Political Bullshit

On July 25, 2006, New York State Democratic gubernatorial candidates, Tom Suozzi and Eliot Spitzer, participated in a televised debate held at the Schimmel Theater at Pace University. In his opening introduction, moderator Dominic Carter, explained that during the latter part of the hour-long debate, "we will end...with a series of lightning round questions where the candidates can only answer yes or no to the questions that I will ask them."

The audience, both at the Schimmel Theater and at home, would therefore be treated to the simplest of answers when it came to difficult questions. There would be no fuzzy unclear babbling on, no talking around an issue. The audience would accept only the most direct of answers.

On the contrary.

Take this exchange during the "lightning round," with Carter, the questioner, putting a rather complicated issue in front of Suozzi:

Q. Mr. Suozzi, can you achieve universal health care in the state — again, universal health care in the state — if you are elected governor?

SUOZZI. You want a yet or no for that?

Q. Yes or no.

SUOZZI. I can’t say I’ll try?

Q. Yes or no.

SUOZZI. Could I say —

Q. Yes or no.

SUOZZI. Uh —

Q. Yes or no, Mr. Suozzi.

The audience awaited an answer. Suozzi was essentially given two options. The first, the more rational, would be to admit that it would be a huge, near-impossible feat to provide universal health care to the state of New York, and that the least he could do would be to attempt, given the limitations of his power as governor, to implement such a system. Or, he could take the easy way out, the "political" way out, and answer that yes, he would succeed in providing universal health care.

SUOZZI. I’ll try. I can’t answer that.

Q. Yes or no, Mr. Suozzi.

SUOZZI. No.

Q. Mr. Spitzer?

SPITZER. Yes.

At this point the audience cheered, roaring in support of Spitzer's positive answer, indicating that what they indeed wanted was to be delivered empty promises by men in suits. What they wanted was some old school political bullshit.

Open Letters, Vol. 3

Dear People Who Sign Mailing Lists,

1) Have better handwriting.

2) Include your zipcode.

3) Use the standard address format: Name, address, apartment, city, state, zip. Please do not go all weird and throw your apartment number just wherever.

4) If your name is something like Riznia DiSpiczewicz, you already know how hard it is to spell your name, and therefore you should print accordingly.


Sincerely,

People Who Work with Mailing Lists

Righteous Baby

I should have guessed it. She's glowing with happiness, awash in love, writing songs like she never has before, with bright, wistful lyrics: "We can jump around like monkeys/after the paparazzi have gone home/having let go forever/of the phallacy of ever being alone." Ani Difranco announced on July 21, upon receiving the National Organizaion of Women's "Woman of Courage" award, that she and current boyfriend and "Reprieve" producer, Mike Napolitano, are going to have a baby in February 2007.

In 1995, I had a friend who decided she was a lesbian. Because of this temporary shift in her sexuality--she's dated men exclusively since then--she started buying Out Magazine. In the back pages of that summer issue of Out, there was an ad for a record called "Out of Range," by singer/songwriter Ani Difranco. We'd never heard Ani before--who knew what the music would sound like--but she looked, from the picture at least, like she was once of us.

We listened to that album a thousand times, driving oursevles around Chattanooga--surely a place where there were no other Ani fans at that time--our rollerblades in the trunk, drinking strawberry malts. The tape (Ani on cassette!) would turn over, playing one side after another, and we'd listen again and again to the same songs we'd heard not an hour before. There was a song called "Overlap," an acoustic ditty laid right in the middle of the record, so quiet and so powerful that it forced you to listen, and when you did it broke your heart. Ani sang "I build each one of my days out of hope, and I give that hope your name," as we drove to the top of Signal Mountain, where we hiked up and down the trails, off the trails, and swam ourselves silly (and cold and tired) at Rainbow Falls.

Later, after Dilate and Little Plastic Castle, my then-lesbian friend fell off the Ani bandwagon, (and Ani fell off the lesbian bandwagon, a place she never claimed to be anyway) but I've remained there ever since. I have all the records, even the odd one-offs and international releases. I have the stuff: people have given me the coffee mugs, the headshots, I have some clothing. None of it I really have any use for, but it's here. As evidence.

I've got so many bootlegs that I juggle the playlists to include not just my favorite songs, but my favorite performances of those songs: the never-released "One More Night," from that Rochester gig in 1992; "Independence Day" performed on the radio show Acoustic Cafe in 1997--I listened in my dormroom, laying in bed with my then boyfriend, it was my birthday; the 1999 version of "Firedoor" from the Stockholm show; "I Know This Bar" from that year's Falcon Ridge Festival; tons of stuff from the full-band years; and now, after "Evolve" and "Educated Guess," and "Knuckle Down," and more and more live recordings, I'm listening to the unreleased new stuff: "Round a Pole," "Alla This," and the slow, twinkling medley she's been playing in concert so often lately: "Red Letter Year/Star Matter."

Do you speak the same language?

What if I tell you that I've got 19 versions of "Shameless?" 17 versions of "Evolve?" 14 versions of "Gravel?"

Ani is one of those artists that seem so completely transparent in their work, like Tori Amos or Fiona Apple, whose rabid fanbase wants to own the musician like they own the records. I've long wondered when I might tire of seeing Ani in concert--not her performances, but the audience: the ridiculous teenage girls, the long-haired hippie children bouncing and swaying and screaming every word. It comes with the territory.

Already the pregnancy chatter on the message boards is ridiculous: "can you imagine what an amazing mother ani will make?" and "or how cuuute she'll look when she starts showing???!!" Ani speaks to the alienation, to the love, to the otherness, to the angry, invisible line between the personal and the political, and it's impossible sometimes not to see yourself in her.

In some ways, that was me--only without the technology, or the community of people to feel a part of. And I like to think that, for me, it's always been about the music. Back in 1995, in that white Buick Celebrity, tearing down Highway 58, the backseat full of towels wet with lake water, Ani sang "I know I can't be the only/whatever I am in the room/so why am I so lonely/why am i so tired."

We stared our sunburned faces out the window and sang with her.

Incongruities...or something more?

--Listening to Brian Greene discussing String Theory while I fold my laundry.

--Working on the Circus Amok mailing list while watching the Barbara Streisand film Nuts.

--The Q101 bus refuses to arrive, it's late, it's later, and when it arrives, it's...empty.

An Inconvenient Truth

I have just returned from seeing what I've been referring to as "The Al Gore Movie," or as it is actually called, "An Inconvenient Truth." Aside from how important the film is--globally, nationally, locally--it is a shining, inspiring example of what can happen when a person with as much passion and (dare I say it) downright likeability, doesn't have to kowtow to the lowest common denominator to score votes, or to appear to fall somewhere in the middle.

I'm not sure how you make a 100-minute "slide presentation," as Gore calls it, as exciting as the movie is, but it works. And despite the material--global warming, ice caps melting, millions of refugees--the film feels less like doom and gloom than it does an impassioned call to action, from someone whose been calling for it since the before anyone knew what it all meant, or what it all implied.

There are the scenes of a young Gore, learning farmy stuff from his cattle-rancher father; a yearbook photo showing a bright eyed, nerdy Gore (not so different from the Gore we know today,) during his impressionable school years; the scenes of Gore walking through airport security--alone, which I doubt occurs very often--carrying his laptop, working away on his Keynote software, tweaking the presentation here and there, in hotel rooms, in Lincoln Town Cars. But it doesn't feel like political blather. It feels genuine. And there's nothing in the movie but him talking.

Certainly President Gore (had things gone another way) could never have made a film like this--full of ideas, impassioned pleas for understanding, critical of big business. He talks of the disappointment in 2000. He's emotional, he's vulnerable. It's like he's finally found himself. But, watching the footage of him in the late 80s, the early 90s, it would appear that he was always this exciting. Who knew?

Play It as It Lays

I'm reading Joan's second novel, Play It as It Lays, for what must be the tenth time, or more. "What makes Iago evil? some people ask. I never ask," is how it begins.

A few paragraphs later, this appears:

"NOTHING APPLIES, I print with the magnetized IBM pencil. What does apply, they ask later, as if the word "nothing" were ambiguous, open to interpretation, a questionable fragment of an Icelandic rune."

Then this:

"I try not to think of dead things and plumbing. I try not to hear the air conditioner in that bedroom in Encino. I try not to live in Silver Wells or in New York with Carter. I try to live in the now and keep my eye on the hummingbird. I see no one I used to know, but then I'm not just crazy about a lot of people. I mean maybe I was holding all the aces, but what was the game?"

Some of What You Can Have Delivered at 11:00pm in My Neighborhood

Souvlaki
Moussaka
Penne Polo Pazzo
Baklava
Carne Asada
Chorizo
Sopes Cesina
Cabeza
Chilaquiles con Huevos Estrellados
Nopales
Halloumi
Lahmajun
Guayaki Yerba Mate
Puro Turco
Milanesa
Pasha Mundo
Coxinha
Bimbimbop
Chirasi
Tekkadon
Gyoza
Sunomono
Negimaki
Kimchi
Burek
Pastichio
Taramasolata
Tzatziki
Takuwan
Pad Mee
Tom Kha
Larb
Mee Grob
Pla Tod Kateem
Num Tak
Rad Naa
Seftalia
Zalatina
Keftedes
Loukaniko
Kaseri
Insalata di Mare
Pilatte di Pesce
Lengua a la Plancha
Chow Mei Fun
Aloo Gobi
Chana Poori
Shag Ponir
Sujbzi Jalfrazi

Still Working

I actually have been working on my new novel, somewhat secretly. If the first book is say, a piece of shiny sheet metal, I'm trying to make the next one like brocade velvet. Not stuffy, not overdone, just richer on the tongue.

It's kind of a wreck right now, in some ways. But I like that about how novels take shape. I like to see how the strangeness first emerges, then it's not so strange, then eventually it works. This part is somewhere in between those first two things:

She masked off some squares, six or eight small sections she could surely do without tiring. She pushed some paint around on a piece of wood—a makeshift palate that she preferred over anything formal—and the blue mixed with the darker blue until she had what she wanted. At one time she could paint the tiny squares without tape or even a straight edge, perfect straight lines that defied logic (and enraged the critics.) She was famous for it. But, like other things, that skill vanished with menopause. Specifically the patience. Or maybe she gained another kind of patience—and what she let go of was the need to paint everything freehand, of having to prove that she was a good painter. Getting older doesn’t really change you; you simply exchange one thing for another. Ambition for confidence, vigor for exactitude. You learn a new kind of precision—with words, with relationships (if you’re lucky,) and with your art. In her thirties—no, before that, her twenties, the loud years before Daniel—there was a kind of circular drive: you have to show them that you’re a great painter, and so you become a great painter; they want to believe you’re a great painter, so with their help you become successful; they want to believe that great painters still exist. Art is a closed community, full of all the shit you see on nature shows: cannibalism and infanticide. But—if you could manage it—what it all boiled down to was, thankfully, the pure solace that comes from one tiny square after another. Pushing the brush into a puddle of color. Blue against dark blue. Darker still until it is nearly black. Until it shines like a crow in the late day sun.

I Saw a Pigeon Eating Puke

That's all. I just thought someone should know.

4th of July

Today, as I write this, at my parents house in Chattanooga, people are arriving for their annual 4th of July breakfast event. My dad says this year he expects about 175. He always makes the joke during his short welcome speech that the party goes on "whether I live here or not." People laugh. They raise a flag, parade around the block, then everyone eats. This is after prizes are given out for the best costumes, of course--everyone comes dressed in red, white and blue. Some people overdo it--crazy hats, ridiculous outfits, stars and stripes in every conceivable concoction. Those people are rewarded.

When I moved to NYC and tried to explain the event to people here, I realized how genuinely original and somewhat bizzare the whole thing is. "Do you grill hot dogs?" they ask. "No, it's breakfast." "And how many people do you have?" "And people just show up?" The looseness seems to make them uncomfortable. They can't configure a celebration without booze.

What also makes them uncomfortable, I gather, is the honesty of the event. It's not a commercial enterprise, it's not sponsored, it's not the Macy's Fireworks Spectacular. It's just an idea my dad had twenty-something years ago. Neighbors invite their out-of-town guests, they bring the new grandchildren, the old folks who rarely leave the house, the fire department brings a big red truck for all the kids to sit on. The antique car club rides their rides down the street to lead the parade. We've been in all the local papers--now just one paper--for many years. I remember feeling nonchalant about having my family on the front page, in color, all decked out, smiling in the yard.

There are hundreds, perhaps a thousand, pictures of the party all over the place. In some ways, every picture looks the same. Some years ago, I attempted to make sense of the stacks of pictures, shoebox after shoebox. It was impossible. How old are the Mackey's children? Is my grandmother still alive? You spread all the pictures around you and look for those signs. Did my dad build the railing five years ago, or six? Old mailbox or new? What color is whats-her-name's hair?

I miss the parties. I'm going next year.