Immigration Song

Yesterday morning, I left my apartment uptown to attend the protest to end the separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border. Trump, in his finite wisdom, signed an executive order to end these separations, but they still happened, and news reports tell us that it’s unclear how the administration is going to reunite all of the families it tore apart. If you haven’t yet heard the audio of kids crying and moaning for their parents in a detention facility in Texas, you need to. There’s no excusing it.

After I packed my sunscreen and new baseball hat (Oakland A’s) to deal with the rays, I thought I would work on an unfinished piece to focus my attention. (And, yup, stimulate a b.m. before getting onto the Brooklyn Bridge, the main stretch of the protest route.) I had started this piece in 2017, near the beginning of my first year as a middle school writing teacher in Harlem. 

Here goes:

Sometime in autumn, something interesting occurred to me while waiting for the A train at 145th Street after work. I was with my colleague, Priya, who also lived uptown, and we were probably there within the latter half of the evening rush. We both felt that the train was taking a while to arrive, and it felt particularly wrong to me that it was the A train that was late. I figured that any line with a Duke Ellington Orchestra song about it should live up to its legacy, and get me home.

We were standing there, and it was hot, and we were both new teachers. I was wearing wool slacks and a tucked-in shirt and carrying a backpack with a laptop and lesson plans, plus a canvas tote with leftover food. My knees hurt from standing up in the classroom. There were a good number of people on the platform, and I think Priya commented that the number proved the train was late. “Look at all the people,” she said.

Then, a new wave of people came up the stairs onto the platform, where, like gas molecules intermingling with other gas molecules, they floated into positions along the track. I remember noticing a woman who may have been of East Asian descent among this new group. She was quiet, and looked self-possessed. Some of the new arrivals kept walking toward a second flight of stairs to another platform, but plenty of them integrated into the initial—initial to me—group that had been waiting for the A.

I probably wondered if those who were just arriving would cede the way to those who were already on the platform when the train did come. I may have thought that it didn’t matter so much, maybe because we were pretty far uptown and there would probably be space once passengers disembarked. I probably also hoped that they would make way, would notice that I was there first, that some kind of tiered grouping of commuters, based on wait time, would persist despite the intermingling. And this is when it occurred to me that what I was also thinking about, or looking at, was the situation of immigrants from the perspective of someone who considers himself native-born.

You’re tired, your knees hurt, you’ve been working all day, and you haven’t done anything to make the train late, but it is. You’ve been waiting for a while, and then another group of people comes to wait as well. You feel like you have a claim on any spots that are available on the train when it does come, but there’s no system in place to insure you do. And you don’t even know if the train is coming, or if there will be any spots; you just know that you were on the platform, waiting, before this second wave of folks arrived.

How you think about this second wave could be an indication of how you think of immigrants who arrived in your community after you or your family. You might feel like you should have first crack at getting a job or finding a home, but there’s no way you can guarantee either. All you can control is how hard you work and how well you treat yourself and others. And treating other people well, whatever your opinion on immigration policy, requires understanding one of the messages I saw at the march: “IMMIGRANTS are not dangerous. They ARE just PEOPLE looking for a better life.”

It’s also important to remember that unless you’re descended from an indigenous people, someone was here before your forebears arrived. One thing I don’t remember from that evening on the platform, when I was wondering how the newcomers would accommodate my presence, is who had already been standing there before me.

The Thing and the Ring

When I went back to my old neighborhood of Greenpoint in August 2017, I visited The Thing, the local second-hand store whose industrious staff makes an arrangement of furniture, luggage, old machines, books, records, and clothing outside the front door every day. Earlier that year, those arrangements started to include new bikes from a cycling shop that had closed. I had just moved up near Inwood to be closer to my new school in Harlem, and a high-end Fuji, marked down from $2060 to $480, had recently caught my eye as a potential commuter. Seeing my interest, two in the crew had already offered to take $30 off the new price.

As I neared the store, I saw a former neighbor walk out. Tall and stout with wispy blond hair, Bruce was wearing a blue Obama/Biden t-shirt with the sunrise logo flecking off. I had once seen him at the post office wearing a Ramones jacket with the band's self-referential song title, "Cretin Hop," printed on the back, and in true Ramones style, his campaign tee just reached the bottom of his belly. It was neat to see such a rocker show love for Obama, who seemed, in that first summer of Trump, like a phenomenon that emerged from the ocean, hovered in the sunlight, and fell back into the waves.

Bruce was at The Thing to drop off copies of his band’s new album. Well, not so new: 14 tracks off Ring 13’s Nothing New, Nothing Learned were recorded in 1984, when he and his bandmates lived in the Midwest. The record included five more songs from a 2013 EP, and it came out on 180-gram vinyl, Spotify, and iTunes. Bruce wanted the shop to charge $12 a copy, and in a testament to his belief in The Thing's peculiar pull, he didn’t plan to leave any at Record Grouch, the trove of new and used wax across Manhattan Avenue, because he didn’t think they would sell there.

I told Bruce I had moved to Inwood, a statement that felt like it whooshed out of my mouth. It was like all of a sudden I lived in Iowa, or I had become a ghost. But then I explained that I'm a teacher, and the morning commute to Harlem is better from there. Like everyone else in Greenpoint, Bruce had my back. 

“Makes sense,” he said. “Can’t be late for the kids.”

We kept chatting. An employee with long black hair who usually wears a blue Mets cap and a customer who looked like Sammy Hagar were outside, too, rappin’ about Bruce’s record and the detritus the shop had for sale.

“I had a teacher named Angela Dust,” Bruce said.

“That’s like a punk rock girl’s name!” I replied.

“The kids called her Angel,” he said.

I wonder where Ms. Dust is today. Bruce also told me that Beer City, Ring 13’s label, pressed 1,000 copies of the album, and you had to buy the vinyl to hear the band’s cover of Billy Joel’s “You May Be Right,” which the label feared would cause legal trouble if released online.

But if the album sold well, he said, the label might change its mind. As of today, you still can't hear a Midwestern garage-rock take on one of Joel's peppier songs unless you visit Beer City's website, or, depending on inventory, bring 12 bucks to The Thing. If you wear a Mets cap, you'll fit right in.

Love you 'Til Tuesday

Through dozens of cursory listens, I always thought ‘Til Tuesday’s “Everything’s Different Now,” the title track from the Boston band’s last album, was a bummer trip. Maybe that’s because Aimee Mann, who once had the best pop star hair this side of Robert Smith, consistently sings about failed relationships on the band’s three LPs, so I assumed that everything that was different had to be worse. But lo and behold, the song’s lyrics are actually about discovering that things are different because two people are in love. A-ha. But Mann doesn’t sound happy, or free from apprehension, at least.

Which, I have learned, makes sense.

Two people in love: that’s wicked special, as we from Beantown might say, and wicked hard, too. To get a grip (two Aerosmith points, please), I’ve been reading Dr. Harville Hendrix’s Getting the Love You Want, a book about what we look for when we look for life partners, and how we can make living with them work. The thing that rocked my world is Hendrix’s claim that we’re looking for partners who will help us meet childhood needs that our caregivers did not. For that to occur, we need partners who possess our caregivers’ (most often our parents’) positive and negative traits, which makes for a fackin’ (c’mon, try it: faaackin) challenging situation, or, simulation of some of our early life experiences.

Back to the song. In “Everything’s Different Now,” Mann conveys the disorientation that comes with love:

Well, soon I’ll say your name

and then I’ll go insane

I won’t understand what I’m thinking

And then the fear of love’s exit:

I’ll look down at my shoes

I’ll wonder what I’ll lose

If I feel this consciousness sinking

And we both know what that means

Returning to what we knew before

Those last two lines are important. In chapter four of his book, Hendrix mentions Plato’s idea that we’re half-beings searching for our other halves. He writes about the feeling of wholeness that results from finding a complementary person, a feeling he calls the “phenomenon of reunification” that’s expressed in the sentiment “I love you so much, I can’t live without you.” And he writes about what happens when we contemplate the loss of our complements, our other halves:

On a deeper level, this sentence [I love you so much, I can’t live without you] reveals the fear that, if the lovers were to part, they would....once again be fractured, half-whole creatures, separated from the fullness of existence. Loneliness and anxiety would well up inside them, and they would no longer feel connected to the world around them. Ultimately, to lose each other would be to lose their new sense of self. (53)

The loneliness and anxiety I always got, but the fear of regression was something I never understood. Hendrix prefaces the above with this sentence:

By attending to their unmet childhood needs, their partners...become allies in their struggle for survival. (52)

And he also explains that it can feel like you’re going to lose that struggle after a break-up. Which is why no one ever really wants to go through one. Mann, it turns out, didn’t write “Everything’s Different Now”: Jules Shear, her boyfriend at the time, and Matthew Sweet wrote the music, and Shear wrote the lyrics. But like Cyndi Lauper’s cri de coeur, “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” the tonal opposite of Mann’s almost lavishly disappointed sound, you’d never know.

A Cider Press in Greenpoint

Let's start with a simple question, in the category of sights from your kitchen window: can you get more perfect than a man standing in a pear tree, holding up a painter’s pole with a tin can tied to the end, enclosing and pulling pears off the branches like a fisherman pulling catch out of a stream?

Not when it’s sunny, and the tree stands within a verdant Greenpoint backyard, surrounded by more backyards, weathered wooden fences, and old brick and stucco walls. Not a chance.

As the fruit fisher plucked away, the tree’s burden was incrementally relieved. Lots of pears hung out of his reach near my fire escape, where I watched the operation. My neighbor, Joe, passed me the pole to remove a few.

“I’m just so happy for the tree,” he said. “It can relax.”

The harvesting was a revelation, because we in the neighborhood are wary of the soil. In 1979, an oil spill along the nearby Newtown Creek contaminated the ground, and toxic ash from a waste treatment facility also poisoned locally grown fruits and vegetables.

But Joe and Elissa, who own the yard where the tree stands, hired an expert to test the dirt. Nothing wrong, the man said. Eat away.

And soon, drink. The couple's friends, Chris and Marty—Chris stood in the tree, and Marty fished from the ground—spent part of the following weekend in their own backyard on Java Street, grinding and pressing the brown and green fruit with some friends to make cider.

On the morning of the People’s Climate March, Chris invited me into his basement and showed me three glass bottles, or carboys, filled with yellow-green liquid. Tiny bubbles floated to the tops of each, the carbon dioxide excretions of cider yeast eating the sugar in the juice, he explained.

And then he showed me a fruit grinder with a screw-studded wheel, powered by a washing machine motor.

“It’s medieval, isn’t it?” he asked.

The press itself was partially disassembled, but Chris shared the funky name of its intended object, a stack of rectangular, cloth parcels of ground fruit pulp called a “cheese.” The hybrid brew--Concord grapes from Chris and Marty's backyard also tasted the screws--will be ready in spring, “when the first cuckoo sings,” Chris told me.

A bottle for a blogger and cuckoo, please.

Gallery-going at the Terminal Market

The Greenpoint Terminal Market, that is. Just around the corner from where I live, the building at 67 West Street houses a warren of smoothed wood floors and various spaces where artists and makers of all kinds do their work. Even Phin and Phebes, ice-cream makers whose pints are available at The Meat Hook, have a room there. I wonder how many artists knock on their door for free samples.

I walked to 67 West last night to attend an opening at Calico, a small gallery that just moved into a larger space on the second floor. Owner, artist, and woodworker Scott Chasse, an ex-Boston guy, stood behind a backroom bar and served tall boys of Narragansett beer. In the gallery, pieces of sculpture in play-doh-like colors resembled miniature kegs, which dispensed pink ooze. (That's the word artist Adams Puryear used to describe the stuff, and it's accurate.) Vincent Stracquadanio's paintings of organic, funny forms hung on opposite walls, and Claire Typaldos' array of small gray and watery dark blue slabs of gypsum cement stood atop a platform in a corner.

After leaving Calico, I walked to another opening at Dose Projects Space, a tiny gallery-within-a-studio just up the hall and around a few corners. Claire Falkenberg's work consisted of pieces of thin, crinkled glassine--almost like flattened plastic bags--that covered cardboard backings. One piece roughly evoked the shape of a large country on a pull-down schoolroom map. It had a sky blue tint, and a similar-sized piece across the room had a pink one. This pairing was effective: sunset, childhood, and nascent impressions came to mind.

One floor up, Brian Willmont's show met the challenge of his boldly named space, Greenpoint Terminal Gallery. Groups of pieces in different styles worked as individual blocs and as good neighbors. I was drawn to a rectangular wood canvas with a--surprise--pink and blue border surrounding what looked like a blown-up image of a cell, or perhaps brain tissue. It seemed characteristic of art-making in North Brooklyn: the effort to express the interior amidst vivid pop ephemera. 

There's that pink and blue border at left. In the larger image, the rods alter the impression of the gray matter.

Willmont wore a black Carharrt vest and a pair of throwback, white-soled work boots to his opening. (I probably would have noticed anyway, but reading this Bedford + Bowery piece about Greenpoint Gallery Night may have helped.) Two women sold beer outside the gallery, as well as booklets of black-and-white reproductions of past shows. On the first page of one called "Tip Top," a Charles Bukowski quote reads as follows:

if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody else,
forget about it.

I don't know if I agree with Bukowski's advice about rewriting. Maybe it depends on the spirit with which we rewrite. But his ending, with the formal version of the classic NYC colloquialism, sounds great.

John Cale: rocker, classicist, smoothie

In the words of Neil Young, John Cale walks like a giant on the land. For me, Saturday night's show at BAM, during which Cale played his classic 1972 album Paris 1919 in its entirety with a small but impressive orchestra--plus a bitchin' rock band--established him as an art rock colossus. Who can marry the classical and rock worlds as well as Cale? And who can overlay both with sensitive, literate lyrics? Plus, more than 40 years after Paris 1919 came out, Cale's voice is undiminished. Same thing with Patti Smith, whom I heard opening for Neil late last year: "Gloria" was glorious in 1976 and in 2012.

It struck me during the show that Cale is an artist who's willing to put forth ideas that may be distasteful and outré. That vocoder he sang through during one song? It sounded too buzzy. His hair? In recent press photos, it's partially pink. And how about the title of his new album, Shifty Adventures in Nookie Wood? "Nookie"? Who, other than rap-metal historians, uses this word in 2013? Fashionable or not though, Cale is often sublime. Paris 1919, if you haven't heard it, is a quiet masterpiece, and 1970's Vintage Violence and 75's Slow Dazzle are great and good records, respectively. When the artist strapped on a red and white Fender to play the new album's title track, the song took about 90 seconds to shift from a dull rumble into a varicolored, metal mosaic. Who uses "nookie" in 2013? The mighty John Cale does. I wouldn't laugh at him.

Wake-up call

As I wait for the election results--the last thing I saw onscreen was Sarah Silverman's act of labial genius on Conan O'Brien--I am thinking about a few things. Here's what I want to say:

The first thing, just to get it out of the way, is that I did not lift a finger in this election. But for the preceding blog post, which commented on going door-to-door for votes as though I was at the head of an army, and a few donations to the Dems and Obama, I didn't do a goddamn thing. So feel free to take anything I write with a chunk of salt.

The second thing, if you can handle all that sodium, is that I think this election, for those of us who support President Barack Obama, is about winning the right to go to sleep, get a few winks, and wake up in the morning and go right back to work. BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT GOING TO STOP FIGHTING US. By THEY, I mean people who think that laissez-faire economics works, and who oppose equal rights for gays and the right to choose for women. But I'm not going to lie to you here: I'm really thinking about economics tonight, or, how we view making money in this country.

Rick Perry, when he was running for president, said that Americans should want to get rich. John McCain, when he was getting buddy-buddy with Joe the Plumber in the 2008 election, looked into the camera during the second or third debate and said, setting up a hypothetical situation, "Joe, you're rich. Congratulations," while smiling. I'm going to guess that any conservatives reading this post will check out at this citation, but so be it: about 10 years ago, a French teacher of mine said that there isn't an equivalent of the phrase "making money" in his language. But making money, we know, is supposed to be a praiseworthy activity in the U.S.A.

There's nothing necessarily wrong with making a profit from your work. And I don't think that a political system that pretends that making money is an unacceptable human activity has a chance of being humane. But, as we embark, maybe, on the second term of a beleaguered president, as we continue in a present in which we are in great debt, and in which our everyday practices, our lifestyles, insure that we will accrue debt, and in which natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy may become more frequent, we need to band together so badly; we need to work together so well; we need to value building and sustaining community more than making money.

I'm not saying we frown on private wealth creation. I'm just saying that we can't pretend, as Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren (haven't lifted a finger; just asked my parents back in Boston if they think she'll beat Scott Brown) have articulated, that private wealth creation exists in a vacuum in which our very lives, our very futures, aren't at stake. And I'm also not saying we shoot for some kind of utopia in which every factory is carbon neutral, in which every product is recyclable or biodegradable, although wouldn't that be something. I'm saying that we do the best we can, and that we evaluate our actions in light of our supreme value: building and sustaining community.

Because shit, the shit going on in the Rockaways and Staten Island and Red Hook and all down the Jersey Shore is horrible. People are freezing, they need homes, they need jobs. I know that some Republicans, pro-choice and pro-gay rights, really do believe that their economic policies are better for job creation, and, in an imperfect world, getting people jobs is worth more than all of the progressive goals of responsible Democrats put together. But their party's policies ignore the deterioration of the environment. They ignore the need to educate young people so that they are inclined to engage the peoples of other nations, not clash with them. They ignore the fact that without an active federal government, African-Americans may never have gained civil rights.

And they're wrong about economics, too. An underregulated free market isn't just bad for our planet and our minds, but it's ultimately bad for job creation. From what I'm learning, laissez-faire economics tends to lead to financial collapse. And with the planet acting the way it is, and with natural resources dwindling the way they are, WE CAN'T AFFORD TO COLLAPSE ANYMORE. Although we probably will, because we don't learn very quickly.

Eduardo Porter, who writes for the New York Times, authored an excellent piece on what a sustainable economic policy might look like. Wanna know what it looks like? Higher taxes for everyone. Middle class, upper class, and perhaps even the working class. Yes, it's more European, and yes, it's hard to swallow if you like spending disposable income--if you like disposable income, period. But whether you sympathize with Porter or not, his articles are worth reading for the notion that we've got to do some paradigm-shifting if we're going to create a livable future for all of us.

Republicans? Tea-Party fans? We're losing our planet here. We're losing our union. What we want does look different from what you want, but what we want is people working together for a better common future. And for people--all people--to work together, they need good educations, a good shot at entering the middle class, good health care, and full respect of their freedom and dignity by their government. So that's why we vote for Obama. That's why we fight for marriage equality, which I can't say I recognized as important as recently as 10 years ago but I sure do now, reproductive rights and equal pay for women, investments in education, and higher taxes on the wealthy, who will still have a lot even if they're paying more. Hey, if you listen to Porter, we're all going to need to be paying more in the future. I sure hope it doesn't take any more disasters for us to get there.