Category Archives: NYC

21st Century Elections

07 Wednesday Nov 2012

Posted by in elections, NYC, S.F., San Antonio

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In Spring of 2000, Hachette-Filippacchi Inc.,hired me and a half-dozen others to work as independently-contracted temporary employees to fact-check and conduct research for George magazine – whose founder and editor-in-chief John F. Kennedy, Jr. had been killed in a light-plane crash amidst fog off the coast of Maine eight months before. They hired us to ensure George remained, in the wake of its founder’s passing, an audible element of the political discourse during the Election of 2000.

As a national magazine which was read by hundreds of thousands of voters in many states, particular focus was paid to the Presidential Election between Vice President Al Gore and George W. Bush, the Governor of Texas.

My fellow employees, under Editor-in-Chief Frank Lalli, were a tight-knit, smart and savvy crew. In fact, on Election Night we were all together at Mr. Lalli’s beautiful upper westside home where he had invited us to watch returns. But Karl Rove’s fat face and a flipped state later, many of us were back in the office. A few of us stayed up most of the night and by 10 a.m. I was not alone in the office when I was posting coverage of Florida on the George website.

Though admittedly not a heavy-hitter politically, George was engaged throughout the Election and maintained an immense audience of voting readers before the magazine was finally brought to an end in 2001.

In 2003 I covered Schwarzenegger’s Election via Recall of Davis for KPFK, 90.7fm Los Angeles.

I also covered The Election of 2004 and the Presidential Race between George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry for KPFK, 90.7fm Los Angeles and in part for Pacifica Radio. Some of that 2004 Election work exists here and online at Pacifica’s Audioport and in the Pacifica Radio Archives, but I have complete digital copies of everything I did for KPFK and Pacifica between 2003 and 2005 backed up on disc in my studio as well.

In 2008, I was no longer working as a journalist, but did cover Obama’s Victory in Iowa for KPFK and produced short Audio-Visual Installments for Freshjive on the Internet. These were amateurish and clunky by design, yet carried considerable data for anyone who had tuned in to the broadcasts I produced for KPFK four years before.

When Obama won in ’08, I was with Lloyd Dangle, who hosted a book signing and Election Night Returns Party at the Riptide in San Francisco. Earlier in the day I had a drink with former SF Mayor Willie Brown at the St. Regis – we discussed Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s plans for appointing a Senator to replace disgraced Alaska Senator Ted Stevens, forced to retire.

This year,I did not work as a journalist, but rather observed as a reader of the news media and a regular Californian voter.

The biggest single predictor of the elections of the 21st century has to be the margin of difference in registrations for the two major parties.

There are many reasons for this: smaller parties are being absorbed and disappearing for lack of membership, corporate interests fund the two major parties only, people threatened by one of the two parties runs to join the other and the demography of the nation is changing.

I have successfully predicted the last two elections as a result of my study of data and my knowledge of voting history. I think I see the electorate again.

Some points on 21st Century US Elections:

It’s impossible to write a blog about all my experiences voting and covering General Elections in the United States in the 21st Century, but suffice it to say there is a distinct difference between these and the Elections of the latter half of the 20th century, in which I also participated.

Much of this is discussed in my talk Political Media, Messages and More.

2003 was the Recall Election and spawned recalls in the 21st Century because of Schwarzenegger’s success.

2008 was the Youtube Election.

2012 was the Twitter Election.

Money and media are the driving forces of what has become a political system mired in divided, brutal contests between two immense parties which are financed primarily by corporations and special interest groups that define their policies.

We are in desperate need of a new Federal Elections Reform Act, as was passed in the early 1970’s.

Our democracy is sick. Hardly half the people with the right to vote even participate.

We need to update, nationalize and standardize voting procedures and make them more secure. We need to increase registration and participation. We need to subsidize the creation and maintenance of additional parties in the face of the massive expenditures made by Republicans and Democrats that have taken elections out of the reach of the common person. We need proportional representation in Congress.

Have been saying all of this for years, and it has only gotten worse. Here’s hoping the young people who are increasing in numbers at the polls pull off what my generation couldn’t.

Before You Came, short fiction, 2008

28 Tuesday Oct 2008

Posted by in fiction, NYC

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The bed is relieved. Two lovers lie beside each other, weightless. Amber light from a street lamp outside falls through the open window casting itself across their splayed bodies painting their skin – his chest goes deep red, her shoulders, a canvas to the shadow of the windowframe – a perfect rhombus in pale orange. She puts her arm over him.

“All right,” he murmurs, “We do it.”

“Mmmm,” she hums into his chest.

They sigh in unison.

That’s how the decision is made. He does not hide his anxiety and she senses it but says nothing more. His lips are chapped and he picks at the dry skin. The movement jostles her. She wriggles, and turns away, already drifting off to sleep. He lies awake considering a temp job.

The next day she tells her assistant, Lucy:

“We’re going to do it.”

High morning sunlight blazes through her office. Lucy enters, closes the door, flattens the blinds, then turns on the ashtray.  It was a gift — an ashtray that sucks smoke into its belly and diffuses it.

A gaily plaid-patterned pouch fluffs out under a black plastic tray containing the suction mechanism.  It looks like a sporran pulled from the navel of a Scot or, when there’s more than one cigarette resting on it, like a tiny set of bone-white bagpipes.

“Well, now you’ve gotta quit,” Lucy comments, shaking a cigarette loose from the pack on the table between them. Jennifer pulls a lighter from her purse.

“Mmm,” she agrees, “this one’s my last.”  She leans across the desk, lights Lucy’s, then her own. They smoke in silence. Jennifer rocks back in her chair as she puts the cigarette to her lips, then leans forward to exhale.  It is quiet between them in the office – the barely audible crackle of the burning paper, the long, slow exhalation of smoke into the ashtray, the soft beeps of fax machines and telephones from beyond Lucy’s desk.  Jennifer ashes.

“Well,” Lucy says, finally, “hope it’s a girl.”

The would-be father of her child sits on a bench in Union Square in a black overcoat with a wool scarf wrapped tightly around his neck; folded once lengthwise and then tucked into a loop made from halving its length — comme son ami Stan, comme un Parisian.

The scarf was a gift from Jennifer. He’d had it dry-cleaned only once: during The Horrific Autumn of the Void when Raj became convinced that noxious World Trade Center dust, porting asbestos and burnt humanity, had infected everything capable of holding it. He’d even rid himself of his beard, then. But it was back by winter – speckled with tiny white spacecraft each time it snowed.

Rajagopal Balasubramaniam americanized when he moved to New York, taking the name Raj Balas, because he felt it had a European feel. He was 19 then and the Mayor was a Jew – it was a good time to change your name.

When they first met, Jennifer thought it would be a one-night stand.  In Raj’s arms, after that hot night, she said:  “People from outside the U.S. aren’t put off by girls with a weight problem,” she said, “It’s like it’s not part of their culture to discriminate – or maybe it’s even better, you know, to have a little more on you?”

“You don’t have a weight problem,” Raj mumbled.

Since that encounter, seven years have fired by at New York’s inhuman tempo. They stayed together through four infidelities, three of which they discussed openly. Raj slept on the sofa fourteen times. Jennifer once left on short notice to stay with her mother in California but she returned after the weekend. They didn’t rush into things after nine-eleven, but knew then, for certain, where it was going.

It’s twilight in autumn when day darkens early and gray dusk speeds toward nightness – the hour of the shift change, when empty taxis return to their gates leaving tourists at street corners waving their arms in futility at yellow cars topped by bright white letters: “not-for-hire.” The city of New York breathes workers in and out – the drone bees of the great hive exhaled and inhaled, exhaled, inhaled.

In the park, Raj watches a woman in black moving fast against a stiffening wind. The woman runs to get to the subway steps. Traffic picks up.

<wheedley eedley eedley> goes his phone. “Balas,” he replies.

“Bigot!” whispers the voice of a shape-shifting creature known as a rakshasa. The streets are a tumult. There are chiseled cement barriers cast into the avenue, cracked and speckled with tar. A tattered leaf skitters across the stone surface of the pathway in front of him. It comes to rest near Raj’s shoe.  “Admit it, at least,” hisses the voice.

Raj holds the phone still against his cheek. A zephyr passes over his face. The rakshasa takes the corporeal form of a gray-flecked, tattered thing that flutters to a landing on the sidewalk.

He pockets his phone. The pigeon steps cautiously, lifting bony legs, stretching the wrinkly pink skin on its knobby legs. A scaly sheen of iridescent violet and sea-green glimmers in its neck.

“And yet you profit from avoiding conflict,” it murmurs, “you hypocrite.”

Raj looks left and right. He thinks a pigeon is talking to him. The park fills with people en route to the subway. From the pocket of his overcoat, he withdraws a crumpled, white paper sack.  He unwraps half a bagel, tears off a piece the size of his thumb and throws it down in the walkway. The pigeon pecks at it.

Several more birds gather, clucking and cooing. Raj feeds them. The light fades fast.  The thousand thousands descend from high-rises into the concrete street, all the souls of city traffic, like leaves drifting down.

Part Two
Lucy was born into a large Irish family that shared a small flat in King’s Cross, London, in the early 1980’s. There wasn’t enough room for a happy family, much less one with her father at its root.

These days, she plugs headphones into a sixteenth-inch jack attached to a radiating plastic box on her desk each morning at 7:30, faces the monitor, the door and the telephone, takes a one-hour break for lunch, returns to her hemispheric chamber for five hours in the afternoon, and then pulls out of the jack at 6, like a stopwatch, <click>.

And she does it again the next day … infinity.

This has gone on for seven years.

Lucy is a vibrant human being who has evolved into a robot trained to respond when things beep and ring:

<wheedley-eedley-eedley>

“Creative.” she sings into the receiver,

It’s Raj: “Hi Lucy, what’s up?”

“I see us as huge, flat, irradiant disks,” Lucy replies, “enormous plates of data stacked on top of each other in a hierarchy of information access. We constitute our consciousness of what is happening in the world right now from the information marketplace, consuming only what’s available at our financial level – on our particular plateau. Nobody reads anything that isn’t on the Internet any more, so it all comes down to TV.”

Ten year’s in the industry, and Lucy’s voice has been whetted for the phone: cool and metallic.

“If you’ve only got TV, you’re in the ghetto where everybody knows the same false shit. If you’ve TV but no cable, you’re broke or the nouveau chic who cut the cable after 9/11 and ran out and bought a DVD player. You watch videos, claim they’re documentaries.

“If you’ve TV and cable – and I’m talking just basic, now, because news and information ride the basic and premium packages equally – then you’re on the biggest, widest disk of all. We shop together, eat out together, form opinions together in electronic media and real time everywhere-now. We watch the same shit on a TV mounted in the back of a seat on the airplane.  Most of us have Internet access, which less than 10% of the world has …

“From our huge, flat socio-intellectual group it gets smaller – smaller disks of information consumers: satellite TV, digital, broadband, until you finally end up with the wealthy few flipping through free porn and catching Formula One live from Dubai,”

Lucy takes a breath, and in a series of quick motions, opens a drawer, pulls out a message pad and cuts the iTunes dj, midstream. “And these aren’t the Illuminati we’re talking about, Raj. These are the most powerful wankers on earth. Neroes, Raj, masturbating while Rome burns.”

In the park Raj shrugs back the chill, “I read the papers. Can you put me through, please?”

“One moment please.”

In her office, Jennifer stabs an index finger at the grey button marked “intercom” and immediately the office is filled with the airy sound of static, a plastic mic dangling in the wind.

“Hey,” she calls out.

“Goddammit, take me off.”

“What do you want?”

“Let’s celebrate …”

“I can’t.”

Cars swoosh by, a horn, in the distance, a siren. A heartbeat.
“C’mon, pick up the phone.” Jennifer takes a drag, eking out, “My hands are full here.” She exhales into the ashtray.

“When are you done?”

She sighs and flips her wrist to see the face of her watch. “I don’t know. Ten, maybe?”

“All right, look, I’m going to Gopal’s.”

“Look for pregnancy books.” Jennifer hangs up, then stabs at another line to call her mother.

“Hello?”

“We’re going to have a baby,” she blurts into the receiver. “We’ll start trying in the spring. It’s decided.”

“Are you getting married?”

“No.”

The dead nothing sound of the digital line between words, then the unmistakable sigh of her mother, “I’ll call you back.” <click>

Jennifer sets the phone down and immediately reaches for a cigarette. “This one’s my last.”

Part Three
Still radiator coolant in a puddle at the curbside bus stop shimmering electric green reflects the neon strip from a lotto sign in the window of the corner shop owned by the immigrant whose kid tagged “AMERIKKKA” everywhere after the buildings got knocked down.

Nobody here – where it’s taught early not to ask or tell too much – would say for sure that the Bush Mafia didn’t let 9/11 happen and most put up an American flag since it meant the Italians’d do business. Pimping and hoing continued at 96% efficiency while the legitimate economy tumbled blindly waiting for the murder of Arabs to save it.

Here, the same smells in an orderly way from the same places everyday, end in a mix remembered miles away as Brooklyn. Each twilight brings the sound of jet-fuel burning in the turbines of descending planes and a few hundred more people everyday. To see what exactly? New York died in the 20th century. The eleventh of September just sealed the tomb, neatly closing the era for historians. It was all so scripted.

Picture night over rooftops and chimneys. When everything is still, you see me. I am a New York night.

Ovid: There is, far above us, a way. It appears white at night and so we call it milky.

Picture a white skipping stone, pulsing, at night. That’s right, a satellite. See that skipping stone blipping regularly across the fluid blackness between the still points of ancient light that forms the great sea of time and space. I am the black sea upon which rests Ovid’s great white way.

On that first night of the new era, while you slept or tried to sleep, having nightmares or dreaming it all a dream, I was clickety-click, lickety-split, looking-climbing, seeing everywhere. I crept across rooftops from ocean to ocean, swam – one among billions of plankton – in the bitstorm on the infosea, avoiding whales of security teams: enormous beasts of agency drifting through the fluid ones and zeroes making as much useful information as stochastic noise.

I lay low, listening as they passed, singing their weird music that pushes them forever on. I became the white eyeball. Have you ever seen two men fight? I am a New York night and there is no greater authority on such matters. I host eight million egos. I catch a fight every shift.

There’s often a moment just before the shit goes down when it seems it won’t happen at all: a slouch in posture, a moment’s hesitation, the briefest instant of sanity or fatigue before the flurry of escalation that leads, ultimately, to assault. It might be a <sigh> that breaks the hard-built tension just before the nod, the push, the shove-jam-cock that ends with the <pop> of battery.

The deaths of 2,800 in my belly were the outcome of one such flurry of violent exchanges between the most desperate and the wickedest of the wealthy. The Oil Cabal Americans – whose religion is capitalism – drunk with newfound power from the success of their Millenial coup d’etat, spent the summer of ’01 baiting the fearless blackguards of the shadow markets over possession of dark crude from the shores of the Caspian Sea.

Then it was the spectacle on CNN worldwide, which means that there was a declaration of war all right, only it happened months before the morning of September 11. Perhaps years, decades and centuries come into it. Will we ever know?

No.

Instead we’re stuck with the birth of a fiction: the spectacle re-interpreted and woven into artificial jingo, accepted by at least enough people to let the war parade begin, middle and … will it ever end?

Part of the spectacle happened half a mile from the hard-angle of Gopal’s nose. It was spectacular right before his eyes. He stood on the roof of his North Brooklyn bookstore – where he’d watched the sun set a thousand times over the glittering Manhattan skyline, where he’d smoked a thousand joints after work over the last seven years – chin dropped to his chest, brow furrowed, staring in awe. He saw the fiery bursts, witnessed the collapse and the enormous hoary plume of ash, poisoned dust and rubble. He rolled a joint.

He’d have made a unique photo. His calmness from a distance linked him with no one. His hawkish South Asian nose was only accentuated by that perched posture on the bookstore rooftop staring at the nullification of the World Trade Centers. He looked more like a vulture than anything else.

Then Gopal went downstairs to watch the news. The kids had been let out of school and some of the teenagers drifted into the shop to hang out. Gopal told them their parents would want them home, and when the shop was empty, locked up downstairs, flipped the “closed” sign and went back up to the roof.

Jennifer was at her office when the second jetliner screamed past. She didn’t get back to the house until after 2 in the afternoon. She found Raj face down in his pillow and woke him with the news. He’d slept through the apocalypse.

They watched the replays of what had happened just half a mile away while he slept. They went to the roof. There they found Gopal, atop his, next door, smoking. They crossed over the flashing. It was Gopal who first said: “There’ll be backlash.”

Part Four
The First Gulf War never happened for Gopal, nor for his wife, Amrita. In May of 1990, just a few months before Bush’s Marines moved into Desert Shield, the newlywed Indian-American couple moved to Madras, she on a fellowship, he under contract. It was the month of the fire winds of Agni, that blow down from the slight eastern ghats across the desert of Tamil Nadu to the sea. Rajiv Gandhi hadn’t yet been assassinated. There was a drunken-ness in the fat, sticky afternoons.

They struggled with being Americans in India. It tore at their relationship. He drank late, often, and gave himself, swaggering, to Indian time. She found him condescending and patronizing and so was defiant when they went anywhere together. He thought her a hypocrite.

By April of the following year, while George H. W. Bush was declaring Kuwait a free republic, Gopal and Amrita were divorced.

Their families were generally unconcerned that a George Bush sought to crush Saddam Hussein and attack Iraq even then. Many secretly rather appreciated the cover that Bush’s war provided for the family misfortune – the hushed-up word and the secret bibliography of unmarried writers – “diworce.”

Bush the Elder’s war was declared over because it was bad politics. Amrita and Gopal called it quits for bad vibes. Late at night on a golf course in Bangalore, they made love, drunk, for the last time. Amrita pitied him and let it happen.

They moved back to New York and found friends who watched television at a frightening speed. Ubiquitous shrinking cel-phones led beep-beeping to workstations playing DOOM with three-dimensional range-of-motion in New York, capitol of capital – into which they leapt, single.  Well, Amrita did: she went to grad school, married a Manhattan Jew, and became something of a demi-goddess; dark, silent and lovely set against all those white people, a broad-leafed houseplant whose curved palm wove its way into everything. She grew into the role. She and David rented a flat on the upper west side. Pukka.

Gopal meanwhile, moved to Brooklyn to tend the bookstore, Subbu’s Books. North Brooklyn pronounced it, “Soo-Booze”.

When his late-uncle’s estate was settled, Gopal was a “recent divorcee”, living with his father in New Jersey. Gopal’s father received the bookstore and a small parcel of land in South India, from his Subbu-anna, which is how he was able to die where he was born, leaving Gopal alone in Brooklyn, with a fate less secure, tending an independent bookstore in turn-of-the-century New York.

They all had to learn the name, ‘Giuliani,’ then, an Italian family name he was meant to live up to while he secured the island for corporate interests and helped Disney draw worker bees to the hive. The succor: they would want to feel the rain in Central Park that had appeared to them as if in a dream; breathing steadily in a dark room anyway, while a low-whirring emanating from above projected sparkling light in the black-and-white, high contrast drops that fell on Diane Keaton and Woody Allen in Manhattan.

Hollywood and Bollywood produce dreams. And Mayors capitalize. Twenty years later, it was complete. Manhattan was a mall. Gopal had watched as Mallhattan made its way from meeting place to marketplace, marched through the Modernists and managed a much-hyped Millennium as it marked the exact end of the first Post-Modernism.

But this was all overshadowed when, at 600 miles an hour, a Boeing 757 slammed into the World Financial Center Two building downtown – an event that will forever be mistaken for the end of Post-Modernism.

Post-Modernism, an art movement of European abstraction that spread to literature and flourished in commercial quarters of the Euro-American entertainment sector, did not end on September 11th, 2001.

American Post-Modernism was authored in correspondence between R. Creeley and C. Olson as per a letter from the poet Olson in Black Mountain, North Carolina to Creeley, dated October 20th, 1951:

“And had we not, ourselves (I mean post_modern man) better just leave such things behind us – and not so much trash of discourse and gods?”

But to say it ended because of 19 Arabs or a cabal of white-supremacist’s covert Operation Northwoods is, you must know it, idiotic.

The fact is, American Post-Modernism ended two years before that fateful Tuesday morning, in October of 1999, with this utterance by the 107th Mayor of New York:

“Here’s how I know if something is art. If I can do it … it’s not art.”

which means American Post-Modernism achieved the respectable age of 48 years.

More than Orwell or Camus; and a generous figure given the very deep encroachment upon aesthetics made by commercial uglification at the hands of the sensationalist US American economic model.

More appropriately, though, Giuliani’s comment safely ends Post-Modernism in the twentieth century of the Christian’s calendar, the century when it thrived.

Mallhattan was Giuliani’s vision. It bullied, begged for attention, got it, and seized still more, until The Civic Act became so scripted that when he jailed three hundred homeless people in the last months of the twentieth century, it was taken as a matter of course.

Then, in the 21st century, they busted the cops who sodomized a man with a plunger and behind them discovered a THICK blue line: Amadou Diallo, an unarmed New Yorker, holding only his wallet and identification in his hand was shot 41 times by unmarked cops in the foyer of his own home. Holes in the soles of his feet revealed they were still firing after he was down.

Giuliani had the trial of the four police moved from The Bronx to Albany, and the four cops, who had histories of violent encounters and even petty corruption, were acquitted of all charges, including “misdemeanor reckless endangerment.” We marched.

Then 26-year-old Patrick Dorismond, father of two young girls, and a security guard who, ironically, hoped one day to be a cop himself, was shot and killed refusing drugs from an undercover officer. And in perhaps the most obscene move of his career, before Dorismond’s body was even seen by his friends and family, Giuliani launched a campaign to vilify the dead security guard in the press.

Facing a p.r. nightmare, Giuliani went on the offensive and ordered Police Commissioner Howard Safir to unseal a juvenile record on Dorismond, disclosing that he had been arrested for robbery and assault in 1987, when he was 13. But the charge, that Kendall Clark reported stemmed from a childhood fist fight over a quarter, was dropped and Patrick’s record was sealed because he was a child.

Giuliani declared that Dorismond was no “altar boy” and that his previous brush with the police “may justify, more closely, what the police officer did.” The police were then ordered – and had the audacity of power to show – at Dorismond’s funeral: cops in riot gear at the funeral of a kid they had murdered. We marched.
The name became heavier: Giuliani’s cops were out of control. Giuliani’s Times Square, Disney-fied. Mark Green, or perhaps Fernando Ferrer, was going to be Mayor.

And then, on the day of the democratic primaries, two planes flew into the world trade centers and Amerikkka was born. Giuliani and the cops … were heroes.

Gopal stocked up on Chomsky, Parenti and Zinn, restocked his Edward Said and Autobiographies of Malcolm X. In Mallhattan, Amrita went to pro-Palestinian rallies, where David carried a sign that said “ANOTHER NON-ZIONIST JEW FOR PEACE AND EQUAL RIGHTS”.

The war-fiction rolled on. And we marched.

Part Five
Subbu’s Books is a tall, narrow shop in a converted, ochre-brick row house at the end of a Brooklyn block that neatly separates two neighborhoods of different languages. Because of post-9/11 gentrification and development, the new customers are immigrants, artists, writers and film-makers.

Subbu’s sells newspapers, poetry, literature, magazines, how-to, nonfiction, a handful of first editions, calendars, selected best sellers, bookmarks, stamps, postcards and textbooks in Spanish, English, Arabic, Romance, Polish, Hindi-Urdu, Russian, Mandarin Chinese and so on. An image of the store’s founder, one V.V. Subbuswami, hangs, framed, garlanded, dusty, behind the counter. Today, Gopal, Subbuswami’s eldest nephew, makes purchasing decisions himself alone.

The block is silent but for the occasional whisper of rustling dry leaves on the asphalt. The birch out front of the shop has begun to turn; several leaves have achieved red and gold and a few yellow ones threaten to be the first to fall. Gopal hasn’t yet replaced the screens in the doors with glass and a thin, chilly breeze gusts through the shop. He props open the door to the washroom to sweep, mop and change the paper.

He was currently obsessed with American novelists of the mid-twentieth century, absorbed in a Van Wyck Brooks paperback of interviews.
After cleaning the toilet, Gopal picks up the paperback from the tank, closes the door and sits down to empty himself:

“In the summer of 1954, when he was forty, two years after winning the National Book Award in the United States for his first novel, “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison sat at Café de la Mairie du VI. In postwar Paris, with a group of expatriated Americans, he granted an interview to The Paris Review. It was his last day in Europe at the end of a well-traveled summer. He would return to the U.S. the next morning.

“I suspect,” Ellison said, “that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance – but it must be acceptance on his own terms.”

Ellison, at perhaps the height of his freedom, embraced by some intellectuals and academics in New York and Europe at least, critically assured of his place in any history of the American novel – “Lolita,” would not appear until the following spring – continued:

“The Negro novelist draws his blackness too tightly around him when he sits down to write – that’s what the anti-protest critics believe. But perhaps the white reader draws his whiteness around himself when he sits down to read … he doesn’t want to identify himself with Negro characters in terms of our immediate racial and social situation, though on a deeper human level identification can become compelling, when the situation is revealed artistically.”

The interviewers describe the author as “overwhelming. To listen to him is rather like sitting in the back of a huge hall and feeling the lecturer’s faraway eyes staring directly into your own.”

Ellison, facing the literary attention of Europe and Euro-america, was direct and serious:

“The white reader doesn’t want to get too close, not even in an imaginary re-creation of society. Negro writers have felt this, and it has led to much of our failure.”

Gopal shits and reconsiders the text: “The white reader doesn’t want to get too close, not even in an imaginary re-creation of society.” He flips to the frontispiece. The little paperback had been published in the city, by Viking, in 1963; the exact year that, some thirteen thousand miles away, Gopal had fallen into this existence. “Too close to what?” he mutters.

When Raj arrives he tells Gopal: “We’re going to have a kid.”

“The aunties will have a fit if you don’t get married.”

Raj adopts a Valley Girl tone that he and Gopal once mocked, putting his hand up, palm out, “What. Ever.”  He rolls his eyes heavenward. Laughing, Gopal reaches over and high-fives the open palm.

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Thirty-six.”

Gopal shrugs and returns to his paperback.

As Raj picks at the shelves, he and Gopal spend the afternoon trying out the sound of their new names: Gopal-mama, Gopal-uncle, Appa, Dad, “Pops” and so on.

The rakshasa returns as an African-American male, 6’2″, puffy afro, in the alley behind the bookshop. Raj, who had slipped out back to piss in the street since Gopal had beaten him to the toilet, finds himself facing the demon dressed in an all-black sweatsuit with two parallel white stripes running down the pants leg.  White, block, sans serif lettering is printed across his chest: HOUSE NEGRO.

“Will you please wake up?”

Raj mumbles like an idiot, looking up and down the alley, peering back over-his shoulder at the bookshop for Gopal’s piercing eyes. “What do you want from me?”

“Come clean!” barks the brother from another planet. The rakshasa looks at Raj in disgust, steps toward him. “Take your clothes off, man, we’re swapping.”

The near-silent alleyway drips invisible trickles of water.  Several blocks away a garbage truck sounds its high-pitched, repeated <wheet-wheet-wheet-wheet> backing up to a curbside dumpster.  Raj Balas is standing naked and alone on a side street in Brooklyn, his clothes in his hands, his cock and balls hanging out.

Later, Raj lays his dark hand upon Jennifer’s pale breast – como Neruda; un reloj en la noche. He makes tiny circles with his index finger around the shades of pink.

They share the row-house next door to Subbu’s Books.  Their bedroom window looks out onto the tree-lined street. Opposite their building, the brick walls of a materials warehouse are tagged with graffiti: SOON.

“A pigeon called me a bigot yesterday.”

“I suppose it was only a matter of time,” she murmurs.

“I’m being visited by a demon. He says I’m a house nigger.”

Jennifer tenses: “I told you not to use that word in front of me.” She half lifts the sheets. “So what are you telling me?” she manages, “that your conscience is brown, too?” She rolls over, away from him, her long white back a wall of silence.

Part Six
On this day, a Sunday, they are expected in New Jersey for a garden party to be held at the home of Ramesh and Kalpana, septuagenarians who had emigrated to the U.S. in the same year as Raj’s parents and who had been close with his Uncle Subbu. “We were a Tamil family all alone here and they were Telegus,” his mother would say when he was young, with such respect and wonderment, “So, of course, Kalpana and I became like sisters.” Since his own father’s death, Raj had become closer with Ramesh-uncle and Kalpana-auntie.

The stems of chlorophyll-leaking leaves snap free, sending showers of technicolor shard drifting down to the earth, rusted and yelloween. Kalpana stands still, at the edge of the driveway on the concrete path leading to the door, looking out across the lawn.

Though she has been a resident of Northern New Jersey for the past thirty-five years, she’s never grown accustomed to the scent of fallen leaves soaked in rainwater.  The damp odor clings to her tongue, hangs thick in her nostrils. She and her neighbors order the leaves raked before the rains come. They are stuffed into bags and marched to the curb, where they stand like squat dwarves, a family of Oompa-Loompahs side by side before each house in their neighborhood.

Kalpana and Ramesh live in a private community set among curving roads over a collection of hills covered in poplars, birches and oaks.  Each home has a grassy, landscaped lawn with a copse of trees and a concrete drive connected by a sidewalk that runs along the road. A rectangular trail of grass between the sidewalk and curbside thematically unites each lawn.

From inside, she hears the phone:

<brrrrrrring>

Ramesh, tilted back in a cloth-covered easy chair in the living room, a few meters from the yellow Princess in the kitchen, makes no move to answer.  The La-Z-Boy is an immense cavern around his frail, aging body.  He is a tiny, thin South Indian man swallowed by a copy of The New York Times.

The recliner is positioned at an angle in front of a huge-screen television a few feet away. CNN is on, the volume unbearably loud.  A second ring from the old yellow phone in the kitchen: <brrrrrring>.

“I’ll take it,” Kalpana calls out, making toward the phone. “Helloo!?” Her voice is hard-edged, high-pitched and grating. When she answers the phone, she always sounds slightly irritated, to dissuade the endless parade of telemarketers and scam artists but more, to put the fear of God into anyone from her family who might call.

“Auntie?”  It’s the tinny sound of Raj Balas, swift in motion on a train marked New Jersey Transit.

“Aaaanh,” Kalpana says affirmatively, in a flat tone.

“It’s Rajagopal.”

“Aaaanh.  Aaaanh,” she repeats.  In the next room, the television blares.  Kalpana glares at Ramesh, who remains in his chair, unmoving.  “Who is it?” he shouts out from behind the Times.

“We’ll be there around 12:30,” Raj says.

Ramesh lowers the paper and looks across the living room into the kitchen. “Is it Lakshmi?”  Exasperation crawls into his voice.

“Aaanh.” Kalpana repeats, to Raj.

“WHO IS IT?!” shouts Ramesh.

Flustered, Kalpana screams into the phone, “AAAANH!”  On the train, Raj pulls the cellular away from his ear.  She lowers the receiver, covers it with her hand and shouts to Ramesh, “Pah!  It’s Rajagopal! Leave me alone! God!”

After Kalpana hangs up, she remains sitting at the kitchen table, staring into the living room at the vast, crinkly rectangle of the front and back pages of the Living Arts section that masks her husband.  Ihe television blares. She says calmly, “He is coming with Jennifer.”

“Yaarre?”

“Jennifer!” Kalpana repeats loudly.  “Che!  Why don’t you turn that thing down?”

Ramesh lowers the paper and mutes the television with a finger to the remote. He looks across at Kalpana.  “What’s he doing now?”

“He’s written an opera.”

Exactly 172 minutes later, Raj, wearing sunglasses and holding a gin and tonic, stands in Kalpana-auntie and Ramesh-uncle’s kitchen, opposite Prasad-Uncle, a 70-year-old Brahmin, in an open-collar and tee shirt, black polyester pants, who is shouting:  “Krishna says, ‘I am God!’; Christ calls himself the Son of God!  Mohammed, the Prophet of God.  Only Krishna says, ‘Who is God?  I. AM. GOD!”

A young boy runs past. Raj pulls his hips back and throws his arms out to avoid him, swinging his glass before him to prevent a spill, “Woah-ho!”

He leans back a little, pushing his free hand into his pocket; a maneuver meant to show deference to his elder with a demureness of posture in dissent. “but Uncle,” he begins, “I mean, the stories are metaphors told over and over creating a consensus on how we agree-”

“No,” replies Prasad-uncle firmly, “Consider Vyasa as a seat from which the story of God and man is told.  It is the role of a man to tell, and of God to write – it is Ganapati who writes the story after all.

“But who puts the story in the mind of man?  God.  Every dream and notion is God’s first. Until it is written it belongs to God and only the enlightened can understand it.”

“And when it is written?” Raj asks.

“Then,” Prasad-Uncle smiles triumphantly, “it belongs to man.

Jennifer approaches quietly and Raj leans forward to kiss her cheek, whispering, “What a circular viewpoint.”

She slips an arm around him. “We’ve got to get back, babe.”

On the New Jersey Transit the atheist Raj Balas is suffering helminths. These particular blood-borne parasites don’t die easily. They swim in the veins for generations. The wicked beast manifests itself in all manner of hallucinations.  Now it is auditory; an unending prattle in his mind as they speed toward Penn Station: “Faker, Fakir.”

Opposite him, Jennifer has fallen asleep, her full, white breasts gently rise and fall with her breathing; her shoulders sway left and right with the motion of the train.

Part Seven
Raj Balas’s opera characterizes Woodrow Wilson as a pedagogic Calvinist who led the U.S. into “the great war in Europe,” believing in an end to war forever and a new world order in which nation-states around the globe communicate in peace through ambassadors at a League of Nations Assembly.

The climactic moment transpires in the fifth and final scene of the third act, when the bespectacled, black-haired American President, a tenor, ascends an arpeggiated, slow-building, upper-register aria in the Oval Office.

It is the end of the war.  Wilson has prepared a grandiose plan of reparations. The following morning he will leave for Europe.  It is night.  Wilson is in his bedclothes.  First, the basses accompany him in drawn, syncopated half-notes.  Their rhythmic pulse is picked up by the cellos, that push the tempo en pizzicato.

Wilson falls to his knees.  The 14 points toward a new world order swell in volume as sectionals are added, from the strings to the woodwinds, the brass.  The cellos persist, but their frenzied pik-pik-pik can barely be heard over the ensemble of instrumentation.  The orchestra amplifies in a crescendo as Wilson climbs high above his clef into the effeminate heavens of the altos.  He rises. The opera climaxes in the fervor of the Calvinist at the height of delusion.  He stretches himself like a tautly drawn wire pursuing higher and higher pitches.  He sings, “The world shall know a peace as never before / The brotherhood of man in shared holy contemplation …” a portrait of the American President overextended at the pinnacle of doomed hubris.

From the 14 points aria, the story tumbles down through the post-war years. The production arcs through the failure of the League of Nations, its blown Senate ratification, Wilson’s fall from favor with the public.

In the closing scene, the aged, beleaguered Wilson, making unattended whistle-stop lectures across the U.S., collapses in a heart attack on the train, raving madly about meaningful dialogue between all people on earth.  And then he dies.

Winter brings calmness to the Apple.  The shopping season ends. Mallhattan rests.  Jennifer walks 23rd Street through a soft feathering snow.  It is dawn.  The silence is embracing.  She is expected on an all-day photo shoot at a warehouse in Chelsea.  Arriving, she finds Lucy outside, on a cigarette break.

Hugs. Cheek-kisses. Lucy mutters through the falling flakes. “How’s Mama-2-B?”

“Not counting her chickens before they hatch.”

“Hmm,” Lucy replies, flipping her cigarette into the gathering snow curbside, “Best not to put them all in one basket.”

For lunch at a German place in the central village, Jennifer orders beef and vegetable stew with potatoes, Raj, lentil soup and a beer.

“You don’t mind coming here, right?”

Raj stirs his soup idly, “No, it’s fine”

“Babe, I want to start soon. We’re ready.”

The tintinnabulation of silverware and words on glass, laughter from a table in the back. Raj stirs.

Jennifer puts her hand out across the table and touches the fingers of his left hand with hers. “I’m ready.”

They finish their meal in silence.

The rakshasa stamps around Raj’s subway car rattling through subterranean New York: a beast with wild fangs and spiky claws, it howls:  “You are drowning in pollutants!” It is the dead of winter – 23 degrees (F) outside – but in a metal box under the East River, Rajagopal Balasubramaniam is sweating.

In Conclusion

The following day, in the middle of the afternoon, Raj and Jennifer take a long, hot shower together. Using the special sponge, he lovingly soaps her entire body and receives the same in return. The difference in the color of their skin is never more apparent than in these moments, their most intimate, delicious reprieves from urbanity.

It is the first time in many years – since the scare – that they have not used a condom. Before Jennifer falls asleep, this is the last thing she remembers Raj whispering, softly in her ear:

“… and then we’ll say … to our little baby:

‘That’s how it was when you came into this world.’”

M.T. Karthik, 2001 – 2008

written in NYC, Los Angeles, Japan, India and Oakland

dereliction

24 Monday Oct 2005

Posted by in artists books, collage, Los Angeles, NYC, poetry, politics

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dereliction [2005]
13.5 x 21 in

an original poem by M.T. Karthik on seafarer’s maps salvaged by G. Borsa from a derelict tugboat on the Newtown Creek that separates the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, NY; with gouache, acrylic, ink, and collage of printed paper, printed plastic and color prints from digital media by M.T. Karthik; bound by C.K. Wilde

Initially authored during the Republican National Convention as it was taking place in New York City, “dereliction” [2004] begins with a slap across the face of the Prince of Wales in 2001.  A reprint of the BBC World Service Internet screenshot features 19-year-old Alina striking Charles with a rose in Riga, Latvia, and is collaged into a map of the seagoing entrance to the Gulf of Riga in the Baltic.  Accompanying text reports that Alina was protesting the then recently begun bombing of Afghanistan by the United States and the United Kingdom. This is the only spread in the book which maps an actual place.

An invocation:
“O, Chorus of unknown seas, drowning the known to smithereens”
leads the viewer from the map and image of an actual place into a fantasy cartography.

As an organizing principle each folio is designed such that no spread has paper from the same original map in its recto and verso facia.  To achieve this, the maps were spread out, cut into quarters and recomposed, designed primarily with an aesthetic created from the juxtaposition of land masses and water. The land and water were then treated with media to create text that serves to obfuscate specificity further, but also to unify bodies of water and masses of land.

Each spread (including the title page and frontispiece) is composed from deconstructed maps positioned to create shorelines and seaways with no basis in earthly reality. The result is a deconstruction of the original maps that creates an atlas of a world familiar yet not accurately descriptive of any known place. The title page is companioned with a frontispiece detailing the title, as the first sets of waves of text appear in the sea: “the ship of state is derelict”.

Figures rigid in concept, but loose and flexible in media, create a striking paradox, as patterns of zeroes and ones are painted in gouache across the land masses – a reminder of digital output and a haunting count.
Swiftly, the context leaps back in time to the era of the Atomic Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as a play on words is employed in the repeating waves of text in the sea: Truman as the “worst president,” the decision to use the bomb as the “worst precedent”. [Curatorial note: there are momentary and unique changes in the underlying text in each spread. In this case, buried in the text are two additions:  “the buck stops here” and “worst Missouri Mob” … meant to implicate unseen hands behind the Truman presidency.]

A spread follows featuring the English transliteration of the name of Hiroshima copied 1,000 times and of Nagasaki 750 times and leads to the A-bomb spread: the spread with the most text in the book, in all five layers, including the Sanskrit transliteration of Chapter 11, Verse 32, from the Bhagavad Gita, quoted by Oppenheimer upon seeing the cloud from the first successful test of his atomic bomb.

From the A-Bomb spread, “dereliction” [2005] continues to accuse the founders of the U.S. of genocide and the current leaders of the United States of militarization for centuries. A parallel is made between the figure cited by Bartholomew de las Casas as killed by Columbus’ ventures and a figure representing those killed by the USA abroad in covert and overt operations between 1945 and 2001 and digital photos of pre-columbian sculptures from Oaxaca, Mexico float in the seas.

The centerfold of “dereliction” [2005] employs a quote from James Joyce’s “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” to make a point about the rush to war in Iraq. In the novel, Joyce describes his class being asked by his teacher, to copy the phrase “zeal without prudence is like a ship adrift,” repeatedly. At the place marked in the maps as “Middleground” this quote is written over and over as instructed, and creates the central thesis of the text: that the USA is adrift, waging bungled wars led by men who don’t know even simple philosophical truths.

The text then moves to an admonition of those adrift without such knowledge:

“Oh, woe betide ye, adrift at sea, without even a cosmology”

and concludes by offering a cosmology in the form of a Haiku [5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5 syllables]:

a cosmology :
sun father mother ocean
the moon is a god

Eric Drooker Fresh from Palestine

29 Sunday Aug 2004

Posted by in audio, journalism, NYC, protest, social media, travel

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I found this interview I did with Eric Drooker on the Great Lawn in Central Park. Before I post it on the date it took place, I’m putting it here – because I think more people will hear it that way. Hope so.

I’ve added it to the Interviews tab as well.

The Marathon Project

15 Saturday Sep 2001

Posted by in audio, NYC

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an audio project I worked on for three and a half years.

[and here is some of the audio streaming online since 2004]

I worked on this all summer of 2001 – getting an engineer to master it, making the packaging – and just when I was getting ready to release it, the attacks of September 11th changed the entire environment.

This is the last copy I personally have of an edition of 101.

$1000 and it’s yours autographed specially.

Transcript, microcassette tape, Brooklyn, NY, 9/11/2001

11 Tuesday Sep 2001

Posted by in essay, journalism, NYC, performance

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Transcript of A-side of a Microcassette Tape
September 11th, 2001
11:15 a.m. – 12:40 p.m., EDT (US)
Bushwick Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
< police siren, Bushwick and Powers streets, Brooklyn>
Corner Deli at 15 Bushwick Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn

MAN TRANSLATING SPANISH TELEVISION: The game plan was this: to bomb Washington D.C., to bomb New York City, to bomb Chicago.
<BREAK>

MAN: I can’t communicate. I can’t even communicate with my sister. I can’t even communicate with the people up there. I can’t even communicate with my boss. I don’t know.
<BREAK>

EXT. DELI, 15 Bushwick
A.E. Williams: It’s September 11th, two thousand and one and uh, the polls have been closed, the world trade centers- buildings, have- (beat) are gone.
<BREAK>

INT. 53 Bushwick, #3
(the sound of television reporting the news)
M-H. Balle: -had a dream about last night. I had a dream about UFO’s last night (notices tape recorder) -Oh, God, No, No, No!
M.T. Karthik: Yes! Listening to what you’re saying right now, I am sure that I’ll want to hear this back later on so-
MHB: Oh, please! Fuck you! Are you being condescending?
AEW: (negatively) mm-mm. No Way.
MHB: And am I being paranoid?
AEW: Well, what is paranoia, right? (points at TV)
MHB: I’ve never-
AEW: That’s not paranoia!
MHB: I told Alison earlier today that I wrote a story called falling debris about a year ago. And the story essentially was that it surprises me that I am not hit by falling debris more often than I am – which is never.
MTK: which is never.
MHB: Right, I’ve never been hit by falling debris.
MTK: Right
AEW: She’s always afraid of shit that’s falling out of buildings.
MTK: Right.
MHB: I’m afraid of- I’m afraid- I’ve always- Not afraid, but I walk around in Manhattan – especially lower Manhattan and I look up and I’m like, ‘The fact that this shit isn’t falling down on me for whatever reason amazes me.’ – the fact that these buildings are allowed to stand.
MTK: Allowed to stand?
MHB: Yeah. I have to like, I  have to hook up my other computer and print something out because-
TV: … a couple of years ago about how much U.S. authorities … attack … and now …
MHB: They’re gone now of course. We’re looking at (laughs) footage of what used to be the world trade centers. (laughs)
TV: -’ve on the phone right now, someone who both in fact and fiction has dealt with this … in …
MHB: … it’s so – They’ve already brought up-
TV: Tom Clancy-
MHB: Tom Clancy, by the way (laughing)
TV: Uh, Mr. Clancy, uh, this is uh-.
MHB:  There it is! Tom Clancy.
TV: I guess a terrible case of life imitating art
Tom Clancy: It’s a noteworthy incident, I mean, it’s not the sort of thing – It’s the sort of thing that’s best left in a novel rather than in real life. Unfortunately one of the problems with being an author is keeping up with reality.
TV: But Mr. Clancy, you also are very well plugged into this world-
MHB: he’s plugged into this world-
TV: From your own knowledge-
MHB:He’s plugged in, baby-
TV: -how concerned have the authorities been
MHB: -to this world!
AEW: (laughing)
TV: – that something of this scale could possibly hit on the- o-o-on American soil?
CLANCY: It’s Jeff Greenfield, right?
GREENFIELD: Yeah, yes.
CLANCY: Well, you’ve been here to the house. It’s uh, I had a conversation some years ago with an Air Force General about a possibility rather like this – I ended up putting it in one of my books – where you know a bad guy takes an aircraft-
MHB: a bad guy! (laughing)
TC: -into the Capitol building during a Joint Session of Congress – which, you know, could effectively decapitate the whole government-
MHB: (hysterical laughter)
TC: uh, (laughing, also) I don’t know, at the time it seemed rather humorous. You know, I said, ‘Surely you’ve thought about things like this,’ and he says, ‘Well you know, to the best of my knowledge nobody in my office has looked at this but I promise you Monday morning they will be.’ Presumably they have been- you know, they’ve considered this possibility for some time … the- the big problem is a person who is willing to, to lose his own life voluntarily in a, in a terrorist incident. People like that are relatively rare because self-preservation is indeed the first law of nature and a per-it’s  not too many people that want to throw their lives away and those who do it generally do it for religious reasons because they think there’s something good waiting for them on the other side of death- Uh, in a case like this that’s going to lead people towards, you know, talking about Is-Is-Islamic fanatics but we need to remember that Islam is a religion and it’s a religion with beliefs not necessarily very different ….
MHB: …voluntarily deciding that they want to lose their lives … or  that they wish to or that they’re willing to. So fuck you on the ‘lose your life thing.’ To declare war is not a statement decided by Congress, right? Why is it any different from a guy who lives in Omaha, Nebraska deciding that he wants to- deciding that he is willing to go to … Europe during world war two and fight. This is different than a man or a woman who decides to fly a plane into the world trade center.
GREENFIELD: -officials, uh, in doing the research – did they see an attack of this enormity or were they more concerned with the sort of smaller kind of hit and miss that we’ve followed the last several years?
CLANCY: Well, you don’t ordinarily expect terrorists to display this degree of expertise. I mean, flying an airplane is not all that ea- <channel click>
MHB: (laughter) I can’t believe that Tom Clancy is the authority on terrorism now. How many more books do you think he might sell tomorrow? <click>
VOICE:  but unfortunately you know the security you have in airports because your dealing with human beings is not perfect (unintelligible)
MHB: Actually I think he’s big on books on tape, too.
CLANCY: Somebody very carefully and <click>
<click>
CLANCY: -madman- <click>
MHB: “madman”
<click>
MHB: Wait- unedited video-
YOUNG GIRL: -huge cars – I’m standing on the corner and watching and taking pictures you could see the wings of the plane sticking out at least in the middle of the second building. (beat) I think they were delivering bombs. The explosion went up on that last one.
MHB: You know what I love-
MTK: “They were delivering bombs”
MHB: It’s the “they”.
YOUNG GIRL: Although it was probably a bomb inside the plane. They saw it to.
MHB: I’ve heard this word “they” many many many times.
YOUNG MAN ASIAN: The explosion went up like a mushroom. The second uh, the second building-
MAN W/AUSTRALIAN ACCENT: (fast) The second plane was an old prop engine plane like an old Cessna?
INTERVIEWER: Say that again.
AUSTRALIAN: (slower) The second plane was like an old prop plane, like a dual prop plane, like a Dakota(r) or something like that – It wasn’t a Dakota, but.
MHB: another authority here.
AUSTRALIAN: -it came in low from over the ocean …

[witnesses are interviewed]

MHB: Can we get Spanish? I want the Spanish channel- or Disney! I’m curious what’s on Disney- <click> lets see what else is going on in the television world <changing channels>“countless acts of kindness” can we record this  term, “countless acts of kindness” thank you. Yeah, well, let’s get BET TV on right here. I think BET TV might sum it all up for you right here.

[lots of channels, skipping around, pieces of soundbites]

MHB: That’s another thing-
[Spanish for some time]
MTK: OK, now we’ve had enough-
VOICE: (female) a source from New York City saying it is likely … it is possible that thousands of lives have been lost-
MTK: Look, (reading scroll) the White House, Pentagon and Capitol have been evacuated – look, the White House, Pentagon and the Capitol-
MHB: thousands of lives have been lost, is that what they’re saying now?
VOICE: at least in the United States, uh, in addition, the Federal Reserve- <click>

<channels skip about more, an old Saturday Night Live episode is on with a spoof of H. Ross Perot driving down the road with his running mate from when he ran for office>

<BREAK>

MHB: -to anger, retaliation, envy, jealousy, hatred, paranoia.
MTK: This is what revolution leads to.
MHB: Well I do- not- I do believe that these are some of the things – I’m not saying that there the only things – these are some of the worst things components of what revolution can lead to. I mean look at what’s happened in other revolutionary scenarios? I mean look at China, look at the Soviet Union, and I believe that this is a statement, that says- I mean we are- the targets are two significant institutions: one, the military industrial complex which is directly linked to the world trade org- World Trade. Multi-national.
MTK: You don’t think- peaceful revolution is impossible you think?
MHB: I don’t- I believe it is- the point that I am making is that I don’t think that this- I mean, to me this is a revolutionary act.
MTK: It is?
MHB: I believe it is-
MTK: Is it a terrorist act?
MHB: It’s a terrorist- well, yes. But we need to define terrorism. This is a terrorist act, which you know, I’m going to assume that this a terrorist act as it’s being called.
MTK: Oh, wow, so you are going to give credence to every single person who’s naming this-
MHB: No, no-
MTK: We’ve got to turn the mute on immediately- immediately (TV cuts off)
MHB: I’m talking about, if this is a terrorist act, which I believe it is.
MTK: You believe it is because you have been told it is.
MHB: No, as a matter of fact no one has actually said that it is yet, right?
AEW: Yes.
MHB: They have? Oh, they have made the statement that this is a terrorist act?
MHB: I’ve heard-
MTK: They had a terrorism timeline!
MHB: I’ve heard- no one has officially been willing – other than Bush who has said the following thing: “I will hunt down the people responsible,” right? So, there is a hunt, yes.  So, here we have a res- now we already have the first tenet of what happens in a revolutionary act, which is the desire for vengeance, “to hunt down.” So the statement that’s being made here, very clearly it seems to me, is a statement that says: the military-industrial complex, the world- the world  trade scenario as it stands-
MTK: hang on, hang on … are you sure it’s not just that drunk people shouldn’t fly planes?
MHB: No. This is too significant to be drunk people shouldn’t fly planes. Drunk people who shouldn’t fly planes, accidentally hit small buildings like the ones we live in now.

<BREAK>

MTK: Like the White House?
MHB: What?
MTK: Remember that guy some years ago-
[edit]
MHB: You said, “The White House”
MHB: Was that a drunk guy? Actually it wasn’t a drunk guy-
MHB: Revolution breeds vengeance.

[stupid conversation]

MHB: We were talking not that long ago about the question of revolution. I think we were implying violence.  We talked about guns. Remember we talked about guns?
MTK: We did?
MHB: We did in the bar at The Garden. And I was like, we were talking about it as a violence against- perpetrated or enacted by one individual towards another.
MTK: That’s what- that’s what you think of as revolution?
MHB: Well, yeah we were talking about it in that context at the Garden.
MTK: hmm, ok.
MHB: I mean, yeah, ‘cause I mean, certainly revolution is a broad stroke, I mean it can mean many things revolution in art,  revolution in writing … although I don’t … there’s many-
AEW: It means ‘taking down,’ doesn’t it?
MTK: No, it means change.
MHB: see this gets very complicated.
MTK: Revolution is change.
MHB: Change happens every second, every moment-
MTK: Right. Revolution is a lot of change in a short amount of time. I’ll take the Webster’s dictionary and read the word revolution if you want.

[dictionary search conversation]

MTK: All right I’m going to try this out of the Webster’s [reads etymology and definitions of ‘revolution’ and gets to, reading]  2a. a sudden, radical and complete-
MHB: change?
MTK: change.
MHB: right.
MTK: (reading) b. a fundamental change in political organization especially the overthrow or renunciation of one government or ruler and the substitution of another by the governed.
MHB: Now, that’s more-
MTK: like the French revolution.
MHB: right.
[edit]
MHB: I would define it as an act of violence. I am opposed to the idea of revolution that is violent.
MHB: can we talk about this (points at TV) We are literally sitting here the three of us, watching a very significant occurrence.
MTK: You think so?
MHB: I do. Because the World Trade Center represents not only symbolically but structurally-
MTK: Mmmhmm
MHB: structurally there are mainframes that exist in those two buildings that are now gone-
AEW: 400 million dollars in each (unintelligible)
MHB: Yeah! The amount of money that is- ok there are several things: how much did it cost to build?
AEW: 400 million dollars?
MHB: How much does it cost to maintain? Not only that -Well, we know because they told us how much it cost to build- Not only that, what is the insurance – on those two buildings? Let’s think about who insures those two buildings? And my guess is it’s that insurance company in England.
MHB: I forget the name of that-
MTK: You know the name of it.
MHB: I forget the name-
MTK: Well I shan’t, uh, say it for you.
MHB: Please tell me, ‘cause I’m very bad with names, I always forget.
MTK: Chris Evert took the name, let’s put it that way, to return-
MHB: No, no, no tell me, tell me- I forget-
MTK: Are you a fan of tennis at all?
MHB: Kind of no, not really.
MTK: Chris Evert took the name, anyway what’s your point?
MHB: My point is that this has this rippling effect. These 50,000 people don’t get to go to work
MTK: Don’t get to go to work?
MHB: They don’t go to work anymore.
MTK: Don’t get to go to work?
MHB: They don’t get to go to work-
MTK: Oh-
MHB: Right they don’t.
MTK: poor kids
MHB: -seriously where do they go? I’m not talking about the people, I’m talking about the industry that exists around those two buildings. The actual industry-
MTK: Is there industry- is there actual industry?
MHB: Oh-, uh, well, 50,000 people work there-
MTK: -or is it just promotion of paper?
MHB: Oh, OK. Well, what is-
MTK: do they really work?
MHB: -capitalism? What is capitalism?
MTK: do they really work? do they really work? Or do they just move paper around to ensure that they stay powerful and wealthy?
MHB: But that’s my point.
MTK: it is?
MHB: That’s the point I’m making-
MTK: Ohhhh.
MHB: -about these two buildings- These two buildings structurally-
(phone rings AEW answers)
MHB: -maintain a (sic) international system. These two buildings, because they are called the world trade centers are symbolic of world trade. They are symbolic of trade, international trade. People who sit at computers who move things from place to place – who organize and move things are in sort of, from the lowest-
MTK: and they can be anywhere. They don’t have to be here.
MHB: No, it’s true, but structurally we don’t have a place to put these 50,000 people right now.
MTK: That’s not true, there’s a huge, massive place to put them.
MHB: OK, well, let me tell ya, it’ll be a while before these people will find another home to work in.
MTK: Yeah, but they have insurance.
MHB: Which they do, back to my original statement about the insurance company-
MTK: which is?
MHB: -that has to cover this.
MTK: unh, hunh?
MHB: The point that I am making is that there is an incredible, symbolic statement that is being made here – and The Pentagon – it symbolizes the military-industrial complex which is obviously connected to the protection of world trade and capitalism
MTK: This is the military-industrial-entertainment complex.
MHB: Well, but that’s the-
MTK: That’s what this is …
MHB: well, it’s more than just –
MTK:  … which is equally vile.
MHB: Right. Right. Well, so it’s all one big package deal – but it is a significant thing. And it’s- and to me – you know as much as I find this disturbing, and I do … it’s surreal. It’s incredible. It’s … it’s going to have rippling effects.
MTK: You think so.

<BREAK>

AEW: (on telephone) -skin, black hair, uh, Muslim-
MHB: I just want to say I’m drunk right now-
MTK: rippling effects?
MHB: I’m saying it’s going to have a rippling effect. I don’t think this is very- I mean this is not cloaked conversation – it’s going to have a rippling effect. We already- It already has one. All airports in the country have been shut down. You cannot get into Manhattan, all the subways have been shut down. You cannot call into Manhattan, all the phones have been shut down. You cannot watch even television unless you have cable because everybody transmits from downtown. We have just closed the voting booths. We have a primary, the most significant primary in New York City history, perhaps, has just been stopped.
MTK: subverted.
MHB: right, subverted. So if this doesn’t have rippling effects, nothing will. And a minimal loss of life. Now, there’s another interesting thing: this could have been in the middle of the day, the decision was made not to make this in the middle of the day – not to fly two planes into the world trade center simultaneously at two-thirty in the afternoon. After lunch when everybody’s back in the office.
MTK: It could have been right at lunch, when everybody was out at the lunch spot so they could have a good viewing position (sarcasm).
MHB: But it’s still- you have less- you- actually, the fact is that in most of the- and this is another thing to- understand and- the way that Americans work- I mean most Americans, especially at the world trade centers start around 8.
AEW: (on phone) and the borders closed now.
MHB: This is the first bombing –  the first bombing, – the first airplane arrived at whatever, seven-thirty-five, so, about a half an hour before most people got into the office. (beat) Most people- I know people who work there – they generally start between eight and nine. The second plane arrives around what? Nine? … Nine o’clock. So by now you have had at least an hour to evacuate the building.
MTK: I find this um …
MHB: The idea is to not …
MTK: boring.
MHB: This is boring?
MTK: Yeah.
MHB: Why is this boring to you?
MTK: same shit, different day.
MHB: You don’t think that the –  (smirking) that the fact that there is no world trade center isn’t significant? The fact that the Pentagon-
MTK: If I believed there was none, it would be significant (a) and if …even if I even if – even if I did- even if there wasn’t one. What I’m sure of is that precautionary measures on the part of the people who have constructed the entire economy protect the wealthy from any real exigency or problem and the people who are going to be suffering are the ones down at the bottom getting the crumbs-
MHB: absolutely.
MTK: so, it’s the same shit, different day-
MHB: no, I understand that part-
MTK: -as far as I’m concerned.
MHB: But I’m talking about – I think I mentioned earlier – this is incredibly significant symbolically. Which is the point that I am making about why you make- I mean, if you wanted to make a decision to make a statement about the world trade – about world trade – so, hence, world trade center – with minimal loss of life-
MTK: Hmmm.
MHB: I mean, I agree with what you are saying. You do it because you know the people who go to work everyday are not – the goal is not to kill 50,000 people, the goal is to glue all of us to this symbol.
MTK: (laughs)
MHB: The entire world is watching this right now, right? 50,000 people didn’t die. Had you done it at 3:00 or 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon, everybody practically would have been back from lunch right now. So you make it strategic. You evacuate everyone at 7:45, and you fly another plane in – and whether or not there were bombs in those planes-
MTK: Well, you’re teaching me about terrorism which is something I know nothing about-
MHB: I’m not teaching you about terrorism, I’m being-
MTK: Yeah you are …
MHB: -very presumptuous.
MTK: you are literally telling me how to do it … what time of day-
MHB: I’m being presumptuous. I’m assuming that I understand the scenario here which is that there could have been 50,000 people in that building at 3:00 this afternoon. We could be going about our business right now, and it’s what? (looks at clock) 12:30.
MTK: Well, I’d like to go about my daily business, actually.
MHB: Right. So you should. And there’s no reason why you can’t. No one’s forcing you to stay here.
MTK: My daily business is voting.
MHB: Right, but you can’t vote.
MTK: I can.
MHB: No, because- the el- the booths are closed. The booths – the election booths are closed (laughing)
MTK: Well, see the funny thing about that is-
MHB: It’s primary day! How interesting is that?
MTK: um, then it’s not subversion then, is my point, it’s complicity. And complicity at that point, becomes a joke for you to be so presumptuous. So, as you continually get drunk and-
MHB:  Wait, wait, wait, no, no, don’t bring in my being drunk because I don’t think that I’m being irrational-
MTK: I don’t either, but I just think you’re being presumptuous to the point of like-
MHB: but wai-wai-
MTK: you’re telling me I can do what I want-
MHB: No, you can-
MTK: – and yet in point of fact you’re not telling me I can do what I want-
MHB: No, you said you wanted to vote-
MTK: – and then your saying there is a subversion of-
MHB: No but I already brought up the voting thing, I already brought that up. I was like, I talked- I said- I  mentioned several things- we can go ba- and that’s what’s great about this tape- we can go back and I- I had mentioned several things that have now been subverted because of this event and one of them was the primary.
MTK: and you believe that?
MHB: Well- I don’t think it’s an accident. Do you think that it’s just incidental? Is this fate? Two planes just happened to crash into the world trade center?
MTK: I don’t make- I don’t make judgements until I have seen the evidence-
MHB: Oh. Oh well, I’m being presumptuous – as I said earlier, I’m being presumptuous.
MTK: For example, air traffic controllers have much more power than pilots, for example –
MHB: They do.
MTK: and something could have happened where air traffic control is going on –
MHB: You’re right- I’m being
MTK: and what’s going on-
MHB: completely presumptuous.
MTK: is … as far as I’m concerned is-
MHB: an accident.
MTK: -absurdly presumptuous.
MHB: ah, well, I’m just saying that … I’m making a statement of presumption.
MTK: Yes, you are.
MHB: I said that several times. (beat goes to kitchen) I said that several times, Karthik. I’m not being, you know, I’m not being uh-
MTK: I am not resisting you.
MHB:  -waffling here.
MTK: I am not resisting you.. I am not resisting you.
MHB: I know you’re not.
MTK: I am not resisting you.
MHB: I’m just surprised that this hasn’t happened already, I guess.

[END SIDE A]

79 Days Before the Towers Fell

23 Saturday Jun 2001

Posted by in journal entries, NYC

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Rent in Williamsburg has risen to the point where a small, clean, $700-a-month, one-bedroom apartment is impossible to find, requests for roomshares are on the rise and complaints about the cost-of-living are played out.

Next door on this very block, “loft building” banners have gone up across construction sites in two empty warehouses. The owners advertise cookie-cutter, 750-1200 square-foot apartments for $2000 – $4000 a month with amenities like all new appliances, double height ceilings, gas heat and hot water; on flyers at the local deli where, yesterday, a woman picked up a flyer, stared at it and seriously muttered, “there goes the neighborhood.”

Burns, a bicycle mechanic and bassist, and Dr. Tracer, an instructor at a local community college, live on a four-year-old lease and pay $1000 a month for perhaps 700 sq. ft. – the back space of which Burns has converted into his bedroom.

Ten days ago I took the world’s longest nonstop flight from Hong Kong to Newark.

I’ve been sleeping here in Burns’s room when he leaves for gigs or work and writing with his laptop on the nightshift.

I rose from my daysleep just after midnight to find Dr. Tracer had dropped acid.  He was about an hour into his trip when I awoke and he offered me a tab. I meditated, ate and dosed.

It was 1:20 in the morning and I was awake and alert for the next 15 and a half hours for a cool, rainy trip on a Saturday morning in June in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Dr. Tracer illustrated without malice, frustration or the use of traditional spoken language that as a result of only 180-degree sensory input, a person who cannot hear evolves under a powerful sentiment of paranoia about what is behind them or out of their field of vision.

We began walking through Williamsburg at 2:30 in the morning, past the swinging doors of a bar. Partied-out, Friday-night boozers stumbled into the street looking for taxi or subway or deli or restaurant doors, their eyes blearily seeking something recognizable, the stench of smoke and alcohol wafting off them.  Music drifted faintly out the open doors.

We stopped at a deli, where a broad swath of bottletops had been crushed into the asphalt in a dense, rectangular splay of circles – a speckled count of the beers drunk at the cornershop on hot summer days, when tossing a bottlecap out onto the street meant it got stuck in black, melted goo. A girl was hanging around the pay phone, Brooklyn summer night; couples fell into each other, lazy eyes smiled, engines fired up, a black sedan pulled away from the curb.

We had a coffee and made our way to a bar off McCarren Park. I drank a couple of martinis, Tracer had cold white wine.  We conversed until 4:30, discussing broad philosophical topics casually. We were specific on the matters of death, writing and deafness.  At one point Tracer and I agreed that when we were children, we were surrounded by others who did not understand how to communicate with us, whose methods were sympathetic but crude. This we agreed, drove us to write.

Two women, a redhead and a brunette, walked in and seduced two men.  The women sent one man home alone and, as he stumbled out, but before the door had fully closed, the brunette said coldly to the redhead:    “T-G- H-G!”-  in time with his steps, with the door swinging closed and with the click shut, she mock-laughed as she fell forward on her stool, elucidating: “Thank. God. He’s. Gone.” as she turned back to the man who remained.  At last call, they walked home with the second man, the brunette told him they wanted to teach him something. We were the last customers and left shortly after this.

A few blocks away, we ran into Tracer’s former roommate, a German who shared his apartment for the three years before Burns moved in. The German’s wife and child were out of town and he was up at 5:00 in the a.m. strolling neatly out of a bar, wide-eyed, looking for cocaine, asking if we had any – we did not.

The sun rose quickly, early on one of the longest days of the year. Dr. Tracer and I returned to the apartment, rolled a joint and continued talking.  The joint was affirmative and Tracer had a broad laughing fit while in the bathroom alone. We decided to travel.

We had a coffee, then took the G and the F trains to the ends of their lines, arriving at Coney Island just past 8:00 a.m. It was a rainy morning and thick, grey clouds masked the sun. The light was a cold-white glow behind them.  The beach was a neat, empty, expanse of sierra-colored loam, darkened by wetness in neat lines by tractors pulling wide metal rakes. The sand was made soft by the thin, white line of foam that the edge of each wave drew as a loose parallel to the horizon, a black straight-edge between the gray sky and the grey sea.

We began walking from the boardwalk to the beach silently, occasionally signing as we walked. We passed an elderly, disheveled woman, who was entirely wrapped in a blanket lying on the beach. After we passed this lump of cloth and human flesh, I saw peripherally that she rose from her reclined position. I then clearly heard her say, “who knows … maybe they like walking on the beach.”

I have never known LSD to contribute to paranoia in me. My use of it has generally resulted in hyper-attenuated hearing and sight and an alertness and remoteness of character. But even now, I wonder about what I heard and saw in that moment.

It could have been a woman on a phone call talking to someone else about something else, but her physical movements implied awareness of us. It could have been a crazed, semi-lucid homeless person babbling incoherently to herself, afraid of people approaching and passing her encampment on the beach or, it could have been an agent of some U.S. policing department observing us as we visited the beach. More engagements with seemingly random others on our trip would increase my feeling that we were being closely observed.

Dr. Tracer and I sat by the ocean, waded, ate a bag of chips on the lifeguard’s chair, had Saturday morning at Coney Island Beach for forty minutes and decried the lack of sunshine. I tape-recorded the sound of the waves and the seagulls to listen to back in the city.

I hoped, pathetically, that the sun would emerge until Tracer pointed out that the storm off the coast was headed inland.  We left the beach before the rain started.  As we left the boardwalk, vendors were opening for business.  We had a coffee.  The first drops of rain struck us as we crossed the street to the subway. We decided to go to Chinatown.

We caught the N and smoked a bowl in an empty car during the long stretch between the end of the line and 50th. Then we switched to the operator’s car to watch people.  On the way back, I glared out the windows at the grey sky defiantly until we went underground. Dr. Tracer finally joked, “when we get out on the other side the sun will be shining down on you … vindictively!”

A black, 40-plus-year-old man, clean shaven and slightly balding, got on and sat beside me carrying a rustly collection of objects in two plastic bags; black plastic covering a white plastic bag inside. He had a small band-aid strip stuck on his head exposed below his high hairlines. The obvious rectangular strip was set perpendicular across a straight, red line of blood above the temple – the wound was obviously fake, staged. The man fumbled with his possessions, continuously muttering to himself. He could as easily have been a semi-crazed denizen of New York as an undercover NYPD detective.

Once we moved from the empty car in the back to the operator’s car, many people who got on the subway on their way to Manhattan seemed like characters, with staged aspects, or too-perfect appointments. I wore headphones, listening to a CD of sarangi and hearing the outside world leak in. Two women with children sat beside us, a young boy in a stroller, his mother holding his infant sibling. They were northeastern Asians, maybe Korean. Their grandmother was gently inspiring the children to be friendly.  The son, cool, observant and thoughtful, seemed worried; the baby was still at the age of wondering at the world.

This was the operator’s car on the N, Saturday morning at 10 o’clock from south Brooklyn to Manhattan on a rainy day in June and I report with the impunity of a witness: public space in New York is undeniably equally peppered with lonesome egos, expressors of unimaginable histories, and potentially dangerous operatives for larger interests, both governmental and mafioso.

Another example: Agent 99, who subsequently led us to Canal street, starts with a pair of plain, white leather sneakers with silver dots evenly-spaced along the edge of the sole – thumbtacks – and a short, hot, controlled blaze of red, orange and yellow flames painted on the outer skin of each shoe, burning up, licking at the clean white leather shoetops toward the short, white, rolled columns – socks – that lead to a pale leg elegantly colored with intricate flowers of reds and blues – tattoos – into a sea of limpid green: an opaque, green silk skirt with a lime-orange border.

She wore a plain blouse and her hair was colored with straight, serene blonde streaks. She was reading a hardback with a romance cover and flowery letters that read, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”  The glance of anyone on her side of the train who bent over to set something down, pick something up or tie a shoe was met with that leg, rocking up-and-down, regular as a pendulum, leading to a carefully put-together young woman on her way to Mallhattan.

We emerged from the subway to the rainstorm we’d seen hovering dark over the ocean. The World Trade Center Towers disappeared into thick, coal-colored clouds. The curved disks of the shoppers umbrellas floated through space, most were black, bobbing with the motion of their porters.  The storm had traveled overhead as we traveled underground and was now present broadly over Canal street.

The huge, warm, tropical drops, falling down, on and around street signs and ads with Chinese and English text, reminded me of Taipei where I’d been two weeks before during the see-bei-oo rainy season.

We stood under the awnings of the Asian marketplace as rain poured down. Oblique, glowing flashes of white light flooded the clouds internally, leaked out the edges.  Thunder rolled.  Rain fell and we passed through it, mindless, walking between the drops.

We crossed between corners and in front of the slow-moving traffic. Many people shopped. Two tall women, one with a necklace that spelled, “dirty south,” in cursive, solid gold letters, awaited a man, shorter, rounder, balding, mustachioed, who was buying a souvenir.  Young southern Europeans, women, were shopping.  An elder, African-American man bought a pair of scarves. Il pleut.

We stopped at a Vietnamese cafe, had hot tea, then pho, rolls and beer.  We returned to Brooklyn on the J. It was past noon.

Burns had gone to gig a wedding.  His cats, Percy and Mingus wandered around the house, mewling for food.  We fed them.  We rolled another joint.  We’d spent 27.00 on food, 25.00 on liquor, 4.50 on transportation and 3.00 for three coffees each, USD 59.50, total.

We were coming down. I was sitting in a chair opposite Dr. Tracer in his room in the apartment.  It was silent.  The grey light of the sky outside was only visible through crevices in the blinds and around their edges.  Tracer had angled a desk in such a fashion that, sitting behind it, he could see himself and me and the door out, mirrors reflecting the interior of the room around him and nothing else.  His back was to the window and the room behind him. I was able to see the window and the lightning that flashed outside.

This was the end of our trip, 12 hours after dosing and after a big meal and a long, wet walk in the rain. In my fatigued simplicity I became conscious of the sound of the weather. We were talking and the thunderstorm was accentuating Tracer’s speech.  It grew in intensity and I could no longer focus on what Tracer was saying – the anxiety of it made me jump up. I suddenly remembered that the window in Burns’s room at the back of the apartment was open. I made my way to the back of the apartment saying, over my shoulder, “the rain! … I left the window open!” I realized only later that perhaps Tracer could not hear me or see my lips.

It was pouring.  There was the continuous sound of thunder following ever-nearing lightning.  At the back of the apartment, rainwater was hammering the wooden sill and dousing objects that lay near the window with a fine spray.  Some water splashed my arm in just the time I took to shut the window.  I went back to Tracer’s room flush with the excitement.  He remained behind his desk, but was standing, pacing as he spoke.

I began to realize my error and clumsily showed him my arm, which now was hardly wet at all.  He continued speaking and I realized I wasn’t following him. I sat down opposite him again, trying to compose the communication space that I had broken.

“… and <crack> … things that aren’t funny … No!” is what I heard him say as he took his seat and pointed down the hall.

Then, not immediately, but a second or two later – as Tracer continued speaking – there was an intensely loud, short, sharp <CRACK>! corresponding to a bolt of lightning that must have grounded somewhere very near to the apartment. It was shocking – by far the loudest sound I’d heard in days.

From the open window, I heard voices on the street raised in unison about the sound and flash – the remarks of people standing by the building outside for cover. Tracer’s face and posture showed no notice of any of it. I apologized for interrupting and we resumed our conversation about rent, writing and philosophy. The storm ended after twenty minutes.

Specifics of our conversation have been edited or lost to sobriety and the mindwash of sleep.

Interview with Scott Stringer Candidate for Public Advocate, 2001

18 Sunday Feb 2001

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MTK:  I am starting with the Office of Public Advocate itself which I think is a truly unique political position. Why are you interested in the position of public advocate, coming from where you’re coming. Why is it attractive to you?

SCOTT STRINGER:  I happen to agree with you.  There is no other office that I can see like it in the United States.  It’s an innovative position.  It’s  a creative position.  It’s a new position.  And in light of the fact that the government of New York is going to go through a wholesale change – a new mayor, a new comptroller, a new public advocate, 37 new city council members, four out of five borough presidents, the whole city government will be brand new.  There’s going to be a tremendous generational change, a more diverse city council.  I think the public advocate can play a meaningful role in the government of New York.  That’s why I decided to run.

MTK:  What do you think of the job Mark Green has done – specifically – since he was the first elected public advocate?  What kind of public advocate would you be by comparison?

SS:  I think Mark’s done a good job.  I mean when you’re the first it’s the most difficult position to go in – plus he did not have a cooperative mayor.  But he carved out a niche on consumer issues, on police brutality issues.  I think he was a good watchdog and I think he molded the office into something very important.

When Rudy Giuliani tried to convene the Charter Revision Commission to do away with the position, the public reacted.  In fact, they reacted to the job Mark had done, because the editorials and a lot of folks said, ‘we shouldn’t have a public advocate.’  So I’d give him, you know – I think he’s done a very good job in the position.  The question is, though, “Where do you take it?” and that’s the challenge and that’s going to take some work and some creativity.  I think a lot of us who are running would say that Mark has done a good job but we want to now elevate it.

I would like to see some of the Charter mandated powers.  With those charter mandated powers, I would like to see us work on those issue and use them – I think that the role of Mark’s appointment – the public advocate’s appointment – to the City Planning Commission can be a very exciting one, in terms of being involved in urban planning and land usages and building communities, preserving neighborhoods, protecting our diversity.  You can do that, I mean, having an appointment to the City Planning Commission allows you to have a seat at the table on some major development issues – whether it’s rational development or – real planning issues.  So I would like to see the public advocate’s office have a land use unit, have a way to deal with those kind of– those communities throughout the city.

You know, you sit on the employee pension system, you decide where investments go and who invests.  And that’s powerful.  You’re there with the mayor and comptroller and labor unions who have a vote and borough presidents.  I mean you can really shape economic policy and that puts you at that table.  How are we going to deal with pension investments almost like part of a comptroller’s office to a certain extent.

You are also a legislator in the city council.  You vote when there’s ties, but you can debate, you can legislate.  You can serve ex-officio.  You are to serve ex-officio on city council committees.  What better place for a legislator who in 8 years has cast 18, 16,000 votes in Albany to come down in a new council and be able to legislate while you have a vote on the city planning commission, while you sit on the pension fund and while you serve as the chief ombudsperson for the entire city?  I mean, the ombudsman’s position has been around for a long time, Paul O’Dwyer advocated it way before Mark Green, part of the city council president’s office.

But what I have tried to do in my office – I do tremendous constituent service – where we’ve been successful is analyzing where those complaints are coming from and then look at it from a larger issue.  So when MCI was doing those 10-10 false – you know that  faulty advertising with the movie stars telling you that if you call the 10-10 numbers you’re going to save money.  We got complaints in our office from our constituents and then we did our own survey and found out that wait a minute, those ads aren’t telling the truth. They’re wrong.  MCI got fined a 100,000 dollars, federally, based on our study – when it was on Dateline and that’s energy and excitement because you deal with your constituent unit in the public advocate’s office.

But then if you’re smart you can monitor for major issues.  You can monitor city agencies.  You can track them through constituent complaints.  You can look at studies.  I used to chair the task force on people with disabilities in Albany.  We got complaints about federal, state, city buildings having barriers to access for our constituents.  We did a report on it – found a hundred barriers to access in 14 government buildings.  Let’s legislate, let’s call in the mayor to do something about it.  That’s what we did as an Assembly member.  But as the Ombudsman you can do it with a whole staff, with energetic people who can scour the borough, monitoring things, getting out into the street, and as ombudsman you can be out in the neighborhood.

MTK:  I think that’s what separates the people who want to eliminate the position from those who want to keep it – a real ombudsman – Paul O’Dwyer’s vision of the position.

SS:  The role of the ombudsman has been sort of evolving.  And the way I look at it is you know, you get constituent complaints and you send people out into the streets.  We’re going to figure out a way to pay for a Winnebago and we’re going to get people out in the boroughs and around the city, learning about what’s going on and then use our investigative unit, our investigative powers to  check things out.  I have just used that as a model as a member of the Assembly for many years and I think it works.  So I’d like to expand the ombudsman’s office.  When you put all that together – all these different roles, it’s a special office.  I’m an Assemblyman.  I vote on the budget and I legislate and I do my constituent service.  That’s what I do.  As public advocate, you can do it all.  You can do things.

And then you have to use other experiences.  You are a city-wide elected official in a diverse city, a changing city.  So who you work with and how you build coalitions – I mean in our campaign we are very proud of the fact that we are building a multi-racial, intergenerational campaign.  That’s good politics, but then that’s going to be good government.  So to try to build a network to rally around issues could be very exciting.

MTK:  Many issues that will come under your purvey have demographic or even racial overtones – housing, education, police, welfare issues to some degree.  And I think also the new census is going to show a very diverse New York.  Now, you’re background strikes me as from this area.  Can you tell me about your relationship with the rest of the city?

SS:  Well, I didn’t grow up on the Upper West Side, I grew up in Washington Heights.  Went to CUNY, went to public schools.  Got interested in politics when a relative of mine ran for Congress, Bella Abzug, back in the 70’s, my mother followed as a member of the City Council.  So I was one of these kids –

MTK:  What relation was Bella Abzug to you?

SS:  She was my mother’s cousin.  So Bella ran the district, we got involved and learned a lot and so I always had an interest.  I moved to the west side and got involved with Congressman Jerry Nadler, worked for him, got elected a District Leader.  When he went to Congress, I ran successfully for the Assembly and have been there ever since – 1992.  So my relationship with the rest of the city is … not just representing this community but I’ve had life experience where we’ve interacted with different people from all different backgrounds.  I’ve tried to work on diversity issues because I have a genuine interest in them all my life – even before I was in the Assembly.  I worked to preserve the Mitchell-Loma Housing Program, got involved in a  lot of tenant organizing before the Assembly.

MTK:  Do you speak any other languages?

SS:  No.  I can barely speak English (laughs).  No, I don’t.  But I have worked in communities where different languages are spoken and with people from different backgrounds.  And in the Assembly I have worked  on issues that impact poor people or communities of color.  I was the only Democrat in the Assembly to take the most “no” votes in the Pataki budgets in the mid-90’s.  I stood up alone.  I stood up alone on the commuter tax – that we shouldn’t eliminate the commuter tax.  I was the only Democrat to vote against the rent-regulation compromise – the only Democrat.  I am very independent.

MTK:  That’s huge.

SS:   Yeah. I was the only person to do it.  It was very huge in a legislature that’s dominated by the speaker.  I have taken him on and the Assembly.  I mean, you don’t vote no on compromise budgets.  You don’t vote no when everybody else is going along and I have chosen to do that.  That was the role.
I was one of the first Jewish, if not the first Jewish legislator, to get arrested at One Police Plaza and went to jail because I thought it was the right thing to do and then people followed.  And I have marched and protested and organized because I believe in the diversity of the city, I really do.  When the KKK came to New York, it was my office and my office alone that worked with the clergy, religious groups of all different persuasions and we had the biggest peacetime rally at (TK site name and RES: event), I don’t know if you remember it.

MTK:  I do.

SS:  That was my rally.  We did it.  And that’s the kind of stuff I want to do as public advocate with a larger staff and a bigger budget.  I think those kinds of things will enhance things in the city for people.  People loved that debate.

The best thing was The New York Times did a story on the rally – didn’t mention me – but talked about how parents brought their children to see the Klan.  To me – you know usually politicians are like, “where do they mention me?” –  it’s an article that I’ve wanted to frame because it was such a – the spirit of it, you know – to have parents bring their kids …

So these are some of the issues I’ve worked on.  And in Albany I have been effective.  I’ve worked on police brutality legislation in Albany with the Black and Puerto Rican caucus.  I’ve been effective dealing with the Republicans in the Senate.  You know, to be independent, you can be liberal, you can be progressive, but if you’re not effective, you know … then how are you going to deal with a diverse city council?  I have passed a lot of laws – seven years to pass the New York stalking law, four years to pass the auto-protection bill that allowed women to get – especially poor women – to get police officers to serve auto-protection on their abusers.  That was a bill that got vetoed by Governor Pataki that I got signed into law. (TK – RES: what is this all about?)

MTK:  You mentioned the relationship between Mark Green and the Mayor and have said you’d like to evolve the position.  Well, evolving the position requires a mayor who is warm to that.  Which of the candidates  for Mayor do you get along with best and do you think there is a specific problem between the mayor and the public advocate that could be ameliorated some other way, from your experience.

SS:  If you’re going to run for public advocate you’re going to have to be prepared to knock heads with the mayor.  There’s an inevitable conflict.  You monitor their city agencies.  You speak out when you think there’s an injustice.  You’re going to issue critical reports.  You’re going to organize coalitions.  You are going to be out in the streets where the mayor is going to be in city hall.  Sure, there is going to be a conflict.  The creativity of the individual is what’s going to come into play here.  Can you maintain your independence?  Can you do the coalition building and organizing on issues that sometimes may not be popular?  But at the same time both in the city council and in negotiations with the mayor, can you accomplish things?  Can you see your ideas and your criticisms come to a point of being successful in the end.  That’s what makes this office so interesting.  On the one hand, there’s that natural antagonism, on the other hand, you’re a working council member, trying to introduce legislation, you want to get bills passed.  You’re the ombudsman.  You need cooperation with city agencies.  It’s better than not having it.  It’s a challenging job to do that.

I think what I bring to the table is that ability.  I think I have proven it in Albany in a place where you have live Republicans running around that control things, a Governor in Pataki, and the Senator, Joe Bruno.  I’ve been able to do both.  I’ve been one of the more independent Assembly members but I’ve been effective.  I took committees like the task force for people with disabilities that was just given to me because I didn’t have enough seniority to get a lu-lu, and we made it into something.  Started holding hearings, we issued reports and we made the mayor come out and say, “Hey you know …” made his office say, “You know, you’re right.”  We’ve protected people with disabilities and we’ve made that task force something.  I’m proud of the fact that I was appointed chair of the Oversight, Analysis and Investigation committee of the Assembly, in part because people recognized what …

MTK:  and the candidates for mayor?

SS:  I like them all.  I haven’t taken a position.  I want to hear what they have to say.

MTK:  You are not an attorney.

SS:  No.

MTK:  Yet much of the power of the Office of Public Advocate is reliant on legal procedure, subpoenas, lawsuits.  You’ve even said it will require creativity.  Don’t you think it will require creative legal work to empower the position?  And if you are not an attorney, isn’t that a problem?

SS:  Part of government is having people of different experiences in government.  I think there is certainly a role for attorneys in politics.  We certainly have a lot of attorneys.  I’ve been an Assembly member for over eight years.  I haven’t been an Attorney but I’ve introduced and passed a whole lot of pieces of legislation.  I’ve been effective in terms of dealing with the rules of Albany and understanding the legal ramifications of legislation and probably have – certainly the council members who are running for public advocate and I obviously have the most legislative experience.  I certainly would match my legislative record with the attorneys.  I know where to find a good lawyer if we have to file a lawsuit because that person will be called the Counsel to the Public Advocate.  We’ll have a Deputy Public Advocate and when I say we have to bring a lawsuit, we’ll bring a lawsuit.  When I say  …  But I can read my own bills.  I can introduce my own legislation. I can write my own legislation.  And I’ve been doing it effectively for eight years.

Maybe one of the things we have to encourage is – and I think this is going to play out in the city council – certainly having a legal background is good,  but we need teachers, we need union leaders in the council, we need younger people in the council, maybe we need people who work in day care in the council, we need parents in the council, maybe we even need a college student or so to come into this new government.  I think it’s not just ethnic diversity, but it’s life experience diversity.  I’ll know where to find a good lawyer.

MTK:  It’s an interesting point, I mean, a 22 year old kid from the Bronx has just been elected.

SS:  OK, yeah, I wouldn’t want to have a bunch of 22 year olds, but you know what?  We have to create this balance so that we hear a young person’s agenda in the city.  Because after all we do this for younger people.  We certainly need to have some experienced people.  But I think we have to recognize that the government is going to change.  We need to elect a new generation of candidates.  I am hoping that will inspire a new generation of ideas.  We cannot continue to go the way we go.  I think I offer that.  We need some energy here.  We need some people who do things differently.  That’s why I decided to spend a year out of my life doing this thing?

MTK:  In reading some background on you, I understand you were involved in saving the New York Historical Society in 1993.  Did you meet Betsy Gotbaum then?

SS:  Betsy and I are good friends.  I played a major role in my first year in Albany in helping to rescue the Historical Society before Betsy was there.  I was able to obtain 6 million dollars in State funding to get the Historical Society on its feet and I was very proud of that.

MTK:  Is it odd though to be running against her?

SS:  I think it’s funny.  (laughing) Betsy has done a good job at the Historical Society.  But I’m going to ask her though that she’s got to mention my small role in getting the ball rolling but we’re good friends and I like her very much.

MTK:  Do you have specific issues in mind for the Office of Public Advocate?

SS:  I want to build affordable housing.  I wrote a housing plan based on how we built Mitchell-Loma housing after World War II during the 1950’s.  We’ve got to build housing for middle income and working poor.  I want to concentrate on developing a real plan.  Not a Giuliani-600-million-dollar-out-the-door plan, “as I’m leaving we should build affordable housing.”  Every mayoral candidate has got to come up with that plan. I think I have done a lot of research on what I think is a direction we should go, from a state point of view.  I care very much about this economy and I am fascinated and interested in  how we can expand e-commerce and deal with the digital divide and make sure that our kids can be competitive.  I don’t think the answer is to throw hundreds of millions of dollars at large corporations, convincing them to stay here, when all they want is affordable housing and a trained workforce.  This is no longer when I went to school and we had to compete with the kids in New York City.  Now it’s, ‘We’ve got to compete globally.’  We’ve got to recognize that in this town real fast.  I want to prod people who do have the power to make those changes.  I think we do our kids a disservice.  My office has worked on these issues.  I serve on the education committee and the higher ed committee.  We try to hold them to higher standards then we don’t give them the tools in the classroom to succeed.  Over the summer we did a study after getting constituent complaints about the fact that 8th graders would be mandated to take 8th grade exams on how to use a microscope and a weight scale.  So we surveyed half the school districts around the city to find out how many microscopes and weight scales were there. Well I don’t have to tell you the end of that story.  We setup our kids for failure.  So those kids would fail that exam and have to do summer school.  This is after the state gave the highest educational dollars into the school system.  I want to organize on the city level to deal with the issue of the inequity in school aid for our kids, for our kids in New York City.  We just held a meeting, a kickoff meeting on the west side last week.  But we gotta tell Pataki and the Republicans and those Democrats who won’t take a stand in upstate and suburban New York – we gotta make them understand that failing to give our kids proper education aid has meant dilapidated school buildings, poor school books, lack of computers.  This is the struggle and I’m going to bring my Albany experience to the job of public advocate, because I’m going to know how to organize when these folks, colleagues, from upstate and suburban New York talk about how unreasonable we’re being.  It’s not just about adjusting the school aid formula, it’s about doing needs assessment to make sure that the kids in poorer districts get more money and if you want to call it reparations that’s fine with me ‘cause that’s what we’re owed for our kids.

MTK: The CCRB and COPIC are both the responsibilities of the Public Advocate.  Have you thought about how you might change either of these responsibilities, technologize them, (laughter) perhaps?

SS: I think that especially from a technological point of view there’s a lot– that the Internet and the entrepreneurial spirit of New York is tied into computerization and new technology that can deliver services.  I’ve read some of Mark Green’s work in that area.  I would like to expand on it.

We just convened under my sponsorship an Internet roundtable of Internet companies in New York City to try to begin at least from my thinking that kind of thinking.  I hope to allow some specific proposals during the campaign.

MTK:  How do you think the Office of the Public Advocate can be effective or can intercede into the negotiation space with regard to complaints of police brutality?

SS:  I think Mark Green has done a wonderful job of documenting those complaints and suing the mayor and I think that he showed how effective the public advocate can be in relation to the CCRB and police brutality.  The role that I think I can play – and I think we have to do this in terms of connecting the police to the community is one to deal with the fact that …. we need real recruitment in the NYPD.  Not just Safir saying, “Oh yeah, let’s get the CUNY kids to do it.”  We gotta make a case to people – not just to attract teachers, because we’re going to need 54,000 new teachers – but we’ve gotta go to the campuses in a meaningful way in a serious way to convince people who want to work in public service that this police department is worth being involved with.  People did it backwards, once the s** hit the fan – please don’t put that in when you do this article –

MTK: Don’t worry.

SS: What we said was, OK go to CUNY and go get minority kids to be the cops, Go .. Go, go.  What would you sell to them?  What would be the benefit of that?  Do they believe that they could have a-

MTK: Worse, the PBA’s running ads of cops shot dead in the streets while only getting paid $30,000 a year.

SS: Right.  As if suddenly … African-American, Latino kids … that would appeal to them.
This has to happen internally.  There has to be a commitment to open up the process.  There has to be a commitment so that people who want to go back to their communities and protect those communities – which is a very worthwhile profession, and I think there’s a lot of interest to do it – that they can have career advancement; that there isn’t this tension with the police department.  I’m going to work as public advocate to make sure that we do that kind of recruitment – not just on the campuses but in communities – and force the NYPD and the new mayor to make sure that there are in fact career opportunities and understand that the police is not the enemy of the people.  I’m tired of hearing parents say to me, “I don’t worry about the criminal anymore, I worry about the cop.”  If we’re going to do improvements, we’ve got to tone that down and that comes from the police department and then the mayor.  And I hope to play that role.

MTK: And what about in specific instances of brutality. I think many people feel that the police are protected very much by the mayor.  If you look at the instance of the Diallo shooting all four police officers were cleared of wrong-doing, found not-guilty on charges even of reckless endangerment.

SS: I support the following:  I support – and a lot of this has to come from Albany but we’ve got to organize for this eventuality – police officers should live in New York, new police officers should definitely live in New York; if you’re going to shoot someone 41 times, you shouldn’t have 48 hours to get your story together – I don’t know of another jurisdiction where – you and I would not be accorded that benefit should that happen.  I think when a gun is fired, he should be drug tested, and you should be drug and alcohol tested immediately.  It’s like DWI.  Cops pull you over, you may not have been drinking, but you should do a check.  And I think we have to hold those officers to a higher standard.  I also think that part of the failure of that TK, one city hall and the police department driving these kids – these inexperienced police officers – to make the arrest, make the arrest, by any means, shake people down, you know, by any cost.  We need to have a supervisory effort here and restructure the department.  You cannot sned young people out in plain clothes, give them a mandate that’s impossible to fill, without understanding the ramifications of it.  I think New Yorkers understand, what every African-American and Latino parent understands that their children are in danger when they walk the streets in some quarters.  Now having said that, we have wonderful police officers and one of the things that struck me during when I was arrested and things like that and talking to other cops: they were horrified by that.  A lot of police officers don’t want to work under these conditions and I think those police officers should be elevated and we should search them out … they can be mentors – a lot of good cops, let’s not denigrate a whole department, you know there are bad politicians, there are bad teachers, every one of us – you know, there are bad journalists … believe it or not … no, you know-

MTK: Of that I’m a firm believer, are you kidding me?  Look at the year we’re having … look at last year.

SS: So there’s a lot that we can do to work on these issues and I hope to be part of it – I have been part of it, both in Albany and on the streets of New York.

MTK: Do you think there is institutional racism in the police department or any other citywide agency?

SS: I think sure there have been a lot of instances where people’s racism comes out. I wouldn’t say it’s true in all instances.  I wouldn’t want to label a whole city like that.  I think there’s a lot of good people, too, who believe as I believe that we are a diverse city and that’s what attracts us to stay here and work here.  The job of any elected official from the mayor to the public advocate is to look at that from a positive point of view and then root out racism and teach our kids that we do live in a diverse city – there’s a lot of things we should do on these issues.  Part of the excitement of my campaign is we’re building a multiracial, intergenerational campaign.  We’re young people, old people, african-american, latino, asian-american, gay, straight, and trans-gendered.  It’s good politics, but I really believe this:  imagine governing having gotten elected that way?

MTK: Especially now.

SS:  It’s a great opportunity.  And I’ll tell you this I’m learning – I tell you I’ve lived here all my life, grew up in Washington Heights, grew up in a multiracial community.  This city is great.  You’ve got neighborhoods upon neighborhoods, 5 blocks later you’re in another neighborhood.  People live together and that’s the best part of this town.  That’s why we live here and not in the suburbs.

MTK: Well … I guess I was thinking how as public advocate, how more aggressive you could be since as you pointed out you have this range of topics now available to you in a rather local context, as opposed to having to deal with other assembly people to make decisions or implement change.  You said that you have the idea of evolving the position of Public Advocate.  But I think a lot of the 60% or two thirds of the community that will show up in the census as non-white are going to want to know how it’s going to change.  I want to know how progressive are you?  Would you, for example suggest changes to the Charter with regard to empowering the position of public advocate?

SS:  I mean I would argue that to do the job right, to have direct subpeona power – instead of just requesting through the city council for subpoenas – to have your own subpoena power would certainly enhance the office and would do a lot in terms of investigative powers.

MTK: Would you try to institutionalize that?

SS: Well, I mean … is it going to happen?  No.

MTK: Well, why not, I mean, TK seats up on the city council maybe everyone’s going to be incredibly radically minded about how they want to change the office.

SS: I don’t think the new mayor’s going to – one of them said it’s not happening to me already.  But to start with, I’m convinced that with the powers that exist right now, I can have a profound effect on the debate over the various issues that are going to face New York over the next four years.  I would work within what the Charter mandated functions today.  Obviously as we build coalitions and we get a sense of what the council’s like, probably, hopefully if people think that– going in if I can create a sense that this office is important, rather than just going in and saying in order to be effective guys I’m need this, this, this and this to happen, especially with a mayor and editorial boards that would argue-
<END SIDE>

SS: It’s easy to say that you can do these things but one thing I have learned in Albany is that certain change comes slowly and you have to be political in how you get to where you want to be and where you want to end up as part of this negotiation as part of this compromise.  As long as you don’t sacrifice your principal belief system.  And I do not believe I have done that in my years in Albany.  Last year Pataki vetoed a very important bill that would allow early release of women prisoners to work-release programs, not to be freed because we ended parole but we left these hundred women –

MTK: to A.T.I. [alternatives to incarceration]

SS: Right.  It was my bill.  Very controversial bill.  Probably come up in the campaign.  And Pataki vetoed it because he wanted the D.A.’s to have input even though the corrections commissioners could call the DA.  But it meant that Pataki – even though it passed the democratic assembly and the republican senate.  I had the bill.  Done.  Not bad.  Pataki vetoed it and he wanted to amend it and I said, “No, let it go, we’ll do it this year.”  Sometimes you’ve just gotta say, “OK, you lose the bill” but sometimes you say, “Ok this is the best I can get.”  That’s being a good legislator.

Sometimes you hit the streets, as we did when the Klan came here or when the police brutality issues came up.  I recognized that it was important for someone who looked like me to be out there because we had to show that it was not just the minority community that was concerned but we had to show that the white community was concerned and some people had to step out there.

Sometimes you have to do that, but then you’ve also got to go to Albany, and you’ve got to pass the 48 hour rule and you have to keep fighting for the ban bill on residency.  This role here is not just being
an advocate out on the streets or doing a Sunday press conference – which I’m good at also – it’s multifaceted.

Then you use the power.  You want to talk about how we build communities, especially in minority neighborhoods – city planning commission.  What kind of infrastructure planning do we have in the Harlem community when all the development after 96th street, we don’t have enough sewage treatment and toilet hookups and things like that so residents in Harlem will want to develop – who have their own community plans are being told, “but you can’t do it because the treatment facilities can’t handle it.” Or parts of East New York that cry out for economic development attention.  And what about subsidies for those communities and community based organizations.  That’s the hidden secret of the public advocate’s office to me.
SS:  You roll up your sleeves and you get involved in zoning and you become an expert on how things are built in this town and you work with the unions and the construction trades and you talk about how we collectively build affordable housing.  Now that in addition to police brutality and other issues will impact the two-thirds, the diverse parts of this city that cries out for some of those services and that piece of the pie.  And I think I understand that – and it’s not the issues that are going to get you on New York 1 in the morning …. it’s not the issues that you are going to come saying I want to do a profile on you for … but at the end of four years if that’s what builds up neighborhoods and toned down the violence and toned down the tension.  And then we got to deal with other issues, you know it’s not just job creation for communities.  It’s not just opening up the store anymore and saying I’m going to give the poor community jobs.  It’s also about ownership and how are we going to give people ownership of this town?  The best way you do that is by giving ownership of small businesses and what are the programs of this new e-commerce, new technology that allows people of color to have the same advantages as other folks who have been here, you know, people who have had those advantages in other ethnic groups.  Let’s do it all.

And that’s the hidden power of the public advocate’s office.  How to use those powers for leverage, to leverage that stuff.  That’s reasonable.  That’s what I’m going to concentrate on.  We’re going to have a unit on land use.  We’re going to talk about economic development and job use.  Some people want to sue a lot.  And I’ll have lawyers to sue, but I also want to build real programs that can last way beyond you know my term as public advocate.

MTK: [philosophical question, open ended]

SS: I think this job is exciting, innovative, creative.  I’m more motivated about running because of the whole change in city government.  I believe that we need a generational change here.  Of the good candidates who are running for public advocate – I respect each and every one of them and I think each one will do a good job.  I just bring something different for this time right now which is real change and something new.  But it’s a stepping stone like anything.  I may decide to get reelected.  I really want to do this job.  But I enjoy what I do now.  I like to serve.  I think it’s exciting to have a larger constituency, to do more.  Not having a speaker.  To go into city council even though your presiding with no power.  You can look in issues not just micro but macro issues.

Mark handles 30,000 complaints a year … try to do more of that.  I want to ask: Why is everyone complaining about HPD?  Why are we seeing trends in this agency?  Then we’ll go to town.  That’s what’s exciting about this job.  If you do a good job well, …

MTK: Real change could happen.

[but seven months later, two planes flew into the World Trade Centers, contravening democracy at the most basic level]

Shanti, fiction, 1999

31 Friday Dec 1999

Posted by in clips, fiction, NYC, press clips

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Condé Nast, Inc., featured my short story, Shanti, in the January/February 2000 issue of JANE magazine, which it had very recently purchased from Fairchild Publishing.

This was the very first issue of Jane as published by CN.

I can remember feeling thrilled because my check had the logo of The New Yorker prominently printed on it – as a design element! My one and only check from CN in the 1990’s.

I got paid on December 31, 1999 to be exact. Which means this may have been the last piece of fiction published by Condé Nast, Inc., in the 20th century – no idea if so, I just know the first thing I bought was a pair of long, camel-colored boots for my editor, and the second was rent in Brooklyn.

I was paid what I asked for as a freelance writer with the intention of setting a rate: $1 a word.

Shanti is a chapter in my first novel, Mood [1997]

Sensation! at BMA and the Mayor Giuliani Protest, 1999

02 Saturday Oct 1999

Posted by in NYC, performance, reviews

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Despite the sheer volume of the events of September 11, 2011 masking the years near them, anyone interested in the arts who lived in New York City at the turn of the millennium – and particularly the borough of Brooklyn – will remember the arrival of the Sensation! touring exhibition of Young British Artists [YBAs] of the 1990’s  that opened on October 2nd of 1999.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani protested the exhibition and in specific a work by Nigerian-born, British National Chris Offili – an image of the Virgin Mary made of many materials from his homeland, but which contained elephant dung as a medium, a paint, a process natural to the production of image-based art throughout the tropics or near deserts.

Giuliani protested that it was offensive to Christianity and attempted to prevent the showing of the work. It’s this time I define the end of post-modernism, at the exact moment that Mayor Giuliani stated publicly to the press,

“here’s how I know if something is art … if I can do it, it’s not art.”

I wore this shirt, with a tie, no coat, slacks and dress shoes, to the opening.

mtk October 2, 1999

99 is the Summer of Unity, (From New York to the World), 1999

10 Thursday Jun 1999

Posted by in NYC, poetry

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From New York to the World
’99 is the summer of Unity

Indian time is measured by the moon
but this is a lyric for the month of June
“I like New York in June, how about you ?”

july and august maybe into september
if we make it last we’ll have something to remember

this is the evolution of the revolution
known as urban contribution
we’re rubbing out the borders and the edges of the thing
so we can get together and sing

99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world
99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world
99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world

there ain’t no such thing as the 21st century
there’s only right now that includes everybody
from Tokyo to Paris, Frisco to Mali
we all know who the greatest is … it’s ali.
we can talk about you and all about me
but what it comes down to is we

99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world
99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world
99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world

niggahs on the left side crackers on the right
everybody who knows better can separate the fight
by jumping in the middle and shouting out the chorus
but you got to shake your ass or you know you’re gonna bore us

everybody’s looking for the next big thing
Y2K ain’t shit yet, so just sing

99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world
99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world
99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world

Saramago’s written a book
in which we all get blindness
while the dalai lama says
his true religion is kindness

I don’t know what the answers are but you might be forgiven
if you put away your bigotry and listen to the women!

99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world
99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world
99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world

nobody knows where we’re going
nobody can say about the weather
but wherever we’re all headed
we’re in it together.

99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world
99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world
99 is the summer of unity
from new york to the world

M.T. Karthik, Brooklyn, 1999

Letter to Salman Rushdie

01 Monday Mar 1999

Posted by in appeals, Letter From MTK, maturation, NYC, thoughts

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Salman Rushdie

Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

115 West 18th Street

New York, New York 10011

1 MAR 99

Sir:

I am an Indian-American man, 32 years old, unmarried, living in Brooklyn, New York. My father was among the first post-independence Indians to emigrate to the United States – in 1957 as a post-doctoral fellow in Organic Chemistry at Northwestern University.

He went back to India in 1959 and then worked to bring his family to the US in the years that followed. My mother, sisters and I immigrated from Madras to the US in 1969, four days before the first lunar landing.

My father struggled to bring us here only to have his family disintegrate in a bitter divorce. The story is still whispered among our society of Ayer Brahmins in Madras. The bitterness in our family has been taxing.

My father is an old man now and I’m his only son. I believe that telling our story will bring some peace to our broken lives and help other immigrant families who face similar difficulties. I seek help in this matter.

My eldest sister chose to return to India and lives in Madras. She married into a Punjabi family that had emigrated to our city from the North in the forties. My sister was, by the magic between two Indian newlyweds in the autumn of 1958 in Evanston, Illinois, born an American citizen.

She was taken back to India at two, brought back to the US at 12 and then returned to Madras at 15, back again at 20 and finally returned to India in 1982 to marry.

The repeated trans-continental travel at a young age reduced her emotionally and exacerbated the divide between my parents who had very different views on raising Indian children in the US.

Both my sisters and my mother are now estranged from my father. They have exchanged a handful of words in fifteen years. I am the only person who speaks to everyone, though I have not been back to India since 1991. There is a sadness among us all.

My father moved us to San Antonio, Texas in 1974. My second sister and I were raised Texan. She is now a converted Baptist living in Denver, Colorado. Three years ago she changed her name to Kate. She has assimilated to an American life.

I live in the New York metropolitan area among the largest population of Indians in the US, but I am lonesome and not close with the community here. With my eldest sister being in Madras and my parents divorced in Texas, we are a wholly divided family. Separated by geography and our anger.

My father was born in a hut with a dirt floor in South India with five sisters, while my mother was raised by a wealthier Madrasi family. Both families were orthodox Hindu Brahmins. The forebears in our patriarchy were strong-willed, powerful men. My fathers father was an idealist, a Gandhian who was jailed during the pre-Independence days when he marched the salt satyagraha. My mothers grandfather was a Congress member and a barrister, esteemed in Madras society circles. His sons were raised as anglophiles. My parents were a “love match” that went terribly wrong in the US. My sisters and I were raised in a chaotic and discontinuous way.

In 1981, the year I became an American citizen and you wrote “Midnight’s Children” there were perhaps 200,000 South Asians in the US. By 1989, when I graduated from University, there were more than 800,000. By 1995, when I finished Graduate School we numbered more than one million. My father was among the first 1,000 to arrive and I was among the first 40,000. That’s my generation.

Soon I will have to move back to Texas as my father is alone at 70 and will need care. I have come to New York to ask for help to write (and in many ways reconcile) the story of my family. I believe the telling will be a healing experience for us and a literary work of significance for other immigrants to the United States. I turn to you as a student seeking a teacher. Can you help me?

with utmost respect,

Karthik Thyagarajan

Brooklyn 718/ 383-9621

Karna’s Conflict, a novel

04 Sunday Oct 1998

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Karna’s Conflict

a novel

©1998 Karthik

Karna’s Conflict was typewritten between midnight, Friday, September 4, 1998 and midnight, Monday, September 7, 1998, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, as an entry in the 1998 Anvil Press Three-Day Novel Writing Contest.

It was retyped into Microsoft Word ’98, edited by T.R. Watson, and completed in this form on October 4, 1998.

It is dedicated with much respect to my editor and friend Tiffany Rhae, to Natty-Dread Michael Burns, and to my colleagues at 70 Commercial Street. The last page is dedicated, in memoriam, to The New School for Social Research, Manhattan, 1917–1997. R.I.P

 

Chapter One

“Nothing is amazing. Everyone is lying.” That’s the beginning of the novel that closed the millennium. It continues, “I am Kantuscha, citoyen du monde.”

That’s what they said when he wrote it: “the novel that closed the millennium.” I’ve read the words so many times that they now lose their meaning for me. He is a writer and I am his echo, a latent force awaiting my moment to act. I am his student and my actions are presaged.

I’m a writing student at The New University of Social Studies. It was founded 60 years ago by a pack of radical angry white men, an experiment, a school unlike any other. The founders were trying to create the first institution to honestly deal with the lies and rationalizations of the dominant culture in the U.S. Men like Charles Beard, the first academic in America to publish criticism of the country’s founding fathers. The New University was begun on a dream that the United States would wake up to the falsity of its politic through the education of its adults.

But now it’s a joke and Kantuscha, my professor, knows it. I am learning from him to be critical, wary and resistant. I am learning to write. He is 63 years old and has been tenured for 25 of those years. His girlfriend is fucking me. I am fucking his girlfriend, Anita.

My fate is sealed.

This is a story about changes and power and freedom. It is our story and, telling it, I strengthen my resolve to act.

This is the story of a school of thought. Primarily it’s about thinking but it’s also about the netherworld of feeling. It’s our story: Kantuscha’s, Anita’s and mine. Its end has been written already. My actions, his words are forever together sealed. We have brought everything onto ourselves and I am sure of my actions now. There is no one else to blame. This is a work of protest. It is the only way.

I am lucky. I will be a part of the end of history. I am a critical component of the transition from the past into an unpast, unfuture. Our story is post-historic, just like the USA.

It takes place in New York City. Among the thousand thousands. I am high above Manhattan with a bird’s eye view, from the vantage point of the Empire State’s most famous ambition. From here the island is busy.

The end won’t be all good. There will be deaths. It is inevitable. The first death is the death of Democratic Socialism. It has already passed, we are designated to mourn. We watch documentary films about Allende, read books about the struggle. We have filed Marxism away in the history sections of our libraries. We are talking about a revolution. We cannot even be bothered to act.

And that is how I come to be here, up high and poised. I am armed.

I am armed with this machine with which I intend to tell our story. It’s a laptop with a built-in modem and my cell-phone will get these words where they need to go. I’m staying up here until the end. Getting here was easy—security was half-asleep when I snuck by. The elevators are turned off now and the guards have made their last pass. It’s just me, high and alone above the twinkling lights of New York City.

This story starts 20 blocks south of here, at the University. I was with Kantuscha. We were in his office on the third floor of the graduate studies building on Fifth Avenue. He was pissed off. Kantuscha was on the University renaming committee. It was a token gesture, since the President had already decided on the new name (I heard he had an identity team create the new logo as early as last year).

Kantuscha resisted. He still thinks his fight makes a difference. None of his students ever say it out loud but we all know he lost years ago.

The new name is more directly related to the primary focus of the University curricula. It reflects the prevailing attitude of the times. “The University of Arts and Social Studies” is to be inaugurated next spring with a new class of students.

They can have their U-ASS.

It’s not the name change alone. Kantuscha is, has been, fighting a losing battle for fifteen years. I am his only research student now. We are two males of a kind, a dying breed. Dodos. The times are passing us. That’s why I can’t go down quietly. I owe it to him to make some noise.

If you were an Anti-Capitalist and you found yourself in New York without a job, where would you turn? I answered that question by sending a resume to The New University of Social Studies. They promised me free tuition in exchange for 30 hours a week in the Computer Science department—simple stuff, database management.

I knew Kantuscha was there. I had been reading his stuff for years. I was naïve enough to take the deal because I actually believed that Kantuscha’s work was making a difference. I thought the revolution was still on! You know, “the struggle continues ….” I was pathetic.

Kantuscha and I worked it out so I clock hours assisting him and get paid to do it. The conveniences I take—free copies, Internet access—my friends who work downtown call it corporate swashbuckling. We feed the underground—give graff writers slap-tags and glue stick. Some catalogs and comics get made that wouldn’t otherwise see the light of day. Some pseudo-revolutionary e-mails get sent. That’s how we have to behave these days. Like jackals.

If you ask my friend Fingers, he’ll tell you this is a worker’s story. The one about the worker who sings on the chain-gang. But I disagree. How deep can I sell out? How deep? I was looking for a Masters of Fine Arts so I could maybe get tenure somewhere. It was either that or become a wage-slave making just enough money to keep my mouth shut.

But now I realize what I have to do and so now, now I get this rare prize for a minute. I get a minute free of the Capitalists. Just long enough to make some sense of it. To express as loudly and clearly as possible. You see, I have come here to seize the microphone, to wrestle it from the locus of power.

But enough of introductions, we must turn to the story itself —the amazing true story of our times! …

Nothing is amazing, everyone is lying.

Chapter Two

“Wake up, wake up,” she whispers, “the enduring aspect of this argument is feminine.”

It is early on a Sunday morning in Brooklyn. Anita rises from bed as Kantuscha wakes and slowly turns into the cool. She is naked. Her bare feet pat the soft wood floor as she crosses from her bed to the bathroom sink, stretching her long brown arms as she walks.

He opens his eyes briefly, watches her walk away from him through one eye, through a triangular lump in the blankets. When she’s out of sight, he closes his eyes and rolls over. His legs rub together, wrapped tight in the sheets and, waking, he remembers the meat of their conversation the night before. The low grrrrr of boxfan blades turning in the window brings a dull, gentle unquiet of thudded air as he opens his eyelids into the pillow. Briefly he thinks, “the masculine is impatient,” before forgetting the thought entirely in the awareness that comes with waking up. He is naked.

He rolls his shoulders back once, twice, and does soft half-push-ups into the pillow. He turns over and allows himself to fall backward into the bed.

She does not like commitment but enjoys Sunday mornings with him. In the bathroom, she looks into the mirror. Her eyes are clear and bright. She puts her hair up, fastening it with a pin. She turns the faucet on, runs her hands under the streaming, then splashes her face with cool water.

“I love your bed,” he calls out.

“It’s the biggest bed in New York City,” she replies matter-of-factly. They have an easy rhythm on the weekend, which often includes Saturday night in the city and breakfast together on Sunday. Kantuscha gets up and puts on a shirt.

Anita’s studio is in Brooklyn, in a renovated warehouse building. There are two large windows on the southwest—the light crawls in through arcs of rectangles that splay across the floor and walls. The space is not big, but it is the first place she has ever lived in alone, and she’s happy to call it her own.

Anita is a graphic design student whose background is in painting. She has been a student at the New University for a little more than a year. She turns off the water. “What shall we have for breakfast?”

Kantuscha crawls out of bed and walks into the bathroom behind her. They have been lovers for three months now and he feels comfortable in her place. “God,” he says, kissing her neck, “it’s too hot for food.”

It has been a summer fling. It began at the end of the Spring semester and now, in late August, it lingers wondering what the autumn will bring. Anita was taking a course in Media Studies for which she had to conduct a video interview. She chose Kantuscha as her subject because she had been attracted to his work. After the project he began calling her up and asking her out. They’ve been together since.

The school is going through a change and the years are filled with contradictions. One is the dialectic between the 30-something multimedia student and the 60-something Marxist literature professor.

The old man is pissed off because everybody is getting stupid on technology that was created to expand the mind; the younger woman has lately been getting a rise out of him by calling him a Luddite, while emphasizing the strengths of being stupid. The school runs the rope between them.

The school is transitioning from its role as one of the great institutions of the radical left into something … else. It is a sign of the times. It’s just how things are in the era of the free market, the new century.

“I am not a Luddite,” he intones. They are laying across her bed with the newspaper in the early afternoon light. “I just think the computing curriculum is something of a scam.”

“I am here to take advantage of the gear,” she says. “It costs a bit, sure, but you can’t get access to that kind of gear just anywhere.”

“The gear is not the point,” he replies, “it’s the problem … how much of what it does is of any value?”

“Value is subjective …” she counters.

“But we agree there’s tremendous inequity in the new world, right? Waste is rampant and value is placed on image and production value instead of content. Besides, what good is a website to a sick and starving person?”

Beckett, Anita’s small black-and-white calico, comes creeping up onto the bed. He stretches, pawing the Home section on his way across Living Arts, finally finding himself a patch of sunlight between Sports and Anita’s knee.

The University has turned to computing as a means of attracting more students. At one time the school had been fiercely independently minded, designed as a resource for adult education, the first such institution in the USA. Now, there are development administrators, human resources personnel and vice presidents. There are living trustees for whom buildings and theaters are named, who want their names on the school’s new computer facilities and want those facilities filled with top-of-the-line hardware and software. It is the nature of the times.

“The whole computing revolution is just a mini-revolution of the rich,” says Kantuscha, “It tills the soil of the wealthy to keep the bourgeois from looking too fat, by creating a false middle class that spends more on stupid unnecessary things.”

Anita leans back against the headboard. “What. Ever,” she says. She rolls her eyes. “The University has the best gear in Manhattan and I have access to it to do as I please. That costs money and I am willing to pay for it.” She picks up the Business section, murmuring, “… if they didn’t have it, I’d go wherever they did.”

“But for the price of one class you could pay for your own computer,” Kantuscha replies. “For the price of two you could get software and books and teach yourself.”

She is silent.

“So admit it,” he continues, “you want a multimedia degree because you’ll get mileage out of saying you have it.”

“Well, yes,” she replies, “I’ll be more marketable.”

“But not from the gear,” Kantuscha presses. “You’re investing in something else … you’re joining a club.”

Anita is exasperated. “Look,” she says, “the pace of the world is not slowing down. I am not getting younger. I am totally at the mercy of the marketplace for a job. Computing skills I can rely on for the next twenty years.”

It is an ongoing dispute. The professor is trying to explain to Anita his philosophy, the philosophy of the most recent past. He sees the image-orientation of the Media Studies department as a bone thrown to the students by the rich. Kantuscha cannot convince Anita that the control the wealthy have over the poor is formed by a complex system of buy-and-sell created to distract the people from the real locus of power in society.

And Anita cannot get the old man to see that he has lost touch with the rate of speed at which the world is moving, to acknowledge the value of new tools and occupations, and to understand the amount of disposable income they can bring to people who have never had choices. She can’t get Kantuscha to see these choices as empowering.

It is an argument of the times and the old man is losing. Socialism is laying down and dying before the promise of Capitalism. Ads carrying images of the rewards of the free-market are jettisoned at light speed around the planet. Socialism is all but dead. And that’s how things are at the University these days: bells, whistles, and, somewhere in the distance, the fading gong of a death knell.

“You have to adapt,” she says. “The world is capitalized, complexified, technologized, interconnected by computers, for better or worse—to speed up the rate of exchange.”

“Yes, yes,” he replies, “but it’s not for the exchange of ideas … it’s for the exchange of money.”

Chapter Three

Manhattan is a mall. It has gone from marking place to meeting place to marketplace. Made its way through Modernists and is shuffling off Post-Modernism as it marches to the much-hyped end of its millennium. We are all just waiting now. Makers are a dime a dozen. Artists are a dime a dozen. I’m a dime a dozen.

We are trying to find a way out of our barbaric past to a better future, struggling all the while to release ourselves from the slow-weakening grip of time. Time, the central preoccupation of our existence, an echo of language. We absorb ourselves in rhythmic acts in a sweet search for harmonics, meaning.

And occasionally we find a groove, banging out a rap from a complex mesh of noises. We have a lot of gear. We struggle with the microphone. Microphone check one two one two. There are artists among the rebels. Madness, madness art.

But mostly we’re surrounded by adverts and fashion that is totalitarian in its attempts at dictatorship. Massive propaganda and hardly anyone free enough to resist to any effect. The air is dulled with banality. We are past the hand-wringing but haven’t yet found a movement. Teachers are hard to find and most everyone is waiting, waiting, waiting.

If you favor the underdog, then you know it is the time of the lone juggernaut against the uncaring machine. In the streets, graffiti artists are bombing every day, begging for eyes to unblind themselves, to learn how to reject billboards and corporate culture. In the record shops and warehouses breakbeat scientists are bringing a mad melange of multicultural sounds … music and noise and words are being broken down and wrecked and checked as hip-hop verses the world in the roots and the essence of urban culture. In the clubs and schools, black kids, white kids, brown kids and yellow kids are setting aside their differences to remember a time when they were more alike than different, a time from before they were indoctrinated. The street is rising up in tiny crests and swells.

I hooked up with Kantuscha. It was only a few years ago that we realized that the Academy had fallen behind. Worse, it’s becoming the agency for separating the Capitalists from the People. The only hope left is the writers and that’s why I connected with Kantuscha. He’s got legs. He’s pumping pretty hard for a guy his age. I’m trying to bring more from the street. The gulf between the school and the people—la gente, I mean, the real people and the real school of the revolution—hasn’t been wider since the revolution began. I figured Kantuscha could teach me to translate, could show me how to get my words in-between the street and the Capitalists.

There are two aggressive Populist movements at play in the concrete fields of the mall. The pseudo-Satirists are pushing thin irony (candy meant to bide the time) and the Systems Organists are complexifying with machines, under the illusion that some infinite net on the horizon will incorporate us all and still support freedom and individual thought.

And these two movements have joined the everpresent zealots for the umpteen causes and the victims of eras past. The times are thus deep with possibility but rife with fear and depression. People are taking every kind of dope available, in concert and alone.

In the streets, we are lucky to find a groove once in a while. If it has drive it lasts a fortnight. That’s our clock since we got hip to rejecting the 9 to 5. We struggle to return to Indian Time, to measure by the turning of the moon. Pseudo-Satirists, Systems Organists, Social Democrats and Capitalists alike find peace in the face of the moon. From here she sets over New Jersey and the whole stolen land beyond.

I can see all of Manhattan from up here, and on out to Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx. I can nearly see my place across the East River. I live in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, at the mouth of the New Town Creek, once home of the five black arts, now the site of New York’s largest dumpsite and landfill. Rent’s cheap and there is a fulfillment of dharma in reclaiming dead buildings. From my place I can see the cityscape of Manhattan, from the 59th Street Bridge to the World Trade Centers. The sun sets on the Empire.

I always have to remind visitors that my view is a convenience and not a luxury. Because when the garbage barges come by and we get a whiff of the waste of 12 million shit-producing motherfuckers, we all stop to think. We are beyond shock. We are just trying to figure out how to deal.

I’m a permagrant. We are members of the permanently immigrant class. We’re always from somewhere else. Some of us are members of the Club of No Places, whose motto is “No flag, no country, can re-place the placeless.” They have a stubborn mind among them. Their work is imperative—I must say, some progress is being made. But the markets are making it tough.

It is summer. The humidity sticks to our skin. We await the cool breezes of autumn and fall. School will start again and the students are wandering around town with their parents, colliding with the other tourists and pickpockets. It’s best just to stay out of the streets. Especially tonight.

Here I sit, high atop the Empire State Building, lamenting the death of intellectualism and the radical left. Fashion dictates that I be more entertaining. What will we do to become famous and dandy, just like Amos and Andy? The answers hang on banners draped all over Times Square, Disneyfied. It’s an ugly time, a time of commercial uglification.

So occasionally, to relieve the tension, we make jokes.

“The year 2000’s coming, yo, you know somebody’s gonna blow some shit up!”

That’s what Fingers says. He’s a composer and bassist in the jazz program. I hang out with him between sets. We trade fours. He’s got a regular Sunday night gig at a new spot downtown.

“I’m not saying I’m asking for it,” he said. “I just know human nature too well, man, not to plan it’s gonna happen.” We were at the club late on a Sunday night at the end of last semester.

I was nonplussed. I was intoxicated. It was late and Fingers had been plucking four thick ropy strings wound taut across a wooden board. The infinite universe had buzzed into perfect harmony at moments.

New York City, yo, players got chops. Straight ahead. There is no edge thicker with talent than NYC. Some as thick maybe, but everybody here is throwing down with respect.

Fingers is cool. He sits with his own thing when he gets the microphone. That’s respect: Practice at home and bring what you’ve got at the appropriate time. There are too many of us here trying to represent ourselves; some etiquette is required.

Looking for a tempo in New York City, a tempo to groove to, to find some peace of mind, we come across harmonies, and for a moment we can chill out with someone else who’s lonesome, too. Together alone together alone. It’s a comfort and not a renaissance. It’s just moment by moment. Fingers does his part and so we inform each other.

“What do you think’ll be left, Fingers?”

“I don’t know man, but shit’s gonna be noisy! They’re going to blow some shit up!”

That seems so long ago now, back at the beginning of the summer, I guess. What’s cool about Fingers is that he freed himself, he didn’t waste time waiting for somebody to come along and do it for him.

This is about waking up. The terror of the new millennium for those that don’t recognize it, is that it brings with it the fear that the old is out and the new is in. That means all the great resistors are at risk of being swept under the carpet, while the Capitalists replace History with their own Disney re-makes, you dig?

Like take for example Octavio Paz, a literary giant of the 20th century, who passed on in 1998. If we turn the clock and leave him behind then we leave behind someone who was wise enough to wake us up to this:

“In the North American system, men and women are subjected from childhood to an exorable process. Certain principles contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, radio, television, churches and especially schools. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flower pot too small for it. He cannot grow or mature. This sort of conspiracy cannot help but provoke violent individual rebellions.”

But Fingers was hip to it before I was. Seeking the microphone in order to make a niche for our rebellions we unearth the need for an instrument. We fashion the instrument from what we have available. Like this word processor, like Fingers’ bass. What we seek is an opportunity to provide the content to the machine that inspires and equalizes. We are working toward Post-Colonialism. It’s slow coming.

When Kantuscha first came to the University things were different. The school was a hotbed for Communists and Marxists. The year was 1965 and Greenwich Village was alive with uncontained exuberance, exploding into jazz at the Blue Note and the Vanguard.

Kantuscha was tenured in 1971, a year after the University absorbed the oldest design school on the island of Manhattan—the beginning of the end of Social Research in favor of fashion. Parsons School of Design brought with it the watered down arts ethic of the monied. The artsnake began its long, slow swallowing of social consciousness. The playful intellectualism of pop art gave way to pseudo-intellectual claptrap and the School became less and less political and more a tool of the monied few.

By 1979, the Capitalists were on a roll, making sure we would all remember their 80’s.

And now we have this.

The school is now comprised of seven “divisions” and 65% of its revenue comes from what is called “arts education.” The only progressive thing about the Social Sciences at the University now is that they have dwindled in importance progressively since 1980. Worst of all there is little or no communication between divisions. There are no creative expressions about significant issues that aren’t funded by corporate interests because a body politic separates the divisions, divides them more completely than walls. And technology seals the hallways.

The aging intellectuals are retiring, the Socialist institution is limping, and the century is winding down. In the next century the tradition of radical thought will be a cute memory, a nostalgia.

Lately I’ve been pissing people off. They have been talking about my attitude. I have been sort of loose, but what the fuck? When did this place get so tight? It’s sad. I’m 33 years old and a hyphenated-American Communist at the end of the American century, watching the money slip through my fingers.

Gotta perk up. Fortunately, Fingers has finished his bourbon and he’s back onstage. With a low-bellied grumble he smacks out a mean jungly line and his horns come screaming in with a wicked screech. Resurrecting grooves of times past and spinning them into a sampled sound from the turntables as the engineer cross-fades in a rider.

Mean, man, real mean this group. Electronic and live drum and bass kicking through downtempo—maybe 95, 100 bpm’s—and looping way late wide backbeats underneath. What? I found this groove maybe a month ago. It might last a month.

Chapter Four

Anita’s studio is colorful and filled with light from late morning to sunset. She is at peace here and finds it easy to create. She can write, or paint … but there is no computer. It has been her practice to use computers at work or at school but to keep her studio free of the machines.

She believes in managing machines. Has a pager but no cell-phone, message center but not call-waiting. She has a VCR connected to a television set that doesn’t work except with the video, which she feels is the perfect kind of set-up to have, and has in fact wondered for years why they don’t sell such a product in this land of variety in the marketplace.

By keeping her studio free of machines she moves more freely through the space. She finds she is more active and manages her time better. She is preparing now a paper on managing machines—but she only works on that at school.

Here, the pace is more even, mellower. The light is great: Brooklyn light. The kind of light that is best appreciated after having been shadowed by the towers of concrete and metal in Manhattan.

Anita’s favorite summertime event is the Charlie Parker birthday celebration in Tompkins Square Park. She goes every year—finds herself a patch in the madding crowd and settles with a book and listens. The festival is a celebration of Parker’s music and his relationship to New York.

An ardent fan of Bird Flight, every morning on the Columbia Radio Station, her silk-screen project for art school was a T-shirt that read jesus, phil, drop the needle! in large sans serif letters, a reference to the DJ who hosts Bird Flight and the Parker Festival, the DJ who has a tendency to ramble on. Who’d rather talk about Bird than hear him some mornings.

The festival is set to begin. The telephone rings. Anita makes a date to meet a friend later and leaves. Behind her the light of sunset remains gold on her sunflower-yellow-painted walls.

It’s a lovely sunset enjoyed only by her cat, Beckett. Late in the afternoon light Beckett awakens and stretches his paws, rolls over onto his back, and opens his mouth with a wide, white yawn. The sun sets while Anita enjoys the high flying sounds of Ornithology, sweeping through the trees in the park.

The drunks pass out. Music—Bird’s music—is heard at Charlie Parker Corner in New York City.

Afterwards, Anita finds herself walking through the East Village casually with nowhere to be. This is how life has been lately. She feels free to do what she pleases. It wasn’t always like that; it has taken sweet time to get things this clean. Empowering herself to take what she wants from this life has been an education.

Anita’s life has become a rich, diverse pleasure. On the regular, she has healthy sex with two men who appreciate her and give her space. She’s been freelancing as a graphic designer, creating business cards and flyers for friends. The school makes it easy; free access to the gear is making her rent. Anita’s got shit wired.

She meets friends at a bar in the Lower East Side. The neighborhood that used to be home to heads, addicts, is now home to frat boys who come on the weekends to drink themselves stupid. At least Sunday evening is mellow. Anita and her friends find a table against the wall and order a round.

The City is feeling it. Summer’s ending, school starts soon. There’s a nice vibe in the air. Anita sees a friend who teaches uptown. “Yo, Michael,” she calls out. He joins her. Michael teaches high school in Washington Heights. Anita met him three years before at a party, and they’ve stayed in touch, at least through voice mail—a sign of friendship in New York, just staying in touch by answering machine.

“Yo, Anita, how you livin’?” He hugs her and takes a seat.

“Good,” she replies, “are you ready to go back?” She is referring to teaching 13 year-olds.

Michael breaks into a big smile. “Ready, yo, I’m crazy ready!”

Chapter Five

So let’s be clear about one thing: Anita and I are Indian. I mean Kantuscha is citoyen du monde, you know? But Anita and I are Indian-Americans. She is from Kerala originally, on the Southwest coast, and I am from the opposite coast in the South. That’s what really got us started.

I mean, I suppose I should tell it right.

I had gone home for a few weeks—back to Jersey, I mean—to be with family, my mother’s family. They live in Middlesex County amongst the largest community of Indians living in the US. It was cool. I ate good food and got a break from the City.

When I got back Kantuscha was with her. I mean just together all the time. I was kind of weirded out that Anita was Indian and fucking my mentor, but I don’t really know how else to name what I felt. Then a few weeks later, Kantuscha went out of town for a lecture, I think to Budapest—yes, and London on the way home.

So Anita and I got to hang out alone for the first time. Together alone together. It didn’t take long for us to figure out how rare a combination we were, without having been arranged, and so … free of cultural hang-ups, we got it on. Man, we got is so on!

So I guess it has been a month now. Kantuscha got back a few weeks ago. We haven’t totally worked it out yet, but whatever. Anita can decide what to do about that. I’m cool.

I dig the way she communicates. We have an understanding that this thing can stay on the DL and the back burner for a minute, but occasionally I’ll get a page…dare I say it? Booty call. It’s cool. We’re not making any decisions or promises.

And the old man? He’s cool, I suppose. I leave it alone.

So there’s the set-up. Oh, except about my job. It’s a long, crazy story. I am manipulating one of Manhattan’s institutions to my own ends. No big deal. It’s already done.

I just have to wrap it up and then I’m out. They’re happy about that at the University. They’ve been wanting me gone, I think, gone or more committed to helping it along.

Kantuscha says my attitude is tighter with the founders’ than the President’s. The President makes a cool $200,000 a year, with a free place to live. So I figure I’m costing the place a lot less than he is. Except, of course—I kind of got my fingers all into his fundraising activities.

It’s a long story. It’s the story of the death of socialism at one of Manhattan’s oldest left-leaning institutions. I’m just passing through. Found myself a mirror.

Well, now you’re all up in it, I suppose—may as well lay it out straight so you don’t end up hearing rumors after it’s all gone down. Maybe my actions—no matter how noisy—won’t even make a splash. Maybe they’ll call me a fanatic, a liar, and just roll on … but I’d rather be sure than have a bad rep kicking around.

None of it’s my fault. I know how that sounds, but when you lay everything out and look at the facts, I argue that I am an innocent. Innocent like a jackal or a hyena or a vulture is innocent, because this is how I have to behave to get mine.

But I’ll let you judge for yourself.

It begins ten months ago in the middle of winter when this mule needed a stable. And sought the warmth of an Inn.

Chapter Six

“Je suis Kantuscha, citoyen du monde,” he writes. “There you are,” he says, smiling as he passes the book across the table. A young woman with dark, profound eyes accepts the text from him; “Thank you, sir,” she whispers in reply. There is a nervous moment between them and he lowers his eyes briefly as he caps his pen. Then before she walks away and the next person in line walks up, he looks back at her. “Thank you,” he says, and nods quickly.

The book signing is the fourth this month; numbers of attendees have dropped significantly since he began this tour. There will be a new book is about the Media Crisis—Lying, Ignorant Dacoits: Propaganda by the Children of the American Media Corps. Today, though, he is signing a reissue of his first text.

“Je suis Kantuscha, citoyen du monde,” he writes. Kantuscha’s readers prefer he signs books with the opening to his first great work, the work which garnered him an audience in the USA. It has been thirty years since their publication. Kantuscha, citoyen du monde, is becoming a has-been before death.

“I feel like Elvis,” he told his student recently. “It’s better to burn out, than to fade away,” Karna had replied.

Kantuscha is suffering from a crisis of identity. At this point in his career, there are powerful forces who want him “just to go away.” Worse: these forces were once his allies in a war of ethics. He is being turned out.

The Bibliography of Kantuscha texts over the last thirty years reads like a eulogy: The School and Society (1968), The Reflex Arc Concept of Education (1971), Ethics (1975), Democracy and Education (1976), What is Man? Twain as Marxist (1978), Human Nature and Conduct (1981), The New Right, Threat to the True Intellectual (1982), The Reagan Revolution: Fact and Fiction in the Era of Lies (1983), New Media As Power Tools: Propaganda in the Year of Orwell (1984), Numb: The United Somnambulant States of America (1986), Valid Fiction Versus Political Propaganda, Pamphlet #23 (1988), The Death of the Age of Greed and Madness (novel, 1989), and Revolutions: A Literary and Political Primer for the ’90s (1990).

The texts that have followed have been collaborations with students, barring two memoirs and the reissue that he has been autographing for the last month. The new book hasn’t even been picked up yet, though his agent assures him it is only a matter of time, a technicality.

Kantuscha, one-time super-revolutionary, faces extinction resulting from an inability to compete with new media, and the beast that plagues intellect: the dwindling of the global attention span.

In 1968, Kantuscha wrote:

“The Academy is set back from the street up a long, winding drive through its campus. From this position academicians seek to represent the people, though they cannot be bothered to meet them casually in their environment, in the street. Economics, the new Capitalists pseudo-science demands their attention.

The people in the meantime seek avenues. Roads by which they can reach the academy. They wonder about the service entrance, ask questions of the postman who makes daily deliveries to the Institution.

When a member of the people is courageous enough to set aside his or her life for long enough to find an avenue from the street to the Academy – carrying with them in all earnestness an expression of life on the outside – they are met with derision and told to go back to the street. This is the function of the Academy in its current state: to enforce the divisions created by the intellectual elite, and reinforce an irrational history based on fictions and political propaganda.”

In those days The New University of Social Studies was wild about the fight for egalitarianism. Baby, the struggle was on! The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense had a standing invitation to lecture in NYC. For a minute there, Kantuscha actually believed the revolution was happening NOW!

And now it seems he is the only one left.

After the signing, Kantuscha went for a walk along the wide sidewalks of Broadway uptown near Columbia. He stopped for a coffee and read the ads outside the coffee shop door. School will begin soon and the Upper West Side is filled with students and their parents, checking out what they perceive of as “New York City,” the sensible ones trying to get their business done and stay out of the way, the more careless or ignorant doing otherwise.

It is good, supposes Kantuscha, that Columbia is up high and out of the way. Nowadays, the Village is a boutique, a bar or a Barnes and Noble. McDonalds has long lines and tourists wander in herds looking for bohemian life. Columbia can retain its attitude up here on the upper west.

Kantuscha smiles at the thought. He remembers that a colleague has moved back to Manhattan very near to where he is walking. “Where was it? —ah yes, here at 105th Street.” He comes to the buzzer of Dr. Nicholas Butler, Professor Emeritus of History, Columbia University, now semi-retired, teaching adjunct anyway just occasionally so his pension fattens for retirement. That was his joke; no one else got away with saying it.

Kantuscha gave the little yellowy button ringed in shiny brass a firm Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt.

“Uh…Yes?” came a voice from the past.

“Nick? Halloo Nick? It’s me, Kantuscha—”

“Hey, Kantuscha—Bzzzzzzzz” came the sound from the intercom and he made his way upstairs to Dr. Butler’s flat.

Chapter Seven – Anita and Amber

Saturday afternoon and Anita is lying sprawled across her bed with Beckett in warm afternoon light. Her sunflower-yellow walls are bright and the air is warm and sticky. She is completely casual, her long, brown arms splay across the covers, lazy. They are flecked with yellow and brown spots of paint.

She told Kantuscha she might come to his book signing in Manhattan, but she flaked on him when she saw the sun creeping across the hard wood of her studio. The sun fell in rectangles across the far wall of her studio and a corner of a canvas that she had stretched several months ago was suddenly awash in light. The light radiated a triangle of bright white that caught her eye.

She spent the morning setting up her easel and dusting off the paints that had been in storage under her big bed. The paint containers had collected a thin layer of dust that manifest itself in wispy collections of lint around that stuck to the excess paint around lips of tubes of acrylic and cans of oil. She cleaned her brushes in hot water and then alcohol and then water again. She spread an old soft canvas as drop cloth. She then set to painting for the better part of the morning.

The work was a dense melange of yellows and browns, simultaneously bright and sunny and dense and profound and earthen. It was good, relaxing time in studio for Anita on a Saturday morning. But then it was time to go to work.

She has been working on a web page for a friend/client and promised it would be up and running by Labor Day. She also has a set of business cards that she has been commissioned to make for a friend who is opening a camera shop in the East Village.

Anita is content without a computer in her studio. She finds a joy from being with her paints and brushes and away from machines. She has grown confident that she paints more, draws more and writes more when she doesn’t have a computer at home.

But having to get up and drag herself into Manhattan from Brooklyn is a bit of a pain in the ass, especially on the weekend when the light is so perfect in her space. These were the days it was tough to manage her relationship to machines.

“C’mon Beckett, you want to go into Manhattan with me?” Beckett yawns in reply. That’s a negative.

She takes the L from Williamsburg into Manhattan and walks to the school from Union Square. By the time she gets into the computer lab and gets her stuff set up, she only has a few hours of lab time left. She must be efficient.

Anita is focused. She is somewhat older than the other students, mostly young kids in the undergraduate schools. They can be distracting. As she works, two kids careen into the seat at the Macintosh next to hers, dropping their backpacks noisily and chattering.

“Yo, that’s just bullshit, man,” says one, “I take loans up the ass to pay for this place and I get no access to computers?”

“It’s intercession,” replies his friend, “the regular hours start back up after Labor Day.”

“Yo, I’m paying $2000 for a computer class, I better get 24 friggin 7, access bra’.”

“Whatever, man,” replies his friend, “We’re lucky to have any kind of access to this kind of gear.”

The first kid stops staring into the monitor and turns to face the second, “You are an idiot.”

“What? What?”

“I could buy my own machine and have 24-hour access for the price of one class, but the student loan office won’t allow me to spend tuition on it. The place is a BIZness, man.”

Anita turns back to her own work, as the second kid fades from her peripheral hearing, “why I gotta be an idiot?”

Anita is practical. It has taken her a long time to get back into school and she does not want to waste her time. She settles in for a long afternoon of computing. The lab is windowless, painted white and lit by strips of fluorescent lighting overhead. The whole of the room is made dull and white. The only color in the room erupts from the flashing internet ads, screen savers and software apps on the plastic big-screened monitors. The school has good gear. It is easy to get immersed in it on a sunny Saturday afternoon.

Back at home, Beckett takes a minute to stretch his paws and move from one side of Anita’s sprawling covers to the other to find a new patch of sunlight on the biggest bed in New York City.

Anita is in the continuing education department. She has been a student for four years. She is taking a long, even-handed path to a Master’s in Design. She began by taking night classes after her day job as an administrative assistant in midtown. She used to work for an advertising firm. That was back when she was married.

Anita had an arranged marriage. It was settled by her parents and she hadn’t resisted. It turned into a six year struggle for freedom that got ugly and abusive before her final success, diworce.

“Diworce,” that was the whispered name she wore now across the state line. She didn’t even bother to visit her family in New Jersey these days.

But for now she has things set up better than they have ever been. Her own place in Brooklyn, rent paid from doing graphic design work, and just two more semesters until she graduates, with honors. It has been a long road to her education. She is earning it.

And lately she has begun to feel something long since lost. Lately, after the dialectics and the conversation and the long, slow groovy nights of some seriously comfortable and conversant sex, Anita has begun to feel beautiful.

It was a terrible thing her ex-husband had taken from her. Once a person loses the ability to feel beautiful, they lose too, the ability to see beauty in the world. And this is a terrible and lonesome way to live.

For Anita, every move she has made in the last few years has been a step toward freedom from her past. She was earning her own way now, was making it on her own. Things were moving. And two men had taken an interest at the same time.

Anita found herself in a completely new moral territory. He was no longer burdened with the hypocritical sensibility of her native culture about sexuality or about marriage. The diworce had burned all of that out of her. She just wanted to feel.

At first it had been hard. She felt alone in New York. She felt continually as if she were missing the point. She went on a few dates with guys who just sort of walked into her life.

Practically blind dates.

But she wanted more freedom, her taste for choice and freedom was voracious, she waned to move easily at her own pace, but wanted to be free to experiment and try new things. She had wanted to find that magical part of life in New York that allows a soul to wander unencumbered. It was hard.

It was a realization that came slow, that the kind of New York life she wanted comes from staying in the city for a long time and becoming a part of the fiber of the place. She had to become a New Yorker if she was to ever feel comfortable in the place. And that meant freeing herself even more than ever before.

The sexuality issue came down to communication. He had never learned how to communicate intimately. Her parents would never speak of such things and without a model of how to do so before she married, she took her husbands view as “normal.’ But it became clear after only a few years that her husband was a boor. She longed to be free to make her own choices about sexuality. She wanted to learn how to communicate sexually.

In the University environment she had found what she was seeking. Her first year she dated a man six years her junior who was more experienced than she was. He was sensitive to her. By the third year she had developed a language with which she could participate as a sexually active urban adult to her satisfaction without compromising her sense of freedom.

She found that she was able to communicate her needs and desires from sexual partners with greater ease. Kantuscha was expressive and easy to talk about any topic, had explored a wide range of territories and Karna, his student, he was as open as a New York night.

For the first time in a decade Anita was feeling pretty cool. There were no latent conflicts sneaking around the corner like Mack the Knife, she didn’t owe anyone any money. Her friends had stopped treating her like an invalid. A few of them even seemed a little jealous of her success. Playfully of course, her friend Amber would tease her, but still and all, it felt good to be wanted. It felt good to be desired. It felt really damn good to get it on!

She finished the website and was almost through pressing the layers of the business card for a final save. She had created a trickety card for the camera shop. First she pulled an image of an old camera from the internet and then, using Photoshop (she morphed it into a logo. All she had left to do was add some color to the outlined text below the image. She had left the color for last as she couldn’t decide. She had been fascinated by yellows and browns lately, but couldn’t quite get the hue right.

Before tackling the problem, she went to pull some research material from the internet. She closed down Photoshop (and opened her internet browser software. Surfing through the newspapers and e-mail she had left for Monday morning, she came across an article in the Times that gave her pause. It related to the work she had been doing.

The article was tied to a story from CNN, referred to it anyway and she was curious. It had direct bearing on theories of her own about managing time in front of machines. A few clicks of the mouse had her at the CNN site and she found the piece she sought.

Anita had proposed a collaborative piece to Kantuscha about managing one’s use of computers and the Internet a few months before. It was how they had met. As a student in the Multi-Media program, Anita had to take a video production class. For her final project she did a piece on Kantuscha and the recent re-issue of his seminal work.

She sent one copy of the CNN piece to HYPERLINK mailto:Kantuscha@newussocstud.edu Kantuscha@newussocstud.edu and hard copied one for herself. Then she logged off and left the lab.

On the way out, she got a sweet smile and a friendly wink from the security guard, a big Jamaican with beautiful skin. He had been making remarks to her occasionally, little niceties. He did it with all the women in the lab, but for Anita, it represented just a little more of the what-she-needed to feel really good.

“What are you talking about girl?” said her friend Amber.

They are at the coffeeshop on Union Square having a drink in the evening light.

“C’mon, Amber … it feels good.”

Amber replies: “Men in New York are barbaric. They hoot and whistle in the street – as if I am supposed to be turned on by that? Girl, I am so sure- they don’t even know what they are yelling about half the time. I’ve seen these guys. If it’s got tits and high heels, they go looking at it like-”

She tilts her sunglasses down on her nose and stares over the top of them at Anita. “They don’t even know what they’re looking at! They aren’t even close enough … they’re too poor to pay attention to what they’re even looking at.”

Anita and Amber break up laughing. “What. Ever.” Replies Anita. “I am just walking down the street minding my own business and if they want to make a fuss and I enjoy it, I am not going to deny I enjoy that- maybe I’ll even wink back-”

“The women look at each other and then say in concert, “… if he’s cute.” They both say it at the same time and collapse into themselves with laughter, a harmonious sound in the sidewalk of Union Square West. “And that’s what it all comes down to,” continues Amber.

Anita is enjoying being practical about finding her sexual identity. It is long overdue. “Baby, you are on fire,” continues Amber, “What you need to do is have a party.”

Anita is taken by the idea.

“Mhmm,” Amber whispers across the table between them, “you need to spread some of that around.”

It has not occurred to Anita to throw a party in a long long time. “Summer’s about to end,” murmurs Amber, “Have a Labor day party. Potluck. Up on the roof over at your place.”

Amber and Anita have become close in the last few months. They met in an Advanced Photoshop class and worked on a project together. Amber reaches out across the table and pats Anita on the back of her wrist.

“C’mon, baby, it’ll be fun.”

Chapter Eight

Dr. Butler’s flat on the Upper West Side is modest but well-appointed. The hardwood floors are of soft yellow pine, and across them lay a varied collection of colorful, serene and even narrative rugs. Intricate patterns are woven into the coverings. They come from India and Pakistan and Israel and Egypt.

The rug in the study is a marvelously intricate weaving. It was a gift from Kantuscha a dozen years before when they worked together to produce a book on Marxist writings from Post-Independence South Asia. It was Butler who had titled that work Labor, Intellect and Dharma.

Kantuscha hated the title. It symbolized all of the problems they had working together. “Dharma” is an intolerably difficult word to translate and the term has already taken the false meaning of “duty” in the West, and besides, “the text was about so much more than Hindu or even Indian points of view.” These were Kantuscha’s thoughts at the time. But the Columbia contract was integral to the process by which he was able to fund his next three book projects. He had bought the rug for Butler not as a symbol of the love he had for the project they worked on together, but as a penance for the damning things he had thought about Butler, while Butler was seeing to his paycheck.

Seeing the rug, Kantuscha said, “It’s good to see you again, Nick.”

“Kantuscha, I am thrilled to be back in the City, I tell you.”

Butler was absolutely beaming. They were in his study now and he had taken his customary position behind his desk. The expansive, swiveling, dark black behemoth of a chair he sat in was positioned such that he could swivel from facing the small chairs he kept for visitors to the desktop with large, sweeping movements.

This was what he needed to do his work. Kantuscha didn’t judge Butler for it, just observed it too up-close-and-personal for comfort. He hoped this time, with no work to talk about, they could actually spend some time together chatting and behaving as friends do, so he wouldn’t have to feel he was lying for calling Butler a friend.

Dr. Nicholas Butler is a very busy man.

“I say the City is just ALIVE with the energy of young blood,” he said, waving his hands across the top of his desk and casting attraction to a wide and dense perspective that, from his window, looked out onto the tops of the trees on his street, and then down to the West Side Highway from where the sunset could be seen, dropping off past Jersey.

“You think so?” Kantuscha mumbled, while shifting his weight in the settee he’d settled into—it had seemed more appropriate than the Director’s chair in the corner.

“God, yes—can’t you feel it?” replied Butler. He turned to his desktop with an almost comical whirl of the chair, reaching out with both arms for the top of the empty desk upon which he slapped his open palms with a [Smack!].

“Now. Let me see,” he said, “I believe I have,” and he put his hand thoughtfully to his nose while staring at his desk drawers, “in the—” and as he reached for it, “bottom drawer!” he concluded with a grin, and in one swift movement, he whipped out a large brown bottle of whiskey that he held up to Kantuscha for his inspection.

“Man, Nick, you are beautiful,” Kantuscha said as he looked at the bottle in complete incomprehension. He had long ago trusted that Butler’s taste was questionable in matters like booze or music. He was sure he wouldn’t have heard of the Scotch anyway as he never drank the stuff himself.

He watched as Butler poured him a small glass and added just a drop of water. Butler passed it across the space between them with flair and offered a toast to “older times than these,” with a smile that wished it was enigmatic. They drank.

And Kantuscha had a moment to reflect on the times as they pass.

They spoke for some time about simple things and it was actually pretty comfortable. Kantuscha remembered why he had first been attracted to this professor from Columbia with the dramatic sensibilities. Butler was always quite positive when he was with others, enjoyed reducing negative things to little jokes or imitations he would pull off to alleviate tensions with some effect of physical comedy associated with them. He’d mimic the Dean of some school or another, or would capture the spirit of a movement with a turn of phrase, with such ease. He always gave the effect of speaking freely. Kantuscha began to feel free as a result.

“Well, I may as well tell you,” said Kantuscha finally, “before you find out yourself and I get a phone call making fun.”

Dr. Butler became very serious. “Well,” he began, “whatever could this be about? Certainly not about the proposed name change for your institution, no.” He shook his head gravely, “It couldn’t be about such a thing, for this sort of thing is very serious indeed. It’s the sort of thing that leads to trouble…change, I mean.” And in the end he smiled that elfin smile for which he was so famous.

“I should’ve known you’d know,” said Kantuscha. He sat back and sipped his whiskey with a sigh.

This is a moment that Nicholas Butler, Ph.D., will cherish. He will bring to fore every theatrical aspect of himself he can summon. This is the sort of moment a man like Nicholas Murray Butler slows way, way down.

It is the conversation Butler has not had with Kantuscha, that he has long awaited. He has been deprived of this great joy for some thirty years, as he has watched from uptown while Kantuscha published powerful texts that made a difference. It is a moment he has expected. He has written the story of this conversation so many times that he is hyper-prepared to have it, to have it slow, and to remember how it goes so he can record it in his memoirs, tell it to others faithfully.

He said it all in one go, just like that. Leaned forward at first, then slowly leaned back as he unwound the sentences that followed. He finished tilting way back in his huge black chair with his elbows on the armrests and his hands in a position that posed as sympathetic, but belied smugness.

“The experiment is over. The New University of Social Studies had legs, Kantuscha, made a serious run at change. But the social research experiment is done. Now just the place is left … and it’s just like every other little-town-college in the country, save that it’s in Manhattan and endowed to the gills by rich, living trustees.”

“It will never attract the intellect the Ivy League does and will be forced to compete for progressively worse faculty, or worse, “star faculty,’ whose work is always sub-par by the time they become “stars,’ and who cost more to maintain.

“Its revenue already comes predominantly from what poses as Arts education but which is in fact Fashion and Advertising in a thin disguise.”

Butler was on a roll now, swiveling in his chair and waving his arms across the vast expanse of air over his empty desktop. He was obviously enjoying himself.

“It has already happened. The place is dead. Intellectually, it is a sinking ship,” he said, and then, leaning forward, he murmured, “and you’re the only rat left.”

Chapter Nine – Karna

I have taken the name Karna and I will tell you why. In the great epic Mahabharata, Karna is a prince born to Kunti who abandons him. He is found and raised by a wainwright, and Karna re-enters our story only as an adult when he challenges Arjuna of the Pandavas in a contest of skill in archery. Karna bests Arjuna in fact, but is deemed unworthy of the act due to his low-caste. His mother, Kunti, looks on and says nothing, knowing all.

The Pandavas and the Kauravas, the two warring family factions in the Mahabharata must play out their story infinitely with each telling, each character has his or her given role to fulfill, their dharma. The extremes, the poles of emotion are dealt with over the course of a thousand thousand retellings. And so characters and situations became both good and evil at once.

Karna is rejected by the Pandavas, who, in the most general interpretation of the tale, represent good. He is claimed by the Kauravas and he is put into action against his own brother Pandavas. He is forced at one point in the great battle of the Mahabharata to choose between staying with the Kauravas and leaving their encampment by cover of night. His mother Kunti has at last revealed herself to him and she begs him to come with her to safety. It is a poignant moment.

But Karna does not go with Kunti to the Pandavas camp. He takes for his duty the assignment of fighting with the Kauravas, who accepted him regardless of caste or status. The Kauravas, who represent in their most general interpretation, evil, are fated to die.

Karna is killed in the battle of the Mahabharata by Arjuna whom he bested the first time they met so many years before, by whom he was rejected for being of low caste.

The way in which Arjuna kills his brother Karna is significant. On the battlefield, Karna has wreaked havoc upon the Pandava armies. His skill as a warrior is matchless. He is responsible, in part, for the death of Abhimanyu, Arjuna’s son. Karna shoots an arrow from behind Abhimanyu, breaking his bow, disarming him to be killed.

Abhimanyu, perhaps the most “Western-style” hero in the Mahabharata, is a teenager who is called into action to lead the Pandava army into battle and to break a complex wheel-shaped formation into which the Kaurava armies have formed. But he becomes trapped behind enemy lines and embroiled in hand-to-hand combat, surrounded by enemy forces, whirling a chariot wheel and standing on a heap of Kauravas dead and dying from his hand. Abhimanyu is finally killed by a blow to the head. It is this death, the death of his son, which Arjuna seeks to avenge when he bears down on Karna.

In the fierce battle that ensues, Karna’s chariot wheel becomes stuck in mud.

As Karna, biological son of Kunti, raised by a charioteer, leaps from his chariot to unstick the wheel, he sees Arjuna advancing upon him. Karna accuses Arjuna of unfair tactics, but Arjuna presses on filled with the driving principle of his dharma – so given to him by Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita before the battle begins – and he beheads the great warrior Karna as he struggles with a wagon wheel.

The story of Karna is the story of Arjuna is the story of the Batman is the story of the Joker is the story of me is a story a thousand thousand years older than the first European novel. But it is richening out these days. It is getting more profound because of immigration, emigration, and movements from nation to nation.

I have taken the name Karna because India is my Kunti, my original mother, and the United States is my adopted Kaurava family. I abandon my given name for a name that suits my condition, placeless.

I am Karna, heir to the last great Marxist at The New University of Social Studies.

Only thing is, the school is changing its name, the century is coming to an end, the Christians have put a new reference point on things, social democracy is dead, and the Capitalists are very much in charge.

I am a permagrant, a member of the permanently immigrant class. And for now I live in New York. I’m an Indian-American with an emphasis on the hyphen and I have set up shop with a teacher.

Now that teacher has gone and started something up with one of my country-sisters. And we’re all mixed up together. She, like me, rejects her mother, our mother ñ though she does so for different reasons, with a different style.

She and I have found something in common and we have gotten it on. Man, have we gotten it so on! I like it and I am about ready to quit my job, which means I’ll have to quit school.

Oh yes, my job, I said I’d tell you the real story. Well, it goes a little something like this. I skated into New York on next to nothing and needed to find some kind of work, “cause as everybody knows, if you live in New York you gotta work.

So I surfed the job website of The New University of Social Studies, figured I’d get a job teaching or something. But there were only jobs in the administrative offices. So I took one I could do.

Now to understand what kind of job I have, you need to know a little about computing. And seeing as how so many people lie about how much they know about computers and computing, I’m going to try to break it down from the shallow end to the deep end. Please don’t become offended if your knowledge of computing is more profound, just be patient, I beg it.

The University has been having trouble collecting the money people promise to her. The pledge and financial records are a mess.

This once radical institution has never before had a complex method for keeping track of endowment – it was founded on quite opposite principles after all – or of graduates from the institution who could be pressed to give back endowment.

Seeing as how the place is in the middle of a Capital campaign to raise $200,000,000 over the last ten years, there’s money to be thrown at the job of development and fundraising. There may not be room for Marxists, but there is definitely room in the budget for new ways to collect money.

I suppose now you are getting an idea about this gig of mine. It isn’t brain surgery. But it has got a twisty logic to it. And that’s part of the mix in our masala of a story, the story of our triangle and our school.

I am a database administrator. I am responsible for keeping track of the money. With computers. The software package is a popular one. It is used by all the people who use computers for fundraising, most non-profits anyway. And that is a point of some significance, that one company should make the software that governs the databases of money raising at most major institutions. They must have access to that data at some point, must know who has the money anyway. And the big question in the USA is always the same: who’s got the money?

The database resides on a LAN, which is a local area network, of computers, at the University. The data is stored in an Oracle( database product that resides on a Windows NT( server.

The application stores reports and files to a network drive that is not on the server or local drive. (At this point I may begin to lose some of you, please bear with me while I bring the remainder of this complex environment to the others who may have an interest.) The whole of the data comes to something like 63,500 records. The budget of the University is around 130 million dollars, 77% of the working budget comes from tuition paid, and the President makes $200,000 a year with a free place to live.

So my position is key to the fund-raising that this President is doing – this 200,000 dollar Yale man, of whom everyone is so afraid. Only I didn’t know all this when I started, so as I have said before, “none of this is my fault. I’m as innocent as a hyena or a jackal or a vulture.’ I’m an American now, I have learned how to do what I gotta do to get mine.

And for my services, I receive free tuition and a paycheck. And with that I am studying under the great Spetzo Kantuscha, citoyen du monde. So I took the job. Only it has been ten months and the blinders burned off eight months ago. Kantuscha and the University are as impotent as the President’s pre-Viagra nights.

But that’s yet another story. This story is ours and there is something we’ve left out: it has to do with that devil of a word, love. I have yet to understand it, but its aspect owns me now. I am seeing Anita and she is seeing me. We are feeling something new.

And that is why this thing is happening. Not that I am in love with her, I am not, but we are intimate. I have found sweet cool places in her skin, have tasted them. My whole life I have been separate from my mother India, so all the sex I’ve been having has been with people from other places, with other mothers. But for the first time I am tasting milk chocolate. Anita is showing me several important things:

First and most obvious, I have learned it is possible for me, despite this era of placelessness to find someone to groove with, the mix-up hasn’t gotten so deep a body can’t find some-other-body once a body knows itself. But the trick is coming to know oneself.

Second, I have found that communication is the key to quality intimacy. Getting what you want means knowing what you want and how to ask for it. It’s a delicate and slow thing that takes time to learn. Nice.

And last, I have learned that there is some kind of hope. “Cause with all the wack-ass shit she’s been through, for Anita to be this cool and basically with a good sense of humor and kind and not bitter, proves it.

<wheedley-eedley-eedley>

Well speak of the devil. Excuse me, I have to make a call. I’ve have been paged.

I’m back. It wasn’t a booty call. I mean, it was Anita, but she was calling to get Fingers’ number. She’s having a Labor Day Barbecue, and wants him to play. She says we’re all invited … well, she invited me and I asked if I could bring a few friends so I am sure it’s cool.

Hope Fingers isn’t gigging already. Boy’s got chops, yo. Hip-ass chops. Right on, man! Livin’ in New York City, working at the New University and about to check out some sweet-hot rhythm and jazz. I guess shit’s going my way.

So how come I feel like quitting?

I guess I got the wrong job.

Chapter Ten – Frank

Dr. Frank Lessman was a 20-year IBM man which means for 20 years of his life he worked at a place where he had to be told to “Think.”

He is 53 years old, white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, earnestly so, but it shouldn’t be held against him. It is meant only as a description that comes with certain stereotypical baggage. This is intended, because most of the stereotypes hold. In this case.

And today, Dr. Lessman is having difficulty thinking about how to solve his current problem. Lessman is Vice President of Information Technology at The New University of Social Studies, a position that has existed for exactly two and a half years, that was launched by the Board of Trustees with the oft-intoned mantra, “to take the University into the next millennium.” Frank makes six figures. Most of the eight Vice Presidents do. It comes out of the budget.

When he had seen the employment ad three years ago, it gave him a thrill. It was exactly what he was looking for, an opportunity at an Academic setting, with a serious salary and hours he could handle. After IBM, he figured, the University would be a cakewalk. It was meant to be a retirement gig.

But somehow things have gone awry. There are major problems with turnover. He can’t seem to keep anybody at the place for long and since he arrived, three long-term employees have taken it upon themselves to leave for the private sector some thirty blocks south, where they are clocking big dollars in the financial district.

Dr. Lessman keeps hoping the problems will go away. He wants to spend time enjoying. He takes Fridays off in the summer and has been doing so for the last month happily. He loves hanging out with the students in the multi-media center and in the computer labs. He likes watching the students “chilling,” – he has learned the vernacular term – with the instructors.

Yes, being a Vice President at the University is supposed to be like that: cooling with the students, basking in the glory of having spent 12 millions on equipment with the highest numbered versions of hard- and software. Walking through the system solving problems with a wave of the hand.

But lately it hasn’t quite been like that.

It seems the e-mail keeps going down and the LAN administrator who was so good at keeping it running has quit. E-mail is important. “It is critical to the student’s research,” he tells the new LAN admin guy, “It is a free way for the professors and students to share important information.” But the new kid just looks bored. The problem persists. Lessman avoids it lately. He takes steps to be absent when the system goes down. It’s better not to think too much about it, he figures.

Things were going so well before the Director of Computer Services quit. He was a capable fellow, had been at the University for the last eight years, had stewarded the creation of all the computing labs, had been the transitionary, go to guy. But somehow, Lessman found himself staring at the Director’s Resignation letter a few months back and he still hadn’t found a suitable replacement. Then two more employees left in quick succession. Things were sort of falling apart. In a rash act, he had made a blunder and he knew it now. But how to rectify it? He was stumped.

He had to think.

It was all that Kantuscha’s fault. Well, mostly, Frank figured, because he continually goaded Karna, the troublemaker, into resistance. This Karna, a graduate student with an interest in computing and literature was bungling up the whole transition to the new database system. And why? All because Kantuscha was filling his head with arcane socialist drivel.

Karna had been hired ten months before on the basis of strong interviewing techniques and a stronger list of references. He had said during his interview that he had only sent out one resume, to the school. It was remarkable, in that moment, Karna had taken away all his leverage in the negotiation process with a dismissing shrug and a declaration of his love for the founding principles of the University and the work of one of its faculty.

When Frank had heard from the Director – the former Director now – that he had filled the database administrator position with the candidate named Karna, Frank had presumed everything was settled. But somehow things had gotten quite muddled.

Apparently, the previous Director had made some promises to Karna that Frank couldn’t keep. He had told Karna he would pay a relocation fee for his move to New York, had promised him an office and an administrative assistant. At the time, the Director had been under Frank’s orders to “hire someone, anyone … before the shit hits the fan.” And so when Karna had made requests, the Director had agreed to them.

But Frank had no plan of fulfilling the promises he’d made. He figured he’d just say whatever was necessary to get Karna aboard. “There is no way a person so engaged by the University’s founding principles as this Karna is walking away from a job here over a few broken promises,” Frank told the Director, “Just deny him off-handedly, say “we’re a non-profit, the money didn’t come through.’”

And he had been right. Karna took the position, found that he had been lied to about so many things during his interviews and still he stuck to his job.

But now, the plan was backfiring, and Karna was clearly jeopardizing the project. He had called his own six-month review to discuss the communication problems at the University and the resignation of so many colleagues. Frank avoided him.

He had taken to sending e-mails, making demands that the promises made when he was interviewed be kept. Frank did not reply. Karna was trying to summon leverage from the as yet unfinished database project knowing the President was breathing down everyone’s neck for it to get finished. Yes, Karna was getting noisy and Frank wanted to fire him. Except, there was the problem of the blunder.

Two months earlier, Frank had given Karna a raise.

It was a moment of panic. Karna had called his own six-month review on the heels of the most recent resignation of one of his colleagues. He had scheduled it for a Wednesday morning a couple of months back. Frank was nervous. He had quickly worked out a 6% increase and thrown it out at the beginning of the meeting.

But Karna wasn’t after money. It turned out he just wanted to talk. Lessman grew wary and avoided him. The result now was that Karna was pissed off, had a raise and was slacking the shit out of his job. There was nothing left to do but wait for Karna to decide on his next move.

And that made Lessman very nervous.

Lessman feared that Karna would hold the database project hostage by controlling the future of the new system. But there was nothing he could do now to stop it. “Oh fie,” he thought, “I have got to think.” And as the last 25 million dollars of a 200 million dollar Capital Campaign hung in the balance, Dr. Frank Lessman 20-year IBM man, turned University VP, tried to think.

Chapter Eleven

It was a lot of money. It was a serious amount of money to be making ethical decisions about.

But the money and the philosophy behind it flew in the face of everything the founders had believed in. It represents to me the end of socialized thought at the New University. May as well call it the Same Old University, now. Surrounded by a highly capitalized institution that claims socialist roots while forcing students into thousands of dollars in debt to take classes in fashion and advertising under the guise of art, I am totally spun. How does a “non-profit” make 154 million dollars in 8 years?

One of the founders of the University was an educational philosopher who had written about the relationship between Labor and Education and Corporate Interests. Recently, Professor Noam Chomsky had mentioned him in a lecture.

“Fact is,” Chomsky said, “to an extraordinary extent by comparative standards, the United States is a business-run society, which means that human rights are subordinated to the overwhelming, over-riding need of profit by investors. Decisions are placed in the hands of unaccountable, private tyrannies, which means that even if formal democratic practices exist, as they do, they are of peripheral significance. The government, in fact, is, as John Dewey called it 50 or 60 years ago, “the shadow cast by business over society,’ so that modifications in the shadow are not going to change the substance. These are truisms throughout most of American history including American working class history until quite recently, until the 1950’s in fact, and it also means that social policy is geared to the transfer of wealth and power to those who already have it and deliberately so.”

Attending the lecture, employed by the development office of the school, under a 20-year IBM man, I felt my stomach turn. I saw Kantuscha onstage at the lecture and felt a twinge of anger.

The University is as bad as any of it—a cabal of wealthy trustees meet behind closed doors and invest in this institution to make true what they want to be true. They invest in the operation of the University through their friend the President who herds them like sheep through the computer labs and names buildings and theatres after them.

They talk about freedom of intellect, but they have a say in what gets taught. There are no students on the board, and so “social policy’ around these parts nowadays, is made by rich, old-school, Jewish New Yorkers and their liberal-WASP Capitalist counterparts.

I shrank in my seat. Voicing such opinions at the University would be tantamount to political suicide, or in my case homicide, since it would reflect back on Kantuscha. But what am I supposed to do? Deny it? The place is a joke. It’s wholly capitalized. There’s no resistance left.

And while every word Kantuscha teaches is contradictory to this kind of activity, they let him teach, because he’s tenured, and he’s old now, and benign. His work is relegated to the archives of the library, to become part of the continuing celebration of the school’s history. A celebration that left the possibility of change in the past.

And I am alone in my disgust. Nearly all my peers and colleagues gave up years ago. The revolution is dead in their eyes. Kantuscha has his tenure, has his friends who remember his fiery days. He wears his past with pride. But I haven’t yet been enough to be a has-been. I am a never-was before even becoming an am. And there’s no rut lower than that one.

The world, fast free-marketizing and soon wholly capitalized, is leaving us behind, and Kantuscha and I are just watching it burn. Lost. Shell-shocked and having sex with the same woman who disagrees with the position that things are so grave.

The day after the Chomsky lecture, hardly a month ago now, Kantuscha called me into his office and he laid it down. He had friends at Columbia who still respected him for his thoughts and his work. He offered to give me strong references and to get me a position in the Literature Department uptown.

It was a low point in our relationship, lower even than the day when I feared for a brief moment that my involvement with Anita had something to do with my feelings for Kantuscha, my perception of him.

That was a bad day.

Everything was stupid. It seemed the grace of old New York was a lie and worse, even the romance was dead forever. The island of Manhattan never looked more like a mall.

But now of course, there’s work to do.

Where the hell am I? Oh yeah, Brooklyn. And what day is today? Shit it’s Sunday night, Fingers is back at the ballroom and I am missing out to stare at the moon and remember what I already know.

Fingers baby. Fingers is bringing the juice. Once you have heard his big, old bass, your beats get right in the groove.

The ballroom is a new night spot. I have been making the rounds and settling in for a late night sip with Fingers. He is always on. That’s as regular as la bella luna, you see. We have among us somehow these ones. They pop out of the womb under different stars or at a crazy new angle or by the light of a different moon. They are our musicians, and thankfully, they keep on coming.

By the time I get there the crowd is swinging. There are Shivs and Interiors, a group of Pseudo-Satirists at the table in the back always gives me a nod; they’re down with the parametric constructivism movement. There’s urbanites, neo-situationists, namers, ravers and glams. A table of finely dressed Loofs keep a chill low-profile at the bar. This is the one place I am sure to be free of Systems Organists. Aaaah, to have a place to go. I am free. I am free. C’mon and bring it my partners, “cause we are all free.

But wait. What’s that light…?

What light from over Queens and Brooklyn leaks in radiant fingers through the cloud cover on a dark dark night?

Wait. I have to get my bearings. Urban hunter-gatherers find their bearings. Where’re the World Trade Centers? The Woolworth building beside them there … Yes! The East!

It is the East and the rise of the pale full moon at last.

The moon, the glorious radiant moon absorbs the sadness and the grief, the sorrows and struggles of the thousand thousands in her pale face. The full moon comes rising over Queens like a long, slow stretch. At last, the moon has come to absorb our songs.

One by one, New Yorkers come out to share her light. Anita crawls out her fire escape to the roof. Kantuscha walking eastward on 10th street slowly stumbles into the middle of the road, staring at that great golden orb. A cab driver swerves to miss him and then comes to a halt and stares at the moon himself. Aaah yes. The healing moon. Still visible in the sky over New York City, a lunatic place. Brings peace to the thousand thousands and resolution to the lonely heart of Karna, who hesitates too much.

It will arc across the sky tonight free, but eventually it, too, will be severed by the sharp crags of the edges of buildings. The cityscape will cut it into angled shreds – shards. The wholeness of the moon will be chopped-cut by the sky scrapers of Manhattan and the ambitions of the Modernists, but still her radiant light illuminates a million souls.

Thank you pale moon, for the reliable resource of your absolution. By your light we remember that the self-importance, the arrogant sense of self that beguiles us into egoistic depressions is but maya. Nothing matters so much that cannot be resolved.

The fantastic odds against the probability of our own existence are revealed by your light. We see but a slice, a moment of it all, in our times of deepest and most profound contemplation.

Everything is everything is everything and we are inestimably lucky.

Fingers is throwing down a mean riff. A golden rummy light fills the place from the warmth of breaths exhaled and the passing of bodies in motion between tables, along aisles.

The laughter is infectious, starting sometimes on stage with Fingers who gives a bark and a smile when he slaps out a new groove he has discovered.

It’s a New York night at the end of the Christian’s millennium. We are all managing to have a laugh.

Anita strolls in with a posse of friends. She spots Karna up front but has the sense to leave him alone on a moon-filled night. “Moody bastard,” she says, not unaffectionately, to Amber, who asks why she doesn’t make a move toward him.

They find a place in the back and order a round. Amber strings the strap of her purse across the back of her chair and then turns to Anita with a crazed, mischievous look. “This guy is on fire!” she cries, and for a minute everyone in the place turns to watch Fingers, his bass surrounded in a golden glow as he rips through a riff that Mingus couldn’t have cut.

The conversation turns to matters of the heart. “Why are you even with him? Asks Amber, “he seems a little wic-wic-wickedy-wack,”. She is talking about Karna now. They have been discussing his attitude.

Anita considers this answer carefully. “It has something to do with us,” she says, “I mean, our people.” Problems with her people, problems with her men, these are things Amber understands too well. “Bring it, baby, “cause I am listening to learn.”

“O.K., yo, after my divorce, I was pissed!” Anita looks across the table at Amber, “PISSED, yo! I mean I didn’t want to have anything to do with my so-called people. The hypocrites turned their backs on me faster than you can chant Om Namo Narayanayas,” she laughs, “faster than I can anyway.”

Anita pauses. Fingers fills the gaps with groove. Then she says: “I don’t know where they are getting it from, maybe nowhere … but they have lost their minds.”

She takes a sip of her drink before continuing. “We’re rationalizers most of all,” she says, “We are the world’s most complex, hyper-rationalizing culture. Our Brahmins have all this spare time to think and overthink how shit is going to be, how shit is supposed to be. We have made all these crazy walls that prevent us from seeing how shit really is … I mean right now.”

Anita is trying to explain her sense of Indian thought, but it is difficult. “I guess being with Karna has given me a kind of hope. I mean here’s a guy, I mean a pretty cute, intelligent, cool guy, from my culture, who isn’t all fucked in the head with how things ought to be.

“He’s got all kinds of other problems, sure, but when it comes to communicating what’s going to happen next, he is all here, all now. And that my cousin-sister, is something Indian men sorely lack.”

Anita concludes and reaches out for some love, receives four fingers and a thumb that pull against hers and pop back creating a lovely, crisp sharp <snap>.

Fingers is getting it on. The place is filled with love and a great groove. You may take the barstools of the dance floor or find a quiet corner for conversing, but what this Big Old Man and his ax will do to you, is WAKE YOU UP!

At the set break, Fingers and Karna turn a high-five into a cupped hand grip and pull one another to the chest for a hug. “What’s happening, man,” whispers Fingers in Karna’s ear, “How you living?”

“Cool, cool, “ Karna replies.

“I see your woman in here-”

“She ain’t mine man … just a little something that happens time to time.”

“Word.”

Watching his eyes, Fingers asks, “You want to join me? I’m headed outside.” The two men make their way out to do what musicians do on set break, namely, light a “j’ and look at the moon. “That Old Devil Moon,” hollers Fingers as they creep into the alley.

Chapter Twelve – Labor Day

“Hey Mister Music … You sure sound good to me.”

Begins with Marley. “Feel like dancin’ … dance “cause we all free.

Feel like dancin’ … come dance with me. Play I some music … listen reggae music. Play I some music … listen reggae music. Roots Rock Reggae,” from the beat box sitting on the hardwood floor. The early rays of light haven’t yet entered Anita’s space and the morning is stretching way way way back to get real wide and slow and holiday.

Today, the worker’s rest.

They can’t ever take this day away from us. It is a day to relax. Brothers and sisters, today we get a whole day, a work day, a Monday, with which to lay our burdens down. Rest our weary selves. Today is an extra Sunday, a chill-day.

And what do the Laborers want to do today? Barbecue. Make a fire outdoors and cook food. In Anita’s neighborhood in Brooklyn, many folks start early. There are barbecue pits set up on the sidewalks, groups of neighbors gather with lawn chairs and coolers around a coal-fired grill.

Some start around eleven in the a.m. They are led by folks who love holidays so much they want to get started early and be at it all day. These parties are being held by people from all walks of life with one thing in common: they have labored for a long time. Yes, these Laborers are practiced at the enjoyment of Labor Day.

There is always enough food and never more than enough for everyone to take exactly as much as they want home. There is always exactly the right kind of booze available, whether its cold canned beer in a tub filled with ice, or gins and tonics with a lime wedge or “a Cosmopolitan for the ladies.” There’s usually somebody with a little grass or somebody’s “on the way.”

Folks are drunk or going to be on the government-approved intoxicants and more and the food will be cooked by someone who thinks they know what they are doing and when you eat it and it’s so damn good right then, at that moment in time and space, who the fuck are you to argue? There is no talk of politics.

Now that is how Laborers get it on. In Brooklyn, anyway.

There are parties that start early in the day and later in the afternoon and fetes that don’t begin until night. Our story continues at a particular kind of Labor Day party, but it’s cool, everyone is welcome. It’s the kind of a party that takes place late on a Labor Day. Labor Night really, when the drunks have already passed out, and all the food that had been out in sunlight has been wrapped up.

It’s a party for the schemers and planners, for revolutionaries and resistors, for people grooving to a desire for change change change. This kind of Labor Night party has been held by the greats. Allende and Araya Peters and presumably Dorfman if he was really down, Lenin and Trotsky and the boys in red, Gandhi, Jawaharlal, and their gang back home while Karna’s pops was studying Chemistry in Madras, all the greats.

This one will take place under a just barely waning moon. It’s the kind of a party that is for all the people who have been at parties all day long and aren’t quite finished celebrating their freedom and the power of the working class, of the true workers on their day. It is for politicians. And writers and intellectuals.

It is for people who want to sleep really late on their Labor day, those who want to get up late, be alone, not bathe until late in the day, and see no one until the sun sets. It is for Laborers who never get to see the outside of a Monday alone and so go wandering through the financial district like a ghost in the cemetery fields.

It will be the kind of a Labor Night party where there are several cold bottles of champagne in the refrigerator, and tons of leftovers from Labor Day celebrations around town. It will be a Labor Night party by Anita, and she hasn’t thrown a party in a long long time.

She gets up and makes her way to the toilet turning off the Marley on the way. There are few details to deal with, it’s the kind of a party that pretty much takes care of itself, everybody is responsible, will bring something or other. Labor Night.

But she has agreed to go to Jersey to see an old friend during the Labor day. She washes her face and slips out of her towel as she gets into the shower. (Here we go).

There was a terrific thunderstorm early in the afternoon. It broke the Labor Day in two.

The early revelers had to deal with the blast, set pots and pans across the floor. They braced themselves for a hard rain and a Labor Day to tell stories about in the years to come. They remembered wild ones. Had seen the big one back in ‘76 or the crazy tornado-vibing skies of that one summer’s end, in ‘84.

The Laborers who set their parties for the afternoon had a stressful Labor morning despite their desires for rest. They were nervous, at least during the storm. Nails were chewed for fear the rain might not break and that people on their way to the party were trapped in that never never land between parties. These afternoon partiers hovered by the telephone asking everyone around, “should we cancel? should we cancel?”

Everyone waited to see what would happen next.

The storm was a blast. It was fantastic. It swept into town on the dead vibe of a vicious increase in humidity. The sky went gray and green. The air became numb and dull for a half an hour.

Then it hit. Ga—Dash! The wind whipped the panes and the screens, frantic arms were thrown at the windows, mad attempts were made to cover the barbecue pit, food was hustled inside.

The rain cleaned out the City. It knew nothing of Labor Day or of parties. It was cleaning houses. Summer was ending, autumn arriving and the house needed to be swept out.

Then at 3:00, in the middle of everything, it stopped. The rain came to a halt, the wind died down, and slowly, the clouds began to break up. It was a marvelous effect. Everyone was rejuvenated by it.

The day was spent enjoying good food and company. Men and women laughed at one another, at themselves, and had a good time. In New Jersey a group of Indian-Americans welcomed Anita as one of their own, “Aaaarrrree, ma? Got all kinds of New York style now, eh?” said the aunties as they looked her up and down.

They ate vegetarian South Indian cooking – in a barbecue setting out of respect for the day. Two of the aunties were scheming to set Anita up with an engineer who worked at a local research facility. Anita was kind enough to go for a walk with him. He turned out to be a guy she had seen in the city at a Talvin Singh show and they laughed about that and about what they had been told about each other by the aunties. It was a good time, a healing time. Anita made the first step toward dealing with her past. The step toward Jersey.

But soon, by late afternoon, she was ready to get back to the City, to her loft, and to Beckett, named for the only white writer she ever really liked. Anita was in love. She was in love with her studio space. She was enamored by her own life. Her place. It represented the grounding environment of her newfound freedom. There was never anybody in her bed that didn’t belong there and it was only empty when she wanted it that way. It felt good.

She had a glass of Kahlua and cream and, in the fridge, ten tiffins of delicious South Indian treats: Saambar, idlis, masala dosais, oorgha, samosas and gulab jamuns.

Everything was ready by 7:30.

Kantuscha awoke late and alone. It was the first time he had slept past nine o’clock since … he couldn’t recall when. It felt good. It felt very good just to lay in bed.

Kantuscha’s pad is pretty cool. It’s an old brownstone in Harlem. Labor Day and Kantuscha’s just laying in bed chillin’. He was planning to go downtown to the nineties for a party at a colleague’s place. Many of his friends and colleagues were moving back to the City at the turn of the century. That’s how he told it, away from New York anyway. He’d say, “I do wonder if the Christian’s calendar has something to do with it. I find so many people moving to the City, to all the cities I suppose, for a decade now.”

For their part, Kantuscha’s friends were coming back because the City is as safe as it has ever been. It has been made into a mall and has hyper-tight security.

Kantuscha felt a disconnection from the calendar, the times. When he had come to New York, he did so because it was an opportunity for him to push his work. He sought more freedom. He sought amplification for his voice. But he had watched the times change.

People were coming for the idea of Manhattan now. It was wrapped up and sold like a bonbon. The capitalization of this idea was at the heart of getting people to work harder for less, pay more to live and claim they were free. The rigors of marketization affected everything and especially the sense of time.

Somewhere along the way, it didn’t matter when, the Christian’s working calendar had come to reign supreme. With computing, with the nine to five, five day work week, somehow it had become entrenched into the lives of the people. The people, la gente, the poor people sometimes became so confused by the institutional perspective of time, now they didn’t know if being late on rent was worse than missing the sales at Macy’s.

The Labor Day was the holiday Kantuscha liked best. It brought shape to his own year, his own sense of time. It was the fulcrum between the lazy days of summer and autumn months of action.

With Labor Day came a new school year and the sense of rebirth of ideas. Perhaps a new student who would take an interest in putting legs under theory and taking shit a little further than it had been taken last year.

Kantuscha, for all the complications of life at The New University of Social Studies these days, was happy that the new season was starting, that the full moon had passed with its lunacy, and that the endless New York summer was shaking of its hype and, in a word, ending.

Soon autumn and that rich, cool feeling of breezes on the sidewalk sweeping circles of rusted leaves, of sweet evenings out with students and faculty to the tune of change, of possibility.

Kantuscha awaited Labor Day. It pulled him out of the doubting summer, into the faithful months of the harvest. His regular calendar, if it could be called that, was related more to the seasons than anything else.

His most productive month was the month of the eleventh moon of the year, his season for editing was the late winter months, and in spring he brought his thoughts to publication. He was well-prepared for the amping up. It was time to go to work. The new school year had officially begun.

It’s the same for all teachers, all real teachers anyway, who have the endurance and the patience to stick it out and make an effort and who try to make a difference in another persons life over the course of seasons.

“It is a rare and special privilege to be a real teacher,” wrote Kantuscha in a text once, “and there is no political frame of reference that can take the joy away from Labor Day, because it means the beginning of a new season and a new chance for change.”

That’s the Kantuscha groove. It was time for him to rise.

By noon, Kantuscha was out of the house and headed downtown with a bottle of Sancerre ‘96. The clouds were gathering and he thought for a moment about how he would get to Anita’s place later, in a storm. But as soon as the thought came he let it ride – “best on holidays to just let things solve themselves,” he thought, “best to try to enjoy oneself, easily and slowly despite the noise and terrible weight of all the work there is to be done all the time.”

The party was at the apartment of a colleague in the Graduate Faculty. She was a new professor and not yet tenured. But the marvelous thing about her invitation and her manner was that it felt unencumbered by the politic of her tenure process. She was sincere and kind, wanted to have a little get-together at her place.

It was just getting going when Kantuscha arrived. As he stood on the doorstep awaiting the buzzer, the rain began to pour from the sky. While the storm blasted the cars and trees outside, inside, the conversation turned to the meaning of the day.

“Professor Kantuscha,” a voice called out. But before the voice uttered even another word the room silenced of conversation. The guests knew that a voice so loud was going to ask Spetzo Kantuscha, citoyen du monde, to issue forth on Labor Day.

Kantuscha stepped on the voice. “It is Labor Day,” he began, before the voice could finish. “Before whoever you are, “ and at this point he feigned to seek out the owner of the voice, deliberately looked another direction, in fact, to prevent any embarrassment. “Before you,” he continued, “ask me anything in such a loud voice … let me just say this.”

And everyone broke up laughing.

“The left is not dead. The struggle is on. And this is our day and no one can take it from us.”

And the party rolled on with a rich, heady aplomb. They argued and cajoled and scrapped for money and played politics and laughed and had, in general, a marvelous time. And Kantuscha took the opportunity to remind everyone in the place that there was still a fight happening, and everyone, even Nick Butler, who called everyone Nick, was forced to smile, Nicky?

By 7:00 Kantuscha was ready to make his leave. He went in search of his host to thank her. She was bearing forth on a topic of some import when he entered the room. Kantuscha found a place against the back wall of the room and listened.

“Everybody is complaining about content,” she began, “but I am here to get past the hand-wringing.”

There was a nice vibe in the room and the new professor had command of attention.

“The empowerment of women is working, but way too slow. Every minute spent empowering women will feed back to every society in the world. That is how it is.”

She stared around the room and sought dissenters or anyone who never came out of a mother’s womb and finding neither continued, “now the issue,” and she smiled as she said it, “is tempo.”

The discussion rolled on. The conversation breathed. Eventually the new professor caught Kantuscha’s eye. “What’s this, Dr. Kantuscha? You’re not leaving? … so soon?”

Kantuscha made his way across the room and made his goodbyes. He wandered out of the new professor’s place and made his way to a Liquor shop to pick up a bottle of champagne for Anita’s party.

Yo. Fingers be chillin’.

He’s got a gig in a few.

Chillin’.

Workin’ out bass lines in his head while lying on the sofa,

Chillin’.

Thinkin’ about how he is going to have a tea and then set to tuning his ax, about pulling out a bow and hearing the strings resonate,

Chillin’.

Trying to figure out what kind of magic he has in his quiver of possible arrows with which he can throw down in the crib of his new friend Anita and thinking just for a second about how he wishes she wasn’t so busy with the main characters to pay attention to where the profundity of his bass and sweet positive vibration is at,

Chillin’.

When a storm came up on his window pane. Slowly, very very slowly, Fingers turned his head toward the windows. The rain began to drip in. The wind slapped at his screens. He got up and pulled down some pots and pans and set them across the floor. He lay down and set back to Chillin’.

He moved one of the bowls, a metal one for sautéing in, with his foot so it caught the rain with a ting!

Chillin’.

Then it was time to go to the gig.

Anita’s place is in Williamsburg which is just down the way from my place in Greenpoint. I live at the mouth of the New Town Creek, a tributary of the (so-called) East River to my West, the river that runs from the Harlem River to the ocean, well, what we call the Atlantic Ocean these days.

The Atlantic is a hole. The Pacific, what we call the Pacific now, that’s our mother, from whose womb-belly we swam to shore. But the Atlantic is the gap between the selves we are now and the us of an older time. For me, the “diworce’ is more recent, but hardly any of us are on motherland.

That’s why I’m a permagrant. For now, I live on the New Town Creek in New York City and I look at Manhattan everyday and am drained by what I see. It’s Labor Day and my lover or my temporary lover is having a party tonight at her place in Williamsburg. I can take the G to the L.

But I think I will just walk. It is a cool and pleasant evening. Earlier today there was this crazy storm. It lasted about an hour and shook up my whole building.

The downstairs neighbors, who are having a Labor Day party, came running up to my place because water was leaking through the floorboards of my place into theirs. We have had problems because sometimes I leave the windows open and the rain drips down through our floors to the flat below.

But my windows were already closed and water was coming from my roof down through the building. My upstairs neighbors didn’t answer to knocks on their door, were away, perhaps at a Labor Day party of their own. So we, my neighbors and I, put out pots and pans and now there’re a whole load of pots and pans to be washed, but I’ll get to them later.

We have a laugh. It’s cool, but everything we do, everything we are is encumbered by what we are seeing at the University, a shift to the capitalized right. She is somewhat older than me and has been at the University for a dozen years. She’s seen the whole thing go down, from the institutionalizing of the Board, to the yearly increases in tuition to the six-figure paychecks of the Presidents and VP’s, to the new-style of business management. She has had the same underpaying job for those twelve years.

She said I wouldn’t last, told me I’d be out of there before too long, and I joked, “Hell, yes!” I said, “I got a life to live, sister!” And we laughed. But I had forgotten about what it would feel like to leave her behind when the time came.

I guess that time is now. And I hate that place. Because I can get out of there and go do something else. But she’ll still be there putting up with all the bullshit. Working her fingers to the bone for more than a dozen years for a belief she can’t let go, and for health care she needs. And that’s why I hate that place.

I hate it for what it is doing to the good people who came to it with an idealistic heart and a sense of purpose. The institution is changing with the times – fighting the capitalists is a fight-already-lost. But the University is folding over the socialist dream without care for the hearts and souls of good people. People who came because they believed. They worked hard because they believed. And they are tired because it is harder to believe.

I haven’t done much today. Got up late. Made breakfast. I have been listening to Lee Morgan’s “Live at the Lighthouse.” There are wicked licks kicking through it. I have been trying to avoid looking at work, but invariably I will have to. Tomorrow, I have to get the database engine up and test it. It has been frustrating me for weeks.

I hate my job. I really hate it. I am assigned a stupid task in an insipid office filled with idiotic reiterative processes designed to enrichen the institution and its administration monetarily but which does nothing for it intellectually. There is a wonderful woman at my workplace. She is a riot and we laugh when we meet at the copy or fax machines. I cannot get over how easily we laugh. There have been a lot of going away parties this year, as my colleagues have resigned their way out from under Lessman’s rule – she’s the one I always end up with, sipping champagne, making fun of the place.

It began with high ideals, a social experiment started by rebel professors. It was meant to be a place where any serious adult pursuit could be considered. It was meant to be inexpensive and collective learning. It was meant to serve the people, la gente. Now it serves the sons and daughters of the rich who want to live in Woody Allen’s Manhattan.

But the rest of the City is worse. If I can’t bring myself to work for The New University of Social Studies because of my socialist ethic where can I work? Maybe I should go downtown like my friends and get a job in the financial district. At least if I’m going to whore myself away, I should get what I’m worth. For what? A fat paycheck so I can become more engrossed in the consumption of entertaining refinements that keep me tied to the social structure of the spending class, a wage-slave?

If you were an anti-Capitalist and found yourself in New York City without a job where would you turn?

The air is much cooler. I don’t think it’ll rain again, at least it doesn’t look as though it will. I’ll walk to Anita’s place. It should be a good party. There is sure to be a lot of food. Anita told me she was going to Jersey today which means there may even be home-cooked Indian food, which is at this point like some kind of holistic medicine to me, a memory of my past and the taste of my own blood. Can’t miss that. Fingers is going to play. So that’s cool. Maybe Michael will be there. He’s a teacher at I.S.90 in Washington Heights. He told me once he had information about how to become a teacher in the New York School system. I could teach. They say the pay for substitute teaching is 50 bucks a day and you can refuse the work if you don’t feel like going in. There’s a cool gig. I could go in when I want. Freedom.

Part Three – The Party

So we’ve the set up. The night is beautiful on Anita’s roof. The cityscape is aglow. The lights of Manhattan shimmer in the late summer evening, breezes on the East River to the west. Autumn is on its way. The rain has cleared the air. Our cast assembles for a late night gathering and discussion. Anything seems possible on a night so pregnant. The cool air, the promise of autumn leaves. There are plans to be elucidated, revolutions to begin.

Anita welcomes her friends. She is comfortable, content. She is excited to be sharing herself again. She is happy to be free of the fear, the terror of not knowing where life is going next. It has been a hard year or two, filled with tests from the great complexity of life. And now she feels free. Free enough to have a party and welcome her friends. Labor Night. Life has brought her to a good place.

When she left her husband, time had seemed to her to slow to an inexorably slow rate of speed. She couldn’t think, couldn’t reason. She had gone to stay with her auntie in New Jersey, but felt lost and alone, separate from the old-country values. She admired her auntie. The auntie was a 70-year old widow who had moved to the US 40 years before. She was still so active, worked as an administrator at a local hospital. At the age of 70, a remarkable woman.

But Anita felt only the heaviness of her diworce and the subsequent weight of her aloneness in the eyes of the Indian community in New Jersey. She couldn’t free herself from the terrible feelings of emptiness.

Now, here in New York, she felt full of life and possibility. It had been a long road through tough times. And at last she felt independent.

The guests began to arrive around 8:00. Fingers turned up with a drummer and a horn-player from his regular gig at the Ballroom.

“What’s happening, Anita,” he asks, “where do you want us to set up?”

They are downstairs at the front door of her building. They assess the skies that are overcast and gray, but that seem to be letting thin violet lines of twilight through.

“I think the storm’s pretty much broken up,” she replies, “why don’t we set up on the roof?”

The decision is made quickly and the first guests help set up a little stage on the rooftop. It takes no time at all. Everyone chips in. By 8:30, Fingers is bringing his bow slowly across the four phat strings of his bass and a deep, long low hummmmmmm fills the night air.

“Yo, Michael!” calls out Anita when the teacher arrives. He is dressed to the nines, in a black zoot with thin silver pin-stripes. Anita gives him a hug. “Hey Anita,” he says in her ear as the music surround them, “I brought a bottle of wine.” Anita directs him to the kitchen and the party gets kicking.

Things are starting to cook. The bass thuds through the roof coming at the guests with a grounding groove. It is turning into a nice little affair. The party takes on a few small groups of conversation and one of these is a group of intellectuals who have gathered in the kitchen over Anita’s salsa. They are absent-minded about what they eat and very clear about what they are saying, but unsure of what it means.

“We are in a crisis,” says one, “Nobody knows what to do.”

“There are no more leaders,” says another, “I feel totally lost.”

“I cannot wait for this Christian millennium to go ahead and happen,” says a third.

The first is reminded of some good news for leftists seeking hope at the wane. “Have you heard about Rigo’s new piece in San Francisco?” All three of the intellectuals are familiar with the work of the San Francisco-based Portugee whose work stands Giant across the cityscapes of the world. Word of his work is encouraging to any free-minded thinker. Rigo pulls hope out of ass as well any artist alive. “It’s a pretty cool piece, man,” continues the first of the intellectuals, “It’s just big as letters on a wall that read, “Twentieth Century Never Again”

The three men laugh and stand in awe of the beauty of such work when the second says, “Yeah, you know I talked to him last week. I was doing a piece on art and advertising and needed some history.”

The first fellow points at his own head, “He’s got a great library man.”

“True, true. You know what he said about that piece, yo? He said he was just going to sit back and wait for it to prove him right.”

Upstairs things are seriously cooking. Fingers has his group burning wide crazy licks and basslines so phat the rooftop nearly lifts off its supports. It’s a funny mix of people. Most of the guests are coming from other parties and are dressed and intoxicated accordingly. Most everyone has that late-night dreamy Sunday feel for staying up, though it’s a Monday and the end of a long weekend. A buzzy sweet hope-it-never-ends kind of vibe is what Anita’s party has. Most everyone has come to find a quiet place to chill, don’t want to think about the fact they have to work tomorrow. Anita has put together a really nice chillzone.

Amber arrives. She gets a moment alone with Anita. “How are you doing baby?” she asks. She knows that Anita spent the day in Jersey for the first time since her divorce papers finally went through.

Anita smiles and hugs her. “You know what, Amber? I am really good. Today was a really cool Labor Day. I think things are coming out pretty cool after all.” She feels the importance of having spent the day with Indian-Americans in Jersey, with her people. She knows that she is managing at last to find a space for herself between her two cultural aspects, she has found a way to surf her hyphen. “I’ll have a lot to be thankful for on Thanksgiving this year.”

Amber smiles, “Well two men on your plate’s a whole lot to celebrate now isn’t it?”

Ah yes, Anita’s two men.

Karna is here. Kantuscha has yet to arrive.

Karna has found a place for himself by the little stage setup. Anita drifts by to see him while he grooves to the solo Fingers is laying down. It is deep and smooth. There is a really marvelous moment when Fingers, his massive bass beside him, plucks and beats on his ax, stares at Anita, looks to Karna as he slides into a walking groove and then breaks into a big, wide, sweet-sounding riff. He smiles as he crosses the long lyrical melody at the head. It’s a real mean groove.

Karna is convinced he will have something of the problems he has had as an immigrant for every day of his life, that he will suffer for the move that his parents made to the United States until his last breath. And while Anita shares his views with regard to her failed attempt at an arranged marriage, somehow she has found comfort in the fact that it gets easier each year to deal. That she has embraced her American self now.

It is a strange position, in-between India and New York. The two cultures are so different. To look at the two places instantly, in a moment is to see the two poles of the era of man, ancient and modern civilization. But India and Indian thought is a subset of what New York is now. New York shows more promise of change. Desires and hopes and dreams of change for the people, la gente, lay openly reflected in the architecture and art and thought, the makings of the immigrant citizens of New York City.

What can be said about life in the USA that hasn’t already been lied? It is a wealthy, obscene society that has established itself on stolen land and post-historically reinvented its aspect as a land of the free while propagandistically shoveling its capitalistic ethic on the world with a complex set of tools.

India is a once-island that smashed into its continent forcing up the tallest mountain on earth in a violent event. Its people are the first emigrants, having torn themselves from mother Africa and floated out to sea seeking freedom freedom freedom (the pursuit of all refugees.) But it didn’t get far. It ran aground. And its people began rationalizing. It remains a complex system of hyper-rationalizing culture that erases past present and future – a place where nothing and everything makes perfect sense, can be rationalized if not named.

And Little India in New York? North Central New Jersey? These places are by their definition contemporary phenomena. Territory yet to be defined. Anita, through her actions, is teaching Karna that there is hope for the part of himself that remains Indian. That he can maintain it with neither shame nor fear through effort and communication.

It has been a happy accident, their little affair. The things that it has brought them has been long overdue. This affair has brought to the heaviness of their immigration the most important of things. It has brought casualness.

“I don’t want to tell him,” she said. “It’s not really his business. It’s between you and me, this thing. Let’s just let it roll.”

“That’s cool,” Karna replies.

“But, I am still going to be seeing him,” Anita says, “Are you cool?”

“Yeah,” replies Karna, “but just stay in touch.”

“I will,” murmurs Anita, “I like what we have.”

Me, too,” he responds, “I t feels like there’s some healing in it.”

“Word.” She says.

As they listen to Fingers set, Michael approaches them. Anita leans toward Michael to introduce Karna, but Michael stops her with a wave of his hand, “I know this dude.” He reaches out an arm and hugs Karna, “yeah, man, how you livin’?”

Anita is surprised but says, “I should have known you two would know each other, you troublemakers probably hang out at the same spots.”

“Why we gotta be troublemakers,” says Karna feigning offense, “It’s this guy, yo,” and he points at Michael, “you can’t walk anywhere with this motherfucker, yo-”

“Whatever,” Michael interrupts.

“Cat’s cooler than Mariano Rivera, yo,” continues Karna, “Da Real Mayor of New York, right here.” They all have a laugh and Anita leaves off to play host, leaving Michael and Karna with a moment alone.

The groove is cool. “Hey,” asks Karna, “do you remember Alexi?”

Alexi was one of the LAN administrators who had recently resigned from the University. Alexi had introduced Michael and Karna at a party a couple of years back and the two had stayed in touch independent of him ñ an uncommon thing in New York. Michael and Karna had found common ground.

“Yeah, yeah man, I used to teach with that dude,” replies Michael, “how’s he doing?”

Alexi had been a teacher at a school uptown before coming to be a computer guy at the New University. He had given up teaching high school to learn computing at the University.

“Yo, man, I guess he’s pretty good,” says Karna, “I don’t see him so much any more.”

Michael is surprised, “Are you still at New U.?”

“Yeah, yeah, man,” replies Karna, “yeah I am. But he left. He got a job downtown.” He pauses briefly before saying, “yeah, I hear he works for Solomon Smith Barney now.”

Michael looks over at Karna. It is something of a heavy moment between friends, equals at a party in Brooklyn on a Labor Night.” Perhaps the only way to understand it is to feel the practical aspects, the capitalized aspects of what has been said. Yes, in the US it all comes down to money sooner later. Sooner or later you hit the bottom line. $hit. The bottom line.

Michael, Karna and Alexi are the same age. They are all college graduates, have hung out together time to time. They met as equals in the social circles of NYC at the end of the Christian’s millennium, bringing what strengths they each had as tools with which to make their way. Alexi and Michael had worked together as bike messengers when they first arrived. They had entered teaching together.

Alexi had been thrown into a particularly hairy teaching environment in a shittily run school in the Bronx. The teachers were held captive by bad administration and a terribly political parents association. The politics and the bullshit had gotten burned him and Alexi found himself teaching less, enjoying it less and being depressed. The New York School system has beaten the joy of teaching out of him. He had moved on to the New University in an attempt to find a place he believed in, a non-profit where he could make a difference.

At the New University things for Alexi became even more complicated and depressing. The place was a sham. He learned about computing but saw no value in what the students learned and taught. He didn’t understand the way this so-called non-profit University did business. He witnessed the capitalization. For Alexi it was the second blow to his idealism in New York.

The last straw was the hiring of Frank Lessman as Alexi and Karna’s superior. Alexi began interviewing downtown and eventually quit. And so now, Alexi, once a somewhat strong and idealistic teacher at an intermediate school in New York working with children, then a LAN administrator at the New University, was on his way to a salaried position pulling 75 grand a year for a major financial player on Wall Street.

It had been for Alexi, a hard decision to make. He had met Karna for lunch and told him about it before he had done it. The two young men sat together at Bar Six and had a grim laugh. But by the end of that lunch Karna’s eyes were wet with tears for the loss of his friend and confidant, a competent who was selling out for lack of better treatment. It was the last time they had spoken. Alexi had left just a few months ago. And he left Karna to deal with the same decision he had faced.

“I guess he’s pulling like 75,” Karna continues. Michael knows Karna makes $50,000 a year. As a public teacher in New York, Michael makes less than 30. It’s a heavy minute, this story of scale, and of ethics in a capitalized time. Karna looks at Michael.

“I’m thinking about walking, too, man,” he pauses before turning back to the face the band, “what makes me crazy is how many money-making choices there are that aren’t worth a shit.”

Michael looks at him and shakes his head, “Each one teach one, yo, each one try to reach one.” And the set ends. Fingers hops down off the stage set and gives Michael and Karna the high sign. They make a quiet exit to the fire escape. Labor Night groove.

Kantuscha shows up late. Karna and he have some words.

“Dr. Lessman came to see me,” Kantuscha begins. Karna looks down at his shoes for a moment and kicks at the black tar sticking up off Anita’s roof.

“I guess he thinks you are sort of flaking on your gig over in the Development Office,” continues Kantuscha. Karna looks Kantuscha in the eye and smiles, “Yeah, I suppose so,” he replies.

Kantuscha looks away briefly, at the band and then at the partiers scattered in little gatherings about the roof. He turns back to Karna and murmurs, “That guy’s so uptight, man, how can you stand working for him?” and the two men laugh.

Kantuscha is a little drunk. It has been a good day to relax, Labor Day. He feels good. Karna looks him in the eye and sees the old man’s youth burning like a long-enduring ember in the recesses of his mind.

Karna knows Kantuscha now. They have worked together for some time. He is comfortable with him. It is one of the perks of the job, to hang out with Spetzo Kantuscha, citoyen du monde.

Kantuscha leans toward him now. “Karna,” he whispers, “I never really asked you about Anita.”

They are separate from the others by some distance. The band has begun a mellow ballad that hums through the crowds of tiny conversations. “I mean, I just wanted you to know,” Kantuscha continues, “I thought for a minute about you when we started this thing. We have talked about you and your ties to your culture and I didn’t really think-”

Karna is confused by what Kantuscha is saying. Did he know? What was he saying?

“I dig her, you know. It just kind of happened.” He is a little drunk and leans forward as he speaks resting a hand on Karna’s shoulder. Karna leans into him, “Kid’s cool, man,” he whispers.

Kantuscha leans back, looking at him. “Yeah.” He smiles and then sighs, “Shit, I’m just a transitionary guy, you know. She needs a little freedom. That’s all I am.”

Karna smiles, “Yeah.”

Kantuscha nearly laughs, “I’m getting old, man. I guess I’m really just a transitionary guy for you, too.”

And in an instant, Karna knows what he has to do.

“I’m leaving,” he says.

“I figured,” says Kantuscha, “is there anything I can do?”

Karna shakes his head, “Nah. I think I’m going to teach for a while. High School. I want to work on a book … maybe about the school, or you know, schools in general.”

“That’s cool,” Kantuscha says, “Let me know if you want to come back. I am sure we can work something out. If you’re going to take a swing at the school you’re going to have to be careful. I’ll try to have your back on the inside.”

Kantuscha puts an arm out and takes Karna’s hand. He gives it a shake. “Rock that shit, kid,” he says, “It needs someone with legs.”

They rejoin the party in time to hear Michael bringing it at Anita. The debate is about how much there is to be done. “You are too a hypocrite,” says Michael to Anita, “and you’re using feminism as a justification.”

“Whatever,” replies Anita, “I am getting mine for the first time, yo. That is all I am doing. I am not pushing anything on anybody else.”

Michael shakes his head, “Yo,” he says, looking at Kantuscha and Karna as they step forward, “If you are truly free, Anita, you should be helping others to get free. That’s your only gig.”

It’s a strong-ass dialectic from the high school teacher from uptown, maybe the only one present with the credentials to bring it. It perks up the ears of Kantuscha who joins the thread of the conversation now.

“Why is that Michael?”

Michael, knowing Kantuscha is witnessing, says, “Well, sir … “cause no one’s free until everybody’s free.”

There is a general groan from the group assembled as the teacher from uptown breaks it down. The groan breaks up into a dozen separate conversations as Kantuscha, Karna, Anita and Michael make their own ring.

“Look, man,” defends Anita, “I make money … make rent and bills, and I keep my house. I give, too. I give to charity.”

“Oooooooh,” howls Karna, “whatever, yo, you sound so bourgeois!” They laugh. There is a silence then. The time settles into an ending groove. Kantuscha, breaks the silence.

“But we aren’t doing enough are we? I know I’m not.” He looks at the people assembled and takes a minute to break it down.

“Take your break Anita, get healed. But the war is going on with or without you. The issue isn’t nearly settled. The inequity grows absurdly out of proportion. The rich are commercially uglifying, public awareness of the inequality is at an all time low and apathy at an all time high. Though we have the tools and the technology we’re not making life better fast enough for everyone, just the wealthy few. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

It is getting late. Fingers closes out his last set and packs up his gear. Livery cars are called to deliver the Manhattanites home. Cars are shared to the 7, to the G, the L.

Kantuscha makes his way downstairs – by invitation. He and Anita will stay together tonight. “Good night,” he says to Karna, “I’ll see you in the office tomorrow.” And Karna and Anita, the last of the Laborers to celebrate their day watch as Spetzo Kantuscha, citoyen du monde, makes his way across the roof and down the fire escape to the comfort of the biggest bed in New York City.

Epilogue

So here I am on 34th street with a bird’s eye, poised. And that’s our story, Kantuscha’s, his girlfriend’s and mine. There’s only the legs left and what I gotta do, what a man’s gotta do.

It’s a mall. From here everyone looks so tiny. The yellow cabs will be in flight one day. I can’t imagine the traffic then.

I’m poised and ready. I have been awaiting my moment to act. Fingers is right. It’s New York City and the turn of the century. They’ll count it down as I make my mark on the mall. I have this thermonuclear device attached to my chest. I’ll drop off the Empire here in a minute. The sun will no longer set on the Empire. I am working toward post-colonialism.

I have a few ends to tie up of course. The first is the plutonium. I found it. It was in a cardboard box under the Brooklyn bridge, had been kept there warm and dry by a fellow who was using it as a pillow. It was just enough really. The rest I got from the Internet I’ll include the notes in the appendices. I’m trying to put legs under Kantuscha, you know. Trying to close the millennium.

That’s what they said when he wrote it, “the novel that closed a millennium.’ He is a writer and I am his echo, a latent force awaiting my moment to act. My actions are presaged.

Here’s my resignation letter.

And the last thing to do is leave my notes behind.

You can do anything you want and some times that’s the problem. Can go anywhere you like, be anyone you want, have any kind of food. The place where you live invented many kinds of feelings you take for granted until you leave but we welcome you to the club of no places. We want to help you make it easier. To let go.

First you have to get wider. It helps to slow down – makes it easier to widen the frame – but I’ve known people who can widen and keep the pace up, too. Find your own tempo. Nothing can be grasped and held. Relativism is the fact of being and having an attitude – not a perspective from which to observe. Enjoy. Feel. Trust your feelings. They are worth more than statistics.

History is an invention of the fearful and we must smash this one quickly. Events occur, have occurred and are occurring and your knowledge of them is relative even if you participate(d). That is not the point. It is not the point that your perspective defines facts, that you have an image of truth. Identifying such concepts is a distraction from the act of participation itself.

All borders are power lines. Sometimes a border is created to empower oneself over oneself. Monocausality is useful only in deduction.

We maintain a level of participation and breathing. Have been alive for thousands of years. Have considered the value of objects and released them of their worth. Totems are temporary. Fetishes are disposable. Organic creation is meaningful. Outcomes and products are arbitrary endpoints.

Usefulness of an object is dependent on your understanding (definition) of its borders. Any object is most useful when you free it of definition. Any rule made existed as its opposite and itself before its creation. Freedom for your brother, freedom for your sister, freedom for your mama and daddy, but no freedom for me, say Mingus say.

Death is the meaning of life. Games are pastimes. Language is word play.

Play.

Participate.

Breathe.

go about the happy business of dying with grace and pleasure. Share your self with others. Feel them share with you. Seek harmony.

Be not lonesome. Free your mind of its burdens. Listen.

Listen

Listen

Listen

Listen ….

Om Shanti Om, it is the sound of one hand

Again we welcome you to placelessness. It is comfortable. Movement can be achieved with relative ease. The mind is the only barrier to motion. Possessions are of no value. All belongs to all. Attachment to material things is fear – all value may be placed on the senses and feelings, but loss, absence and dearth are necessary to sustain balance. Rationale is pretty and unnecessary – movement is always advised and justifiable. Motion and change are natural constants. Revolution is natural. Do not question the inspiration to move.

There have been, are and will be many efforts by members of the community to invoke sustained acts of creation to achieve a kind of symbiotic stillness from the harmony between participants. These acts are occurring all around you. Participation feeds and nourishes the actor and the acted upon.

The earth is not shrinking. It retains a near constant mass and volume. It is not getting smaller. Do not mistake new media applied to old distances for bridges. New media are often improperly metaphorized by the fearful, deceitful or careless. Our numbers are increasing and the earth remains the same size. We must govern and manage ourselves. Understand carefully your responsibility to give when possible and take as little as possible.

The value of anything given returns to the giver and bounces back to the receiver in repeating cycles based upon a need beyond the comprehension of either. Many members of the club of no places have tested this to significant trustworthiness.

No flag, no country can replace the placeless. All borders are power lines.

The creator within the self is the guide to inspired movement. In the moment of absolute harmony – perceived as stillness – the creator within expresses most clearly. It is difficult to hear the sound of the creator within you due to the distracting cacophony of disharmonious noise. This noise is a necessary part of the whole. Deep breaths and patience allow one to extract from the terrific ocean of static and stochastic noise a single particular note comprised of harmonic parts.

Any seemingly single particular note selected from within the greater noise is subjectively selected according to the borders of one’s own senses, no more or less important than any other. From any given note selected, new harmonies are relative. The creation of harmony within the greater noise is the act of loving creation. Trust the senses, the creator, perceive, choose and express.

The appeal of harmonies is a function of time, space and attitude. Senses must be open to be receptive.

Elegance is always open.

Open …

Open ….

Open your self to change and motion.

Change and motion are the natural methods by which the creator within you alters your environment toward a more harmonious act of expression.

The question is the means by which the creator motivates. The question mark is the mark of the creator in pursuit of harmony. The question is more important than its answer. Answers are temporary feelings of stillness from a momentary harmonic instance. Questions are open.

?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

I am Karna. My actions are presaged. I have a thermonuclear device tied to my chest and I am poised high atop the Empire State building in New York City. I am protesting the celebration of the victory of Capitalism and of the free markets and of commercial uglification. I protest the act of history-making by the winners. I protest the Western world redefining history in its own terms. I take this weapon by which all of time and space are rent and I tear a vast hole in that history. I demand an unfuture, unpast free from the lies and deceptions of the Western world in the last five hundred years.

We must move toward post-colonialism.

You reap what you sow, so give what you owe, y’all. Pay attention to the poor and help the downtrodden. Later. I’m out.

Kaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

How Long Have I Been Writing

21 Tuesday Jul 1998

Posted by in beliefs, Commentary, essay, journal entries, Letter From MTK, NYC, philosophy, thoughts

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July 21st 1998ce

Q: “How long have you been writing?” – T. Rhae Watson, question posed by e-mail – July 17th, 1998ce

A: I have never answered this question before. I include here a discussion only of the things I still possess – that are thus verifiable.

I began writing a journal entry to myself about my own life as I perceived it at the age of 9. It was in a small (maybe 5″ x 5″), square journal given to me by my mother. It had a plastic laminated cover that was mostly white. It had green-bordered edges. There was an image of a yellow, sparrow-like bird on the cover. It sat on a twig or branch of some tree. Inside I made drawings of Snoopy, the dog from the comic strip Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz, riding his doghouse as a WWII pilot chasing “The Red Baron”.

I wrote in it that at night I was listening to classical music on the radio before I went to sleep. I wrote about the San Antonio Spurs basketball team and about other sporting events. I wrote about what we did after school i.e. “built a fort … went caving.” I wrote in it that I had been watching different television shows and of how my sister and I were getting along. I wrote about being afraid to bring home a report card to my father with a grade of b minus in one of my math classes.

I wrote my first short story when I was 8. It was called, “The War of the Saturnanians and the Jupiteranians and other Space Stories” It was typewritten by Ms. Hutzler, my second grade teacher and the first teacher I had in Texas, in the United States. It had drawings that I made myself. I still have it.

The journal entries continued and I began to write about pubescence – about girls in school I had crushes on who rejected me (Jill Prather in the 6th grade) or who took an interest (Michele something-or-other … is it significant that I can’t remember her last name but can remember Jill’s?). I wrote about my teachers and friends whom I felt separate from, separate because of my appearance as an Indian kid.

I began writing more serious journal entries and poetry in the autumn of my 14th year. That year I became an American citizen by oath and against my will and that same year, my parents, after years of bickering and fighting became one of the first Indian families in the US and the first in my ancestry to divorce.

I wrote about loneliness and disaffection from the society in Texas where I lived. I was depressed. Writing helped me to feel less alone. But more than the writing – which I showed to no one, reading helped a great deal. Listening to Jazz was deeply influential to my writing.

I read “Music is My Mistress” (the autobiography of Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington) that year. I also first read the Autobiography of Malcolm X. I was listening to Ellington, Strayhorn, Monk, Miles, Coltrane and other jazz musicians avidly. I had taken an interest in Russian literature in this time, too. In particular the work of Anton Chekhov – I can remember that at that time I read “The Bet” and it “changed my life”. I also read a great deal of Kurt Vonnegut’s work, whom I admired.

I wrote more and more short stories and poetry in the next ten years. In high school, I wrote stories and poems – which again I showed to no one, save a few friends, and by young adulthood to one or two lovers (though the use of that term for what we were then is laughable). I wrote a couple of stories for a class in high school – Mrs. Garner’s Honor’s English class. The first one was a fantasy story about an E.R. Burroughs’s Conan-like character who traveled into a mine shaft. The second was a rip-off of “Miracle on 34th Street,” save that it was stupider and less interesting – it was called totally unoriginal by Jessie Burstein, the most talented writer in my class, who had her own column in the school paper called, “Jabberwocky”. I heard the class comment on the story from outside the window. Mrs. Garner who was a great English teacher, told the class who the author of the story was though she promised the readings would be anonymous. Later, she told me she revealed me because she thought, “I could take it.”

In college I wrote about many things. I wrote a paper on the Kurds in Turkey (this was before the big American press blow-up). I wrote about Civil Disobedience and Constitutional Law. I wrote a short story about a guy named Joe who had the most boring job in the world because he was assigned to watch the world’s most accurate clock, to be sure it stayed accurate. Then one day it stops and time stops and alien creatures land and tell him they have been stopping time and visiting all along and that the clock is totally inaccurate but that we all don’t know it because time is a relative concept. Joe is flabbergasted and amazed. It was a stupid story with a bad ending.

I was deeply influenced at this time by the works of Howard Fast, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, Lewis Carrol and other writers of the “fantastic.” I had been reading science fiction for years. I also began my first serious pursuit of the writings of Buddhists. Prior to this time I had been reading only casually works by Paul Reps and other translators.

After college I worked for a while in Austin, Texas and then made the decision that I needed to leave the United States.

I moved to Asia on a one way ticket and with $10 US on September 6th of 1990. For the next three years I wrote journals and stories. I wrote journal entries about my travels and changes in perspective. I learned Chinese and went back to India. I traveled in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and India. I wrote a great deal about language and about my withering and often depressed self. I felt free and alone for the first time in my life. I felt very alone and depressed.

When I returned to the US – again against my will – I went back home to Texas, took the Graduate Record Exams with my mother and then made a series of blunders – moved to Washington DC for four months, then to New Orleans for two years to study for my Graduate degree at Tulane, a “mistake” that cost me $40,000, which I haven’t yet paid back. I left New Orleans in December of 1993 in a driveaway car, with $1000 in cash and up to my ass in debt. I arrived in San Francisco on December 24th, 1993 – Christmas Eve.

I walked and walked and thought a great deal that night. There was a crescent moon over the Transamerica pyramid. I went back to a friend’s place where I was staying temporarily and wrote a list of goals for the time to come. This list included the first practical discussion of my desires to write. I made a list of items I wanted. A novel and a collection of short stories appeared on that list. I intended to use my time in San Francisco to create a body of work.

I worked for ten months at Genentech, Inc. with Dr. Don Francis on an AIDS vaccine project. I saved about $3000. I wrote three short stories in that time – all of which sucked because work was a distraction. One was called The Plan and was about a marathon dance contest. On January 9th of 1995, I met Jonas Salk at a meeting regarding the prophylactic AIDS vaccine project upon which I was working at Genentech. The next day I quit and moved to Ecuador. I arrived on January 15th and began writing what would become a novel and the journalistic experiment I would finish two years later. Jonas Salk died while I was in South America.

For four months I wrote journal entries, some poems and a handful of story ideas while in South America. I spent the time considering what I wanted to achieve. I moved back to the US (again) and sublet an apartment in Austin, Texas. I gave myself a test period, telling myself I would try to write for two months. I reasoned that if I spent the two months just hanging around Austin, enjoying myself and lounging then writing wasn’t for me. If however I actually spent the time writing then I would see into what it would grow. I stopped cutting my hair.

Those two months were the birth of the novel.

I moved back to San Francisco, couch-surfed homeless for ten months, entered the 1995 Anvil Press 3-Day Novel Writing Contest on Labor Day, placed in the top ten, continued writing and writing and writing and finished a skeleton of the novel by January. By February shit was pretty lame – I was broke and homeless.

My friends and family assisted me in getting a room in an apartment on Hayes Street. That was April of 1996. I set myself a deadline of January 15th, 1997, to finish the novel and the writing experiment. In August I was extremely depressed, writing a lot and feeling alone.

That month, I gifted a story I wrote called Eulogy, to my friend Missy as a birthday present. I read it aloud at a party at her house while having my hair, which had grown long by then, braided by you, an editor. You called and expressed interest in my work and between then and January you know the story: you edited fifteen of my works.

On January 17th, two years and two days after I began, I ended the novel, produced a copy and took it to Chronicle Books in San Francisco. It was a sunny Friday afternoon that I chronicled carefully. I walked the book to Chronicle and dropped it off. The receptionist was reticent to accept it because she said it should have been mailed. Then, after consultation by telephone to the inner sanctum, she finally took it.

It was rejected within ten days without being read. I have a confession from the person who signed the letter of rejection that the book was never read. I wrote a reply to the rejection, sealed it in the book and closed it up.

Over the next five months I turned thirty years old and produced the books “Mood”, “Truthful Conceits”, “Sucka Free” and “An Examiner’s Chronicle” – self published texts all: a novel, collection of short stories, of essays and journals.

On June 6th, I decided I would move to New York. During the time I spent in SF, South America, Austin and back in SF, I had created four novels, fifteen short stories, a collection of essays and hundreds of thousands of words in journal entries. I had made a body of work. Megan Sapperstein cut off most of my hair and then I shaved my head.

I moved to New York in summer – writing a novel called “Incognito” on the way across the country – and sending post cards to Sonny Mehta, the president of Knopf publishing as we traveled. I told him I would arrive in New York and deliver my novel to Random House publishing on September 1st. I arrived Sept. 1st and went to Random House. It was closed for Labor day.

I returned on September 2nd and delivered the book, which Mr. Mehta subsequently saw. He suggested I pass it to two other editors. I also gave him a copy of the novel “Incognito” which I wrote while traveling. The novel was a post-modernist collage of flyers and text and characters created in the spirit of “On the Road.” It was written by hand during the summer of the 50th anniversary of India’s independence and the 50th anniversary of Kerouac’s travels with Cassady that became “On The Road.” Incognito is comprised of four journal-sized books and a Compact Disc which I made in Seattle – it is intended to be a disc of one of the characters of the novel singing and telling a story. It is 60 minutes long.

Once “Incognito” was returned by Knopf, I sent it back out on the road by passing it to a reader without my name in it, in a shoebox. “Incognito” is presumably still traveling from reader to reader.

Since that time I have heard nary a word from Random House about my book. The company has been bought by Bertelsmann. I never again heard whether my book was accepted or rejected. I have written three stories in New York City. The first two were called “Mahmoud Singh,” and “The Rubric of Philpot Dot Doc”. The most recent piece I have written is called “Close the Piano”.

I am alone in New York. … and that is the story of my writing career. … I have never written that down nor said it aloud before. Now I have a job I hate – in administration at The New School University in Manhattan. I can be reached at 212/ 229-5662 x286. Messages may be left for me at 212/ 229-5662 x286. Every word I have written here is true to the best of my knowledge.

Pulaski Bridge Drop, 1998

10 Wednesday Jun 1998

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On June 10th of 1998, a warm summer evening in New York City, I conducted the Pulaski Bridge Drop, which was based on a bet or dare.

I told the architect Peter Dorsey and his friends at a dinner in Manhattan in 1998, that I would drop off the Pulaski Bridge – between North Brooklyn and Queens – into the Newtown Creek on the photographer Kenny Trice’s birthday as a performance present, and I did.

This blog entry is a chronological placeholder for videotape footage of the event which needs to be digitized and cut to be posted.

J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion, New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, 1998

18 Wednesday Feb 1998

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2/18/98ce
–55 West 13th Street, Manhattan, New York, noon on the third of several grey, cloudy rainy days

Last night I heard the New York Philharmonic perform the St. Matthew Passion, by J. S. Bach, under the direction of Kurt Masur at Avery Fisher Hall (formerly Philharmonic Hall) at Lincoln Center.

The space is considerably less well designed than the Opera Hall in the same Center.  I have not yet visited the Alice Tully Hall space which completes the three.

Crossing the plaza and passing the small fountain as you approach the high-ceilinged, great glass front of the Metropolitan Opera House, two very large canvasses painted by Marc Chagall are visible from all directions.  They are something like 50 feet high and 30 feet wide.  The main stairway of the Opera House passes between the two pieces.  The Avery Fisher Hall is the auditorium to the right when facing the Opera House.  It is lower and more box-like, though it too has a tall, glass-fronted facade.

The Philharmonic Hall is long and rectangular.  The seats are arranged in horizontal rows forming a long rectangle from the stage back to the main doors on the floor of the auditorium.  Above these seats there are four tiers of balcony seats.  The box seats on the side are smaller and a little cramped.  They provide only an angled view of the stage and so one must continually turn one’s head to see the orchestra, the balcony seats in the rear of the auditorium are maybe 100 yards from the stage, but the line of sight is good and straight on from any of the seats in the back of the Hall.

Last night’s performance marked the second time I have heard the St. Matthew Passion by Bach.  I checked it out in San Francisco in 1997ce (see previous material).  This time, the stage set was completely different and the orchestration was somewhat changed as well.

The choir consisted of Thomanerchor Liepzig (The choir of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig) that Bach himself led, several hundred years ago.  They were perhaps 90 strong and provided the choir solo voices for the Apostle Peter and other parts from within their number.  They were split and arranged on benches at stage front left and front right, featured prominently.  The orchestration consisted of a small chamber group surrounding the conductor and a harmonium.  The harmonium was played by the director of the boy’s choir.  The chamber group was comprised of a cellist, bassist, first and second violins, and reeds.  On a platform behind the group were the six soloists.  The secondary strings and flutes and reeds were placed in the rear of the stage behind the soloists and Mr. Masur stood on a raised platform just to the right of the harmonium.

The performance was microphoned and amplified but the volume was far too low to enjoy complex changes in dynamics.  The sound in the corner seats in the rear boxes where we were (went with D.) was good but could have been louder and with more dynamic variance.  The seats were angled hard and somewhat cramped so we had to turn our heads to face the stage stereophonically.

The New York Times ran a review of the performance from the weekend past on the morning I saw the show (cf.: NYT, FEB 17, The Arts, p.4, aside: Siva Vaidyanthan on the cover for an unrelated story regarding a lost scrap of paper written upon by Mark Twain). The article said the work was among Masur’s first with the Philharmonic and suggested the changes and alterations (i.e. using St. Thomas Church choir from Liepzig) were Masur’s continuing efforts to come to know the music of Bach.

The performance was at a quick tempo, not workman-like, but regular. There were some lovely voices in the context of the piece, including the mezzo-soprano whose work was so beautiful.  The tenor who handled the part of the Evangelist may have been a little tired from a weekend’s worth of performance.  He was good, though.

The quality of live music performance in New York City is generally extremely high. Everywhere I go I hear bold, confident, passionate performances.  The players are eager and well-prepared.  In New York, the level of energy and play and quality of sound by any given performer is so much More More More than anywhere else I have been in the US.  There is little doubt or wavering.  The performers have in the context of their relationship to the venue and the audience, a certain confidence that frees them to try to be their best.  Or maybe they are scared witless and just playing their asses off so they can “make it in New York.” But it doesn’t “fee’” like the latter.  Rather it is just the general level of play, that the town attracts the nation’s best.  That is how it feels to me so far. (so why is the coffee so bad?)

The performance had some interesting moments:  the second mezzo-soprano solo in the second part, is predecessed and accompanied by an instrumental sectional.  There is a relationship here between the melody here and the melody of one of the six Violin Concerti for Violin and harpsichord.  The theme is augmented and then toyed with slightly, but check it out.

The section I awaited, had remembered from the last performance, was the simple harmony (or is it even unison?) calling out of the name of Barrabas.  It lacked the impact it had in SF.  There, the choir erupted in the name of Barrabas so loudly and strongly, one could hear the maddening crowd calling the name.  Here the section passed relatively quickly.  The tempo was speeded up and even-handed without such lingering drama.  Perhaps that is an aspect of performance here or by Masur.

He was beautiful to watch.  Had a relationship with the music as he conducted.  His body language, his expressiveness coaxed, pushed and pulled on the sound.  It was nice.  Masur’s an older man, balding (big centered patch over grey, evenly-cut hair all around), with a big frame.  maybe 6’2” or 3” tall.

<Break>

 

J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, New York Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, 1998

18 Wednesday Feb 1998

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2/18/98ce
–55 West 13th Street, Manhattan, New York, noon on the third of several grey, cloudy rainy days

Last night I heard the New York Philharmonic perform the St. Matthew Passion, by J. S. Bach, under the direction of Kurt Masur at Avery Fisher Hall (formerly Philharmonic Hall) at Lincoln Center.

The space is considerably less well designed than the Opera Hall in the same Center.  I have not yet visited the Alice Tully Hall space which completes the three.

Crossing the plaza and passing the small fountain as you approach the high-ceilinged, great glass front of the Metropolitan Opera House, two very large canvasses painted by Marc Chagall are visible from all directions.  They are something like 50 feet high and 30 feet wide.  The main stairway of the Opera House passes between the two pieces.  The Avery Fisher Hall is the auditorium to the right when facing the Opera House.  It is lower and more box-like, though it too has a tall, glass-fronted facade.

The Philharmonic Hall is long and rectangular.  The seats are arranged in horizontal rows forming a long rectangle from the stage back to the main doors on the floor of the auditorium.  Above these seats there are four tiers of balcony seats.  The box seats on the side are smaller and a little cramped.  They provide only an angled view of the stage and so one must continually turn one’s head to see the orchestra, the balcony seats in the rear of the auditorium are maybe 100 yards from the stage, but the line of sight is good and straight on from any of the seats in the back of the Hall.

Last night’s performance marked the second time I have heard the St. Matthew Passion by Bach.  I checked it out in San Francisco in 1997ce (see previous material).  This time, the stage set was completely different and the orchestration was somewhat changed as well.

The choir consisted of Thomanerchor Liepzig (The choir of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig) that Bach himself led, several hundred years ago.  They were perhaps 90 strong and provided the choir solo voices for the Apostle Peter and other parts from within their number.  They were split and arranged on benches at stage front left and front right, featured prominently.  The orchestration consisted of a small chamber group surrounding the conductor and a harmonium.  The harmonium was played by the director of the boy’s choir.  The chamber group was comprised of a cellist, bassist, first and second violins, and reeds.  On a platform behind the group were the six soloists.  The secondary strings and flutes and reeds were placed in the rear of the stage behind the soloists and Mr. Masur stood on a raised platform just to the right of the harmonium.

The performance was microphoned and amplified but the volume was far too low to enjoy complex changes in dynamics.  The sound in the corner seats in the rear boxes where we were (went with D.) was good but could have been louder and with more dynamic variance.  The seats were angled hard and somewhat cramped so we had to turn our heads to face the stage stereophonically.

The New York Times ran a review of the performance from the weekend past on the morning I saw the show (cf.: NYT, FEB 17, The Arts, p.4, aside: Siva Vaidyanthan on the cover for an unrelated story regarding a lost scrap of paper written upon by Mark Twain). The article said the work was among Masur’s first with the Philharmonic and suggested the changes and alterations (i.e. using St. Thomas Church choir from Liepzig) were Masur’s continuing efforts to come to know the music of Bach.

The performance was at a quick tempo, not workman-like, but regular. There were some lovely voices in the context of the piece, including the mezzo-soprano whose work was so beautiful.  The tenor who handled the part of the Evangelist may have been a little tired from a weekend’s worth of performance.  He was good, though.

The quality of live music performance in New York City is generally extremely high. Everywhere I go I hear bold, confident, passionate performances.  The players are eager and well-prepared.  In New York, the level of energy and play and quality of sound by any given performer is so much More More More than anywhere else I have been in the US.  There is little doubt or wavering.  The performers have in the context of their relationship to the venue and the audience, a certain confidence that frees them to try to be their best.  Or maybe they are scared witless and just playing their asses off so they can “make it in New York.” But it doesn’t “fee’” like the latter.  Rather it is just the general level of play, that the town attracts the nation’s best.  That is how it feels to me so far. (so why is the coffee so bad?)

The performance had some interesting moments:  the second mezzo-soprano solo in the second part, is predecessed and accompanied by an instrumental sectional.  There is a relationship here between the melody here and the melody of one of the six Violin Concerti for Violin and harpsichord.  The theme is augmented and then toyed with slightly, but check it out.

The section I awaited, had remembered from the last performance, was the simple harmony (or is it even unison?) calling out of the name of Barrabas.  It lacked the impact it had in SF.  There, the choir erupted in the name of Barrabas so loudly and strongly, one could hear the maddening crowd calling the name.  Here the section passed relatively quickly.  The tempo was speeded up and even-handed without such lingering drama.  Perhaps that is an aspect of performance here or by Masur.

He was beautiful to watch.  Had a relationship with the music as he conducted.  His body language, his expressiveness coaxed, pushed and pulled on the sound.  It was nice.  Masur’s an older man, balding (big centered patch over grey, evenly-cut hair all around), with a big frame.  maybe 6’2” or 3” tall.

<Break>

 

David Dinkins Lecture, Mingus Big Band, NYC, 1998

13 Friday Feb 1998

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2/13/98ce
–55 West 13th Street, Manhattan, New York, noonish on a Friday

Yo, I was set up …  by Mingus
and knocked down  … by The Mingus Big Band
over gin and tonics at the Fez.

Last night after work I went to a lecture by David Dinkins, former Mayor of New York, sponsored by The New School.  It was a part of a series of lectures taking place this semester entitled, “Media and Race Relations.”   Dinkins feels like a really positive old guy.  Very forthright and direct and even-handed.  He read a prepared speech and then fielded questions from the crowd of maybe twenty or thirty people on hand.  The speech was rhythmic and well-paced, addressing the topic in general terms and peppered with a couple of extemporary examples.

He did not say anything too unusual, said what the ex-first-Black-Mayor-of-New-York-City-who-was-embattled-throughout-his-administration-and-who-lost-re-election-by-the-same-slim-margin-he-won-by-first-time-round might be expected to say, that, and I’m paraphrasing here, things under the current administration pretty much suck … unless you’re rich.  That the crime rate being down is a good thing, but that it was his previous administrations programs that were primarily responsible.  That the current Mayor is a bully.  He defended himself against the main controversy of his term.

He is a politician after all and was obliged thus to say some things about America and “this great City,” and so on.   He spoke eloquently about the disparities of this city, though.  Mentioned that the infant mortality rate on the Upper East Side of Manhattan is 5.4 per 1,000 live births and in Fort Green Brooklyn, less than twenty miles away, it is 24 per 1,000 live births.  A frightening and sad statistic.  He mentioned another statistic that I found staggering: regarding the media and it’s treatment of women and women’s issues.

In a recent media study, he reported, it was found that when a person is referred to in the Main section of the paper, 86% of the time it is a male person, in the business section 85%, and in the Metropolitan sections 76% of the time references are to men.  Of the occasions when women are mentioned in the paper, more than 50% of the time it is as a perpetrator of some crime or in some other negative connotation.

These numbers are weird and I can not understand really how they are conceived.  I’d like to look into that.

It’s funny how a thought becomes a statistic becomes a fact and a part of social truth.  Paz:  “the North American … substitutes social truth for real truth which is always disagreeable.”  Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950.

The lecture was good.  I look forward to the next one in the series by the Reverend Al Sharpton.

(Afterward, I came back here to the office and edited the third draft of “Mahmoud Singh.”  It’s a good first story for New York.  I feel tired of it now though.  It doesn’t breathe enough.  Need to make a new one.  When?  When I get some peace of mind.)

MB made 9:00 reservations for us at the Time cafe and Fez Supper Club.

While I was waiting for him at the school, I was chatting with the security guard and a young woman who was also waiting, to meet someone after class.  I said to the guard, “You’ve heard of home-sickness, right? … what do you call it when you have no home and yet you feel a sickness? That is, you have no place to be homesick for but you feel a sickness for a home that exists in your mind?”

The young woman said, “Identity Crisis.”

I waited for MB at my building until ten minutes to 9, then we hopped in a cab to the club at Great Jones and Lafayette streets in the East Village.  Arrived right at 9 and went in.  “Time” is labyrinthine with an upstairs glass-walled, fishbowl restaurant and then a blue archway leading to an inner red-boothed bar, both filled with the pretty people and then a stairwell down into the sanctum, a blue walled hallway leading to the supper club known as The Fez, where we were met by a beautiful young bronzey Black woman wearing a wireless headset who was responsible for seating us.  Girl was fine and had a sweet smile.  I said to her, looking as deeply as I could into her eyes in the darkness of the low-ceilinged club, “it must be difficult walking around with disembodied voices in your head.” and I smiled.  She looked puzzled at first and then was actually interrupted by the voice in the headset to which she responded first and then smiled that beautiful smile and said to me, “Yeah, it gets a little confusing when it’s busy.”  Fine.

We sat and ordered a round of drinks.  MB had the usual.  I was hungry and ordered some Salmon which was not great.  It was boring and tasted like nothing except the sauces and spices which were hardly placed on the plate.  Even the supposed blackened salmon with wasabi-vinagrette that sounded so nice was boring food, and too expensive.

The deal on the gig was that the cover was $18 and there was a two-drink minimum, but you could stay for the second set once you were inside.  Dinner was not included and we were wearing serious critics ears after dropping so much bread for the much-hyped Mingus Big Band.  Much of it was choice of course, because I wanted to estimate the place, quality of the food, seating etc.

I spent three bucks on the coatcheck and 18 to get in and 63 on drinks and dinner.  That’s $84 for the two of us with the show included.  We were there at 9:00 and the show started at 9:30.

The set up:

The Mingus Big Band is a Workshop group that plays the music of Charles Mingus.  They opened the set by telling us they were going to play some music they hadn’t practiced fully, that they hadn’t looked at in a long time.  It was odd.  The performance started with a chart called, “Slippers,” and they were literally signalling and calling out changes and sections to one another.  It felt crowded and unrehearsed. They were working shit out while they played.  It gave MB and I pause.  We figured we had been taken.  $18 and the drinks for this?  We are new to New York, him a year and a half and me a few months, we didn’t know any better than to attend the Mingus Big Band, thinking we’d hear some Mingus wicked-like.

They were struggling their way through the shit when I actually wrote on a napkin at one point, “MINGUS DONE 20 YEARS and STILL KICKING ALL Y’ALLS ASSES”

The band also recognized their benefactor, Sue Mingus who was in attendance, a blonde, short-haired (business cut) older white woman with a kindly, smiley way about her.  Then they introduced a Mingus contemporary, one Mr. Howard Johnson who played in a Mingus septet at one point and who charted an arrangement of “OP,” a tune originally written for Oscar Pettitford.  Mr. Johnson was to direct the band in playing it.  He introduced it with some discussion about his relationship with Mingus and then actually took a moment to remind the band of some changes and notations.  Again it was odd.  Like a practice session.

They flubbed the shit out of it so badly they had to be counted into the “D” section.  It was almost comical. But occasionally our thoughts crept to how much we’d paid to see the show.

The set break came and we decided to take a little stroll around the block.  We got back to try to find some better seats, since the second set was less crowded.  The sweet hostess with the headset made a little small talk with me and smiled that beautiful smile again.  She led us to a pair of seats front and center.  Many people left, but there were several sticking around for the second half.

The Knock Down

Bam! How can I describe the second set to you without explaining that we were HAD!  The dark, low-hanging ceiling of the Fez filled out with the radical sounds of Mingus!  It was crazy.  It was like a different group came on.  They were wild and soloing like crazy and just out of this world.  Hollering and yelling and playing tight tight tight Mingus licks like they weren’t even the same band as the first set.  It was too much.  MB and I kept staring across the table at one another and laughing.  They completely turned us around.  It ended with a raging take on Better Get Hit in Yo Soul which knocked the doors off the place.  It was two different gigs:  a rehearsal/workshop and a straight ahead performance!  Cool.

An instructor from the New School is the bass player in the band and he had a student come up and jam on harmonica at the gig, too.  It was right on to be associated with the cat.  Big-ass shoes to fill, and he did so respectfully and with modesty.  Even had some skills, too.

The deal

The Mingus Big Band plays at the Time Cafe in the Fez Club.  $18 for both sets OR with student ID, $10 for the second set only!!!  They’re saving the shit, man.  Go second half!!!  And find yourself the soul of Mingus kicking through a 15-piece, sweet-ass, tight-playing, booty-kicking band.  The food’s overpriced unless you get something like hummus or chips, and the two-drink minimum is worth it if you’re coming in that late anyway.  Mingus Big Band, a nice time.

So yo,  I was set up and knocked down by the Mingus Big Band over gin and tonics at the Fez.

Afterward we walked for a while and ended up at the Coffeeshop on Union Square for a bite to eat, then I cabbed it home.  Expensive nights are all too much fun in NYC.

Peace.

<Break>

working vacation

First Visit to the Metropolitan Opera, 1998

10 Tuesday Feb 1998

Posted by in journal entries, NYC, reviews

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2/10/98ce
–55 West 13th Street, Manhattan, New York, noon

It’s a Tuesday morning and last night I saw the inside of the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center for the first time in my life. I saw the Met production of Die Zauberflote by Mozart.

Lincoln Center is really beautiful.  The main entranceway holds a grand staircase placed between two very large canvasses by Marc Chagall, bright colors and swirled lines.  The interior of the Opera House is all golds and red velvet.  I did a sketch at intermission of the stage lay out.  Our seats were pretty far back and high up but the view was perfect.  The performers are un-mic’ed and yet their voices and the music carry so beautifully through the hall.  The place is intimate despite its size.  It has five rows of box seats up the left and right sides of the stage.  Everything is covered in red velvet.

The seats are equipped with Met Titles which appear on a small digitized computer screen placed in a railing before each seat.  the titles provide simultaneous translation of the Opera.  They can be turned on and off and will pick up at any given line as the production proceeds.  Gracefully designed devices.  You cannot “read” the screens on either side of you because of the angle of placement, however if you lean forward you can see in the dark theatre the seat by seat staggered glow of gold letters on screens before the seats below you. Marvelous technology which makes the production much more enjoyable for audience-members who do not speak German or Italian or etc.

“Die Zauberflote” means “The Magic Flute.”  Ignoring the racist positioning of the White European in a position of superiority over the Moor and the general glorification of white over black features, light over dark which is established in the piece, the opera is a light-hearted romance about love and human longing for companionship.  Papageno the clown and his Papagena provide the comic climax in the pa-pa-pa-pa scene which I saw first in the film “Amadeus.”  There are high arpeggiated sequences by the Queen of Night who handled them with flair, and long tender arias by both Pamina and Tamino, the leads.  There are also noble arias by the baritone who plays the King, Sarasanto.  There are even roles for three young boys who play guiding angels to the hero, Tamino.

The racism in the opera isn’t about current ideas of race hatred, it is simply the ignorance and attitudes of an era gone by – lyrics by Papageno glorifying the beauty of the white, blonde-haired Pamina and several about the ugliness of the Black Moor.  It is frustrating that such lines will exist in the context of a Meisterwork by a man like Mozart for so long.  Frustrating to me at least whose face is brown and more like the black-faced white man who portrayed the Moor, than the blonde-blue eyed woman who played the princess.

The experience was a good first one for me at the Lincoln Center and with the Metropolitan Opera.  The tickets were expensive ($66) and we were treated to them and to dinner – at the Italian restaurant Fiorello, just opposite the theatre on Broadway – by Alex and Sally, a lovely elderly couple who are friends of R. who works in my office.  It was a good time.  But I find socializing difficult.  I had the seared tuna in capers, onions, roasted peppers and sundried tomate.  (boring though it sounds nice … It was tasty but predictable).

Quickly now to last Wednesday to cover the lecture entitled “Lawyers of Political Prisoners in the United States,” at the Benjamin Cardozo Law School and pulled together by Michael Kasner and BALLSA (maybe it’s black and latin-american law students association??).   A panel discussion hosted by Kathleen Cleaver and featuring Johnnie Cochran, Lennox Hinds, Leonard Weinglass and others.  A powerfully inspiring lecture by a group of lawyers who care about people.  It was meaningful on many levels.

Got straight dope on the cases of Assata Shakur, Mumia Abu Jamal, Dr. Mutulu Shakur, geronimo ji Jaga and others.  Some heavy statistics:  there are now 600,000 lawyers in the US.  Of these 90% work for 10% of the wealth.  “That leaves 10% for the rest of us.”  Maybe 600 work in areas like political prisoners rights and etc.  Stats about Mumia’s case that are still overwhelmingly frustrating to accept.

A letter from Assata Shakur to “his Holiness,” Pope John Paul II on his visit to Cuba in response to a request of the Pope by the New Jersey State Police to help them extradite Assata Shakur  Too much.  Lennox Hinds was fantastic.  He spoke so eloquently of ethics.  It was truly inspiring and the lecture was packed with people.

I need a haircut, gotta take a

<Break>

Karmic Rubber Band

09 Monday Feb 1998

Posted by in conceptual art, essay, journal entries, NYC

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2/9/98ce
— 55 West 13th Street, Manhattan, New York, noon

Today is a Monday in February and the sun is shining in New York through clear skies.  It is cool but not cold and the blue in the sky is high and whitened by a thin wintriness. These events are from last week:

Karmic Rubber Band

B., my neighbor down the hall is a recent arrival in New York City from Austin, Texas where he has been for the last 6 years.  Prior to that he lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Now he’s 27 and lives in our warehouse building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn and works in Manhattan at a retail bookstore (a national chain) and at The Bottom Line club.  Last week, he had friends in town visiting from Baton Rouge.

MT., 27, and JO., 22, punks traveling from Baton Rouge to New York and back in a little, two-door, Honda CRX within which they were also sleeping, were staying alive by eating peanut butter sandwiches and MRE’s – Meals Ready to Eat, military rations purchased by MT.’s father, a soldier – while on the road.  They were young scrappers who had taken to living in condemned buildings in Baton Rouge to keep from having to get too many jobs.  They had been on the road for a month or so.

I met them briefly the night before last Monday morning when I ran into them in the hallway outside B.’s door.  I asked them that morning what they were up to.  They were building a frame for B.’s bedroom wall.  I offered them some marijuana to help them stay focused and get through the task.  They accepted, so I left them with a small amount of weed and my pipe and lighter and headed off to work.

I got into work and had a message from my friend M. who was taking the day off from work and planned to be downtown near my office.  We made plans to meet for lunch.  By 3:00, I hadn’t heard from M. so I decided to get some lunch for myself before my 4:00 meeting with the Vice President and several members of the Accounting department.  I walked out of my office, though, and saw M. just walking towards me in the street.  He had just gotten to the building.  It was the first coincidence of the day.  I took M. around the corner to Bar 6 on Avenue of the Americas for lunch.

Afterward we made plans to meet in the evening and I went back to work while he strolled off to the East Village.  At 4:00, I went with C., the manager of the department in which I work, to the meeting with Accounting.  It went all right and when I returned it was already 5:30.  M. was waiting outside my office building for me.  I brought him up to check out where I work and then we went walking.

We ended up at St. Mark’s Bar in the East Village, enjoying high-flying alto solos by Bird over quartets and quintets of swinging rhythms and over our heads as we sipped a couple of cold beers and talked about music and art.  I went to the bathroom.  While I was in there, M. got the high sign from a fellow at the bar.  When I joined them, we all went outside to have a smoke.  Out on the sidewalk we made a smoker’s circle. M. and I introduced ourselves to our host, R. who produced a fat little joint to pass.

R. is a light-skinned brother with a thin, evenly-groomed mustache.  He has short, carefully styled hair and full lips that part to reveal a glowing set of teeth when he smiles.  We all laughed and chatted as we passed the smoke, talking about all manner of things.  Somehow the conversation came around to my space in Brooklyn.  I mentioned that I was living in an unfinished warehouse space, that I was working on it to build a live/work studio.  R., suddenly looked at me strangely as he pulled on the joint that had just been passed back to him by M.  After exhaling, he asked if I was living in Greenpoint.  I was surprised that he guessed.  All I had said was that my place was in Brooklyn.

He was holding the joint, now-half smoked.  He smiled and said, “Do you know a guy named B.?  It was incredible:  8 million people in New York and we get pulled out by a guy who knows my neighbor.  He was a co-worker of B.’s at the The Bottom Line.  We couldn’t believe the coincidence.  I laughed and said, “It’s even more perfect because just this morning I gave his friends a little bag to get them through the day.”  We looked at each other and for just half a second locked eyes and then collectively looked down at the joint.  I looked down at it, thinly burning with ashy flecks across it’s orangey tip in R.’s hand. “That’s my weed!”  I half-shouted.  We broke up the circle and fell away into individual peals of laughter, three high-flying brothers smoking a j. on the sidewalk in the Village and cracking up

The coaccidence was dazzling.  Over in Brooklyn in the morning, I give away a small bag of weed to my neighbor’s friends and not ten hours later in Manhattan, a co-worker of his, unknowingly and independently gives my friend the high sign and ends up sharing a joint with me.

A couple of nights later, on the eve of their departure to Baton Rouge, I took MT. and JO. to dinner.  I figured the two young punks would need a little better food than MRE’s to sustain them on the long journey back to the deep South.   B. came along with.  We went to the little Thai place in Greenpoint a few blocks from our place.  When I told him the story of meeting his friend R., I ended by saying, “Hey man, I know I can trust you as my neighbor.  I mean I lent you something and I got it back within less than a day, a borough away … I mean your shit is tight … you’re like a karmic rubber band.”  And we all laughed and had a good time.

After we smoked the joint down, we went back in the bar to finish our beers.  Then M. and I made our way out to my place.  We hung out, smoked some more pot as I cleaned up and we made plans to go to St. Nick’s Pub.  My hot water still wasn’t working then and I was really funky, so I asked M. if I could stay out at his house that night and he readily invited me to do so.  I grabbed up some clothes, threw them into my work bag and M. and I were off to Harlem.

BROTHER CAME FLYING OUT THE SUBWAY DOOR …

… BALD HEAD shining, hollering, “Milky Way, Man, Milky Way!” paid the guy, got the candy and got back on the train before the doors closed.   And we made our way on to 145th street.  That’s what I wrote down on the back of a business card on the way up to M.’s.  with brother unwrapping that thing all casual-like and munching on it as we rolled along.  I’ll tell you the things I’ve seen on the New York City Subway one day.

We went up to M.’s place on 145th around the corner from St. Nick’s so he too could change clothes.  He had a message on his machine from a woman he had met the week before who reported she would be at St. Nick’s that night.  Earlier, after I had given the young punks the weed and come into the office, and before lunch with M. and my series of coincidences and coaccidents, I had written myself a short journal entry:

I have been having crazy nights.

… Just Long Enough

St. Nick’s Pub has an open mic jam session on Monday nights hosted by MC Murph and produced and promoted by Berta Indeed Productions.  It features Patience Higgins and his quartet, who host some of the baddest local talent cutting one another in solotime and occasional newcomers and amateurs as well.

When we arrived things were sounding a little cheesy but they straightened up a bit and before long we were sitting and finding grooves as various soloists made their way through Parker charts and other standards.  We weren’t there twenty minutes when M.’s friend arrived with her two girlfriends T. and J. – three chocolate-colored, gorgeous women who turned every head in the house at one time or another.

M.’s friend is beautiful.  She is thin and curvy, about 5’6” tall in heels and she has a bright smile that she shares when inspired to do so.   She is a poet and spoken-word artist who performs regularly in the New York area.  Her friends are equally beautiful but uniquely so.  T. had long cornrows and a round, gentle face.  J. was an Amazon.  Well over 6 feet in heels, she was tall and lanky and moved with a gangly beauty that gave her ebony arms a mystical quality.

J. was kinetic.  Her arms moved smoothly and hypnotically, yet quickly and out of her own control.  We all sat together, listened to the music and talked.  J. and T. stood up often and danced, with one another and alone, bringing a desire to the hearts of everyone present and filling the room with the magic of music’s power to move a body and soul.  They were sexy and nimble and moving sensually, energized by the swelling music that filled the little joint.

T. even arranged with MC Murph to sit in.  She wanted to sing. It was her first time singing at St. Nick’s.  She did “On Green Dolphin Street,” and after a little timidness in the first go around came back after the solos to finish strong and clear with only a slight, wavering tremolo to reveal what may have been any nerves on edge.  She sang clearly and held her body still to the microphone staring evenly into the audience, smiling at her friends occasionally.  We all enjoyed ourselves.

I am new to this place, to these people.  I’ve learned it’s foolish to try anything too soon.  So I was keeping quiet.  Listening to the music and relaxing.  I ached to let these three women know how much I admired their shapes and styles, but knew how stupid I would sound saying so.  But it’s good, I think, to let people know you notice their beauty even if time and space conspire against doing anything about it in the now.  If you have an opportunity, you’ve got to seize it.

J. was talking with us all at the table when she managed in the whirling motion of her long, beautiful arms, to knock over her drink.  She pulled her chair back from the table, startled, as we picked up her drink and patted at the table with napkins, telling her not to worry about it.  “Oh, God, my arms are just too long,” she apologized as she scooted back from the table, “I’ll just move back here.”

Quickly and for perhaps the first time all evening I spoke up, “No baby, your arms are … just … long enough,” I said, looking directly into her eyes, “come back over here and we’ll just move your drink.”  I ordered another round for her and the other women and we were all too smooth for words.

M. and I strolled in the cold, back to his place.  On the way I teased him about his friend.  He kept saying, “She’s not my girlfriend!” and when he did I heard the desire behind it.  We both knew how nice it would be if she were.  Before going to bed, we listened to both sides of the Abbey Lincoln album he had bought earlier that day down in the Village.  Her voice rang rich and sweet through the Harlem night as I drifted off to sleep on M.’s comfy old couch.

And that’s the story of last Monday.

<Break>

Tuesday I woke up at M.’s house with a bit of a headache from the gins-and-tonics the night before.  Predominantly from the gins, I’m sure.  I decided to skip work so I called in sick and stayed in the city.  I caught the D down to 59th street and then went walking over to the Upper East Side.  I had lunch by myself at a little French bistro – ordered a seared Tuna – and bought a couple of back pocket journal/sketchbooks.  Then I strolled over to Gracious Home on 72nd and Third and picked up some paint brushes.  I went home and slept.  That night I was in, listening to Mingus and watching ships pass the Manhattan skyline as the lights went on in the City.

Wednesday I got up and went to work to try to achieve something, anything.  It was good.  I managed to make.  There was the lecture … gotta get that lecture covered.  It has too much to handle poorly.

Thursday I took off from work again, rainy and cold weather and the hot water finally on.  I hung out with the visiting kids from Baton Rouge, made a dope deal (scored a $50 quarter bag of some weak-ass shit) and built a shower curtain set up (a “d” rod with a hanging cord to a metal ring in the ceiling of the bathroom).  I took the Lousiana punks for their going away dinner that night.  Had a hot shower for the first time in my space on Friday morning.

Friday was D. and being out and acting silly – drinks at Bar 6, dinner at L’Orange Bleue (430 Broome Street), drinks at bar ñ and then on to Soho.  A late night walk through the East Village and ending up at a little cheesy brazilian bar called Anyway with a guitar duo who couldn’t keep time but could finger-pick like a couple of Brazilian freaks.  We laughed and acted silly and misbehaved and were just happy together which we hadn’t been in months.

Then the weekend has been an explosion of food and drink and joyous celebrations of a million senses.  My fortune cookies and horoscopes are all overwhelmingly positive and my mind is confused about what I am supposed to be doing.  I keep going with the flow.

My new roommates have a 1971 Ford Gran Torino of a metallic green color with a white hard top.  It is a beautiful old machine.  I now have keys to that machine and on Sunday we loaded up into that low-riding cruiser, crossed the Queensboro Bridge and came into the city.  We went to Pongal, the South Indian place in the twenties and then to this really cool sake bar downstairs on 9th street at 2nd in the East Village, it’s called Decibel.

Cruising on a Sunday afternoon.  In the green machine.
New York:  Manhattan.  Brooklyn.  Queens.

mtk 1998

snow my first night in Brooklyn, 1998

21 Wednesday Jan 1998

Posted by in NYC, poetry

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I’m shivering –
can’t hold myself tightly enough and there’s no one else to hold me.
It’s cold.
It snowed last night on the spring equinox.
It only snowed once in New York this past winter –

that day, three full moons back, when I returned from Boston
to spend my first night in Brooklyn.

It fell in drifting, tiny, crisp, wispy flakes
that melted when they struck the concrete
and the earth of the city
mean

while it was snowing
in drifts up and down the east coast
shutting down whole swaths of automated New England
killing electricity for thousands
killing several who were inadequately housed.

My first night in Brooklyn was cold.
I fashioned a bed from a piece of sheetrock laid across cement cinderblocks,
and covered it in some of my warmest clothes.
My overcoat was a blanket.

I lit some candles.

there was no heat, no bath, and no electricity.
there was a toilet and a sink that gave no warm water
and I watched it snow and considered the english language

There is no snow where I am from.

Never.

There, it is either wet or dry and usually it is too hot to be outside for long.

Now, I have traveled far from where I am from
and have seen many things and kinds of things.
I have, along the way, learned new words.

I have heard english-speaking people say, in amazement:
“the Inuit have more than 30 words for snow.”

and that day in Brooklyn I wondered how
english could have snow for millennia
and yet have only one word
for the many different kinds of falling white
I’ve seen –

the cold, browzy, white haze at great heights
the soft, gentle quiet of an empty field
tiny flakes and slippery ice
hard rains of sleeting shards.

english has been arrogant.

It just feathered that day.

It was just a little feathering down.

a feathering of

The End of 1997, New York

29 Monday Dec 1997

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12/29/97ce
— 55 West 13th Street, Manhattan. New York, late morning

On the eve of the birth of the Christian’s Messiah I left the office for a late lunch and went to a bar around the corner, had a portabello mushroom sandwich and two glasses of champagne and then returned to work.  There were very few people left in the office.  The new employees like myself were straggling about – trying to get a handle on our tasks, seeking definition for our selves in the context of this place.

I sat and talked with a couple of my colleagues about the evening.  I intended a long walk through the city “to watch the Christians on their eve.  It is something I have done in cities all over the world,” I told them, and now I would get to do it in New York.

Together we mapped out a route for me.  It began from the office here in the central village and proceeded south and west and then cut across the island through Soho, back to the East Village and then up through Astor and St. Mark’s Places and eventually to Union Square.  I was to go up Park Place to 35th street where I was to cut over to Fifth Avenue and make my way up past all the shops and stores, past Rockefeller Center, to the park and my final destination, Wollman Rink at Central Park for ice skating.  The walk was to take several hours and would take me past some of the cities most famous landmarks.

We talked at length and then the very pretty young woman who works near to me in the office – and who is also new – and I began talking about the approaching holiday.  We would have a few days off, we were both new to the area, what would be doing & etc.  Her name is R., originally from Connecticut, she was returning there this evening after work to be with family for the holidays.  She was taking a 6:30 train.

I invited her to leave work a little early to have a glass of wine before her trip.  She agreed and we found ourselves at the little bar around the corner where I had just dined, she sipped a red wine and I another champagne.  It was nice.  I haven’t worked in an office in three years and I have forgotten about things like protocol.  I do not know even the most rudimentary rules for relationships in the office anymore.  I find them troublesome and I am fearful of them.  I was nervous thus to ask the young lady to have a drink, even though I wasn’t suggesting anything by it, but a drink.

She and I talked about art and philosophy and about her plans for courses at the New School.  It was a very pleasant time and then it was time for her to leave for her train.  I sat and finished my champagne alone.

A woman came in and sat beside me.  She chatted freely with the bartender and the waitress.  She was either a regular or was close with the bartender in some other context.  She had a slight accent.  She was Belgian.  The waitress, a half-Cuban, half-Puerto Rican, now american, commented in a slightly Nu-Yorican accent that the Belgian had not lost her accent despite having been here for so long.

The Belgian said she had not changed her voice in twenty years.  I asked them both if they ever changed the way they speak when they talk to different people.  They both appeared confused by my question and the Belgian shook her head negatively as she exhaled smoke and ashed her cigaret.  I continued, “Sometimes when I am talking to my family or to other Indians, even though I am speaking in English, my voice changes to the idiomatic English which they also speak.”

They both smiled at that in recognition and the waitress, the younger of the two commented that sometimes she did that when speaking to someone from another country even if it wasn’t her own country. The Belgian woman said she never changed her voice, but seemed to understand what we meant.

A woman came into the bar seeking a tobacconist and wanted to know where she could buy a brand of Cuban cigar called Romeo y Julieta. A man responded that the Romeo y Julieta company also grew tobacco off the island of Cuba.  The woman did not know this.  She wanted a cigar which would taste like the Cuban make of Romeo y Julieta cigars.  The man and I each recommended a brand of cigar and he knew of a shop.  She left.  Shortly thereafter I too left for my walk.

I had chosen the music to soundtrack my walk earlier in the day.  I was wearing a Sony Walkman and had Bach’s Suites for Solo Cello on tape as performed by Pablo Casals.  The Suite #1 began as I stepped onto 6th Avenue headed south and the sound of the long drawn bow across the strings filled my ears.

I walked southward on 6th.  The streets were crowded with people shopping.

<Break>