hospital.  When I finished, I stood home debating whether I should go or not, because i felt as if Tina died, but i believed that she was too strong to die.  I got queasy and scared of what I might hear.

 

I called my friend Karla, and I told her what was going on, and how I felt this type of pain.  A pain that only a sister would have, & can tell.  I told her I didn’t wanna go, because I don’t wanna hear “samantha, your sister’s dead.”  Karla said  “mami listen, your sister’s not dead.  she’s probably sick.  And i think you should go cause she might need you there.”  While me and Karla were on the phone, the detective called again on the other line, I picked up and he said, “be downstairs in 10 minutes.”  The adrenaline rushed through my body and I really didn’t know what to expect. I kept jingling my mothers keys to help calm me down.  He walked me to the room, and when he opened the door, I saw mommy’s red eyes filled with tears and puffed up from the crying she did. She looked at me scared of what I was going to hear.  Then I looked behind her, and it was Tina’s dad, Edwin.  I wanted to run out of the hospital and throw my body against the cold, wet, concrete because I KNEW I was gonna hear this.  I snapped out of my daze when,

 

FEMALE DETECTIVE: “samantha right? sit down.”

ME: “nah. uh. I wanna stand.”

FEMALE DETECTIVE: “okay. ummmm. [ asks doctor ] can I tell her instead?…samantha sweetie….your sister died.”

 

Those words still haunt me every single day.  I sat down and burst in tears.  Everyone tried to comfort me, but moments like this, I don’t like to be touched.  It’s devastating news, but to me, it was BEYOND devastating. Tina was all I had.  She was my only best friend, and I felt comfortable with her about everything.  She came first most times, and she backed me up and protected me when mommy and I fought.  Mommy cries again and says “omg.  samantha’s lonely.  that was my baby.  omg…….where’s james?  why isn’t he here?”  I sat there crying hysterically and trying to put the pieces to the puzzle.  I knew james had something with this for some reason.

 

My accusations and thoughts all lit onto his name.  The doctors ask if Edwin and Mommy wanna see Tina one last time.  They asked me too, but I was too heartbroken and petrified to see my sister, laying on a metal bed, cold and dead.  I prefered to stay in the room, and just think of the good things me and Tina had. I asked for tissue and a phone to use.  Since I didn’t remember Benny’s number (my brother), I decided to call Karla instead since she was my only comfort.  She picked up the phone and I replied in a mixture of mumbles and talking in between cries.  She asked me what’s wrong and I kept taking deep breaths so I can speak clearly so she can understand, but I just couldn’t.  It hurted me to say, Tina died. She started guessing out different scenarios so I wouldn’t have to speak.  I got irritated and I finally told Karla.  The reply I got was a long silence.  She asked me if I was kidding, but why would I be kidding if I’m crying like a maniac?  Little did I know, I found out Tina’s death by detectives and the News.  She also made front cover on the newspaper, lying on a stretcher and you can see the BLOOD all over her face!

 

I spent a whole month, grieving while James was on the run.  But I thank god each and every single day, that he’s in a cold, empty, cell suffering for a huge mistake he made.  He wasn’t gonna get away with murder.  God wasn’t gonna let him and the family put this in god’s hands.  But it sucks to come home to nothing every single day.  I can’t even go to Keyfood and tell Tina one funny story that happened in school.  I’m not even the same anymore.  I lost interest in school, I’m always in a daze, and I don’t like to do as much things as I used to.  Tina was my motivation to everything.  And she was supposed to be at my sweet 16, my high school graduation, my first real job, and she’s gone, just like grandma.  It hurts me so bad, to see how depressed Mommy is.  She got me a laptop yesterday because she couldn’t stand me being bored at home, and ’cause I was asking for one since she complains about me using her computer.

 

I took Tina’s advice to gain Mommy’s trust, and she lets me do a lot, depending on what I’m doing.  I’m not happy that Tina’s gone, but I’m happy that Tina had a big part in my life, and I’m happy that me and Mommy don’t fight anymore.  I guess good things do come to those who wait. But I’m always gonna remember that Tina saved my life.  But I wish I could’ve saved hers.  I tried my best, & look what I got in return. A sister that’s never gonna come back……Only in my Dreams.

   “….how government deals with culture

as a distraction from its own pornography.” – Richard  Serra

Here we are well into fall and there’s so much catching
up to do so let’s begin where I last left off with a brief list of
gigs I witnessed, before getting to the heart of this article.

There was the Zorn – Lou Reed duo which culminated with guest
appearances by Mike Patton, Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori, followed 2 nights
later by Zorn, Reed, Ribot and Milford Graves who played impeccably and
tastefully throughout the night and who during set two when Reed
joined in, actually seemed to enjoy being “the drummer in the
band”.This was originally supposed to be a trio of Zorn, Milford and
Bill Laswell but Laswell fell ill and couldn’t make it. These events
took place at a new venue with a very eclectic menu on Bleeker
Street called Le Poisson Rouge which was the bottom part of the old
Village Gate, a club where I had enjoyed many great shows and where I
now intend to enjoy many more. Another recent “Rouge” event I loved
was blues and jug band greats Geoff Muldaur and Jim Kweskin .

Other moments were the warm hug by Kim and Thurston
during the Sonic Youth gig that closed McCaren Pool’s concert series
(the pool will again become a pool and I can’t wait to take a
dip.)
Finally got to hear Wolf Eyes on this program and am still
absorbing them.

Heard the master Lee Konitz interviewed and in duo at Joe’s Pub.

The ICP Orchestra as part of Tonic’s series at the Abrons
Art Center and a fantastic panel discussion at the Bowery Poetry
Club on punk rock by former members of Television, Suicide, the
Heartbreakers, the Slits, etc. This is music I know nothing about
but I learned alot about the political, social and dress code
urgencies of the times and some major differences between
British and American punk. And wow, that Slits chick really slammed
Richard Lloyd. But that’s a whole article by itself.
Now on to what I really wanted to discuss: The Living Theater vs. HAIR.

Improbable comparisons? Not really. First I want to say that the benefit for

the Living Theater at Joe’s Pub,“Revolutionary Acts”, was a sold out affair.

All the performers were basically cabaret and musical folk and though some carried
anarchistic messages in their somewhat funny and theatrical performances their styles

as with the style of HAIR were completely antithetical to what the Living Theater stands for,

though it ended with Judith Malina reading some of her poetry. But it’s the similarities

between Hair and the Living Theater that I want to deal with, the spirit of counter culture
rebellion and the messages that both HAIR and the Living Theater have to offer us.
Though the one (L.T.) is intellectual, high art and the other (HAIR) almost an anti-intellectual,

popular musical  ( fundamental difference being the use of song as vehicle),

they both gives us ensemble players that offer up an anarchistic, pro sex, pro drug,
anti-war palette with other parallels such as nudity, group sex and the pitfalls of so called

democratic (actually oligarchic),“organized” if somewhat fascistic  government.

The authors of HAIR, like the principals of the Living Theater, come from the

experimental roots of theatre. In HAIR one can see/feel parallel moments to such
Living Theater productions as Mysteries and Paradise Now. Also throughout
HAIR, as with most Living Theater productions the audience is constantly being engaged.

Though both are concerned with the way folks react to the material presented

and how that material relates back to the audience and are both willfully,

as with most good art that is not made for its own sake, interested in the activity

as well as its result there is one major difference, aside from the festive catchy pop/rock
atmosphere of HAIR. In the production of HAIR at Shakespeare in the Park the
character who gets drafted and sent to Vietnam (the draft being one of the

only differences between war then and now) dies and is laid out on an American flag

toward the back of the stage. The cast immediately gathers starts singing “Let the Sun Shine In”

and encourages the audience to sing and dance along. The “victim” is completely upstaged, in fact

almost blotted out, forgotten. If this were a Living Theater production, say, as with the end of
Mysteries, we would be left with that dead body to think about and not good
hearted optimistic merriment. Yet, though many of their processes differ many of their

approaches are the same and it’s very interesting to watch them unfold and calculate where, at
certain points “structure and content” of both ideas become “identical.”
I prefer the Living Theater’s approach, though a good song and dance never hurt anyone.

I can say however that despite its happier moments HAIR might just be the one of most anti-war,
counter-culture plays to come along and one that finds itself wrapped up nicely
in a perfect pop culture package and tied off neatly with a yellow ribbon.
This fall look for HAIR on Broadway and the new Living Theater production of Eureka,

the late Hanon Resnikoff’s adaptation of Poe’s epic poem.

And while you’re looking remember that LIFE,like modernism,

though it ends at times, is anti-durational so listen with all your senses.

 Andrew Castrucci

Dear john
you were one of my closest friends
I miss you dearly
i’ve known you for over 22 years
john you left us to early
I wasn’t ready for you to leave
I thought you were going to make another comeback
My muhammid aLI FROM LOUIEVILLE
You always had the strength to bounce back- I wasn’t ready to say goodbye
I still owed you that spaghetti sauce
We were calling each other about getting together to photo a guerilla art piece we were going to write “America Berserk” on the wall 100 times till you couldn’t read it – until America berserk turned into a blackened sprayed unreadable overlapping pattern. I had the spray panit. He had the camera.
You kept telling me you got to give me more notice -I got to go visit my sister
Or the next time your were to weak to go out
The last time I saw you I gave you one of my fedora hats. I had a collection of my grandfather’s hats
When I first met you it was thru one of your photos it was about 1985/86
A strange photo of colonel sanders form Kentucky fried chicken in an open casket
You had balls to sneak into his wake and take this shot
You always had the guts to take the unusual shot/unusual perspective
Your photo was juxtaposed with a group of artist’s /poets in a book called anti -utopia
I was curious to meet the guy that took this photo
You were a part of a group of artist that c
ame from louieville Kentucky in the early 80’s

we later worked closely on your house is mine squatter and homeless project
Also guerilla performances at met
John also photographed my wedding in 2001 and various other family affairs
He recently photographed my mother and fathers 50th wedding anniversary
my mom was a big fan of john ranard
you always kept it a secret how sick you were
“I don’t want to tell you about bad news”, he would say
he would only tell me when he was bouncing back and things were looking good
Besides setting up john with commercial projects
we collaborated on various art projects thru the 22 yeaRS I’VE KNOWN HIM
JOHN was my photographer
My ALI from louieville
i have over 500 of his photos of john’s
I was a true believer in you

there are basically 8-10 important photographers that documented the lower east side from 1976  to present
marlis momber
Martha cooper
Tom warren
Clayton patterson
Chris flash (from the shadow)
John panley
To name a few
John was different from these photographers
He tresendend photojournalism –john’s work was more mystical
A fine line between realism and abstract forms
John unusual subject matter, perspective, a dramitic cropping stood him out from great photojournalism of our time. John was more of a surrealist- a magic realist.
He reminded me of a story when a photographer came into this African village and20set up a portrait of the tribal chief
Before the photographer snapped the portrait, “the chief said are you
going to steal my soul or give me soul? “
John was the kind of photographer that gave you soul

Ranard could take a wedding photo showing 90% of the persons back (no facial features)  greeting a younger guest and this photo still had this magical spirit.
this photo was actual my father greeting his granddaughter
As we were hanging johns show at tribes I saw john’s work in retrospect as a pyramid: the LES work, the Russian work, and middle America (the boxing series)
And outside this pyramid were the recent self-portraits, his most personal work. And than outside this circle was his collaborations w/artists like david hammons/ krizytof wodiczko
Than outside this was his commercial work that he rarely took on like an unusual wedding
he kept telling me I don’t have a long time to live and I have to to finish this new work
I naively always thought I would get old with john ,2 old men arguing about art and politics
John I’ll miss your stories the ones you kept in your pocket everytime I saw you
You always had a good joke
Or some informative opinion of some important absurd news event
At this time john just left his wife and moved into the squats
We were both deeply involved w/ the squatter community
“whats the first thing you do when you move into a squatE2 , john said
Quit your job”
John finally surrended after giuliani brought in the tanks in one of the final symbolic evictions on the LES
while I was trying to get him into bullet space he moved into subsidized housing on east 2nd st. and rebuild his dark room for the 5th time

john was a photographer  that took chances -he was in dangerous situations- he dared go where very few roomed
either it being in Russia  in post-soviet union transition (after the wall fell)or in the middle of a riot on the lower east side-he went to this edge and saw things that gave his photos this other dimension
from shooting galleries outside Moscow to hardcore off the path boxing sub-culture of middle America

one time at 6 am on april 1,  when the sun just starting to come up. I read a manifesto in front of the metropolitan museum of art and knocked over 20 squatter piss bottles ,poor man’s gold, a manifesto in reaction to a museum of dead artists, some of the Rembrandts were fakes, a homage to Van Gogh’s yellow sunflowers, a protest to Giuliani’s regime ,a 10 year anniversary of Tompkins Square riots, the day they acquitted the police officers that shot Diallo.

this was a 5-10 minute guerilla piece john photoed and documented
after most of us got away jonh stayed and kept shooting I ran back and screamed john! we are going to get arrested we got to get out of her
e.
I left he stayed to shoot the aftermath barely escaping arrest

When john did a 2 person show at bullet space w/ bruce witsipe (one of the leaders of the group of artists from louiville-) (R.I.P. bruce ) they argued a lot
Bruce spoke about during the Russian revolution there were 2 kinds of artists
There were the social realist and there were kandinsky, el lissitsky and malevelvich (the suprematists),
They debated the content of narration and propaganda  vs. art
The abstract vs. realism- how the less narrative works had more of a metaphysical meaning in their work while still being honest to the revolution
Less overtly political, but more powerful.
John played the devil’s advocate and stuck up for the realists.
Even though his work was in the light Rodchenko and deep down inside
He knew he was not a realist
Somewhere in heaven or hell or where ever you guys are- I can still here you and bruce still arguing.
john transcended this mirror of life –its hard to explain?
He was just different from the rest of the photographers
As a painter /sculptor with photography we battle with this imitation of life
We reject the camera-we try to transcend this realism -this machine- this flat surface-(like a david smith sculpture)
but with john I saw something different!
I compared him to Weegee (Arthur fellig)
He wasn’t just recording a historical event
In reality there are 3 dimensions. In quantum physics t
here are 11 dimensions
With John ‘s photos he went beyond this 3rd dimension
He gave a soul -a spirit -an aura to his images
You could see the ghosts between the glass and frame

One day he was taking a large group photo at our wedding -about 80 of us.
He had a camera he bought on the black market outside Moscow, some sort of post- WWII sliding wide angle lens that would move side to side as he shot this large horizontal family grouping.
The camera started to malfunction and the audience starting complaining to hurry up and shot the god damn photo.
I calmed down the group saying this guy is a great artist be patient.
John shot the most incredible photos for this special night.
This took place at Angel Orensanz place on Ludlow street.
John had his magic working that night.
Our last hurray. This was one month before sept. 11
We sang god bless America for the last time with a Italian festival band we hired off mulberry st. john captured a magical realism of this night
It felt like The world turned upside down a month later
With john gone /an era has gone- we are in a new city
A new century

John the next time I make my grandmothers secret spaghetti sauce I’ll think of you
The sauce is on its way to 2nd st. and B apt. 3d
or the next time I put that fedora hat
The next time I see the young 17-year-old ALI from louivillle I’ll think of you the next time=2
0I look at one of your photos…
I miss you john

I was actual in a situation at a club on the les in 1985when I was working w/ the bad brains when a local well known photographer was shooting a portrait of HR (sort of the god-father of hardcore punk) he said to the photographer w/ his dreads pushed away from his eyes “in a staring glance -are you going to steal my soul…
Over the years and at this moment i think a lot of this incident and see how if
Ranard would have been in this situation- how he would of treated this chief different
john you stood out from the rest of the LES photographers
you were a true artist
a true shaman
I miss you dearly
your friend and brother
a.c.

john ranard selected works
tribes gallery thru sept. 30
285 east 3rd st.nyc 10009
www.tribes.org