For Bella Akhmadulina

Note: In her great poem, “I Swear,” written for her forerunner, the poet Marian Tsvetaeva, Bella Akhmadulina vows to “kill Yelabung,” the town in which Tsvetaeva hanged herself in 1941. Akhmadulina addresses the town as if it were some kind of malevolent entity or demon.

A life for a life, a young black
woman’s voice said to me on the
phone the day George
Jackson died in prison and I
said even twenty, a hundred for that
one would be cheap. Even a thousand.
And if I claimed a million
lives for each of my lost, like some
superHitler out to depopulate
the earth, and cd drink, somehow
that blood : this one’s
for you, Freddie, and this for you,
Lee Probst, Genevieve, Gloria still
alive but dead and you, Little One
we called you & this immensity
of gore I drink to you, Jimmy, teacher
and friend. O lost mad Mike, killed brain of Timothy, palsy
in Allen’s face, this one’s
for Warren Miller, nobody knows
they killed. Fred Hampton in his bed, asleep
in blood. Emmett who told us
it sen’t be “overdose” that got him
a million lives for each,
so what, it wd take four thousand only
to finish us all then & I alone
cd probably name four thousand.
Listen.
There’s got to be another way, we can’t
just kill yelabuya or be killed. Or both.
There’s
anyway here, the ghost dance, or tin
floating as gold in the vessel. I know it’s nonsense
but is it worse nonsense than drinking yourself to death
tonight in some Russian suburb? Here
we’ve got Black Elk’s four horses in the sky
to replace the ones in Revelations. What
have you got? You must have something
I won’t be “translated”
alone, or at least w/out female
buddies. I know some of the men will “buy” the ideal
but they don’t count, they never carried their flesh
grave as lead, there must be a peasant whisper
the shape of a hill, or a sneaky look
in the eyes of an ancient icon – give me a hint
don’t hide
& die.

there isn’t enough blood on earth
to buy our losses. And blood is salt, it will never
quench my thirst. Do we kill,

or split

or kill and split

..... or translate this shit

to a paradise omtting nothing taking nothing
w/us. Gravid, full
of the squirming seeds of our dread

can we
sow the wind?
can we
condense fury till it is
flame

can we use this fuel
to move us out of here

a flying leap

to another “plane” or “sphere”
& I don’t know into what, don’t ask, only
I know it won’t be worse.

#71 was first printed in the most recent edition of Diane di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters (Last Gasp Press).

HAITI, CHILE, TIBET

LET'S STOP FOR A MOMENT TO REMEMBER WHAT WE ARE
a handful of tribes on a rather small rock
where water streams over arable earth
into larger, living waters we call "ocean"

a rock that has clothed itself in an ocean of air
and we walk on that ocean floor and look out
at a vast soup of consciousness we call "empty space:"

and all is not well with our rock, it might even

come apart

could be it will soon be another asteroid belt

or meteors—
just a bunch of meteors

While our rock is shaking, and water pours from the skies
and the winds have turned demonic
could be it's time...maybe it's really time

to rewrite

the Social Contract

or at least change the rules that apply in catastrophe:

& that might soon be every day - there are lots of us & we swarm like bees)

Just a few suggestions:

1. ALL HANDS ON DECK

means just that
it's a really small boat

2. ANYONE BRINGING HELP ANYWHERE IT'S NEEDED

BRINGING...FOOD...BLANKETS
WATER...MEDICINE

IS WELCOME (obviously)

don't ask where they're from—
just say Thank You
& we'd better learn to say Thank You
in hundreds of languages)

3. ALL BORDERS DISAPPEAR

in catastrophe
they are stupid & irrelevant anyway

4. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS LOOTING IN A DISASTER
think about it—
after Katrina, Rita, all the others
after the quakes in Chile, Haiti, Kobe, Managua—look back a bit

can you call it looting when anyone breaks plate glass

comes out with food & water...medicine
camping supplies....................whatever

is that looting or just plain sanity?
keeping your family, keeping each other, alive

5. THERE IS NO PLACE FOR POLICE OR ARMY IN TRAGEDY
except as facilitators,
distributors
UNARMED they should walk the streets, bringing food

putting out fires, digging people out
rescuing those stranded on rooftops or bridges
fleeing the waters

they shd be digging latrines
putting up shelters, helping families find each other

6. EVERY BUILDING STILL INTACT SHD OPEN ITS DOORS
to everyone
what else are guest rooms for?
whoever comes to your door should be taken in
I learned when I was four
she's your guest—should be given the best
of what you've got
even if you thought she had been your enemy.
Not special. It's a universal law—

& why we're still around at all.

7. GIVE UP CONFUSING YR PROPERTY WITH YOUR LIFE
This will save a lot of problems. Stuff comes & goes

& holding on is like holding back a river

with your hands

8. STOP ASKING WHAT OTHERS "BELIEVE"

just look in their eyes
& see we are the same, they are the same
as your most beloved, be it
yr child, yr lover, dog

no child is hungry who is not your grandchild
HOW LONG WILL YOU LET HER WAIT?
no child is orphaned who is not your son
& WHAT WILL IT TAKE

to make us remember our own?

Walpurgis, 2010, San Francisco

When Chicago Bulls forward Luol Deng missed his second of two free throws with two seconds remaining and his team leading 108-106 in the third game of the Chicago-Cleveland first round NBA playoff series, it was clear LeBron James would not have an overtime period of five minutes in which to add to his total of 39 points. Either the Bulls' lead would hold, or Cleveland would steal the game with a desperation three-pointer, hoisted up by Anthony Parker (exactly the kind of shot that Butler's Gordon Hayward had barely missed sinking – along with the Duke ship – weeks earlier in the NCAA Final).

Parker missed his too, but either way, with Deng’s errant free throw, Elgin Baylor's special place in my memory and personal pantheon was secure, as very little else seemed to be, in the face of LeBron’s prospect of rewriting basketball history.

It was to see James play in person that I was, on my sixty-seventh birthday, at my first live NBA playoff game since 1962, when my college buddy and I made the trek to Boston Garden, and plunked down a modest fee, for which we were rewarded with decent seats from which to witness Elgin post an astonishing 61 points, giving his Lakers a home-court service break in the pivotal fifth game of a championship series which the Celtics nonetheless came back to win in seven.

As involved as I remain with basketball, as a high school coach and devoted fan of my Division III all-conference guard son, I no longer seriously consider going to NBA games. Having covered the University of San Francisco's games for ten years as an Associated Press stringer, I got used to being paid forty bucks and a meal for attending games, sitting courtside among knowledgeable and cynical sportswriters, listening to coaches and stars of various games pontificating about how this particular victory became theirs on that particular night.

My sole excursion to Oracle Arena, the recently renovated home arena of my local franchise, the Golden State Warriors was bizarrely repugnant to me: being ushered to my appointed seat in a supposedly desirable luxury corporate box reminded me so much of going through a (pre 9/11) airport check-in line that I was reduced to muttering stuff under my breath about having to catch a connecting flight to Houston. At Oracle, my seats had been generously provided gratis by Golden State Vice President and former title-winning Coach Al Attles, whose acquaintance and near friendship I valued and had heretofore taken great pains to cultivate. Here was a terrible disconnect: accepting the gift tickets had become the price of continuing the relationship. Al understood: “Oh, you remember when it was just about basketball.”

OSCAR’S HEIR?

Yet as well as I know that the game, especially on the professional level, can never provide me with the moments of transcendent joy that it did for so many years, I have been captivated by LeBron James since I first heard of him as a high school junior (him, not me) and saw him play in a summer league game in Berkeley. My sole interest in watching NBA games in recent years has been to see him, because there is at every moment the possibility that he will do something I have never before seen anyone do, or even thought possible.

James’ combination of strength, speed, raw power, and skill has amazed me so much that I started to conceive of him as not only on course to become the greatest player of all time, but also to accomplish the remarkable feat of obliterating the time-honored duality between best big man and best all-around player, as his incredible and unprecedented combination of size, speed, athleticism, and brute strength enable him to combine the sets of attributes that distinguished the greatest all-court player (Oscar Robertson, Larry Bird, Earvin Johnson, Michael Jordan) with the physical prowess that characterized the reigning Big Man (archetypically, Wilt Chamberlain; most recently, Shaquille O’Neal). He would, I liked to contend, replace dualisms with dialectical unity: bring together the two disparate tracks that have always been necessary in discussions of who is the greatest player.

James can both play any position on the floor and also match the physical strength of almost any center or power forward in the game today. Where there always had to be the powerful big man and the all-court player who was not a center, LeBron seemed to point forward to a time when there would be only one King.

Along with that came his work ethic, which in my mind recalled that of Oscar Robertson, the greatest player of my era, and still – I argue – the greatest ever, in that he meticulously mastered, in textbook fashion, every aspect of the game (1), and took the developmental line of greatness so far beyond what had previously existed that his like could never come again; except that James made me think of Oscar reborn, with an Oscar-like attentiveness to improving and mastering everything that really mattered between the lines of rectangular confines of his world.

How different, though, is his world than was Oscar’s! It would be way beyond self-indulgent hubris to beg that I be allowed to count the ways. As Al Attles’ contemporary, a member of the 1960 NBA draft class that also included Jerry West and Lenny Wilkins, Oscar too remembers (2) when it was just about basketball, whereas James, Inc. represents and extends not only the line of development of basketball, but that of marketing. Seminal figures who have preceded James in this progression have been Patrick Ewing, Michael Jordan, and Shaquille O’Neal. Nike and Adidas have become household corporate names. James had a $95 million sneaker contract waiting for him when he leaped from high school to the NBA, leaving behind a trail of rumors and press clippings that included his mother’s mysteriously acquiring a new Hummer.

THE GAMES

I left Chicago’s United Center that night feeling disappointed that lightning had not magically struck again – this time upon my command – but still trusting and hoping for The Big One from LeBron, even if it wasn’t going to happen in Michael’s house; even though he had only 39 on my birthday; even though Cleveland suffered its only defeat of the Chicago series. Despite all that, I believed!

The Cleveland-Boston series figured to be closer, but the Cavs had racked up 61 regular season wins, and the Celts had spent much of the season in disarray, having been plagued with enough key injuries that I imagined Cleveland a fairly safe bet to advance, except that there seemed to be a developing problem with an injury to James’s right elbow, which came to the public’s attention when he shot a free throw left-handed at a meaningless time in the late stages of Game Five of the Chicago series.

Boston and Cleveland split the first two games in Cleveland, making it clear that this would be a competitive series, especially with difficult-to-evaluate concerns about James’ injury, but Game Three seemed to eradicate any further talk about “Elbow Gate.” Lebron tallied 21 first quarter points, hitting 8-10 shots, and even demonstrated that the points were not going to his head with a late fourth quarter assist where he could have chosen instead to score (“score the basketball,” in contemporary parlance – what else would one throw in the basket? Don’t tempt those Boston fans!) himself. He outscored the entire Celtic team 21-17 in the first quarter, and there were less than ten minutes left in the first half when Boston’s point total first crept in front of his own. The King shepherded his team to a 65-43 half-time lead, and the Celtics, seeing their hard-earned home-court edge disappear, never managed to get back in the game, which ended 124-95. Bob Dylan’s voice seemed to be echoing throughout Boston’s Fleet Center: “When I paint my masterpiece.”

The Celts turned out to be far from finished though, and in fact did not lose again to the Cavs. In Game Four in Boston, Rajon Rondo painted a masterpiece of his own, with a 29-18-13 triple-double that was reminiscent of the kinds of numbers that only Wilt Chamberlain and Oscar had ever delivered. Yet even this was not overly alarming to James’s fans, as Cleveland still held the home-court advantage, but Game Five blew everyone’s circuits: inexplicably passive throughout, James was scoreless from the field until he slipped behind the Celtic defense for a long pass and an easy dunk with fully 6:13 remaining in the third quarter (at which point the ever vigilant Rondo countered immediately, assiduously blunting the possibility of a full Jamesian eruption). James never really asserted himself, seeming just to let the slaughter drag on to its 120-88 conclusion.
Back in Boston for Game Six, LeBron at least was a factor, but was not nearly the dominant force he needed to be to stave off elimination, as Boston closed out the six game series at home 94-85. His desultory play was tantamount to casting the Cavaliers off his shoulders, instead of hoisting them up and carrying them. Disbelieving fans were stunned to the point of even wondering if James had dumped the series. How else to explain his having sleepwalked through the critical fifth game, which turned out to be his last in a Cleveland home uniform? Was he in effect asking his loyal following’s permission to move on by leaving them such a bitter aftertaste? Playing well only in spurts throughout the Boston series, he appeared to be cruelly disdainful of his team and his home city, uncharacteristically tarnishing – perhaps irrevocably – his carefully constructed image.

Why, though? James had always seamlessly integrated the unseemly business aspects of sports, maniacally perfecting both his game and his body, while remaining steadfastly focused on his goal of becoming the world’s first billionaire athlete, continuing and expanding the business marketing focus was thrown into high gear by the arguably rigged 1985 draft that delivered Patrick Ewing to the faltering Knickerbocker franchise and ushering in the use of “impact player” to apply to markets, instead of team victories. Now, here was his Cleveland team failing to advance even to the Eastern Conference Finals, their worst playoff finish in three years (4).

Though Lebron’s early exit made it all less compelling for me, the playoffs careened on in surprisingly interesting fashion, with Boston’s courageous but just-short campaign against the multi-faceted talent and overwhelming size of the Los Angeles Lakers. These two star-studded teams went to the wire for seven games, renewing an historic rivalry, with both of them sporting a roster full of future Hall of Famers, as well as players with arguably comparable though less harnessed and focused talent: Rasheed Wallace and Lamar Odom.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS: MIND YOUR OWN

When Boston sent home the disgruntled and mysteriously unspectacular King James, the playoffs still had a month to go, but what Chicago sportswriter Sam Smith dubbed “stupid time” (the period between the Cavs’ elimination on May 13 and the July 1 commencement of open-season on free agents) began immediately, and droned on in what constituted in effect a parallel universe. The quiet but always-present background was speculation, over the top at all times, occasionally interesting but generally inane, giving everyone an equal opportunity at punditry-without-knowledge, the seeming preferred stance of sports fans without self-awareness, perhaps – some would say – a redundancy.

James said after losing Game Six to Boston that he had “no plans; we’ll see what happens.” How could he dare be so vague when so many people actually know what he’s doing! Who was he to say he has no plans? Doesn’t he realize that important people want to know! We allow our heroes no private thoughts.

Finally, the day came: July 8, 2010. With carefully constructed but shockingly tasteless pomp and circumstances, King James staged an ESPN spectacular, after listening to offers from his six suitors asked to express their undying love, as Lear before him had demanded from his three daughters. In casual dress in a carefully but poorly chosen locale, the Boys and Girls Club in Greenwich, Connecticut, the endlessly boring Jim Gray teased expectant viewers a slew of pointless questions, apparently to provide more sponsors with commercial time, and James and the ESPN marketing empire that he now spearheads more time to indulge in platitudes and self-contradictory rationales, all the while crediting the influence of James’s mother.

The mass of analysis preceding the final choice had identified five possible rationales which might inform his decision. Loyalty would argue for staying in Cleveland; making the most possible money (furthering his obsession with becoming a billionaire) would send him to the Knicks, as New York offered the largest market and the biggest stage; maximizing his chances to win a title would propel him to Chicago or Miami, probably Chicago, where he would also have the best prospects of building his legacy, as successor to Michael Jordan, whom he could hope to equal or surpass, and where he could play with the ideal point guard for him, Derrick Rose (5).

Just before announcing his destination, James stated that the chance to win was primary, leaving only Chicago and Miami as contenders, but Miami had the fifth factor too: the joy of playing with his buddies – Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh – which is ultimately what sent him to Miami, where he also might win titles. The unaddressed thorn in the Miami rosebush may be that even if it all works, Dwyane Wade, whose team James is joining – not commandeering – will always have one title more than he, having won in 2006, but can this be something LeBron never considered? No. It must not bother him.

The biggest seeming problem with the choice is simply its short-run unpopularity. Nobody outside Miami is likely to be happy with it. In this maximum alienation of fans, James may now rival Kobe Bryant, whose Lakers are still likely to defeat Miami, if the Heat can jell sufficiently to dethrone Boston in the East, but Kobe – whatever people may say and dislike about him – has been vindicated by recent history in his insistence on constructing a team on which he wants to play, a team that he felt could win and best allow him to use his and display his wondrous gifts and talents. After all, his “talents” are what LeBron said he was going to take to South Beach, and what’s so bad about wanting to play with your buddies and true peers?

The other dimension in which James may be emulating Bryant is in his desire for a coach who can offer strength and non-intrusive support and guidance. Phil Jackson offers this to Kobe, and Pat Riley’s presence, whether on the bench or in the front office, figures to comfort LeBron, in that Riley – like him or not – has presided over so many great players over so many years that his accumulated experience is invaluable.

By contrast, LeBron ran things in Cleveland, with Mike Brown genuflecting to his superstar’s extraordinarily high basketball IQ, giving him free reign to create, but falling short of actually coaching him in the way James probably senses that he needs.
We may not like it, and how it was handled, but after all, are personal happiness, the chance to play with one’s friends, and a secure franchise run by a powerful and successful executive with championship coaching experience such a bad basis for a decision? I’m unhappy with it too: I wanted him in New York; wanted him to light up the town, win more titles than Clyde and Willis, make ten fortunes, but that’s my problem, not his.

On another level, it’s a clear triumph for monopoly capitalism, with three superstars comglomerating at the top, but to go there is to let envy have its day in the sun. What if I had gotten to root for Elgin Baylor, Bob Pettit, and Oscar on the same team?

Starved for heroes, aching to find meaning in the game I so love, and hate seeing swallowed and housed in the belly of the infotainment beast – mediated and brought to me by the likes of Jim Gray – envious of those, like my son, who simply enjoy athletic greatness for what it is rather than what it might mean, who can relax and enjoy the games/delights of HD, and scoff at old curmudgeons who maintain that Michael Jordan did not truly supplant Oscar, I chafe at not getting to see LeBron James equal Elgin Baylor’s playoff high of 61 in regulation, because Dwyane Wade will want his share too. Masterpieces are priceless...but maybe it’s a team game after all.

1. Oscar played before the advent of the three-point line, and lacked the great range that Jerry West had, but Oscar prided himself on getting the best shot possible in all instances, meaning that if you gave him the thirteen footer, he want to get it from twelve. He had no use for range, but imagine him playing in the era of the three-pointer: given his softer-than-soft touch, perfect stroke, and demonstrated ability and determination to master all aspects of the game that mattered, there is every reason to believe that he would have made himself a great three-point shooter. Then what numbers would he have posted in the year he averaged a triple double while scoring over thirty points per game?

2. Oscar periodically weighs in with a curmudgeonly New York Times jeremiad that offers perspective about today’s pro game and the absurdly cheapened statistics generated by absurdly high salaried players. I am breathlessly waiting for him to hold forth on James’ press conference and decision.

3. Others had masterpieces too: these playoffs were rich in early spectacular performances, most prominent being Rajon Rondo's 29-18-13 performance in Game Four versus Cleveland, setting Boston on course to win the next two as well. Double RR had also bedeviled Cleveland in Game Two, with l9 assists, and made what was probably the best pass of the entire playoffs, behind his back to a trailer when he heard LeBron’s footsteps and sensed him closing in for a spectacular block. Steve Nash’s back-up Goran Dragic had stolen Game 3 with a 23 point fourth quarter earned but a late third quarter three without which he likely would not have been out there for more than a few minutes, if any, of that phenomenal fourth.

4. James later acknowledged some issues with his elbow after the Game Six loss, but the Cavs’ elimination was still a stunning disappointment after they had led the league in wins with 61, winning sixty for the second straight year, an achievement that proved insufficient for Coach Mike Brown to keep his job, despite his having been named Coach of the Year the previous season. No NBA coach ever has lost his job after such a run, though Alex Hannum resigned in 1969, after a pair of 60-plus win seasons with Wilt in Philadelphia.

5. Chicago sportswriter Sam Smith made an excellent case for James joining with Derrick Rose in Chicago, pointing out that James controlled the ball like a point guard in Cleveland, but would be most devastating playing with a ball-handler like Rose, because he could run ahead of the ball and take the defense with him, thus making it easier for his point guard to penetrate and create offense. Smith points out that this had been an issue with Michael Jordan, until he came to trust Scottie Pippen to handle the ball, and could then attack more easily with the ball in his title years. More from the hard-headed Chicagoan Sam Smith: “Here’s a guy who has won at every level but college and the NBA. If James really wanted to win—he’d join the Bulls.”

A shorter version of this piece appeared in "Broad
Street Review," http://www.broadstreetreview.com. Thanks to Dan Rottenberg for letting FIRST go long!

Introduction by Robert Farris Thompson
Park Plaza essay by Vincent Livelli
Postscript by Pablo E. Yglesias
Edited by Robert Farris Thompson and Pablo E. Yglesias

Introduction

Historians of mambo have established the cultural importance of the Park Plaza dancehall. The late and great New York Puerto Rican bandleader, Tito Puente, immortalized its very Harlem address, 110th St. and 5th Avenue, as the title of a bop-flavored mambo with a dramatic riff. The passion and imagination of Afro-Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican dancers animated and confirmed the prestige of the address, as they later would propel to world fame a downtown counterpart, the Palladium.

But the early mambos and classic rumbas of the Park Plaza were more than music, more than dancing. They were theatres of cultural self-assertion, even de facto desegregation: there blacks danced with and among Italian, Jewish, and Irish-American dancers nearly a decade before the Supreme Court decision of 1954. Not only that but when Park Plaza regular Frank “Machito” Grillo performed a mambo composed by René Hernández bearing the name of Great God Almighty in creole Ki-Kongo, Zambia, or cited the Abakuá term for buddy or comrade, nagüe, or chanted the phrase Chango ta veni [in lucumí: "the spirit of the Yoruba thunder-god be coming down"], he not only alluded to the presence of three African faiths in Cuba but in effect argued their addition to the roster of world religions.

Enter, in 1938, a handsome, dapper American of Sicilian and Genoese descent named Vincent Livelli. He was attracted to the Park Plaza by the beauty of its Afro-Cuban dancing and the rephrasing of that beauty in the bodies of young Latinas. In this first floor venue, great music met Spartan surroundings: “No tables, no bar, no balcony”­ these would come later in the period of Anatole Broyard’s famous visits in the 40’s. But without Livelli bringing his friend to the uptown ballroom there would be no Broyard testaments of Park Plaza life and art (see Kafka Was The Rage). Livelli taught him the protocols of rumba, down to and including junking his brogans in favor of more practical shoes. Livelli himself wore the two-tone shoes that proclaimed his role and pride as rumbero.

The dancer’s experiences include several Afro-Cuban sites of creative happening. He was at the New York La Conga nightclub in 1941 when Graciela Pérez “broke up the propriety of the night” by singing “Sí, Sí – No, No” [Yes, Yes – No, No]. As Vince recalls: “The band fell silent, the waiters froze, the dancing stopped” as Graciela engagingly performed a song about a self-possessed woman fighting off the sexual advances of a hot and determined male.

Livelli, in short, seized and made permanent strong moments in the history of Latino dance in the city of New York. Take for example his first nights at the Park Plaza. He did not dance. Like aspirant tangueros he stayed stag on the sidelines and watched and absorbed. By the second night a woman came up to him and asked him to dance. He politely refused. Then René, the black rumba master, approached him the third night and asked, "Why don’t you dance?" and when he answered, "I don’t know how", Rene signaled his partner, Estela, and told her to teach him. It was like having Derek Jeter commissioned to teach you how to play baseball or Venus Williams to teach you how to play tennis. Few of us have such luck but then Livelli was a live-wire, good-looking paisan who attracted attention whether he wanted it or not. But let him continue the story.

- Robert Farris Thompson

The Park Plaza

When one steps outside the circle of the family and by doing so, encounters the true world for the first time, knowledge gained that way shapes the course of one's life. 19th Century Americans taking le grand tour of Europe returned home with a concept of higher cultural values. Thus, we became a society interested in learning.

Next to visiting a foreign country there is the familiarization gained through immersion in that country's literature and music. When it comes to the Caribbean, it is the music in particular that has the power to influence and formulate the direction of one's life forever.

Without the movements that music inspires, there would be no life to express the inexpressible. There is a mobile connection that is essential to put events into actuality between motive and accomplishment. Life dies without movement, and each move we make is unique. It is this quality that allows an amateur to outperform a professional. By displaying the amateur facet of ourselves we are closer to life, since life makes us all contestants and unequal competitors. Dancing exposes the essence of a person. We quit dancing when nature obliges us, not before. The older we become, the more we miss it, as it is identified with our youth and gaiety.

What's all this have to do with the Park Plaza? Like a first-time encounter with a foreign country, the Park Plaza dance hall in 1937-'38 helped to fashion a more salutary individual, thanks to the musical education found there. I traveled to the Park Plaza searching for music of a certain flavor – Afro-Cuban. I couldn't dance a step, I didn't know a soul, couldn't understand a word, couldn't play a note, nor could I really spare during the Great Depression the carfare and the admission. At a time when there was little joy in the world, the music gave me the reason I needed to set off from Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn up to Harlem, when it could be dangerous to do so.
I found what I was searching for the moment I heard the Happy Boys Orchestra as I paid my 25 cents admission. The ticket window was grilled like a Bronx bodega cashier's. The bandstand was a lighted area as I sought a chair near an exit sign. The ladies, young and old, were lined up facing their complement of men, all sitting on rows of chairs that lined the walls. For the first few numbers that the band played, I felt no need to do other than sit and listen, watch and luxuriate, filled with the satisfaction of having found what I needed. I was not destined to remain a mere observer for long, for after my second visit I was approached by a girl who came and asked me to dance, something unheard of at the time. I wisely declined, feeling foolish. But better to feel foolish than look foolish on the dance floor. What I needed now was the ability to dance the rumba [not the folkloric form referred to as rumba, but the Cuban son, which was erroneously referred to as “rhumba” at the time – Ed.].

On my third visit, a tall, thin black fellow came up to me. “I see you sitting. Why don't you dance?”

“I don't know how,” I answered him.

“Show him how,” he said to his partner. She was tall too, but also solid and strong, displaying a dignity combined with femininity that did not distract from René, a bit motherly-looking because of her ample appearance.

And so it was that René and Estela, arguably the top Afro-Cuban dance team of all time, got me dancing. That brief encounter was the first step that led me around the world on cruise ships, hotels, nightclubs, dance studios, and lectures, carrying the sacred fire of Afro-Cuban rumba with me for others to learn. To popularize it was what now was needed, to send its joyous content on to others.

When I met first René and Estela, they had just performed the dramatic tornillo [cork screw] routine in the Hollywood film Another Thin Man. I saw them perform it live in 1940 at the Havana Madrid nightclub downtown, but the night I met them at the Park Plaza, they were there to dance, not perform, so they did not do any fancy moves then.

What they performed at the Havana Madrid was almost acrobatic, with a tremendous response from the patrons, who had never seen a routine like that, especially dancing done with a magically balanced glass of water. René first balanced it on his head, while slowly turning on one foot like a cork-screw, then he put the glass on his other extended foot, and then also on his inverted out-stretched hand, all without spilling a drop. The whole time his body was as rigid as a 2 x 4 pine board. Estela, being a very strong support, provided steady hip movements as she gracefully strolled around his well-balanced frame, turning him like a screw, as he slowly bent one leg, lowering himself, spinning down impossibly to the floor. Then, with her quiet power pulling him upwards, he spun rapidly back up-right like a top, moving in very close to maximize velocity as a flashy finish. The music was at a very slow tempo so that the furiously spinning upright return was made all the more dramatic. He followed this with his handkerchief dance display, which also had never before been seen in New York. Picking it up off the floor with his teeth while doing a summersault in an all white suit was a high-class finale for an act full of quality and invention, elaborate as well as authentic. Meanwhile, Estela was a picture of poise, grace, and nobility – in fact, they were both Afro-Cuban royalty!

At the Park Plaza, the dance floor resembled a rush hour A train, except that the dancers were not stepping on toes. They were the very best dncers in that winter of 1938-39. The dancers named "Eléctrico", "Midnight" and "Chino" (and even an anonymous mulata lady who was on crutches) were competing during continuous applause from the onlookers’ nonstop encouragement. Normally, though, there were no formal dance competitions back then at the Park Plaza, as there would be later at the Palladium.

The sweet scent of the tobacco of the tropics came up from the basement lounges, blending with the cologne in vogue, called Tabú. Most of the dancers were from the area around 116th Street (the main street before 125th Street became known as such), and from 114th Street. They were frenetic and exuberant under the spell of a band that brought them “home,” to the islands of their enchantment, unlike the latter day Studio 54 club that set dancers adrift, lost in space. What attracted me to the Park Plaza was its unassuming simplicity, the atmosphere set by its hardcore dancers and crowded, scuffed floor. It felt authentic, there was no “glitz” at this venue, which seemed closer to the heart, soul, and sound of the music. There was a much fancier ballroom upstairs, with a separate entrance to the left, called the Park Palace, but that did not interest me as it was far too big, well lit, with deluxe décor and a shiny floor. At the Plaza, unlike the Palladium - which came later, was a giant room, and seemed such a self-conscious scene - everyone was more satisfied with themselves; the young danced with the old, in more of a neighborhood family environment, so people were better behaved there. The young Latinos of El Barrio during the Depression could not afford to go in the more expensive downtown clubs (nor would they be admitted), so the dancing at the Plaza was more conservative because they were dancing among their elders. The young girls were so shapely in their homemade, well-fitted dresses; the sharp guys sporting their black and white shoes, the mark of an accomplished rumbero. Heavily slicked-back hair managed to overcome the huge fan that was intended to cool off overheated dancers who possessed the stamina of prizefighters. There were two bouncer alarms (one in the front, the other back of the dance floor) that were heard in response to occasional trouble among the patrons.

As one of the sole sources of gaiety during thirty-percent unemployment in America, the Park Plaza's rumba world was vital. At a time when you would be asked to “please leave the dance floor” if your dancing was indiscreet elsewhere, here at the Plaza the behavior was encouraged as an ingredient of joyful exuberance. The “piropo” —that flattering display of titillating, sexy innuendo — manifested itself in the physical activity on the floor, like intimate painted vignettes that sprang to life, animated by the music.

When the seemingly inexhaustible band gave signs of taking a break, the dancers were seen to prostrate themselves, pounding their fists on the floor in mock protest in the five beat clave pattern. Some dancers fell to their knees, pleading and supplicating the exhausted band. All this would be skillfully ended by the piano ever so casually, softly resuming the melody, followed by the full band, released like wild horses. The entire company, dancers and musicians, ended in a joyful victory that defeated the gloom of the world outside. The Happy Boys Band, with vocalist Doroteo Santiago, did not take long breaks. The two-minute numbers allowed frequent change of partners. Particularly favorite pieces would be repeated. To tease dancers, the band employed a mock break, resulting in chairs being thrown into the middle of the floor, in jest, not in anger. (This display of bogus protest was inspired by cowboy-movie barroom fights popular in the Thirties.) The music resumed, with the once prostrate supplicants rising up off the floor to continue dancing.

Eléctrico was a live wire. He was greased lightning, with his spasmodic quebradas (breaks), razor-sharp style, top speed, deadpan face (known as ‘carafea’ among tangueros), and showmanship. His solos were the highlight of an evening of highlights. Every part of his body was in complete synchronization with the music. Perhaps it helps to imagine the more familiar “Killer Joe” Piro at the Palladium, except that Eléctrico was closer to the male solo style of rumba called colúmbia, which was more akin to true Afro-Cuban ritual, with some break moves involving hitting the floor with the flat of the palms and the feet off the ground. For some patrons, this would be the first time they would have been exposed to elements of the authentic street rumba as it was danced by Afro-Cubans in Havana at the time.

Midnight, negro como el teléfono, black as a 1930s telephone, was the only dancer who challenged Eléctrico, one of the main dance masters of the Park Plaza scene. He would hurry out onto the floor while applause for Eléctrico was still resounding, so as to cut into his rival's performance appraisal. Midnight dressed entirely in black, including a rare vest, an encumbrance giving him a fuller, more solid contrast to Eléctrico's string-bean frame. Midnight had a down-and-dirty, solid-man quality that contrasted with the latter's height advantage (a four-inch difference). Where Eléctrico flew high, Midnight glued himself deep into the music — heavy man! Eléctrico on the other hand was far-out; he had the whole place stunned, shocked. Like two road-runners, their movements risked stress fractures. Amazingly, neither seemed to be out of breath off the floor. It was the audience that was left breathless.

Meanwhile, the trumpets of the Happy Boys brought down the walls of the Great Depression. They were the pipers we followed to recovery. From a low-key romantic locale hidden away in El Barrio, they raised the level of intensity in their choice of more cheerful melodies, such as “Ahora serémos felices” (“Now We Will Be Happy”). The most dramatic part of their repertoire was the steamy bolero, with the slow build, featuring the repeating montuno riff which replicas the act of lovemaking, gradually increasing in intensity until reaching a climax ending in a crescendo utilizing the full band. Couples would dance very close, seemingly conjoined at the hips like Siamese twins, only to untangle as the last note cut out.

There was no set closing time. An evening at the Park Plaza ended when the last couple went for their coats. Once outside, some would cross the street into Central Park to play out their deep arousals. The rowboats lining the lake served to cradle the partners under a cold grey sky. Here, far from palm trees, they shared mankind’s most heavenly encore as the dawn arrived at last. For the few who walked home alone, they could still hear Doroteo singing “Tu no comprendes” like a surrogate lover. Many patrons did not own a radio, and after a night of fancy footwork that was sometimes a form of amorous foreplay, they would return home singing along dark streets a music that sweetened the dreams of their sleeping neighbors. Quite soon, they too would be nestled in the arms of Morpheus. Tomorrow, Sunday, normally a day of rest, there would be another dance, bigger, always better than the last.

—Vincent Livelli

Postscript

Vincent Livelli at 90 is a fascinating gentleman. Storyteller, raconteur, teacher, adventurer, professional dancer, lover of women and la música Latina: he has made his life his art. His story is at once a piece of the Greenwich Village bohemian saga and a global chronicle of wanderlust encompassing an insatiable search for the knowledge of other cultures and places. Livelli is full of humor and has strong opinions that can make him seem outspoken, but he always backs up his points of argument with thoughtful thoroughness based on a wealth of experience and deeply held convictions.

Though his seemingly endless treasure trove of “historietas” is as varied and multi-leveled as the most incredible of libraries, he does have a lion’s share of stories about music, dance, and his love affair with all things Afro-Cuban. This is where I first encountered him, in the part of his overstuffed brain that knew the “rhumba”, in the time before mambo, salsa, and hip-hop. I was fascinated hearing about Vince’s experiences in the Village with intellectuals like Anatole Broyard (and their social gatherings in bars and at the bookstore Broyard ran), and curious to hear of New York Latin dance culture before it hit the Palladium, before I Love Lucy was on in everyone’s living room. Livelli had been there, dancing in the 30s and 40s at clubs like The Park Plaza uptown in Spanish Harlem or La Conga in Midtown, blazing trails. He humorously tells of witnessing a teenaged Tito Puente practicing bongos off-stage during a period when the Noro Morales Orchestra was regularly engaged at La Conga. The corpulent Morales had to sit sideways at the piano as the stage was quite small, and when the young Puente would show up hopefully toting his drums, Noro would just barely tolerate his presence, directing Tito back stage to bang his bongos safely out of sight. Livelli also testifies to the fact that back in the early 40s, the sultry chanteuse Graciela Peréz’s double entendre vocals were truly revolutionary, calling her “La libertadora” as her actions proved her to be a genuine Afro-Latina precursor to women’s lib. Through Vince I learned the little known fact that there was an important connection between New York Chinese restaurants and the support of Latin music (through Cuban-Chinese restaurant owners and their Jewish customers), and to hear him tell of setting up a Latin dance club in war-torn Tokyo is a revelation nothing short of thrilling.

What makes Livelli doubly valuable to historians is the fact that he is a living link with a bygone era, experiencing firsthand the sublime yet little-known dance moves of Afro-Cubans like René and Estela and making the acquaintance of a young Miguelito Valdés, the great talent who brought African language into the popular consciousness through popular Cuban song. In 1937, Livelli befriended the seminal Afro-Puerto Rican bongocero José “Buyú” Mangual, but perhaps most importantly, he made the friendship of Mangual’s compatriot, bassist Julio Andino, best known for his work with Frank “Machito” Grillo’s orchestra, The Afro-Cubans. Before any one else, Andino had wanted to form a big brass band to take his beautiful Afro-Cuban music from the Latino ghettos of NYC and make the move to Broadway, transgressing the segregated Anglo world downtown, where he felt sure whites would love it. A few years later, he and Machito, along with Graciela, Mario Bauzá, and others, would change Latin music forever with their super-charged orchestral New York style mambo, making it popular all over the world, but especially in midtown Manhattan among Blacks, Italians, and the Jewish population. Andino and his contemporaries had brought Afro-Latin culture to Broadway and the social changes this move incurred would reverberate down the decades. Mambo was in effect introducing Afro-Cuban culture through the back door, infiltrating popular music with subliminal Africanisms that helped convert an entire mambo-mad populace without their really being cognizant of the significance of what was taking place.

In Cuba in 1941 Livelli received a divine assignment in the form of a prophecy from a babalawo, Juan Bessón, a priest of divination in the Yoruba-Cuban religion known as La Regla de Ocha. Bessón directed him to spread the music, and hence an appreciation of the culture, to all corners of the globe. Vince began to fulfill that mission when he became entertainment director for several international cruise ships. In his way, he was carrying Afro-Cuban music around the world – just like Machito, Pérez Prado, Tito Puente, and so many others – but through the medium of dance, teaching everyone he met to rumba across the waves. And bless him, through his lectures, writings, devoted support of live Latin music events, and salon-like social gatherings, Vince has kept on spreading the gospel of Afro-Cuban music ever since.

— Pablo E. Yglesias

For his entire professional life, Thelonious Sphere Monk was almost universally thought to be weird beyond comprehension, musically (up to the late ‘50s) and personally (all of his life.) He was thought to occupy a dimension of his own, to possess a mind that was impenetrable by anyone who thought sequentially, to float above the world of humankind, to be incapable of rational discourse, to be eccentric, quirky, unreliable, nuts.

This was not the opinion of jazz musicians who worked with him, who testified to his broad learning, perspicacity, and generous wisdom. Now, with Robin D. G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, there is documentation of, not only his sanity, but of the hard, committed life of a musician of genius and a dedicated family man. This book is a masterpiece of sound and detailed scholarship and loving analysis. Even in the opening chapters, which treat Thelonious’ ancestry, where the oral history is thin and the documentation is scant, Kelley draws such interesting period settings that we are illuminated by the social environment that the post-reconstruction and early twentieth century Monks must have endured.

The years when Thelonious lived in the San Juan Hill area of Manhattan, the district roughly around where Lincoln Center now stands, bring such a wealth of new information, primarily from interviews, that I wonder why the authors of the previous biographies of Monk even bothered to write them. Thelonious’ education, his early piano training, his social and family life, are fully drawn in fascinating detail. His professional career began with a tour with an evangelical preacher and healer which afforded Thelonious an opportunity to work steadily with other musicians and jam with the local aces at the tour cities. Mary Lou Williams, who was in Kansas City in the late ‘thirties when Monk came through, testified that his style, with his augmented and dissonant chords and unique timing, was already in place.

Though Thelonious enjoyed the esteem of his prebop peers, the enduring frustration of his attempts to build a stable career is a sad theme of the first half of Kelley’s book. He met such contempt, dismissal, rudeness and betrayal that it seemed that he would never earn enough to leave his parents’ home. Even in 1941, when he landed the job as house pianist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem and established himself at the center of the emerging bebop movement, the wages were as much in food and drink as in cash. But those were rich years; the dynamics of the relationships among the musicians are intimately told. It was not the compact, immediate revolution that most jazz fans have read of: Monk, with the seminal drummer, Kenny Clarke, and the very good trumpeter and singer, Joe Guy, played mostly with swing musicians in the early years. The scene, and the music, gradually evolved during the next several years. Thelonious’ importance as the primary theorist of the movement is documented as is his pedagogy at Minton’s and at his home. There are wonderfully revelatory anecdotes of this period as there are throughout this book. For example, Monk offered to name a tune for a friend whom he accompanied on a gig, a singer who happened to be gay, and the friend replied, “Well, you needn’t.”

Though his reputation grew among his hipper peers, including the more open minded of the earlier generation musicians such as Coleman Hawkins, several classes of the jazz nation generally misunderstood the man and his music. These included critics, club owners and bandleaders, a brutal axis to overcome. To win them, Monk would have to compromise, become someone else, which he would not do, and we are grateful to him for that. Thelonious desperately wanted steady work, recognition and a hit record. None were forthcoming, even in the late ‘forties when Al Lion and Frank Wolff issued those wonderful Blue Note recordings; they could get no traction, and some still prominent critics need to apologize posthumously to Monk for panning this work.

There were other advocates, most notably a growing cadre of intellectuals, devoted to the new music, who were emerging from college and knew genius when they heard it. Some produced undersubscribed concerts that featured Thelonious, some wrote spirited defenses of his music. The greatest of his sponsors, however, were members of his family and his close friends, who were generous with their material and emotional support.

Kelley describes the painful, petty arrests for possession of small amounts of marijuana that cost Thelonious Monk his cabaret card and thus kept him off the scene in New York, except for a few concerts and underground club dates. This situation prevailed until 1957 when he finally regained his card and gained an extended stay at the Five Spot. The audience and critical establishment finally had caught up with him, and at forty he finally had the stature and income that he had earned long before. I was at the Five Spot for most of the nights of this gig; in a long autobiographical poem entitled The First Seventy, the longest and most intense section by far was my rendition of this scene, which suggests that this was the greatest experience of my life. I watched the band evolve from the original trio to the quartet of Shadow Wilson, the drummer, Wilbur Ware, the very underappreciated bassist, and John Coltrane. I watched Coltrane emerge into gianthood under Monk’s tutelage, and the quartet blossom from greatness to the sublime.

I will end this review there; Thelonious now was a major public figure whose face had been on the cover of Time magazine. I do not mean to suggest that the remainder of Monk's life and times is any less rich. Kelley's story of his relationships with other musicians continues to be fascinating and revealing as does the image of Thelonious the father, husband and friend. There is also his growing mental instability and the support of his patroness, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. It’s just that nothing in my life surpasses those nights of nursing a beer in the Five Spot as Monk danced his way through John Coltrane’s horn. You should have been there.

Here’s the Monk section (invoked above) of A.B. Spellman’s poem, "The First Seventy," originally publised in "Things I Must Have Known," Coffee House Press.

in ‘57 i moved to n.y. & caught monk’s return
from brutal exile to the 5 spot. trane joined him
on the stand with double stopping wilbur ware
no music has ever so joyously inured to itself
such explosively advancing revelation, note to
phrase, tune to set, night to ignited dawn. the ineffable
message those instruments sang to me – not the learning
we parse from text, but the meaning we feel lost & blind
for the lack of. hard & softly blown, full lives compressed
in the blazing moment of the horn
in such moments i understood the fear of art
its in the sudden departure to places i’d never heard of
when all i came for was a little froufrou
to tack onto the dim lit walls of my consciousness
i did not hear this music so much as it occupied me
pulled me up, eyes closed to the sonic light
brain thrown hard against the back of my skull
in the sharp upward acceleration at more gees
than i could handle. my suffering silent reason yelled
stop! this air fires blue hot! there’s danger in this flight
but instead my mouth gaped in the numinous yes
in the smoky dark, screamed yes monk yes trane yes yes yes

how it happened? imagine john coltrane starting the gig
enclosed in a crystal egg & thelonius dancing
the monk dance around him & trane stammering
his opening lines, a halting brilliance that did not flow
& monk dancing the invocation of swing dance
‘til the line coalesced with the geometric burn
the broken sword architecture of lightning
shattered the egg in a storm of jewels
& out stepped john, wailing, this godzilla
tenor player who took me out & out & out
for the next 10 years. i have heard gould play bach
seen cunningham & fonteyn dance; known
the primal strokes of van gogh & pollock; read
the verse of the masters & all, all have remade me
but no art has so blown my inner spaces clean
so propelled me thru the stages of being
as john coltrane live. i tried not to miss a note

I was consumed that summer by the desire to find my way toward a meaningful life. I had a girl in Boston who was the first with whom I had wanted to forge a real relationship. (I knew this because I preferred spending time with her to shooting baskets with my buddies.) I had turned on becoming a lawyer because it seemed so drearily conformist, and was daring to hope I might write. To ease toward that goal’s attainment, I had begun a journal; and, to find experiences with which to fill it, in August, I would join a childhood friend, Davey Peters, already the author of a Henry Miller-inspired novel, which he had abandoned because it had not met his standards, on a cross-country automobile trip. (Davey planned for us to camp out, rather than sleep in bourgeoise motels, pay our respects to City Lights Books, and grow beards. Beyond that our itinerary was open.) Tapping my inner Bohemian, I had bought my first folk album (“The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”). And I had smoked what another friend had assured me was marijuana, a judgment about which, later study convinced me, he had been mistaken.

My temporary employment provided little fodder for my literary career. No hired killer entered any luncheonette where I was dining. No bored housewife decided my charms were required to sweep the soaps from her afternoons. The only moment to make my journal was the delivery of a thick envelope to a row house in the upper fifties. The sender was the San Francisco Warriors and the recipient Wayne Hightower, a 6'8" center/forward, who had followed Wilt Chamberlain from Overbrook High School to the University of Kansas, been the Warriors first round draft pick in 1962, and while sharing the forecourt with Wilt, averaged seven points and five rebounds a game as a rookie.

A pink card advised the carrier to forward all mail. Mr. Hightower no longer lived among these houses with ripped screens and broken porch railings. He had left these half-naked, children running up and down, these grown men on corners, drinking from bottles in paper bags.

That summer, I also volunteered for the Northern Student Movement’s Philadelphia Tutorial Project. Through it, the NSM, which aspired to equal the impact of the Student Non-Violent Co-ordinating Committee in the south, matched college students (mostly white) with teenagers (mostly black) to sharpen their knowledge of courses they had already studied or prepare them for those they would face.

My primary credential was good will. My parents had filled my childhood record shelf with .78s about equality and brotherhood, as well as determined little engines, and told me that the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Topeka Board of Education was a momentous event. I firmly believed that the rednecks trying to bar Negroes from schools in Little Rock and Birmingham were evil, but I had never considered the implications of there being only one among my seventy classmates at Friends’ Central, and it had taken a Larry Merchant column in the Daily News to make me aware that it was not coincidence that no Negro managed or umpired in the major leagues and that every NBA roster was over half white. My senior year at FCS, I had spent a weekend at a Quaker work camp, renovating sub-standard housing in North Philly, but the Saturday I was to join a group picketing a Center City Woolworth’s in protest of its segregated lunch counters to our south, I got lost and missed the bus,

At Brandeis – two Negroes in my class of 340 – the activists, who picketed the Watertown arsenal and demanded fair play for Cuba were of the black turtleneck, Levis and sandals persuasion, while I, if not a jock, a jock symp, stood sartorially square in crew neck, khakis, and desert boots. But I went to lectures by James Baldwin and Roy Wilkins and James Farmer. When SNCC workers were jailed in Greenwood, Mississippi for efforts to register voters, I joined those writing impassioned protest letters to their Unites States senators. (Joe Clark ignored me.) And when Bill Higgs, the only white civil rights lawyer in the Magnolia State, who was spending a restorative term on campus, offered to show students his home turf over spring break, I was among the half-dozen who signed up. We met Medgar Evers and visited William Faulkner’s plantation. We obtained literature from White Citizens’ Council bookstores and received cards from Governor Ross Barnett extending to us “the courtesies of the state.” (Two summers later, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman would lack them.) We flinched when elderly Negroes stepped off sidewalks so we could pass, and, invited to address a church congregation, embarrassedly assured those assembled on the worn, wooden pews that, throughout the north, people were with them.

The trip was unforgettable. But I left early to visit a classmate in New Orleans. The strippers in the rock’n’roll bars, the beignets and chicory coffee, the shadowy club where, rumor had it, one could purchase drugs smuggled in from the Carribean were unforgettable too. The experiences, collected from Delta church to Bourbon Street, layered one upon another like liqueurs in a pousse café, awaiting time and fortune straw to deliver their final, defining kick.

My students were Clifford (small and light) and Willie (tall and dark), cousins entering eighth grade at Sulzberger Junior High. Two nights a week I tutored them in English in a musty church basement off Belmont Avenue; two nights someone else tutored them in math. Both came regularly. Both did their homework. They were fourteen, on summer vacation, and this is how they were spending that. I was proud to be working with them.

I had planned what my students would read and write and the discussions we would have. Hemingway, I had thought. Baldwin. “They’ll be learning grammar,” my Uncle Bernie, principal at Furness Junior High, had said, handing me two books. “See where they stand.”

Neither Clifford nor Willie knew what a noun was.

Clifford believed “nice” a pronoun.

“‘Sprinter’?” Willie said. “That like shooting water around?”

After six sessions, they split on whether the verb in “The books, pen and paper are on the table” was “are” or “on.” As to the subject, they were unanimous. “Ain’t none.”

Both Clifford’s mother and Willie’s father came to confirm their sons were not spending evenings in the schoolyard. He was an auto mechanic with forearms that bulged from his cut-off sweatshirt like Virginia hams. She was a domestic, whose speaking pace might have allowed me to complete a chapter of A Walk on the Wild Side before she did a sentence. They were surprised to learn I worked unpaid. They thought it nice of me to help their sons.

“What do you want to be?” I asked the boys one evening. It had been in the nineties. The walls dripped with sweat. The framed Jesus plead for a seersucker robe. “Doctor,” Clifford said. He got “C”s and had not read a book all summer. Willie had read two and could not remember either, but in one Venus had invaded Earth. “Me too,” he said. “I want college. I know that.”

A sense of “Ask-not-what-America-can-do-for-you...” filled many of us then. A sense of “To-whom-much-is-given...” The belief, as clear and strong as Arctic ice, was that progress was inevitable. We would sing out justice. We would sing out freedom. We would sing out love between the brothers and the sisters. It was, we believed, blowing in the wind. But I knew pre-meds and, compared to Mark Polonkowitz and Michael Trigstein, the Venutians seemed a better bet than Willie and Clifford.

A week later, I asked if they played sports. “Basketball,” Willie said.

“You any good?”

“He on the team,” Clifford said.

We compared hands. Willie was fourteen and six feet tall, and I was twenty-one and six-three, and his was larger. “I do all right against the big boys,” he said. “I can stuff.”

When the tutoring ended, I gave each a book on grammar and another on basketball fundamentals. Maybe, I thought.

The most courageous members of my generation – those who spearheaded the most profound social change – those of whom we should be most proud and honor the most highly – were the young men and women who sat-in and freedom rode and voter registered across the south. Many of them, I imagine, first stepped in that direction with little more than the inclination I possessed. But their sense of right and wrong had been catalyzed by an inner agent that I lacked. It had charged them to ride through hatred and terror and the temptations of the more settled life, and its absence left me beside the road, awaiting another bus.

Soon after my six weeks of tutoring ended, I took off with Davey. When Martin Luther King delivered his “I have a dream speech” at the March on Washington, we were in La Jolla, in a room rented from oceanography students at Scripps, preparing for a night in Tijuana, where, for the price of a drink, bar patrons could attempt cunnilingus on the floor show. My journal records that Davey and I debated afterwards whether this evidenced unrepressed societal sexual health (his position) or an unfortunate lack of romance (mine), but what I thought of King’s words and my distance therefrom goes unremarked.

Too much information about nothin’

Too much educated wrath...

What looks large from a distance, close up ain't never that big

Bob Dylan, Infidelity (Bootleg from Infidels sessions)

Listening to Shirley Sherrod’s post-apology interviews, I was struck by her knack for recognzing traps. Informed by family history – her father was martyred in the segregated South – and Movement experience – her heroic husband Charles was one of SNNC’s lead organizers – Sherrod displayed a deep understanding of fear, power and lies that bind. On The View, she handled the house conservative (who’d parroted Fox riffs about her supposed violations of the Hatch Act). Through with this little hassle, Sherrod nailed the G.O.P.’s niggardly non-response to the plight of the uninsured during the national debate over healthcare. Yet here and elsewhere she avoided coming on as a born-again Dem partisan. While she allowed she was “pleased” to have Obama’s ear (and e-mail address for messages down the line), she wasn’t about to let her President slide for signing off on top-down blunders of his administration. Her smile on CNN when Gibbs apologized at the press conference was unforgettable but it didn’t mean she’d stopped seeing through Gibbs’ shifty eyes or his glasses grabs when the subject of White House involvement in her firing came up. Still, her unillusioned movements of mind seem distant from the sort of disdain that regularly drips from the lips of Obama’s progressive critics.

Notice how Ms. Sherrod made her disappointment with Obama into an occasion for grassrootsy affirmation (and solidarity) during her interview on Today:

I don’t want [Obama] to apologize to me. I’d love to have a conversation though…I’d like to talk to him about the experiences of people like me, people at the grassroots level, people in rural America, people in the South. I know he doesn’t have that kind of experience. Let me help him a little bit to understand how we think, how we live and the things that are happening.….We are people who struggle every day, who do the best we can in our communities, who love this country, who love him. We want him to be successful because we feel he thinks, in some ways, like we do. And we think that’s good for the country. Yes there are issues out there – issues of poverty, issues I worked so hard on these last 11 months at Rural Development. – mainly because that’s me but also I want a…good reflection for him as the first black president.

Sherrod’s nuanced mix of emotional identification –“We are people… who love him – and critical distance – “we feel he thinks, in some ways, like we do” enabled her to speak social truth (to power). Contrast her litany of we’s with the self-enrapt tone of a recent letter to the Times by a New Yorker whose educated wrath is typical among a certain class of reflexive, wannabe morally superior “progressives.” He begins by putting his own spin on the categorical imperative: “The failure of President Obama to use the powers of his office and his personality to make good on his pledge to close Guantánamo Bay is despicable.” Without getting all up in the issue of Gitmo (it’s not my subject here), our exemplary hater doesn’t care that Obama has had a nearly intractable logistical/political problem on his hands (and in the House) due to an outbreak of NIMBYISM among Democrats as well as Republicans. Then again, maybe it all would’ve been over quick if Obama had just used “his personality” as per the letter writer whose prose schools us all on this score. This is how he do it:

I voted for Mr. Obama on the basis of his promise of real change. With respect to Guantánamo, there has been none. For this reason he has lost my vote. On some things, like undoing a legacy of extrajudicial detention and torture, there can be no compromise.

This guy is full of his own...vote. Like many of Obama’s harsher critics on the left. Check how NYRB’s Gary Wills showed off his feeling for himself (and his franchise) in a 2009 goodbye-to-all-that blog post on Obama: “I was deeply invested in the success of our first African-American president.” But no more! This white liberal is done with this black president (unlike Shirley Sherrod who knows forbearance is no sin to a true fighter). By the way, the straw that broke Wills' will-to-be-black-baby was Obama’s decision to send more troops to Afghanistan. But, on the real side, Wills' policy objections are already dated. What endures is his majority-of-one presumption that democracy’s just another word for groups of me.

That’s an a priori among a strain of self-involved progressives. There’s often a racial dimension to their sense of enfranchisement. Paul Berman picked up on that at the start of the millennium when he noted how Naderites were fine with going back to the 19th century.

During the 20th Century the American Left has achieved wonders in regards to racial integration. The great protest and reform movements of the 19th Century left were, with the exception of Abolition, almost totally white, overwhelmingly white. The 20th Century Left – the socialists, the Wobblies and on to the Communists, who in spite of everything, had some very real achievements on this front – managed very slowly but with the force of inevitability to bring in black participation and to create finally a racially mixed – if not always integrated – reform, protest or radical movement in America. Which has had a revolutionary impact on the society. The Nader movement is not a 20th Century movement. It’s a complete and total throwback to the 19th Century – an all-white, or virtually all-white protest movement which describes itself as the Left.

The implicit conflict between dueling key-note speakers Van Jones and Ed Schultz at the Netroots Nation convention last week highlighted differences between black and white historical imaginations. The African American Jones (who himself resigned last year from his job in the Obama administration after being targeted by Glenn Beck and right-wing bloggers) counseled leftish bloggers to avoid trashing Obama and their own fledgling “pro-democracy movement.” Born the year Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, Jones noted it took 40 years before Obama could help the country shake off its grief and make “hope a mass phenomenon again.”

Hope may be a renewable resource, but it sure takes a long time to replenish. We finally got the hope back. The candle is flickering now. And so you cannot allow yourselves and your own heartbreak or your issue or cause to let you be a part of blowing that candle out. You can’t do that to America.

Yes I can was Ed Schultz’s message to Netroots. This ex-right-winger and forever blowhard wanted the world to know he was spitting mad at Obama: “They must have a war room at the White House. I think they’ve got a sissy room too.” He took a macho stance that may always have an appeal to a certain sort of willful lemming: “You're either with us, or you're against us in the progressive movement in America.” Schultz’s Bush-league jargon hints his roots in that “movement” are pretty shallow. His tantrum not only made (young activist) Van Jones seem like an elder statesman but it’s a reminder Schultz’s short career in political tit-for-tat theater pales in comparison with, say, Shirley Sherrod’s lifetime of engaged advocacy for everyday people. Schultz is a former Reaganite who began to turn left around 2000. Despite his decades of complicity with GOP meanness, he’s remarkably guilt-free. His shameless plaint against Obama boiled down to his bottom line: instead of going on The Ed Show, Obama went on Bret Baier’s show on Fox: “in my time slot. What’s that all about.” While Van Jones advised Netroots to keep hope alive by struggling with Obama toward a common future, Schultz was content to vent: “I busted my ass for Obama!” Contrast his whining with Shirley Sherrod’s calm testimony: “I worked so hard on [issues of poverty] these last 11 months at Rural Development. – mainly because that’s me but also I want a…good reflection for him as the first black president “ Seems like we’re confronted here with a choice not an echo.

II

While the gulf between Sherrod’s (and Jones’) side and hardcore venters testifies to the salience of race on the left, their differences don’t always come down to black and white. It’s about class too – “haves and have-nots,” as Shirley Sherrod would say. Her line, though, is a little out of time now. In a culture of narcissism where megalomaniacs (always) threaten to become standard bearers for progressive ed, we need to dig deeper to measure the distance between grassroots Sherrodniks and mad captains of punditry.

On this score, it’s instructive to glance at Ed Schultz’s new ghosted tome, Killer Politics, in tandem with the recent as-told-to memoir, Living and Loving Out Loud, of a prominent black proponent of disillusion with Obama, Cornel West. The personas in these products – Heartland Ed vs. Brotherman West – are racially constructed. But that’s all in the game for these jokermen. Both Schultz and West belong to a media class that uses the real to cover the deal.

Ed Schultz often invokes “the journey I’m on.” He hustles there by melding Deepak Chopra, populist shtick, Tora Bora talking points, and locker room lingo. A former college quarterback, Schultz played pro ball in Canada before becoming a sportscaster in Fargo, North Dakota. He then got into talk radio. Killer Politics’ opening autobiographical chapter, “From Fargo to 30 Rock,” offers a “Norman Rockwell” snapshot of his (blended) family – both he and his wife are on their second marriages – celebrating Thanksgiving in the heartland. But it hints his own heart’s in tv. Big Ed’s big aspirational moment comes after he takes a meeting that led to The Ed Show on MSNBC.

Wendy was waiting patiently outside for me in the hotel lobby when I finally emerged. She knew the length of the meeting was a good sign. I’ll never forget that we both had tears in our eyes. The first thing I said to Wendy was “I think this guy is going to hire me,” and we hugged each other like we were never going to let go. This was it. I was going to get a chance at tv…Can you imagine? You’re talking about a guy who has a lake home in Minnesota so he can fish at a moment’s notice. Now we would be living just a few blocks from 30 Rock, one of the most famous showbiz addresses in the world. I could not believe all this was happening...Sometimes hopes and prayers can be pretty powerful.

Ed’s prime-time spirit is hard to square with his assertion: “I have a blue collar soul.” There are other revelations that don’t add up as well. By his own account, Schultz’s father was an aeronautical engineer and his mother an English teacher. He’s something other than a single-minded son of the working class. But taking his cues from the life and lies of Bill O’Reilly, Schultz distances himself from “stereotypical geeky academic vegans with pocket protectors, bad hair, and Earth Shoes.” On Killer Politics' cover, he wears a suit, tie and boxing gloves. Six-two, 250 pounds of ham and main chance, Schultz means to be the heavyweight champ of illiberal liberalism.

Big Ed issued a challenge to the Netroots audience: “"I've got the balls to say it, you better have the balls to write it.” He also has the...temerity to put his name on Killer Politics, which was clearly a team effort. Schultz thanks one Tony Bender, “the best writer I know, for helping to shape my thoughts into chapters.” Ed doesn’t sweat the small stuff. Like sentences. He was, no doubt, content to provide Killer Politics’ building blocks such as its “four pillars” of wisdom: “1 Defend the Nation 2 Establish a Sound Fiscal Policy 3 Feed the Country 4 Educate the people.” I’m guessing the rest was up to the hot air Bender and the rest of Ed’s team who managed to push the page count above 200 (thanks to the index). You can feel their strain; three graphs and a cloud of methane.

Schultz’s deadly pieties – “It’s too easy to become numb or oblivious to the heartbreak of war, and that isn’t good.” – make him a brother of platitudinous Brother West. While they play very different characters, they have anti-intellectual angles in common. West is also out to remove himself from (Schultz’s) “stereotypical geeky academic.” While Living and Loving Out Loud promotes the con that West is a world-class mind, it presents him as a raw bluesy scholar gypsy and pumps up his jock cred too. It clocks his old times as a high-school cross-country runner and calls on his older brother to talk up West’s youthful skills as a pitcher – “That’s a mean curve you got bro…just falls off the table” – and shortstop – “No one’s got eye-hand coordination like you Corn…You can make it to the majors if you wanna.”

But how to choose? Young Mr. West had so many options. He recalls being a Renaissance child who won state-wide classical violin prizes and R&B dance-offs (“quiet as it’s kept [Can you spot the tell?] I made a little money winning dance contests”). West, of course, is still a dancing fool. (See him all up on Mo'nique on YouTube.) But what moves him most now is his own voice. Like Big Ed, he’s way proud of being able to talk on his feet without notes. He’d allow, no doubt, the flattering phrase he saves for imitator/colleague/competitor Michael Eric Dyson– “unadulterated rhetorical genius” – is on point for him too. Though there’s a more apt and pungent alternative for the word that comes third.

West’s amanuensis David Ritz – known for his as-told-to bios of numberless black pop musicians – tries harder than Big Ed’s collaborators to do the bloviation. He looks for the melody – “I loved me some Beethoven. I loved me some Mozart.” – but West’s blather is, indeed, enough to give the blues the blues: “The Great blues artists: Toni Morrison, Louis Armstrong, B.B. King...Lil’ Wayne...Giacomo Leopardi...Bruce Springsteen...Muriel Rukyser...Savion Glover...Federico Garcia Lorca...Thomas Hardy...” The blues had a baby and they called it bull...

Sometimes Ritz gives up trying to “sculpt” clunky into funky and just lets his co-faux-homie go for self as when West places himself (when speaking of his fam) as "the proudest uncle in late modernity.” Or when he recalls without shame lines from a short story he wrote as a young man after discovering Russian writers (“Forget Proust and Joyce. Later for Cervantes and Victor Hugo…I just didn’t want to read them or reread them [Can you spot the tell?] in 1975.”) Here’s the passage generated by West’s encounters with Russian models:

People of all size and shapes of the Negroid spectrum filled the misty sweltering room. Flashing fluorescent lights shone just bright enough to see who was wearing what and who was with whom. The floor was filled with banana skin females dancing with jet black men and chocolate colored women dancing with paper-bag brown males.

Much of West’s baggy monster of a memoir details his own slipping around (and slip-ups) with “banana skin” females of all colors in the “Negroid spectrum.” A reader learns that on a second date with the Ethiopian woman who would become his third wife, West proposed: “Eleni, marry me and become the first lady of Black America.” A breathtaking conceit that coughs up the truth behind West’s long history of carping about Obama.

West is a proud player (though he notes, sadly, women “deserve inordinate attention”). But, like Big Ed , lover man wants everyone to know he came up hard. “Rage came early” he recalls. “Little Romeo…was a little gangsta.” According to West, he was a sort of toddler Robin Hood who took on bigger Trouble Boys, before morphing into an elementary school militant who was once expelled for fighting back when a principal tried to paddle him into saying the pledge of allegiance.

West’s aim to add a gangsta wing to his house of self-worship is a stretch goal since he’s presented himself as “one grateful negro” for decades. And that’s still on. The gift words keep coming in Living and Loving (along with the incessant name-dropping). It’s not a full Tom because West kisses many black asses. His sucking up seems to be calibrated not by race but by what-have-you-done-for-me-lately. Thus, his BFF right now is Tavis Smiley, who happens to be his publisher. He also broadcasts his tight connection with former and current Ivy League college presidents (like his “dear and courageous [!] brother Neil Rudenstine”); the crew that must pay the cost for him to live the fantasy that he's Black America’s PhD.-in-chief. He’s much cooler toward ex-BFF Rabbi Michael Lerner though he’ll “never forget” Lerner for introducing him to “the most brilliant and compassionate literary agent in the world.” An encomium that suggests West is a pure product of the Left Coast. West images himself as black-to-the-bone, but he’s really Cali-at-the-core.

One segue in Living and Loving gets to the heart of the...matrix. West recalls how he broke up his first marriage and walked out on his young son: “Cliff clung to me like his life depended on it. He kept crying, ‘Daddy! Don’t go, Daddy!’ I went, crying along with my son.” The tracks of his tears fade fast in Living and Loving. Two pages later, West has moved on to the realm of Michelle Wallace:

I knew Michelle had come out of the heavy-duty intellectual climate of New York City’s City College. I wanted to meet Michelle, so I invited her to my class at Union…I remember the moment when she walked through the room. The instant I saw her, I said to myself. “Lord have a–mercy! It’s gonna be a thang!” And Lord knows it was. Michelle was magnificent; a different kind of woman than any I had encountered before. She’d been shaped by the kind of rich but existentially ambiguous subculture of the Jewish intelligentsia. After college, she had gone to the Village Voice where that same sort of heavyweight cultural environment continued to sharpen her mind. I had met few black women who had emerged from this background. As a writer, thinker, and social critic, Michelle was spectacular.

Baby got background! West ended up in bed/on tour with Wallace who was selling “one of the big books of 1979, Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman.” He was off on the first of many adventures in the society of spectacle, while his first wife went back down to Georgia where she would raise their son.

Which brings us close to where Shirley Sherrod’s soul grew deep. A good place to pause.

To Be Continued.

Columbia is appealing the Nov. 2009 decision and it continues the ruse of bureaucratic distance from the nastier steps associated with the eminent domain process by insisting it’s only supporting ESDC, the state agency which is technically the party doing the appeal and the one judged to have colluded with Columbia. The spin is that it’s the state doing the eviction order and takings and the innocents in Low Library (an administration locale, no book dere) are just waitin’ on the world to change. This posturing is done with the same deceptive zeal President Bollinger and his political friends – from Charlie Rangel to Council member Robert Jackson – employ when claiming no residents will be victims of eminent domain – even though more than 400 tenants must be gone by 2018 according to ESDC notices delivered to all buildings. And even though Columbia’s preferred (under-)estimate of 5,000 displaced residents in its own Environmental Impact Statement is never dealt with beyond some chump change designated for West Harlem Local Development Corporation (WHLDC). At best, those empty dollars might take care of a few hundred in some market rate future.

Five WHLDC Executive Board members resigned in Nov. 2007 just before the City Council vote on Columbia’s plan, after a year and a half of hard committee work ended with them being completely shut out of the negotiating process. Of the 20 plus seats on the Board, only one is filled by an Hispanic in a district where at least half the residents fit that bill. Columbia has renewed its push in the last couple of months to get rid of the remaining businesses and an arts collective in the expansion area. This is all about Columbia having an enclave in Harlem and its refusal to conceive of a neighborhood’s development on anything but its own terms. It’s also about a disinformation process that is more and more common nationwide – outright lying to cover up elitist colonization, in this case done with a dash of liberal panache, certified Ivy League respectability but with the same old, same old corrupt pols.

Norman Siegel, the lead attorney for Nick Sprayregen, owner of five properties who has been fighting valiantly against the takings along with the Singh family which owns two gas stations, resists reactions to the ruling that go beyond noting it has left the community pleasantly surprised. Looking back, he argues we all should have been cautiously optimistic after the hearing last May since the judges’ questions indicated issues would not be whitewashed. Still, for Siegel’s record, I’d cut the doomiest among us a break for doubting New York State Supreme Court would do the right thing. After all, most of the judgeships go through the Democratic Party and its selection process is dominated by real estate developers and the banking industry. I don’t mean to begrudge Siegel’s faith in the System and I’ve heard him tell how the effectiveness of West Harlem’s grassroots organizations has bolstered that faith. We have a partnership where optimism and realism alternate in frank exchanges that help us all keep fighting against the odds.

So what do we expect now? What are we up against?

Well, a bully campaign by a liberal wagon that just keeps rolling along. You got all the Democratic politicians (with the exception of State Senator Bill Perkins) backing the road-show by cowardly refusing to comment in depth on the language of the ruling. And now Bollinger is selling his book on the First Amendment, slickly painting himself as the hero of a free press on Charlie Rose’s PublicNon TV program, side-stepping the question about eminent domain with no reportorial challenge from the Pink Man (is he still Amanda Burden’s – the City Planning Commissioner who backed the Columbia expansion – boyfriend?). And, in this corner slightly to the right, you got all those developer connections – twas Jerry ‘oh he owns new york’ Speyer who had Bollinger installed as one of nine current members of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Finally, on the right and the left, you have the built-in censorship of the press which obscures opposition to the expansion – all but eliminating coverage of it. And since the student hunger strike in November 2007 on behalf of the community’s alternative plan which would share the Harlem expansion area (and which got some press attention), the administration has managed to badmouth Coalition to Preserve Community (CPC) members to the point where the students no longer even sponsor events that bring community voices onto the campus. Low Library spinners have convinced students to remove themselves from the bomb throwers and upgrade to Nuance, so now most students seem intent on getting their young proactive groove on by climbing on the wagon driven by compromised thinkers with color-coded bona fides – searching for the implementation of a community benefits agreement and keeping it real, scrapping away for a few of those politically controlled slush fund dollars.

So let’s take a little ride on the stagecoach and see how this works:

Bollinger reports to the University Senate on November 13, 2009, immediately after the ruling against eminent domain. According to the Minutes:

Sen. Mark Cohen (NT, Bus.) said the recent ruling had cast Columbia in a terrible light in the court of public opinion, raising the specter of 1968. He asked if Columbia should be taking steps, despite the impending ongoing litigation, to reframe its position.

Bollinger’s response, again, according to the Minutes:

The president said he had to disagree with Sen. Cohen's characterization. He said many bad things had been said about Columbia during the 7 or 8 years of its quest for approval of the Manhattanville project. But they had all come from a very small minority. He said the range of support for Columbia's expansion into Manhattanville had been extremely broad, even in the surrounding community. He recalled that Community Board 9 ultimately voted in favor of the project…

Community Board 9 voted 32 to 2 against the plan. It was front page news on the Columbia campus. The resolution came with ten conditions Columbia had to meet, including not using eminent domain, before the Board would reverse its position. So here is the author of just released Uninhibited, Robust, and Wide-Open: A Free Press for a New Century (Inalienable Rights), – a constitutional scholar at a “world-class institution” (a phrase he loves to flaunt in all its imperial splendor), a man cloaked in the integrity of authors etched in stone on campus buildings and statues, flacking the facts to the University Senate. His misrepresentation amounts to much more than simply conflating a no vote into a yes one, because he implied there was some learning curve Board members had undergone: those who were hesitant and watchful in the beginning, or even outright opposed, “ultimately” saw the light. Remember, Bollinger was addressing scholars and teachers who have dedicated their lives to intellectual pursuits and the search for truths, so the fact he is telling them a great goddamn whopping lie is hard not to notice. He is clearly confident the hicks from harlem wouldn’t be around to call him on his contrickery.

Bollinger went on to list the politicians who backed the plan to support his claim about the “very small minority” in opposition, but he refused to make mention that at every public meeting and hearing for years and years, a huge and varied opposition always expressed heartfelt objections to his “all or nothing.” Consider the unprecedented denouncement in a ULURP (land use) hearing in August, 2007 – the very meeting which precipitated the NO vote Bollinger claimed was a YES. At a packed Manhattanville Center, a half block from the proposed expansion zone, Bollinger and David Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor, got booed for minutes on end (youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Bollinger+booed&aq=f) A response that must have shocked both of them given that Dinkins would normally get respect even from those skeptical of his mayoral record in such a venue.

Back to those Minutes. Bollinger’s revisionist history was enough to turn the discussion away from what could have been a democratic moment of candor. Senator Cohen backtracked from his initial point that the expansion should be “reframed,” proposing only that Bollinger take additional steps to deal with public opinion in light of the “terrible light.”

So back comes Bollinger killing it softly with his words (again from the Minutes):

The president agreed completely with the idea of bringing voices forward to reaffirm the extensive process Columbia had undergone, along with its commitment to rebuild relations with surrounding communities. He said this process was already under way, with extensive outreach over the past 24 hours that would continue.

The president said that issues like this can be difficult for journalists, who need some time to grasp the full context. The university was doing its best to clarify that context, and so were ESDC lawyers. He was optimistic that within a week or two, there would be a more balanced understanding of this situation. The president decided not to say more on this subject.

Clearly Bollinger saw this ruling as one that was severely jeopardizing Columbia’s land grab. The level of desperation impelling “extensive outreach over the past 24 hours” is a lot higher than the cool, calm and collected president suggests. He was absent at the December Senate session due to “honest miscommunication of schedules” (as opposed to dishonest miscommunications the President is usually a party to) – according to Sharyn O’Halloran, chair of the Senate Executive Committee (and community benefits agreement SPY extraordinaire). An inside source in Columbia’s PR department reveals that officials were scrambled by the Court decision – shoulda listened to Siegel – but they rushed out right away to spend and spend, to reverse and “rebuild.”

When Bollinger talks of a reinvigorated targeting of the press and says he is “optimistic that within a week or two, there would be a more balanced understanding of this situation,” can you feel the godfatherly outreach reaching out? The Coalition to Preserve Community (CPC) had a protest on 1/28/10 outside the offices of ESDC and Gov. David Paterson on Madison Avenue to urge them to drop the appeal of the eminent domain ruling. But not even Columbia Spectator (the student newspaper) sent a reporter! Long arms hard at work.

(CPC members have been urging Spectator to follow up on a story Jimmy Vielkind broke from a FOIL request in 2005 which revealed a $300,000 deposit Columbia provided ESDC to pursue eminent domain. Question is, since then, how much more has been paid to ESDC? It’s a touchy subject. Former PR man Warren Whitlock got in hot water with his bosses for simply reacting to the revelation at a meeting in 2005 with the words “it’s not Columbia’s finest hour.” There are many important expansion-related stories that the Spectator does not pursue like it used to, and as for the other press…well, longer arms.)

Now lack of coverage in the press of grassroots actions, and the lack of response to press releases, faxes and phone calls, can always be attributed to media business as usual. But what Bollinger was saying to his Senate was that his PR department would be going full force to counter both community opposition and the bad press the ruling was generating. He had already poured buckets of duckets on Bill Lynch Associates to exploit Lynch’s long established link to Harlem pols. Lynch, smart and treacherous, must have been conscious of how bad that big pile of Bollinger bills looked (he probably barely greased the palms of the “leaders” of the overnight community coalition that he assembled before that ULURP meeting where Dinkins was booed – most of his people left the scene early or joined ranks with CPC members once they saw what was going down). He didn’t even declare hundreds of thousands of dollars in income on that score as required by lobbying rules and ended up getting busted, paying a fine and agreeing to be monitored for all future lobbying work. (Lynch has always been a close adviser to David Paterson but should have recused himself from all contact with the governor due to conflict of interest since the issue of eminent domain lies very much in Paterson’s hands.)

No doubt Bollinger’s guys and gals have been in it to win it for years but if his new disinformation campaign can start with a lie as big as fudging support for the expansion by Community Board 9, imagine the load he is laying on the press out of the public eye – that heavy weight of the powerful, closeted boardroom stuff worthy of his membership on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY). Oh, those connections! In a New York Times article (1/19/10), “Lesson on Limits of Eminent Domain at Columbia,” writer Terry Pristin quotes another FRBNY member (also a Speyer protégé) without identifying that significant bank board link of the lesson-giver:

Kathryn S. Wylde, chief executive of the Partnership for New York City, a leading business group. “I think it’s frightening because there are few more important investments in our city’s future than that which Columbia is making.”

Just another independent source on the New York street who represents a “business group” (Say what? bodega owners perchance?). A Times article a week later describes the Partnership for New York City as “a research and lobbying group that represents some large banks and companies.” That at least hints at her close ties to Bollinger and company. Recent Times reporting on the Columbia expansion has been marked by the same lack of integrity displayed in their editorial excoriating the Court ruling, which failed to note the Times too had acquired its new building through eminent domain, driving out over 50 businesses in the process.

Given Columbia’s (1) vast real estate connections (and who knows about financial contributions those boys promised in pursuit of knocking off Sprayregen since eminent domain takings are often a key to big profits – yo, no source here) (2) links to the banks (3) coziness with the Times (4) huge, amped up lobbying force, how does Bollinger finesse his own faculty and student representatives in his Senate address? He resorts to old school and tells them whoppers! Some example he’s setting for his professoriat and the cream of the crop who may be destined to lead our country. Though they weren’t exactly a tough crowd. Sure, many in the University Senate are removed from the details of Columbia’s dirty business, but it was telling how quickly Senator Cohen’s inquiry morphed into a call for a collaborative effort to get Columbia back in the good light – a fade-out that would not happen in Harlem venues if the public had a chance to speak out. This is precisely why Harlem and its history and culture of honest resistance must not be replaced by an Ivy League enclave of twenty story walls protecting the imperial elite.

(And the selling point that there will be some stores on the street level? Yeah, sure. Both transparency and community guaranteed by some glass windows – where “everyone” can go shopping – a topic of discussion in a recent fireside chat between Bollinger and his students. Just another example of a great divide being cynically ignored.)

In-house critics of the Honorable, Robust and Open Lee Bollinger need to pick up on the urgency of messages from the grassroots. At the Senate meeting in December, a senior representing the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification (SCEG) noted an error in the November minutes, advising Senate members, to his credit, of the actual CB 9 vote count in opposition to the expansion. But to his extreme discredit (and he will remain nameless because the point here is not to jump on a student grappling with significant and complicated social issues), he too jumped onto the “we all in it together” bandwagon. He was quoted in the (2/1/10) Spectator:

“I just want to urge transparency and academic honesty going forward in this attempt to raise University and community awareness about the benefits of the plan.”

Well, thanks but no thanks. This is hardly the path to go down when contending with Bollinger’s thuggish ruggish bald-faced in-house lie campaign. A call for academic honesty and buying into the concept of a campaign to raise “community awareness about the benefits of the plan” is only good for the out-house. It ain’t no way to confront this level of collusion and corruption. The community does not need students telling the GodfatherPresident how he can better make the benefits clearer to us dumbos.

By the way, the SCEG organization used to be a good community ally but it’s now pretty much at the mercy of the Low machine. That rep of theirs who held forth at the December Senate meeting is now SCEG’s major mouthpiece. And he’s done everything possible for the past two years to keep the CPC from talking to students, which the group had been enabling us to do since 2004. Why? Well, read how he responded to criticism that he was actually aiding the eviction plan with his weak comments at the Senate. He wrote, in part, in a recent email to our CPC action group:

I think students like nuanced arguments, and I think nuanced arguments have much more bite to them. And when we last had an organizer, we were holding large events for nuanced issues, so in my experience it is the ONLY way to organize at Columbia right now. I'm sorry but that's the way it is. Contexts change. I am going to try to place things in context, which I know is always hard. Yes, I am aware of the PR assault against the CPC.

Hey it’s the wave of the future – let Bollinger’s lies sit out there and turn the battle for Harlem’s soul into some “context” that we can’t quite wrap our Malcolm X rhetoric-filled, impractical, conga banging, guiro scraping, revolutionary throwback, dreamy on the road minds around.

At least he admitted to familiarity with the “PR assault” against CPC. Still, this new highly insulting “nuance” rap doesn’t hold up logically. If we did not have nuanced arguments, we would never have gotten student support to begin with. Neither students, nor the community, are that stoopid. But this student and Bollinger are going to put it all in context for us hajjis. What we ignorants are spozed to be occupying ourselves with now is spending time bowling for dollars, lobbying for Columbia to pay into the slush fund for the WHLDC, procuring benefits that were already part of the General Project Plan and then re-negotiated with the WHLDC so the pols could save face (and a small corrupt-ass face it is) for selling out Harlem. Jess lay down and learn to love block after block of huge ugly buildings that may look like air cooling systems (check out the new building on 120th and Broadway on top of the gym, and say it don’t look like a huge air conditioner – just take a gander at it from inside Riverside Park.)

The “context” here is bigger than the consequences of the post-modern urban removal promoted by Columbia the developer and gentrifier. It even goes deeper than the attendant racism and Bollinger’s failure to understand that this “Harlem mystique” thing (to which he gives occasional lip service) can’t be comprehended from an angle of elitist self interest. Sorry to beat that drum again, but what really counts is the history of dignified resistance from the Hispanics in Washington Heights, black folks from the projects to Central Harlem, the crazy mix of working class people, musicians, students, teachers, and lovely nutcases of every persuasion that have always lived in West Harlem. Not to mention all the resistance of all those New Yorkers all over who want neighborhoods not gated communities with biohazard labs established through collusion of blight-finder profiteers.

Columbia’s institutional racism, ingrained deceit and hardcore meanness toward those up against its Ivy Walls (no nuance here) has already resulted in panic, pain, depression and even death. Yet New Yorkers in my neighborhood continue to exercise their fundamental democratic right to stand up honestly and cleverly and humorously and with great spirit and a down-home belief consistent with the best of what an uptown Ivy League school should be showcasing: independent, imaginative thinking, free from whatever context is in control. After all, that’s what’s behind all them great books, si o no?

Short of broadscale social transformation, political art can achieve three things. While such art rarely changes the world, it may change minds. If political art does not actually win over its audience, it may challenge its assumptions. Finally, political art may be content to please its audience. I’m thinking here of entertainments such as Dr. Strangelove and Aristophanes’ scathing satires of the demagoguery and patronage of Athens democratic politicians, the Peloponnesian war, and the dramatic innovations of Euripides.

Church challenged the assumptions of its audience and probably changed some minds. That’s unusual in New York City where the audience for “serious” theatre runs the gamut from liberal to left wing and the bulk of political theatre espouses left wing to liberal views. Espousing such opinions on New York stages is about as challenging as mounting a passion play at Bob Jones University.

Church presents an evangelical Christian service. After the house lights go out, the audience hears the voice of José - the only male clergy member of this congregation in which everyone is addressed as reverend:

Your spiritual bankruptcy is reflected in your endlessly repeating conversations about your struggles to quit smoking, quit drinking, quit junk food, quit caffeine, quit unsatisfying jobs and relationships – and this is what you talk about when you’re trying to be deep. You claim to care about suffering in the world and take luxurious pleasure in raging against the perpetrators of that suffering, but this masturbation rage helps nothing and no one… Let go of these superficial earthly ties and deliver yourself in humility to the Lord.

Later, another Reverend, backed by chanting Sisters and Brother, asserts the congregation shares the professed values of a downtown New York audience:

We believe that all of Jesus’ political beliefs are right and just and that we must stand against racial discrimination, homophobia, anti-abortion, commercialism, war, and indifference. (chant: God is life) We believe that is sin to engage in masturbation rage against the perpetrators of this evil without doing anything concrete to create change. We believe that pontificating and making art about political subjects doesn’t count as concrete action and is a form of masturbation rage (chant: Jesus Christ is Lord). We believe that it is sin to attempt in self-help therapy; it is just as wrongful as living a polluted and dysfunctional lifestyle if one is only focused on the self. (chant: The spirit is love. Rev Karinne: Dear God please have mercy on me.)

Reverend José has already affirmed:

Now, Jesus didn’t go around picking on people for drinking too much or having pre-marital sex or being homosexuals. He wasn’t interested in condemning people for their personal lives. Jesus was interested in things we experience as clichéd abstractions: police brutality, illegal immigrants in prison, the child living in poverty, trying to do his homework without electricity …all the greatest evil that has been done in this world has been perpetrated by people who are prospering and terrified, just like you.

Young Jean Lee’s Christian voices confront downtown, hipster audiences - breaking down bourgie bohemian fantasies. By giving Church’s congregation politics her “progressive” audience can’t resist, Lee removes an obstacle to walking a mile in the shoes of an evangelical.

The 2009-10 New to New York theatre season has brought another spate of political plays, though the Iraq war is no longer a hot topic. Geoffrey Nauffts’ Next Fall explores the same territory as Church. It tells the story of the romantic relationship between Adam, a secular liberal lapsed Catholic, and Luke, an evangelical. If you are wondering how an evangelical could be in a homosexual relationship, the answer is that, like George W. Bush, Luke believes all people are sinners and all sins are equal. Nauffts attempts to challenge his audience by portraying Adam and his friends as being, in varying degrees, prejudiced against Luke. Next Fall may inspire a modicum of sympathy for evangelicals in that Luke tries to convert Adam out of love and a desire to be with him in the after-life. Luke, though, is not the sharpest tool in the shed – in an exchange that Sarah Palin would not appreciate, he confuses someone who lives in a country north of China with someone who has Down’s Syndrome. He’s a well-meaning naïf, and his theological convictions are underarticulated and hard to take seriously. Any sympathy that Luke may evoke for evangelicals is wiped out by the depiction of his father Butch. While he comes across at first as an intelligent man genuinely concerned about his ex-wife’s addiction to prescription drugs, the audience is bound to lose all sympathy for him when he responds to evidence that his son is gay. At that moment, referring to an actor who played Jim to Luke’s Huck in a musical stage adaption of Huckleberry Finn (presumably Big River), he wonders: “Do you think the nigger was a fag?” This lets a New York audience off the hook - no one need consider Butch’s religious convictions (regarding homosexuality or any other matter) since he can be dismissed as a bigot.

Nauffts’ style in Next Fall is sit-com-like. This is both a strength and a weakness. It’s a weakness in that regular theatre-goers don’t need to spend time and money to listen to facile jokes they could hear in the comfort of their living rooms. It’s a strength because a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down. While Next Fall is ineffective in challenging secular urban liberal assumptions about evangelicals, if it were performed in more rural and more conservative communities - and if Butch’s racism was cut from the play - it could upend evangelicals’ assumptions about gay people. Next Fall underscores W’s point that homosexuals aren’t worse than straight people because everyone is a sinner. It also depicts a loving, spousal relationship between two men.

Both Church and Next Fall take abortion off the table in dealing with secular liberal views of evangelical Protestantism. Young Jean Lee doesn’t aim for straight realism - Church contains several surreal speeches – so audiences can finesse the improbability of pro-abortion-rights evangelicals. In Next Fall, Adam mentions Luke is pro-choice. This defies credulity: would a Christian who rushes to pray for forgiveness after having sex with another man condone what he believes to be murder?

In Jonathan Reynolds’ Girls in Trouble, performing at The Flea Theatre, abortion is the central issue and religion is peripheral. I know from speaking with Reynolds after a performance that he opposes abortion rights. But his play leaves an audience uncertain about his views. The first act of this play presents abortion in the context of callous womanizing. Reynolds resorts to a device Coppola used in Apocalypse Now when the director had one of the soldiers find and then lose a puppy – the pet’s loss works on the emotions of audiences long-desensitized to cinematic depictions of human suffering and death. In the first act of Girls in Trouble, the child of the abortionist (who is African American – and there are social and political ramifications to this fact) takes a newborn kitten to bed with her in spite of her mother’s warning not to. When the kitten claws her, she wrings its neck. The dead kitten evokes more emotion from the audience than an aborted fetus.

In the second act, the girl, who’s now in her twenties (and has changed nick-names from Cyndy to Sunny) seems to be performing at a poetry slam where she declares her determination to have an abortion to spite the man who impregnated her. In the third (and final) act, she’s abandoned both her plans to abort (and her nick-names): she’s now a married mother and anti-abortion activist named Cynthia. She worms her way into the Upper West Side apartment of Amanda, the host of an NPR cooking and political talk show called The Virtuous Vegan, who is planning to abort an accidental pregnancy. Cynthia sets out to persuade her to have the child. A debate The New York Times called Shavian, ensues. Cynthia has the stronger voice, and the inadequacy of Amanda’s arguments had me thinking up retorts on Amanda’s behalf. For example, when Cynthia shows up with two freshly killed grouse to add to the cook’s “Sri Lankan Surprise” dish, vegetarian Amanda is horrified at the “slaughter” and Cynthia accuses her of anthropomorphizing. Yet later, Cynthia describes how, at protests outside abortion clinics, she would follow prospective patients speaking for their fetuses: “Mommy, why don’t you want me to see the sun? Why don’t you want to buy me ice cream?” So who’s anthropomorphizing now (or, at least, age-opomorphizing)? She could just as easily have said, “Mommy why don’t you want me to bring my laundry home when I’m 32? Why don’t you want to see me shoot up?”

Cynthia did finally voice an argument I found persuasive. She tells Amanda she doesn’t want her to keep the baby, but to give it up for adoption, pointing out childless couples are currently traveling to developing and former communist countries to adopt. On the other hand, and to the play’s credit, Amanda’s point of view gets a boost from an unexpected quarter. It turns out the partner in her pregnancy is her ex-husband, whom she recently seduced and with whom she has a teenage daughter. When he finds out about the pregnancy and Amanda’s plans to abort, he demands she have his child. When she says she will if he takes sole custody, he backs down. The fatuousness of this defense of Amanda’s unborn child starts to balance the scales. Finally, Amanda has an argument that seems weighty. Yes, she allows, abortion is murder, and she doesn’t care: it’s no different from killing the grouse. I don’t agree that abortion is murder, but at some point a fetus becomes a feeling being, whose awareness of life matches that of an animal, and probably one significantly less developed than an adult primate, dolphin, dog, or pig. I recognize this puts me on the slippery slope to infanticide – and on that point, there’s a challenging debate to be had.

To me and to others in the audience, the ending of the play seems to turn its right to life perspective on its head, and presents a visceral and devastating condemnation of anti-abortion activists. Reynolds, however, told me this is not his intention.

There are problems with Girls in Trouble. Act I is realistic comedy-drama. Act II is more along the expressionist line of For Colored Girls, but since it’s staged like a poetry slam, it could still be taken for realism. Act III moves into broad satire (The Virtuous Vegan, an NPR segment on the “the value of apology in foreign policy,” direct address to the audience by Amanda and Cynthia, and the caricatured ex-husband). It’s completely disconnected from the previous acts. Still, with its faults, Girls in Trouble is an intellectually invigorating evening at the theatre.

Young Jean Lee followed up Church with The Shipment in 2009. The Shipment deals with attitudes of and toward African Americans. As with Iraq in the W years, race has been the subject of a number of plays in the first year of the Obama administration. Along with The Shipment, there’s David Mamet’s Race, Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park and Branden Jacob-Jenkins’ Neighbors. In Race white lawyer Jack Lawson declares “Race is the most incendiary topic in our history.” Yet, I can attest that three of these plays (I did not see Neighbors) fail to ignite. Why?

None of them deal with aspects of race about which we dare not speak: pervasive black poverty, drug-related crime, and absentee fathers. These plays fail to address who’s responsible for these problems in the black nation and in white America. Nor do they press a white guy, like me, to consider why he has such a prurient interest in having such issues raised. For the most part, the current crop of plays deal with sensibilities of middle to upper-middle class black and white people. In Race, both black characters are lawyers and in Neighbors, an African American college professor married to a white woman is unsettled by the arrival next door of a black family who seem like caricatures from a minstrel show. While Clybourne Park includes two working-class African Americans in its first act, set in 1959, these figures serve as foils to reveal the prejudice, both intentional and unintentional, of white characters. In the second act, set in 2009, the actors who played these working class characters morph into buppies.

Despite its relatively conventional class-bound take on racial/cultural politics, Clybourne Park is wickedly funny. It’s entertaining like Dr. Strangelove and the plays of Aristophanes. (And like Next Fall, it contains a Mongolian/mongoloid joke – this season is not only rife with political plays, but with plays seemingly intended to piss off Sarah Palin.) Race is only moderately entertaining but, in one way, it’s more original than Clybourne Park. Norris’s targets are a little more obvious than Mamet’s. Clybourne Park is set in the all-white Chicago neighborhood to which the family in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun is planning to move and it satirizes the attitudes of two types of white folks toward blacks. The first is the NIMBY who’s afraid African American neighbors will lower property values. The second is the unintentionally condescending housewife who lords over her domestic workers. In the second act, Norris goes after both politically correct whites and whites who feel victimized by political correctness. The NIMBY has been a target of pop culture satire since Auntie Mame, if not before. (Surely Sinclair Lewis or Dorothy Parker took swipes at this kind of racism.) The second act’s display of insincere political correctness and white liberals’ self-righteous sense of victimization is less than revelatory; we bourgie libs are completely comfortable with mockery of this aspect of ourselves. As Michael Feingold pointed out in his review of Clybourne Park, Avenue Q has already proclaimed that “everybody’s a little bit racist.” In Race, on the other hand, Mamet makes a hard-bitten, cynical lawyer out to be vulnerable to race-based guilting even as he reveals this character’s ingrained prejudices. Mamet has come up with a fresher target than a stereotypical 1950s racist or insincere white liberal. Nonetheless, Race is a weaker play than Clybourne Park.

The Shipment begins with a stand-up routine performed by Douglas Streater, in which he criticizes black people and the delight white people take in his “brave” teasing. Black comedians, from Richard Pryor to Dave Chappelle, have been doing such material for decades so I was not challenged. Some critics argue The Shipment exposes this style of comedy as a limiting stereotype – even if that’s so, it still fails to unsettle its audience. The opening routine is followed by a skit that caricatures white people’s views of black people, focusing on an aspiring rap singer’s world of drug dealers, drive-by shootings, and prison. We know this caricature exists – the skit addresses neither the reality on which this caricature is based nor white people’s role in perpetuating that reality. The play ends with a party scene in which the guests (all played by African American actors) vent petty insecurities of the privileged. At the end, it turns out the actors have been playing white people, and the scene is meant to show how African Americans view white life. Whites in Lee’s New York audiences are probably not too put out by such criticism from across the color line. But The Shipment is currently touring other cities including Chapel Hill and Pittsburgh. If the audiences there include somebody other than hipsters and cognoscenti, The Shipment may yet prove to be a challenging piece of theater.

At first glance, Suzan-Lori Parks’ The Book of Grace, performed this season at The Public, seems to be a part of the current crop of race-themed plays. It tells the story of Vet, a white Texas border guard, Buddy (who changes his name to Snake), his African American son from a past relationship, and Grace, the border guard’s cheery white wife. Yet, Vet does not seem particularly racist – abusive, militaristic, and xenophobic, but not racist. Buddy was not the hidden product of a Strom-Thurmond-style liaison; Vet lived with Buddy and his mother. And Snake/Buddy, who has arrived at his father’s house with a trunk full of grenades, sees himself as part of a line of revolutionaries that includes Timothy McVeigh. Once Buddy turns into Snake the terrorist, Parks’ obvious symbolism becomes clear: Vet represents traditional, oppressive white America; Buddy stands in for disaffected revolutionaries; the hopeful Grace, who has said Obama makes her smile, is the image of optimistic liberals who want us all to get along. Throughout most of the play, Grace seems self-destructively naïve, but the ending holds out the possibility she may steer Buddy/Snake from his bloody path. The play is, perhaps, more philosophical than political, in that it seeks to analyze rather than persuade. That analysis, though, is neither profound nor challenging: what audience of New York theatre-goers wouldn’t like to believe liberalism might turn the disaffected away from violence?

Another political play now at the Public aspires to meta-historical profundity. Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson (book by Alex Timbers – who, I believe, also had the idea for the play - music and lyrics by Michael Friedman) equates populist appeal with the sex appeal and charisma of rock stars. I’ve just plumbed the depths of Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson; and unless you are a fan of “emo rock” or want to see what may be the best set of the season, you can safely save yourself the price of a ticket. To be fair, Timbers raises a couple of issues. He invokes Jackson’s genocidal acts against Native Americas to point out populism can be racist and nationalist – I’m shocked! Shocked! Timbers depicts Jackson as struggling when he discovers populist pandering does not work as well in governing as it does in campaigning. I doubt the real Jackson was nearly as nonplussed by this as his rock-star counterpart in Bloody, Bloody. Yes, the play’s theme is relevant to the tea party movement and the success of politicians like George W. Bush and Sarah Palin – one Jackson fan declares he feels like he could drink a beer with his hero. But this is as profound as Mr. Timbers’ deep structure gets.

The play breaks some politically correct taboos, but it’s a less than subtle alternative to p.c. piety. The narrator of the play is wheelchair-bound and Jackson, who wants to tell his own story, repeatedly shoots her in the neck. This leads nowhere (again and again). And the depiction of Martin Van Buren is also pointlessly provocative. Van Buren is a Twinkie-fellating (I refer to the mass-produced pastry, not the gay category for boyish young men) queen who’s got it bad for Jackson: “if you love Jackson so much, why don’t you marry him?” This is adolescent political/historical incorrectness, worthy of teen-y heads, not mature theater audiences. Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson is South Park without the wit and insight.

Young Jean Lee’s Church directly called into question the values of its audience. Of the 2009-10 season’s political plays, only Girls in Trouble takes on its audience so aggressively. Church not only had the potential to engender, among secular New York liberals and leftists, tolerance of Christian fundamentalists, but, were it performed in less cosmopolitan communities, it might engender, among Christian fundamentalists, tolerance for sexual and substance-abusing sinners. If Geoffrey Nauffts excised the caricature of Southern evangelical-as-racist, Next Fall might have a similar effect among fundamentalists (in re homosexuality, not substance abuse). It leaves New York audience, however, pleasantly undisturbed. On the other hand, for pure entertainment, Clybourne Park is the best political satire of the season.

Obama’s first responses to Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts had even strong supporters wondering if the President was up to the job. (His vague line about the need for Congress to “coalesce” around the least controversial elements of healthcare reform was reminiscent of his first weak, CYA take on the Jeremiah Wright controversy.)

Obama had already begun to lose folks who’d once been over the moon about him. Uri Avnery zeroed in on one problem arising from Obama’s readiness to use the bully pulpit:

Obama’s numerous speeches are starting to tire people and are losing their appeal. When he turns his face from left to right and from right to left, from one teleprompter to the other, he starts to look like a mechanical doll. The millions viewing his speeches on TV see him turning to the left and turning to the right, but never really looking them in the eyes.

Obama’s comeback began when he looked and talked straight at G.O.P. House members in their now famous “question time” colloquy. That session, along with the day-long forum on healthcare reform he moderated two weeks later, made good on his campaign promise to cultivate real political debate. While commentators tended to damn the low level of discourse (on both sides of the argument), it’s not as if nothing was revealed. The G.O.P.’s rote talking points served to reiterate they had no plan to deal with the uninsured, insurance company abuses or escalating healthcare costs. One back and forth between Obama and McCain: “The campaign’s over, John.”/“’I’m reminded of that everyday.” – got lots of replays. But there was a richer exchange. After McCain objected to the deal done by Dems to get Florida Senator Nelson’s vote, Obama said plainly: “You’re right.” Obama’s affirmation brought McCain up short. He stammered – his eyes rolling up and then looking down as if ground was moving beneath him. It wasn’t just that he’d been off the “straight talk express” for too long. (In truth, he was never really on one since his once-vaunted frankness was largely a private thing between him and the press.) Here was Obama, not shooting from the hip, but calmly showing how one takes an opponent’s point crisply in public (while showing up McCain’s bad loser bluster). A display of fairness and intellectual command that punctuated Obama’s knack for hearing out G.O.P. hacks before taking apart their arguments.

Hype about Obama’s oratorical gifts tends to deflect attention from his skills as a listener. Andrew Sprung links Obama’s performance at the Healthcare Summit with a bit in David Remnick’s biography about Obama's participation from 1997-2000 in the Saguaro Seminars on civic engagement at Harvard's Kennedy School. Obama wasn’t well known then but he attracted attention quickly. According to the seminar’s leader:

The striking feature was his style in the discussion of hot topics with a lot of big egos. His style was to step back and listen. There were some important people who looked pretty bored; he was not, he was following. He carefully listened. Bill Clinton is also a power listener, but Obama, who has this capacity, is less forward than Clinton in letting you know what he thinks. But then he would say, "I hear Joe Smith saying X, and Nancy saying Y, but I think Joe and Nancy actually agree on Z" and it wouldn't be pabulum. It is not a trivial thing to listen for a whole day and see common themes in the midst of an arguing bunch. It's a personal skill or a personality trait. I don't think I have ever seen that same ability in anyone else.

Sprung explains how Obama exercised his "synthesizing technique" during the Healthcare Summit. Obama seized on any “little scrap of Republican input that he could dub a ‘good idea’” and “pointed out core elements of the bill - the insurance exchanges, the Medicare commission, the individual mandate - were ideas with Republican pedigrees.” But he was fully aware he was engaged in political combat. His nods to Republicans served to demonstrate his side’s sweet (and winning) reasonableness even as he “repeatedly exposed contradictions and transparent bad faith in Republican positions.”

Wannabe public intellectuals often imagine they're too pure for Obama's soft soap. They regularly trash his power listening, equatiing it wtih what Gary Wills contemptuously calls “omni-directional placation.” (While Wills objects to placating others, he’s inclined to kiss his own white ass as per this pale pearl from his 2009 goodbye-to-all-that blog post on Obama: “I was deeply invested in the success of our first African-American president.”) Obama's pure haters tend to miss the stones behind his style. Unlike garden variety pols, Obama’s career has been founded on ballsy clarity as well as cozy stories. He may flatter audiences but he has a habit of telling them things they don’t want to hear. (Just think on him making a case for Just Wars as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.)

Obama’s candor (and ear) helped give Democrats the heart to pass healthcare reform.

II

A day before Democrats’ crucial legislative victory in the House, conservative Times columnist David Brooks published a piece bemoaning “The Broken Society.” He commended a case for a new communitarianism made by a British intellectual with ties to UK’s Conservative Party. The timing of Brooks’ Tory dreaming seemed odd. Instead of noting Democrats were on the verge of mounting a heavy challenge to anti-social, market-is-final morality that’s ruled American politics since Reagan, Brooks looked far away. Claiming to feel a “fresh political wind” from across the pond, he refused to recognize Obama and Democrats had just got their second wind here.

Healthcare reform had certain nego “progressives” in denial too. After the bill finally passed, Lawrence O’Donnell, a Huffington poster and MSNBC talking head, distanced himself (on Olbermann’s Countdown show) from “many” who’d given up on health care reform during the year-long struggle to enact it. But after Scott Brown’s election, O’Donnell – who was Democratic Senate Finance Committee staff director during the 92-93 health care debate – insisted there was no chance the Senate bill would pass the House. According to him, it was “juvenile” and “ridiculous” to suggest otherwise.

O’Donnell wasn’t simply wrong. He actively encouraged opposition to reform from the left by talking up Kucinich’s and Michael Moore’s contempt for Democrats’ healthcare compromises. His hope against hope attitude showed forth during the run-up to final passage. Seizing on an inarticulacy of Pelosi’s, he tried to raise doubts (on Countdown) about the Speaker’s confidence level going into the votes.

Reporter Ezra Klein was around to kill that noise, noting (tactfully but firmly) he’d been at Pelosi’s press conference and had detected no sign of jitters. Over the past year, Klein became mainline media’s most authoritative voice on the content of healthcare reform and its prospects. You knew where he stood, but he didn’t spin. Klein unwound a bit, though, once the House finally passed The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Still his Washington Post summary of its significance was careful as well as triumphal:

I don’t want to suggest this bill is all progressive victories. It isn’t. It isn’t single-payer and there’s no public option, and though I think the excise tax is a progressive tax, I grant that reasonable people disagree on this matter. But the fact of it is that this bill represents an enormous leftward shift for American social policy. It is not, in my view, a sufficient leftward shift, but it is unmatched by anything that has passed into law in recent decades. Progressives have lost some very hard battles but are on the cusp of winning an incredibly important war. For all its imperfections, health-care reform itself is deeply, deeply progressive. And if you don’t believe me, just ask the conservatives who have made opposing it their top priority.

You could start with the right-wing blogger who called my attention to this graph of Klein’s, claiming it revealed: “There’s another word for progressive in its present day meaning. And that word is fascist.”

Last words here come from an anonymous voice and then an echoing, notorious one. Forgive me for not recalling how I happened to read (and save) the following passage which I ran into somewhere on the internet. But perhaps my bad adds a certain homiletic quality to this commentary:

Nearly any of the great political advances in American history, viewed from ground level, looked like a pastiche of grubby compromises and half measures. At some point the imperative is to take the broader view. If they ever do that…the critics from the hysterical right, delusional left, and the sullen center will feel ashamed.

Non-believers who fancy they're beyond such political categories won't try to hear this voice. But - what the hey - maybe Johnny Rotten can get past their...unique defenses. Rotten went out of his way in a recent interview to propose he might write a song about healthcare reform since it was a "wonderful thing."

Change, don't be frightened of change. It can only be for the better. My God it's the first time I think ever in American history the government's actually trying to stop people from being ripped off.

To all the families who loved so deeply the miners we’ve lost; to all who called them friends, worked alongside them in the mines, or knew them as neighbors, in Montcoal and Naoma, or Whitesville, in the Coal River Valley and across West Virginia - let me begin by saying that we have been mourning with you throughout these difficult days. Our hearts have been aching with you. We keep our thoughts with the survivors who are recovering and resting at the hospital and at the homes. We're thankful for the rescue teams. But our hearts ache alongside you.

We’re here to memorialize 29 Americans: Carl Acord. Jason Atkins. Christopher Bell. Gregory Steven Brock. Kenneth Allan Chapman. Robert Clark. Charles Timothy Davis. Cory Davis. Michael Lee Elswick. William I. Griffith. Steven Harrah. Edward Dean Jones. Richard K. Lane. William Roosevelt Lynch. Nicholas Darrell McCroskey. Joe Marcum. Ronald Lee Maynor. James E. Mooney. Adam Keith Morgan. Rex L. Mullins. Joshua S. Napper. Howard D. Payne. Dillard Earl Persinger. Joel R. Price. Deward Scott. Gary Quarles. Grover Dale Skeens. Benny Willingham. And Ricky Workman.

Nothing I, or the Vice President, or the Governor, none of the speakers here today, nothing we say can fill the hole they leave in your hearts, or the absence that they leave in your lives. If any comfort can be found, it can, perhaps, be found by seeking the face of God who quiets our troubled minds, a God who mends our broken hearts, a God who eases our mourning souls.

Even as we mourn 29 lives lost, we also remember 29 lives lived. Up at 4:30 a.m., 5:00 in the morning at the latest, they began their day, as they worked, in darkness. In coveralls and hard-toe boots, a hardhat over their heads, they would sit quietly for their hour-long journey, five miles into a mountain, the only light the lamp on their caps, or the glow from the mantrip they rode in.

Day after day, they would burrow into the coal, the fruits of their labor, what so often we take for granted: the electricity that lights up a convention center; that lights up our church or our home, our school, our office; the energy that powers our country; the energy that powers the world.

And most days they’d emerge from the dark mine, squinting at the light. Most days, they’d emerge, sweaty and dirty and dusted from coal. Most days, they’d come home. But not that day.

These men - these husbands, fathers, grandfathers, brothers sons, uncles, nephews - they did not take on their job unaware of the perils. Some of them had already been injured; some of them had seen a friend get hurt. So they understood there were risks. And their families did, too. They knew their kids would say a prayer at night before they left. They knew their wives would wait for a call when their shift ended saying everything was okay. They knew their parents felt a pang of fear every time a breaking news alert came on, or the radio cut in.

But they left for the mines anyway - some, having waited all their lives to be miners; having longed to follow in the footsteps of their fathers and their grandfathers. And yet, none of them did it for themselves alone.

All that hard work, all that hardship, all the time spent underground, it was all for the families. It was all for you. For a car in the driveway, a roof overhead. For a chance to give their kids opportunities that they would never know, and enjoy retirement with their spouses. It was all in the hopes of something better. And so these miners lived - as they died - in pursuit of the American Dream.

There, in the mines, for their families, they became a family themselves - sharing birthdays, relaxing together, watching Mountaineers football or basketball together, spending days off together, hunting or fishing. They may not have always loved what they did, said a sister, but they loved doing it together. They loved doing it as a family. They loved doing it as a community.

That’s a spirit that’s reflected in a song that almost every American knows. But it’s a song most people, I think, would be surprised was actually written by a coal miner’s son about this town, Beckley, about the people of West Virginia. It’s the song, Lean on Me -– an anthem of friendship, but also an anthem of community, of coming together.

That community was revealed for all to see in the minutes, and hours, and days after the tragedy. Rescuers, risking their own safety, scouring narrow tunnels saturated with methane and carbon monoxide, hoping against hope they might find a survivor. Friends keeping porch lights on in a nightly vigil; hanging up homemade signs that read, “Pray for our miners, and their families.” Neighbors consoling each other, and supporting each other and leaning on one another.

I’ve seen it, the strength of that community. In the days that followed the disaster, emails and letters poured into the White House. Postmarked from different places across the country, they often began the same way: “I am proud to be from a family of miners.” “I am the son of a coal miner.” “I am proud to be a coal miner’s daughter.” They were always proud, and they asked me to keep our miners in my thoughts, in my prayers. Never forget, they say, miners keep America’s lights on. And then in these letters, they make a simple plea: Don’t let this happen again. Don't let this happen again.

How can we fail them? How can a nation that relies on its miners not do everything in its power to protect them? How can we let anyone in this country put their lives at risk by simply showing up to work; by simply pursuing the American Dream?

We cannot bring back the 29 men we lost. They are with the Lord now. Our task, here on Earth, is to save lives from being lost in another such tragedy; to do what must do, individually and collectively, to assure safe conditions underground - to treat our miners like they treat each other -- like a family. Because we are all family and we are all Americans. And we have to lean on one another, and look out for one another, and love one another, and pray for one another.

There’s a psalm that comes to mind today - a psalm that comes to mind, a psalm we often turn to in times of heartache.

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”

God bless our miners. God bless their families. God bless West Virginia. And God bless the United States of America.

Rory Nugent, travel writer and mariner, spent seventeen years living and working in the Massachusetts port city of New Bedford, home to "America's largest fishing fleet.” From 1988 to 2005 Nugent documented the “riches to rags” story of an industry, it’s economy, culture and community, capturing the last gasp as it tumbled into the murky drink. Early on, the crusty-smart water people of New Bedford felt something in their bones, like arthritis in inclement weather. There’s an old saying, “When you’re at the end of your rope, let go.” Ever alert to signs and symbols, the drowning fishermen of New Bedford did what farmers, miners, whalers and loggers had done before them, they kept on scrambling, holding on, even as it was killing them.

Now in paperback, marketed as “a compelling eulogy for an iconic New England town and the rapidly vanishing fishing industry,” Down at the Docks made a stunning hardcover debut last year. Critics acclaimed it as “a bare-knuckled take-no-prisoner’s account,” “a movingly profane lament,” “an extraordinary document, a witnessing of something essential from the inside.” Compared to work by James Agee, Steinbeck, Joseph Mitchell and Oscar Lewis, Down at the Docks is a funeral dirge for a way of life washed out to sea.

Nugent’s New Bedford is a tough town, insular and impenetrable. You taste the salty mist, the stench of rotting wooden boats; you feel the grit of darkened, oily streets sticking to your skin, the perpetual ache of mangled bodies broken over years of long, hard labor. You see the hookers walking the docks, hear the bloody din of bar fighting in the distance, feel the fish slipping out of frozen fingertips. Gone, baby gone.

With a pitch perfect ear for linguistic nuance, Nugent supplements a sextet of discreet oral histories with hard data — nautical science, demographics, and cultural history, meticulously tracing the lineages of tools, artifacts and geography. The abandoned textile mills, the dying ocean, the rotting wooden boats and the docks themselves become characters in Nugent’s tale. An obsessive concern with minutia and a critical edge qualify this as sociology — the kind you can’t put down.

A master craftsman of narrative non-fiction, Nugent wraps each oral history around characters you couldn’t make up. Through eyewitness testimonies, a larger picture bubbles up from the harbor’s gunk and slime. We learn everything about the city’s underground, social relations, status hierarchies, seafaring family life, courtship, and community responsibility. New Bedford is a peculiar place where ancient pirate folkways, dope, aquaholic mysticism, Catholicism and outlaw ethics make up the religious life of the working man. Men like Sword who feel more at home in the sea than on land, who revere great ships like the mighty Magnificence, and days where “The weather was finest-kind, warm, flat seas, a big sky showing more stars than anybody knows what to do with.”

Commercial fishing is a manly man story, but the women get prime time too as Nugent uncovers a luminous lesbian lineage in New Bedford. Secretary Ricker is a relic of New Bedford’s aristocracy on the hill. A direct descendent of Mary Coffin Starbuck, a Puritan from Nantucket who defied patriarchal authority and effectively birthed America’s whaling industry, Secretary Ricker spells out the origins of the Petticoat Society, a female dominated power cartel that ruled Nantucket and later, New Bedford.

According to the last Secretary of the Petticoat Society, the 17th Century male settlers of Nantucket had made a mess. They originally wanted to farm, but it was a ridiculous project for a coastal community. After a killer storm left too many homeless widows and orphans and buckets of self-pity, Starbuck infiltrated and harpooned the old boys’ town meeting. In an age when women were banned from participation beyond domestic service, Starbucks’ intervention led to an egalitarian fishing economy. Her plan worked; farmers left the land and farmed the sea. In time, America would dominate global whaling, blubber, oil, sperm and all.

In a new division of labor, organizational meetings took place among fishwives dressed in petticoats, clothes soiled stinky from cleaning fish. Since men were gone at sea for years at a time, likely engaged in Pirate Love, Sapphic sisterhood became a clandestine pleasure. Eventually, the matriarchal Petticoat Society migrated to New Bedford, essentially running the town until the 1950s, enjoying French perfume, Paris fashions, whalebone dildos and Oriental spice. America’s seminal lipstick lesbians helmed the American Whaling industry.

In the glory days of independent fishing, 1960-1990 New Bedford enjoyed a careful harmony between vessel, fisherman, ocean, fishing stock, weather, man, mob and feds. And then the tides shifted. With the help of local informants, Nugent sleuths out all the “fucked-up shit” that wasted New Bedford; geeky marine ecologists, a rising tide of humongous corporate fleets, competitive Asian markets, federal legislation, depleted fishing stocks, pollution. In time, even the drug smuggling trade is usurped as Latino gangs and drive-by shootings become part of the soggy landscape.

Decline would be gradual and the causes multivariate. In the 1970’s federally guaranteed “demonic” bank loans for boat construction. This meant bigger boats, greater expectations and more debt. Small boats couldn’t compete, becoming obsolete as corporate fleets gentrified the waterways. Hunger for bigger boats lead to higher overheads, manic labor-intensity and burnout for crews and fish stocks. To fix a problem they helped create, the federal government then imposed quotas on fish. To further arrest ocean depletion and pollution, feds began limiting days at sea without regard to weather. On perfectly clear days, fishermen found themselves arbitrarily landlocked, out at sea during brutal storms. New rules arbitrarily displaced the rhythm of nature.

A new regime of over-regulation, drug testing, endless paperwork, and chronic intrusion was imposed on a self-regulating subculture barely able to comprehend this new order. The work became impossible, people burned out, mutinied, and many died. The smaller boats were sacrificed in insurance scams. Half the people Nugent interviews sound insane, high or both. For generations, New Bedford had been a lawless frontier ruled by class solidarity among wild men who suffered a landlocked alienation so severe only heroin could soothe it. That is, until they could ship out again. Men addicted to the salt, the hunt, greedy for booty, married to the sea, gone for months, no regrets. Even in the best of times, bodies were broken, swallowed by Poseidon, sharks and the sheer brutality of the labor process. Men traveled the coastline to Alaska, Montauk, or Newfoundland, anywhere for fish.

Like so many “old school” towns across America, Nugent’s people dealt in cash only, sealing agreements with a handshake — no papers, contracts or bank accounts. Family incomes were supplemented with welfare, unemployment insurance, carpentry, scams, drug smuggling and bartering. Lying to authorities was considered an act of honor, cooperation treason. The fiercely independent, free-spirited fishermen harbored a healthy contempt for anything blocking their pursuit of fish, cheese (money), dope, life and liberty at sea. As the corporate fleets squeezed out the little guy, salaries began replacing cash — unfathomable to third generation independent jobbers who’d sailed the high seas since childhood, schooled on the job by their elders.

As the frontier mentality was criminalized, corporate fleet owners refused to hire anyone with warrants or addictions. Background checks and drug testing meant the work would now be done by foreign labor desperate to break minimum wage. The people of New Bedford had to make the usual bad choices; bend over, get with the program, go to jail or die off. Many did. But some, like Pink, just forced themselves to stop caring. A fixer and card shark with cozy ties to New England’s Patriarcha crime family, Pink found the whole thing too painful, sitting by, watching it all slip away. Pink anticipates a chilling future for New Bedford, a kitschy Sturbridge by the Sea where American Fishing goes all Disney-like with schoolboys running things, a cartoon version of a passionate life.

Down on the Docks sometimes reads like a paranoid crank run and superstition filters into every moment. Old Man Olafson won’t go near the docks if he’s seen a cat. Captain Shad won’t head out to sea unless he’s talked to his brother in Texas. Captain Cherry relies on his wife’s chickens for divine instruction. And then there’s the “Jonahs,” men like Hafe the Jinx. Some won’t say his name out loud. And they dare not look him in the eye. The repeated sole survivor of too many sinking boats, “Lucifer’s boy” is deemed a walking curse. Nobody will hire him, so the demon seed spends his days tweaked out on the docks, angling for work, oblivious he’s blacklisted. The Jonah of death eventually turned up on deck in Florida waters. Locals concluded he’d graduated to hunting human prey.

The last chapter, “Perfect Wreck,” had me in tears. Nugent documents a boat’s funeral as tenderly as if it had been a living being. Once a mighty fishing boat, Conquest is now rotted and useless, draining her owners. Tugboat Captain Garr makes good on a favor owed to the family; in the middle of the night, he agrees to sink Conquest. Nugent attends the somber ceremony with Monk, a third generation Portuguese-American sailor with an albatross of his own. The wreck of Conquest is divorce New Bedford style. Monk came to observe Captain Garr, crafting his own plan to take down Shell Shock.

After a fourteen-hour day of solo clamming clears $150 after expenses (fuel, pain-killers, chiropractors) Monk knows the marriage was over. “His troubles with clams turned love into despair and got him thinking up ways to kill Shell Shock and collect on her insurance.” Every night Monk prayed, “Dear God, kill her, please.” But tonight, to his horror and ours, Conquest won’t sink. Watching Captain Garr break her down is agonizing, and it takes hours for the brutal destruction of a mighty sea warrior, an elegant being who served with grace and dignity. Conquest would be dumped like the fishermen, the town, like entire sectors of American labor, buried in secrecy and lies.

The world of whaling that preceded America’s commercial fishing industry is fixed in the American imagination by Moby Dick. We know New Bedford as a mysterious place Melville likened to Gomorrah. Salty Dog Sailors are as mythic as the American Cowboy or the Chicago Gangster. But in recent years, America’s proud fishing villages come to us in imagery of social decay. Lives are measured in the statistics of social decline — youth suicide, addiction, teen pregnancy, and violence. Brokenness calculated in rates of HIV, overdoses, dropout rates, and lurid headlines. We read about a gang rape in New Bedford, a bizarre teenage pregnancy pact in Gloucester. In dead-end Montauk winters we see strung out, jobless fishermen spent before the age of fifty. Men who reinvent themselves as charter boat Captains, still fighting against over-regulation and diminishing leisure trade. Now, the economy too works against them. We read about their teenage alcoholic children, noses collapsed from cocaine abuse, the battered fishwives, infants remanded to foster care. Down in the Docks is a painful story. But truth-telling can be redemptive too. For the seafaring grandchildren born to swallow this pain, and lost children who wander the wastelands wondering “What broke our fathers? Who were they? Were they losers or heroes? How did this day come to pass?” Nugent offers answers. There’s no better reason to write cultural history.

If you’re a pop listener, you may have wondered: What accounts for the undeniable popularity (among both consumers and critics) of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance”? Arguably the most hyped personality in the Western world, Lady Gaga cavorts in celebration of nightmare, declaring, “I want your loving and I want your revenge/You and me could write a bad romance.” Seconds later, apparently unaware she’s in hell, she chants her own name amidst nonsense syllables, proving that nihilism is the new naivete. The song’s a commentary, we are told, but irony can find no foothold here; pathology and marketing are too smoothly interwoven. (The song could perhaps be salvaged if Pet Shop Boys covered it.) All this, set to the aerobics-class drone provided by producer RedOne.

It’s perplexing. I think the answer can be found in another pop single from 2009, Mariah Carey’s “H.A.T.E.U,” from the album Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel.

The sound of “H.A.T.E.U.” is, pretty much, the sound of Memoirs. Most of the album was written and produced by Carey in collaboration with Terius “The-Dream” Nash and Tricky Stewart, who together were responsible for Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” and Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” among other mega-hits. On Memoirs, Nash and Stewart give Mariah a complex sound composed of starkly contrasting elements: harsh bass-drum beats that almost batter the ear at times, wistful synth or acoustic guitar melodies, jazzy high-hat work, demure handclaps or finger snaps. The always-rhythmic mix reminds listeners that human need and insecurity are often expressed from within postures of toughness. When the heaviest beats slam home in “H.A.T.E.U.,” an uncanny squawk alerts us to the presence of pain.

“H.A.T.E.U.”’s lyrics give us the thoughts and feelings that lie underneath Lady Gaga’s Halloween mask – beneath the façade of anyone who fronts his/her way through bad romance.

We went round for round (beat, squawk) till we knocked love out
We were laying in the ring not making a sound
And if that’s a metaphor of you and I
Why is it so hard to say goodbye?

That last couplet calls to mind Flannery O’Connor’s response when a dinner companion called the Host of Catholic tradition “a great symbol”: “If it’s just a symbol, to hell with it.”

Trapped in a real hell, Mariah longs for the end of sensitivity, where she can slough off her pain onto her tormentor, where she, like Lady Gaga, can exult in her “revenge.”

I can’t wait to hate you make you pain like I do
Still can’t shake you off
I can’t wait to break through these emotional changes
Seems like such a lost cause

She longs for it but can never achieve it. “H.A.T.E.U.” was made by artists perceptive enough to understand the desire for emotional death (the lure of “Bad Romance”) but humane enough to face the pain of living. Mariah closes the chorus by climbing to the very top of her soprano, a perfect, wordless description of her indomitable emotionality. Nash and Stewart caught some flak from critics who objected to their sparing use of Mariah’s upper register throughout the album, but their economical choices in fact restore meaning to her high notes. Instead of a vocal stunt meant to impress, they become virtuosic asides and accents, nearly furtive and sudden, like an expulsion of uncontainable feeling.

Subsequent album tracks build on the revelations of “H.A.T.E.U.” Anger, astonishment, and – the secret weapon – pity collide in “Standing O,” a splendid denunciation of a faithless lover. Mariah calls for a “Round of applause/For the biggest fool in the world,” with the implicit understanding that society routinely rewards those who profane the laws of love. Make no mistake, this is the hard-won knowledge of a 40-year-old woman who has been a pop star for her entire adult life.

Romantic and pop experience become inseparable on “Up Out My Face,” a track of sheer delight and vernacular brilliance. It’s a masterpiece of mouthing off that includes the double entendre, “I should’ve had another mechanic under my hood.” Cue the groaning of the New York Times, which singled out “Up Out My Face” for derision in its mostly negative review of Memoirs. The Times reviewer complained about the “unintentional humor” of lines such as, “Not even a nail technician with a whole lot of gel and acrylic can fix this.” Mariah’s command of vernacular speech so flummoxed the Times guy that he failed to take note of the laughter (The-Dream and Tricky’s?) that can easily be heard on the track. Joke’s on him.

The vernacular emphasis of “Up Out My Face” develops into the pop poetics of “The Impossible,” a love song distinguished by its head-spinning array of cultural references. Mariah catalogues the components of love and finds a pop-culture analogue for each.

Love ya like free money, like a preacher loves Sunday…
Love ya like Kool-Aid, Louis millionaire shades
Love ya like sugar daddies, love ya like a pimp Caddy

The enormous range of the tune’s references means that Mariah leaves almost no dream unembraced. It’s her pop-star’s way of expressing the elation of being in love, of embracing the world and feeling – impossible! – the world in turn embracing you. Though this feeling doesn’t change much with age, “The Impossible” is undoubtedly a mature woman’s vision, evincing a tested faith in the importance and meaning of human experience.

In the mini-Elle magazine that comes with Memoirs, Mariah adds to this faith a witty understanding of how pop media normally packages and sells human experience. The booklet, whose cover promises “VIP access to her sexy love life,” is replete with ads for Mariah-endorsed products. “Because I’ve been interviewed so many times, we thought it’d be fun to turn the tables and create a little book about some of the things I love,” she writes in her introduction to the mini-magazine. The phrase “turn the tables” implies something slyer than corporate synergy. It’s like the slightly lifted eyelid that lets you know someone is not quite asleep. It’s enough to give one hope when “Bad Romance” blares from speakers and headphones all around one.

Here’s to survival.

Willie Mitchell slipped away this January 5 just past. Trumpet player, bandleader, songwriter, he was foremost a producer. Not a celebrity producer, he was better than that.

Throughout the 60s, he made records under his own name. they were mostly instrumentals, in a Junior Walker-ish style. The title of one collection, That Driving Beat, is an accurate description. That would change. He almost never featured his own trumpet playing.[1] That self-effacement wouldn’t.

Easily his best solo record was “Soul Serenade.” It featured one great descending guitar riff (Teenie Hodges) and a brief guitar solo, which, more even than Steve Cropper’s break on “Green Onions,” is the great Memphis guitar solo.

It also featured a sax solo by Charlie Chalmers, who was to remain an essential part of the Willie Mitchell’s sound, as the male voice in Rhodes Chalmers and Rhodes. The song has been covered by a lot of people, but most memorably by Aretha Franklin, on I Never Loved a Man. The challenge there was to avoid repeating the guitar break – what would be the point? The solution was to answer Aretha’s singing the title with three descending horn chords. And anchoring those chords is, a small world away from Memphis, Charlie Chalmers, on baritone sax. It is a high point of an album that was a high point of its time (and works as well as ever today).

Mitchell left solo work for the Hi Records, Royal Studios, and producing lots of people, but above all others, Al Green. It’s easy to think of Mitchell’s career at Hi Records as a continuation of Stax. He was recording in a converted movie house in Memphis, doing – more or less – 60s type soul, at a time when most black popular musicians had, for better and worse, moved on; he was using mostly the same instrumental lineup as Stax, even including one of Stax’s key players, Al Jackson Jr., but the differences are important: Mitchell’s style is, initially, classicist. The beat is much less central to his records. He started out using two drummers, Jackson, and Howard Grimes. The object was not to double the impact: neither drummer played a full kit. The snare drum was no longer the driving beat. The different parts of the kit, lovingly recorded, became more equal coloristic devices. (The intro to “So Glad You’re Mine” is the best illustration.) And where Steve Cropper typically played chords on the beat, or doubled the bass line one octave up, Teenie Hodges mostly played arpeggios, floating over the beat. Stax defined a sound; Hi teased it out. The “sweetening” was different, too. Technology was a factor. A Southern record label in the 60s, like Stax, would have to make records that would come through on transistor and car radios. Horn charts that were too complex would likely get lost. Mitchell, in the 70s, when much better sound systems were the norm, could use a fuller horn section, to articulate jazzier, more elaborate harmonies.[2]

But more important to the Hi sound was the regular use of a vocal chorus (Rhodes Chalmers and Rhodes) and a string section, where Stax used them sparingly. The string sections tended to get the most adventurous writing. The strings pop up in the most unexpected places. “Simply Beautiful,” possibly the loveliest song in American popular music, is acoustic guitar, plus a very spare organ, horns, and drums – and the string section from a symphony orchestra. Al Green’s Higher Plane, not a Mitchell album, but the product of his influence, has no horn section, but there is a string section on every track.

Green’s memoir, Take Me to the River, tells of his early years with Mitchell, who brought him along and developed him. On one early record, there’s a some studio back-and-forth before the song starts. “Shut Up, Al Green,” says Mitchell, even as he brought out his voice. In an interview on National Public Radio ten years ago; talking about “Let’s Stay Together,” Green said:

I’m in here trying to blow the studio top off, and Willie kept saying, “No, just say it,” I’m going, .like “I think I need to muscle up and sing it.” He said, “Don’t try to handle the song, Al. Just let the song happen. Just let it happen. Just let it ooze out and let it – that’s right.”

And Mitchell said:

I wanted this golden voice on it, and he kept giving me somebody else’s voice. And that’s why we just kept going over and over and over and over again. Yeah. When he nailed it, I said, “That’s the one.”

Mitchell fostered Al Green’s idiosyncrasies. And the more Green went his own way, the collaboration grew closer. Their first records together had only a few songs co-written by Green and Mitchell. Mitchell’s compositions were noticeably jazzier. “Let’s Stay Together,” for example, opens with a minor ninth chord, something Green would normally stay away from. Their last few albums featured songs written together. Mitchell followed Green to some strange places. If Green started out as the next big soul man, a natural successor to Sam Cooke, the mature Green is a very different thing. He has filleted the convention out of his performances. Look at the video of his duet with Lyle Lovett on “Funny (How Time Slips Away).” He mostly laughs and smiles his way through the song. It is pure Al Green, and you’re not cheated. He loves long vamps, where he can minimize the constraints of a song. And he shows little interest in showing off his instrument. He can sing high without resorting to the falsetto, and his falsetto is strong, but he prefers to press it past audibility. (Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the hearts of men the things which God has prepared for them that love Him.) There is a hint of career suicide in all this – and aesthetic triumph. Willie Mitchell has been by his side, his truest support.

Beyond the records themselves, Willie Mitchell leaves a legacy of the greatest artistic selflessness. “Full of Fire,” is a song he wrote with Green and Teenie Hodges:

I can dance with the fire burnin, burnin low I can stay till the party is all over

I can dance
dance
dance
dancc
I understand
there’s some things that I know
but I want the horns to blow

Notes

1 Mickey Gregory, Isaac Hayes’ lead trumpeter, once said that when Mitchell played, you didn’t hear him, but you felt him.

2 Where Stax could get hit records out of its rhythm section, Booker T and the MGs, and could even produce hits for two horn sections, the Mar-Keys and the Bar-Kays, the music put out under the Hi Rhythm name you’d have to go looking for. The label “eccentric” has been placed on both Mitchell and Green. In their case, it means integrity and indifference to fashion. None of their records needs an apology.

“One Woman," released in 1969, starts off as a song very much of its time, in the “Little Green Apples” vein. But at the end, as the chorus repeats, “One woman making my home, while the other one is making me do wrong,” Al Green cuts loose:

Sometimes I get so mixed up inside I wish I could find a place to hide

and

I didn’t mean to let it get this strong…

No?
and ending with

Baby, baby, baby

But which one? and the falsetto off into the stratosphere. Here, out of nowhere was the style to come.

Throwing out Jerusalem Arab families from their homes of more than 50 years, and making way for Jews affiliated with Ateret Kohanim, could not be more revealing of the ethical autism Israelis in Jerusalem have suffered from and the political dangers we are sliding toward. The demonstrations against this are the most perfect way to oxygenate the embers of the peace process.

What other issue so exposes how the security rhetoric justifying military occupation of Palestinian territory since June, 1967 eventually came to cover for a romantic scheme, whose signal event was the annexation of Jerusalem in June, 1967, and the quadrupling of its municipal boundaries? What other stand focuses on the collusion between the Jerusalem and national police and settlement organizations? What stand so dramatizes the importance of East Jerusalem, Palestine’s largest city, and its historic commercial hub, as the capital of a Palestinian state? What stand so reveals the pathos of refugees losing property on both sides during this awful century of war, and the importance of moving forward with a sense of reciprocal fairness – the importance of not opening up pre-1948 land claims on either side of the green line?

The logic of Sheikh Jarrah speaks to Old Lions of the Israeli Left but the demos include more than the usual suspects. Protestors are Jewish and Palestinian, from a wide range of backgrounds and with diverse political views. (The New York Times noted the presence of Moshe Halbertal, who is perhaps best known to Americans as a lucid critic of the Goldstone Report’s biased conclusions about IDF actions in Gaza.) Reporting on Sheikh Jarrah has recently highlighted the presence of elders with a long history of involvement in the Israeli Peace Movement, but most accounts underscore the fervency and fresh thinking of the protest’s youthful organizers. Ynet, for example, zeroes in on “the small bunch of youngsters devoid of any legal experience” who managed to beat the State in the High Court of Justice.

Avner Inbar (29), a Ph D student in Philosophy at the University of Chicago told Ynet about the petition’s course. "We soon realized that we could not afford the services of a lawyer so we decided to write the petition ourselves. We spent two-or three days churning through it, in an intensive fashion, day and night. We studied the subject. We read previous judgment on the subject of freedom of assembly. We went down to the site to photograph the relevant area. We took down affidavits from demonstrators and neighborhood residents and wrote down the petition."

When it became clear that the police had no intention to authorize the demonstration the struggle deepened. "We planned a major event for Saturday night," Inbar told us. "The police’s refusal was immediate and was not accompanied by any explanation or reasoning – even though they are obliged by law to provide those. We recognized that this was a police campaign against the protest on site. We presented the petition on Sunday and by Thursday we were already representing ourselves." According to him, this self-representation typifies the Sheikh Jarrah struggle – self-organized, independent and not tied to any institutions.[1]

The spring protests in East Jerusalem bring to mind other seasons of freedom and fearlessness. There are echoes of such world-historical moments in the following speech given at Sheikh Jarrah by a 28 year-old student-protester named Sarah Benninga who spoke to (and for) the “New Left in Town.” But Ms. Benninga (and her comrades) have their own sound too. It’s louder than bombs.

There is a New Left, and it is not a left that is content with peace talks; it is a left of struggle. There is a New Left that knows that there are things you have to fight against even when they are identified with the state and even when they are sanctioned by law. There’s a New Left that knows that this struggle will not be decided on paper, but on the ground, on the hills, in the vineyards, in the olive groves. There’s a New Left that is not afraid of settlers – even when they come down on us from the hills, masked and armed. This left does not succumb to political oppression by the police, nor does it care what Ma’ariv writes about it.

We will continue coming to Sheikh Jarrah and everywhere that justice is crushed by the forces of occupation and oppression. Take a look around you; we are not as few as we thought we were! And we will prevail!

Notes

1 Thanks to Didi Remez for compiling/translating Israeli reporting on Sheikh Jarrah at www.coteret.com.

The Palestinian co-director has been called a collaborator. Israel’s nominating committee has been demonized as a pack of lefties. But something is changing on the streets of Jaffa, whose citizens have been given, in Ajami, both a mirror in which to behold their own community and an international voice.

Ironically, it began as a screenplay that would illustrate the segregated state in which Israelis – Jewish Israelis, since screenwriter Yaron Shani didn’t know much about Arabs at the time – exist, each community distanced from the other by their own narrow perspectives. Then Shani read about the crime-ridden neighborhood of Ajami, where Muslims and Christians, criminals and cops, Jews and Arabs collide, and he decided to move his story there.

He began trading stories with Scandar Copti, a Palestinian resident of Ajami. They talked for hours, building a friendship, learning to trust, together finding real-life tales that would fit into the framework of a film designed to portray what happens when good people refuse to look beyond the boundaries of religious prejudice, tribal justice, racial hatred. Five stories intersect: a Christian Arab whose father would rather tear her limb from limb than let her marry the Muslim man she adores; an Israeli Arab trapped in a Bedouin blood feud; an illegal Palestinian worker from the occupied territories desperate to raise money to keep his mother alive; a Jewish cop whose brother has disappeared under mysterious circumstances; and a Palestinian bohemian (played by co-director Copti) who wants to make a life with his Jewish girlfriend. Even as their worlds exclude each other, their fates intertwine, with only one inevitable result: tragedy.

Not to get all biblical, less literal interpretations of the Exodus story view the former slaves’ forty years of wandering around in the desert as an opportunity to let the generation that had known captivity die, leaving the future to be determined by free men. It’s also said (by the same camp) that there will be no peace in the Middle East until the generation that fought to create the state of Israel – and the generation that fought so bitterly to destroy it – die, leaving the future to be determined by men and women who grew up with the reality of a heterogeneous Middle East.

Ajami isn’t about peace between Arabs and Jews. It isn’t about peace, period. It’s about dropping the labels of the old generation – hero, demon, martyr – in order to see your neighbor for what he is: a neighbor.

I recently got the chance to interview Ajami’s co-directors.

GELMAN-MYERS: Yaron, you wrote the screenplay when you were a student at Tel Aviv University. You really didn’t know too much about Arabs at that point. How did you decide to make it a Jewish-Arab thing?

SHANI: The screenplay was about people who live in different worlds who meet in different scenes, and in every scene, everybody has a different motivation, a different understanding. I only knew newspaper headlines about Ajami, but I knew that if the film could be in this scenery – a very small, condensed neighborhood, with cops and criminals, Jews, Muslims, and Christians, Palestinians from the territories and Israelis – it would be much more important and much more interesting.

GELMAN-MYERS: How did you two start to work together?

COPTI: I met Yaron at the Tel Aviv Film Festival, and one day he brought a screenplay to the restaurant where I worked in Ajami. He said, “I wrote this two years ago. Maybe we can work together on something.” We started meeting, just getting together and building trust. And we got to know each other and found that we love the same kind of cinema, the same kind of movies, and there it started. It was a seven-year process.

GELMAN-MYERS: Yaron, did it change your politics?

SHANI: My opinions are the same, but I address them from a much wider perspective. I was exposed to things I couldn’t imagine. There’s a huge gap between people in Israel, and this segregation is part of the problem. There’s not only the big conflict [between Jews and Arabs] but also differences between Orthodox Jews and secular Jews, and immigrants from here and there. Ajami, which is a film about a very narrow reality, is also a story about the human conflict. Because the human conflict is never simply between the just side and the wrong side…between evil and good…it’s always between people who are very devoted to their own truth, their own justice, to their own people, but they perceive reality in a different way.

GELMAN-MYERS: Do you think that that’s an existential condition or a political condition?

SHANI: It’s a political condition. The solution is for people to try to understand more than what they think and what they know. They have to open up to different perspectives, to understand where he comes from. What does he suffer? What are his wounds, his dreams? This is the only solution. If you get too concerned with your own suffering, your own traumas, your own justice, the other side becomes less human, less just; he has no rights, he is dehumanized. This is how war starts.

GELMAN-MYERS: You shot all your scenes without scripts.

SHANI: The film is totally fictional, totally controlled. We wrote the script, which is very precise, with dialogue, and everything. We knew precisely where we wanted to go and what the characters had to say. But we wanted it to come alive without us directing it. So the actors didn’t get a script. They reacted spontaneously to what happened to them like it was really happening to them. The whole film was shot chronologically from the first scene to the last. We shot the whole film in only 23 days.

GELMAN-MYERS: That’s a very difficult way to work.

COPTI: Yes. But the actors were so identified with the characters and what happened to them that when we put them in a scene, they immediately forgot it was a film. They lived the situation. And then they went to the next one charged with the feelings and the knowledge from the other scenes. I was an actor in this movie, and even though I knew the screenplay, when the cops came to my house, suddenly this magic also happened to me. I was really, really scared inside and I was angry when those policemen came to me. I was scared and angry. And this magic happened to all the actors.

SHANI: It became alive from itself. We didn’t tell anybody to cry. We didn’t tell anyone to say a line. It came out of them spontaneously. And that’s why though the film is fictional, it’s much closer to reality than any other fiction films.

GELMAN-MYERS: But what did you do when you needed a specific outcome and didn’t get it?

COPTI: Usually whatever we wanted, we achieved because we worked with our cast for ten months, and we knew each and every one of them. And also, of course, you know how people from Jaffa react when there’s a policeman in the neighborhood. But when things go wrong, you ask yourself, Is this wrong? Or can we use it?

GELMAN-MYERS: It’s a little bit the way Mike Leigh works.

COPTI: We didn’t invent this kind of cinema. Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, plenty of others did it…but I think we took it to the extreme. We did the entire movie like this.

SHANI: If suddenly some cop enters your place and he’s a real cop, you can see, you can feel from his language, the way he reacts, that he’s a real cop. [NB: The cops in the film were played by real-life cops.] It’s so strong, the feeling of reality is so strong that it’s like magic; you forget that it’s a film. You forget yourself. You believe that in this very moment it’s really happening.

GELMAN-MYERS: Talk about the with scene where the Bedouins hold the peace agreement.

COPTI: That scene was called a sulha or hagarab, which means “Arab justice.” It’s an alternative justice system that is still going on in Israel; when an Israeli court cannot solve a case, it sends it to a sulha and accepts the sulha’s verdict. Only three actors in the scene knew it was fictional. One was the judge, who is a real-life sulha judge. We used to meet with them every Saturday and go to sulhas with them to understand how it works. And then when we shot it, it was like a real sulha, where those three knew that it was fictional but all the rest thought it was a documentary. They were acting like in real life, with real emotions, but the judge knew that at the end of the scene Omar has to pay more money than he had. And we shot it. Two cameras, one hour.

GELMAN-MYERS: Did Omar know?

COPTI: Omar knew nothing. Omar didn’t know what was going to happen. He knew that he was going to go to this peace agreement and his fate would be decided there. Only the judge knew what he was going to decide, of course according to the laws of sulha, which are like any other laws, like in Western laws. When you kill a person, it depends on how you kill him. If you kill him in an accident, you get three years. Everything has its price. If you kill him in a war, you get nothing – you’re a hero. And if you murder him, you get 25 years. Every system has its own justice and its own price for everything.

GELMAN-MYERS: The film’s structure, as well as the way you cut – fragmented, not only from story to story but also within a story – usually produces an emotional distancing.

SHANI: Of course.

GELMAN-MYERS: So here you’re talking about all the emotions and reality and truth, but then you make a film that’s…

SHANI: Limiting itself.

GELMAN-MYERS: Exactly.

SHANI: We made “mistakes.” [He draws quote marks in the air,] You shouldn’t tell a story for twenty minutes, then take a viewer to a totally different story, a totally different character. You shouldn’t do that because emotionally it disrupts concentration. But it was important for us to make you experience how different human beings live in totally different worlds. So we had to make you really identify with somebody, with his dreams, with his sorrows, and then tear you from him and throw you to somebody else to discover a totally new point of view.

GELMAN-MYERS: The press kit uses the phrase “tragic consequences of enemies living as neighbors.” I think that’s an unfortunate phrase.

COPTI: People perceive themselves as enemies because they’re so segregated from each other. And because of the context – Jews and Arabs – they are enemies. Even in Israel Arabs and Jews are friends, they work together, they go out and buy from each other in the market, sometimes they marry each other, but the big picture is that we are enemies.

GELMAN-MYERS: Is there a solution?

COPTI: In the Technion [Institute of Technology], a professor told me, “Everything has a solution.” So there is a solution, of course. There are millions of ways to end this thing. Everybody has his own way, but eventually there’s no other way to do it.

GELMAN-MYERS: Was there a political motivation in doing this film?

COPTI: Yes, of course.

SHANI: Yeah, it’s political, it’s social…

COPTI: It depends on what you mean by “political,” but for me, it was also a lot of self-criticism about my own community in Ajami. A chance to mirror ourselves and see ourselves from the outside without trying to put the blame on others; to take responsibility. Because usually when you are living in such a situation where you’re being oppressed all the time, you say, “OK, it’s not me. It’s them. They are bad. They are doing this to me. I cannot change anything. I don’t have any control over my life. I blame them.” I take away the responsibility from myself and I forget that the life I’m living is not normal. It’s not normal that kids on the street talk about crime and guns as if they were talking about surfing. So this movie was a chance for me to try to explore and to see and to try to understand myself and the life I’m living and ask: “How did we get to this point?” When I had the chance to re-create this reality inside a movie and to show it to others, it was important for us to photocopy reality, not try to victimize any of the sides, or beautify, or patronize anybody, or judge anybody. It’s reality as we see it. Not the whole reality, of course, but it’s a part of the reality as both of us see it. And now, take it!

SHANI: It’s like chunks of reality from different perspectives. Everybody understands reality in a different way. We wanted to give the stage to one character’s point of view without judging him, without patronizing him, without victimizing him, to let him speak to the world and show what he believes in, then go to another character.

GELMAN-MYERS: To give him a voice.

SHANI: Yeah, exactly.

COPTI: Yeah, exactly, you said it right. Because this movie really gave pride to the people of Ajami. They’re really proud of themselves. This is our story, and now our voice can be heard. And forget the movie…there’s a big discussion in Jaffa and other mixed towns in Israel about what has to be done. A lot of questions that were never asked. A lot of questions that had the answer, “Yeah, it’s occupation. Yeah, it’s racism.” But now people are saying, “OK, we don’t forget the big problem, but how do we solve the small problems between us” …you know, like questions that we raised in the movie, the relations between the cops, the Israeli police, and the Arabs – questions that people are talking about now. Because it’s a dilemma. The Israeli police represent the government, which has racist laws. But we are hurting each other, and maybe we should, I don’t know…

GELMAN-MYERS: Figure something out.

SHANI: Yeah. Nobody has the answers, but now people are asking the questions, which is one of the first stages in the solution and a kind of solution itself. In the stages of liberation, one of the first stages is to understand that you don’t have a good life, that your life can be better. Oppressed people think, “OK, I will be a cab driver. Why? Because Indians are cab drivers in New York. So I’ll be a cab driver.” And this movie opened up something. I can hear it in the street, I can hear it in schools and high schools where I go and meet people. So this is amazing.

GELMAN-MYERS: That is amazing. Congratulations.