The two Asian-American women to our left had come from San Jose to Berkeley’s Greek Theater because the brother of one, who was boyfriend to the other, had been a great fan of the evening’s headliner; and the women knew, if he had not died six months before, he would have been at the concert. In fact, they believed him there now. Each held his photograph to contemplate, while they smoked the joints through which the music reached them, beneath the chill, grey, starless sky.
Choosy Beggars: 2012
Comments on the debates and/or the election by Bernard Avishai, Robert Chametzky, Benj DeMott, Carmelita Estrellita, Ty Geltmaker, Eugene Goodheart, Allison Hantschel, Casey Hayden, Christopher Hayes, Bob Levin, Barack Obama, Jedediah Purdy, Theodore Putala, James Rosen, Nick Salvatore, Aram Saroyan, Frederick Smoler, Scott Spencer & Patricia Williams.
Double Truth-Teller
Rachel Swarns, American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama (New York, 2012)
The Real Deal
Michael Grunwald, The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era (New York, 2012)
Conventional Thinking
The presidential nomination convention season always reminds me of tripping over Governor Lawrence.
Only Love is Radical
The author wrote this brief Movement memoir in advance of participating in the upcoming conference at the University of Minnesota on the 50th anniversary of The Port Huron Statement [http://www.lsa.umich.edu/phs].
I was a child of small town Texas, and of a single parent mom, a feminist. We were poor closet liberals. Austin was my mecca. I excelled there, in the late fifties, and morphed into an existentialist at a residential community of learning alongside The University, the only integrated housing on campus, both by gender and by race. We met in rigorous seminars with a collegium of renegade Christian ministers, headed by a chaplain from WWII who’d seen the carnage, demythologizing the church fathers and scriptures; studying the contemporary theologians
Dreams From Our Avatars
“You should be asking what his wife thinks of him.” That was Bob Dylan last month stiffing a Rolling Stone interviewer who entreated him to endorse Obama or at least concede racism was at the root of right-wing rage against the President. Dylan’s evasions got me thinking about who he is now and how he became an American avatar. I’ve gone on to consider the aspirations of other pop artists who’ve dreamed big in the Age of Obama.
Solidarity in Alabama
Things are looking bad, but just hold on. There’s some good news from liberal prognosticators who’ve been staring into the future. The “relatively conservative white working class” is in decline! Women, Gays, Latinos, Asians, African-Americans, Singles, College Grads, and Digital Henry Fords are all compiling into a demographic wave that only needs one more decade to crest and wash the Tea Party, NRA, Baptists, and Republicans in general into the oblivion of a permanent minority.
Big Man & Sisters Under the Skin
“I won’t change my mind…Keep your hand on my thigh tonight!” That’s a line from the chorus of the echt Springsteen track of the past decade. But it’s not by Bruce.
Bringing It All Back Home
Robert Duncan, one of the key figures of the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the 1950s in which the Beat Generation surfaced, once said that he didn’t believe there was any such thing as a poet. What happened, Duncan said, was that every so often this or that man or woman became, in the process of composing a particular work, the poet. And when the work was done, so was the designation. In other words, the poet was a process one entered, not a title — not a noun but a verb. If one were to give Duncan’s idea historical application, one might say that whoever became the poet might come to stand for the particular time in which the designation fell to him or her. In the case of Allen Ginsberg, for instance, who first read “Howl” at the Gallery Six in San Francisco in the mid-fifties, the period would date from that reading into the early sixties, when he published “Kaddish,” a work of comparable power. Then, according to my personal chronology, a sort of hand-off took place, and the laurel wreath was passed to Bob Dylan, with Ginsberg’s personal blessing.
From Unger to Fulfillment
James Brown once wondered at anti-war protestors who headed for Canada in the 60s – they wanted out of the U.S.; J.B. wanted in. I’m reminded of the distance between him and them, when I try to take the measure of “hard” left disdain for Obama.
The Great Society
What follows are (slightly adapted) excerpts from Harrington’s play about “the unquiet presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson.”
The Unfinished and the Unknown
There was a time in my lifetime when an opposition to the economic inequality which fuels the Occupy movement’s fire had a significant champion in this land. But that was long ago, a fog-flogged far away – and burned with more fundamental fervor.
Demos & Generosity
This spring St. Francis College presented a forum on “the virtues of liberal democracy compared to its Islamic rivals.” Panelists were asked to respond to the argument in Ibn Warraq’s new book, Why the West Is Best. Paul Berman was one of the panelists and here’s a slightly adapted transcript of what he had to say. (Moderator Fred Siegel intervenes at one point in the course of Berman’s remarks.)
Lebron Gets It
I PROLOGUE
Lebron James has been a groundbreaking force in many ways, but who expected him to be in the forefront of the humanization of superstardom? A team player in all senses – even extending the notion to the NBA family of players – after seven years of Cleveland, he felt he needed someone to make the assist, help him carry the load. His buddy Dwyane Wade wasn’t quite enough last year, but this year, he found the perfect man; or, that man found him.
In Kevin Durant, whose calm self-effacing manner makes him a kind of anti-Kobe Bryant, James serendipitously was presented with the exact proper foil to carry him home without demanding that James trade too heavily on the alpha male aggression that he has seemed mysteriously to eschew.
Louis Reyes Rivera (1945–2012)
People are always talking about The Creator, meaning some great abstraction beyond ourselves for whom and to whom we give deference to if we don’t want to cop to God. (When we were in the organization we use to call our weapons “Gods” so you can understand the relativity of the term.) But for all our talk about the Creator, we rarely use that term for those moving among us whom we could concretely use that word to describe. And whose creations are knowable, tangible, though wonderful even if we could stand in a bar and have a beer with them. It is as if our familiarity with humanity downgrades its profundity. Like the only truly heavy stuff is what we don’t understand. Like the economy, what’s truly valuable is what we don’t have.