By Russell Shorto
March 26, 2007
Anger, like heat, has the power to sterilize. Of course, it also burns. Anger is a defining force: you might say that what you choose to do with your anger, or what it does to you, shapes who you are.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali has annealed her anger into so sharp and hard a blade that it has not only chiseled the features of her life but has cut a swath right around the earth, from Africa, where she was born and raised, to Europe, where she came of age and made history, to, now, the U.S. Her autobiography, Infidel, was published here in February and became a bestseller. As the title suggests, she has an almost pathalogical need to draw the ire of the Islamic world.
If Dickens had lived in the 21st century he would have lifted the trajectory of Hirsi Ali’s life for one of his characters. It starts under a talal tree in Somalia, where, shaded from the desert sun, her grandmother, who could make a basket from dried grass tight enough to carry water in, had her recite the lineage of their clan going back 300 years. At age five she was hoisted onto the kitchen table, her legs pulled apart, and a man who was probably “an itinerant traditional circumciser from the blacksmith clan” snipped out her clitoris and inner labia with a pair of scissors. As the family traveled from Mogadishu to Nairobi and then back to Somalia in the 1970s and 1980s, it was against a background of resurgent Islam. Hirsi Ali has nothing good to say about the faith into which she was born. Quran school was “mostly about Hell” and the torments there: “boiling water, peeling skin, burning flesh dissolving bowels…. These details overpower you, ensuring that you will obey.” Girls were taught that when they married “we must be sexually available at any time outside our periods, ‘even on the saddle of a camel,’ as the hadith says.” Her ma’alim, or teacher, beat her so hard that at one point he fractured her skull.
Her family arranged a marriage for her with a man who had emigrated to Canada, and shipped her off to him. Instead of changing planes in Frankfurt, she hopped onto a train bound for Amsterdam, and so began what she terms “my freedom.” As it happened, she stepped, in the summer of 1992, into about as different a world from Somalia as was probably possible to find. Green lawns and trimmed hedges were as freaky as Amsterdam’s red light district. Dutch tolerance was still operative. Refugees and pretend refugees (Hirsi Ali lied and told the authorities she was fleeing political oppression) lived in a bungalow village with a swimming pool and volleyball court, free medical care, even laundry service.
Continuing her knife-like movement through the late twentieth century, she quickly learned Dutch and enrolled in Leiden University, the Harvard of the Netherlands, where she got a live-in boyfriend and immersed herself in Voltaire, Rousseau and Marx, and felt her old self dying and a new one being born. “Meeting Freud,” she writes, with the clean declarative simplicity of a children’s book author, “put me in contact with an alternative moral system.”
She became a Somali interpreter for the Dutch government, and in this capacity became aware of a blind spot in the liberal European social consciousness. The Dutch had tried to fashion a system that gave refugees the protections of their vaunted social welfare system, but their zeal to protect the newcomers’ rights and customs had unintended consequences. African Muslims who had formed communities in Holland were performing ritual female circumcision on their daughters. The Dutch fulminated against the barbarity of the practice in Africa and the Middle East, Hirsi Ali noted, but it was happening all over their own country. Her writings and TV appearances on the topic, and on the broader situation of Muslim women, resulted in a leader of the Liberal Party (which is actually rather conservative in Holland) asking her to stand for parliament.
From the moment she won, she became a lightning rod for the fury of many Muslims in Europe. Far from watering down her notions in the time-honored manner of politicians, she forged a relationship with the controversial filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, and wrote a ten-minute film that he produced that gave graphic vent to her feminist rage at Islam (a woman who has been raped and beaten has her body covered with verses from the Quran). Then, in 2004, as a result of this little piece of outrage, came the act that brought Hirsi Ali to an international stage: a Moroccan man who lived in Amsterdam killed Van Gogh and, with a knife, pinned a letter onto his chest that said Hirsi Ali would be next. The murder of Theo Van Gogh became one of the signal events of post 9/11 Europe, which focused attention on a whole welter of interconnected issues: terrorism, resurgent Islam, American hegemony, secularism-versus-fundamentalism, third world immigration, European-style multiculturalism, national identity, tolerance, and fear.
Hirsi Ali stood right at the center. “60 Minutes” did a fawning profile of her. “Time” listed her as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The Dutch government issued her round-the-clock bodyguards. Her Dutch venture came to a head in 2006, when the immigration minister suddenly “discovered” that Hirsi Ali had lied in requesting refugee status (in fact, Hirsi Ali had been open about the lies she told for years) and declared that, as a result, she was never a Dutch citizen at all. The action sent the little country atwitter, with seemingly half of the population feeling embarrassed and bullied by her tirades against their traditions and taking a “we’ve had enough of Hirsi Ali’s crap” position, and the other half defending her right to speak her mind on issues that affected their country and, for that matter, the planet. Proving that Dutch politics is incomprehensible to the rest of the world, the event actually brought down the government.
Hirsi Ali, meanwhile, made another exit. This time she took the offer of a fellowship at the American Enterprise Institute, the right-wing thinktank in Washington, where she is now installed.
I happen to have met her for lunch in New York one day in January, a few months after she had begun the American portion of her odyssey. (I had asked for a phone interview for a magazine article; she had read a book of mine and suggested a face-to-face meeting.) Spending time with her gave me the chance to size up someone who, for better or worse, has actually altered the landscape through which we all move. Hirsi Ali cuts across political types. Her hard line on immigration (she believes Euro-style multiculturalism is a disaster that allows Muslim radicals to infiltrate Europe) charms the right wingers she now works among. But she has also become a virulent atheist of the Karl Marx, religion-is-the-opiate-of-the-masses school, and she told me with a satisfied laugh, of her AEI comrades, “They don’t like my views on religion.”
In person Hirsi Ali is striking to say the least: tall, thin as a knife, coal-dark, with sharp high cheekbones. She is also a fashionista, who wears designer labels with arrogant panache. The arrogance is offset somewhat by a vivid sense of humor: she giggles, she likes a good time.
In the U.S. she has been lionized, but the Dutch have a more nuanced view of her. There, she was seen as an opportunist, who advanced herself as much as she did her cause of making the world take note of the plight of women in Muslim Africa. And it has often been noted that for a champion of Muslim women, very few of her enthusiasts are Muslim women. So who are her enthusiasts? Mostly Americans, it seems, and of both political stripes: if there’s one thing Republicans and Democrats agree on, it is that genital mutilation isn’t cool. Europeans, meanwhile, who are scratching their heads and trying to figure out how to live with millions of recent Muslim immigrants, are more guarded.
There is a deep inconsistency in Hirsi Ali’s views, of which she herself is aware. Her experience of the laxity and moral flabbiness of the European welfare state has led her to adopt an American-style “let them pick themselves up by their bootstraps” approach to the less fortunate. She prefers privatizing over government intervention. “Yes,” she agreed with a dark chuckle when I noted that all that she has today-fame, wealth, opportunity-is thanks to the Dutch welfare state, which she despises for its softness and for the way it allowed injustice to flourish. But she sees herself as an exception: not one of the many who were content to wallow at the state trough but one of the few who burned to excel.
Some in Europe refer to Hirsi Ali as an Enlightenment Fundamentalist: part of a subcategory of Muslims in Europe who have replaced the hardcore Islam of their upbringing with a radical belief in science, reason, and “progress,” western-style. As she said to me, “The West was saved by the fact that it succeeded in separating faith and reason. The only way to stand up to radical Islam is to revive the message of the Enlightenment, to make Europeans and Americans remember that their modern society didn’t just fall out of the sky. There is a long history of struggle that led to this complex functioning society. And religion, including Christianity, has most of the time hindered that.”
There are problems with this perspective of hers. One is that the Islam in which Hirsi Ali was reared doesn’t necessarily apply across the board. The other is that we westerners aren’t all marching down the boulevards of our respective enlightened capitals bearing placards with the images of Voltaire and John Locke. Some of us are eating Cool Ranch Doritos and watching “American Idol.”
Still, anger can be so pure. Hirsi Ali is the most persuasive right winger I’ve ever met-not because the right is right but because the left has been so pathetically, programmatically wrong. The most vital part of the Hirsi Ali phenomenon is her role as global gadfly. Buckets of ink get spilled repeating the same news stories and analyses while important subjects remain invisible. Why should a tolerant and open society tolerate groups that are officially intolerant of open societies? And, come on, polygamy? Hirsi Ali says some necessary things that others, especially leftists, don’t want to say or hear.
Of course, it’s easier for Americans to nod in agreement with much of her tirade because we aren’t caught in the same immigration stream that is flowing through western Europe. And from her perspective it’s probably smarter for Hirsi Ali to be in the U.S. now. She may be a bit naïve about the country (she suggested to me that when her book came out here she assumed she would have the same superstar, on-the-sidewalk recognizability in America that she had in Holland), but she knows where the power is: even before the Dutch immigration minister racheted up the heat on her, she was in talks with AEI, planning to make the jump.
And while she is certainly an exotic presence on Washington’s insipid sidewalks, in a way the U.S. is now the perfect place for her. Where else can one mix it up with policy wonks by day and then do Bill Maher and The Colbert Report? Here she can fill pages in both The American Spectator and US Weekly; she can stand, photographically, next to Bush or Britney, and outshine either (admittedly not very hard to do). Rather appropriately, as I left the hotel in Chelsea where we had met for lunch, I literally bumped into Rod Stewart getting into the elevator. From the Somali desert to the celebrity wasteland: the journey may not be so vast after all.
Breakfast
by Tyson Koska
The cereal aside, I’m depressed to be here. This wholegrain and fruit spectacle, all these clean and cheery faces, toothy grins and tumbling flakes of bran-such assertions of joy and nutrition. I can't work free of advertising’s little hooks. My eyes flick and finger the front of each fine-looking box. Though I just want cereal, something to pour into my bowl and eat with milk, the hyperbole locks me down, and what a strange paralysis, what immense freedom of choice. This choosing is why I don't shop, because when I do, among other things, I can’t pick a goddam box of cereal.
I spot a young clerk stacking boxes on a full shelf. I ask, “Which one’s best?”
He shrugs, “I don’t know, sir. What do you like?”
That’s the problem, isn’t it? Plain questions become thorny matters of personal choice. Just answer me, I think. And let me get out of here. But instead I ask, “What do you like best?” hoping the swift reversal might dislodge from him an answer, any answer, that I can act on. After all, hasn’t the clerk spent far more time in the cereal aisle than I? Hasn’t he had ample opportunity to work it out. If he can’t choose, then who?
“Um, jeez…” he offers, adding dreamily, “I don’t know, sorta depends on my mood, I guess.”
You see already how distressing this answer is. According to this kid, not only is the quality of cereal dependant on personal choice but also mood at the time of choosing-and more, whatever future mood one may be in on any as yet undefined morning. Breakfast, like all other things, is an indefensible and illogical system of irrational choices, no different than women, politics or religion.
I gaze up and down the aisle again, the boxes yearning for my attention, Corn Flakes, they call to me, Cheerios, they beckon. Shall I simply reach for one and be satisfied? Yes. Done. Decision complete. I can feel the creeping relief of action, the helpless irrevocability of commitment. And yet my hand remains motionless by my side.
I need a method -- I need a more sound system. I could count calories and tabulate differences in niacin, potassium, thiamin. I could contrast the results with published Recommend Daily Allowances, but how can I be sure? What about taste -- I mean, would the pleasure of Captain Crunch or Fruit Loops outweigh the positive effects of Raisin Bran? What's my pleasure worth when it comes to good health? How much sugar does it take to offset tasteless and well-tuned regularity? Mary knows. She could tell me. She could manage this crucial balance; that woman could pick cereal.
The clerk, having now stocked the remaining inventory, darts away. I see the carefully hidden nervousness in him; I see the way he looks back at me as other shoppers slide in and pull boxes from the shelves-these good consumers who hardly falter in their choosing. They select with seeming ease and certainty, yet I am weak and angry and think to myself, this really could go on forever. So I decide to go, without cereal, and resolve to think no more about breakfast. I firmly postpone the implications of my decision, my indecision, and turning to leave this disaster, a man carrying a bag of potato chips and a baseball bat walks by me. I follow him; I am almost pulled by, as if caught in his slipstream. At the end of the aisle he turns left and with focused and confident grace, he approaches the meat section.
The man carefully walks alongside the low open case of refrigerated and freshly-butchered meat. Stopping, he raises his baseball bat in his right hand and, without a trace of irony, stands for a moment as if posed in triumph. It strikes me immediately that this is all quite odd, that this guy, dressed in a yellow trucker’s cap and red flannel shirt gripping a black wooden bat in the meat section of the supermarket, is fantastically unusual.
Then the man lets go his chips; he grabs his ‘slugger’ with both hands and swings downward. A thick thud full of plastic and meat concusses the air. Then his bat is up again, and again down. In quick succession, he pounds the steaks, the burgers, the roasts with inexplicable ferocity-these dead, red cuts get a horrible thrashing. The man’s yellow CAT hat tumbles off his head and onto the checkered supermarket floor. He swings away, the tails of his red flannel shirt flapping with each loft and smash.
If Mary were here she’d hold my arm and say, "Do something," as if I’m the hero who stops maniacs with baseball bats pounding away at meat in the supermarket. But the hero and I both know it’s proximity, not urging, that makes men brave. It’s irrational to step in front of a man with a moving bat, even the hero knows that. Perhaps if I were closer, Mary, maybe then I would step in...And yet I know already she would think me a coward for this reply; would never accept my sound logic and reasoning. Would you, Mary?
The bat's end is dripping now with meat and chunks fly off, styrofoam and cellophane shrapnel splatters gazing innocents. The man flails and in his rage I feel calm, an eerie simplicity. His steady swinging quells me like a river,if only I could step into this same moving water. A few clear seconds pass in untamed fury, his cool blows, the smash, smash rhythm of his anger.
Now the meat manager opens the sliding glass window between the cutting-room and the meat case. He’s white-smocked and clean; he shouts at the batter, “Stop!” The madman turns to the meat manager and smacks his skull against the metal pane of the window. The clean meat manager falls, slaughtered, onto the scrubbed floor, and the bat-man returns to his meat.
"Do something," Mary would beg. "You have to help!" And the worst part, I’d want to and still do nothing because at heart I’m afraid of maniacs with bats and have no wish to be another meat manager with a cracked head. Mary may choose to risk me, to chance my safety for the sake of another, but I don’t see the payoff. Is the person I might save better, more blameless than I am? And though I don’t begin to move or to help, I am filled with tenderness for the victim slumped unconscious on the floor, his smock pulled to the side, his pale face, blonde hair, open eyes awash in the yellow supermarket fluorescence. I admire and appreciate him. I am thankful for his baffling attempt to calm the lunatic… but to be him?
Then, finally, other customers close on the aggressor, and he turns to meet their attack. A different man, puzzlingly near to the action, charges at him from behind-it’s the hero. The lunatic tries to outrun the hero’s destiny but only lurches forward. As the hero slams the man to the ground, the moist club speeds out as if seeking any last solid thing. I see the bat’s thin profile and flecks of beef as it lands across my face. I drop into the refrigerator case. My blood casts a spray across the few untouched packages. My blood reaches almost to the chicken.
Activity is all over me --I think to myself, I’m lying in a meat case and my eye is pressing on soft red plastic. People talk. I can’t understand them, and I don’t know why I’m lying on meat. The more I think, the less I know. Blood is on my lips, and as I work to hold onto a few grounding facts, consciousness fades.
Now I’m in a meat case; I’m lying in a refrigerator full of meat. Footsteps and voices collide in the high-drama around me.
I’m hurt. I'm alone.
Why am I alone in a supermarket meat case? Where is Mary? What time is it? I seem, actually, to have red meat on my face. I think to myself, what day is it?
I’m lying in a refrigerator, on meat. I try to stand. I’m dizzy. I fall. Someone catches me.
“What day is it?” I ask.
“Thursday,” someone says.
I’m lying down.
“Where am I?”
“You’re hurt,” someone says.
“Where’s Mary?”
“Who?”
“Mary?”
Someone says I’m hurt. "What day is it?” I ask.
“Thursday,” says a voice. “We need help here.”
I’m sleepy-in a confused way. “Where am I?” I ask.
“You’re going to be okay,” a voice says, ignoring my question. “Help is coming.”
“Where’s Mary?”
A voice responds, “Relax.”
A great chaos of reds and whites and hands and gauze flick about my face. Overhead lights now alternate bright and dark, I seem to be rolling along a great cereal-box abacus, such wonderful colors.
I’m in a vehicle. I’m being driven. I speak, but no one hears.
I am waking up.
Was I sleeping? I’m in a hospital room. Where’s Mary? In fact, what time is it? What day is it? What the hell is going on here?
“Do you want to know what day it is?” It’s a nurse, she’s young. Her fingers fidget on my head.
“Yes, how did you know?” I ask.
“It’s Thursday.”
“Oh,” I say.
There’s a nurse in front of me. “You’re going to be fine, everything will make sense later. Now tell me, what day is it?”
“How the hell should I know?”
Standing in front of me is a nurse; she tells me exactly what I am burning to hear. “Today is Thursday,” she says.
“Thank you. Oh, thank you so much.” I whimper. “Please, where’s Mary?”
Some white-clad young woman asks me, “What day is it?”
“I have no idea,” I say, but I wish she would tell me.
A woman is speaking to me as if in mid-sentence “…and it’s a concussion,” she continues. “You’re having problems with short-term memory; do you understand what I’m saying?” A woman is looking deep into my eyes. “Some things you can remember, some things you can’t,” she says.
I have only just woken, “…you can’t hold new information right now,” says a woman. “By tonight, or tomorrow, you’ll be fine.”
What will be fine, I wonder to myself?
A nurse is leaving my room. It’s a fucking hospital room. What am I doing here?
I stand up. I’m weak. I seem to be injured. I think it’s Thursday, but I don’t know why I think that.
I see a plastic bag-searching in it, I find my wallet.
I am searching through a white plastic bag, inside are, I think, my cell-phone and my keys. I discover I’m holding a wallet in my other hand.
I’m holding a wallet, cell-phone, keys-they seem so familiar. I’m almost certain they’re mine.
I’m standing in a hospital room with my hands full. I need to keep this randomness together. I don’t know-I need a system.
I have to make a decision, about something, but what? There's a cell-phone in my hand, it's my cell-phone. I call home; Mary doesn’t answer. I let it ring, but the machine doesn’t pick up. I have to get home. I know that. I need Mary.
I am standing in what looks to be a hospital room with a cell phone held against my ear listening to nothing but air. I panic. I'm in a hospital room. I’m in a panic, but I don’t know why I’m panicking.
I have to get home-I know it-I have to do it now. I walk quickly down a long hall, through an automatic sliding door into a brightly lit area. I can’t be sure, but I seem to be outside a hospital. A woman huddles a bleeding man from a taxi. The poor bastard is utterly out of control. I rush into the backseat of their cab.
The driver listens as I give my address; he nods.
“How long will it take?” My ass is sticking to the cracked vinyl seat.
“How many times you gonna ask me that?”
“I'm sorry. I… Excuse me,” I say to the man seated in front of me. “It’s Thursday, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he says angrily.
“I knew it!”
“What’s your problem man?”
“None,” I say, “I don’t have a problem, but my wife-something’s happened, how much longer?”
“Not long, relax pal.”
“It’s Thursday, right?” A cabby is driving, shaking his head, he won’t answer me-asshole, I think, and decide not to talk to him.
“Excuse me,” I say to a taxicab driver, “Please take me to…”
“I know!” he snaps.
My ass is sticking to a vinyl seat.
Mary knows if today is Thursday; she knows for sure. Mary can fix this.
I seem to be in a car parked in front of my house. “How long have I been here?” I ask the man sitting in front of me-the driver. “Let me out of this fucking cab!”
“What?”
“Let me out of here!”
“Three-sixty, man.”
“You fuck, you just let me sit here? Right in front of my own goddam house?” I grab bills from my wallet and push them at the cabby.
I’m running up the lawn to my house as a taxi driver yells at me from behind-I can’t understand him. Cold grass sticks to my feet; where are my shoes? Christ, oh Christ, Mary, something is wrong. The driveway is empty. The house is locked. I'm holding my cell phone, wallet, keys. I unlock the door, swing it open and understand nothing.
I’m standing on my front porch. A cold draft lingers behind me.
From my porch I stare into my house; it’s dark, empty.
I stare inside my house from my front porch and see a folding chair in front of a small TV centered on my living room floor, otherwise the room is bare. There’s no carpet, no sofa. CD’s are stacked in the corner-no stereo.
I see a coffee cup on a small table next to a folding chair in front of a small TV.
I’m standing inside of my living room, which seems to be empty except for a few pieces of flimsy furniture. Seemingly new curtains hang over the windows; there's an empty cereal box on the floor next to a folding chair.
My empty house smells like soap. It’s devastatingly clean here.
I’m standing in a house, which should be mine, but clearly is not.
Holding tight to a cell-phone I find in my hand, I dial home. I hear ringing in the next room.
Here is what I know: I’m standing in a bare room in an almost empty house. Mary is not here, and I am holding a cell-phone that appears to be calling the number to my house. There’s another phone, in the next room, ringing and ringing.
Jesus, these rings are oppressive-these rings are pushing on me from all sides, they are washing over me. Ringing soaks me through now, and I have a strong, cool feeling of waking-a standing kind of waking. I am waking without sleep; I am remembering. The rings in the next room fall, I am wet in memory, and then-I am on the hardwood floor. The smell of wood and mops and vacancy splinters inside me…and I remember.
The meat, I remember -- and the bat, the man in the yellow cap and the red flannel shirt.
I touch my head under the bandage. I know the story, the empty cupboard, the cereal box and the few papers underneath it, the 12-hour old signature.
I remember why the phone in the next room is ringing, still ringing. I know why you won’t pick-up Mary. I know there is no system here, there is no logic. This matter is one of personal choice, indefensible-like so many other things. I am powerless to reach out and to choose. I know you are not here, Mary; I know you are somewhere else. So I turn from the emptiness of our home, and I walk the two miles back to the hospital -- into the bright, constant floodlights.
The cereal aside, I’m depressed to be here. This wholegrain and fruit spectacle, all these clean and cheery faces, toothy grins and tumbling flakes of bran-such assertions of joy and nutrition. I can't work free of advertising’s little hooks. My eyes flick and finger the front of each fine-looking box. Though I just want cereal, something to pour into my bowl and eat with milk, the hyperbole locks me down, and what a strange paralysis, what immense freedom of choice. This choosing is why I don't shop, because when I do, among other things, I can’t pick a goddam box of cereal.
I spot a young clerk stacking boxes on a full shelf. I ask, “Which one’s best?”
He shrugs, “I don’t know, sir. What do you like?”
That’s the problem, isn’t it? Plain questions become thorny matters of personal choice. Just answer me, I think. And let me get out of here. But instead I ask, “What do you like best?” hoping the swift reversal might dislodge from him an answer, any answer, that I can act on. After all, hasn’t the clerk spent far more time in the cereal aisle than I? Hasn’t he had ample opportunity to work it out. If he can’t choose, then who?
“Um, jeez…” he offers, adding dreamily, “I don’t know, sorta depends on my mood, I guess.”
You see already how distressing this answer is. According to this kid, not only is the quality of cereal dependant on personal choice but also mood at the time of choosing-and more, whatever future mood one may be in on any as yet undefined morning. Breakfast, like all other things, is an indefensible and illogical system of irrational choices, no different than women, politics or religion.
I gaze up and down the aisle again, the boxes yearning for my attention, Corn Flakes, they call to me, Cheerios, they beckon. Shall I simply reach for one and be satisfied? Yes. Done. Decision complete. I can feel the creeping relief of action, the helpless irrevocability of commitment. And yet my hand remains motionless by my side.
I need a method -- I need a more sound system. I could count calories and tabulate differences in niacin, potassium, thiamin. I could contrast the results with published Recommend Daily Allowances, but how can I be sure? What about taste -- I mean, would the pleasure of Captain Crunch or Fruit Loops outweigh the positive effects of Raisin Bran? What's my pleasure worth when it comes to good health? How much sugar does it take to offset tasteless and well-tuned regularity? Mary knows. She could tell me. She could manage this crucial balance; that woman could pick cereal.
The clerk, having now stocked the remaining inventory, darts away. I see the carefully hidden nervousness in him; I see the way he looks back at me as other shoppers slide in and pull boxes from the shelves-these good consumers who hardly falter in their choosing. They select with seeming ease and certainty, yet I am weak and angry and think to myself, this really could go on forever. So I decide to go, without cereal, and resolve to think no more about breakfast. I firmly postpone the implications of my decision, my indecision, and turning to leave this disaster, a man carrying a bag of potato chips and a baseball bat walks by me. I follow him; I am almost pulled by, as if caught in his slipstream. At the end of the aisle he turns left and with focused and confident grace, he approaches the meat section.
The man carefully walks alongside the low open case of refrigerated and freshly-butchered meat. Stopping, he raises his baseball bat in his right hand and, without a trace of irony, stands for a moment as if posed in triumph. It strikes me immediately that this is all quite odd, that this guy, dressed in a yellow trucker’s cap and red flannel shirt gripping a black wooden bat in the meat section of the supermarket, is fantastically unusual.
Then the man lets go his chips; he grabs his ‘slugger’ with both hands and swings downward. A thick thud full of plastic and meat concusses the air. Then his bat is up again, and again down. In quick succession, he pounds the steaks, the burgers, the roasts with inexplicable ferocity-these dead, red cuts get a horrible thrashing. The man’s yellow CAT hat tumbles off his head and onto the checkered supermarket floor. He swings away, the tails of his red flannel shirt flapping with each loft and smash.
If Mary were here she’d hold my arm and say, "Do something," as if I’m the hero who stops maniacs with baseball bats pounding away at meat in the supermarket. But the hero and I both know it’s proximity, not urging, that makes men brave. It’s irrational to step in front of a man with a moving bat, even the hero knows that. Perhaps if I were closer, Mary, maybe then I would step in...And yet I know already she would think me a coward for this reply; would never accept my sound logic and reasoning. Would you, Mary?
The bat's end is dripping now with meat and chunks fly off, styrofoam and cellophane shrapnel splatters gazing innocents. The man flails and in his rage I feel calm, an eerie simplicity. His steady swinging quells me like a river,if only I could step into this same moving water. A few clear seconds pass in untamed fury, his cool blows, the smash, smash rhythm of his anger.
Now the meat manager opens the sliding glass window between the cutting-room and the meat case. He’s white-smocked and clean; he shouts at the batter, “Stop!” The madman turns to the meat manager and smacks his skull against the metal pane of the window. The clean meat manager falls, slaughtered, onto the scrubbed floor, and the bat-man returns to his meat.
"Do something," Mary would beg. "You have to help!" And the worst part, I’d want to and still do nothing because at heart I’m afraid of maniacs with bats and have no wish to be another meat manager with a cracked head. Mary may choose to risk me, to chance my safety for the sake of another, but I don’t see the payoff. Is the person I might save better, more blameless than I am? And though I don’t begin to move or to help, I am filled with tenderness for the victim slumped unconscious on the floor, his smock pulled to the side, his pale face, blonde hair, open eyes awash in the yellow supermarket fluorescence. I admire and appreciate him. I am thankful for his baffling attempt to calm the lunatic… but to be him?
Then, finally, other customers close on the aggressor, and he turns to meet their attack. A different man, puzzlingly near to the action, charges at him from behind-it’s the hero. The lunatic tries to outrun the hero’s destiny but only lurches forward. As the hero slams the man to the ground, the moist club speeds out as if seeking any last solid thing. I see the bat’s thin profile and flecks of beef as it lands across my face. I drop into the refrigerator case. My blood casts a spray across the few untouched packages. My blood reaches almost to the chicken.
Activity is all over me --I think to myself, I’m lying in a meat case and my eye is pressing on soft red plastic. People talk. I can’t understand them, and I don’t know why I’m lying on meat. The more I think, the less I know. Blood is on my lips, and as I work to hold onto a few grounding facts, consciousness fades.
Now I’m in a meat case; I’m lying in a refrigerator full of meat. Footsteps and voices collide in the high-drama around me.
I’m hurt. I'm alone.
Why am I alone in a supermarket meat case? Where is Mary? What time is it? I seem, actually, to have red meat on my face. I think to myself, what day is it?
I’m lying in a refrigerator, on meat. I try to stand. I’m dizzy. I fall. Someone catches me.
“What day is it?” I ask.
“Thursday,” someone says.
I’m lying down.
“Where am I?”
“You’re hurt,” someone says.
“Where’s Mary?”
“Who?”
“Mary?”
Someone says I’m hurt. "What day is it?” I ask.
“Thursday,” says a voice. “We need help here.”
I’m sleepy-in a confused way. “Where am I?” I ask.
“You’re going to be okay,” a voice says, ignoring my question. “Help is coming.”
“Where’s Mary?”
A voice responds, “Relax.”
A great chaos of reds and whites and hands and gauze flick about my face. Overhead lights now alternate bright and dark, I seem to be rolling along a great cereal-box abacus, such wonderful colors.
I’m in a vehicle. I’m being driven. I speak, but no one hears.
I am waking up.
Was I sleeping? I’m in a hospital room. Where’s Mary? In fact, what time is it? What day is it? What the hell is going on here?
“Do you want to know what day it is?” It’s a nurse, she’s young. Her fingers fidget on my head.
“Yes, how did you know?” I ask.
“It’s Thursday.”
“Oh,” I say.
There’s a nurse in front of me. “You’re going to be fine, everything will make sense later. Now tell me, what day is it?”
“How the hell should I know?”
Standing in front of me is a nurse; she tells me exactly what I am burning to hear. “Today is Thursday,” she says.
“Thank you. Oh, thank you so much.” I whimper. “Please, where’s Mary?”
Some white-clad young woman asks me, “What day is it?”
“I have no idea,” I say, but I wish she would tell me.
A woman is speaking to me as if in mid-sentence “…and it’s a concussion,” she continues. “You’re having problems with short-term memory; do you understand what I’m saying?” A woman is looking deep into my eyes. “Some things you can remember, some things you can’t,” she says.
I have only just woken, “…you can’t hold new information right now,” says a woman. “By tonight, or tomorrow, you’ll be fine.”
What will be fine, I wonder to myself?
A nurse is leaving my room. It’s a fucking hospital room. What am I doing here?
I stand up. I’m weak. I seem to be injured. I think it’s Thursday, but I don’t know why I think that.
I see a plastic bag-searching in it, I find my wallet.
I am searching through a white plastic bag, inside are, I think, my cell-phone and my keys. I discover I’m holding a wallet in my other hand.
I’m holding a wallet, cell-phone, keys-they seem so familiar. I’m almost certain they’re mine.
I’m standing in a hospital room with my hands full. I need to keep this randomness together. I don’t know-I need a system.
I have to make a decision, about something, but what? There's a cell-phone in my hand, it's my cell-phone. I call home; Mary doesn’t answer. I let it ring, but the machine doesn’t pick up. I have to get home. I know that. I need Mary.
I am standing in what looks to be a hospital room with a cell phone held against my ear listening to nothing but air. I panic. I'm in a hospital room. I’m in a panic, but I don’t know why I’m panicking.
I have to get home-I know it-I have to do it now. I walk quickly down a long hall, through an automatic sliding door into a brightly lit area. I can’t be sure, but I seem to be outside a hospital. A woman huddles a bleeding man from a taxi. The poor bastard is utterly out of control. I rush into the backseat of their cab.
The driver listens as I give my address; he nods.
“How long will it take?” My ass is sticking to the cracked vinyl seat.
“How many times you gonna ask me that?”
“I'm sorry. I… Excuse me,” I say to the man seated in front of me. “It’s Thursday, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he says angrily.
“I knew it!”
“What’s your problem man?”
“None,” I say, “I don’t have a problem, but my wife-something’s happened, how much longer?”
“Not long, relax pal.”
“It’s Thursday, right?” A cabby is driving, shaking his head, he won’t answer me-asshole, I think, and decide not to talk to him.
“Excuse me,” I say to a taxicab driver, “Please take me to…”
“I know!” he snaps.
My ass is sticking to a vinyl seat.
Mary knows if today is Thursday; she knows for sure. Mary can fix this.
I seem to be in a car parked in front of my house. “How long have I been here?” I ask the man sitting in front of me-the driver. “Let me out of this fucking cab!”
“What?”
“Let me out of here!”
“Three-sixty, man.”
“You fuck, you just let me sit here? Right in front of my own goddam house?” I grab bills from my wallet and push them at the cabby.
I’m running up the lawn to my house as a taxi driver yells at me from behind-I can’t understand him. Cold grass sticks to my feet; where are my shoes? Christ, oh Christ, Mary, something is wrong. The driveway is empty. The house is locked. I'm holding my cell phone, wallet, keys. I unlock the door, swing it open and understand nothing.
I’m standing on my front porch. A cold draft lingers behind me.
From my porch I stare into my house; it’s dark, empty.
I stare inside my house from my front porch and see a folding chair in front of a small TV centered on my living room floor, otherwise the room is bare. There’s no carpet, no sofa. CD’s are stacked in the corner-no stereo.
I see a coffee cup on a small table next to a folding chair in front of a small TV.
I’m standing inside of my living room, which seems to be empty except for a few pieces of flimsy furniture. Seemingly new curtains hang over the windows; there's an empty cereal box on the floor next to a folding chair.
My empty house smells like soap. It’s devastatingly clean here.
I’m standing in a house, which should be mine, but clearly is not.
Holding tight to a cell-phone I find in my hand, I dial home. I hear ringing in the next room.
Here is what I know: I’m standing in a bare room in an almost empty house. Mary is not here, and I am holding a cell-phone that appears to be calling the number to my house. There’s another phone, in the next room, ringing and ringing.
Jesus, these rings are oppressive-these rings are pushing on me from all sides, they are washing over me. Ringing soaks me through now, and I have a strong, cool feeling of waking-a standing kind of waking. I am waking without sleep; I am remembering. The rings in the next room fall, I am wet in memory, and then-I am on the hardwood floor. The smell of wood and mops and vacancy splinters inside me…and I remember.
The meat, I remember -- and the bat, the man in the yellow cap and the red flannel shirt.
I touch my head under the bandage. I know the story, the empty cupboard, the cereal box and the few papers underneath it, the 12-hour old signature.
I remember why the phone in the next room is ringing, still ringing. I know why you won’t pick-up Mary. I know there is no system here, there is no logic. This matter is one of personal choice, indefensible-like so many other things. I am powerless to reach out and to choose. I know you are not here, Mary; I know you are somewhere else. So I turn from the emptiness of our home, and I walk the two miles back to the hospital -- into the bright, constant floodlights.
Who Will Survive The Shopocalypse?
(Dispatches from the struggle against consumerism)
By Reverend Billy
It Didn’t Feel Like A Starbucks Anymore
I walked into the Starbucks on the corner of 67th and Columbus, around the corner from the Lincoln Center. It was after dark, but still early. I sat next to the window. The place was filling up, maybe a performance let out or something. I was in that slow mood you can get into in the city, just staring at a newspaper I picked up from a chair. There’s all the violence in the papers these days, and I was doing that thing of reading the heaviest news very lightly. I’d look up from my massacres, glance around.
A guy next to me had a nice laugh, small fair black man with lively eyes. He didn’t have a computer or a coffee. He was talking to a tall laughing white woman with a strong face, with the bearing of a statue in the park. What were they up to? They didn’t look like students. The two weren’t on a date. The windows with the darkness on the other side mirrored back everyone sitting every which way. The cappuccino machine hissed, the baristas efficiently placing the lattes on the high counter.
I returned to my paper, to some eastern European country with separatists and innocents in shock. The usual official statements gathering around the bloodied bodies. The statements never change at all - same words. Regret and resoluteness. Then I looked up again. The tableau of customers was like a picture of life. People sitting at tables. A couple coffees here and there, but mostly just people sitting talking quietly and then returning to a pre-occupation. Something on everyone’s mind.
Then I heard a very out of place thing - so much so that at first I assumed it was an iPod with volume problems, but no, it was a woman, who was, no doubt about it - she was singing - from across the room. Now there was a lot of chatter and droney sounds in here - so her voice almost felt like a memory of a sound. But I found her, standing there like a diva with her mouth WIDE open. She was over to my left, she had black hair and a dress with a fish on it, she was singing with happy abandon. I think I actually looked back at my massacre at that point, the way you do, because I didn’t want to admit to myself that this was happening. The two at the table near me looked at each other and turned back toward the singer - and now there was second woman singing.
Now, this songbird was closer to me and I could hear some of the words. “Start stopping, get ready, start stopping.” I want to stop a lot of things, but what are they talking about? The coffeeshop is a big one, and loud sound has that echoey quality, and most of the people were not noticing, or were refusing to register, that these surreal words were coming through us. There was a slow motion quality. Most of the customers did not look up from books, iBooks, magazines, date’s faces or whatever. The body positions stayed put. This is that first wave of embarrassment, or is it hipness - you don’t want to respond. Am I about to have an experience?
By now a good six or eight people are standing, and I can tell they are a group because they are singing the same words. “Stop Shopping! Stop Shopping!” It sounds like an anthem. It has a triumphant quality, and our cafe socialites are coiling into their own fetal positions because this is all just too happy for a New Yorker to accept easily. This enthusiasm! What’s the problem? Are these Christians or what? -- But now there were, I counted, fifteen singers and they were singing harmonies, with insistent chord changes. The Starbucks’ manager can’t help himself - he’s out in the tables trying to talk to first one singer, then another and the tall girl from the next table over, with her friend who was swooping his back and arms to the rhythm - oh they’re in this cult too. The tall woman began to solo in an obviously trained voice, “We’re gonna put those Nikes down and we’ll Stop Shopping, Stop Shopping!” It was an over-the-top, Broadway type delivery. The choir was now up to a couple dozen, the whole place milling around, four part harmonies, and an electric piano was now out on a table with a musician at the keys, he’s beaming like Stevie Wonder.
A maroon-haired woman with bangs swung a saxophone into the air and now a man a tambourine, and the bravura soprano just a few feet from me, after appeals to stop buying SUV’s, smart bombs, GAP shirts, finally lit into “We’re going to put that Starbucks down!” and now, clearly, the manager’s center was not holding. Chaos was loosed upon his world. He ran to the phone shouting and gesticulating back at not only the singers but the mayhem of laughter and regular customers standing up to wiggle their hips and shout. You couldn’t hear the manager. He mimed calling the cops, I guess, then ran through the room to the front door and began to lock it - only to be stopped by one of the singers, who looked like Jesus Christ. This baritone was putting the voodoo on the manager, morally overwhelming him. The poor manager, when he realized that of course he can’t lock people in, started shouting even more vehemently. All I could hear was “I WILL…” “I WILL…”
The singers were now reaching high harmonies, passionately dancing to the song. “We will never shop again, forever and Amen! Allelujah! Allelujah!” The non-singing customers had made their decisions, consciously or not. Some were trying to join the choir, trying to catch the words. Some were angry, refuse-niks back at the seemingly de-legimitized cappuccino machine. I realized that the shiny sort-of-European coffee apparatus was an altar, and now a new church was grabbing the congregation. And that’s when something very interesting took place. Suddenly it didn’t feel like a Starbucks anymore. I remember the moment that happened. We were now a group of people creating a quality in the room, an edgy circus. The colors were vividly shifting and the air itself seemed like a liquid waiting for its wave. I sensed that there was a sense of recognition, as if we had done this before. There was even a kind of calm authority. No-one would leave, even those angry ones. Customers were dancing alone. The organ was pounding. We all stayed because this was like unexpected sex. But it was time for me to leave.
I ducked out the front door and into the lobby of a dot-com motel. I shed my raincoat. Got the high sign from the Action Manager. I snapped on my priest’s collar and vestment and donned a white tux coat. I tested my bullhorn, made sure the batteries had power. Looking at the big Starbucks from the outside, it resembled some post-modern version of the Cotton Club, the gyrating and sailing sounds. Time to open this door and preach.
The Commons
Our stage is “contested space,” a commons that has been privatized. It is a place where the First Amendment's rights of speech and assembly were exercised but in the era of the transnational corporation are seized by pre-emptive architecture or by corrupted law enforcement. You made our Main Street into a mall? -- OK so we go into your mall shouting.
We come from the traditional performance arts of theater, dance, spoken word - but we find that the stages where things happen that might change our lives - such experience rarely takes place before the usual footlights. Mostly the scripts of the traditional arts are depoliticized by Consumerism. So -- we go to sidewalks and streets, parks and subways, and we counter-invade into the endless spatial offensive of the transnational cookie-cutter stores, their cash register altars, their lobbies and advertising frames. Now that’s a charged stage.
The 24/7 activity of American Consumerism is a highly specific set of gestures, phrases, and reward-and-punishment patterns. The consumers proceed through a formal choreography. The much-heralded American prosperity sends most folks from bed to highway to desk to hallway to elevator back to the car to the evening sitcom-sports-reality of TV. The maze of repetitions is re-created from medicated sleep to medicated sleep. Is this hypnosis or happiness? We’re too hyped to be make the distinction.
The charged stage that we seek interrupts all this like homages to the lives of Rosa Parks or Abbie Hoffman or Subcommandante Marcos - all we can call these scenes are actions. The stages in the case of these three teachers? There is Rosa’s famous bus; with Abbie - the streets and parks and courts of the sixties and; in the case of the ski-masked and piped Chiapas leader -- the air force attack on the Mexican government’s army, but with paper airplanes and laughter. The three re-entered the grand bluff of entrenched power in public space. The three re-took their “Commons.”
Time was that there was a field in the center of town, where people dismounted and loafed, hitched wagons, fools and music yawped, vision uncles winced, cads seduced, traders saved, and everyone but the tax collector cursed the King. Most importantly, there was a kind of talk and a kind of hearing that took place outside of power. Nowadays, we catch our culture-making on the run, because a hologram of the King sits in the center of the park covered with surveillance cameras. The King can’t be alone! He’s copped The Commons.
But The Commons keeps coming back - we have seen, for example, the community come to life in times of extreme joy or tragedy. Ever meet everyone in your neighborhood at the three alarm fire? Those of us at 9/11 remember how downtown Manhattan that September was a promenade, no cars. It was breathtakingly radical that neighbors could slump into their bodies and approach each other. The variety of emotion in the foreground, the weeping and laughing, the ad-hoc help that was offered. It was a heady experiment for those of us in the business of neighborhood-defense. Suddenly we were taking care of each other, no money down. It would have made Rosa and Abbie and Marcos smile.
The Commons can re-assert itself very quickly. The air can be cleared of cars, advertising and other corporate distractions in the exhale of a “What is this?” and some laughter. It can happen in a moment. Suddenly, right there, in the anything-can-happen moment we might be able to ask basic questions about our hypnotizers the corporations. And we should be able to do this on purpose. We should be able to create an instant, portable commons. We just have to be crazy enough to ask these questions on our own, and not wait for geniuses or tsunamis or some self-help God.
If all the Commons has been tortured into boxes, into pixels, into share-price... if the parks are over-policed and the community gardens bulldozed and anything not tied down purchased by the transnationals -- then we are not commons-less, because we carry The Commons inside us. That’s where the courage to commit actions comes from. Memories of Rosa and Abbie and Marcos, yes - how they reclaimed public space helps us. I think they would tell us, though, that we should look away from their biographies and we might find our own commons. We carry it around as we go about our daily lives,
In the Church of Stop Shopping we sometimes cross into contested space as fierce clowns, singing and waving signs. Often we go into transnational chain stores incognito, disguised as consumers, ready to buy. Most of our actions proceed from that simple premise. They want our money. They want us to approach their product. They will surveil us as we walk in; they’ll limit our gestures and talk; they’ll ask us to leave the moment we break out of the Consumer’s Choreography - but they will let us in for a moment as they eye our wallets. When they hear our unsupervised conversation (our guerilla commons is showing) they will run toward us with their uniforms, but we will have disappeared, as they say, into the civilian population. The Commons will hang in the air, witnesses carry it in their memory.
There never was a revolution where those in power didn’t squawk “Trespassing!” Real social change was never accomplished without the force of an unexpected performance. Do I have a witness?
Beatitudes of Buylessness
Blessed are the Consumers, for you shall be free from Living By Products.
Blessed are the Lonely Believers, for you shall transcend all media and dance in the streets.
Blessed are those stumbling out of branded Main Streets, for you shall find lovers not downloaded and oceans not rising.
Blessed is the ordinary citizen who holds onto a patch of public commons, for you are the New World.
Blessed is the artist who isn’t corporate sponsored, for you shall give birth to warm fronts of emotion and breakthroughs of Peace.
Blessed are those who confuse “Consumerism” with “Freedom,” for you shall be delighted to discover the difference.
Blessed are the advertisers and commercial celebrities, for you have been waiting for the remarkable restfulness of honesty.
Blessed are the neighborhoods flown from and shuttered, for you children shall illuminate the dark economy.
Blessed are the workers in the supermalls, for you shall no longer be surrounded and domed, the town your employers’ killed will come back to life full of memories of you, jobs for you and love by you.
Blessed is the breadwinner with out-sourced dreams who sits wondering in stopped traffic, for you shall find inside your own mind more stories than Hollywood, Bollywood and Babel.
Blessed are the teenage girls in sweatshops, for the real value of what you make will fly you in magic evening gowns to the City of Light.
Blessed are those of us who are pinned under the gaze of supermodels, for we shall escape to accept the radical freedom and infinite responsibility of making love without buying it.
Blessed are those who disturb the customers, for you might be loving your neighbor.
By Reverend Billy
It Didn’t Feel Like A Starbucks Anymore
I walked into the Starbucks on the corner of 67th and Columbus, around the corner from the Lincoln Center. It was after dark, but still early. I sat next to the window. The place was filling up, maybe a performance let out or something. I was in that slow mood you can get into in the city, just staring at a newspaper I picked up from a chair. There’s all the violence in the papers these days, and I was doing that thing of reading the heaviest news very lightly. I’d look up from my massacres, glance around.
A guy next to me had a nice laugh, small fair black man with lively eyes. He didn’t have a computer or a coffee. He was talking to a tall laughing white woman with a strong face, with the bearing of a statue in the park. What were they up to? They didn’t look like students. The two weren’t on a date. The windows with the darkness on the other side mirrored back everyone sitting every which way. The cappuccino machine hissed, the baristas efficiently placing the lattes on the high counter.
I returned to my paper, to some eastern European country with separatists and innocents in shock. The usual official statements gathering around the bloodied bodies. The statements never change at all - same words. Regret and resoluteness. Then I looked up again. The tableau of customers was like a picture of life. People sitting at tables. A couple coffees here and there, but mostly just people sitting talking quietly and then returning to a pre-occupation. Something on everyone’s mind.
Then I heard a very out of place thing - so much so that at first I assumed it was an iPod with volume problems, but no, it was a woman, who was, no doubt about it - she was singing - from across the room. Now there was a lot of chatter and droney sounds in here - so her voice almost felt like a memory of a sound. But I found her, standing there like a diva with her mouth WIDE open. She was over to my left, she had black hair and a dress with a fish on it, she was singing with happy abandon. I think I actually looked back at my massacre at that point, the way you do, because I didn’t want to admit to myself that this was happening. The two at the table near me looked at each other and turned back toward the singer - and now there was second woman singing.
Now, this songbird was closer to me and I could hear some of the words. “Start stopping, get ready, start stopping.” I want to stop a lot of things, but what are they talking about? The coffeeshop is a big one, and loud sound has that echoey quality, and most of the people were not noticing, or were refusing to register, that these surreal words were coming through us. There was a slow motion quality. Most of the customers did not look up from books, iBooks, magazines, date’s faces or whatever. The body positions stayed put. This is that first wave of embarrassment, or is it hipness - you don’t want to respond. Am I about to have an experience?
By now a good six or eight people are standing, and I can tell they are a group because they are singing the same words. “Stop Shopping! Stop Shopping!” It sounds like an anthem. It has a triumphant quality, and our cafe socialites are coiling into their own fetal positions because this is all just too happy for a New Yorker to accept easily. This enthusiasm! What’s the problem? Are these Christians or what? -- But now there were, I counted, fifteen singers and they were singing harmonies, with insistent chord changes. The Starbucks’ manager can’t help himself - he’s out in the tables trying to talk to first one singer, then another and the tall girl from the next table over, with her friend who was swooping his back and arms to the rhythm - oh they’re in this cult too. The tall woman began to solo in an obviously trained voice, “We’re gonna put those Nikes down and we’ll Stop Shopping, Stop Shopping!” It was an over-the-top, Broadway type delivery. The choir was now up to a couple dozen, the whole place milling around, four part harmonies, and an electric piano was now out on a table with a musician at the keys, he’s beaming like Stevie Wonder.
A maroon-haired woman with bangs swung a saxophone into the air and now a man a tambourine, and the bravura soprano just a few feet from me, after appeals to stop buying SUV’s, smart bombs, GAP shirts, finally lit into “We’re going to put that Starbucks down!” and now, clearly, the manager’s center was not holding. Chaos was loosed upon his world. He ran to the phone shouting and gesticulating back at not only the singers but the mayhem of laughter and regular customers standing up to wiggle their hips and shout. You couldn’t hear the manager. He mimed calling the cops, I guess, then ran through the room to the front door and began to lock it - only to be stopped by one of the singers, who looked like Jesus Christ. This baritone was putting the voodoo on the manager, morally overwhelming him. The poor manager, when he realized that of course he can’t lock people in, started shouting even more vehemently. All I could hear was “I WILL…” “I WILL…”
The singers were now reaching high harmonies, passionately dancing to the song. “We will never shop again, forever and Amen! Allelujah! Allelujah!” The non-singing customers had made their decisions, consciously or not. Some were trying to join the choir, trying to catch the words. Some were angry, refuse-niks back at the seemingly de-legimitized cappuccino machine. I realized that the shiny sort-of-European coffee apparatus was an altar, and now a new church was grabbing the congregation. And that’s when something very interesting took place. Suddenly it didn’t feel like a Starbucks anymore. I remember the moment that happened. We were now a group of people creating a quality in the room, an edgy circus. The colors were vividly shifting and the air itself seemed like a liquid waiting for its wave. I sensed that there was a sense of recognition, as if we had done this before. There was even a kind of calm authority. No-one would leave, even those angry ones. Customers were dancing alone. The organ was pounding. We all stayed because this was like unexpected sex. But it was time for me to leave.
I ducked out the front door and into the lobby of a dot-com motel. I shed my raincoat. Got the high sign from the Action Manager. I snapped on my priest’s collar and vestment and donned a white tux coat. I tested my bullhorn, made sure the batteries had power. Looking at the big Starbucks from the outside, it resembled some post-modern version of the Cotton Club, the gyrating and sailing sounds. Time to open this door and preach.
The Commons
Our stage is “contested space,” a commons that has been privatized. It is a place where the First Amendment's rights of speech and assembly were exercised but in the era of the transnational corporation are seized by pre-emptive architecture or by corrupted law enforcement. You made our Main Street into a mall? -- OK so we go into your mall shouting.
We come from the traditional performance arts of theater, dance, spoken word - but we find that the stages where things happen that might change our lives - such experience rarely takes place before the usual footlights. Mostly the scripts of the traditional arts are depoliticized by Consumerism. So -- we go to sidewalks and streets, parks and subways, and we counter-invade into the endless spatial offensive of the transnational cookie-cutter stores, their cash register altars, their lobbies and advertising frames. Now that’s a charged stage.
The 24/7 activity of American Consumerism is a highly specific set of gestures, phrases, and reward-and-punishment patterns. The consumers proceed through a formal choreography. The much-heralded American prosperity sends most folks from bed to highway to desk to hallway to elevator back to the car to the evening sitcom-sports-reality of TV. The maze of repetitions is re-created from medicated sleep to medicated sleep. Is this hypnosis or happiness? We’re too hyped to be make the distinction.
The charged stage that we seek interrupts all this like homages to the lives of Rosa Parks or Abbie Hoffman or Subcommandante Marcos - all we can call these scenes are actions. The stages in the case of these three teachers? There is Rosa’s famous bus; with Abbie - the streets and parks and courts of the sixties and; in the case of the ski-masked and piped Chiapas leader -- the air force attack on the Mexican government’s army, but with paper airplanes and laughter. The three re-entered the grand bluff of entrenched power in public space. The three re-took their “Commons.”
Time was that there was a field in the center of town, where people dismounted and loafed, hitched wagons, fools and music yawped, vision uncles winced, cads seduced, traders saved, and everyone but the tax collector cursed the King. Most importantly, there was a kind of talk and a kind of hearing that took place outside of power. Nowadays, we catch our culture-making on the run, because a hologram of the King sits in the center of the park covered with surveillance cameras. The King can’t be alone! He’s copped The Commons.
But The Commons keeps coming back - we have seen, for example, the community come to life in times of extreme joy or tragedy. Ever meet everyone in your neighborhood at the three alarm fire? Those of us at 9/11 remember how downtown Manhattan that September was a promenade, no cars. It was breathtakingly radical that neighbors could slump into their bodies and approach each other. The variety of emotion in the foreground, the weeping and laughing, the ad-hoc help that was offered. It was a heady experiment for those of us in the business of neighborhood-defense. Suddenly we were taking care of each other, no money down. It would have made Rosa and Abbie and Marcos smile.
The Commons can re-assert itself very quickly. The air can be cleared of cars, advertising and other corporate distractions in the exhale of a “What is this?” and some laughter. It can happen in a moment. Suddenly, right there, in the anything-can-happen moment we might be able to ask basic questions about our hypnotizers the corporations. And we should be able to do this on purpose. We should be able to create an instant, portable commons. We just have to be crazy enough to ask these questions on our own, and not wait for geniuses or tsunamis or some self-help God.
If all the Commons has been tortured into boxes, into pixels, into share-price... if the parks are over-policed and the community gardens bulldozed and anything not tied down purchased by the transnationals -- then we are not commons-less, because we carry The Commons inside us. That’s where the courage to commit actions comes from. Memories of Rosa and Abbie and Marcos, yes - how they reclaimed public space helps us. I think they would tell us, though, that we should look away from their biographies and we might find our own commons. We carry it around as we go about our daily lives,
In the Church of Stop Shopping we sometimes cross into contested space as fierce clowns, singing and waving signs. Often we go into transnational chain stores incognito, disguised as consumers, ready to buy. Most of our actions proceed from that simple premise. They want our money. They want us to approach their product. They will surveil us as we walk in; they’ll limit our gestures and talk; they’ll ask us to leave the moment we break out of the Consumer’s Choreography - but they will let us in for a moment as they eye our wallets. When they hear our unsupervised conversation (our guerilla commons is showing) they will run toward us with their uniforms, but we will have disappeared, as they say, into the civilian population. The Commons will hang in the air, witnesses carry it in their memory.
There never was a revolution where those in power didn’t squawk “Trespassing!” Real social change was never accomplished without the force of an unexpected performance. Do I have a witness?
Beatitudes of Buylessness
Blessed are the Consumers, for you shall be free from Living By Products.
Blessed are the Lonely Believers, for you shall transcend all media and dance in the streets.
Blessed are those stumbling out of branded Main Streets, for you shall find lovers not downloaded and oceans not rising.
Blessed is the ordinary citizen who holds onto a patch of public commons, for you are the New World.
Blessed is the artist who isn’t corporate sponsored, for you shall give birth to warm fronts of emotion and breakthroughs of Peace.
Blessed are those who confuse “Consumerism” with “Freedom,” for you shall be delighted to discover the difference.
Blessed are the advertisers and commercial celebrities, for you have been waiting for the remarkable restfulness of honesty.
Blessed are the neighborhoods flown from and shuttered, for you children shall illuminate the dark economy.
Blessed are the workers in the supermalls, for you shall no longer be surrounded and domed, the town your employers’ killed will come back to life full of memories of you, jobs for you and love by you.
Blessed is the breadwinner with out-sourced dreams who sits wondering in stopped traffic, for you shall find inside your own mind more stories than Hollywood, Bollywood and Babel.
Blessed are the teenage girls in sweatshops, for the real value of what you make will fly you in magic evening gowns to the City of Light.
Blessed are those of us who are pinned under the gaze of supermodels, for we shall escape to accept the radical freedom and infinite responsibility of making love without buying it.
Blessed are those who disturb the customers, for you might be loving your neighbor.
Burrow Introduction
Welcome to the first posting of Burrow Magazine. We, the editorial board, have some experience at producing a magazine. Formerly, we put out Lurch Magazine from 1995 to 2006. Lurch grew out of our community in South Brooklyn, from a collective of writers and artists who knew each other, primarily through working the customer side at first O’Connor’s Bar and later Freddy’s Bar & Grill (which is currently threatened by the construction wrecking ball, because it stands in the midst of the proposed Atlantic Yards development). Throughout that period, we produced sixteen hard copies of Lurch Magazine. Thus, we are not strangers to this process. For reference sake, samples of this work can be checked out on the web at www.lurchmag.com . We also have back issues available.
Now some of us have decided to breathe life into a new project. This one is called Burrow Magazine. This is not be confused with “burro,” which is a sort of South-of-the-Border ass, or “borough,” which describes the boundaries in which we are confined to live, or “burrito,” which is a lard specialty at Yummy Taco, a Korean-owned ersatz Mexican restaurant on Flatbush Avenue, or “burgher,” a law-abiding German, not the popular American health-food snack. Nor should you mistake Burrow for the word “barrow” as in the following Allan Sherman version of Dublin’s unofficial anthem ”Cockles & Mussels,” the original of which wasn’t written by an Irish person at all, but by a Scotsman:
“She wheels her wheel barrow
Through streets that are narrow
Her barrow is narrow, her hips are too wide.
So wherever she wheels it
The neighborhood hears it
Her girdle keeps scraping the holes on each side.
In Dublin’s fair city
where girls are so pretty
My Molly stands out cos she weighs twenty stone.
I don’t mind her fat, but
It’s not only that, but
She’s cock-eyed and muscle-bound Molly Malone.”
The self-definition of Burrow Magazine is this: “A Brooklyn-based magazine publishing a borderless community of writers, artists and non-elitist shit stirrers.” That’s us, and we invite anybody interested in submitting written material, short stories, essays, poems, reviews and art work to consider this as a possible source for being published. We intend to regularly update this site, but will also produce two hard copies of Burrow per year.
This is a humble beginning, but we know that we will only receive feedback when we put some food on the table. So we’ll be brutally honest with you and relate the saga of our name choice. We wanted “Plan B” but some bastards had already nabbed that one. Then we considered “The Rolling Stones” but totally unknown to us, there is some kind of aging and supposedly popular English rock band by that name. Then we toyed around with “Sabenza Gakula”, a Zulu phrase about hard work, but to our surprise nobody here knew what that meant. We even entertained an amalgam of all of these under the title “The Rolling Plan Gakula Stones Sabenza B Magazine,” but we bickered about whether anybody would understand the “B” reference. From this rather pointless exercise, we learnt two important facts, namely that there is an emerging popular music scene happening in the United Kingdom of all places, and that not too many people speak Zulu in Brooklyn. We are much the wiser.
The first incarnation of this site deals with a few commentaries and some not-so-tall tales. Russell Shorto, author of the "The Island at the Center of the World," an absolute page-turner about the original Dutch colonialization of Manhattan, had the chance to rub shoulders with Hirsi Ali, the Somalian writer who made a big stink in Holland, and he shares his take on this experience here. The Reverend Billy, lead-howler of the Church of Stop Shopping, a man with a pompadour and white tux that would make Jerry Lee Lewis salivate, pontificates against consumerism and dispenses with a Beatitude or two. You can read about the fruitless pursuit of one of our editors to bring the Pogues’ front man Shane MacGowan to Brooklyn on St. Patrick’s day to spin some records in a local club. There's another writer’s take on the wonders of the steam age as they relate to the technology of how to listen to music, and various rants, reviews and fiction, some of which deal with what is happening in our immediate neighborhood. And then there's the art work! It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but as the old song goes, “From small things baby, big things sometimes come.” Read on. Furrow your brows with the Burrow.
Now some of us have decided to breathe life into a new project. This one is called Burrow Magazine. This is not be confused with “burro,” which is a sort of South-of-the-Border ass, or “borough,” which describes the boundaries in which we are confined to live, or “burrito,” which is a lard specialty at Yummy Taco, a Korean-owned ersatz Mexican restaurant on Flatbush Avenue, or “burgher,” a law-abiding German, not the popular American health-food snack. Nor should you mistake Burrow for the word “barrow” as in the following Allan Sherman version of Dublin’s unofficial anthem ”Cockles & Mussels,” the original of which wasn’t written by an Irish person at all, but by a Scotsman:
“She wheels her wheel barrow
Through streets that are narrow
Her barrow is narrow, her hips are too wide.
So wherever she wheels it
The neighborhood hears it
Her girdle keeps scraping the holes on each side.
In Dublin’s fair city
where girls are so pretty
My Molly stands out cos she weighs twenty stone.
I don’t mind her fat, but
It’s not only that, but
She’s cock-eyed and muscle-bound Molly Malone.”
The self-definition of Burrow Magazine is this: “A Brooklyn-based magazine publishing a borderless community of writers, artists and non-elitist shit stirrers.” That’s us, and we invite anybody interested in submitting written material, short stories, essays, poems, reviews and art work to consider this as a possible source for being published. We intend to regularly update this site, but will also produce two hard copies of Burrow per year.
This is a humble beginning, but we know that we will only receive feedback when we put some food on the table. So we’ll be brutally honest with you and relate the saga of our name choice. We wanted “Plan B” but some bastards had already nabbed that one. Then we considered “The Rolling Stones” but totally unknown to us, there is some kind of aging and supposedly popular English rock band by that name. Then we toyed around with “Sabenza Gakula”, a Zulu phrase about hard work, but to our surprise nobody here knew what that meant. We even entertained an amalgam of all of these under the title “The Rolling Plan Gakula Stones Sabenza B Magazine,” but we bickered about whether anybody would understand the “B” reference. From this rather pointless exercise, we learnt two important facts, namely that there is an emerging popular music scene happening in the United Kingdom of all places, and that not too many people speak Zulu in Brooklyn. We are much the wiser.
The first incarnation of this site deals with a few commentaries and some not-so-tall tales. Russell Shorto, author of the "The Island at the Center of the World," an absolute page-turner about the original Dutch colonialization of Manhattan, had the chance to rub shoulders with Hirsi Ali, the Somalian writer who made a big stink in Holland, and he shares his take on this experience here. The Reverend Billy, lead-howler of the Church of Stop Shopping, a man with a pompadour and white tux that would make Jerry Lee Lewis salivate, pontificates against consumerism and dispenses with a Beatitude or two. You can read about the fruitless pursuit of one of our editors to bring the Pogues’ front man Shane MacGowan to Brooklyn on St. Patrick’s day to spin some records in a local club. There's another writer’s take on the wonders of the steam age as they relate to the technology of how to listen to music, and various rants, reviews and fiction, some of which deal with what is happening in our immediate neighborhood. And then there's the art work! It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but as the old song goes, “From small things baby, big things sometimes come.” Read on. Furrow your brows with the Burrow.
MySpace & MyPod
by Bill Carney
Both of my bands (the Jug Addicts and Les Sans Culottes) have had MySpace.com pages for a couple of years now. While I appreciate that it allows rather small-time outfits to engage in the self-promotional Ponzi scheme that is MySpace, it is mind boggling to see the number of bands and individuals that have customized (or “pimped” in MySpace parlance) their MySpace sites with almost completely unreadable graphics. It is the visual equivalent of the music that our nation’s torture experts use, along with stress positions, targeted humiliation, and sleep deprivation, to break down the will of their prisoners. I can’t recall if blasting “Welcome to the Jungle” was sufficient in itself to ferret out Manuel Noriega from his place of sanctuary in the Panamanian Papal Nuncio, but I feel fairly certain that some of these MySpace pages would have done the job. If Bush and Attorney General Gonzalez start surfing MySpace, I am sure it is only a short matter of time before the torture plan for our myriad Guanatanamos includes these brain scrambling and punishing MySpace pages. I knew that once Rupert Murdoch got hold of MySpace it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped.
I got my IPOD (MyPod one year ago. Quite frankly, I was intent upon rocking my Sony Walkman until they came back into fashion again as part of the 80's retro craze. I was content to be totally behind the times knowing that I was ahead of the next wave. Sometimes you have to be willing to pay the price to be cutting edge and fashion forward. I pictured myself as the musical equivalent of one of those Japanese Imperial Army guys, crawling out of the jungle 50 years after the war. Death before dishonor. But now I got an IPOD so another brilliant plan has been blown to Hell.
With the IPOD (which I think stand for InterPersonal Oneupsmanship Device), I initially organized my library into playlists with names such as “Rock,” “Totally Rockin” and “Awesome Rawk,” simply to distinguish them from one another. As a longtime, obsessive compiler of mixed tapes (see Sony Walkman para., ante) I organized my playlists into a play order, as a musician might try to pace the set of music for a performance. My preferred modus operandi is to have pretty sharp contrasts from one song to another, mixing genres and tempos. I realized, however, that my lists compiled for the IPOD were simply no match for the cassette collections. They suffered from having been compiled too easily, through the magic of click and drag and without the necessity of recording them in real time. I once heard Godard complaining about digital film editing versus analog in much the same way. My new click and drag playlists lacked the sturm and drang of the analog playlists.
So I succumbed to the IPOD’s infamous “shuffle” setting. I say infamous because of all the ridiculous hyperbole that has been put forward in the media about how this function supposedly revolutionized way people listen to music. The proponents of this theory claimed that listeners suddenly had much broader tastes in music because they were now shuffling their playlists. Of course, for years before the IPOD, many people had cd players with a shuffle function, and those CD players allowed the listener to load in dozens or even hundreds of CDs. Personally, I always liked the five CD shuffle because I felt it allowed one to be selective about the five CD and the ultimate playlist universe so it was keyed into whatever mood I was in, but also allowed for interesting contrasts within those five CDs.
In my experience the feature was far from foolproof. It had some secret formula for weighing the five CDs, and in fact seemed to favor certain songs on each CD. So if, for instance, “Some Girls” by the Rolling Stones was in the mix, inevitably the first track played from that disc was “The Girl with Far Away Eyes.” Truly, there was a ghost in the machine. Also, I will make a deal with Mick Jagger. He doesn’t have to listen to Roger Miller sing “London Swings Like a Pendulum Do” ever again if I don’t have to hear him try and sing another country song.
In addition, if there were five CDs in rotation, the shuffle feature focused on four of them and did not play one of them. I guess the feature was truly random since it did not distribute the music from various records equally. It would eventually play every song if you played all of the CDs to completion but did so unevenly, almost radically so through some secret, yet annoying principle of selection. And if, God Forbid, you decided that one of the CDs in rotation was not really playing nicely with the others and opened the CD exchange feature, the shuffle was back to square one. You then were likely to hear most of the songs you had already heard before, in fact, the aforementioned shuffle “favorites.”
The IPOD seems to recreate the shuffle favorite feature. Or it seems to be focusing on just one section of the playlist instead of moving up and down all of the 1000 songs in the potential playlist. Recently, in pressing my “next” feature as part of a quiz someone sent me, five of the fifteen selections were from the Dirtbombs. While their music is well representd on my IPOD, it was frustrating that the IPOD was not offering me the variety of music that the company and the media trumpeted as part of the device’s purported revolutionary impact on music listening.
So I was driven back to the playlists. A recent solution for me was to listen to all of the songs on my playlist alphabetically. This approach, much more so than the “shuffle” feature was in fact a revolutionary way for me to listen to music. I was pleased to see that there were no clunkers among the Number Songs on my IPOD. Since the alphabetical system starts with all the songs beginning with numbers (or other symbols before the A through Z alphabetical sequence starts), I discovered the first song on my “alphabetical” playlist was in fact “$1000 Wedding” by Gram Parsons. The IPOD, appropriately, respects the dollar sign before all else. Next, come the songs that begin with parentheticals such as “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” and “(I Don’t Want to go to) Chelsea. That got me thinking about how much I like this convention of titling songs. (Perhaps The Whole World Would Be) Better If (This convention Were) More Widespread. Because as things stand now (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.
After the parade of parenthetical titles, I have a Spanish language song that starts with the upside down ! mark they use in Spanish (and which I also think English would do well to employ). And then there are 13 number songs. These include, “16 with a Bullet” by Scott Morgan, “1970” by the Stooges, “2012” by SSM, “25 Hours a Day” by Kim Fowley, and “7 and 7 is” by Love. And then it’s on to the alphabet. There are a good number of songs starting with “Country,” a decent showing by “Dead” or “Death,” and “Don’t” is a very popular sentiment in song titles, I have discovered. “Get” is represented by “Get Down Tonight,” “Get It Together,” “Get It While You Can,” “Get Out Of Denver,” and the wonderful “Get You Off” by the Go. “Hey” would also do well on Family Feud because there is ‘Hey Joe,” “Hey Linda,” “Hey Sailor” and “Hey Teacher,” and finally “Hey! Little Boy” (the only one to use an exclamation form of “Hey”). Perhaps, the top title starter is “I’m,” “I am” or “I” which makes sense to me, and I can hardly say I am surprised although somewhat saddened that it beats out the titles beginning with “Love.” The last song is “Zero Point,” and there is only one Zero.
Both of my bands (the Jug Addicts and Les Sans Culottes) have had MySpace.com pages for a couple of years now. While I appreciate that it allows rather small-time outfits to engage in the self-promotional Ponzi scheme that is MySpace, it is mind boggling to see the number of bands and individuals that have customized (or “pimped” in MySpace parlance) their MySpace sites with almost completely unreadable graphics. It is the visual equivalent of the music that our nation’s torture experts use, along with stress positions, targeted humiliation, and sleep deprivation, to break down the will of their prisoners. I can’t recall if blasting “Welcome to the Jungle” was sufficient in itself to ferret out Manuel Noriega from his place of sanctuary in the Panamanian Papal Nuncio, but I feel fairly certain that some of these MySpace pages would have done the job. If Bush and Attorney General Gonzalez start surfing MySpace, I am sure it is only a short matter of time before the torture plan for our myriad Guanatanamos includes these brain scrambling and punishing MySpace pages. I knew that once Rupert Murdoch got hold of MySpace it was only a matter of time before the other shoe dropped.
I got my IPOD (MyPod one year ago. Quite frankly, I was intent upon rocking my Sony Walkman until they came back into fashion again as part of the 80's retro craze. I was content to be totally behind the times knowing that I was ahead of the next wave. Sometimes you have to be willing to pay the price to be cutting edge and fashion forward. I pictured myself as the musical equivalent of one of those Japanese Imperial Army guys, crawling out of the jungle 50 years after the war. Death before dishonor. But now I got an IPOD so another brilliant plan has been blown to Hell.
With the IPOD (which I think stand for InterPersonal Oneupsmanship Device), I initially organized my library into playlists with names such as “Rock,” “Totally Rockin” and “Awesome Rawk,” simply to distinguish them from one another. As a longtime, obsessive compiler of mixed tapes (see Sony Walkman para., ante) I organized my playlists into a play order, as a musician might try to pace the set of music for a performance. My preferred modus operandi is to have pretty sharp contrasts from one song to another, mixing genres and tempos. I realized, however, that my lists compiled for the IPOD were simply no match for the cassette collections. They suffered from having been compiled too easily, through the magic of click and drag and without the necessity of recording them in real time. I once heard Godard complaining about digital film editing versus analog in much the same way. My new click and drag playlists lacked the sturm and drang of the analog playlists.
So I succumbed to the IPOD’s infamous “shuffle” setting. I say infamous because of all the ridiculous hyperbole that has been put forward in the media about how this function supposedly revolutionized way people listen to music. The proponents of this theory claimed that listeners suddenly had much broader tastes in music because they were now shuffling their playlists. Of course, for years before the IPOD, many people had cd players with a shuffle function, and those CD players allowed the listener to load in dozens or even hundreds of CDs. Personally, I always liked the five CD shuffle because I felt it allowed one to be selective about the five CD and the ultimate playlist universe so it was keyed into whatever mood I was in, but also allowed for interesting contrasts within those five CDs.
In my experience the feature was far from foolproof. It had some secret formula for weighing the five CDs, and in fact seemed to favor certain songs on each CD. So if, for instance, “Some Girls” by the Rolling Stones was in the mix, inevitably the first track played from that disc was “The Girl with Far Away Eyes.” Truly, there was a ghost in the machine. Also, I will make a deal with Mick Jagger. He doesn’t have to listen to Roger Miller sing “London Swings Like a Pendulum Do” ever again if I don’t have to hear him try and sing another country song.
In addition, if there were five CDs in rotation, the shuffle feature focused on four of them and did not play one of them. I guess the feature was truly random since it did not distribute the music from various records equally. It would eventually play every song if you played all of the CDs to completion but did so unevenly, almost radically so through some secret, yet annoying principle of selection. And if, God Forbid, you decided that one of the CDs in rotation was not really playing nicely with the others and opened the CD exchange feature, the shuffle was back to square one. You then were likely to hear most of the songs you had already heard before, in fact, the aforementioned shuffle “favorites.”
The IPOD seems to recreate the shuffle favorite feature. Or it seems to be focusing on just one section of the playlist instead of moving up and down all of the 1000 songs in the potential playlist. Recently, in pressing my “next” feature as part of a quiz someone sent me, five of the fifteen selections were from the Dirtbombs. While their music is well representd on my IPOD, it was frustrating that the IPOD was not offering me the variety of music that the company and the media trumpeted as part of the device’s purported revolutionary impact on music listening.
So I was driven back to the playlists. A recent solution for me was to listen to all of the songs on my playlist alphabetically. This approach, much more so than the “shuffle” feature was in fact a revolutionary way for me to listen to music. I was pleased to see that there were no clunkers among the Number Songs on my IPOD. Since the alphabetical system starts with all the songs beginning with numbers (or other symbols before the A through Z alphabetical sequence starts), I discovered the first song on my “alphabetical” playlist was in fact “$1000 Wedding” by Gram Parsons. The IPOD, appropriately, respects the dollar sign before all else. Next, come the songs that begin with parentheticals such as “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” and “(I Don’t Want to go to) Chelsea. That got me thinking about how much I like this convention of titling songs. (Perhaps The Whole World Would Be) Better If (This convention Were) More Widespread. Because as things stand now (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.
After the parade of parenthetical titles, I have a Spanish language song that starts with the upside down ! mark they use in Spanish (and which I also think English would do well to employ). And then there are 13 number songs. These include, “16 with a Bullet” by Scott Morgan, “1970” by the Stooges, “2012” by SSM, “25 Hours a Day” by Kim Fowley, and “7 and 7 is” by Love. And then it’s on to the alphabet. There are a good number of songs starting with “Country,” a decent showing by “Dead” or “Death,” and “Don’t” is a very popular sentiment in song titles, I have discovered. “Get” is represented by “Get Down Tonight,” “Get It Together,” “Get It While You Can,” “Get Out Of Denver,” and the wonderful “Get You Off” by the Go. “Hey” would also do well on Family Feud because there is ‘Hey Joe,” “Hey Linda,” “Hey Sailor” and “Hey Teacher,” and finally “Hey! Little Boy” (the only one to use an exclamation form of “Hey”). Perhaps, the top title starter is “I’m,” “I am” or “I” which makes sense to me, and I can hardly say I am surprised although somewhat saddened that it beats out the titles beginning with “Love.” The last song is “Zero Point,” and there is only one Zero.
Part I: The Little Fat Girl
by Faith G
She pretends not to be there.
Crouching in the corner;
the fat little girl with the large black eyes;
so intent on watching his upper arm muscles
expand and contract
as he tosses the first
of two drawers of clothing
halfway across the room.
He gets this way on Fridays,
when he goes to Pepe's.
Usually lasts the weekend.
But when he goes to the garage on Mondays
it becomes another Saturday Night dream.
Still, it's better than when
her momma's away,
when he grabs her and kisses her cheeks
over and over again
with his slobbery lips and puckered mouth.
She wipes the spit away with the back of her hand
but the wet dirt won't go away.
And better too,
than the days he flings the back of his hand
across her mouth, calling her stupid
like he calls her grandma.
She longs to be kidnapped,
taken away to the country,
with grass and trees
and dogs and cats
like the ones he won't let her have.
Where she can have all the comic books
and candy she wants.
She sleeps alot.
That's her world.
He can't take that away;
though some days he tries.
She pretends not to be there.
Crouching in the corner;
the fat little girl with the large black eyes;
so intent on watching his upper arm muscles
expand and contract
as he tosses the first
of two drawers of clothing
halfway across the room.
He gets this way on Fridays,
when he goes to Pepe's.
Usually lasts the weekend.
But when he goes to the garage on Mondays
it becomes another Saturday Night dream.
Still, it's better than when
her momma's away,
when he grabs her and kisses her cheeks
over and over again
with his slobbery lips and puckered mouth.
She wipes the spit away with the back of her hand
but the wet dirt won't go away.
And better too,
than the days he flings the back of his hand
across her mouth, calling her stupid
like he calls her grandma.
She longs to be kidnapped,
taken away to the country,
with grass and trees
and dogs and cats
like the ones he won't let her have.
Where she can have all the comic books
and candy she wants.
She sleeps alot.
That's her world.
He can't take that away;
though some days he tries.
Complexion
by Faith G
A day like any other;
as I stare out at this blue-crabbed coast.
I am fixed on the waves and their gentle foxtrot;
first turning outward, then inward towards themselves,
in the hope that their slow dance will somehow calm me.
Lately my anger feels so powerful,
it could stop God’s plan daily at 3:00pm.
Eating, sleeping, walking by rote,
but I cannot aptly execute the tiniest gesture
with my obsession.
Must I now also accept that there are no clear, dispassionate thoughts
moving through this stagnancy?
I kneel down on the coarse New England beachcover;
praying for your memory to fall into the sea.
I stare at the pillows of clouds
as tears gather on my cheeks;
they are the texture of rain falling
on late November soil.
It is difficult to project whether
my genuflection will help me forget,
warm to again or not,
the peculiar lineaments of love.
A few years prior, I might not have recognized your trademark,
and yet, I am still very much alone in body and spirit.
Somehow I think we together decided that last day
that your brand of segregation
would work quite well
in both our worlds.
A day like any other;
as I stare out at this blue-crabbed coast.
I am fixed on the waves and their gentle foxtrot;
first turning outward, then inward towards themselves,
in the hope that their slow dance will somehow calm me.
Lately my anger feels so powerful,
it could stop God’s plan daily at 3:00pm.
Eating, sleeping, walking by rote,
but I cannot aptly execute the tiniest gesture
with my obsession.
Must I now also accept that there are no clear, dispassionate thoughts
moving through this stagnancy?
I kneel down on the coarse New England beachcover;
praying for your memory to fall into the sea.
I stare at the pillows of clouds
as tears gather on my cheeks;
they are the texture of rain falling
on late November soil.
It is difficult to project whether
my genuflection will help me forget,
warm to again or not,
the peculiar lineaments of love.
A few years prior, I might not have recognized your trademark,
and yet, I am still very much alone in body and spirit.
Somehow I think we together decided that last day
that your brand of segregation
would work quite well
in both our worlds.
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