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M.T. Karthik

~ works, thoughts, events of 1977 – 2017

M.T. Karthik

Tag Archives: m.t. karthik

Hola, Hello, Bonjour and Bienvenue

31 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by mtk in Final Post

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archive, artist, author, ffptp, Karthik, m.t., m.t. karthik, madras, mtk, mtkarthik, thyagarajan

I’m artist and author M.T. Karthik, known as Karthik or MTK.

This is an archive til I was 50; for current MTK, check my Youtube chan or twitter @mtksf:

Here you’ll find original writing, images and documentation of things I made and performances I gave until the age of 50. As I find and uncover things I dropped along the way and recollect them, I add to it over the years.

I wrote everything on this site – the poetry, essays, fiction and reviews – and shot or produced all the video and photographs (all the images in the headers above) and have occupied the node mtkarthik dot org and removed advertising so you can peruse free of distractions.

In the four decades covered here, I circled the world several times, living for years mostly in California – the San Francisco Bay Area,  Los Angeles – but also in New York City, New Orleans, Austin, San Antonio, Japan, India and Taiwan.

I have not landed. I don’t own property. I am mostly of nowhere and homeless; mostly unknown in both my birth nation and the nation to which I’m naturalized as a citizen. I’m most like ash on the wind or a stone skipping across a lake that studies the taxonomy of species around it.

Love,

M.T. Karthik

Oakland, 2012 and San Antonio, 2017

GBC Reader Vol. 2, Issue 2: 2017 Giants, a Work in Progress

18 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by mtk in GBC Readers

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alex, baseball, blackburn, Bumgarner, Buster, cain, chris, Clayton, de la rosa, frandy, gbc, giants, hundley, Jake, jarrett, Jeff, Karthik, League, m.t. karthik, Madison, major, marrero, mastroianni, matt, mlb, Moore, mtk, National, nick, olney, Parker, pavlovic, Posey, reader, samardzija, sf

Well the first fourteen games (four series) of the season are behind us and a couple of things are already clear.

  1. The NL West is going to be a dogfight. The Rockies, Dodgers and D-backs all expect to be in the hunt.
  2. The Giants are unsettled in left field and in the middle inning bullpen.

Though we’re 5-9 and tied for last in the division with the Padres, we’re only four back because everyone in the NL West is actively beating up on each other. I have a strong feeling that’s how it’s going to be all year.

To get the Negative Nelly out of the way first, Grant Cohn of the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat is convinced after just 14 games that the Giants “dynasty is over,” and that we are not going to make the playoffs.

Me, I am not so sure. There’s a lot of baseball left to play.

Pluses and Minuses

Johnny Cueto is 3-0 while Madison Bumgarner has yet to win in three starts. Once again a Cy Young campaign for MadBum’s hamstrung early. sigh.

Our Gold Glovers Joe Panik and Brandon Crawford look awesome, but we lost Buster Posey to a fastball to the head. John Shea wrote this excellent piece on the after effects of getting hit in the head by a 90+mph baseball. It is reported that Posey may play in the series against Kansas City that starts tonight.

Nick Hundley has been really good in Posey’s absence, a stable veteran behind the plate who instills confidence in the position of backup C.

Nuñez ABs are fun to watch and he is a demon on the bases, but his play at third has been up and down. Let’s hope it’s early season stuff. I really like the guy.

Brandon Belt and Hunter Pence are looking good at the plate.

Matt Moore looks good for about 78- 85 pitches and then the drop off seems a little crazy. The fact Bochy doesn’t feel he can trust our ‘pen hurts in Moore’s starts.

But Mark Melancon turned around after his weak opening day showing and has looked considerably better.

Jeff Samardzija, like last year, is probably going to take a few starts to get going.

Matt Cain got a win! (Olney comments below)

LF has been a problem and it was compounded when Jarrett Parker made a great play only to crash into the wall and destroy his clavicle – gone eight to ten weeks.

On to the Reader

With Parker going down Chris Marrero could be seeing more time in left field. Kaila Cruz thinks that’s a good thing.

We traded Clayton Blackburn to the Rangers for a 21-year-old unproven utility infielder named Frandy De La Rosa – Brisbee explains why.

Jake Mastroianni has a closer look at the pitching and offense two weeks into the season.

Buster Olney had this to say about Matt The Big Horse and his win.

The Giants’ Matt Cain is facing a similar transition to the one that CC Sabathia has had to go through — adjusting to the reality that he cannot throw as hard as he used to and learning to mix his pitches differently. In Cain’s most recent start against Arizona, he did what catchers and pitchers refer to as pitching backward — by throwing breaking balls in counts in which pitchers typically throw fastballs and using his off-speed stuff to set up the less frequent use of his fastball. Cain allowed one run in five innings. Sabathia recalled an at-bat in which he pitched to Russell Martin a couple of years ago, when the left-hander had it in his mind that he would bust a fastball past his former teammate — but the best he could do was 90 mph, which Martin clubbed for a homer. Sabathia says now that he wishes he had started altering speeds with his pitches earlier in his career.

  • Buster Olney on ESPN

If you haven’t yet read the sweet, sweet quotes in AlPav’s look back at Madison Bumgarner’s relief appearance in Game seven of the 2014 WS in KC, do it now.

Love,

MTK

Book Review – Lincoln in the Bardo

16 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by mtk in Book Review, reviews

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Bardo, book, form, George, Karthik, Lincoln, Lincoln in the Bardo, m.t., m.t. karthik, mtk, novel, review, Saunders, structure, the, writing

The originality of the structure of Lincoln in the Bardo immediately sets George Saunders’ debut novel apart. It’s composed of stacked lists of quotations attributed to the souls occupying Oak Hills cemetery in the Georgetown section of our nation’s capitol in 1862; to the President at the time, Abraham Lincoln, and to his son, Willie, recently deceased; and to the night watchman and manager of the cemetery, neighbors, historical figures and eyewitnesses to the events of the time.

I plunged into this work thinking these crazy quotes would continue for a few pages and then return to a normal third or first person narrative. Not only did they not, the form became its own sort of thing with hilarity and piety. The quotations interact, finish one another’s sentiments.

Saunders’ approach from his short stories in Pastoralia, where letters and notes and faxes between characters move plot and create conflicts, is here in fuller effect. This “debut novel” thus actually resides somewhere between the novella and the norm of long-form fiction. Almost as if Saunders still isn’t ready to write one of those “novel” things.

It was initially off-putting because pretty quickly quotes from real historical sources reside in equanimity with a tumbling invention of the thoughts of the dead.

The first time several quotations are used to describe the same person and there are wide disparities implying unreliable reportage, forcing the reader to flip back-and-forth to separate quotes from actual historical texts from made-up ones, it’s a hilarious reminder that we’re in a novel, and it doesn’t matter.

Fiction and Non-fiction swim together.

In the mid-90’s, in San Francisco, it was the fashion among serious young (read: unpublished) writers like me to read the postmodern fiction of structuralists like Harry Matthews, the only American member of the Oulipo, with great love. The Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle bears consideration in advance of talking about Saunders as constructionist.

There is a confidence and ease I love about George Saunders. He really is in command of his craft. With this form, within a matter of a few chapters, you are in his world. If a person were to come over to you and look over your shoulder while you’re reading this novel, it would look to them like insane gibberish.

Saunders’ effort is totally original but like Matthews and the Oulipo before him, uses structure to train you into his narrative – isolating you from being able to “tell” this book.

It was immediately apparent an audio book of this work is basically impossible without dozens of actors and a unique method for attribution, audibly. It’s another thing, a book.

I wonder how the e-versions look/read?

Once aboard, the form establishes a rhythm and momentum that sends this richly imagined exploration of death, life and loss, forward with vigor.

The historical facts surrounding the 16th President and the death of his son at the White House and the Civil War that raged with the nation’s history in the balance are the nest in which Saunders crafts a re-imagining of purgatory. He does so to examine our sense of purpose and meaning – in life and after death.

But rather than a staid, dusty exploration of our historical understanding of the deaths of the time, Saunders populates his work with real people – everyday people who lived and died normal and un-extraordinary lives, filled with sins and loves and hates and pettiness. It is part of his charm in the short form that his characters are easily believable and admirable for their flawed, utterly human qualities. They are our guides to the mind of our beloved Lincoln, and nation.

Saunders’ exceptional understanding of people and compassion for their desires, dreams and regrets is again on display as this diverse collection of souls from many walks of life reveal themselves and the stories of their lives.

The population of the cemetery includes slaves but the book fails to really plunge into the national sin. I read a review that felt the opposite, that the recrimination and oppression of the slaves in the cemetery by the whites was clearcut and evocative, giving voice to the horror, but it was disappointing to me.

As I reflect on the role the slaves do play, it is once again as from a position of rectitude, to be able to look back at slavery and racism to contain it in the national narrative.

There are some serious and violent points of intersection between the black and white population of the cemetery and one particularly poignant one never ends, an eternal struggle. But I can’t help but feel this could have been developed. Slaves and masters in the same cemetery, with only the masters in marked graves, seems a rare territory and an opportunity to explore racism more deeply.

The conceit does fruit into a tangential reference into Lincoln’s conclusions on the matter, conclusions that led to years of bloody war over ending slavery. This book isn’t about that though, nor about the civil war.

It seems to be about how we, all of us, think of ourselves and our lives more than Lincoln or anyone else in 1862 does. It seems to be about how we think of our lives in advance of, and even after, death – whether it’s the death of someone we know or ourselves. In that, Lincoln in the Bardo succeeds with sensitivity and compassion.

Saunders understands un-requite, failure, desperation and the longing we all feel. He also knows how to craft this understanding into an incredibly direct narrative. It’s amazing.

Apparently he has said about his process that the narrative tells him how long it is to be, what it is to be. In this case it became something wondrous.

I am left with so much after this novel. I find I cannot describe it very well. It’s like a magician’s deception. What you find within is worth much more than the conceit.

It is clear though, the magician knows his audience inside and out.

Impressive.

mtk

Dylan Nobel

23 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by mtk in First Post

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Currently, I’m celebrating the 2016 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Bob Dylan, by learning a few old songs on guitar

and printing some lyrics and quotes with a portrait I drew of him in 2008 (a re-working of a still from D.A. Pennebaker’s 1965 footage) that I can rubber stamp at will.

Thanks for visiting.

MTK

12/12/2016

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image

new avatar photo

13 Tuesday Nov 2012

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2012, autumn, avatar, contemporary, Karthik, late november, m.t., m.t. karthik, mtk, now

Posted by mtk | Filed under North Oakland, self portrait

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Last Year I Ran for Mayor

03 Monday Sep 2012

Posted by mtk in elections, protest, S.F.

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2011, campaign, Karthik, m.t., m.t. karthik, progressive values, rajan, san francisco, videos

I added these to the Looks Tab and thought I’d just post them here as well for kicks. This was my project to inject progressive values into the SF Mayor’s Race.

M.T. Karthik, 2012

03 Friday Aug 2012

Posted by mtk in conceptual art, journal entries, North Oakland, Uncategorized

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2012, Karthik, m.t. karthik, mtk

Over the past 200 days, I’ve populated this blog with 200 posts.

Many are backdated – material collected over the past thirty years – but I’ve also posted three to five times a week in 2012, with mostly photographs of baseball games, flora, fauna and landscapes.

There’s a distinct and deliberate difference in the work of these last five years from the work before. In my 40’s, my work is decidedly less political, more image-oriented and produced with and for the plastic, digital fluidity of the inter-webbed world. This is by design.

I do not wish to be known as a political artist.

I promised myself decades ago I would work socially on political matters until I turned 40, when I hoped to turn the mantle of activism over to a younger generation. I have helped this happen and documented its occurrence.

When I was 15 I wrote that I’d make these changes to process when I turned 40, including the addition of filmmaking – which I waited decades to take seriously.

At 15, watching the first of the Macintosh computers come out, I also knew that new media would arise over the years. My generation was the very first to own a personal computer or send an e-mail.

I have tried to be judicious about studying and using tech. I do not play games.

Of new media, Youtube has been the most interesting to me. I started my first Youtube account at 40 and have several now which I use to embed videos to this site.

Continuing my methods over the past year, at 45, I joined Facebook and Twitter during seminal years for both companies. I observed closely as Twitter was given tax-breaks to move to San Francisco and FB created its massive IPO.

I’ve deactivated my account on FB and will not post there again.

I will continue to use Twitter in concert with this blog. I’ve come around on Twitter. I still decry the tax break created and approved by Ed Lee, David Chiu and the SF Board of Supervisors, but I am a Twitterer and will remain so.

The work until I turned 40 is represented here by posts of work I produced between 1981 and 2007. It’s detailed and requires time to sift through. I’ll continue over the years to add work from the past and to edit the contemporaneously written material describing work from my 20’s and 30’s.

I hope to leave behind a sound record of what I consider my work via this blog.

I dream of a reader willing to consider the continuity of thought here as a kind of single expression of a humanistic free radical living in the latter half of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st. I am lonesome because of my work.

I like blogging and after some years of experimentation, I believe in WordPress as the best free way to do it.

Thanks to any visitors in advance; I love comments, likes and interactions. I am blessed that my site gets visits from many many different countries around the world. You are welcome here.

I remain, M.T. Karthik, author, artist, producer and director in pursuit of art, culture and change.

a salutation

24 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by mtk in poetry

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Karthik, m.t. karthik, mtk, poem

To those about to light a toothpick,

the reverse end of an incense stick or

deliberating whether to forcibly divorce

a pair of chopsticks,

by lighting one on the gas stove,

in order to light a smoke

because you’ve no matches or lighter …

I salute you.

mtk 2012 Oakland

Norcal Turkey, Marin, CA

21 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by mtk in fauna, photography

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2012, Area, Bay, california, Karthik, m.t. karthik, Marin, mtk, NORTHERN, san francisco, TURKEY

More Spring Flora

07 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by mtk in flora, North Oakland

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Opening Day for the San Francisco Giants

06 Friday Apr 2012

Posted by mtk in baseball, S.F.

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catching light

02 Monday Apr 2012

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Empire State Building (above) and plane engine (below) from same vantage point  about two hours apart.

a few seconds of sunshine measured by sneaker whites

01 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by mtk in conceptual art, North Oakland

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Political Media, Messages and More

03 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by mtk in elections, essay, journalism, press clips, reviews, social media, talks

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Bush, cable, history, internet, Jefferson, limbaugh, m.t. karthik, media, message, mtk, newspaper, orwell, pamphlet, politics, presidency, president, radio, Reagan, rush, States, talk, television, television presidency, U.S., United

( a one hour talk delivered to students at Academy of Art University in San Francisco on Friday, March 1, 2012. There was no recording. Slides appear in order here as images, and some video clips and links have been added to this online version).

Good afternoon, I am M.T. Karthik.

I’ve organized this talk chronologically, and into three general parts, starting first with historical examples of mass media used for sociopolitical language here in the US;

then second, a line between politics of the past and the present drawn by the invention and use specifically of television,

and finally politics in the Digital Age, which will conclude with some discussion of the contemporary situation.

The largest arc of this one hour talk is pluralism of mass media in sociopolitical language – from pamphlet to newspaper to radio to television to cable television to the Internet to FB to Twitter over the last 236 years.

In the last part of the talk, I will also be sharing some of my original work in the field. I have sought to report upon, document and portray through art, certain social interests primarily because I believe they are being written out of history, even covered-up by specific interests and aggregation of public opinion around a monocultural viewpoint of our nation’s political past.

No discussion of American political thought and expression can start without the Declaration of Independence –

– Thomas Jefferson’s seminal document authored against the monarchy in England, which set off an age of revolution on behalf of individuals against kings and nation-states and which, with the U.S. Constitution, created the bond between the Colonies that holds as Federalism to this day.

It’s important to read the Declaration in context, because of the scale of Jefferson and the Colonists’ reach.

Jefferson was influenced by the French and other European thinkers as a result of visits there, but really, the scale of the task was unprecedented.

How would you author a letter to all the Kings and governments of the nations of the world declaring the creation of your own new country – led collectively – with an unprecedented democratic governmental structure set up by its citizens?

It’s said Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas, has supported secession of Texas from the United States. How would his Declaration of Independence read, today? Would he address it to the UN, the Senate, the President, the Supreme Court? – none of these institutions existed for Jefferson to appeal to. He was writing to the nebulous notion of a “world at large” and against the British Monarchy.

What kind of persuasive language do you use in such a context?

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

Epic.

But how was it possible for Thomas Jefferson to set down these words in Virginia with such confidence? The seeds had been sown by a Philadelphian, who wrote and published a pamphlet which became an instant best-seller here and abroad.

Perhaps more than any text in that nascent revolutionary period, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense – addressed audaciously to “the inhabitants of America” – pushed the colonists toward independence. The text demanded an immediate declaration of separation from England a full year before Jefferson sat down to write the great document.

With Common Sense, began the era of the political pamphlet in the United States. The authors of the Revolution used the format in the next ten years to author the Constitution. Should we refer to the American political pamphlet as a medium?

Here’s a recent one:

The pamphlet brings with it the creation of whole industries: printing, typography, stenography, journalism, cartooning, and begins an arc of American sociopolitical language that pluralizes to include newspapers, magazines, radio, television, cable television and the Internet. This talk will discuss the use of all of these and pluralism of media over the 236 years since the Declaration of Independence was written.

The serial publication of essays, viewpoints and even texts of speeches became the normative method for political discourse in the Colonies. It birthed the centralization of thought in new-born cities and the media channel of our oldest newspapers and journals.

The Federalist Papers were a series of 85 articles or essays promoting the ratification of the United States Constitution.

77 of these were published serially in The Independent Journal and The New York Packet between October 1787 and August 1788. A compilation of the 77 and eight others were published as The Federalist or The New Constitution in two volumes in 1788.

From these documents and the discussions they generated, came our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Promptly thereafter, colonial cities birthed the “two-paper town” as the newly minted First Amendment of the Constitution produced contrasting viewpoints in the form of newspapers, which bore, defined and built the “constitution” of American political thought for a hundred and fifty years.

The era made editors-in-chief men of great power a hundred years before Citizen Kane.

Note that the Presidents of the US at this time are mostly forgettable bureaucrats. Perhaps Van Buren stands out for his hemispheric reach, but great debate and intellectual work wasn’t being done by the President. It was occurring in the Senate, at the level of the Supreme Court and with the birth of newspapers’ Editors-in-Chief like Horace Greeley of The New York Tribune – who began to take on greater responsibility for political language.

During the period of 1840 – 1860, after years of the establishment of new civic centers and States, with their own newspapers and journals, the country faced its greatest sociopolitical unrest. Correspondingly, an era of great newspaper publishers and editors representing contrasting viewpoints emerged.

By 1858 it was common for newspaper-editors to employ stenographers to attend speeches and to publish the speeches in totem in their papers.

The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 were a series of seven debates between Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate for Senate in Illinois and the incumbent Senator Stephen Douglas, the Democratic Party candidate. At the time, US Senators were elected by state legislatures so Lincoln and Douglas were vying for control of the  Illinois legislature.

The main issue in all seven debates was slavery and ultimately all of the issues Lincoln would face in the aftermath of his victory in the 1860 Presidential Election – issues which would lead directly to the first dissolution of the Union and the first Civil War in U.S. History.

The debates were held in seven towns in Illinois, but became so popular that they were distributed by papers elsewhere.

But editors of papers who favored Douglas would take the stenographers’ notes and clean them up, fixing errors of notation, context or even meaning only in Douglas’ words. Papers that favored Lincoln did the opposite. The power of the Editor was never before so clearly visible.

Lincoln lost the Senate election, but afterward he had all the texts cleaned, edited properly and republished as a single book – which was read broadly and helped lead him to the nomination in 1860.

The issue of Slavery was defined for vernacular discourse by the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, a remarkable moment in U.S. political history and language. Here’s the Centennial Stamp:

And so for long years newspaper men and politicians were bound in this country and great cultural and social consciousness that helped define the nation emerged through muckraking and whistle-blowing, but also, inevitably, corruption and yellow journalism.

The Spanish-American War may have been born from such yellow journalism, as the sinking of The Maine, falsely attributed to the enemy by papers in the U.S., pushed Americans into the war. More examples exist, and indeed as media pluralizes over the next century, this cozy corruption between politicians and journalists has been exacerbated by new media.

By the turn of the 20th century, the dominant medium was the printed word, and then, the word as heard through radio and both were being used to push political interests and social agendas.

Radio, a warm medium, a tribal medium with which President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the fireside chat, became the primary media tool for information about the wars abroad that defined the century. As Wiki points out, Every US President since Roosevelt has delivered a regular radio address.

News and official information delivered by voice over the airwaves is warm and available, lucid by the intimation of the sound of the voice, not subject to interpretation of the reader. Baseball and music and DJ’s sounded great on the radio and political communicators quickly recognized it.

Writing for broadcast began.

An excellent metaphoric example of the power of radio before television as a vernacular medium in politics can be found in the Coen Brothers musical film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?.

Set in the southern state of Mississippi before television, one narrative thread of the film follows a Governor’s race. Throughout the film, various people in the State are shown at home following the Election by listening to the radio.

Three escaped state prisoners form a musical group on the run, and anonymously record a single at a rural radio station which becomes immensely popular throughout the state through the power of radio. The men appear in disguise to perform their song live at an event which both candidates are attending.

The Governor’s opponent is insensitive to the popularity of the group, focusing instead on denigrating the men for both their fugitive status and their race. In a moment that predates television’s power in this regard, the challenger is revealed to be a racist statewide over the air. The challenger, unlike the incumbent, has no grasp of the power of the radio.

In the climactic scene, the incumbent Governor of Mississippi, seeing the immense popularity of the three escaped state prisoners, pardons the musical phenomenon the ex-convicts have become. The whole of the dialogue is shown to be carried out on radio throughout the State to the folks listening at home, who even hear the challenger run out of the hall on a rail as the Governor leads the crowd in a rousing chorus of “You Are My Sunshine.”

The entire scene is here:

[with respect to the Coen Brothers]

These scenes are remarkably faithful to the truth. In Louisiana, Jimmie Davis, a popular singer and the attributed author of the song, “You Are My Sunshine, became Governor.

The blogger LaLouisiane is eloquent on this matter:

“I remember my granddaddy saying that if Jimmy Davis would come around and sing “You Are My Sunshine”, (he wrote it you know), that everybody in the state would vote for him and never even ask him about a policy, a road, a bridge, nothing. We just really like that song down here, I guess.”

This talk, Political Media, Messages and More, is a follow-up to a talk I gave as News Director and Elections Coverage Producer for KPFK 90.7fm in LA, seven years ago at C-Level Gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown, which was subtitled, Pluralism of Media in the Age of Surveillance [mtk 2005].

Pluralism of media is evident at the addition of each new mass medium – radio doesn’t arrive at the newspaper’s exclusion or the pamphlet’s exclusion.

The pamphlet and certain newspapers remain significant modes of sociopolitical communication. They are at the heart of some, arguably all, of the United States’ greatest movements. Women’s Suffrage,

Socialism, the Labor movement’s successes in the first half of the 20th century.

So Pluralism of Media means we media-include, not media-exclude.

Where before you read pamphlets, now you read pamphlets and newspapers. Where before you read print, now you read print and listen to the radio – you add TV.

We add each medium and the media morph to fit our desires of them. Talk radio, drive-time radio, live radio, each is its own form.

This is what Marshall McCluhan meant when he said any new medium contains all previous media in it.

This is all changing now, of course, as Pluralism of Media has matured since 2005 to become the fluid, the cloud, the totality of data that we swim in today, post-TiVo, at the dawn of the streaming era of the web.

END PART ONE

Part Two: THE TELEVISION PRESIDENCY 1945 – 2008

The Television Presidency, born when Truman used it to announce the end of World War II , instantly made the Office of the President of the United States different from every presidency before TV – and television dominated until the Internet and the digital age, a period of twelve presidents.

Ike was the first President on the tube, and in his most important moment on TV, his exit speech, President General Eisenhower famously warned against the growing presence of a “Military-Industrial Complex”

… perhaps it would have worked in color.

But forever the line that defines the Television Presidency will be the Kennedy-Nixon Debates of 1960.
If you’ve seen Frost/Nixon you know that Nixon to the end of his days considered television, and the close-up, his undoing.

In the televised debates with Kennedy, Nixon’s problems with perspiration accumulating on his lip and his jitteriness in general on TV, came over as nervous and untrustworthy – on radio or via text this would never have been transmitted to the public-at-large. Nixon was ridiculed mercilessly for it by critics.

Imagine the contrast, Kennedy’s cool, youthful good looks and Nixon’s shiftiness.

Kennedy garnered the potency of the new medium, and, thanks in  part to the work of Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Baines Johnson in delivering Texas, won the election by a slim margin.

I really like the blogger J. Fred McDonald’s take on this, who states, in his excellent essay on Kennedy’s relationship with TV: “For JFK, television could turn defeat into victory.”

Kennedy addressed the people of the country often and personably, but politically used the tool at critical junctures to save himself: after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s use of television was pitch-perfect.

So, the relationship between live color television and the Presidency began with Kennedy’s handsomeness but then, typically of all things new, was taken promptly after discovery to the other extreme, the visual abuse of his savage assassination.

TV then exposed LBJ and Nixon and Kissinger’s dirty wars and the ugly side of the USA: repression, corruption, racism.

The 1968 Olympics were the first televised live and in-color around the world. They took place at the end of one of the most tumultuous years in history, a year I refer to as The People’s Year. This image of a staged protest against race and class oppression, thanks to live television, was impossible to stop:

I participated in making a monument to this moment on the campus of San Jose State University, when in 2006, I worked intimately with others assisting the artist Rigo 23 in the creation of this:

(At this point in the talk, I describe the Tommie Smith/John Carlos statue project anecdotally and include personal, non-published images of the construction of the statues.)

The impact of the moment as seen on television is described well by this Mormon blogger, who tells of being young and white and American and watching with her father. She describes his reaction both at the time and after watching ceremonies of the courageous act on video 20 years later – his change of heart is set in universal terms.

TV was the king of the failure that was The Vietnam War. It ended the Nixon Presidency. But politicians, as they had in the past, reacted by learning to manipulate the new medium to their advantage. Predictably, it was an actor who synthesized the power of the “small screen” for political propaganda.

Ronald Reagan overcame the tool’s power to reveal – with charisma. TV’s investigative potency withered with the mic in his hands.

TV buoyed Reagan into the White House with a full eight-year script, designed just like a Hollywood movie, with a brilliant new dawn at the front and a cowboy riding into the sunset at the end.

Reagan and TV media convinced most Americans that people in Russia lived in a dreary, black-and-white reality, trudging when they walked, standing in interminable lines as black-booted officers of the Kremlin marched past with truncheons to beat them if they acted out.

Reagan asserted our freedom to shop and drive and declare vast spaces ours to tame. Trained and experienced for fifty years in delivering lines written by others, he powered through TV.

Consumer technology was represented in its farthest reach by television, broadcast into millions of homes then on four channels, perhaps a fifth. It was a medium dominated by the Networks, and owned by private corporations. The unholy alliances between corrupt newspaper men and politicians had become de rigeur for relationships with corrupt television execs.

TV was manipulated on the greatest scale by Reagan. In those days, to be broadcast all over the world on US television was as close to “global communication in real-time” as existed and, on the evening of my sixteenth birthday, the actor-president went on television and gravely told us it was imperative to invest our tax dollars in a Strategic Defense Initiative to protect us from nuclear war. Reagan described this SDI as “Star Wars” technology, in the vernacular of the pop-movie phenomenon.

Every legitimate scientist in the world knew SDI was a ploy of language, a technical and political impossibility to deliver, and indeed, it was later revealed that Reagan’s own speechwriters had advised against his including it in public presentation – he’d made the decision on his own that day to do it. Generals, scientists, politicians and writers protested; others were put on the spot, but somehow the language was never exposed.

A naïve public wowed by Reagan, Star Wars, computers and technology in general – and without the Internet to look up the reaction of scientists and writers – ate it up.

Conservatives have used the phrase to justify defense spending for offensive weapons for decades – even now in Europe. Years later we live with these  TV-generated myths, like the “dirty bomb”. (cf. The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis)

It was 1984, and the United States was described by most as being a free society, totally unlike the one in George Orwell’s prophetic novel named for that year.

That image – of totalitarian fascism that produced false-flags and enslaved citizens to a national narrative – was projected by the U.S. President onto the Soviet Union, a country he called “The Evil Empire”. It was a term taken directly from popular movies and, wielded by a movie actor through the ubiquity of the medium of television, it became successful political propaganda.

Reagan used his charisma on the small screen to push corporate, private, and even illegal agendas, until the veneer finally broke in the Iran/Contra hearings. But even then, his “I can’t remembers,” delivered pitch-perfect on national television, got him off the hook.

The Dawn of “Pluralism of Mass Media”

By my senior year of high school in 1985, say 10% of students were writing papers with word processors and printing them dot-matrix to take to our teachers. The movement started with stand-alone word processor devices, which were typewriter-like machines that had single-line or paragraph-wide monitors at the top of the keyboard, allowing writers the ability to read what they were typing without printing it first, for the first time ever.

Looking back it seems both obvious and amazing how quickly we made the transition to using the word processor and eventually software on a pc to write. It was a natural step that changed writing forever. Cursive and the typewriter are all but dead. Content began its high-speed ascent. USA Today and CNN were born.

But though the computer was on the verge of changing writing, publishing, and expressing with text and image forever, the single most dominant force of mass media technology wasn’t yet the computer. It was still television, which had expanded through digital technology that created cables delivering far more visual information directly into American homes.

George Herbert Walker Bush, the former head of the CIA, wasn’t close in the primaries when he ran for President in 1980, but was appointed to the bottom half of Reagan’s ticket and became Vice President. Now the actor was termed out.

The Republican Party seized the lessons of the small screen, and having had eight years of method  training by a great actor, extended that training to a former serviceman. George H. W. Bush’s team was precise and almost militaristic at staying on message.

Bush repeated phrases without giving policy details, promised Americans more of what Reagan gave them and then repeated the same two or three positive phrases again.

Democratic Presidential Candidate Michael Dukakis’ imagery was by contrast horribly clunky – footage of him in a tank with an ill-fitting helmet had the opposite effect of projecting the desired image of a strong leader.

Bush had the immense advantage of the Office of the Vice President for air-time, but used it sparingly, with few details. When Bush’s campaign did use TV ads, it was to attack – the Willie Horton ad ran ad nauseum and painted Dukakis as a bad judge of character.

This was the beginning of catchphrase culture.

A culture manifest most strongly on television by ads, and in political communication as satire of the timeliest manner on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, featuring Dana Carvey as a repetitive robotic message man George H.W. Bush against John Lovitz as an exasperated Michael Dukakis, who finally shrugs, and delivers the punchline:

“I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy”

[click that link above to see the bit … Chevy Chase birthed portraying the President on SNL, but Dana Carvey nailed it before Phil Hartman or Will Ferrell]

Though we have been pluralizing mass media from the pamphlet to the television, this era is the dawn of the Pluralism of Mass Media that delivers us to the Internet Era of sociopolitical propaganda – not only because of the birth of word processing and cable television, but because radio returns for what it’s good at.

RADIO and TV in concert

Radio broadcasting shifted from AM to FM in the late 1970s because of the opportunity to broadcast music in stereo with better fidelity.

Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show was first nationally syndicated in August 1988, in a later stage of AM’s decline. “Limbaugh’s popularity paved the way for other conservative talk radio programming to become commonplace on the AM radio,” states his Wikipedia entry.

Radio became the drumbeat for the President’s made-for-TV messages. The cool medium was used sparingly for headings and rubrics and catchphrases, while radio was used for tribal intercommunication of long, warm discussion of the message.

Limbaugh had an immense following and Bush made sure he got as much access as he needed. My father remembers seeing footage on network news of President George H.W. Bush welcoming Rush Limbaugh, shaking his hand and then picking up his bag for him before turning to walk into a personal meeting.

This potent image deliverable only by television (wordless communication in background footage, not a press conference with the President) was transmitted for the conservative President and his media agent on ABC, NBC, CBS, and perhaps PBS and the TV message – short, cool, specific – conjoined with the radio message, long, rangy, warm – to create a uniform statement.

The 1988 Election was the last Network News Election. The four-channel era of television was over.

Cable News Network, CNN, began and had its watershed moment by being the first embedded network live during wartime. At last, TV had provided war,itself, live and in-color.

George H.W. Bush and his Gulf War versus Saddam Hussein over Kuwait gave CNN more than a billion viewers worldwide, birthed CNN International and pushed Cable News past Network News in terms of relevance.

Television production became tighter, faster, snappier, with jump-cuts and camera motion. Technology was on the cusp of the fluidity of digital. The TV talk show incorporated radio stylings.

The cable news era, which is only just winding down, began with The Gulf War, and the 1990’s are littered with what cable TV invented: Newstainment, and, critically because it signals the demise of the Academy, the creation of star faculty and pundits.

These define cable TV in the 90’s, composing formats used today by Rachel Maddow, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly and so many more pseudo-intellectual, corporate-financed, opinion-making cable TV “shows,” designed by marketing and legal teams, by groovy execs and demographers more than journalists.

Whole channels have emerged – and here the Daily Show/Colbert are uniquely successful – from what was drawn so poorly in the 1990’s. The medium’s highly refined message delivery system operates full-tilt, 24/7, and millions call it real-time.

[END PART TWO]

PART THREE:

The21st Century : The Internet Meets the Television Presidency

Part Three notes are much less formal as the latter part of the talk is filled with anecdotal descriptions of several projects I have engaged in. However, I am writing it up cohesively and will add it here when finished.

This section starts with the 2000 Election that ended in the Florida Fiasco and into Howard Dean’s successes with the Internet, then moves through the Kerry-Bush Election, the first-ever Congressionally-contested election and then the Obama-McCain election, ending finally with the unique situation of politicians in SF running for Mayor and using Twitter for the first time even as they granted Twitter a huge tax-break to stay in the City. I reference works of my own that parallel these circumstances.

Update

20 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by mtk in Uncategorized

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2004, alec, baldwin, daniel, election, ellsberg, gonzalez, interview, m.t. karthik, matt, mtk, rnc, usa

rewrote the ABOUT tab and added INTERVIEWS and INSTALLATIONS and COLLAGE and FLORA and FAUNA and a C.V.

In the Interviews section there is a nice one with Daniel Ellsberg, I was hosting live radio on drive time LA during the Democratic National Convention in 2004.

The Alec Baldwin was a good one, too.

I will dig up some others and add them. I really don’t like how the collage looks online, but am cool with these little ones being up.

Oakland Cherry Blossoms

16 Thursday Feb 2012

Posted by mtk in photography

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on Colby street

Wiki Truth

15 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by mtk in social media

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chronicle, education, ffptp, higher, m.t. karthik, truth, wiki, wikipedia

I beg you NEVER to create a wiki entry for MTK as it is understood by you to mean me, because for some time now I’ve been concerned about Wiki-culture’s perceptions of truth. Real-world arguments – in pubs, restaurants, cafes, galleries and even libraries and classrooms –  are being built on pseudo-intellectual wiki-bullshit.

Timothy Messer-Kruse’s piece concerning his area of historical research and the “editors” of the wiki world is very disconcerting.

read it here:

Of course the defense of broadening what is and isn’t “just” about the U.S. Justice system is the slipperiest slope of all; it’s just one of the thin veils of our nation exposed.

Let’s build a better USA, together, with honesty. Let us expose sophistry, sycophancy and propaganda from what we collectively, slowly, globally begin to define true.

The Kingfish Pub and Cafe is an Oakland Landmark Building

08 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by mtk in North Oakland

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Advisory, Board, california, daniel, garry, goins III, Karthik, Kingfish, Landmark, Landmarks, m.t. karthik, mtk, naruta, north, oakland, pub, rajan, rockridge, schulman, temescal, valerie

I attended my first City of Oakland public meeting Monday, February 6th, to hear appeals by proprietors and regulars of The Kingfish Pub and Cafe seeking Landmark status before the Landmarks Preservation Advisory Board.

Here’s the agenda, and this piece in Oakland North covers the meeting fairly well.

In what can only be described as rare for an Oakland story about a dive, The San Francisco Chronicle actually did a cover piece on the place and this attempt to achieve Landmark status back in October  (Which was amended by a piece on C-1 of The Chron, by same author, February 12).

This discussion yields an opportunity to address local art, architecture and gentrification, and historical and archival significance of the culture of North Oakland.

We are a decade deep into the digital generation and there are new, complicated reasons to carefully consider how we archive the past. Things have long begun to look more the same and with less character. Huge mega stores and strip malls replace local businesses, and much of what has existed has been erased and destroyed casually because of a lack of concern for the vernacular value of place.

The Landmarks Board has little power in the face of the Planning Commission or the City Council, which are dominated by lobbyists, mostly for vested developers’ interests, but the Landmarks Board exists for a reason and it is imperative we sharply define exactly how much power regular people have to protest rampant development solely for personal profit.

There are serious questions as to whether our City government is sophisticated enough to appreciate and protect what constitutes a Landmark in a specific neighborhood. Though, in fairness, this cannot be said of Valerie Garry, Vice-Chair of the Landmarks Board, who is a preservationist and showed architectural, artistic and cultural sensitivity to the petitioners’ request.

The Board as a whole heard the petitioners, were thoughtful faced by so many in the gallery, and yielded time for public comment, asking relevant questions.

Board Members Daniel Schulman and John Goines III were particularly vocal,  and both voted against the upgrade of the validation request. Indeed both seemed moved, but cynical.

Goines was like a reluctant father trying to help supporters of the pub to get over losing it. Schulman declared he had been to the pub over the years, and recently as well, but argued huffily that a stronger case could be made for The White Horse in the neighborhood – the voice of political reason breaking the hearts of pub regulars. This led to a discussion about the matter and many great, old Oakland bars were brought up.

Staff reminded Schulman that The White Horse, Geo Kayes and others mentioned are storefronts in a building of another purpose, and not a free-standing, crazy-gorgeous, little wooden building built over decades.

It was inarguable that The Kingfish was in the company of all of the very old bars the Board discussed, but that among them all, the Kingfish, as a structure, is wholly unique.

Listening to these two gentlemen try to let folks down easy was one of the things that makes this discussion interesting to me: the suggestion that the petitioners are idealists asking for the moon from a Landmark Board Member who knows political reality.

I don’t know any of the Board Members, but I’ve thought deeply about the matter and inspected the Kingfish’s structure. I have interviewed regulars, owners and new customers and interacted with its extremely diverse clientele. A broad age and race demographic frequents the establishment – many of whom I know to be local residents.

In response to a direct request from the Chair of the Landmarks Board, Anna Naruta, for more oral histories on the Kingfish, I am beginning with this blog entry.

Many new residents of North Oakland are younger, wealthier and work in San Francisco. Some new homeowners are the product of the very last and most successful of the “house-flippers”.

These new owners join a flood of new renters from San Francisco and elsewhere. Rents are astronomically high. It’s hard to get a reasonable rent and dozens of high-rent apartments built during the fantasy boom stand empty, unrented. Greed has governed decision-making far more than culture.

Condos on the spot are economically and culturally unnecessary in this neighborhood and far more so if it requires removing the Kingfish, which is a remarkable structure filled with collage art and made from materials culturally syncretic to vernacular building in the area in the early 1900’s.

The first thing I told the Landmarks Board was that I am not a regular of the Kingfish Pub and Cafe , nor a friend of the owner/management petitioners. I stood before them as a local resident and urged the board to vote unanimously on behalf of the petitioners for Landmark eligibility status, because The Kingfish is a totally unique structure and a living collage of materials.

Management and regulars related that the Kingfish was begun as a bait shop in the early 1920’s, when it was built by a single individual from vernacular materials contemporary to its era, mostly wood planks.

Its location is excellent for fisherfolk because of very easy access to roads leading to many different parts of the Delta from Telegraph and Claremont. But also, for decades the Temescal Creek ran through here – until it was aquaducted so it now runs under here – and people fished it, too. The Kingfish Bait Shop must’ve been the hub for fisherfolk here.

It became popular and grew into a pub and restaurant in the 1930’s, and by the 1950’s had at least two generations of fathers, sons, mothers and daughters that had spent time buying bait, and then eventually sandwiches and beer, in what had grown into the ramshackle form it still takes.

My son and I fish. It’s clear we can get to many different fishing spots in the Bay easily from here. We notice less parents fishing these days. As computer games, digital culture and home entertainment dominate our society, less parents and children learn to fish and about the management of water-dwelling life. Less families spend time near the water.

The Kingfish is attached to a long vernacular history of people who cherish fishing here, leading up to ourselves. As a pub, because of this history, the ‘Fish attracts contemporary fisherfolk who maintain vernacular knowledge of climate, tides and environmental quality. It collects locals of a fading culture.

In the 1950’s and on into the 1970’s a second unique clientele began enjoying the ‘Fish. The pub lay just beyond the one-mile dry radius from the University of California. The Kingfish and many other local pubs became a hangout for college-aged students and, in the Kingfish Pub’s case, particularly for student athletes.

Cal players, coaches and managers as well as those from professional teams in the area, like the A’s, have long made the Kingfish a center of sports talk and culture. Its low-key, egalitarian atmosphere allows the most well-known or empowered athlete or manager to be able to co-mingle with younger athletes and students without the formalism of civic space.

The walls speak to years of this kind of activity, as sports memorabilia applied throughout the establishment exhibit the significance of The Kingfish as a Sportsperson’s Place. It’s clear that as with local fishing lore, a second, vernacular history is collected and archived by regulars of the ‘Fish, that of local sports.

The materials used and indeed the very “look” of the place are what attract me to this argument about its status as a Landmark of North Oakland. Many features of the Kingfish conjoin to demand consideration as cultural artifact of the region it inhabits, with powerful archival elements, protected solely by the managers and regulars of the pub – the petitioners.

The uniqueness of the application of the sports memorabilia is that while they are affixed in a seemingly uncurated and random manner, each comes with a story, and often regulars relate stories of how they came to be where they are on the walls. In fact, while some are quite valuable I am sure, no one would ever remove or move any of them.

Secondly, the Kingfish lets in very little light and has a low wooden ceiling. These are almost perfect conditions for archiving the materials in question! Through an oddity of its vernacular design, the culturally sensitive material affixed to the walls cannot be removed and are perfectly preserved over decades. Philosophically, from an arts and architecture standpoint, there is much to be considered here.

Representatives of the owner/developer are objecting to Landmark status and have claimed a vested interest and state-driven right to develop the land; that they had plans to do so and had those plans approved in 2007. Thus, in reality, what the Landmarks Board would have to do to support the petitioners would be relatively extreme.

The fact is, the developer’s plan was made in another universe – exactly at the peak of speculation in 2007.  The immense and global crash that has occurred since 2008 still dominates the economic environment. No numbers generated for projects then could possibly make sense now.

The Kingfish has a diverse clientele in age and cultural background, attracting new generation residents like myself and 30- and 40-year customers. It feels welcoming while being historically connected – which in my experience is unique.

I told the Board my investigations made me realize lots of local parents and their children go and have gone to the Kingfish over decades, and lead me to approve of my son dropping in to the Kingfish when he turns 21, if the bar still stands in what would be its 99th year.

As an artist living in North Oakland electing not to own a car, and traveling weekly by bicycle and on foot between Peralta Elementary (with history to the late 1800’s) where my son has been a student, and the rock ridge for which the neighborhood is named, my son and I observe and photograph changes to public space and discuss them with others.

In these past five years we have documented:

— seismic retrofit of BART

— revivification of Frog Park and the creek pathway

— removal of the eucalyptus trees at the DMV by external interests

— repaving of Claremont to the freeway entrance (likely on behalf of Safeway’s expansion)

— closing of Long’s/CVS, and many older businesses

and the arrival of dozens of new businesses, salons, cafes, restaurants, bars and pubs between 2007 and 2012, including the closure and re-opening of the Kingfish.

The re-opening of the Kingfish by current management was met with enthusiasm locally in this time of revival here. The current petition to maintain the place via Landmark status is an extraordinary result of the most contemporary incarnation of the pub merging with intense cultural connection with its past.

Matt Cain, SF Giant

08 Wednesday Jun 2011

Posted by mtk in baseball

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How To Cut a Habanero Pepper

17 Monday Jan 2011

Posted by mtk in cooking video, performance

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The Giants Win the Pennant, 2010

24 Sunday Oct 2010

Posted by mtk in baseball, S.F., short film

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Eleven to Eleven in the Bottom of the Eleventh, 2010

09 Monday Aug 2010

Posted by mtk in baseball, essay

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[this was the Championship Season, August, amidst Lincecum’s first crash]

First Pitch 1:06pm – Indian Summer began with a heat wave and the warm weather seems to correlate directly with baseballs sailing out of AT&T Park.

The Giants, a great pitching team that struggled to produce three or four runs a game in San Francisco‘s foggy, cool summers, had, with the heat, flipped the script, smashing the ball against the surging, Central Division-leading Reds – scoring 27 runs in the first two night games to win 16-5 and 11-2. It was the beginning of a home-run fiesta that would carry the Giants to the playoffs.

Headed into the city on BART that morning after the long-ball fest of the two previous nights, we met lots of Giants fans looking for a sweep.

We all talked about how the day game would be even warmer, and hoped Giants bats would stay hot. More than once we heard the refrain: “I wish they’d save some of those runs and scatter them across a few games.”

We were excited to see Madison Bumgarner, the newest member of the starting rotation, a tall, strong 21-year old with big-time game. It would also be my first time seeing the Reds’ Joey Votto live. He didn’t disappoint.

In the first, with two men down, Votto blasted a two-run homer. Worse, his was followed by back-to-back solo shots by Jonny Gomes and Ryan Hanigan that got out of the park in a hurry. The Reds shelled Bumgarner mercilessly before that last out. Reds 4, Giants 0.

Though the Giants were down big before they’d even had a chance to bat, my son, the woman to my right, her son (wearing a floppy-eared Panda hat) and I all agreed not to let it bother us. Giants batters were coming off 27 runs in two nights! Pandahat favored Aubrey Huff.

Yes, game we were, in the face of four runs, and, as if to prove us and the whole universe true, Bumgarner settled down in the second, and in the bottom half Jose Guillen singled to left, was advanced to second by a Sandoval base hit (much to Pandahat’s excitement) and to third by an Uribe sac-fly. The Giants chiseled him across the plate from third on a Freddy Sanchez single. Reds 4, Giants 1.

But in the top of the third, the 21-year-old Bumgarner lost it with two outs again. Rolen doubled, Gomes singled, Hanigan walked on a full count and Drew Stubbs tripled to clear the bases. Just like that it was seven to nothing. Ugh.

Then, just when we thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, the poor kid blew it like I haven’t seen since Little League.

With two outs, three men in, and Stubbs standing on third, Righetti and Bochy decided to intentionally walk Paul Janish to set up the force out at second, first or home.

So picture it: runner on third. catcher Buster Posey standing up, glove-arm extended. The ump’s got his hands on his hips. Janish at the plate is barely even in his stance – holding the bat in a  relaxed posture awaiting his walk.

And then suddenly, Madison Bumgarner throws a wild pitch on an intentional ball! Missed Buster entirely! And Stubbs scores from third on an E1. Reds 8, Giants 1.

I had no idea what to say. Talk about brain freeze. I looked at my son between the top and bottom of the inning, speechless. I ran through the list of clichés out loud:

“Hey you know, there’s no clock in baseball, it’s the most changeable sport, anything could happen. A coupla runs here, a solid inning in relief there and a couple-few more runs, and we’re right back in this thing.”

It was weak, but the woman to my left chimed in appropriately and together, we showed strength in the face of adversity to the boys – but not before she leaned over and whispered “I wish they’d saved some of those runs from yesterday to scatter across a few games.”

Then again, torturously, with two outs in the fourth, in his first at-bat against our new right-hander Ramon Ramirez, Joey Votto homered for the second time. It was impressive. He worked the count against the second pitcher he’d face that day and calmly jacked a solo shot to left. Votto already had two big flies and three batted in. Reds 9, Giants 1.

When the Giants failed to score in the bottom of the fourth, a lot of people left, but the woman to my right and her son stayed. They minded our stuff as we took a quick walk down to concessions to see if it might change our luck. My son flipped his hat round, the first of many rally caps I’d see that day. We never leave games, but this one just got worse.

In the fifth, with two outs, Ramirez walked Stubbs, then issued a back-to-back, full count walk to Janish and finally capped his performance by yielding a single to the pitcher, Homer Bailey, scoring Stubbs.

Santiago Casilla came in to get the last out and stood on the mound facing people’s backs as they climbed the steps to scramble out, and a frustrated remaining crowd. In a tension-relieving moment akin to broken glass Casilla then beaned Reds second baseman Brandon Phillips.

It was inadvertent, but took Philips out of the game, clearly bothered, in the sixth. Casilla then just took a strikeout, so his box reads: one beaning and one strikeout in a third of an inning’s work! That was enough for our seatmates, who bolted up the steps – Panda ears a-flappin’.

And that was how the Giants got down ten to one in the first five innings of a game we now refer to as one of the greatest comeback performances in SF Giants history.

When the Giants came up to bat in the fifth down ten to one, there were maybe 20,000 of us left, enjoying a rare, hot day at the park. It was a gorgeous Wednesday afternoon and there really wasn’t a better place to be in SF. Oh, the waning light in Indian Summer, then, like a consolation gift to us for staying.

Giants recent acquisition Mike Fontenot drew a lead-off walk and Andres Torres singled and then – what, what? – Aubrey Huff advanced both to scoring position with a grounder. When Pat Burrell singled to right to bring in two runs, we made noise. Reds 10, Giants 3.

All year, our expensive left-handed reliever Jeremy Affeldt – whom we’d signed last year to a two-year, nine million dollar deal – has struggled in relief. He seemed as likely to throw a wild pitch as a strike. When he entered the game in the sixth, I felt Manager Bruce Bochy and Pitching Coach Dave Righetti had given up on this one.

I assumed they were happy taking two of three from the Reds over the week and had decided to use this opportunity to help some guys who’ve been struggling work out kinks. I had resigned myself to watching Affeldt fail before he even threw a pitch and even prepared my son for it.

Affeldt had taken a beating in the press and been shown up significantly by left-handed acquisition Javier Lopez, a specialist, whom the Giants pay one tenth of his salary. Affeldt watched Lopez enter games in pressure situations just days before – in San Diego and at home – and end them with less than ten pitches. It must have been a blow to his ego.

Affeldt stepped up and closed out the sixth without giving up a hit. Three up, three down. An electricity passed through us. None of our guys want to be the one not carrying his weight. Anybody who loves effort and was at AT&T Park that day fell in love with this team.

In the sixth, Juan Uribe hit a one-out single to short, just beating the tag. Nate Schierholtz – pinch hitting for Affeldt who’d done his job – smashed a double to right, sending Uribe to third. After five and two-thirds, the Reds pulled Bailey with a seven-run lead and brought Bill Bray in relief.

It was Bray’s wild pitch that made everybody sit up. It was a parallel to Bumgarner’s run-scoring wild pitch in the first – karma. This one brought Uribe home and sent Schierholtz to third. Fontenot then stepped up with one down and grounded out to second, allowing Schierholtz to cross the plate. Reds 10, Giants 5.

Now, the vibe in the building was palpably “no-hitterish“. It was ten to five. Nobody wanted to talk about a comeback for fear of jinxing it. But there was an excitement after that wild pitch – like maybe the Reds were more vulnerable in relief.

We were all two days full of recent memories of towering homers by Posey and Uribe and Burrell – could the Giants come back? I wondered what Kruk, Kuip and Jon were talking about. [still haven’t heard what I’m told is an epic broadcast].

In the seventh, the Reds brought Logan Ondrusek in relief of Bray, Sergio Romo pitched for the Giants, and both pitchers held.

Still down five now in the top of the eighth, the Giants brought closer Brian Wilson in early to keep the Giants within reach. Wilson, who would go on to end the season with a major-league leading 48 saves is our nutty backstop – crazy as a loon, but who knows how to finish.

Again. In Wilson, we felt the fight in this team. The unwillingness to just rollover and call it a day because you’re down.

We went to the bottom of the eighth inning trailing by five runs, but having crept back to within striking distance against the Reds bullpen. Has there ever been a more exciting inning played by an SF team than the Giants eighth that day? That’s for historians to decide, but it was the craziest Giant inning I’ve ever seen live, hands down.

Guillen leads off with a single to left, and then Sandoval, to center – runners in the corners for Juan “One-Swing-of-the-Bat” Uribe. <BLAM> three run homer. Nobody out. Ondrusek done. Reds 10, Giants 8.

The Reds, suddenly only up two, scramble. Massive substitutions. Helsey in at left, Bruce at right and Arthur Rhodes on the mound to set up Cordero, the closer. It was crunch time and we, long-suffering Giant fans – desperately searching for situational hitting and run support – watched five of our guys make it happen.

Ross and Fontenot hit back to back singles to left and Torres jumped on a Rhodes change-up, smacking a stand-up double to the same part of the park, scoring both. Reds 10, Giants 10. And then in two quick at-bats against Rhodes, Posey and Huff earned sac-flies to bring Torres home, sliding to the plate to beat the throw. The Giants lead 11 to 10.

Wow. The place went crazy. My seven-year old was high-fiving seventy-year olds! It may have been the smallest standing ovation the Giants will ever receive, but it was unequaled in sincerity.

When I looked around it was apparent that since the fifth some fans had returned, or maybe had come in from a downtown bar to catch what they were seeing on TV or hearing about in the streets or on the radio – The Greatest Comeback in Giants History.

Now, there is some dispute about what constitutes a Great Comeback. To me, it isn’t a comeback unless you win. There are many who share this opinion. This definition dominates the view presented by the mainstream sports press. But for some, a comeback is defined by effort, as measured by the difference in the lead you make: if you were down by a hundred but lost by only two, it must have been a really amazing game, and you must have made superhuman effort though you took the loss.

I find this definition of a comeback without victory to be suspect in sports with only two opponents. Because, where in a foot race, it applies to the difference between second’s finish versus third’s in relation to first (and more importantly fourths distance from third), it makes no real sense where only two are competing against each other.

That said, the ten runs made up by the Giants to take the lead was the greatest deficit overcome in Giants history. We were exhilarated. The relief of tension was palpable. We all felt special. It was incredible. We were going to sweep the Reds, scoring almost 40 runs in three days. The elders behind us and my son were just glowing in the late afternoon light . . .

It’s a shame home games don’t last just eight innings. There’s those last three pesky outs to get. Even after a huge comeback achieved as a team, you have to stay focused … and seize the win. To me, that’s what makes it a comeback.

Now, here a word must be inserted about Pablo Sandoval. I was at a local pub the other night watching the game when Sandoval made the throwing error by sending the ball home with a force out at every bag without stepping on third, preventing a double play from ending the inning – a mental slip that allowed a run to score later and lose the game for the Giants- when a patron beside me said he blamed the marketing department for Pablo’s problems.

That was when I put it together. The Marketing department, desperate to replace Barry Bonds with a ‘batting persona’ forced the 23-year old Sandoval to become The Panda. And went nuts making Panda suits, hats, bobblies, glasses, mats, key chains, stuffies and everything else. Did anyone in marketing notice that our strength is pitching and that we need team play and contact hitters? It was undue pressure to put on Pablo Sandoval.

I enjoy shouting out to the players in encouragement when I am sitting low enough to be heard. We were just up the first base line behind the Reds dugout for this one and in the third I can remember shouting to Freddy Sanchez as he awaited a pitch with Panda on first, “Hey, Freddy, You got ‘em, man! They can’t touch you!”

Pablo, standing on first, turned, pointed at me from first with two black-gloved fingers and shouted, “That’s Right!” My son was thrilled. Freddy hit into a double play. It felt like poor Pablo was cursed.

With one out in the top of the ninth and the Giants up 11 to 10 after coming back from being down 10 to 1, the greatest comeback in Giants history, Brian Wilson delivered and the Reds’ Drew Stubbs hit a routine grounder to Sandoval. I was sitting right behind first base. I looked right at him. He scooped it up and had plenty of time.

For a second, I thought I saw his eyes looking right at us. And then I watched his right arm just go screwy and his face turn. The ball flew way wide of Huff at first and into the grass in front of the dugout. Stubbs, thinking it was going to be a routine out, hadn’t really come close to first, so he turned the corner and turned on the speed, arriving standing at second.

It was a two-base throwing error on Pablo Sandoval that put the tying run in scoring position and the fifth Giant error of the game. Moments later, Wilson gave up the single to Janish that scored Stubbs. He then got the final out. Reds 11, Giants 11.

The Reds had turned to Nick Masset to finish their debacle of an eighth, which the right-hander ended with a strikeout. Now, he manhandled the Giants in the ninth, striking out three. The Giants’ Javier Lopez, la specialista, entered in the tenth and true to form made quick work of the Reds. Again, it felt like Lopez didn’t want to be shown up by Affeldt, didn’t want to be responsible for failing when called upon.

I mean this in a good way.

Not like guys competing for jobs, but like comrades in struggle. In the eleventh, Bochy leaned on Lopez to extend and the specialist held the meat of the Reds lineup to just one hit. Meanwhile, Manager Dusty Baker and the Reds turned the ball over to their excellent closer Francisco Cordero.

The Giants wouldn‘t score in the tenth or eleventh, but we got the thrill of seeing a scoreboard I don’t think I’ll ever see live again – Eleven to Eleven in the Bottom of the Eleventh.

Arriving at the top of the twelfth, exhausted of left-handed relievers, I looked down to see Barry Zito trotting out to the mound. Bochy probably thought he had no other choice. Maybe he thought it would help the slumping Zito get back some lost confidence. But there was starter Barry Zito on short rest, entering a tied game in the 12th inning in relief.

Janish singled to left, then Matt Cairo doubled to center sending Janish to third. With two on, nobody out in the twelfth inning of a midweek day-game, the last of a series in August, against the Central Division leader, and a failing Zito on the mound, these Giants refused to die.

The next batter, Chris Helsey, hit a sharp grounder to Uribe hoping to at last get the winning RBI. Janish sprinted for home, but the hard-charging Uribe scooped it up and threw a bullet to Posey at the plate, in time to get the sliding Janish. We roared.

It was still 11 to 11. But now it was one away with runners in the corners for Zito facing league MVP-candidate Joey Votto. We knew the battle between Barry Zito and Joey Votto would decide this game. As Votto fought off pitch after pitch on the strikes and Zito missed the box by millimeters on the balls, the sinking feeling that we were losing this one crept into us all.

In a way I was resigned to it when Barry ran out there, but somehow it didn’t matter. We had seen superhuman effort by our Giants. Grit, toughness and an unwillingness to rollover and die.

Finally though, one guy was tougher than them all and in an epic display of game-winning force, Joey Votto hit a ball so hard into shallow right field that nobody could’ve handled it – a smokin’ dribbler. Sanchez stopped it and tried to get the ball home.

Cairo, who had taken a huge lead from third arrived at the plate almost simultaneously with the ball, but Posey had blocked the plate. The two collided hard as Cairo outstretched for the plate, but Posey held on! The umpire, Hirschbeck, signaled vigorously and shouted, “Out!” … then the ball flew up in the air, slipping out of Buster’s hand … and the call was reversed. He was safe.

Reds 12, Giants 11.

Cordero retired the side in order and stole a win as the Cincinnati Reds beat the San Francisco Giants 12 to 11 in 12 crazy innings. Zito took the loss to fall to 8-9 (he didn’t win again this year and this was the one that made him a losing pitcher for the 2010 season).

Epilogue

Amazingly, the story of this game and its internal question of whether or not you can lose a Great Comeback was buried by baseball itself, which, in its statistical perfection provided a definitive Comeback Game on the very same day, by the very same margin of difference as ours.

In a staggering coincidence only possible in the mathematical infinity of baseball’s continuity, the Atlanta Braves were ahead by the exact same score of 10 to 1 over the Colorado Rockies and allowed Colorado to come back and win 11-10. On the same day! So guys were like, “Now, that’s a comeback.”

Thinking about it now, you could say it was the last game the Giants lost because of a collection of their own mistakes rather than by a single player’s lapse or by being outplayed by the better performance of their opponent. But despite the lop-sided opening and all the crazy errors made by so many Giants, this against-the-odds contest was also the grittiest expression of this team’s fight that I‘ve yet witnessed.

I’ve never been happier after a loss in my life. I was just so proud of our guys for trying that hard. You could feel that pride among all the fans as we shuffled toward the exits, smiling.

The whole team had an unwillingness to lose, yet lose they did, and in a sad but poetic way, that loss came at the hands of our own beloved, expensive, Prince of Inability, Barry Zito. Yes, we were proud of our Giants, despite, and now I understand what people mean when they say a Great Comeback can end in a loss.

Oaktown Streets Cutup

28 Wednesday Oct 2009

Posted by mtk in collage, North Oakland

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california, cut, fliers, flyers, Karthik, m.t. karthik, mtk, oakland, oaktown, streets

Making Money … Into Something Else, installation, 2009

03 Saturday Oct 2009

Posted by mtk in collage, installations, MTKinstalls, North Oakland

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2009, art, Avenue, Caroline, Claremont, Deco, Karthik, m.t. karthik, mtk, new, oakland, Stern, work

flyer for show: Jefferson Snowboarding [2009]

Concerning the Author’s Previous Attempts at Fiction

05 Tuesday May 2009

Posted by mtk in Berkeley, Commentary, essay, journal entries, Letter From MTK, novel, self portrait, thoughts

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fiction, history, Karthik, m.t., m.t. karthik, mtk, nobels, novel, stories, story, writing, writings

Between 1995 and 1997 I wrote my first novel, Mood. Because digital printing and imaging were nascent technologies, and because I was growing increasingly interested in doing art myself, in making visual art myself, Mood was conceived and designed specifically, with a graphic element that drove the creative engine of the work: the passage of an image of the changing moon moving through the margins, and the presence of the night sky on the pages by making the pages dark and the letters light, with the slightest alteration of color and contrast of the pages and letters as the book progresses to correspond to the light provided by the moon as it passed through a fortnight of phases during the course of the narrative of the novel. The pages were to be the night sky and the letters the stars – paragraphs were constellations.

The timing of the narrative takes place during the fortnight represented by the physical pages and artwork, and as a conceit, the main character’s name changes with each phase of the moon. Set in San Francisco, I employed many contemporary businesses – bars, restaurants – that were popular among scenesters then. I punnishly changed names, or not, on a whimsical basis. Anyone who went out to hear live music or DJs or art in The Mission, North Beach, SOMA or elsewhere in the mid 1990’s would recognize many locations by their descriptions in the novel, Mood.

I physically took Mood to New York City in August of 1997, and attempted to have it published. I hand delivered copies to Sonny Mehta at Random House and at all the major houses. This was the exact moment when many of NYCs oldest and most famous publishers were being bought out by large German corporations.

Response to Mood was almost negligible. Only one agent wrote back at all, a handwritten note to say he liked the style but that the work was too experimental. The book was never produced as imagined and for a dozen years has existed as only a single, 187-page hardcopy, bound in 1997 (which may be lost in India), and as files stored on floppy disk. In January 2000, one chapter of Mood was published as a short story by the Conde Nast women’s monthly, Jane magazine. That story, Shanti, was roughly 1500 words long and represents my first published work of fiction that had a national audience. More than 50 readers wrote to an e-mail established to receive feedback. All the feedback was good.

I stayed in New York to attempt to write more and address the publishing industry, but grew increasingly disappointed in the changing face of the industry and writing in general. The New Yorker rejected seven of my submissions between 1997 and 2009, though once they wrote by hand that I was on the right track, “this one is more like what we might run,” the unsigned note read.

In 2001, my short story, Close the Piano, was published in an anthology of South Asian writers out of Toronto, Canada, under the pseudonym Raj Balas. I did a public performance as Raj Balas reading a part of that story aloud to a group gathered at the Asian American Writers Workshop in Manhattan, in April of that year – four months before the September 11th attacks which changed my career trajectory, somewhat, as I began and have been doing much more art, performance, news and journalism rather than fiction writing, ever since.

After 9/11, I nearly stopped writing fiction altogether. This has been an intense period in my life that includes the birth of my son and years of writing hard news and politics for Pacifica Radio, as well as anti-war essays and e-mails for a half decade. I was very politically active during the Bush/Cheney era. I also completed a lot of art, performance and installation work that was politically motivated in response to our changing world.

My explorations into visual art – which began in 1996 with Rigo 23 in San Francisco – began to fruit in New York in part as a result of collaboration with Christopher Wilde, Marshall Weber, Mark Wagner, Sara Parkel, Amy Ferrara and others at Booklyn Artists Alliance, and also because, on an irregular but intense level, I began assisting Rigo 23 with large scale art and installation projects all around the world. I became a working artist somewhere between the year 2000 and 2003 – when most of my placed work found its home in educational and arts institutions in the U.S.A. This is also when I founded Fifty Foot Pine Tree Press (Los Angeles, April 25, 2002) to begin producing limited editions, artist’s books, prints and digital art, now on the web at www.ffptp.org

In the 21st century, I began to make artists books and to do collage, drawing and painting more than to write fiction, however, I did write one more novel and five more short stories while in New York City. None of this work was published, though the novel was posted page by page, online, in its entirety, by a now defunct website. That novel remained online for a full year, December 1999 to January 2001.

I have only finished one story since 9/11, as raising my son has made it nearly impossible to find the mental space and time to write what I want to write. The only fiction I have finished in the last 3 years is Before You Came, the opening chapter of a novel with the working title, The Outsider Inside.

M.T. Karthik

Berkeley, California

May 2009

The Attacks on Mumbai, India 11/26/2008

29 Saturday Nov 2008

Posted by mtk in India, journal entries, journalism

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The Attacks on Mumbai, India
[posted by mtk, 2230 IndianStandardTime, Saturday, November 29th]

Late Wednesday night, in Mumbai’s priciest district, on the city’s south coast shoreline, two-member teams of gunmen suddenly appeared, fanned out and fired AK-47 rounds randomly into crowds while hurling grenades out of their backpacks.

They targeted luxury hotel restaurants and eventually seized hostages and whole floors of two major hotels and a Jewish Center, from which they launched a firestorm of bullets and incendiary devices aimed at Mumbaikars, tourists, police, anti-terror forces, and the colonial-era hotels themselves.

Gunfire began at or near the Oberoi Hotel at Nariman Point around 9:30pm, and by 11:30 the coastal Marine Drive was a war zone of ambulances, police vehicles, satellite TV vans and trucks filled with heavily armed soldiers. Soldiers moved into the Oberoi even as seven grenade explosions rocked the Taj Mahal, which burned for hours. Simultaneous grenade and gunfire attacks by armed gunmen began at the central railway station, a taxi stand and a hospital. Fierce battles between police and terrorists lasted more than 50 hours and have been described as urban warfare.

Two full days later, the death toll stands at nearly 200, including 22 foreigners, three high-ranking Indian anti-terror police, and at least nine of the terrorists. One has been captured, nine others detained and the nation of India stands shocked to attention.

The attacks themselves relied on multiple, audacious gunmen and were conducted with organized and well-trained execution, implying greater terrorist infrastructure, but most serious experts doubt the involvement of al Qaeda.

At the Trident Oberoi and Taj Mahal luxury hotels, the “terrorists” sought and killed foreigners. American and British guests were targeted in particular, but among the dead are a Greek millionaire, a Japanese tourist and at least two Australians. The attacks were brash, loud, pointed and violent. Many are still wondering who would do such a thing and why?

On Thursday morning, speaking from inside the Oberoi, where foreigners were held hostage, a man identified as Sahadullah told India TV he belonged to an Indian Islamist group seeking to end the persecution of Indian Muslims: “We want all mujahideens held in India released and only after that we will release the people.”

This claim and a written fax #stating responsibility was with a group called “Deccan Mujahadeen” – a regional identification with the South Central Deccan Plateau in India – masked the true authors and were meant to inspire “homegrown” terrorists within India.

The attacks are cast thus somewhere between a suicide bombing and a revolutionary assault. But they seem hyper-provocative – an orgy of public violence for an unlikely single objective. There are strong reasons to believe they are provocations with other authors and objectives.

We can describe four:
1. Hindu Extremists
Mumbai has a history of Election year violence and investigations continue into an internal political agency for the attackers. There are accusations against Hindu Nationalists in pursuit of a harder-line policy, concerning Kashmir and Pakistan in specific, and Muslims in general. Extremist Hindus have executed attacks or organized them to create a greater fear of terrorism and push the election toward their policy.

It has been reported that Hemant Karkare, chief of the city’s anti-terrorism squad, who was gunned down Wednesday in the line of duty, was in fact on the trail of Hindu extremists in the cases of certain attacks in previous years. This from Amaresh Misra [tel:91-9250305699]:

“The Mumbai ATS chief Hemant Karkare and other officers of the ATS have been killed. These were the same people who were investigating the Malegaon Blasts–in which Praggya Singh, an army officer and several other noted personalities of the BJP-RSS-Bajrang Dal-VHP were arrested. Karkare was the man to arrest them. Karkare was receiving threats from several quarters. LK Advani, the BJP chief and several other prominent leaders of the so-called Hindu terrorism squad were gunning for his head. And the first casualty in the terrorist attack was Karkare! He is dead–gone. the firing by terrorists began from Nariman House–which is the only building in Mumbai inhabited by Jews. Some Hindu Gujaratis of the Nariman area spoke live on several TV channels–they openly said that the firing by terrorists began from Nariman house. And that for two years suspicious activities were going on in this house. But no one took notice.”

UPDATE: China says don’t rule out Hindu extremists on the basis of “the red thread” around the wrist of attackers – a Hindu practice, that wouldn’t be necessary camo/costumery where they were attacking, a westernized part of town. Read the “Red Thread” China angle here. (Chinese Red Thread, ha! multicultural poetry, I say) The only other named agent in all this then is Dawood Ibrahim (discussed below) who serves as the transition to:

2. Unseen Hands in Pakistan
China, the USA, Russia and Iran all have their hands in “leaderless” Pakistan, since the collapse of Musharraf and the murder of Benazir Bhutto. China has negotiated a port with Pakistan to allow the Chinese access to Caspian Sea oil by pipeline. The United States is actively interested in Indian/USA alliance to balance China. Iran is the source of the China oil, Russia seeks to counterbalance USA’s presence in region. Jane’s has alredy identified a China/Russia/Iran Axis that seeks Pakistan. Countered by a USA(via Iraq/Afghanistan and now)/India alliance – trying to get India into aggression with USA versus Pakistan. All of these hands have interests and remain largely unseen could any of them be involved in these attacks? Are there terrorist or operatives willing to deal with anyone for the highest price? Who are they? Could this be from Pakistan but having no relation to Zardari or ISI?

3. Israel/BJP connection?

There are claims that when the BJP was in power in 2001 (when it allowed Sharon to visit as the first Israeli PM recognized by India) secret alliances were made between Extremist Hindus and Zionist Jews to address Pakistan more aggressively. It has been claimed that as recently as this summer, Israeli Security and Mossad Agents have been involved in training these Indian Extremists. The idea of Mossad involvement here is far-fetched, but possible. Could extremist Zionist and Extremist Hindus be running provocation false flag attacks to incite violence? Again, Misra:

“It is clear that Mossad is involved in the whole affair. An entire city has been attacked by Mossad and probably units of mercenaries. It is not possible for one single organization to plan and execute such a sophisticated operation. It is clear that this operation was backed by communal forces from within the Indian State. … Muslims and secular Hindus have been proven right. RSS type forces and Israel are all involved in … destabilizing … India. India should immediately snap all relations with Israel. We owe this much to Karkare and the brave ATS men who had shown the courage to arrest Praggya Singh, Raj Kumar Purohit, the army officer and several others.”

the radical blogster aangir fan agrees and thinks Dawood Ibrahim (if you don’t know who he is, it’s detailed in clip) is a pawn of both Pakistan’s ISI and USA’s CIA! [BTW, after the NYT blamed them yesterday, the L-e-t have since issued a denial] so Ibrahim serves again as a transition which leads us to:

4. Bush/Cheney Actively Agitating Covertly (cf. Iran)
Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker this year that Bush/Cheney received the go ahead from Nancy Pelosi and seven other Congressmembers – four Democrats and four Republicans – to earmark $400 million dollars for covert actions in Iran. COVERT US military within the sovereign country of Iran! These are resources and personnel allocated to agitation. Bush/Cheney and the neocons’ stated policy is to agitate and push these countries into action in an attempt to get the US military involved to “settle” it as a part of their War on Terror. Are the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad and these attacks on Mumbai covert agitiation black-ops out of USA’s Pentagon?
UPDATE: Professor Michel Chossudovsky of The Centre for Research on Globalization at Univ of Ottawa has an excellent piece on the whole affair! with deep details into U.S./I.S.I. relations. It concludes with this smart rebuke of “what we are seeing now” in the English-language press:

“The role of the US-UK-Israeli counter terrorism and police officials, is essentially to manipulate the results of the Indian police investigation.
It is worth noting, however, that the Delhi government turned down Israel’s request to send a special forces military unit to assist the Indian commandos in freeing Jewish hostages held inside Mumbai’s Chabad Jewish Center (PTI, November 28, 2008).

Bali 2002 versus Mumbai 2008
The Mumbai terrorist attacks bear certain similarities to the 2002 Bali attacks. In both cases, Western tourists were targets. The tourist resort of Kuta on the island of Bali, Indonesia, was the object of two separate attacks, which targeted mainly Australian tourists. (Ibid). The alleged terrorists in the Bali 2002 bombings were executed, following a lengthy trial period, barely a few weeks ago, on November 9, 2008. (Michel Chossudovsky, Miscarriage of Justice: Who was behind the October 2002 Bali bombings? Global Research, November 13, 2009). The political architects of the 2002 Bali attacks were never brought to trial.

A November 2002 report emanating from Indonesia’s top brass, pointed to the involvement of both the head of Indonesian intelligence General A. M. Hendropriyono as well as the CIA. The links of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) to the Indonesian intelligence agency (BIN) were never raised in the official Indonesian government investigation –which was guided behind the scenes by Australian intelligence and the CIA. Moreover, shortly after the bombing, Australian Prime Minister John Howard “admitted that Australian authorities were warned about possible attacks in Bali but chose not to issue a warning.” (Christchurch Press, November 22, 2002).

With regard to the Bali 2002 bombings, the statements of two former presidents of Indonesia were casually dismissed in the trial procedures, both of which pointed to complicity of the Indonesian military and police. In 2002, president Megawati Sukarnoputri, accused the US of involvement in the attacks. In 2005, in an October 2005 interview with Australia’s SBS TV, former president Wahid Abdurrahman stated that the Indonesian military and police played a complicit role in the 2002 Bali bombing. (quoted in Miscarriage of Justice: Who was behind the October 2002 Bali bombings?, op cit)”

All of this must be considered and investigated seriously, and restraint and calmness must be encouraged in India. Let us mourn and heal and investigate.
Indian investigators, from the street level up to the Prime Minister’s office, state that forces responsible for the attacks are “based outside the country” – and the world’s press has rapidly presumed Pakistan. There has as yet been no explicit charge against another nation, but it has been revealed that the one captured terrorist is from Pakistan[and stated he had accomplices in Mumbai] , and a guarded, but confident and firmly-worded statement from the Prime Minister warned “neighbours” of consequences if they continued to allow the use of their territories to terror groups.

[posted by mtk, 2230 Indian Standard Time, Saturday, November 29th]

Last Piece Before Election 2008

31 Friday Oct 2008

Posted by mtk in appeals, beliefs, Berkeley, Commentary, elections, essay, journalism, politics, public letters, thoughts

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2008, election, electronic, fraud, Karthik, m.t., m.t. karthik, mtk, problems, voting

We’ve proved that the electronic voting machines are made by highly partisan private corporations and feel strongly that fraud has occurred. There are dozens of very serious cases, allegations and simulations of sheer electronic fraud, by reputable academics. There are allegations of vote theft – the outright changing of results … read this excellent summative:  http://www.wanttoknow.info/electronicvoting


And still as many as ONE-THIRD of U.S. votes are being cast into the black box of un-auditable e-voting without paper record trails. See who votes how here:

[http://verifiedvoting.org/verifier/index.php?ec=mixed&topicText=&state=&stateText=] 

While this year’s presidential election has generated more interest than those in say 1996 or ’88, and perhaps even more than the Bush/Rove manipulations in 2000 and ’04, very few in the corporate press are preparing for what could be another utterly bogus presidential election night. The Republicans don’t need to actually win because they can negotiate the Democrats losing, and make the corporate press agree the polls were wrong.

“The Bradley Effect: that people won’t admit to pollsters that they didn’t vote for a black man” is already being paraded as an excuse, and races that are polling very wide are being portrayed as close! why? So it can be fixed again and presented as legit?

By contrast, many in the blogosphere of the Internet now feel that the outcome of the 2008 Presidential Election must be “either an Obama landslide, or definitively election fraud …” as it has been already identified in 2002 and 2004; including computer fraud via the alteration of votes in electronic voting machines, illegal vote purges and suppression in key states.

We have uncovered the exact ways in which HAVA (the “Help America Vote Act“) – forced county clerks in communities all over the country to rapidly accept UNAPPROVED Diebold, Sequoia and Premier electronic voting machines. We have testimonial after testimonial – all over youtube – complaining of what looks like rigging or suppression of votes. The outright changing of electronically cast votes by an exceptionally simple and quick hack is alleged nationwide. See these 3 movies on the facts:

http://www.freeforall.tv/
http://www.uncountedthemovie.com
http://www.stealingamericathemovie.org

So, on election night, what are we going to do? be transfixed by the corporate media? by Karl Rove’s fat face telling us a state has “flipped” from blue to red? or a “Too Close To Call” tuesday night and then a fixed election wednesday morning? how are we as a people to prevent election night and indeed our whole election process from being an utter joke?

Don’t let surprise turn into silent acceptance of a coup on election night. 

Brad Friedman started with that attitude. The one-man election integrity super-blogger has been pursuing issue after issue in an organized fashion for the past four years. www.bradblog.com is indispensable now from the standpoint of election integrity awareness. It’s possibly the single best place to go on the day after election day to follow up on a priori complaints. 

Black Box Voting, begun by Bev Harris, pursues similar goals – they are at www.blackboxvoting.org – and have begun a campaign they call: What to Do on Election Night “Protect the Count!” that advocates taking your video cameras where votes are stored on election night and being prepared to spend the night.

From the standpoint of long term solutions, so we can get together after this election and write the un-HAVA [maybe we could call it SAVA, the Secure America’s Votes Act]  and have it passed by the new Democratic President and Congress, here’s one: Open-Source Voting http://openvotingconsortium.org/ It’s endorsed by many who care, as a good way out of the nightmare HAVA has produced. 

“But MTK … ,” you ask, “ … all that’s fine and good, but what are we gonna do if it’s election night and they are freaking rigging the election and shoveling a result down our throats via the Corporate Press with bullshit numbers, un-investigated mysterious vote-shifts and hundreds of thousands of purged and missing ballots, again?”

First, I think be very open-minded, slow to judge and aware. Second, why not be prepared to bring the government and the press to a halt on Wednesday the 5th of November if necessary – a stoppage of the process for investigation. In all seriousness. Be prepared to say you do NOT accept a concession by any party or any interpretation of the votes by any government body without a full Congressional Investigation into the Election. Imagine headlines in the Times that read Election Fraud Alleged … Public Demands Results Be Investigated, and subheads:

impound the electronic voting machines

do NOT certify any election where voters claim the process was interfered with.

demand the right for a re-votes, tell people to prepare for a second ballot if necessary and entire re-votes of counties and states should be encouraged if necessary  

Other than that … get ready to tell the people who want to take this country over illegally again that that isn’t what democracy looks like, ‘cause that’s what we will be doing. And it may take months.

sincerely,

mtk on the mic

Before You Came, short fiction, 2008

28 Tuesday Oct 2008

Posted by mtk in fiction, NYC

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2008, Before You Came, Karthik, m.t. karthik, mtk, short, story

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

“All right,” he murmurs, “We do it.”

“Mmmm,” she hums into his chest.

They sigh in unison.

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

The next day she tells her assistant, Lucy:

“We’re going to do it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she does it again the next day … infinity.

This has gone on for seven years.

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

<wheedley-eedley-eedley>

“Creative.” she sings into the receiver,

It’s Raj: “Hi Lucy, what’s up?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“One moment please.”

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

“Hey,” she calls out.

“Goddammit, take me off.”

“What do you want?”

“Let’s celebrate …”

“I can’t.”

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

“When are you done?”

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

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

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

“Hello?”

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

“Are you getting married?”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The war-fiction rolled on. And we marched.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How old are you?” he asks.

“Thirty-six.”

Gopal shrugs and returns to his paperback.

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

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

“Will you please wake up?”

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

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

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

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

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

“A pigeon called me a bigot yesterday.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From inside, she hears the phone:

<brrrrrrring>

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s Rajagopal.”

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

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

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

“Aaanh.” Kalpana repeats, to Raj.

“WHO IS IT?!” shouts Ramesh.

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

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

“Yaarre?”

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

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

“He’s written an opera.”

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

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

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

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

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

“And when it is written?” Raj asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not counting her chickens before they hatch.”

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

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

“You don’t mind coming here, right?”

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

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

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

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

They finish their meal in silence.

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

In Conclusion

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

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

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

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

M.T. Karthik, 2001 – 2008

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

Sonny Rollins, concert review, 2008

04 Friday Apr 2008

Posted by mtk in essay, jazz, journalism, reviews

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2008, Berkeley, Cal, california, collossus, Colossus, Ishmael, m.t. karthik, mtk, Performances, Reed, review, rollins, sonny, the, The Colossus, Zellerbach

77-year old Sonny Rollins absolutely lifted 2,000 plus in a wowing two-hour set Thursday night at Zellerbach Hall on the Berkeley campus.

The gig was the first before a worldwide tour over the next two months for the tenor giant that includes Singapore, Japan, China and Rollins’ first trip to Korea. The group returns to the US briefly before moving on to Europe in the summer.

The irrepressible genius called tunes and blew glowing chord support throughout the show and was positively still energetic backstage – after two hours of uninterrupted performance. The Rollins feel remains, an unmistakably witty and stable voice in jazz and the sextet has found a dope new heartbeat in drummer Kobie Watkins who, churning the toms, created a pulsing drum-and-bass groove that Rollins, and all of us, felt. If they were strolling it would be sick.

Rollins’ broad tone blends seamlessly now with long-time collaborator, trombonist Clifton Anderson, whose fluidity is technically superior and, at moments, gorgeous. Rollins continues to experiment with African percussionist Kimati Dinizulu.

Highlight of the evening for me was witnessing novelist Ishmael Reed and Rollins share a fistpound backstage after the show, and hearing the former introduce his wife to Rollins, thus: “Meet my wife, Carol, Carol … The Colossus.”

word.

Letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, 2007

19 Monday Nov 2007

Posted by mtk in elections, public letters

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2007, Bush, cheney, impeachment, Karthik, letter, m.t. karthik, mtk, Nancy, Pelosi

AN OPEN LETTER TO NANCY PELOSI, SAN FRANCISCO 2007
To: U.S. Representative Nancy Pelosi:
You are the only person of power we on the progressive left can approach, because of your position as Speaker of the House: you could re-structure the dialogue in this nation, and some would say you could single-handedly save it in a totally unique and American way.

We beseech you to ignore Republicans, Democrats and so-called Progressives who have conceded impeachment in toto.

Impeachment, Censure and Congressional Investigation allow us as citizens to monitor our leadership. They are important tools of state that must be exercised actively to keep balance. We feel you know this, but are being roped into a position of pseudo-neutrality by National and Federal pressures in your role as Speaker, and so, as constituents, here in the Bay Area, we urge you to reconsider, to take a new approach and to save this country from despotism.

Representative Pelosi, you will be greeted by a flood of support from the grassroots level if you take this on. You could revolutionize the argument. You could be the one in Washington who says, “This has nothing to do with the upcoming primaries or the Election of 2008 – this has to do with what this country wants revealed by this Administration now, before another can take over, before they are out of the reach of public accountability.”

Make History: We ask you to have a public change of heart and to step up to being the ethical and cultural conscience of our nation at this tense moment in history when this very unpopular administration has us poised to begin world war against Russia and Iran on bogus intelligence and false claims against another of West Asia’s ancient centers of culture.

The Cheney/Bush agenda for tactical nuclear strikes on Iran is aggressive, frightening and – exactly like the agenda against Iraq was – illegal, unconstitutional and against our country’s fundamental values. Yes, Ms. Pelosi, I am accusing them of lying and deceit in the engagement of their war in Iraq – the Persian Gulf War Two. I accuse them of great, staged manipulations in their idiotic War on Terror. Many at home and abroad fear greatly that they are engaged secretly in practices to do this again, thus: If we do not impeach Cheney and Bush then they will bomb Iran … with or without our sanction.

The only way to regain control of the U.S. American government from this kind of despotism is to actively promote transparent investigation of every single corner that Bush/Cheney has labeled “National Security,” to do the same with this War on Terror.

Demand the Administration open these to Members, in private or a special committee, if not publicly. Look into the requests of Constitutional scholars and others who see criminality in their behavior. Yes, definitely Investigate and Impeach Cheney; and be proud of taking this Bush government up loudly and on the record, because future generations will vindicate you. The lies, conflicts of interest and criminal acts are provable, apparent.

Bush, Cheney and the Neoconservatives:  Rumsfeld,  Ashcroft, Perle, Wolfowitz et. al., must be questioned. They have lied to the United Nations and our own people, and are universally being condemned for this. Our only hope is to show the rest of the world that our system here in the United States does have in place the means to check itself, when it is so obviously occupied by despots. That is what Impeachment and Censure are for. The world waits for us to take these people to task. Congress must open up the Bush/Cheney administration before it leaves office.

It is imperative to the future of our country that we force them to testify and tell us what has been going on in our name in their so-called war on terror. The successes they trumpet turn out to be staged and often involve terrified innocents. Their failures in Iraq and Afghanistan are riddled with criminal activities in prisons, in the field of battle and in the streets. There are hospitals and villages where our soldiers are feared and despised.

Please, Representative Pelosi, look deep into the future of this country, summon the courage and do what you do so well. Stand with your colleagues in the House who cry for Congressional Investigation of Cheney/Bush – that includes Impeachment and Censure, if necessary. It is an absolute necessity before the U.S.A. can pass one more law or engage in one more battle.

No, Ms. Pelosi, Impeachment, Censure and Congressional Investigation of Bush/Cheney have nothing to do with the Election of 2008. They have everything to do with the soul of our nation.

Respectfully,
M.T. Karthik

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M.T. Karthik

This blog archives early work of M.T. Karthik, who took every photograph and shot all the video here unless otherwise credited.

Performances and installations are posted by date of execution.

Writing appears in whatever form it was originally or, as in the case of poems or journal entries, retyped faithfully from print.

all of it is © M.T. Karthik

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