Author: kid oakland

These faces make me think of  so many things…

friends, co-workers, classmates, people I have known here in the Bay Area who came to the city to make their way in the world….people I might someday have met….and now, likely won’t.

They are us.  And by “us” I do mean all of us.  All of us in this small world of ours…

and if we are ever going to turn back this tide of terror, I am convinced it will be because the majority of “us” decide to reach out and define a new “we”….a new kind of brotherhood and sisterhood…

a new equality of compassion and respect…

and it will be because those lured into tolerating the mindsets of terror, the mindsets of hate and of war, will look into the eyes of those we have lost and see themselves.

Peace to you.

That much is true.

I’m currently playing the first video game I’ve purchased in years: Winning Eleven 8…a Japanese Soccer Sim….and before that, last January I guess, I finally completed Final Fantasy X, a Japanese Role Playing Adventure game, after…uh…about two and one half years, and 140 hours of game time.  So I’m old and slow and nerdy.  Kill me.

What does this have to do with anything?

Well, I was going to a family get together a few years back and had purchased a video game magazine in the airport….
and when I got home it was just hanging out randomly by my bedside one morning…

and one of my sisters passed by, saw it, and gave me the eyebrow.  You know, the EYEBROW.

You see, there was this HUGE-boobed cartoon woman staring out of the magazine.  Some kind of “Red Sonja”-with-a-sword gal….who…uh…was actually a playable character in a game that…ergh…I’ve also completed:  Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance.  

Background:  I grew up in what I guess folks would now call a feminist household.  Nothing fancy.  My mom and my dad just believed in the, gosh, radical notion, that women should have equal rights…that my sisters and I should see each other as equally capable of doing or being whatever the hell we wanted to do or be.  We were probably on some level…a low level…influenced by radical academic feminists…and on a higher level Dr. Spock and Dr. Suess and Sesame Street and, more importantly, my grandmothers and aunts who had fought like Hell through the first half of the century to define womanhood as something more than cooking, doing laundry, raising children and saying “yes, sir.”

Again, so kill me.

So, I guess part of my family’s feminist shared “ethos” comes down to what you might call….I guess…”white, middle-class, bourgeois” notions of what acceptable depictions of women AND men are…well, that mixed with my parents more impoverished and religious (read “old fashioned decency”) background and the media environment we kids grew up in.

And let’s just say, simply put,  that Baldur’s Gate is a juvenile, raging-id, rejection of that “surface standard”.  The women in the game have huge boobs.  Their boobs jiggle.  They kill things.  Everyone kills things.  But regardless…the whole thing was both, uh, offensive on some level and moreover, juvenile…in the extreme…and uh….male-oriented…so sadly and pathetically male-oriented that I cringe at it for what it says about some large realm of my subconscious.  

(But not that much, friends…come on, I’m not insane…a cringe is a cringe.  I mean, I have not burned my copy of Baldur’s Gate, I know who I am, it’s a basically fun game…and, whatever….the whole thing IS ludicrous on so many levels.)

So…when my sister gave me the EYEBROW all these thoughts went coursing through my head.  But the core one would be this:

We’re on a new adventure in my family….I’ve got two nieces and a nephew…and I have some responsibility to enunciate what kind of world I would like to make for them, all of them…in conjunction with my sisters, their husbands and my parents…and building on the legacy of those who’ve come before.  I for one, hope that feminism’s promise has something to do with that world…and I hope it would influence how I present to them as their uncle…all of them…as an example of a man and a person and a friend.

Because for me feminism isn’t about women…or children…it’s about all of us.  It’s about what roles we embrace..and what assumptions influence every last thing we do…and it’s about, on some level…despite all the BS spewed by whiny insulting sophistic airheads the last few days… EXACTLY why we are at war in Iraq right  now.

Why does Cowboy George Bush make folks feel safe?  Why was war the answer?  Why did they make fun of John Edwards by calling him the “Breck Girl?”  Why does GWB strut and talk like he does?  And why do his daughters giggle and dress up totally “debbed” out?

So no.  The huge-boobed fighting woman is not the biggest barrier our kids face…to put it lightly.  There are bigger issues.  Thousands of them.  But they are all interwoven in basic issues that feminism addresses because feminism, at the end of the day, is NOT just about women, or some small little topic to be relagated to a new blog…it’s about changing the world by empowering all of us to live in a new way, free from the BS of old patterns and roles, even as those patterns and that history surrounds us on all sides.  

At the end of the day, feminism is about how the assumptions about gender we take for granted shape the world we live in. It’s about how the blinders that shape how we see things…man/woman…war/peace…are actually prison bars that lock us in. And the way we find this out is often to get called on it, to get criticized. Especially us men.  I mean, sometimes the only way us guys see how BULLSHIT out mindset is…well…is for someone to give us the EYEBROW and point it out to us…to say, “hey, that’s not ok.”

So, what happened, you know…after my sister’s EYEBROW.?

Well, in different cultures and contexts I know that large breasted fantasy warriors like Sheena / Red Sonja might be cool…might be funny and empowering even…but not in my parent’s house that day…

and, more importantly, and this IS the point I’m getting at…it says more about the respect I have for my sister as a woman, as a parent and as my friend and ally….that when she gave me the EYEBROW…

I put the goddam magazine away.

River Hall was a dorm for misfits, rebels and outcasts on 114th Street across from St. Hilda’s and St. Hugh’s private school for girls and boys.

Under the labyrinthine dorm policies of Columbia College of Columbia University there was almost no chance of anyone ending up in River before their Junior year….which was why most ‘river rats’ were disaffected veterans of a variety of underclass dorms that either, like Carman and John Jay, put these delicate souls through the “normative” ringer….or, in the case of the more savvy, and lucky, “indie” kids…time well spent in Ruggles, McBain or the legendary H__ off 121st and Amsterdam. (god, I hope I remembered that right.)

River residents were called rats I guess, among other good reasons, because in order to get to the dorm one had to walk past a chain link fence that served only to block access to an empty lot that consisted of a two-story high chunk of Manhattan schist which, particularly on rainy nights, served as a playground for legions of Norwegian rodents…
If there was one moment which defined River it was the midnight fire drills that plagued the dorm, a former SRO cum “suite-style” living arrangement…let’s just say the fire department paid a visit to River about once a month.

Bathed in the lights of fire trucks and the headlamps of NYC’s finest fire fighters the aggregate population of River would get to meet up.  At 3AM.

Gay and straight.  High, tweaking, stoned, raging on midnight espresso and soberly half-asleep.  Those with new lovers, those stuck with the old.  Those who, um, found themselves most often, or always, alone.  All of us poured out into the street half-clothed like the cast of a crowd scene in a non-existent music video for They Might Be Giants…a sea of hard-scrabble vaguely punk kids around twenty years old…none of whom “fit in.”

Some folks…you may have heard of…musicians, djs, poets, academics, activists, lawyers, web designers, moms and dads.  Others it would be great if you had heard of them…but alas it’s unlikely that you have.  Folks whose bands, whose writing…whose varied work just hasn’t made it out there yet and maybe never will.  But there is something about that “we”…the kids who had the annual punk mosh party in the basement of the dorm, for, uh, ourselves…the kids whose voices and flavor reeked of the sound of “indie” music and cigarettes, who, after growing up in the listless seventies and under “Ronnie” Reagan in the 80’s, and who in the 90’s of the Bush the First’s Gulf War, were about to get defined, for better or worse, in the media response to Richard Linklater’s movie, Slacker, as….puke….Generation X.

I guess I realize now, on some level…who we were.

The cynical non-joiners, the ones too disaffected to strike the “ironic” pose and who fled to the farthest corner of the University…the agnostics, the anarchists and the true believers…the ones who sought out an alternate path…the goofy plush toy fetishists…those who’d been rejected and ostracized…those who’d been privileged enough to know that they didn’t want “in.”  The wearers of black T-shirts with a pink triangle that said “Silence = Death”…the haggard stragglers on the uptown 2 at 5AM from the downtown…the readers of Roland Barthes…the hollow-eyed late-night diner denizens…smart kids who just needed a break from campus norms.

Every university, every community has this space.  A spot for the outsiders.   A voluntary community defined by its negatives, by its rejection of the absolute bullshit of the status quo.

Frank Zappa called us freaks….and embraced the term.  

Some of us became, like indie-heroes Sonic Youth and the Beastie Boys, proponents of a new kind of “indie” entrepeneurism…some moved to Williamsburg…some moved, ahem, back home with mom and dad for a spell….some got hooked on smack, some, thank god, kicked…but if there’s anything that summed this moment up, any artifact for that generation, of that time, in my view, it would be the music of the band the Pixies.   Howling, raging, soft, then focused…the essence of the Pixies was this:  I’m gonna tell you just how I feel.  I’m gonna be who the fuck I am.

That resolute naked honesty means something.  When the chips are down, it’s good to know that someone has been standing howling the truth naked in the street all along.

Why does any of this have to do with anything?

Well, every once in awhile there comes a moment where the relevance of those ragged outsiders becomes suddenly relevant.

Every once in awhile regular folks start to puke on the crap they get fed by the machinery of power…cultural, political and religious.

Every once and awhile the freaks have their say.

And, quite often, it’s when the face of power has reached the point of becoming a sort of all-encompassing mask.  When the face of the dominant paradigm has become a predictable incantation of rigid norms…a face that seeks, like a greedy ancient god, to devour not just its standard brainwashed share of the populace, but all of us in its spell.  Sometimes there comes a point when entrenched power oversteps its bounds and tries to quench the “human” itself, when it tries to redefine the world to reflect its sick, greedy, dominating and hypocritical ways…when, as in the painting by Goya, Saturn devours its young.

In a word, when assholes like George W. Bush and Tom DeLay have their way for too long….and when folks start to choke on the lies and the smarmy and the vicious half-truths…when the “normal” gets to seem like too much even for those comfortably ensconced in its grip.

Well, at times like this, it’s time for “the freaks” to stand together….to raise our voice….to assemble our disaffected yet true-believing ragged band of outsiders…and reach out like we’ve done before…

from Diderot to Bob Dylan…from Mary Wollstonecraft to Audre Lorde…from Ralph Ellison to Ani DiFranco…

it’s time, once again, to fly our flag.  

(ph. credit Declan McCullagh.)

{this diary appeared as a late night Saturday piece on both dKos and LSF….I submit it here for your weekday pleasure and highly recommend checking out:

indiepoprocks! on somafm.com for a complementary soundtrack.   kid o.}

We Democrats, we Progressives, have…and I hate this term but use it anyway…a “nuclear option” too.  Everybody knows it…and folks joke about it from time to time, but maybe as we slide into Bush’s second term and witness the GOP’s unabashed power grab in DC it’s time to make “the joke” something a little bit more serious.

All those folks who talked about “moving to Canada” last November were onto something…they just had the wrong country.  If we on the Left want to avail ourselves of our “nuclear option” to wrest power back from the right wing Neanderthals who thumb their noses at us from the Beltway as if they OWN this country, as if they had MONOPOLY on power, we have to begin to talk about moving to America….to New Mexico, to Montana, to Colorado, to South Dakota…to Wyoming, to Arkansas, to North Carolina, to Iowa, to Kentucky…and even, ahem, Ohio.

You get the picture.  Here’s how that might work…and why this idea is one whose time has perhaps come…
It’s 2005 and the huge wave of Baby Boom retirements has already begun.  On top of which, public school systems in our large cities are under enormous stress…such stress that life for public school teachers in our big cities has become almost impossible…owning a home in the Bay Area?  Home ownership in creative centers like New York and San Francisco have “priced out” many of the artists, teachers and folks who give those cities their flavor and allure.

Even without a single ounce of political motivation, there are urban retirees and young families, teachers and health professionals, and artists and creative professionals… looking for large and small communities located just outside our metropolitain zones.  Communities with an infrastructure of historic architecture, well built homes, civic amenities and which provide close contact with both neighbors and the outdoors, with the cycle of the seasons, and, in this era of Whole Foods, Peet’s Coffee and DSL…all the organic goodness and tech-connectedness that folks have come to expect in the digital age.

Cities like Petaluma, California….or Red Wing and Winona, Minnesota…or Holyoke Massachusetts.

All this trend needs…to have a huge impact on the political infrastructure of our nation…is to turn its eyes to states and Congressional districts that are much closer to “flipping” to our side than anyone really realizes.  ie. To “Red” states.  And far from being a zany and idealistic proposal for starry-eyed idealists…

I’m actually talking about BUYING our Democracy back with ownership and private property, with joining the tax base and civic participation, with…ahem…the hard work of real estate developers and “our” kind of chain stores…of bringing a Martha Stewart touch to places that are MUCH CLOSER to a “Martha Stewart vision” than most people think…of creating our own answer to Sam Walton…a kind of Ben and Jerry’s in the Heartland.

And, while I am making this point heavily tongue-in-cheek…I’m not joking.  Why not do this?

There is too much Democratic money and votes locked up in our big cities and states…and one of the lessons of 2004 is that we can’t stay in our enclaves and “donate” our way out of this mess… perhaps it’s time to do it the old fashioned way, the American way, and start to BUY our way out of it.

• by building retirement developments across the West and Rocky Mountain States
• by investing and developing in attractive communities in States that not currently “favoring” our side.
• by getting groups of families and disgruntled teachers and professionals and looking seriously at building “new paradigms” in attractive quality-of-life regions that folks might not have thought about before…purple zones.
• in sum, by starting a rolling wave of “Volvos and espresso machines” aimed square at the heartland of this nation.

If we do this together.  If we do this as a part of a “wave”…then no one will actually be doing it “alone.” Many, many states and districts would be enormously impacted by this kind of interior immigration.

Hell, I even have a non-PC Reaganesque name for this proposal, in honor of those racist vigilantes patrolling our Southern borders at the moment.  We can call it the New Pilgrim Project.  (please don’t, however…for obvious reasons.)

At any rate, as a determinedly urban Democrat.  And as someone who is committed to sharing community with neighbors of all income levels and backgrounds…I know that this proposal is fraught with contradictions and inconsistencies.  In some ways, the very people who SHOULD be moving to small towns…the working poor families with kids who are caught in our urban public school systems…can’t.

And I also know that the small and medium towns of America are much different places than most people think…with waves of Latino immigration in recent years that have truly changed the face of the heartland in ways most urban folks don’t realize.  Further, small towns are home to citizens who’ve lived in community for generations and who would be quite resentful of simply being “bought out” of someplace their families have lived in and built up over our nation’s history.  In some ways, it is the long standing urban poor who have the most in common with folks in small towns, even though they often vote differently.

Nevertheless, it is important to point out that we do have a “Nuclear Option” (what a repugnant phrase) that the GOP does not have.

There are piles of Democratic votes and money and energy that gets focused into redundant counties and cities….that could, with a simple change in point of view, be directed elsewhere.  And have the side benefit of ownership of a three bedroom historic home with wood floors.

You can pick the state or region.

New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, Arkansas, South Dakota, Virginia.   10,000, 40,000, or 100,000 new voters would have an impact.

We need to seriously begin to talk about this.  It makes sense economically…and culturally this trend is already well established..however mostly within states that are ALREADY heavily Democratic.  ie. Folks move from NYC to…uh..Vermont, or the Catskills or Western Mass.

If someone told you that they had a deal that was high quality of life, financially beneficial, allowed you to participate in building something exciting and new…AND contributed to wresting power back from the GOP in DC.  Wouldn’t you at least give it a listen?

For what it’s worth, I could envision a movement that aimed to move not just those who were “well off” from cities and urban regions…but those who weren’t as well.  A for-profit/non-profit alliance that would truly change the face of rural American small towns forever, by moving folks of ALL backgrounds and income levels into the heartland.

And to all those Right wing…abuse the system…threaten the “nuclear option” zealots who’ve run out proud nation into the ground these last decades…we can proudly look them in the eye and remind them:

We’re American citizens too.  We can move where we want, buy property where we want, make affiliations how we want, work how we want and vote how we want….

and the logical consequence of the GOP taking the Federal system and shoving the coincidence of their fake “majority” down our throats is that at some point we would say enough.

At some point we start to fight back the old fashioned way.

At some point we would BUY our country back.

{cross posted at Liberal Street Fight, which is still working through some funkiness, but is, as always, well worth a look!}

The Great American Music Hall is one of those venues that with its combination of gilded ambiance, storied history and spooky atmosphere….creates a kind of off-the-grid node, a super-charged creative space, that adds something intangible to whatever goes on there.  The Hall is at once emblematic of the city of San Francisco…just off the seedy corner of O’Farrell and Polk streets at the entrance to the Tenderloin…and at the same time, it is, like the best clubs, quite literally another realm entirely, another world, someplace you step into…a place of magic.

For a long time now, it’s been a club where acts play on their way up.  One of the last stops on the small club circuit on the way to bigger halls, bigger venues, greater reknown.  It’s the kind of venue that, when a friend says…”I may have a free ticket to see this guy, at the Great American Music Hall”…you go.

Matt Ward is a singer-songwriter known as M. Ward.  I’d never heard of him.  My buddy J. was shocked at this.  “You can’t be serious.”  

Of course, I was.  Mildly claustrophobic veteran of many live shows that I am…my finger is currently about five beats behind the musical pulse of my generation, that group of kids they used to call X a long time ago before that moniker, like us, grew too old for that shit.  

J. and I were sitting after work in a downtown Oakland bar at 7PM…and he was explaining to me that M. Ward was a show I didn’t want to miss.  Is he like Dan Bern, I asked?  `No,’ J. replied…’Dan Bern wants to be Dylan, M. Ward wants to be Tom Waits.’  Ahhh…

So J. called P. to find out if she had that free ticket.  She did.  P. would leave it for me with her friend T. at a bar next to the Roxie on 16th street…if we could make it there.  So J. and I jumped on BART, got off at Civic Center…jumped into the waiting VW van of J’s friend G. and drove to the bar where I proceeded to futiley ask folks if they were “P’s friend T.”…….before I broke down and called T.’s cell phone.  T. was standing right next to me…looking down, he saw my strange phone number on his caller id and said to his friend…”Who the fuck is this?”    When I volunteered, `Me’, he smiled and proferred the ticket.  And like that, I was in.

Like all modern music clubs, getting into the Great American Music Hall requires a kind of running of the gauntlet.  Rules and regulations delivered by stern-faced, seen-it-all employees who can barely hide their disdain for you…which of course is really misdirected BS because in all likelihood if they didn’t work there….they would BE you…I  mean, they like the music too.  At any rate, once inside the Hall, you see that it really IS a music hall…the kind of small entertainment venue that preceded and then flourished during the vaudeville era.  A gilded palace with human scale.  A Globe theater.  An Odeon.  The kind of place that feels like Mozart would have happily produced `the Magic Flute’ for a cheering 18th century populace….or, earlier, Ben Jonson might have seen one of his masques performed.

The show was sold out.  As my eyes adjusted to the darkness…I surveyed the crowd.  They were me and I was them.  A teeming throng of college-educated, largely white bread kids, creative professionals in their twenties and thirties hungry for music that they’d loved and listened to on their iPods for months.  Nervous.  Self-conscious.  Well-behaved.  Friendly.  Looking at each other but never, ahem, really making eye contact.  Hanging out.

Everyone in this crowd, including myself….was sporting meaningful signifiers of a certain type…a faded ball cap, a tattoo, a cool t-shirt, vintage sneakers, a pair of courderoys.  Which was fitting, because when the lights dimmed for the main act…and M. Ward took the stage, a lone figure with a vintage guitar in the spotlight…he was basically a guy in a sweater and a blue baseball cap pulled tight over his eyes.  He was “us” too.

M. Ward can really play acoustic guitar.  If you are into that, go see him if you can.  For all the thousands of guitar-playing American kids holed up in basements and apartments with roommates…for all those duffers strumming on porches littered with beer cans…out of those brilliant souls who’ve turned humble open mic nights into something memorable and unforgettable…or even those urban legends like Flathead or Satan who’ve given their music away for free on streetcorners the world over…M. Ward really is something special when he sings and plays guitar, he has that lyrical touch that folks have been rumoured to sell their souls for.

He’s young and gifted, and has a voice that oozes mood. And, yeah, in that he’s like Dan Bern being like Dylan…like Tom Waits or Nick Cave.  But let’s face it, Dylan and Tom Waits were being like somebody else themselves…Spider John, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong…but on the way there, like all artists, they became something significant in their own rights…for us and with us…in conjunction with their audience.  That’s how it works, and, if you ask me, how it always has.

There were moments, however, in that crowd of fans reverently swaying their heads, holding on to every note with a silence that was eerie, when I realized that the thread of the music being played was already older, more ancient and more venerable than when Alan Lomax pushed `record’ on his reel-to-reel sitting in front of Leadbelly (and then copyrighted it…the ultimate `crossover’)…moments where I found that, for myself, I couldn’t just give myself to the songs without getting all wracked up with self-conscious distractions relating to the audience and the musician himself.  Moments where I wished I was in New Orleans where there’s eye contact and head-nodding in the crowd and where the acknowledgment of the past is explicit and forms a continuum that’s larger than even the best artists.

Authenticity is the craw in the maw of “our generation.”  It’s awkward.  And, if you ask me, that’s just the way it is, too, and the way it’s gonna be.

But there were also moments, like the intial acoustic number….or the encore where he did a langourous cover of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance, a cover that powerfully reinvented and deepened the song…where the conjunction of the venue, the artist, and the crowd created something memorable and pure.  Something hypnotic and new.  

And that’s fitting.  Because, for all his folkroots nods, M. Ward belongs to David Bowie’s generation…our post-modern one.  And in that context, he, like Bowie, is driven, creative…committed to bringing his own personal vocabulary out and sharing it any way he can.  Experimenting with one goal in mind…making a connection with his listeners…like artists have for as long as people have sung songs…conveying something of his private self in order to draw that out of his audience, so that for one moment…like in the awkward silence at the Great American Music Hall the other night…something is created that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

essay © 2005 paul delehanty / kid oakland

published as well at Liberal Street Fight, which is having some technical difficulties at the moment.

[promoted to the front page by BooMan]

I was driving up Alcatraz Avenue…it’s a long east / west street that ends near my house and leads down to the San Francisco Bay.  From where I live, the street itself frames Alcatraz island and the Golden Gate Bridge…a view most of us here just take for granted.

Anyhow, I was driving up Alcatraz the other day when I saw a sight out of Fellini.  An  elderly woman was standing in the middle of the street with cars passing on either side…and she clearly did not know she was in the middle of the street…it was not clear she could even see much in front of her as she shuffled.

I stopped my car.

That stretch of Alcatraz is working class and poor, largely African-American.  It always bugs me how fast people drive through there…and how little they respect the cross walks, which is kind of a religious aspect to civic life in other parts of Berkeley and North Oakland.  It’s almost like folks see that stretch of Alcatraz as second class….not worthy of slowing down, or noticing a woman in the street.

But D_ was not walking in any crosswalk.  She was pretty much blind.  She had made her way, I later figured out, unattended from a senior center on a quest for some mints.  And, as I walked her to the side of the road, it was clear to me that D_’s grasp on where she was and how she was doing…was fading.

I walked her to the side of the street, and parked my car.  And when I rejoined her I tried to figure out where she’d come from.

D_was guarded.  Unclear.  She understood when I told her that she had been in the street and that that wasn’t good.  But, I could tell she hadn’t traveled far…and, for whatever reason…I guess sheer anger and frustration at her predicament, I decided that “what the hell” at the very least we would get her her mints…while I tried to figure how to get her home.

So we walked to the store a half block away and I asked about her life.  She has four sons.  One who looks in on her from time to time.  ‘Would she tell that son to make sure she doesn’t end up in the street like that again?’  I asked…..Yes, yes she would.

Did she have grandchildren?  She grabbed my arm harder.  ‘Do I ever have grandchildren.’  She said with pride.  Clearly, however, they weren’t coming to visit all that often.

When we got to the shop…two blocks from the senior center…I asked the shopkeeper if he had ever seen her.  He said no.  I told D_ to pick out the mints she liked.  And she told me to pick them out for her….standing not three inches from a rack of candy.  I realized that D_ could not see much of anything.

We got three bags of mints…with her money…handed over without any idea of how much she had given the man…and walked back to where I was pretty sure she lived.  (I was lucky that I was right about that, I guess.)

As we walked, D_ told me she was from Mississippi.  That she had come to California during the war, to help with the war effort, and stayed.  Oakland was where she had raised her family.  West Oakland was where she had lived her life.  I told her about my grandmother…92 years old…in Minnesota, how she liked mints too.

As we got closer to the senior center, her strength began to fade.  I saw two women with ID necklaces on…they didn’t seem too shocked to see me walking up with D_.  I guess they thought I was a    mobility counseler.  At any rate, when I told D_ that I saw the women with ID’s, she said…’My word, now I’ll be in trouble, I’m sure.’

I knew then that I had returned her to her home.  It’s a nice building.  A new building.  I can’t say whether D_’s escape reflects a one-time oversight….or a chronic failure.  I can’t say, and don’t choose to.

But when it came time to say goodbye…(the Care Center employees promised to take D_ to the nurse.)….D_turned to me and said, in all sincerity, “Thank you, it was so nice meeting you.”

And I realized that in all likelihood I was one of the last “strangers” D_ will ever meet, one of the last neighbors she will chat with about life and children, and where she’s from.  I felt a sense of pride that we got the mints…and failure in that she was returning to someplace that she really shouldn’t ever have left and someplace that cuts her off from the world of her neighbors.  I couldn’t help but feel that in “handing her over”…I was in some sense failing her, but doing what was necessary at the same time.

I wanted to tell D_, “God bless you,” which I guessed would mean something to her.  But all I could get out was…”It was nice to meet you too”…before I quickly turned away, hiding my face from the  women who blithely chided D_ for leaving and seemed nonplussed that I had helped her.

Did I feel sad for D…or guilty for living so far away from my own grandmother, and not visiting her all that often…or horrified at the prospect that I too might grow old and frail and have people talk to me like I was a child…and worse, talk about me like a child in my own presence…?  Did my sympathy for her come from the realization that I too might someday end up wandering blind in the middle of the street as younger people drove by?  I don’t know.

There’s no point to this story really.  But that is the point, in a way.  That’s life.  We’re born fragile and helpless…and we grow old to be frail and helpless…and we are all one step away from an accident or illness that might change our lives.

A blind woman made me see that, reminded me of that fact.

paul delehanty / kid oakland © 2005

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….

I coined the use of the terms:

oatmeal

and

sugar smacks….

In reference to two different types of diaries on dKos.  Oatmeal being the kind of upright, forthright decent citizen….a kind of John Proctor meets the Quaker oat man kind of figure….whose political writing matched that appearance.  Stolid, informative, earnest, wonky.

And…Sugar Smacks….well, we all know the frog here…it was about writing with humor, life, brio, a kind of insistance that we human animals like to pick the lice off each other once and awhile.  And, hey, that can be good too.

What the hell did I mean?  What was I getting at?  Did I even have an, ahem, political message…??
Hell yes I did.

At that time the recommended diary function had been put in…and everybody seemed to be writing the most earnest, tidy little essays in search of the glory of that elusive….uh….box.  In other words:

Everyone was coloring between the lines.

That’s bad politics.  Politics is more than policy.  More than formula.  More than one thousand dittoheads dittoing whatever in hell they choose to, or are told to, ditto that day.

In fact, few of the folks on this list would be there if they had lived a life of strict oatmeal.  It takes balance….it takes a recognition that we’re all human…

and any politics that is gonna succeed over the long haul has to balance the oatmeal with the sugar smacks.  Has to give folks a place to fly their flag.

And amen for that.

Politics is about community AND ideology.  The one without the other equals a very lonely and ineffective movement.  (and, yes, this IS a movement…and a moment.)

Years ago I stumbled into a Love drug store (one of the better store names ever) on Broadway after a night of political discussion and drinking during the Gulf War.  I forget the details of the conversation I had…at 4AM…with the woman at the cash register.

But the upshot was, whatever political dilemma it was I was asking / telling her about…that she so politely listened to…and put up with my intrusion…and my 20 year old confidence that everyone cared about whatever the hell was on my mind…ie. whatever BS I had to say to her…

she told me something whose import I remember to this day.  She said,

“I’ll tell you what I tell everyone.  I’ll tell you what I tell my kids.   You should do what makes you happy.  Everything else is bullshit.”

Aristotle would agree.  Oatmeal.  Sugar Smacks.  And a tube of toothpaste I bought at Love drugstore in New York city almost 20 years ago.  It was worth every penny.

In that spirit….best of luck to this blog…and all the others sprouting up in the blogosphere.  We’ve got work to do.  And we’re gonna have fun along the way.

When I was eighteen years old I met an older woman in Manhattan named Ellen.  Everyone who went to my university knew her.  She was a fixture.  Like Amir’s or Mama Joy’s deli or the Cosmo restaurant.  A small, quick-moving woman always carrying two or three heavily laden bags with a voice that was pure New York…distilled through years of cigarettes and bus exhaust.  Her voice was kind of a female equivalent to Lou Reed’s: smoky, knowing, world-weary.

Ellen was in her late forties.  Her politics were radical.  An advocate for the homeless.  A tireless debater.  An opponent of both Reagan and Bush and everything bourgeois.  She was an inveterate smoker.  Bipolar.  A mother of three.  A veteran of years of New York politics.  And, like tens of thousands of other New Yorkers in 1987,  Ellen had no place to live.  She slept where she could.  She, too, was homeless.

I’m a city kid.  I grew up in the Reagan 80’s.  Things were tough all over.  I worked in soup kitchens as a teen in the midwest.  People I knew sometimes passed through the line.  In Manhattan things were magnified.  On my stretch of Broadway early one morning I once counted twenty-four people sleeping in the space of one block.  Where other people, I’m sure, would see Ellen as a “bag lady” and nothing more.  I didn’t.  It’s never that simple.  My friend Karl, a minister’s son coming from the city of Detroit, knew this too.  He befriended Ellen and helped her out with food and a place to stay a couple times. It was through Karl that I met Ellen.

What is there to say about the endless coversations that Ellen and I had in diners all over the city?  (Tom’s. College Inn. The Mill. Vaselka’s. The Kiev. Leshka’s.  Chock Full o’ Nuts.)  I don’t know.  Ellen was a complex person.   She was someone I’d always hoped would get it together enough to write her own story.  Hell, I lent her my first electric typewriter (never to be seen again) the summer she found a room in an apartment off 126th and Lexington.  She wrote some great letters to me.  I still have them somewhere.

But that was so long ago.  A year and a half friendship, when you’re eighteen…leaves a mark, but also becomes in some ways a part of your past.  To be honest, there is no way I can speak for Ellen.  There is no way I can do her justice.  Her sense of humor.  Her sense of outrage.  Her way of interacting with the city.  It’s all mixed up in how I see New York, and in some ways, in how I see myself…

—————–

I would get calls.  It’d be 9:30 at night, or 7 in the morning.  Ellen might be at a diner somewhere.  She might be in the lobby of my building.  She might be freaked out at a hospital emergency room.  I’m not rich, but I always had six bucks for a cheap meal and a pack of cigarettes.  And I always learned something new from Ellen.  About life.  About politics.  About New York City and the people I shared it with.  So I’d go.

I’d meet Ellen at homeless encampments in the subway.  Herald Square.  Grand Central Terminal.  Or at Tompkins Square Park or a nearby squat.  New York was different then.  Maybe for some the eighties in New York meant glitz and flash.  It was also a dirty, crack-smoke-filled decade riven with ruined lives.  At one point, the New York Times reported that one in nine New Yorkers used cocaine on a daily basis.  From where I stood, that was totally believable.

Ellen was different.  She was, let’s face it, mentally ill, but she was also an incredibly smart and fierce observer and reader of the politics of the day.  She’d grown up in a prosperous family on the Upper East Side.  She’d had two different families.  Her grown sons did their best to care for her at times.  But they didn’t share her world…and didn’t join it.  And Ellen in some ways chose to live the way she did, however desperate and difficult that made her life and those who cared for her.

There is too much that Ellen taught me to convey here.  But if I could communicate one essential point it would be this.  No one has made as clear for me the connection between poverty and privelege that Ellen did.  At her best, she was able to bring humanity, to bring a face and a story to the very real people who found themselves homeless on the streets of New York.  She was also able to explain clearly how racism, how economic injustice and pervasive discrimination boxed people in and kicked them to the curb, forced them into lives where they were treated like human trash, and often ended up living a literal reflection of that.

White, middle class kids like me saw the world as “cause and effect.”  That was so easy.  So simple.  You make mistakes, you end up on the street, you end up poor and destitute.  Ellen was able to show me how privileged I was.  How when I made mistakes….and I did…they were forgiven…solutions were found.  She showed me how I saw the world through a lens that made judging other people a very comfortable thing to do.  How easy all my assumptions were.  How those assumptions always justified…at the end of the day…a course of action that I was going to take anyway.  The easy way.

But Ellen took it further than that.  Conversation by conversation, example by example…over endless cups of coffee….Ellen showed me how my privelege was actually linked to other people’s suffering, how in order for some to have plenty, plenty others had to have not much. It’s like the line to all the good things in life was six billion long, and I happened to be born (like Ellen herself) right up near the front…

I didn’t earn that.  No one does.  And there are times, asleep in my comfortable bed in California that I wake with a start.  I’m dreaming about a voice from my past.  A cigarette-fueled voice from New York City.  Someone with whom I’ve lost touch…someone I don’t know what happened to.  (I last spoke to Ellen in the early nineties when she was in the hospital for an operation.)

I’d call her my conscience, but that would be lying.  I’d call her a lost friend, and that would be closer to the truth.  But more and more I feel like there’s something specific to that voice that I can’t quite pin down.  On some level…it’s like New York City itself is speaking to me.  Telling me to open my eyes.  Telling me to wake up.

essay © 2005 paul delehanty / kid oakland