The Delicate Comfort of Anonymity

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We push, sit upon and ride the half-ass, trickety jalopy we call the Internet at the dawn of international communication in real-time, awaiting a sensibility to take hold of the government that isn’t fundamentalist Christian and radically right-wing or from Texas with a hardline agenda or wearing an elephant tiepin in the form of the flag of the United States of America.

It is apparent and obvious to absolutely everyone now that the United States of America is occupied by a political force that can only be called a faction. This faction controls communications media with near-absolute restriction of content, controls agencies that monitor, manage and distribute the collective funds of the largest bank account in the world, and controls the military to which it granted 400 Billion dollars last year, the best funded, most powerful war machine on earth.

Among the fools in this faction there are elderly bigots who are given swan-songs of attention, there are hyper-militarily minded protocol hounds who have seized the language they wrote only two and a half generations ago. There are House Niggers. And House Wiggers, too. House Immigrunts.

All have been seized by soldier mentality and blood-lust – that is the stage play CNN, NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, HBO, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and every major news outlet in the United States is meant to project because what has happened is:

The free-est economy in the world puffed itself up for eight years – wrapped itself into a Y2knot by getting dumbed into a hitch in the 90’s – and had to be “system re-booted.”

Thus, 9/11.

When all intranet debts were erased by a tidal wave of media, all pumping the same fiction (a well-known – not obscure – mafia move). All the drunk parasites clinging to the largest multi-media assault on international humanity ever attempted by any country, any peoples.

This faction is guilty of producing, staging and titling “9-eleven” to salvage the failing economy and stimulate younger generations of participants into their System of Society. They do this with pride.

We witness these people drop megatons of death from the sky upon the heads of others, elsewhere, anywhere in the world they wish. These, who have said aloud – and continue to say it – they believe they are doing God’s work: murder, manipulation of masses, demagoguery, espionage, political deceit, covert operations, corporate protectionism over truth and environmental needs.

(and their remains this stubborn question of “whiteness”. A demon they have given political birth to and won’t let go of. This ugly American Racism born from the evilest of the fictions they claim … the “discovery”of “Colombus”).

How does one address a bigot? How does one approach an enraged fundamentalist in order to seek common human spirit and tranquility among us all? One imagines s/he is most susceptible during religious ceremonies, when they claim to be open to God’s word.

The Peace Movement is God Asking Humanity to Stand Down.

Make Peace. Calm yourself and your species of its ill-will and avarice. Earth hangs in the balance. Human arrogance deafens and dumbs you in the delicate comfort of your anonymity.

Put a stop to it.

Americans United to Stop War
we must learn to do without oil

mtk 12/20/2002 Los Angeles

Off-Year Elections

I am a pacifist and a conscientious objector to war who seeks political asylum for myself and my family from the United States of America, whom I perceive to be the world’s worst terrorist nation-state.

It is a nation-state without clearly defined borders. It consistently and has constantly maintained armadas on the high seas and in ports all over the world – on “sovereign” territory. Its government is a military junta run by pseudo-Christian fundamentalists who have turned a universal moral truism: “Thou Shalt Not Kill” into its opposite, and have violated every international law on war established since the Second World War (as they have it): Nuremberg, violated. Geneva, violated. Warsaw, violated. U.N. and U.N. charter, violated from first day. The despotic faction in charge has violated also the United States’ own Constitution and shielded itself from recrimination or even inquiry. It is secretive, cabalistic and frightening to many.

The election of a Republican Senate unifies the branches of the U.S. government under an insecure, aging collection of un-representative rightists who paranoically project evil on to mankind, believe these actions to be legitimate. The media are predominantly owned by huge corporations who support this worldview, and the system has successfully factionalized, cordoned-off, controlled and out-capitalized independent outlets for information, thus eliminating any hope of a “checks and balances system” for at least two and a half years. There is about to be wholesale change of how business is done in the name of the United States with its partners and alliances. New compromises will be demanded on top of this, for this white, unfathomably rich, minority of the human species.

The people who have taken control of the United States government are the biggest money there is in the world and now, they are a desperate machine composed of a people who have fictionalized for so long that they feel they have startlingly seized control legitimately. To this worldview has been granted two years of control of the Supreme Court, both Houses of Congress and the Executive Office. (Please Lincoln Chafee, Turn. Now. Not to independent, to Democrat, outright.)

As a registered voter who has participated in the last 9 U.S. elections with federal implications, including the following for President, in order chronologically from 1988: Dukakis, Clinton/Gore, Nader and Gore and in local races in Austin, TX, San Francisco, CA, New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA, for Governors Ann Richards and Jerry Brown and many Democrats, Independents and Libertarian and Green Party candidates. I have participated deliberately in the American exercise in democracy with consideration.

I now believe that not one single vote that I have ever cast in the American system has made a positive difference in the world, because my vote either went to a losing candidate or my candidate was, in point of fact, a loser (Clinton). The American system is corrupt and worthless. It is not democracy (Germany’s is far better). The tiny range of political ideologies in its corporate-controlled system protects a wealthy minority from everyone else. A minority that allows only limited entry – at its speed, for its purposes – to its party.

Because I do not wish to participate in the lie that the USA perpetuates, I have been successfully marginalized by the very wealthy of the United States of America.

So, I have not democratically voted at all, but have merely attended a pathetic dance-of-legitimization that has resulted in hats and horn-blowers for the faction that calls itself Grand Old Party, a dance which would have been only mildly less incorrigible were it being done for the Democrats (I dare to say: “If Gore’s President, the WTC are standing today.” Bush baited them … all summer, just like Roosevelt in ’41 with the boats in Japanese water. It’s their style actually, it’s not even that clandestine, they call themselves “gentleman farmers” … The Bushes brought down the attacks, dammit. Face the facts. And they are murderers, this morning by an unmanned spacecraft over Yemeni soil. No judge, no jury. Cowboy – maybe Wellstone got it the same way.)

They are a serious family, the biggest mafia. The grandfather assisted in the financing of Hitler and the mentality that exercised the poisonous lie of eugenics. As it failed, they somehow planted candidacy onto one of their sons through a shady war-story and, though he lacked intelligence, he managed to ride on the coattails of the television actor, and so became Chief Executive and began baiting Arabs for oil, their “spice”. They rolled into Texas from Maine or Connecticut with a whole lot of money and they bought a posture by feeding bigotry, insecurity, fear and rage. They manipulated and bullied newspapers and poor people. They re-instituted barbaric, unenlightened practices. And they lied and posed bare-facedly, using powerful media to do so, rehearsing ultimately for the “big-time”. This is all so obviously scripted in their response to an event they ‘staged’ … And still they posture. It’s amazing, shameless.

Yes, conceptually, the Bush-Americans staged the attacks on the World Trade Center. [Leave out the Pentagon and wherever the other guy was wandering in what must have been a hellish turmoil. (“Your job is to see if they’ll shoot you down, God be Willing”).]

The Millennium was the set up and 9/11 was the knock down.

Forever let it be added to their list of crimes, the short-sighted old fools, the Bush-Americans staged the “planes-into-towers” thing. They built the set, bought the losses, made the calculations, placed the documentation tools, baited the enemy and stepped out of his way. And that is an accusation. A legal and civil accusation. These people are fascist and amoral and need to be tranquilized and jailed. They lack the intelligence to see humanity and our planet for what it is, a delicate organism.

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

AMERICA, I HAVE SEEN THE ENEMY, AND IT IS YOU.

Our Son and His Country, 2002

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Family:

Ocean Mandela Milan has been born to my partner TRW and myself.
He enters the western calendar at 9:13 a.m. (PDT, GMT-8) on 8th October, 2002, a Tuesday.

He weighs in at 3170g and has a full head of black hair. His eyes initially appeared blue! But now they are getting browner by the day. We are not getting much sleep, but we are thrilled to have him with us.

We conceived Ocean purposefully, with all loving intent, courage and will, last winter. It is our first child. We have known each other only as adults. I met TRW in San Francisco when she was 22 years old and I have known her for more than seven years. We lived together in New York City for 18 months. We have relocated to Los Angeles. I am 35. She is 28.

In my partner’s work with young children (aged 0-6), and through her studies in college, preschool and in intimate family settings, it has become apparent that loving family structures benefit a child greatly. We have read, studied and personally observed that the most important factors in children’s development and happiness are parents who are attentive and loving and the presence of love, kindness and attentiveness in any extended family; parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles who are supportive, kind and encouraging.

Here in the U.S., we have both witnessed single parents, divorced parents, and unmarried couples who are more involved and loving than many of their married counterparts and who do have happier, more balanced children. We want to provide a safe, stable, loving, educational and enlightened environment for our child in which POSSIBILITY is a fundamental that makes life worth living and fulfilling. We do not want to create an environment that symbolizes RESTRICTION of possibility. We want to be organic in addressing the needs of our child. We do not want to create formalistic rules based on pre-existing social structures, rules that might limit the growth of our child’s mind, soul or body.

Recently, friends, family and others have asked if we are married or worse, if we plan to marry, or worse still, why we aren’t married.

Young children don’t know or care whether their parents are married; it’s simply not an issue before age 6. And while it’s true that as children become older (6 and up, school-age), they are more aware of social structures and may be influenced by peers or others who may imply that their parents are “supposed” to be married, we have witnessed this stigma lessening every year as times change. We are confident, from watching and learning from families and children and society around us, that in 2008, marriage will not be as serious a societal expectation and that our decision will not affect our child’s self-esteem or security.

We are quite proud to provide for our child’s friends, an example of a relationship in which parents are individually whole, total and perfect equals, mother and father, neither reduced or inflated by the socially-weighted titles of “wife” or “husband”, providing a happy and healthy home for their child. We are proud to be strong enough, stable enough in our love for one another and secure enough in our knowledge of self to be unmarried partners in the endeavor of raising a child.

We met in San Francisco and moved thousands of miles, abandoning personal projects and employment, to make our family and settle here in California, a place we love, where we feel secure. We made this decision to have a child because we care deeply about our world, are devoted to making it a better place, and feel that by raising a kind and conscientious child we can change the world. This pregnancy is happening now because we are lucky, and because it is meant to be. The world needs peace-minded, enlightened, non-violent, intelligent, humanist parents, badly.

Neither of us feels the institution of marriage is for us. We recognize marriage as something that many people have grown to expect of those who love one another and who want to have a child – but marriage, as an institution, has no personal meaning for either of us.

Religious marriage ceremonies conducted when any party is NOT a faithful believer in the philosophy under which the ceremony is being held have always struck us both as hypocritical and fundamentally bogus bonding rituals. And licensed marriage under a State that STILL refuses to recognize same-sex marriages and is completely unrepresentative of our political views is ethically reprehensible to us. We think of ourselves as brave in our deep commitment to TRUTH and honesty in politics, life and our love. We do not want to participate in rituals or support institutions in which we do not personally believe.

If we were to ignore the discomfort we feel and marry to satisfy our family’s, state’s or anyone else’s expectations, we would both soon regret it, and we strongly believe that we would be starting out on this venture with a negative feeling. Resentment—toward each other, toward the family or state that pushed us into it—would be sure to develop quickly. We don’t want that.

We have both witnessed tragic and debilitating divorces, and have seen the heavy expectation that marriage places on relationships. I was an unwilling participant in the terrible strain that orthodox concepts of marriage placed on my parents at an age when I should have been free of such concerns. Separation has been good for my parents as individuals and would have been easier to cope with had the heavy expectation of marriage not been such a significant factor. Many people trapped in marriages they do not want suffer needlessly in relationships that no God or good person would wish for any sentient being.

Neither my partner nor I know any couples in wildly successful long-term marriages. We do know couples who have been together for many years without marrying and who have strong relationships. Some of these couples do not have children but wish they could, eventually hope to. Marriage has never been a positive consideration for them in that decision-making process – only a negative: “Well, if we do have a child, we’ll HAVE to get married.” They say it because they are considering HAVING to satisfy someone ELSE. This (sadly common) sentiment in these relationships actually prevents beautiful, stable and wonderful people from committing to bringing new life into this world.

We both feel that if we were married we would lose control of the pure and honest love that we are daily working so hard to build. By deciding to have a child, we feel we are leading by example, providing an alternative for other unmarried couples – those who choose to be together and may have similar feelings but lack the personal security or the courage to have a child.

We are proud to assist in reducing the expectation society places on anyone in love.

There are things we each feel strongly about, and overwhelmingly, remarkably, my partner and I agree with each other about the most important environmental factors that will help determine what kind of person our child will grow up to be. That is in large part why we have decided we’ll be good partners in parenting. We enter into all our decisions together and with great thoughtfulness, foresight, and clarity.

This decision, not to marry, was the first of many decisions we made and will make together. It is a decision that reflects our personal beliefs, our experiences and the ways in which we hope to change this world and our child’s experiences in it.

Just as we respect others’ different opinions—and know that they are what make our society and world a diverse and fascinating place filled with cultural and social variance—we expect respect for our opinions in return.

Now, to his name:

We have considered dozens of names in the past year. I won’t go into the many possibilities, but I will tell you some of the things we like about the name we have given to our new son.

We both decided early on that we didn’t want to take either of our family names – we feel that a third new surname would serve to bond our family better since we chose not to marry. To this end we have given our son his own first, middle and surname. We will eventually decide whether or not we wish to take his name for ourselves, likely we will.

TRW and I have swum in many oceans and seas. We have both always loved the Ocean, having been born by it ourselves – TRW near the Pacific and I by the Bay of Bengal. It was a great day early in this pregnancy that we agreed that the English name for Ocean could be used for either a boy or a girl and that French, Portuguese, Spanish or Sanskrit variants could be used by anyone who chooses to do so (Oceano, is the Spanish, Swedish and Portuguese, and a particular favorite of mine). It’s easily translated.

It was TRW’s idea that a second initial with an ‘M’ would make “OM” and we agreed that would be nice. Had he been a girl, the name we first thought of was Madeleine (a French name that TRW has always liked and I remember enjoying in the children’s book of that title). After she had chosen the girl’s name she asked me to think of a three-syllable, ‘M’ name for a boy. Within seconds, the first thought was of one of my heroes, Mandela.

TRW agreed that the name Ocean Mandela has both a wonderful sound in English and carries international significance for its socio-political importance (a sidenote: Nelson Mandela titled his autobiography “Long Walk To Freedom” after a quote from Nehru)

The hardest part for us was choosing a surname for the baby. We ended with Milan because it means “union” or “coming together” in Sanskrit. We are an inter-racial couple and we feel this name is progressive and beautiful. In addition to creating the sound ‘OMM’ with his initials, the name has the following anecdotal niceties.

As letter number 13, ‘M’ is the center of the western alphabet providing balance.

The numbers of letters in each name corresponds to the number of syllables in the haiku form of poetry from Japan – 5,7,5.

Only afterward did I remember Milan Kundera the GREAT Czech writer – exiled in Paris – whom I have read and enjoyed for decades.

I, for one, call him “Little Man” and approve of Manny or other variants as long as they are tasteful. We look forward to introducing you to our son, Ocean Mandela Milan.

I mean that as the aforementioned Czech-writer Milan Kindera once wrote: “An illusion revealed and a rationalization unmasked have the same pitiful shell. Nothing is easier than to mistake one for the other.”

My life in the USA has been a constant disagreement with the powers that be. I find them deeply bigoted, fascist and corrupt. But until 9/11/01, I allowed myself the thought there was hope for this place. I always worked hard to believe I was helping to educate and create a better USA than the one I was forced to move into. That we would one day come to common ground. What nonsense! This place is run by supremacists and pseudo-Christians who suck oil, water, air and energy from the rest of the world and then justify their bloated, self-serving attitude. 9/11/01 only made what was covert, overt. Unmasked the rationalization of empire.

We were all spending the last decade talking about “post-colonialism” only to find that in the Christian’s 21st century, colonialism is alive and well, and its latest manifestation, the USA under Bush and Cheney, is no different from the ones who locked up my grandfather in a jail in his own country in 1928 and 1931, and who claim to have “civilized” India with railroads. They are only wearing a different mask.

My son, my partner and I vociferously protest the American military intervention planned for Iraq and the covert operations that these pigs continually run around the world – in the Philippines, in Colombia, in Afghanistan, in Africa, with armadas on all high seas, overtly militant, with global positioning technology accurate to the size of a dime.

Because of my protest work for the last fifteen years, (and because of the sensitive work my father did for the American military) I am absolutely certain that my e-mail and phone are monitored by the NSA. Though I have always followed their rules and have struggled mightily to work within their system, there is no real freedom for me here and there never has been.

The American nightmare is what I hope my son can avoid. My partner and I – truly global citizens who believe in world peace and harmony between peoples – intend to raise him to lead us away from war – to disarm the USA and to demand multi-lateral, peaceful disarmament of the entire world for his grandchildren.

Three Days After the Birth of Our Son

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11 October 02
Los Angeles

Last night as I sat in the baby’s room with TRW and we tried to calm Oceano as she breastfed him, the radio broadcast the U.S. Senate roll-call vote on Resolution 45 that authorized the use of unilateral military force against Iraq for George W. Bush. It was O.’s third night “on earth.”

This country makes up only 7% of the entire population of the world. 7%!!! Where do you get off telling 93% of the world how to live?! You suck so much more oil, water, power and energy than anyone else anywhere. You produce more waste – nuclear, plastic, noxious gas – and force garbage onto others. You have a military presence in most places – your military commands global positioning technology down to the size of a dime.

What is happening in the United States of America is shameful, pathetic and racist. Americans, drunk on technology or passed out from over-indulgence weren’t even woken from their reverie of engorgement when slapped HARD on 9/11. We need you to wake up! Your elders have no idea what they are doing. They refuse to leave the world stage quietly.

Instead they force their high-tek-savvy grandchildren to create pro-war content that glorifies them as “The Greatest Generation” – which they, being kids, do for a paycheck, weekly doses of “Friends” and sexual freedom. The warmongering generation dumbly rattle the wheels of their chairs like sabres – scream blindly about wars past as though they have an understanding of weapons of the day – they don’t. World peace can only happen through peaceful, multi-lateral, disarmament.

There is little representation in Congress for this idea – embraced by most Americans – and yet we are deeply taxed to pay the salaries of our so-called representatives. Taxation without representation was the basis for the “revolution” that gave birth to this system. Today, unrepresented people taxed to pay for this system number in the tens of millions. Bush placed last after Nobody and Gore. And the paper screams that Congress supports Bush’s proposal for attacking Iraq. Meanwhile the radio this morning presents a “community calendar of anti-war demonstrations” that includes 16 different protests to take place across L.A. Several are ongoing, weekly protests. It is time for another revolution. We must disarm the USA.

Television programming devoted to sports, entertainment and even to watching each other behave stupidly has been so successfully marketed to the under-educated Americans that they have become skittish and defensive about their own ignorance – unable to admit they know nothing about the world – indoctrinated by the endless sloans of Big Brother in the schools, churches and moviehouses: “Columbus discovered America.”

The USA is an idiot-child in a world of ancient cultures – China, India, Africa, Australia, Europe – and it’s being led down the toilet by a crusty, stubborn, rigid, militant culture headed by pseudo-Christian haters who have audaciously remade Thou Shalt Not Kill into its opposite.

They spit venom at others while acting out all evil human behavior themselves – bombing, killing, butchering, name-calling, hatred, bigotry – and they see no hypocrisy in it; pathetic, repressed, idiot-children of humanity, you will be the death of us all. The USA sucks. It sucks oil like no one else. It sucks water and power and energy and it shits out more poison than anyone. It’s freedoms have spawned unsupportable gluttony. All in the name of the white man’s Liberty – his unsatiable need to consume all property, have total control of humanity.

And what will you Bush-Americans do after you “regime-change” Iraq? What will you do about China? And India? They are nuclear powers. What if they start to hate you because you are so stupid you don’t even see what a mess you are making? What if rogue Al Qaeda members choose to hide in China?

Where are America’s priests, rabbi, brahmins and imams? Reduced to pawns in a political battle of ever-shifting factions of power-seekers. Right now, we couldn’t see or hear any God trying to communicate with us anyway, because the enormous din of our own machines of war and oversexed marketing – billboards, screaming ads, hyper-powered narratives of false prophets – drowns out everything, even the chirping of crickets.

Fuck you silent Americans who let this charade continue that leads to death by nuclear or bio-chemical attack – Bush is asking for it, baiting others to give it to you and you won’t even say: stand down, dammit, before you kill us all. Stop the USA. Stop the warmongers. Tranquillize the bellicose.

Us = Them, installation feat. "1984" performance, Los Angeles, 2002

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usequalsthem001

Us = Them, curated and produced by M.T. Karthik, Fifty Foot Pine Tree Press, Wine Hobo Trio, Booklyn Artists Alliance and 33 1/3 Books and Gallery, Sunset at Alvarado, F. Sosa, Proprietor, September 11, 2002

1984, performance by MTK

On September 11th, 2002, beginning at 5:35am Pacific Time, corresponding to the moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center in New York City exactly one year before, MTK read George Orwell’s novel 1984, aloud in its entirety at 331/3 Books and Gallery, at the corner of Sunset and Alvarado, in Los Angeles, ending at sunset:

as a performance element on the opening day of the Booklyn Artists exhibition

Us = Them, installation feat. “1984” performance, Los Angeles, 2002

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usequalsthem001

Us = Them, curated and produced by M.T. Karthik, Fifty Foot Pine Tree Press, Wine Hobo Trio, Booklyn Artists Alliance and 33 1/3 Books and Gallery, Sunset at Alvarado, F. Sosa, Proprietor, September 11, 2002

1984, performance by MTK

On September 11th, 2002, beginning at 5:35am Pacific Time, corresponding to the moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center in New York City exactly one year before, MTK read George Orwell’s novel 1984, aloud in its entirety at 331/3 Books and Gallery, at the corner of Sunset and Alvarado, in Los Angeles, ending at sunset:

as a performance element on the opening day of the Booklyn Artists exhibition

ode, 2002

Love a pine tree intensely,
expecting nothing
and perhaps it will, in its immensity,
rebroadcast that love
like an antenna
scattering your emotion
down the umbrella of branches and tiny needles
that fall from above
to prick the soles of pilgrim’s feet
in accurate punctures,
coursing by vein at the heel
up into the minds of tree lovers
who seek nothing in the trunk
save the root
and to die in peace

MTK, Los Angeles, 4/25/2002

The Marathon Project

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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

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

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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.

A Hundred Days Before Nine Eleven

My novel, Karna’s Conflict, in which a disgruntled socialist blows up the Empire State Building with a thermonuclear device, remained online for a year (1999) and statistics showed the site was visited numerous times by users in Langley, Virginia and other D.C. suburbs. We assumed the content had attracted the vaunted Pentagon intelligence goons who would fail so completely the following year, only to remain in power and indeed, to receive promotions.

I was not surprised then on September 11, 2001, when I saw the towers burning from a Williamsburg rooftop. I clearly understood why someone would do it and I, like many others, had expected the like enough to have predicted it in near-exacting detail.

Having been among those who witnessed the controlled implosion of the Williamsburg water tanks a couple of months before the attacks, I even wondered aloud to M. Weber at the Booklyn Tuesday night meeting# whether any of the Italian families in our infamous neighborhood had anything to do with it. Occam’s Razor … it just fit. Or, as those same neighbors in my old ‘hood might put it: “If it smells like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck … shoot it – it’s a duck.”

New York City was bloated then. It had been waiting to pop for years. One could feel it. That’s why what I felt, as that Tuesday unfolded and it became clear – by noon – that everything was over; what I felt more than any other emotion under a brilliant blue sky empty of the machines of grounded men; was relief.  Relief that the damage wasn’t worse.

That summer, undercover agents were everywhere in New York. I have said to many friends, in sober terms, that as a dark-skinned, bearded Asian I felt their presence, often. I can also honestly say I witnessed them – both making arrests and getting loaded in the bars. I played pool once with a gun-toting federal agent who was so loaded he challenged me to play a game because he didn’t like the way I looked. It was scary. My friends told me not to do it, but this was before I had my son. I beat him by two balls and he showed me the gun and told me I was lucky I’d won fair. That was late 1998.

In June of 2001, I left town and went to Taiwan for two weeks. I returned to New York City on the 23rd of June and wrote:

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 awake and talkative. 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 a place to do 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 smoke and continued talking.  The smoke was affirmative. 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.”

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 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, toward Manhattan.  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 sneaked a smoke 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; an unmarked black plastic bag, covering a white plastic bag inside. He had a small band-aid strip stuck on his head exposed below his high hairline. The rectangular band-aid 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, expressers 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 upper two thirds of the World Trade Center Towers had fully disappeared into thick, coal-colored clouds. The curved disks of shoppers umbrellas, most were black, bobbed and floated through space.  The storm had traveled overhead as we traveled underground and now a broad dark cloud covered 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 smoke.  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.

<unsnip>

And a hundred days later they were gone.
CONTROLLED DEMOLITION?

The official explanation for the collapse of the towers as first proposed by FEMA and subsequently supported by the 9/11 Commission, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and Popular Science magazine, is that the collisions and ensuing explosions and burning fuel from the aircraft that struck the towers weakened the infrastructure, created increases in temperatures such that steel melted and concrete was pulverized in less than an hour and, by a random natural accident, collapsed each tower into its own footprint – the first time this ever happened in the well-documented history of skyscrapers.

And this happened not once, nor twice but three times that day, including to a 47-story steel building that was never struck by any plane.

This is an unprecedented shock, as per Loose Change, the DVD, which is excellent on this topic:
1945, a B-52 Bomber lost in fog crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building. 14 people died, and the building endured 1 million dollars in damages, but it stands to this day.

1975, a three-alarm fire broke out between 9th and 14th floors of North Tower. The fire led to the decision to install sprinklers in the Towers.

1988, a 62-story Los Angeles skyscraper experiences a fire spread over four floors that burns for 3 hours, but the building remains intact.

1991, a 38-story skyscraper in Philadelphia, built in 1973, burned for over 19 hours, spread over 8 floors. It did not collapse.

2004, a 56-story skyscraper in Venezuela, built in 1976, burned for over 17 hours spread across 26 floors, eventually reaching the roof. It did not collapse.

2005, the Windsor building in Madrid, Spain, a 32-story tower framed in steel-reinforced concrete, burned for almost 24 hours, completely destroying the top ten stories of the building, but the building itself did not collapse.

Yet on September 11, 2001, two 110-story skyscrapers, completed in 1973, burning for 56 and 103 minutes, respectively, on four floors in each building, collapsed entirely to the ground; and a third, with minimal damage, the same.

And the official explanation has other major problems.

In fact, there is no photographic or physical evidence of temperatures described in the official explanation of the collapse. There is, however, much documented evidence of firefighters and evacuees making their way to and through these regions of allegedly molten steel.

Melting steel demands steady endurance of 2,000-3,000 degree temperatures, but the fires in these towers lasted hardly an hour. Indeed, the North Tower, was struck at an angle by the airliner-turned-missile, which resulted in most of the jet’s fuel burning outside the building in a huge fireball. The fire inside, meanwhile, looked like it was going out:

“Battalion Seven Chief: “Battalion Seven … Ladder 15, we’ve got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines. Radio that, 78th floor numerous 10-45 Code Ones.”

Firefighters had radioed that they felt they could control it. They were there, present – in hallways that were supposedly aflame in 2,000 degree temperatures and they were reporting that it seemed they had the fire contained. And then, suddenly, the North Tower collapsed.

The building in which fire burned for the shortest amount of time, in which it seemed to be contained, weakened and collapsed first.

The 911 Truth community is very convincing on this: the collapses weren’t random or accidental. Investigations reveal evidence suggesting it was accomplished with explosive charges placed at strategic points in the buildings, a controlled demolition. The most recent research, finds evidence of thermite, a sulfur-reactant used in controlled demolitions in melted WTC steel.

There are numerous reports by eyewitnesses describing multiple explosions in the buildings, far from the site of the initial crashes – the downstairs lobby looked like it had been bombed out when the firefighters and the French filmmaking Naudet brothers arrive with their camera.

The amount of testimonial evidence is stunning and can be found online in many places: http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org and
Mike Rivero’s What Really Happened? at: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/911_wtc_videos.html The evidence was also presented as far back as 2002 by Eric Hufschmid in his book Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack, and the accompanying DVD Painful Deceptions and very well deliberated in the Loose Change DVD, previously cited. There are flashes and puffs of cement in all the videographic evidence that look very much like controlled explosions designed to allow for freefall and secure implosion of the structures.

There has been much focus by the 911 truth community on the late afternoon collapse of WTC7 that day, a 47-story, steel-framed skyscraper that collapsed upon itself in six seconds, though it was not struck by an aircraft. WTC7 contained sensitive data, including 3-4,000 files belonging to the Securities and Exchanges Commission related to numerous Wall Street investigations and was revealed to have housed the Department of Defense, the Internal Revenue Service, secret CIA operations staff on three floors and Rudolph Giuliani’s emergency bunker. There was no reason for this building to collapse and documentation and reports of the event overwhelmingly support the conjecture that it was intentionally destroyed.

The building’s owner, Larry Silverstein, said as much when, in an interview for the PBS documentary, “America Rebuilds,” he reveals:

“I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I said, ‘We’ve had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.’ And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse,”

implying that he and others authorized the controlled demolition of WTC7. (It has been reported that Silverstein later recanted this taped statement, saying he meant to say “pull them” meaning the firefighters, out of harm’s way, which smacks of nonsense).
“Maybe the smartest thing to do is just pull it,” he says, “and they made that decision – to pull – and we watched the building collapse.” This immediately brings up questions:
1. Why did you make this decision?
2. When exactly were the explosives set?
3. Who set them?

The timing of the collapses is another giveaway. The 110-story structures fall within ten seconds each – straight down into their own footprint. There is no tilting or listing and the material from one floor to the next meets with no resistance. The tempo of the collapses never even slows. WTC7 falls in less than seven seconds! The Loose Change DVD makes an excellent case for “free-fall,” by including a simple calculation of gravitational collapse superimposed over images of the collapses shown set to timecode.

But currently, the leading conjecture on controlled demolition of the towers is that the towers were demolished with pre-planted explosives that likely included thermate, a sulfur explosive/reactant that melts steel and which is commonly used in controlled demolitions.

Physical evidence was swiftly removed and destroyed after September 11, but recently, evidence of the presence of thermate on WTC steel was discovered by BYU professor Dr. Steven Jones, physicist and co-founder of “Scholars for 911 Truth,” an organization of professional academics seeking to investigate the polarizing events more thoroughly – from their website:

“Scholars for 911 Truth is a non-partisan association of faculty, students, and scholars, in fields as diverse as history, science, military affairs, psychology, and philosophy, dedicated to exposing falsehoods and to revealing truths behind 9/11.”

Dr. Jones has published a paper on the collapse of the towers, in which he calls for an investigation based on hard evidence that he has gathered and experiments he has conducted.

It has also been documented that there was a 30 – 36 hour window of time when power was down in both WTC towers the weekend before the events of that Tuesday. The power was out for long stretches from September 6th to the 9th. Cameras and security systems from the 36th floor up to the roofs of the buildings were off.

Facing the data brings one swiftly to the conjecture that explosives were likely planted in the buildings at this time. ZIM Corporation’s sudden exodus from the North Tower’s 17th floor just one week before 9/11 is suspect – the company forfeited a $50,000 deposit in suddenly breaking the lease. Details are at http://www.911missinglinks.com.

Further, for several weeks prior to the attacks, due to threats, security had been increased at the Towers, but there was a sudden stand-down from a heightened security position, just before the attacks, on September 6th and, bomb-sniffing dogs which had been present for several weeks, were removed from the Towers. Additional support for the theory that explosions at the bases of the towers assisted the collapses, comes from data collected at Colombia University’s Seismic Research Center in nearby Palisades, New York. Which show two IMMENSE spikes just before each collapse! Experts have said the spikes resemble those registered by underground bomb blasts.

Let’s say no U.S. American is ever found guilty of being on the inside of the attacks – because of a lack of interest, or because of political will or by oppression – at least the fundamental laws of physics, gravity and science shouldn’t suffer. We ought to address the collapse of the buildings in order to hold universally understood ideas that are visible over basic real-time media like television broadcasts, to be true. People should be able to immediately comprehend that 110 stories collapsing in less than ten seconds is “free-fall” which necessarily implies a controlled set of explosions, timed to allow material to collapse.

It just cannot have happened by accident. It simply cannot have happened as described in the FEMA report, the 9/11 Commission Report and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) report. It’s physically impossible.

When I first saw the collapses, live, on television, there was no doubt in my mind that it was a controlled demolition. I have an understanding of gravity and basic physics – I know and understand what free-fall is. I immediately knew the WTC buildings were brought down with pre-planning and the detonation of controlled explosives. I guess I assumed it would be a part of the plot revealed – the bombs in the buildings that allowed the feat.

This first instinct, which was substantiated by a lifetime of experience and education, gave way to a myth that defied logic as I listened to the government tell me that the collapse was an accident caused by burning jet fuel melting steel. I doubted my knowledge in favor of the official story – or at least doubted myself enough not to voice my feelings against the official story.

I have been trying to understand how this could have happened. I think I am the victim of calculated mass hypnosis. It could be that I was terrified by the scale of what it meant that this controlled demolition was going to be covered-up and replaced with a myth, and thus, boggled with fear, I succumbed to an immense, corporate-media-propagated lie that defies all science.

Perhaps because it was reiterated so often by so many agencies of “truth” – government, press and academy – and accepted by so many U.S. Americans immediately, I shelved rejecting the explanation. It took me five years of steady investigation into this matter to shake off the veil that was cast over me then and to return my mind with confidence to what I originally believed when faced with this extraordinary event: the towers, free-falling in less than ten seconds into their own imprint cannot have been achieved without controlled demolition tactics and neither collapse had anything to do with the plane crashes.

Allowing insiders to accomplish the demolition of the World Trade Center buildings live, in real-time for the sake of a larger political end implies a level of “National Security” far beyond the imaginings of any sane democrat. It is, however, a stated tactic of the Leo Strauss-inspired neoconservatives: generating public myths because allowing the truth to be understood would be a threat to national security, is a primary tactical aggression of these thinkers, who have told us they will “lie” to us for our security and who have authorized never before seen powers of spying and intelligence gathering on our own citizens. It all just seems to fit together to say … “9/11 was an Inside Job.”

In fact, there were a lot of people who had suggested it could happen, who had reasoned it out as a logical and perhaps even likely target.

I shot 8mm video of planes in the air over the city in the summer of 2000; from my Williamsburg rooftop, including quick pans to the WTC towers and the rest of the buildings of the Manhattan skyline. The low-flying commercial jets are all landing at La Guardia in my footage and so they are very near the ground. You can see the sunlight glistening off their huge shiny underbellies just before the camera whips around to a close-up of the Towers – or the Empire State Building.

And that is why The Report of the so-called 9/11 Commission is so completely and utterly offensive to me. As a witness, as a New Yorker then, I am incensed and disgusted by the pathetic collection of whitewashing and ass-covering rationalizations produced in the 9/11 Report by the cronies in the U.S. American government.

It’s a massive hole of omissions. As a totally unplugged person I knew and know more about certain factual events of that day than the commission even elected to discuss. How can this be? Worse, there are key events – including the wargames that were held that day, false flag operations – that have been omitted by the Commission, which effectively means these were covered-up by their so-called Investigation.

No, I did not feel surprised on 9-eleven. My surprise was only at how clearly and closely I was allowed to observe this seminal event in the history of our species.  The enormous burning triangular gash, the purposeful, last-second upward angling of the second plane as it screamed into the building, the neat and even collapse of each tower. The collapse of world trade center 7. I was presented all of this. Live. And then from many angles; what happened just a few thousand feet away from my nose. [Had they fallen toward me, how far from my feet would they have lain?]

By evening, I had a swollen rock in my gut. I had the feeling that the experience was a staged event, a New York spectacle that had been planned to occur at a precise moment.  I met at least fifty people who felt this within hours; a woman I was with that morning, a Scandinavian from Copenhagen said, “This was a well-planned act. It was meant to happen when it did. If it had been at noon, the death toll would be 50,000.” A recently immigrated Italian, an artist, designer I knew said bluntly, “It feels scripted.”

That there were many people who knew it was going to happen; that it was being presented to me by people who knew more before it happened than I still know about what happened … this thought haunts me. The fact, not theory, that there are people who could have stopped this from happening and didn’t sickens me. That there may be specific people who let it happen, so they could begin an all-out campaign for more war has depressed me for years.

In the days immediately after the attacks, I watched all news reports with a suspect eye. I watched anyone who was not in New York that day and who spoke of the attacks on the Towers – including George Bush – very, very closely. Many people recast what I had witnessed. There were numerous mis-statements, false statements and melodramas – sensationalist, yellow journalism inflamed emotions instead of becalming them. “Tens of thousands dead!” came down to 2800. Osama bin Laden was named as the culprit within fifteen minutes of the first plane striking its target – a classic disinformation technique of the US CIA, confirmed as such when six days later bin Laden denied involvement to the world’s papers that would listen, a denial buried in World Trade Center steel.

Dick Cheney disappeared for five days and then reappeared on Meet the Press with Tim Russert from Camp David for a special one hour program with only one commercial interrupt, during which time he legitimized the unelected military dictator Parvez Musharraf of Pakistan as a staunch ally of republicanism and US American liberty, defined and blamed an organized, multinational secret agency he called Al Qaeda – “which means “the base” in Arabic” – and declared it headed by Osama bin Laden. Cheney told blatant lies about the U.S. military protocol for shooting down aircraft in emergencies and demanded the right to function with a National Security agenda that overcame the Constitution, to murder bin Laden or others without trial, to be allowed to hire unsavory elements to go after “the ones that did this,” and to impose never before seen restrictions on US American freedoms.

Donald Rumsfeld then followed Cheney’s performance appearing first outside, in front of the glass doors of the ABC building in DC for an impromptu question and answer period in which he first dropped his, “Sometimes the best defense is a good offense,” as though we hadn’t just been blindsided in a huge failure of defense, and then subsequently went indoors to make a national announcement to regulate plane tickets on ABC’s This Week, trying to make it sound off-handed: “Well, Sam, I’d say about the price of a ticket from DC to Los Angeles, maybe 800 dollars.”  Rumsfeld the voice of reason in a wild, emotional time: Cokie Roberts shouting, “Congressional reaction is real, it’s not just for the cameras!” After Rumsfeld, John Ashcroft popped up on MSNBC for a 2-minute press conference to quickly and internationally demand, by executive order, greater and wider wiretapping capability than ever before in U.S. history.

I videotaped and observed for four days. Coverage by mass media felt obviously and intensely scripted – heavy state propaganda permeated every sector of media, well-known independent media. It was shocking to watch – respected companies, publishers, editors-in-chief, editors, anchors and even well-respected reporters and journalists lined up to declare war in response to the acts of 9/11, a vengeful desire to lash out at “those who did this” that completely ignored the lack of evidence and the fact that the executors of the act were all dead, had died with the bystanders they had murdered. Many declared a violent reaction as being as requisite as caring for the wounded and/or seeking out the bodies of the dead. This was in direct contradiction to the compassion and care I had witnessed in the streets of New York.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were two unknown villages until Truman decided to incinerate the people living peacefully there, not to defeat the Japanese, but because Truman was directed to communicate to the Soviets and the rest of the world that the US is willing to do what everyone feared Hitler would do: use nuclear weapons to display its dominance. In Iraq and Afghanistan, they are doing it still.

Agents of the US have been responsible for the deaths of millions in their homelands around the world, by crass and brutal methods: carpet bombings from aircraft, ground invasions, covert operations, land mines, assassinations, tortures – the CIA has been actively doing these things – pitting tribes against one another, committing bribery and extortion, distributing weapons and drugs, spying, murdering, raping and beheading – I’m talking about tax-payer funded agents of the U.S. government, taught the doctrine of the School of the Americas, committing atrocities.

China 1945, Italy 1947, Greece 1947, Philippines 1940’s, Soviet Union 1940’s–60’s, Eastern Europe 1948, Korea 1945, Albania 1949, Iran 1953,
Guatemala 1954, Costa Rica 1954, 1970-71, Syria 1956, West Asia 1957-58, Indonesia 1957, Vietnam 1950-73, Laos 1957–73, Haiti 1959-63, Guatemala 1960, 1962-80’s, Congo 1960-64, Ecuador 1960-63, France/Algeria 1960’s, Peru 1960-65, Brazil 1961-64, Dominican Republic 1960–66, Cuba1959 – 1980’s, 2001, Ghana 1966, Uruguay 1964-70, Chile 1964-73, Greece 1964-73, Bolivia 1964-75, Iraq 1972-75, 1989-present day, Australia 1973-75, Angola 1975-80’s, Zaire 1975-78, Seychelles 1979-81, Grenada 1979-84, Morocco 1983, Suriname, 1982-84, Nicaragua 1981-86, Panama 1989, Bulgaria 1990, Iraq and Afghanistan 2001 to the present.#

Five decades of this has divided human society, pluralized the diversity and spread of horrific, US-made death machines and maintained the cruel human failing of war in the face of all our philosophy and science. In this regard – in the matter of military intelligence and covert foreign policy – Truman equals Eisenhower equals Kennedy equals Johnson equals Nixon equals Ford equals Carter equals Reagan equals Bush equals Clinton equals Bush. All worked to make the US military the most diverse and complex arms seller in the world. Now only Carter repents.

The U.S. American military has infested itself upon every nation’s economy, including its own. It sucks away finances that rightfully belong to U.S. laborers, thinkers, families and children.

We push, sit upon and ride the half-ass, trickety jalopy we call the Internet at the dawn of international communication in real-time, awaiting a sensibility to take hold of the U.S. government that isn’t fundamentalist Christian and radically right-wing or from Texas with a hardline agenda or wearing an elephant-shaped tiepin colored like the flag of the United States of America.

It is apparent to everyone now that the United States of America is occupied by a political force that must be called a faction.

This faction has changed governments using force and intimidation around the world single-handedly to create axes and allies for its own imperial ambitions, in the guise of self-defense – a ludicrous argument – controls the world’s global communications media with near-absolute restriction of anti-US content; controls agencies that monitor, manage and distribute the collective funds of the largest bank account in the world; and controls the military to which it granted more than 400 Billion dollars last year – the best funded, most powerful war machine on earth. All are under the control of the so-called neo-conservative doctrine – an elitist doctrine of corporate protectionism that serves minority interests.

Among the fools in this faction there are elderly bigots who are given swan-songs of attention. There are hyper-militarily minded protocol hounds who have seized and cemented language they themselves wrote as radical outsiders only two and a half decades ago. The faction owned Tony Blair.

All were transported by soldier mentality and blood-lust – that is the stage play CNN, NPR, PBS, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, HBO, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and every major news outlet in the United States was meant to project.

but word on the streets around the world is that what happened is this: The free-est economy in the world puffed itself up for eight years – wrapped itself into a Y2knot by getting dumbed into bad speculative investment  in the 90’s – and then had to be “system re-booted.”

Thus, 9/11, the moment when all intranet debts were erased by a tsunami of media, all pumping the same scary story (a well-known – not obscure – mafia move). Rumsfeld’s announcement od trillions of dollars just missing from the Pentagon’s budget . lost in asbestos and pulverized cement. And then the birth of a terror fiction buoyed by the drunk, high, parasitic hangers-on of the 20th century, clinging to the largest multi-media assault on international humanity ever attempted by any country, any peoples. You didn’t even have to love America … just keep your mouth shut and keep shopping so Bush “justice” could be served.

This neo-conservative faction of Bush Americans is at least guilty of producing, staging and titling “9-eleven” post-facto, to salvage the failing economy and stimulate younger generations of participants into their System of Society, which the world knows brought them the attacks. It might seem natural to react to being hit in such a spectacular way, but they do this with a fanatical pride which now seems disingenuous to many – even in the United States.

We witnessed these people drop megatons of death from the sky upon the heads of others, elsewhere – anywhere in the world they wished to assist corporations pirate resources. Yet these Bush-Americans have said aloud – and continue to say it – they believe they are doing God’s work: murder, manipulation of masses, demagoguery, espionage, political deceit, covert operations, corporate protectionism over truth and the environment – a deaf-ear to the most pressing threats to the planet.

How does one approach an enraged fundamentalist in order to seek common human spirit for tranquility? How do we tell them that the Global Peace Movement is God asking the United States to stand down?

The only way to regain control of the U.S. American government is to actively promote transparent investigation of every single corner that Bush/Cheney has labeled “National Security.” Demand Congress open all of these to Members, if not publicly.

HIGH TIME THE U.S. STAND DOWN

eh?

2002

an ode

Interview with Scott Stringer Candidate for Public Advocate, 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]

1st Interview with Norman Siegel as Candidate for Public Advocate, 2001

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An Interview with Norman Siegel, Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union Sunday, February 11, 2001. At an “Open House” for an office on 72nd street on the upper west side of Manhattan run by an organization called, Friends of Norman Siegel, where there are documents that read, in part, “Norman Siegel for Public Advocate 2001” and a petition for the same at the door.

NORMAN SIEGEL: … it’s exciting. I’ve never done this before. You read about people running for office. You see films about it … and the balloons, and the people, and here it is. I’m in the middle of it. So often I think, “How did I get here?” But I’m excited.

MTK: But this shouldn’t seem foreign to you insomuch as you deal with politicians all the time.

NS: I deal with politicians all the time but the implication here is now I’m becoming one and that kind of concerns me on one level because I’ve always been critical of politicians myself. The main thing is politicians generally don’t answer questions. They’re disingenuous. They’re delusional at times, and I just have to make sure that I remember who I am; what my roots are, what my principles are, and try to answer the questions even when they are difficult ones. Generally speaking I’ve done that all my life as an advocate and in fact I think I’ve been the private advocate and now I want to be the public advocate.

MTK: But couldn’t you be losing power in a way (given that the position is weak)? If not, do you think of yourself as a progressive candidate, and if so, how do you think you will evolve the office if elected Public Advocate?

NS: Well the first thing .. I don’t think I’m, quote, “losing any power.” I mean, I think that I had these yearnings to take what I did at the Civil Liberties Union in Legal Services for the last 23 years in New York and apply it in a larger setting. Perhaps a less supportive ideological setting and test to see whether or not what I’ve been successful at with the Civil Liberties Union and Legal Services can be applied in a larger setting. What that means is I can now take on issues like education, immigrant rights, health issues, housing issues. The number of issues is going to expand substantially. I mean at the Civil Liberties Union we always had to deal with constitutional rights and, “Is it a test case.”  Here, any issue is up for grabs. Which is the transition to the second part. I think Mark [Green, current and first elected public advocate] did a relatively good job. I think I would like to continue what he did but expand it. I’ve never been an “in the box” personality. And I don’t think I’ll be an “in the box” personality here–I’ll stretch it. I’m an activist. I am a progressive. I better be able to continue my activism and my progressive views. I’m assuming that that will happen. If it turns out that that doesn’t happen then I better take stock because that’s part of my assumption. I’m 57 years old now. I’m kind of silently proud of who I am, what I’ve done, the people I’ve represented. I’ve been tested a lot of times, and I’ve generally done OK. And that’s in a private way, when I go home at 11, 12 at night and I gotta look in the mirror, I gotta be OK with me and, generally speaking, I am. So knowing that, I want to enter this other arena which has a lot, a lot, of problems. When I watched what was happening in Florida and the betrayal of democracy in America, watching young people becoming more and more cynical, more and more alienated, it occurred to me that maybe I have to step into this arena and try to inspire and motivate young people. That it’s not all that way. In a lot of speeches I’ve been giving I’ve been telling people, “We need to dare to continue to dream about how it should be rather than how it is.”

MTK: I’m very fearful that this kind of a message is fading in importance. When you are out talking to people do you think there is a renewed feeling for public service there?

NS: Not yet. Not yet. And what I am hoping is that I can succeed in doing it in a nontraditional way–putting together the multiracial coalition of New Yorkers that I’m convinced want to come together across racial lines, but haven’t had the opportunity yet to do that because the failure of leadership to provide the climate, the atmosphere, the opportunity so that people from the black, the brown, the red, the yellow the white community can begin to learn about each other. We all stereotype each other because we don’t know each other. And we continue to do that because no one is prepared to take on this radioactive issue. One of the reasons I run? I want to begin a citywide dialogue on race. I want to begin to talk about it frankly. Racism in New York is not like it was in the deep South when I went there in the sixties. Racism in New York is subtle. It’s sophisticated. But it exists.

MTK: Do you think it’s institutional?

NS: Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. There’s a legacy of racism in many of the…just take the NYPD, who I’ve been battling for years. That’s an institutional problem, it’s not just an individual problem. It’s systemic.

MTK: So don’t you think there’ll be a great deal of resistance to what you’re saying?

NS: Of course, but you see, I think post-Louima, -Diallo, and -Dorismond … and Bush. I’ve been at many, many community meetings … Staten Island, Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, the Bronx. I think there’s a majority of New Yorkers, across racial and geographical lines, that want to come together on racial lines to develop a common agenda to take on certain issues like at the Police Department, at the Board of Education, Housing … I mean, all of these–Housing, Education, Police–they all have enormous racial overtones. A lot of it stems from stereotyping. So if you begin to talk about it, if you begin to address it and identify people across racial lines who want to talk about it and want to realistically ameliorate it, I think we can do it. We haven’t had our civil rights movement here in New York, we had a southern civil rights movement but we haven’t had one here. So if I become the public advocate, I have an enormous bully pulpit, and as a white guy, I can be talking about race issues. It shouldn’t only be blacks or Latinos talking about race. White folks, it’s our problem too. So I want to use the position as a vehicle, to kind of shake it up. I was kidding when we just cut the ribbon out there that I got the “Shake it Up” party endorsement this afternoon. We want to try to excite young people, yet we also want to reach everybody so that people begin to realize that we don’t have to accept the status quo. Even on the most transient issue, which is race, in my opinion. I think we can make progress. And I think there are so many people in New York who want to come together, but when you’ve got a mayor like Rudy Giuliani, you can’t come together. In fact, he divides people. Here’s a guy who doesn’t even feel comfortable with blacks and Latinos in the room. Well, I’ve had many African-American, Latino, and Asian clients and I have become educated and sensitized for 35 years of being with people of color and white folks. And I like when there’s a mix. If it’s all homogenous, I’m not comfortable. New York is not homogenous. It has diversity and we should build upon that and realize the pluses out of that. Now, is it hard? You bet, it’s hard. It’s hard, first, because people have already given up. But I’m young, I’m energetic. There’s a lot of other people. I’ve got the black and Latino police officers with me. I’ve got the cab drivers who are with me. Those are powerful people.

MTK: I think the census results in April are going to show us remarkable numbers in the electorate.

NS: Sixty percent are people of color, at a minimum, maybe a third. Well, on the police, two thirds of the cops are white. And I’ve got statistics from a couple of years ago: 5.7% of the captains were people of color. And that says it in a nutshell. Three percent of the fire department is African-American. People don’t even know this kind of stuff. It’s gotten to the point in New York where people don’t even know what to do about race. I think the reality is we’re all prejudiced. We have to acknowledge that and then begin to deal with it. What equality is about is that you treat people equally. And we don’t know how to do that in New York. And so I want to try to do that. How are we going to do it? We’re going to try to create independent neighborhood councils where people will come together and they will begin to talk to each other, learn from each other. What their cultures are, what their mores are. We have cab drivers who are Sikhs, and people don’t know why they wear a turban. If you explain to people why they wear a turban, then they will understand what that is. If people understand what people’s customs and religious practices are, they might be more tolerant and respectful of that. But if there’s no one who’s trying to create that dialogue, is it any wonder that we continue to stereotype each other? So one of the most important things I want to do is exactly that. I can’t do that from the ACLU. So I take the risk. I leave something that I love, that I do very well at and take this plunge to kind of see whether or not this can work. What I think–and so far it’s only been five weeks that I’ve been doing this–but people are receptive to it. But I don’t want to be delusional or misleading myself. This is hard. This is a cynical town. This is a tough town. But being the public advocate, in my mind, is being the people’s lawyer. I’ve been doing that all my life. A lot of people—thank God–trust me, and I think if I can take that and parlay it into this new arena, it could be special and it could be exciting and, most important, we might make a difference. If I can do it, then maybe other people will step up to the plate and do it as well. You shouldn’t have to be rich to run for office and you shouldn’t have to know all the people in power to run for office. I’m still the outsider. I’m running against five people, four of whom are kind of insiders. Three who are career politicians. But the Office of Public Advocate, it seems to me, is unique, and it seems to me I’m a perfect fit for it. So I try it, and if we win it’s great. We’re gonna have fun. We’re gonna be witty, we’re gonna be irreverent. We’re gonna be very activist, and if we raise enough money we’ll be able to get our message out and if we get our message out I think we’ll win.

MTK: And what about the mayor’s office? A progressively minded candidate relies on a person being in the mayor’s seat that is at least not opposed to that and, at best, welcomes it. Who among the candidates do you think you’d work well with and, conversely, who would you say might create a problem like the one we’ve had, if we do have a problem between the offices of Mayor and Public Advocate?

NS: Well, it’s a no-brainer: Any one of the four Democrats–Ferrer, Hevesi, Green, and Vallone. No one will be as bad as Giuliani was. So that’s a no-brainer. I think that any one of those four could win and–in an ironic way–I’ve gone after a lot of politicians, been very critical of them, and for whatever reason, all these four, I get along well with. So from my perspective I can work with any one of them. Assuming they want to work with the public advocate. And obviously that would be the ideal situation. But I also think the public advocate should be independent of the mayor. For example, I will not endorse any of them. Because I think the public advocate should be the monitor of the mayor. If you have a cozy relationship, and you endorse one of them to win, I’m not sure you can have that independence. If you know the person and you’re friendly with the person and you work with the person, generally it’s hard to be critical of the person. And I think the public advocate has to have good working relationships but has to be separate and independent. I believe independence is the key issue in this. So I will not endorse any of them. I will be friendly with all of them. I will encourage them to do progressive, inclusionary things, but I won’t endorse any one of them at this point.

MTK: It’s very early.

NS: It’s very early. I haven’t even declared yet.

MTK: When I rang, I was calling to find out if you were going to.

NS: We opened this storefront because we want a visible place. We want it accessible; people have been coming in all week. And then, I have to figure out … I’m on leave from the Civil Liberties Union so between now and March I’ll have to decide whether or not I’m going to resign and then, if I do that, then I’ll declare and then I’ll get out there and start the campaigning and I’m looking forward to the campaigning because it’s basically interacting with people and that could be fun. I’m aware that some people see me as someone who could be different than any other politician. And I like that perception, but being realistic and thoughtful about this, I gotta make sure that I can be different. I don’t know exactly what that means. I’ve been at a few events so far and, for example, a lot of the candidates get up and they talk about, “I did this, I did this. I’m on this committee, I’m on that committee.” I get up and I just talk about the issues, and the message I’ve been mainly telling people is that no one, no one should ever accept anything short of full and complete equality, justice, and freedom. And this is a town that hasn’t done that for a lot of people: racial, gender, sexual-orientation, economics. So I can be a vehicle and a symbol and a catalyst to try to address the inequalities that exist in the city and not just, you know, about a pothole or a streetlight, although that’s important to people, but we’re talking about institutional racism. We’re talking about institutional discrimination based on socioeconomic status. And I want to take that on.

MTK: With term limits there are lots of seats available; something like 46 seats are coming up. Are you encouraging other people who are, as you say, outsiders, to participate?

NS: I am doing that. There’s a guy, Hiram Montserrat, who is the first elected Latino official in Queens. And he got elected as a district leader recently and he is running for city council. I have personally given him a check, and I’ve gone to a couple of events, and I’ve endorsed him. Friday night, Adonis Rodriguez, who is from the Dominican Students Union, whom I represented.  He’s decided to run for city council. I went up there, gave him a check, and made a speech for him. There were 300 people Friday night in a church in Washington Heights. I bet you two-thirds of those folks have never participated in electoral politics. And we were talking about a progressive coalition of people who are going to run and are going to try to make history in New York. So that’s starting to happen right now. My criteria is: Are people social justice people? Are they people that I’ve worked with before and can I trust them? And finally, are they the only one in the race that meet those criteria? If there are two people I won’t choose one over the other. But I will try to help and encourage people not only to run but to help some of the people win. And finally, in the Democratic party–there’s no reason why a Democratic party where the registration is like five to one, should ever have someone like a Rudy Giuliani ever get elected in the city of New York again. So what happened to the Democratic party? I would like if it all works with new people, new blood, new vision … rejuvenate the Democratic party. On the other hand, as I say, I have to be respectful of my elders, people who are experienced, to make sure they don’t think I’ve been disrespecting them.  Now it seems to me and I’ve said to some of the Democratic leaders, “You should open the doors and welcome us in.” Now if they don’t open the doors and welcome us in, then you have to figure out alternative structures. But I would like to work with people rather than have to create alternative structures, but if you have to create alternative structures in order to deal with social justice issues, as we’ve done before in movements, we’ll do that within electoral politics as well. And the last thing, as I mentioned before, is the young people. We’ve got to make sure that we don’t lose because of cynicism.

With this storefront, on Sundays at 3 o’clock we’re going to have speakers come in. And we’re going to try to attract young people so that they learn about issues–and that they can make a difference. Young people have made a difference historically. We’re going to have a lot of young people–high school students, college students–working with us, and trying to encourage them to be involved, and then maybe there’s a new generation of leaders to come … And–we gotta make sure–black, brown, red, yellow, and white, together. That’s my battle cry. We gotta include everybody. This has to be inclusionary. New York is great, but there are a lot of people who have been left out. And what we have to do, the people of my generation, now, is to make sure that we can assure people that they will be included more and that this city–it’s theirs as well as other people’s city. We don’t want to be excluding anyone, we want to include everybody.

MTK: That’s really exciting to me. That’s really exciting, what you’re saying, but—

NS: Well, we hope we can pull it off!

MTK: –I fear you’re being idealistic, but I think it’s really exciting..

NS: There’s nothing wrong with being idealistic.

MTK: There’s nothing wrong with it, but I think you need to be careful.

NS: This is the people’s arena. What politics is about is interacting with people, all kinds of people. Everyone has a vote. So if you’re a skilled pol, you make sure that in fact you listen to everyone, you touch everybody. That hasn’t happened a lot. Too much of politics today is on the TV ads and there’s no direct contact, there’s no street contact, there’s no grassroots development. We’re gonna do that. We’re gonna do it with passion, we’re gonna do it with excitement, and I think that by the time the primary rolls around on September 11, if we succeed, this could be the start of something very exciting.

MTK: Last question. If you don’t succeed, would you run as an independent?

NS: Oh, I haven’t even thought about that yet. I think that since this is all new to me, I’ll just take one step at a time and see what happens. And obviously the answer will be: Hopefully, I won’t have to get to that hypothetical because we’ll win. This is not quixotic. This is to win.

[in 2001, during the primaries, I began interviewing all the candidates for Public Attorney because it was a historic shift in power for the position, but, exactly seven months after this interview, on September 11th, election day was cancelled because two planes were flown into the two tallest buildings in NYC, contravening democracy at its most basic level.

In the aftermath, Norman Siegel and Scott Stringer was crushed by Betsy Gotbaum for the position of PA and Michael Bloomberg became Mayor, stealing the election from either Fernando Ferrer or Mark Green]

Longest Day of the Year 2000

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It was a bright spring day, and I was coming out the glass doors of my office building in the central village when I suddenly felt as though I had walked into a Woody Allen movie. Through the glass of the open door, I saw playwright, actor and artist Wallace Shawn coming down the street carrying a large, heavy duffel bag containing some odd-shaped things that looked like bowling pins.

It was 1997 and I had just seen The Designated Mourner, Mike Nichols’ film of Shawn’s year-old play first performed at the Royal National Theater, London. I was so surprised I nearly struck him with the door and so he looked up and caught my eye. I paused there in the middle of the sidewalk and just stared at him and he gave me a little smile as he continued down the block.

I came to learn later that the famously private Shawn often made his way about the island on foot carrying a heavy bag – as a kind of improvisational exercise perhaps, but described in one article as an eccentricity.

I told this anecdote over and again in my New York life until the summer of 2000 when it became appended, after I read a tiny theater listing in The Village Voice:

The Designated Mourner
Wallace Shawn’s wonderfully nasty and clever drama returns to the New York stage. This three character piece examines the aftermath of a war in an unnamed country in which notions about high and low culture have murderous consequences. In this incarnation, Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg. Andre Gregory directs. 21 South William Street, 21 South William,532-8887 (Soloski)

Louis Malle, Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn were at the heart of one of the most important movements in theater in New York in the latter half of the twentieth century. They took responsibility for the barbaric provincialism of the North and West more than nearly any white artists in the field and created storytelling of examined intellectual tenor.

On the summer solstice of the year 2000, I took the 6 train down to Wall Street and walked to an old, crumbly house at 21 South William, at the base of the World Trade Center Towers. I was sitting on the warm stone steps of the little house – still in sunlight on the longest day of the year – when I looked up to see a small, slowly moving figure walking toward me. It was Wallace Shawn. He wore dark clothes and a light, thin scarf around his neck that he was worrying at a little as he walked. He seemed to be in a placid, meditative, pre-performance state. I was awaiting a companion and was the only person sitting outside the small theater when he arrived.

He nodded and smiled as he approached. I stood and quickly congratulated him saying I felt The Designated Mourner was one of the most important American plays of the era. He smiled, thanked me and asked if I had a seat. I told him I hadn’t yet, but hoped to by waiting list or if not, then at another performance that summer. He said he hoped so, too and went inside.

The show was sold out and when my friend arrived we went in to add our names to the waiting list – we were numbers 7 and 8. Ten minutes before curtain the stage manager came down a set of small stairs into the foyer to announce there were 6 seats available. There was a group of three atop the waitlist and two couples ahead of us and I assumed at that moment we weren’t going to be seeing the play that night but suddenly, there was some discussion at the stage manager’s podium.

The couple ahead of us was trying to decide if they wanted to be split-up for the evening as there was only one seat left after the first five guests were seated. They took what felt like an interminably long time to decide – curtain time had passed. Finally, they agreed they would go to an early dinner rather than be split up and gave up the remaining seat. My close friend Daniel encouraged me to go take it. I paid the $10 fee and ran up the stairs toward the performance space.

The stairwell and indeed the whole house was dark save for a line of yellow electric lamps with yellow bulbs meant to guide the audience to the room in which the performance was to begin. A wonderful old and musty smell hung in the air. I followed the lights slowly until my eyes adjusted and I had some grasp of which floor they were headed toward and then ran the last flight in order to get to the performance which I was sure had begun. At the top of the stairs I nearly ran into Wallace Shawn who was standing, holding a chair and waiting.

“Oh good,” he said, “You made it.”

He carried the chair to a place at the edge of the audience, set it down, gestured for me to sit and then made his way to the carefully lit back of the room that was the performance area. There was no stage between audience and performer, just a subtle line on the floor, created from where the chairs ended and the lighting began.

Shawn then turned and faced the audience. The lights were dimmed quickly and he struck a match and lit a small piece of paper on fire which floated as it turned into ash, slowly up to the ceiling, “I” he recited, “am the designated mourner.”

Musical Influences 'Til Age 33

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journal entry from June 6, 2000

USA 1981 – 1990:
aged 14 to 22
Ellington, Basie, Miles, Coltrane, Parker, Diz, Ella, Billie, Monk, Jobim, Gilberto, Getz, Bill Evans,  Irakere, Hancock, Corea, Hubbard, Breckers, Stravinsky, Strauss [Richard], Debussy, Copeland, Bach, Brahms, Mussoursky, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Beethoven, Stevie Wonder, Carol Kane, Elton John, The Police, the Fat Boys, Kurtis Blow, Rapper’s Delight, Duran Duran, The Cars, Devo, Billy Joel, Talking Heads, Public Enemy, Tears for Fears and then at college:  The Housemartins, Sade, Trip Shakespeare, The Cure, The Smiths, Morrisey and Indigo Girls, Bob Marley, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and every Beatles record ditto REM and U2 and a big Dylan period and The Stones and Public Enemy and RUN DMC, and (finally) Zeppelin and CSNY and de la soul, Sinead O’Connor, James Brown, Maceo, Prince, Fishbone, Buckwheat Zydeco, and live music where I was: Stevie Ray Vaughn, The Reivers, Timbuk 3, Poi Dog Pondering, twang-twang-shock-a-boom, but basically I bought what I was sold for a long time until leaving the US and worse, I bought it late.

Asia 1990-1992:
aged 22 to 24
International music in Asia, Tribe Called Quest, Jane’s Addiction, Nirvana, Dylan, John Prine, Dead, The Band, Tom Petty

New Orleans, USA 1992 – 1993:
aged 25 to 26
Nevilles, Howling Wolf, Dr. John, Professor Longhair, Fela, Aster Aweke, Lucky Dube, Screamin Jay Hawkins, Marsalis’s, Rebirth Brass Band, Boozoo Chavis, Zydeco, Cajun, Los Lobos, Nina Simone, Klezmer-shit, Arrested Development, Gangstarr, Disposable Heroes of hiphoprisy, gypsy kings, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, L. Subramaniam, Zakir Hussain

SF 1993 – 1997:
aged 26 to 30
primary musical influence was dj consuelo who brought me to much of the following: Funkadelic, 4 hero, ten city, horace silver, mingus, roach, ellington, coltrane, strayhorn, roni size, nu yorican soul, anohka, talvin singh, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Abdullah Ibrahim, Paul Horn, Ravi Sankar, Shakti, Zakir Hussain, Ali Akbar Khan, John McLaughlin, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, maxwell, charlie hunter trio, broun fellinis, wallace roney, pharoah sanders, disposable heroes of hiphoprisy, warp, photek, bjork, Cachao,  Steely Dan, Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, more Willie Nelson and Paul Simon, Brothers Johnson, Harlem Underground, digable planets, Nick Drake, Cesaria Evora, Ben Harper, countless unknown labels and sounds.

New York City 1997 – 2000:
aged 30 to 33
Hariprasad Chaurasia, mos def, talib kweli, common, djpremier, asian dub foundation, LKJ (live), Hendrix, Medeski Martin and Wood, D’Angelo, Dead Prez, Mobb Deep, DMX, Prodigy, John Zorn, Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, James Carter, Eric Allen, Michael Burns, Brent Kirkpatrick, Nusrat Fate Ali Khan, Fiona Apple

— MTK June 02, 2000

Musical Influences ‘Til Age 33

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journal entry from June 6, 2000

USA 1981 – 1990:
aged 14 to 22
Ellington, Basie, Miles, Coltrane, Parker, Diz, Ella, Billie, Monk, Jobim, Gilberto, Getz, Bill Evans,  Irakere, Hancock, Corea, Hubbard, Breckers, Stravinsky, Strauss [Richard], Debussy, Copeland, Bach, Brahms, Mussoursky, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Beethoven, Stevie Wonder, Carol Kane, Elton John, The Police, the Fat Boys, Kurtis Blow, Rapper’s Delight, Duran Duran, The Cars, Devo, Billy Joel, Talking Heads, Public Enemy, Tears for Fears and then at college:  The Housemartins, Sade, Trip Shakespeare, The Cure, The Smiths, Morrisey and Indigo Girls, Bob Marley, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and every Beatles record ditto REM and U2 and a big Dylan period and The Stones and Public Enemy and RUN DMC, and (finally) Zeppelin and CSNY and de la soul, Sinead O’Connor, James Brown, Maceo, Prince, Fishbone, Buckwheat Zydeco, and live music where I was: Stevie Ray Vaughn, The Reivers, Timbuk 3, Poi Dog Pondering, twang-twang-shock-a-boom, but basically I bought what I was sold for a long time until leaving the US and worse, I bought it late.

Asia 1990-1992:
aged 22 to 24
International music in Asia, Tribe Called Quest, Jane’s Addiction, Nirvana, Dylan, John Prine, Dead, The Band, Tom Petty

New Orleans, USA 1992 – 1993:
aged 25 to 26
Nevilles, Howling Wolf, Dr. John, Professor Longhair, Fela, Aster Aweke, Lucky Dube, Screamin Jay Hawkins, Marsalis’s, Rebirth Brass Band, Boozoo Chavis, Zydeco, Cajun, Los Lobos, Nina Simone, Klezmer-shit, Arrested Development, Gangstarr, Disposable Heroes of hiphoprisy, gypsy kings, Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, L. Subramaniam, Zakir Hussain

SF 1993 – 1997:
aged 26 to 30
primary musical influence was dj consuelo who brought me to much of the following: Funkadelic, 4 hero, ten city, horace silver, mingus, roach, ellington, coltrane, strayhorn, roni size, nu yorican soul, anohka, talvin singh, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Abdullah Ibrahim, Paul Horn, Ravi Sankar, Shakti, Zakir Hussain, Ali Akbar Khan, John McLaughlin, Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, maxwell, charlie hunter trio, broun fellinis, wallace roney, pharoah sanders, disposable heroes of hiphoprisy, warp, photek, bjork, Cachao,  Steely Dan, Johnny Cash, Bob Wills, more Willie Nelson and Paul Simon, Brothers Johnson, Harlem Underground, digable planets, Nick Drake, Cesaria Evora, Ben Harper, countless unknown labels and sounds.

New York City 1997 – 2000:
aged 30 to 33
Hariprasad Chaurasia, mos def, talib kweli, common, djpremier, asian dub foundation, LKJ (live), Hendrix, Medeski Martin and Wood, D’Angelo, Dead Prez, Mobb Deep, DMX, Prodigy, John Zorn, Steve Coleman, Greg Osby, James Carter, Eric Allen, Michael Burns, Brent Kirkpatrick, Nusrat Fate Ali Khan, Fiona Apple

— MTK June 02, 2000

Shanti, fiction, 1999

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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

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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

The Legend, short story, 1999

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There was a lack of leadership at the end of the century.  We were all waiting to see what would happen next.

I remember where I was the day of the announcement.  I was living in Brooklyn and the Yankees were in the pennant race.  I was thirty-one and trying to make it as an actor or a writer, I didn’t care which.

It was October after a full moon and the air in the city had become cool.  I didn’t own a television then.  Usually I got the news from looking over somebody’s shoulder on the train, but that day it was impossible not to know; so I was in a bar.

My job was in Manhattan but I had a pretty kind commute – on the 7 – each morning.  In the evenings I used to drink a lot, so often I took a cab home.  The announcement was made during prime time.

I had been in the west village near Chelsea, so I headed East until I’d found myself in a suitably quiet place for a drink.

There were three others in the bar on my side, all men.  The bartender was about my age, too.  We checked each other out when I walked in but she wasn’t interested.  Let me know with a glance.  She was attending to us and going back to the telephone where she was involved in a casual conversation.  That’s how we heard. She told us.

She was on the phone with her roommate, I discovered later, who told her to turn on the TV.  The television was off when I walked in, which is why I walked all the way down the bar and sat by it.  I was putting room between me and the other patrons and the bartender on her phone call.  I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, just wanted a drink or two before going home.

She walked down the length of the bar toward me, though my glass was still half-full.  “Jordan’s on ESPN,” she said as she passed me with an air of excitement.  She reached up and turned on the TV.

I moved over to get some perspective and ended up next to one of the other guys.

“Perfect timing,” he was saying to his friend, “It’s storybook.”

We were all looking at the television for a moment as we realized at our own pace it was a commercial.  Then we turned away from the TV to notice each other.  The guy to my left was a know-it-all.  Cliff Claven-type.  His Norm was an appropriately fat guy to his left, who was listening, bored.

“There’s not gonna be any basketball this year – the league’s locked out,” says Cliffy,  “It’ll be the first strike in NBA history.  And look at this – Jordan’s going to retire before it gets ugly.”  He looks at the both of us, including me in their space.  “Storybook, man!  The guy’s all class.  His entire career.  C-L-A-S-S, class.”

It seemed about right.  We had all been waiting for the announcement, fans and not fans.  We had been well-prepared by the rumours and gossip for the last few months.  The other guy, Norm, wasn’t so sure about all the “class,” but he had his “favorite Jordan moment.”

“My company’s had floor-side Knicks seats for years,” he began, “I had finished doing the numbers for the annual report a few years ago and so they let me have the tickets, as a kind of a bonus, you know.”

The ad was for Nike – a long narrative about a couple of guys buying sneakers with all these idiotic effects meant to be impressive.  They were playing one-on-one at what was meant to be an inner city court, but that looked more like a Hollywood lot – an appearance by Tiger Woods – hits a three-pointer with a golf club or something – stupid.

“Jordan was off in the first half, shot maybe four-for-15 from the field … just didn’t have his rhythm,” continued Norm, “But during the warm-ups before the second half – the Bulls were down at our end so I could see him up close – he seemed so casual.  He was joking around and chewing his gum.  He stopped during the shoot-around to sign some kid’s little plastic basketball at courtside.”

Norm turned to face us – making a little circle.  He glanced over his shoulder at the TV to make sure it was still a commercial, before continuing.  “Knicks were up five at the break and the second half started with Jordan bringing the ball down.”

“Here we go,” chimed in Cliffy, “never let Jordan bring the ball down up five at the beginning of the second half,” he said, as if that made any kind of sense.  The Nike ad was followed by an ad for the new BMW convertible.  It was being featured in a movie.  Hot Babe racing at speeds meant to appear saucy, around curves on the Pacific Coast Highway – but it was stagey and excessive – a patina of production slathered across it.

“And it wasn’t that the rest of the game was so impressive – ‘cause he went 12 for 18 in the second half and ended up with 42 points, 8 boards and four steals on the night-”

“Wooooah!” chimed in Cliffy, “See?  See?”

Norm continued:  “But it wasn’t that.  It was that first bucket after the second half started.” Norm looked at us both significantly.  “He went coast-to-coast, juked twice and burned Starks and Oakley on the way to the rack for the slam.  It was like he was waiting to turn it on and once it was on there wasn’t anybody to stop it.”  We were all silent for a minute wishing we had that … when ESPN came back on.

“If the Yanks lose tomorrow, Joe Torre will have a decision on his hands – El Duque or Andy Pettite – but as Andy Schapp reports, the decision may have already been made.”

“Yanks better win the fuckin’ series,” I said.  It was the first time I’d spoken to them and they noticed.  I have a sort of a Mike Tyson voice problem.  It’s sort of squeaky.  I’m real aware of it now.  I mean, at the time I hadn’t fully developed my speaking skills to use it to my advantage so there was always a minute or two when it freaked people out – a grown man. It’s really why I became a writer as opposed to going into say, radio … or television.

Cliff blew right by it.  “Fuck yeah, the fucking Yanks better win the fucking series.  Better win the world series, too.  I mean, what the fuck?  After the season they had?  If they don’t win, heads will definitely roll.”

We talked about the Yanks for a minute as the time passed.  I know, I know, it has to seem stupid now, but I mean, we had no idea what he was going to say.  We were all just figuring he’d retire, we’d bullshit a bit and that’d be that … on to baseball.  We were strangers in a shitty little bar in the East Village.

By now of course the video has been shown umpteen times.  The stage set in Chicago and the introduction and all of it has been ingrained in our heads for as long as the little bitmaps will last in our memories.  But let’s just review what he said, how he said it.  I mean if we’re going to talk about a Legend, it’s good to be precise.

“Good evening, everyone.  I’d like to make this as brief as possible, but there are many people to thank.  I have played my entire career here in Chicago and I have always felt the deepest love for this city and the fans.  It is without a doubt in my mind that these are the greatest fans in the world.”

He always had that sweet disarming way of saying something just a little – off – that still sounded so right and perfect coming out of his mouth.  The man had skills.

“I have faced a lot of questions this past summer about my plans for the future and I have entertained all kinds of opportunities and thoughts on the matter of retirement.  Frankly, I don’t want to give up basketball.  I love this game.”

And that look, that smile, directly into the camera for the fans at home, for the commissioner of Basketball.  It was perfect.  He knew all along what he was doing.  There was never a feeling of doubt that he was in control, only of wonderment that he was alive.  It was like that on the court and afterward.  He was a great leader.

“That is why I have to ask for your support at this critical and important time in my career.  I need each and every one of my fans, everywhere in the world to know that I have enjoyed every minute of my career in the NBA.  I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  And now I need something back from you.  I need your continued support.”

It was at this point that we, I, anyway, began to wonder if he didn’t have a surprise in mind.  I had thought it before of course, he was famous for them.  But that night, I mean, he looked to the right and left, and then for a second it seemed like maybe he was changing his mind right there.  Before letting us all in on the biggest move of his career, it still seemed like he had something else in store.

I remember the announcement and the introduction perfectly.

“I am retiring from the National Basketball Association.  [smile. flash, flash, flash, flash,flash, flash]

I would like to thank everyone, but of course that’s impossible.  Let me just re-iterate my thanks to the wonderful people here in Chicago and to my fans around the world.”  He said things twice his entire career to emphasize his point in a different manner to get it across to as many channels of media on the spectrum as possible and was misunderstood by many as, “just being a jock,” – like Coltrane, Jordan was ahead of his time with the media.

“Again, I hope you will continue to support my efforts as I move on, away from the NBA and into public life in other ways.”

This was the stumper of course.  He had every free male in the nation caught on by then that it wasn’t your average resignation.  Cliff said, “What the fuck is he talking about?  Not baseball again, jeez, the guy was a sub-200 hitter on a farm club for God’s Sakes.”  Fickle, that Cliffy.

Then, the introduction:

“I would like to introduce now, my first partner in my new life after the NBA.”

When he walked out I swear you could have knocked me off my bar stool.  I was totally confused.  I had no explanation for what he was doing there.  I quickly tried to add up scenarios that would bring the two of them together, but never in my wildest dreams could I have figured what would happen next.

“Ladies and Gentlemen … a boxer, a pugilist of world-reknown,” he said ‘pugilist’ carefully and playfully, like he had looked it up for the event, toyed with it for a while and then decided to keep it for the fun of it, and he gave us a smile when he continued, “the world’s greatest fighter in my book, and I challenge anyone to deny it:  Ladies and Gentlemen, President Nelson Mandela of the Republic of South Africa.”

The flashbulbs made it impossible to see for a moment.  Everyone was standing.  Jordan must have made arrangements for the cameramen to be positioned, though, because the television audience had a clear view throughout the proceedings.

Then, he appeared.  Mandela.  It was such an incredible feeling to be watching it “live.”  Mandela walked with such cool grace – slowly and stately past the podium to his seat beside Jordan.

Michael had effectively taken the spotlight off himself at the peak of his most significant hour.  The entire experience was like watching a game.  He was masterful, in control.  And nobody was stopping him.

“Mr. Mandela and I would like to announce that effective immediately, I will be player-coach of the South African National Basketball team to participate in the year 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia.  I hereby invite my friends, colleagues and players from all over the world to tryout for the team that we will field in summer of 2000.

“I would also like to announce the creation of a new line of shoes, clothing and athletic wear designed for the new South African team by my own designers and to be manufactured by textile workers throughout Africa. All proceeds from the sales of these products – that’s 100% of the proceeds – will go, in two equal parts, first to the United Nations and second to a non-profit organization begun by President Mandela and myself toward the creation of a free, peaceful, healthy and well-developed Pan-Africa in the next millennium.”

I was numb.  My ears.  My ears were filled with a dull sensation that removed me from my surroundings.  I couldn’t stand.  I couldn’t possibly sit.  I stood.  I hugged Cliff.  I slapped Norm on the back. I pulled the bartender over the rail and kissed her full on the lips … and she hit me.

The End

[I can’t even remember when Jordan retired now. He quit, came back, jammed again, quit, came back… managed the Wizards for a time, always plays great golf – a giant. I wrote this piece in 1998 after a conversation with a friend about why U.S. American sports stars don’t take more active political stances anymore (cf. Tommie Smith or Arthur Ashe or many others). It seems relevant today, but nostalgic, and weirdly attached to an era when television affiliates in every city in the USA was running simultaneous and continuous reruns of “Cheers!”- sometimes twice a day – rather than fill the spectrum with any diversity.]

M.T. Karthik

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

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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

the Doña, 1999

Everybody says beauty is fleeting and whether it’s because we ourselves are fleeting and so cannot appreciate enough the lives we have or because our tastes are refined now for things that don’t last because of the clocks, the god damn clocks, I don’t know.  But contentedness really doesn’t last beyond a moment for the living.  Doña Rita and her twin babies are living in a small town in Northern California.

It was only a glance.  There, in swirling memory is that one cast of the eyes that I interpreted as a love sign and so …

This memory is for those who know the importance of lingering longer.  I resist at the laundromat, in the park, at the beach, though they’ve put a television in the laundromat now and the guy in there always has the volume up.  I heard Bill Kennard, chairman of the FCC say, “think about how many ways our lives are touched by the spectrum …”  That’s what they call tv, radio, the internet and any other broadcast that adds to the noise – the spectrum.  (… like a child I resist.  No, not like a child. The spectrum is for kids now more than ever – that’s why they call it programming – it teaches that obstinance is no longer childlike, it’s immature, anti-social.  The spectrum teaches how to “get with the program.”)

I didn’t talk to Rita in San Francisco, so I’m only going by the friends I saw there and what news they have of others.  I heard from Ricardo, the artist, that she lives in Tahoe.

Ricardo is one of my most reliable sources.  He stays still longer than most, watches more intently, gathers as much as he can hold and then delivers it in metaphor relatively free of the sloppy stains of opinion.  His is a semi-public life, the most public of any of us.

Myself, I am filled with doubts.  I take my frustration out by testing truth in the face of commercially uglified metaphors hurled at us by the spectrum.  “Right, sure,” I respond to ads and statistics.  “Whatever,” I murmur.  I despise all media and question authority.  I am sometimes a part of the attitude problem.  I breed mistrust.  I agree only with literature on historians.

But Ricardo always bounces back in the face of the stupid news.  It is because he remains adamantly slow and wide. He resists better than anyone I know.  He was stern and clear about the Doña.  It is important to get the story straight.

I knew Rita before, had met her anyway … I forget where.  I have seen her only four times in my life. I don’t remember the first time well.  It was brief.  Maybe it was in a bar or at a party.  I know I was with a Grand Teuton, at the time and we both saw her.  Neither of us acknowledged the desire within us, though we each saw it in each other.  We did not act, not for lack of desire, but because we each knew we wanted her alone.  We didn’t speak to her because neither of us wanted to reveal his weakness.  But the black void behind our eyes was stained with her form – we would dream of her.

I remember the second time I saw Rita because I was alone.  She was finishing a mural.  It was past twilight, dark.  She had been working all day and was returning a ladder.  She carried it over one shoulder, her arm looped between two rungs.  The long metal thing swung with a tender balance.  In her other hand she carried her paints.   She moved quickly and with ease despite the unwieldy ladder.  She seemed fierce to me.  I longed for her.  I saw her as pure energy glowing like a dim but permanent candle in the wane of the day. I burned to speak to her.  “Hello,” I said.  She smiled a brief, tight smile and continued on.  It was the only word I ever uttered to her alone.

I never got to know Rita but fate has kept us bound.  After she became pregnant, I saw her for the fourth and last time.  She was huge, carrying the two of them inside her.  I was in the front room of my place on Hayes Street, the room that perched out over the sidewalk.  I looked out the window through the slats in the blinds and there she was, waddling slowly across the street.  There was no mistaking her, she has this kind of beauty.  She was visiting a friend who happened to be my neighbor – whom I did not know.  I closed the blinds and sat at my desk in silence.  I was afraid to speak to her.  I was afraid to call out from my window because I knew she was pregnant and alone.

And that leaves only the third time, and the glance and fate.

We were at Four Walls, the gallery space above the Kilowatt, a bar that was something of a grungy punk-rock venue.  Ken-Dog had a collage in a group show there.

On that Friday night, Ken-dog was representing himself as MGV.  I don’t know if his collage sold.  If not, it might have disappeared when he got rid of all his stuff a couple of years ago, after the birth of the Doña’s babies.  I heard he went into the street and gave everything away, then.  I heard it from Ricardo who rang across the coasts to me in Brooklyn.

Ken’s collage at Four Walls that night was of the Virgin de Guadeloupe as an alien surrounded by a glorious light.  The Virgin’s body was long and robed in bright green.  Her fingers were spindly.  Her face had been replaced.  I remember it was one of a series he was doing then.  There was one of the Christ-child as an alien swaddled and basking in holy light between the down-turned and adoring faces of Mary and Joseph.  The scene was in the manger surrounded by onlooking animals.  The Christ-child’s face, like the Virgin’s, had been replaced with that now-ubiquitous symbol – triangular head, big, black oval-shaped eyes – of the extraterrestrial. (K. Huerta, San Francisco, 1996).

There were six of us and some were high.  Ricardo, Ken-dog, Aaron, Kenny, the Grand Teuton and me.  It was January and someone had collected discarded Christmas Trees from the gutters and hung them inverted from the ceiling, the room was pungent of pine.  There were strips of wood and branches along the baseboards.  We sipped cheap red wine and watched people under upside-down trees.

The spectrum is supposed to provide metaphors for us, but they are false, filled with moralistic rhetoric in a dumb repetitive loop.  The internet, radio, television all move too fast for the subtle interplay between us. Rita and we moved slowly that night.  We struggled for her attention.

It was on the stairs at the gallery, the glance.  And it was not cast by Rita but Ken-dog.  I knew they would be together that night.  I saw it in Ken and I saw it in Rita, and I knew.  I saw it, David saw it, Ricardo and Aaron saw it and though none of us acknowledged it aloud, there was a palpable relaxation as we let what was developing between them appear.

Rita and Ken-dog moved into Ricardo’s house later.  It was there, the conception.  I heard about it by grapevine and the results were announced similarly through the quiet of friends who tell things as they happen, slowly, as they are.  The story is difficult to summarize.

Rita was pregnant with twins, came the news.  Ken-dog was the father and when he found out, he took all his possessions into the street.  A grand gesture, because there was no news flash on the internet: San Francisco muralist, artist and teacher gives away everything he owns – gives up art to become father.  No.  Nothing of the sort.

Over the years I heard different reports about Ken-dog.  He was with Rita at his parents house in the San Joaquin Valley, and then at her mother’s house, maybe.  He was in San Francisco and the babies were at their grandmother’s house.  I heard he had decided to settle down with Rita, then again that he left.  There was a story that he took off all his clothes and went to lie in the park where all the homosexuals go.  He came home covered in insect bites.  I heard he had a fascination with numbers and numerology, had taken to counting aloud for long periods of time and barking: numbers aloud.

I received a phone call from him in New York City once, the weekend my mother was in town.  He was at a payphone.  His voice was edgy and quick-tongued.  He said he was staying with friends in Brooklyn.  I offered to put him up after my mother left.  I didn’t hear from him again.

On the last night of my trip to San Francisco, Ricardo came to say goodbye to me.  I wept in realizing how much I miss him and my other friends on the left coast.  It was an hour before the redeye to New York that he told me that Doña Rita is in Tahoe now with the twins.  She is still “very energetic,” he said.  She invited Ricardo to come and do artwork with the children she teaches. She lives in one of the poorest parts of the South Lake with her two babies.

Beauty is still fleeting.  The moments wash past our eyes like rainfall.  So I am fiercely proud to report that Doña Rita and her twin babies, who will be four years old this year, are living, breathing and making art in a small town in Northern California.

Letter to Salman Rushdie

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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