John McCain, on the day of his christening, with his father and grandfather at the Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone, 1936.
McCAIN’S NATURAL BORN PROBLEM
by Rod Ciferri
Even a cursory glance at Article 2, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution proves John McCain was never eligible to be President of the United States. The Constitution requires that the President be a natural born citizen which is different than just being a citizen. Natural born citizen is sufficient for eligibility, while citizen is not.
The U.S. congress may, and has, come up with any criteria for U.S. citizenship it wants. This power was given to congress by Article 1, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution. No law that congress makes, however, can change the requirement that the President be a natural born citizen. Such can only be done via constitutional amendment.
McCain sought a congressional mandate stating he is a natural born citizen because of the facts I discuss below. These are void however because these Congressional acts have no legal authority. Congress cannot amend the Constitution’s requirement that the President be a natural born citizen.
No act of congress can change the fact that McCain was born in an unincorporated U.S. territory, the Panama Canal Zone. No act of congress can change the fact that the Panama Canal Zone was NEVER part of the United States.
This fact can readily be attained by reading the Hay-Bunau Varilla Treaty, which first recognized U.S. rights in the Panama Canal Zone. It is indisputable that such treaty gave the U.S. only proprietary rights to the Panama Canal Zone. The treaty was akin to an easement. An easement is the right to use another’s land. Article 1 of the treaty is the guarantee of the U.S. to maintain the sovereignty of the Republic of Panama over the area of the Panama Canal Zone. Furthermore, Article 14 of the treaty establishes the amount of money the U.S. must pay annually for the use of the Panama Canal Zone. All political rights in the Panama Canal Zone remained with the Republic of Panama.
Therefore, the U.S. only acquired proprietary, rather than political control over the Panama Canal Zone. The United States Supreme Court has confirmed that proprietary rights in a territory do not equate to the full political power necessary to make such a territory part of the United States. See, Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 244, 251 (1901).
While the United States eventually extended citizenship to those born in the Panama Canal Zone of at least one U.S. citizen, it did not, and could not without constitutional amendment make such a citizen a natural born citizen.
Like Obama, McCain is bound by the natural born citizen requirement of the U.S. Constitution in order to be eligible for president. That is, he must have been born in the country to parents (or at least a father) who were U.S. citizens. While he was born to U.S. citizen parents, unfortunately for him, he was not born in the country.
As a result of McCain’s natural born problem, he cannot be President of the United States.
Columbia University’s Alma Mater (sculpture by Daniel Chester French) gazing toward Butler Library.
AN ARGUMENT FOR A CORE
by Nathan Birnbaum
Towards the end of my junior year in high school I entered the fray of the college admissions process, making decisions that would affect the course of the rest of my professional and academic life. Quickly zeroing in on Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York I was excited not only by the class offerings at my fingertips but by its liberal minded philosophy towards a core curriculum, with students free to take their education in whatever direction they prefer. Bound to meeting only a freshmen writing seminar, foreign language and quantitative requirement, I have been able to dictate what and how I learn.
But is this freedom beneficial on a wider scale? Are there certain subjects and philosophies all students should be exposed to? And if so, how do we decide what is taught and how? By filtering out subject areas at Vassar that I am not particularly interested in – but which are necessary to gain a broader understanding of the forces that shape the American landscape – one could make a serious argument that I am hampering my ability to democratically participate as a global citizen.
As a starting place for discussion, lets compare the curriculum(s) of Columbia University and Brown University. Columbiaboasts a strict and structured core curriculum that is meant to introduce students to the “texts, ideas, and works of art that have deeply influenced the world in which we live, and that continue to shape how we think about ourselves and our society. Brown University, on the other hand delegates the choice of a “core curriculum” to their students, with no required courses or types of courses necessary to graduate.
Slowly but surely, other institutions across the country have taken notice of Brown’s philosophy, and some are beginning to experiment with a relaxed, if non-existent, core.
I understand the merits and goals of this system of leniency towards a core curriculum. College was always intended to allow students to break out of the structured education they had been confined to for the first 18 years of their lives. Given this new freedom, it was assumed that they would find a subject, or subjects, that sparked their interest, leading to a life full of inquisitive study and passion for learning. The problem is that this leniency virtue towards coursework has been placed on a pedestal and does not accurately reflect the usual considerations facing an 18yr old.
Most students leave college having taken in the range of about 24 classes (four classes a semester for four years). Without guidance, it is unfair to assume that they would naturally pick a well-rounded schedule. A college that lacks a core curriculum will only deliver as good an education as the free range of choices their students make, and not all college age students in America study at institutions as well-regarded as Brown. But on a wider scale this freedom of education is overly idealistic when applied to the majority of college-age students across America.
Whereas I received a stellar education at a well-funded public school in Marin County, CA, other students aren’t so lucky. American public schools continue to be grossly under-funded, which results in students having inequal access to studying materials and being taught by teachers with varying degrees of expertise. This inequality will therefore translate into some students not necessarily being qualified to determine whether they have mastered the above subjects to a degree in which they should not have to retake them in greater depth at the college level.
The second, and most important, reason why a basic core must be in place is that students must be taught to think critically about a wide variety of subjects in order to evaluate and analyze the situations and questions posed to them in their daily lives. One would hope, in turn, that this evaluation would lead to progressive thinking capable of changing our social milieu. Admittedly this kind of education can be obtained by those who attend a university without a core just as much as it could be unobtained by one who has sat through a core. But these types of truly educated and analytically advanced people I speak of are more likely to emerge if they have mastered a diverse range of subject matter.
Expecting college-age students to naturally gravitate towards sampling a diverse range of courses is, from my experiences at Vassar College, absolutely improbable. Many of my peers – and I for that matter – are comfortable with taking classes that only fit our interests, preferring to leave the “boring” subjects behind. Taken at face value, this sounds like a swell idea to us.
But bearing in mind the reasoning above I think it is time we begin to seriously consider crafting a core curriculum that will be met by all students leaving America’s universities. In my opinion, this core would feature simple requirements in the following areas: foreign language, math/philosophy, basic writing, art, economics, and English.
Every college student should take a course that teaches and expects fluency in a foreign language. In an increasingly globalized world, we should no longer be taught to just understand our own country and traditions – breeding a dangerous espousal of American exceptionalism – but gain an appreciation for the diverse cultures, traditions, and beliefs of others. Being able to communicate with one another is a key step in learning to respect one another as equals.
Mathematics, contrary to popular belief, is not just about numbers, but rather encourages a patter of logical thinking, forcing students’ brains to look for patterns and connections. This type of brain exercise is closely linked to philosophy, where one must consider multiple routes of thinking to reach and understand a conclusion. While many college-aged scholars despise math (I will admit that I fall in with this group), we should all benefit from the type of learning it encourages.
Moreover, too many students enter their professional careers with absolutely no grip on how to write proficiently. Americans should be able to craft an argument and defend it on paper, as well as tell a fictional story birthed from their own imagination. Being able to write would give students a better understanding of the critical process needed to comprehend and analyze what they read, as well as put a whole new group of people in contact with a form of communication which can beautifully and rationally describe feelings, situations, positions, etc.
Being a theatre major I am especially concerned by the fact that the arts have lost their value in the American curriculum. This must change. Instead of open debate, discussion, or research, we should also be presented with an artistic interpretation of our common issues. The creative process makes the exploration of the human condition more comprehendible, or in some cases, raises more issues for these student viewers to confront.
While our country’s unemployment levels skyrocket and the banking industry continues to game the system, more now than ever college graduates must come away from college with a formal understanding of economic theory. To me, this means teaching both the tenets and failures of supply and demand, Marxist theory and socialism, fascism (yes it is relevant economic theory, not just Nazi philosophy), and Keynesianism (at minimum). These theories are simply not interchangeable and are necessary to be an active citizen in our participatory democracy.
Finally, the interpretation of the “Great Books,” and English literature in general, must be integrated into any core. These works give students a scope of human history and thinking, providing a basis for contemplating where mankind was, where mankind is currently, and what possibilities lie ahead.
Let me make it very clear: I am not arguing that the core classes must weigh on the minds of students throughout their entire tenure within a college setting; reasonableness would require that a core take up no more than a third of all units required for graduation. The rest of a student’s energy should be tailored to focusing on their major and taking any elective courses of their choosing.
Furthermore, it is my hope that each college will advise their students to craft their well-rounded courses of study in different ways depending upon the individual universities’ tenets and backgrounds. Thus, even an institution that preaches the virtues of a core would not prevent young adults from accessing the freedom that college symbolizes.
But to look at my course selections as they stand currently, and to ponder those of students who enjoy an education free from requirements and well-rounded areas of learning, is to wonder whether our generation, who has been trusted with placing their curriculum in their own hands, might be hurting themselves in the long run. With all optimism, I hope not.
Nathan Birnbaum is a Drama major at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.
During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, he once discussed immigration by saying that we ought to be less worried about immigrants learning English and more worried about whether our children are learning Spanish. He must have known he’d wandered into unsafe territory, because he immediately began enumerating the business advantages your children would have if they were bilingual. (It is always safe in American discourse to return to how something might make money.) Obama was attacked by Democrats and Republicans alike for daring to utter the unthinkable—that Americans need to be learning foreign languages.
As I write this, I am in Montréal, a city that has achieved nearly seamless bilingualism. Depending on the neighborhood, most signs, menus, etc are written in both French and English, and you can order at most places of business in either language. I don’t mean to suggest there aren’t tensions between those who consider their mother tongue French and those who consider it English. There are. Famously so. And one of my instructors, Jessy, at the language institute where I’m studying admitted to being reluctant to read Canadian literature in English (though she also happens to be nearly fluent in English, which indicates her resistance to the language isn’t total, and she seemed embarrassed to admit to reading only francophone literature). And Jessy isn’t alone in her ambivalence. There’s a referendum every few years for Québec to secede from the rest of Canada, but it is always defeated, and largely because of the huge population in Montréal which always votes en masse to remain part of the larger country.
But there’s the brighter, almost ideal side. You walk up Rue St Laurent, lined with hipster bars and nice restaurants, and you’ll hear the people at one table speaking in French while those at the adjacent table speak English. My favorite scene, which I’ve seen play out several times in my few weeks here, is when a group of people is speaking one language, then someone shows up who is less proficient in that language (usually an English speaker, sadly), and the group simply shifts to the new person’s language of comfort. It’s a seamless transition, and no one is put out by it. For lack of a better word, I always think how civilized this is.
Those people in the US who are worried that English will disappear are either willfully ignorant or just insane. English enjoys not only the 4th largest native speaker population on the planet but is also by far the most common 2nd language learned. I’m sorry, but every time I hear someone bemoan the rise of Spanish as a second language in the US, I hear laziness or mindless nationalism. There is absolutely no downside to learning another language, while there are numerous upsides.
But the paranoiac fear isn’t abating. Nowhere is this made more visible than on the US-Mexico border with the fervor for fence-building and of volunteers toting shotguns, excessive in their eagerness to “defend our borders” (from what, I always wonder, hard workers with a drive for self-improvement?). William T Vollmann’s new book, Imperial, which will be released next month, is a 1,300-page nonfiction exploration of Imperial County, California, where many immigrants who have died in the journey across the border are buried. There’s an excellent New York Times article about Vollmann and his new book here.
But instead of seeing the ugliness nationalism can cause and instead of embracing the positive aspects of bi- and multilingualism, many Americans are doing just the opposite. Arizona, Idaho, and Iowa have all recently passed English-only laws, and Oklahoma is poised to vote on an English-only referendum on the 2010 ballot, one which is expected to pass by a large margin.
But what are the advantages of multilingualism?, one might ask. Aside from Obama’s aforementioned job opportunities, which certainly exist, there are the joys other languages bring. There is nothing like being in a foreign country and speaking the language. The experience is so much richer, I have basically foregone visiting countries whose languages in which I don’t at least have some proficiency. Language is so often the vehicle for culture, and there is simply no way to appreciate another culture without understanding its language.
But there are more immediate ones as well. The CIA has recently been running ads in an attempt to recruit Americans with foreign language skills. Apparently less than 20% of the CIA staff has proficiency in a foreign language. Pause for a moment and take that in. Less than 20% of our international intelligence gathering organ speaks a foreign language. Mama Elliott didn’t raise no geniuses, but I see how this might be a problem. Now, I tend to think that most of what the CIA does adds to the misery in the world, so its being hindered in any way might be good in the long run, but there is an old Polish saying: “Know the languages of your friends well, but know the languages of your enemies better.” Here, even the security-crazed people of this country have to admit that learning Arabic, Farsi, Korean, etc might prove useful.
But I’m less interested in talk of enemies, and I would like to rephrase that Polish saying to: “Learn the languages of your enemies in order to make them your friends.” I remember when I was an undergrad and preparing for my first academic study abroad to Germany, I was required to attend several information sessions. At one of them, the goals of the program were laid out, and one of them was world peace. I thought, “Huh? How can my improving my understanding of the dative case in German alter international relations?” The counselor explained that people are less likely to support a war against a country if they’ve lived there or speak the language, and that the kinds of cultural misunderstandings that can lead to less than diplomatic solutions can be obviated if we have enough people here who know firsthand how to navigate those cultural waters.
The advantages, both large and small, are legion.
There are many jobs in legal, technological, governmental, and medical fields that require knowledge of foreign languages. Studies show that studying a foreign language can reduce the chances of dementia in old age, can improve children’s comprehension of their native language, and even increase a person’s IQ. There are the interpersonal benefits. I can’t help but notice the tens of millions of Spanish speakers in world and can’t help but be happy that I have the means to communicate with them. Likewise with French; when I look at a linguistic map of Africa, my heart fairly flutters with possibility. There are advantages for the activist-minded, such as Habitat for Humanity, Peace Corps, Doctors without Borders, etc.
And on, and on . . .
If being in Montréal has taught me anything, it’s that bi- and multilingualism can work and can have a hugely positive effect on a culture and business community. It’s not a perfect model, but those tend not to exist in the real world. It is, however, a hopeful example of what certain US cities could become or already are becoming, if only we embrace it fully and encourage it with the proper institutions and attitude.
Cover of Marcuse’s Collected Papers, Volume 4, published by Routledge, 2007.
THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED:
HERBERT MARCUSE’S ONE- DIMENSIONAL MAN
by Anthony Torres
I recently came across an old copy of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. That find give me cause to revisit certain themes and issues, but what really was uncanny was that rather than seeming far removed and historically distant, the book seemed absolutely appropriate to the present: the necessity of the elimination of alienated labor and reification, through political action and social transformation, which should be the first step toward a more humane society by creating conditions for the realization of human potential and conceivably aspiring toward a dream for homeostasis.
Decades have passed since Marcuse wrote One Dimensional Man, and yet at present, the capitalist structure of a social production for private accumulation is still in place.
In our current society (as when Marcuse wrote), technology and rationalization are used as a means to further the reproduction and maintenance of our society. And while there is no question that technology is in and of itself apolitical, the technological apparatus operating currently, is by the conditions of its existence, still used as a tool for further subjugation and domination of the populace, and continues to perpetuate the alienated and reified condition through private property relations. In fact, it can be said that today an even wider variety of cultural and ideological techniques for social domination continue to prevail, while concurrently providing a rationale for their existence, as well as for the destruction of nature as a prerequisite for the accumulation of capital.
As the productive forces in society have been altered and advanced, so too have the relations of people in production. And as the economic system has expanded, so too has the proliferation of administration and domination. Today, the advent of bureaucratization, of which Marcuse spoke, continues to create a situation in which the bureaucrat’s job is to administer things and people, making little distinction between the two, being far removed from both. Separated in the vastness of the reified machine we call post-monopoly capitalism, the bureaucrat does not — nor almost any of us for that matter — see the whole of society or the individual’s place in it, but is instead merely a component part of a vast machinery of capitalist crisis and accumulation.
This complicated social mechanism in which everyone is implicated has been constructed to administer the technological machine, and yet the whole creation stands over and above those who created it, with people once again confronted with the products of their social dysfunction.
As Marcuse seem to predict (perhaps simplistically by today’s developments), the relations of people in society have been altered so drastically that it is hard for anyone to question or see beyond the destructive nature of capitalism, especially since according to its own logic and ideology, it is increasingly capable of satisfying the needs of the populace through its organization, as it is able to supply more goods and satisfy more needs while at the same time seeming to provide — again according to its own ideological orientation — more civil liberties within the current status quo.
This logic thus undercuts any oppositional social demands as unnecessary and useless, if even desirable, since as long as the needs are being met, it makes little difference whether artificially stimulated needs and desires are met by an authoritarian or non-authoritarian government. Here, the seeming liberty and freedom to consume commodities that surround us in ever-increasing supply — presented as “freedom of choice” — serve, Marcuse argued, as a valuable tool of social domination.
In previous stages of capitalist development, the lines of demarcation between classes were much clearer. However today, the proliferation of media technologies and the complex relations between status and power have blurred class differences, seemingly alleviating much of the perceived basis of social antagonisms.
In this context, the implementation of an array of forms of social domination fortifies against social resistance for qualitative changes that would bring about fundamentally different institutions and a new direction for the productive forces and relations of society, by developing increased means for satisfying human and ecological needs and priorities. This thus preserves the social forces that perpetuate the existing alienated condition and crisis-ridden social relations of society.
The current cultural apparatus thus reveals its political character, as it becomes a greater vehicle for new forms of more effective social control, creating a social system of consent in which mind and body, society and nature, are kept in a state of permanent mobilization and occupation for the defense of the existing power structures.
Here, as Marcuse suggested, we find social and cultural non-freedom, in the sense that people are subjugated through the ideological and reproductive apparatus and circulation of commodities. Critical here is that these social structures are perpetuated and intensified in the form of illusory liberties and comforts, however inaccessible, that are a necessary consequence of the economic apparatus, as business and the state develop new products and strategies to keep the economic system going. In this way, what should be considered illusory liberties and technological advances function as tools that keep the populace occupied and distracted, and, as a result, indoctrinate and confuse the population with artificially stimulated needs and desires and at the same time provide the only avenues for satisfying them.
Thus, according to Marcuse, these artificially stimulated needs are actualized in the alienated consciousness of society, which, however problematically, sees no other option but the present system as a vehicle for taking care of these needs on a grander scale. This rationale repulses humane and ecologically friendly qualitative change, so that things seem to be getting increasingly better — if “better” means access to a greater variety of given products of a limited nature. However, it can be argued — especially today — that human social conditions, rather than getting better as a result of the reproduction of an increased array of goods and services, are getting increasingly worse, precisely because of this illusion that things are improving through the proliferation of goods and services, which is merely a manifestation of reified life activity in our contemporary capitalist societies.
Indeed, with the expansion of capitalist systems through globalization, the socially mutated existences of people in various societies has intensified to a full, all-embracing social alienation, where we are estranged from ourselves and others, from nature, from the determination of the forces of production, and from social control over our own destiny. This alienated condition has inverted our socially created world into a reified world that is seemingly completely out of our control, and that now controls, or limits, our own self-determination.
Ironically, the social and cultural apparatus that should theoretically have the potential to free people from labor, while providing more of the necessities of life as well as more leisure time, has become, as Marcuse seemed to foresee, a self-generating, self-devouring, crisis-ridden monster.
The question of a “human” existence versus an alienated existence has, through unbridled capitalist accumulation, moved from a question of personal and social alienation to one of utter social dysfunction and ecological crisis. The problem facing the human species, it seems, has moved beyond the degradation and devaluation of human life and self-determination or social control, to the more pressing issue of the potential for mass human detriment of the species through ecological disaster, as humanity increasingly submits to the means of destruction, and perfection of waste. The alienated condition in which we find ourselves has separated us from our own acts to a point of destroying nature—the true vehicle of our own existence and sustenance—and to a point where, whether consciously or unconsciously, human life has become an instrument of its own oppression and destruction. In an increasingly twisted dialectic, it seems that people have become so culturally separated from their acts that they find themselves in a potentially suicidal historical predicament — that is, unless we choose to do something.
Anthony Torres is an independent art critic and curator who has taught at Ohio State and UC Santa Cruz.
My country hasn’t been liberated: it’s still under the warlords’ control, and Nato occupation only reinforces their power
In 2005, I was the youngest person elected to the new Afghan parliament. Women like me, running for office, were held up as an example of how the war in Afghanistan had liberated women. But this democracy was a facade, and the so-called liberation a big lie.
On behalf of the long-suffering people of my country, I offer my heartfelt condolences to all in the UK who have lost their loved ones on the soil of Afghanistan. We share the grief of the mothers, fathers, wives, sons and daughters of the fallen. It is my view that these British casualties, like the many thousands of Afghan civilian dead, are victims of the unjust policies that the Nato countries have pursued under the leadership of the US government.
Almost eight years after the Taliban regime was toppled, our hopes for a truly democratic and independent Afghanistan have been betrayed by the continued domination of fundamentalists and by a brutal occupation that ultimately serves only American strategic interests in the region.
You must understand that the government headed by Hamid Karzai is full of warlords and extremists who are brothers in creed of the Taliban. Many of these men committed terrible crimes against the Afghan people during the civil war of the 1990s.
For expressing my views I have been expelled from my seat in parliament, and I have survived numerous assassination attempts. The fact that I was kicked out of office while brutal warlords enjoyed immunity from prosecution for their crimes should tell you all you need to know about the “democracy” backed by Nato troops.
In the constitution it forbids those guilty of war crimes from running for high office. Yet Karzai has named two notorious warlords, Fahim and Khalili, as his running mates for the upcoming presidential election. Under the shadow of warlordism, corruption and occupation, this vote will have no legitimacy, and once again it seems the real choice will be made behind closed doors in the White House. As we say in Afghanistan, “the same donkey with a new saddle”.
So far, Obama has pursued the same policy as Bush in Afghanistan. Sending more troops and expanding the war into Pakistan will only add fuel to the fire. Like many other Afghans, I risked my life during the dark years of Taliban rule to teach at underground schools for girls. Today the situation of women is as bad as ever. Victims of abuse and rape find no justice because the judiciary is dominated by fundamentalists. A growing number of women, seeing no way out of the suffering in their lives, have taken to suicide by self-immolation.
This week, US vice-president Joe Biden asserted that “more loss of life [is] inevitable” in Afghanistan, and that the ongoing occupation is in the “national interests” of both the US and the UK.
I have a different message to the people of Britain. I don’t believe it is in your interests to see more young people sent off to war, and to have more of your taxpayers’ money going to fund an occupation that keeps a gang of corrupt warlords and drug lords in power in Kabul.
What’s more, I don’t believe it is inevitable that this bloodshed continues forever. Some say that if foreign troops leave Afghanistan will descend into civil war. But what about the civil war and catastrophe of today? The longer this occupation continues, the worse the civil war will be.
The Afghan people want peace, and history teaches that we always reject occupation and foreign domination. We want a helping hand through international solidarity, but we know that values like human rights must be fought for and won by Afghans themselves.
I know there are millions of British people who want to see an end to this conflict as soon as possible. Together we can raise our voice for peace and justice.
A Manifesto for the San Francisco Collage Collective
by Paul Occam
Few people can tolerate a long silence in the middle of a conversation these days. It is the sound of someone pulling a pin on a hand grenade.
As the interior world of the individual is increasingly mapped and occupied – it is primarily the imagination that has been decimated or taken over. People are no longer able to dream beyond their circumstances.
The vacant lots are filled with trash and they are no longer outside. Colonization no longer applies only to the world at large – it is an internal state.
America, once the nation of dreams for a better life, now careens forward as the standard bearer of personalized hallucinations – the unsurpassed leader of colonization – not of places so much as the mind. The dreams we currently export and enact are off the shelf factory made fetishes. If you think we are not talking about you then ask yourself – do you not wish to be a rock star, actor, writer, artist, entrepreneur, captain of industry?
Just consider this: In some places vast numbers of the population still believe they will win the lottery.
This manifesto may be redeemed as a coupon for your life. For those with a little more ambition there is a soul crushing existence awaiting you – the mundane dramas of the ‘good life’ – which to us resembles a happiness like Disneyland – a miniature golf-tournament with despair.
At no time in history has the individual faced such a barrage of relentless amusements, commands, empty pleasures and distractions. Every sense is continuously occupied, every waking moment filled, every orifice spoken to, pleasantly stroked or assaulted. All of it a series of carefully constructed events which are meant to distract.
The silence and emptiness that looms ominously in the background stands as a kind of terrorism. Possessed by the disembodied voices of radio hosts, aversions, favorite things, bosses, red lipstick, TV shows, the local news, advertisements, sexual escapades, movies, media, – a person has no choice but to wander through life as a ghost lost in a supermarket.
Yet at odd moments the plaster falls off, – a moment comes when the ocean draws back and reveals all the dead things left on the shore. It was for this reason that the surrealists loved ruins.
There are instances in which time opens – one becomes cognizant of the infinity behind things – that silence holds a tension like the electricity in the air before lightening strike, revealing everything in a flash of insight. It is out of such cracks in the architecture of life that our most inspired thoughts and sentiments come into being.
Small outposts against the storm have always existed in recondite art movements through history, seeds that like wheat may germinate only after a hundred years. The San Francisco Collage Collective takes its modest place among them. In such cases it is the Freedom of the margins that is lived, the things that were once thrown away become a graveyard for new meaning. Where nobody is watching there is always possibility. A collage made of artifacts from a walk; a celebrated ‘drift’ provides a window to the future. It was Phillip K. Dick who rightly observed that trash was “the intersection of the divine.” and it was Guy Debord who declared in 1953 “We will change the world by wandering.”
The apparent uselessness and idle strolls, the turning of pages as we inspect the picture book, all with an eye for a new assembly and terrain is the antidote we have discovered. We declare now that it will set us free.
Paul Occam is the pen name of a San Francisco writer. This piece was written on the occassion of the SF Collage Collective’s first exhibition in early 2008. It has been disseminated by hand, but not otherwise published.
Photographic negative of Charles Baudelaire by Félix Nadar, 1862, Musée d’Orsay.
PRODDING BAUDELAIRE
by Eve Toliman
These days find me hunting through my books, searching through the past, tracking down the random bits that have survived time’s unrelenting sedimentary procession through my life. I am assembling a collage from these pieces, a collage of me.
Today I am prodding Baudelaire. Wasn’t that your story, Charles, the one about the beggar who beat you up? Don’t you remember, you told me that he asked you for some change and you punched him in the face? Later, bruised and battered, you limped up the stairs to your apartment, proud of your accomplishment, happy to have paid the price with your own pained body: He asked you for a handout and rolling in the dark empty street, fists flying, beggar and patron indistinguishable under the dim lamplight, you made him claim his dignity.
I’ve always liked that story. It’s messy, full of the kind of love I recognize. I have envisioned a noble love, serene and dignified, but what I have known is fists flying under dim lamplight and liberation in the wake of our foolishness. When we have been leveled by stubbornness or circumstance, too tired to play the game of beggar and patron anymore; when idiocy or pain has vanquished our civilized pantomime, we fall headlong into the ever present arms of love. Startled into hearty laughter, we make our irretrievable, reverberating contribution to that resilient web of humanity — humanity shared or not at all.
It’s too early to weigh the efficacy of Barack Obama’s administration in a practical way (putting aside personal feelings about vampiric bailouts), if only because six months is merely an eighth of his guaranteed tenure—he deserves a reasonable chance to find his sea legs before the daggers fly. Then too, no one can deny the country’s sense of relief after eight years in the unventilated political abattoir that passed for government during the Bush‑Cheney regime. Nonetheless, Mr. Obama has exhibited a lapse in judgment with potential to derail not only his administration but the world. He has committed himself (actually not himself, but potentially countless lives, along with resources we’ve been told we do not have enough of for our own needs) to an amorphous war he neither understands nor knows what to do with—at least he hasn’t adequately explained his presumably major battle plans. In that respect, his resembles every failed war presidency in recent US history. He is engaging in war for political reasons (there appear to be no other grounds), and the armored hatch through which he can escape the greatest threat to his young presidency is closing fast.
Since the end of World War II (though not exclusive to that period), many presidential candidates have run for office on promises to end or wind down this or that war—as part, if not the whole, of their platforms—but not one ultimately elected in the past sixty five years actually did so, with the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Korean War, and he didn’t exactly end that; it was brought to a negotiated truce. The country’s WW II war‑weariness forced him to take what he could get, saving an incalculable number of lives in the bargain. Unfortunately, he canceled out that good work by imitating predecessor Truman’s snub of Ho Chi Minh’s pleas for recognition of his government in Viet Nam, thus setting the stage for the U.S. war in Viet Nam, which his youthful successor JFK positioned between other foreign invasions in his own vision of U.S. world domination and set on the road to becoming the nightmare of the 1960s and 70s, LBJ’s wet dream, and Nixon’s gift horse (manipulated mercilessly to distract the public while attending to lesser crimes).
At this point it already sounds clichéd to draw analogies between current U.S.‑Middle East wars and the U.S.‑Viet Nam War, and so, though such comparisons can be instructive, it’s more practical to recognize that something worse (and very different) is afoot, and that no amount of usual protest will be enough to stop it. Things set in motion by the Bush‑Cheney regime have taken on a life and direction of their own, and only a completely different approach to U.S. policy and the concept of world peace can avoid the coming disaster. Mr. Obama could possibly be the last U.S. president in a position to call anything close to a near‑term halt to what promises to be the ultimate slide of humanity into an abyss of war beyond anything previously conceived or experienced—the longest, most destructive war in history. And that assessment is not intended as apocalyptic rhetoric, but moderate, realistic evaluation.
The problem with current U.S. wars is that the military is in control of policy, and asking a general for advice on what to do about war is like asking a mechanic whether or not you should fix that irritating rattle in your car. And no one is better at charming the good sense out of a president (short of elections) or the public (short of reality TV) than a general. Take, for example, the current general‑in‑chief, bedazzling medals and all, along with his personal army of advisors and experts, hell bent on solving the world’s problems with military precision and know how, mix in tribes of desert people with religious zealotry, endless landscape to escape across and access to the richest troves of oil and poppies on the planet, and (somehow) you have the perfect formula for convincing a man with no military experience whatsoever outside of Hollywood movies that it is in the best interest of the U.S. to pursue a fifty (at least) year war. That’s where we are now.
The Iraq War may look like it’s winding down, but it’s only moving into a different phase. Then there’s Afghanistan, a war with renewed traction now cranking into full gear with Washington approval (complete with increased‑troop‑death‑is‑imminent disclaimers, a surreal rider that should blast shivers down Main Street). And then there’s Pakistan, a third war, in motion but only at its beginning and barely catching the media spotlight—that will change once the subject of India, Pakistan, the Taliban and nuclear weapons can be said in one breath without anyone scoffing. And there are other, smaller related conflicts, and possibly even invisible mini‑wars for all we know. Generals never tell everything, only enough to keep their strategies afloat, and even politicians who know better (who have read war history or been on the receiving end of a barrel) keep their heads down, worried over employment at the local munitions factory and how it might affect their reelection.
War can be sold as a good thing if you’re winning, but winning in war is a conundrum. Those who could provide strongest testimony to the success and effectiveness of winning any war are the dead, both victor and loser. In war, triumph and defeat are the same in the end because death is the only possible outcome, of the body or spirit. War’s purpose is death (no matter what it’s waged in the name of). It is meant to kill, maim, destroy and poison. It has no higher purpose, no matter what politicians claim for it. It’s a short cut, a crass, brutal form of nationalized bullying that reduces human potential to it’s lowest nature. Anyone can argue the virtues and necessities of self defense, and even revolution, but brief or protracted, mechanized, wide spread aggressive destruction is not self defense (particularly in foreign lands where the self one is protecting does not belong)—it is murder, pure and simple.
But strategies of the moment don’t have to produce immediate results: a potentially endless war has been launched, and if the generals have their way, and if our promising new president does not reverse his course and commitments, the following will be true: If you are ten years old today and reading this, your grandchildren will be fighting these same wars (and related others). The relevance of our generation—this era—will have been completely erased and forgotten by then; the country will have become financially, politically and artistically bankrupt; the environment will be a hot sewer (no such things as ice caps and potable water); and the extinction rate will have surpassed imagination (creatures we consider common will be mysterious and unheard of to your grandchildren—squirrels maybe, housecats, who knows?). Everything original and creative about the human imagination will be swept into the effort of continuing and supporting endless war, and your life—you who are now ten years old now—would not (if we were given a chance to see you again in fifty years) be recognizable to us, we who stand at this crossroad on the verge of allowing the remnants of our battered republic to be taken over by ancient, tedious visions of conquest and enforced peace, designed and executed by a pejoracracy of generals and other lesser beings. We will have ruined the planet for you, and will have done it purely for the sake of war itself, a human preoccupation as ancient and primal as sex and food gathering, but it will all have been for nothing because unlike the other two, war is unnecessary to survival. Then again, so are most political decisions.
George Evans first witnessed and experienced martial violence as an Air Force medic in Libya during the Six‑Day War of 1967, then in Viet Nam. His books include The New World (Curbstone Press), and Sudden Dreams (Coffee House Press).
Broadway & 3rd: “The Pope of Broadway,” by Eloy Torrez
In February I hiked 9 miles (18 round trip) from Eaton Canyon Nature Center in Pasadena about four thousand feet up the old toll road to Mount Wilson, arriving four or so hours later with a sandwich and water left in my water bottle at a parking lot near the radio television broadcasting towers and the complex of observatories that date back a century. There was only one vehicle in the parking lot and a few people enjoying the view at the top, with a patch of dirty leftover old snow along the southern edge, where a marker that noted the altitude at 5,500 feet. Brilliant sun shone across the mountain tops (Mount Lowe to the west, Mount Baldy to the east) emerging from a soft sea of white clouds like rocks in a Zen garden. The cloud cover had made the early hours of the hike very cool in a couple ways, as I ascended through fragrant misty oaks and pines.
9 miles back downhill was of course easier, sweeter because I knew by then that I’d have no problem with the ankle I’d broken a couple years earlier in the Stehekin River, in the North Cascades National Park, some 40 miles from my vehicle.
A lifetime of electronic media, flat screens, movies, TV, books, music, the radio, news, the newspapers, pictures, photos, billboards, bumperstickers—all such things that produce us (even if, or as, we produce them), 24/7, day in and day out—dull the senses immensely. This stuff makes us retarded, it retards our reactions physically, spiritually and intellectually, it blurs, blunts and distorts our understanding of and feeling for the experiential, the actual and the real. Like any addict, I am in love with the fix because it works, it takes instant effect, I am in love with intelligence in any kind of medium, paper or plastic, electronic or 2-D. I got it going at all times of the day, at any given moment: music blasting, computers on, unread magazines scattered about, papers everywhere, artwork by friends and family on the walls and shelves, books piled everywhere, DVDs falling out of a basket by the TV, pictures on my flash drive and on my mind, telephone about to ring… Citified in who knows how many ways, penetrated and infiltrated, I find my only sure means of escape is by walking.
Walk away.
Walking is a form of resistance. You are not encapsulated by the steel vehicles which license your identity, you are not face first in a screen, you are not insulated behind glass, you are not listening to electronic voices beamed into your head. I have so far resisted carrying a cell phone precisely because then there’s no escape if you carry the various sorts of media accessible via the little screen in your pocket. Everywhere you go in an urban space, drivers are texting, drivers erratically proceed with phones clasped against their heads, people are trying to focus on buttons to punch, strollers advance oblivious to the day, verbalizing and spouting forth in the air, preoccupied persons are driven compulsively to check their cell phones at every opportunity for the next psychosocial twittering or voicemail to tell them what to think or to do. After a lifetime of resisting being a drone, I continue to resist being told what to do every hour, every minute, by little messages, by gangs of associates or random acquaintances, by people I already owe so much to, by my peers and by my betters, I am resisting final inroads into those last places where I actually am forced to reflect and think on my own experience and originate thought, as it happens, on walks.
My sister Hannah and her husband Dave run Smallhouse Art Glass in Northern California where he makes art glass vases, bowls and art objects including squids and frogs that are sold at galleries and places like the Long Beach aquarium. They brought their sons, Marcus and Caius, to visit L.A. and had already been to Disneyland and the Norton Simon Museum, took in the L.A. Philharmonic production of Porgy and Bess at the Hollywood Bowl, went to the Alhambra cineplex for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince as well as the Griffith Park Observatory where they saw myriad exhibits where they could press buttons to find out their weight on each planet of the solar system while simultaneously watching videos taken by space probes to distant planets and moons in outer space, as well as reclined on plush seats in the planetarium to view a digital laser program on astronomy, “Centered in the Universe,” projected against the inside of the great dome by “the most sophisticated star projector in the world, the Zeiss Universitarium Mark IX,” and had reservations (which I made for them on-line because my mother refuses to own a computer) for “Pompei and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples” at the L.A. County Museum of Art. In short, they were getting the pre-programmed and mediated version of experience of place which is produced for tourists everywhere (and so in that way homogenized, Disneyfied), with on-line reservations and computers and cell phones telling them where and when to go. However, Los Angeles is my home town and I believe after a lifetime of resisting capitalist ideological programming, consumerist dogma and my own preconceptions that it was my duty to treat them to some alternative to that experience, a Los Angeles you cannot purchase, undelivered in digital formats, not preserved behind glass, not virtual, instead—actually, strangely, real.
In short, I suggested we go on a walk.
I know, practically unheard of in Los Angeles, slightly impractical in the 90 degree heat of July days, and—coming in at five to ten miles—more of a hike than a stroll. But, “real” in a way the touch-screen can’t touch. Unheard of, impractical, subversive—sun blasted streets, tarry pavements and long sidewalks, buildings and distinct neighborhoods, traffic and crowds, the real L.A. The Smallhouse family could bring their cell phones and digital cameras, but I was confident the actual city would render the virtual Matrix wholly secondary, subsidiary, derivative, an afterthought.
We left the van behind, parked a couple blocks from the Mission Street Gold Line station in South Pasadena—a couple blocks away because 2 and 3 hour parking zones aren’t sufficient for a walk that might take most of the day, given that my group of hikers might need to rest, might slow toward the end. Gold Line tickets are $1.25 one way, and even with a party of five, this is cheaper than all day parking in a downtown lot. Besides, it made us all pedestrians as soon as we took seats on the train and it left the platform. Escaping your own car is the necessary first prerequisite.
It feels old-fashioned, taking the Gold Line light rail into downtown Los Angeles. Like the red car trolleys and trains of the early 20th century, the Gold line follows an older route through Highland Park down the middle of Marmion Way, a residential street a block off Figueroa, where driveways open onto the street used by the train, where children bike and people stroll. Dave happened to be wearing a T-shirt featuring a block print image by Artemio Rodriguez, which I’d purchased at the Avenue 50 Gallery and I pointed out the gallery as the train scooted alongside it. At Marmion and Museum Way, the train stops at the Southwest Museum station—and I remarked on surviving century old Victorian houses hidden amidst palm trees and stucco box apartment blocks on the way and the “Casa de Adobe,” a 1920s reconstruction of an 1850s Californio adobe. A gray haired gent wearing a white plastic hard hat and a student’s backpack volunteered his own information, jumping into the conversation.
When Dave responded to the announcement, “Next stop, Chinatown,” by admitting he’d never seen L.A. Chinatown, I decided to add another mile or so onto our hike by getting off at the new Chinatown Station. Downstairs to the street shining in summer heat, across College into a two story maze of junk, trinket and dry goods stalls, a rats warren of a market, endless baubles and knick knacks for sale, from pots and pans to plastic AK-47s “in case you want to get shot by police,” knock-off clothing and souvenir T-shirts for $2 each. Stacks of T-shirts with Michael Jackson or “Hollywood,” on them, “Lakers,” or I love San Francisco,” “I Love Los Angeles,” “California,” or “I [heart] NY.” Mickey Mouse steering wheel covers ($8) and live turtles ($5). My party began enjoying shopping, and I didn’t even have to mention that some stalls in this market sold the most potent (if illegal) insecticide chalk. We went east across Broadway by the stone lions at doorways to various “benevolent association” headquarters, and walked through the Chinese gate to the Central Plaza and Gin Ling Way, which I suggested they’d recognize if they visualized it in movies or car commercials, sprayed with water and diffused at night by steam or smoke, the bad guys entering from one end and advancing on the protagonists. This late summer morning, Chinese dudes sat on folding chairs under big umbrellas in the plaza hunched over board games. Across from the Mountain Bar, part of the new Chinatown scene with literary readings and a hipster crowd, I handed out pennies to toss into the fortune fountain, with its waters splashing on cups marked “LUCK,” “MONEY,” HEALTH,” “indecipherable,” etc., and although all five of us tried pitching pennies at every cup in sight, none of us made a penny into any—perhaps because we already have all we need?
Across Hill to Chun King Road, I showed them the new Gallery row where “people from the west side” (read: white) bought out failing or dusty old mom and pop junk stores and trinket shops and remodeled them into new art galleries—gentrification if you want to call it that, but one that brings a new generation of people, customers, cash, new energy and new life into the neighborhood. Little Asian girls pushed their scooters up and down the otherwise quiet and empty Chun King Road. The art crowd doesn’t show up until the evenings, and till then the neighborhood is still full of multigenerational Vietnamese and Chinese families. We peeked into a couple galleries, then I led the group through a greasy back alley where the Calarts crowd converges in a basement called Betalevel for readings and music, down College and across Alameda to Homeboy Industries Headquarters, where we lunched at the Homegirl Cafe.
Patricia Zarate, her white hair short, who started Homegirl Cafe a couple incarnations back in the direction of Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights was chatting with friends at the next table, but I don’t think that’s why service was particularly good. Some days are just good days for the homegirls cooking up a storm behind the counter and for us, chowing down on their sandwiches and tacos, nine kinds of tacos like beef tinga with pickled onion, carnitas with minced green apple, celantro green turkey chorizo. Hannah bought a chocolate brown (cream-colored lettering: Homegirl) T-shirt in the souvenir shop (next to the full bakery case) for one of her Chicana activist friends. The waiting room in the bottom floor of Homeboy Industries was full of restless black and brown street encrypted youths, waiting for referrals and counseling, working their way of out that life.
A block west we walked in the rear door of Phillipe’s Original French Dipped Sandwiches, just to give them a glimpse of the next luncheon choice up the street, with the crowd lined before the counter where countergirls in their aprons carve the meat and the long tables stand amid sawdust scattered on the cement floor. Old school! I pointed out to the boys the row of telephone booths along the wall near the cigarette stand: “You may not recognize these things, and this may be your last chance to see them. Check them out. They are called telephone booths and they were once common across the United States.” Caius stepped into one ands his mother snapped a shot of him holding the telephone to his head. Marcus stepped into one and his mother snapped a shot of him holding his cell phone to an ear.
Westering, across Cesar Chavez at Alameda (kitty-corner to Terminal Annex Post Office, which offered 24 hour postal service for generations but no longer, and across the street from a particularly ugly heap of new “luxury condos” which block out the 1939 Union Station “colonial revival” train station), we worked our way up Olvera Street, that tourist trap which previously had featured as the rundown empty setting for street scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 short, “The Kid” (according to wikipedia), and was officially renovated in 1930 as a civic and commercial project by a woman named Christine Sterling, with the backing of Harry Chandler of the L.A. Times. Marcus located a Betty Boop belt buckle to his liking in one of the stalls and Caius tried out two plastic pistols, one in each hand, which when the trigger was pulled, played music and spun either a revolving basketball or baseball on the muzzle, which as the music played, opened to reveal a spinning basketball player or baseball player. Certainly I regret that I did not buy one of those pistols now! Sometimes objects of great value look like the purest trash.
We crossed the placita by the mission-era 1861 chapel under the great ficus trees, crossed over the 101 freeway with its bumper to bumper northboard traffic crawling at perhaps ten miles an hour (several hours later when we returned, the traffic was exactly the same) and I suggested that we must wave at the traffic and laugh, and walked past the Federal court house to try to enter City Hall for a look around (“Mayor Villaraigosa grew up in City Terrace, too, you know, but he did not answer my letter asking what the old address for his childhood home had been. He must have bitter memories…”). The guards at the door with their metal detectors and X-ray machine rejected us because Dave carries a big folding knife. So we went outside and Dave stashed the knife in the shrubbery and we went back inside and took the elevators, three of them in succession, up to the top of the building. At the 27th floor you can climb the stairs past a bronze bust of Tom Bradley (his predecessor, Republican Sam Yorty, called Bradley a communist during the campaign), to the large empty Tom Bradley room, a big meeting or banquet hall with an immense high ceiling and windows all around. The room was full of tables and chairs with a podium and microphone at the front of the room, where I improvised a short speech welcoming everyone to City Hall. In fact, as we (skittishly, some of us) went outdoors on the walkway outside that runs around each side of the building and you can stand in the breeze at the railing and look out over the smoggy city in four directions, we were the only visitors to the top of the building the entire time we were there, except for one young office worker with her city hall ID badge pinned to her blouse, who apparently was looking for a quiet, private place to smoke. We circled the building a couple times while I pointed out landmarks such as Dodger Stadium, General Hospital and the El Sereno hills to the east, the Disney Opera Hall atop Bunker Hill to the north, and architect Thom Mayne’s futuristic steel-skinned Caltrans Building and the old L.A. Times building to the west. Hannah took digital pictures of the views in all directions.
Continuing north from City Hall, we crossed the lawn in welcome ficus shade of muggy summer, strolled past the Rockefeller plaza-stolid facade of the 1935 L.A.Times building with fascist-style eagles flanking the front doorway, and the words “Truth/ Liberty Under the Law” on the one side, “Equal Rights/ True Industrial Freedom,” on the other. I commented that for the original owner Otis Chandler, like the Rockefellers, that meant no unions for workers, selling out to the Chicago Tribune, massive lay-offs and eventual bankruptcy for the newspaper. We hiked First Street uphill to the Disney Opera Hall, which Dave admired for Frank Gehry’s sculptural extravagance in stainless steel. The front doors were locked, so we went round the back to the garden, which was full of groups of foreign teenage tourists lounging, posing, shooting photos. We strolled through the crowd of kids speaking Hebrew or Greek or Hungarian, down the steps on the other side of the building, and out along Grand Avenue, in the shadows of immense bank skyscrapers and tall condo towers. The skyscrapers towering above MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art and California Plaza cause a wind tunnel effect, which on a blazing hot day is nice enough. Dave stepped to corner of the severe sharp edge of the blade-like Wells Fargo bank building, sheathed in chocolate granite, and looked straight up.
Crossed to Hope, and down the Library (or Bunker Hill) Steps (Hannah shot the Robert Graham female nude statue atop the fountain that squirts the cascade that runs down the center of the steps)—across West 5th, and into the bustling Central Library where Charles Bukowski discovered the work of John Fante, and Fante did important work as well as Carlos Bulosan, and then some pyro-arsonist set it on fire in 1986. We escalated up to the balcony at the top of the great eight story atrium, where everyone could use the restrooms and get a drink of cold water, not to mention cool off and enjoy the terrific air conditioning after walking all the way from Chinatown. I mentioned I ran a writing workshop out of the library once for six months. We looked at the library visitors, most of them young, all kinds, really, scruffy and studious, business-like and wild, going about their intellectual duties. I noted there were art exhibits (usually photography, this time by Paul Outerbridge) to see in the galleries in the building. A quick perusal of the gift shop off the central foyer, and we were off again south on 5th Street, alongside the Biltmore Hotel, which I couldn’t recognize from the back when Dave asked me what it was, down to the once dull and sun-stricken and full of winos but now terribly ugly (after remodeling) Pershing Square, full of people getting on the bus, businessmen, tourists, citizens of the city, citizens of the day. Young tourists, students, hurried all about downtown, maps or guidebooks or cameras in hand, talking quizzically about where they might be going, I’m sure. French, Korean, German or Dutch, all young, traipsing around with their lives in their hands, having adventures. I glanced at them going by with envy as we crossed from street corners. Did the weather-beaten and torn up alcoholics strewn along the benches at the base of Bunker Hill register us in the same way? People with their lives in hand, rushing about through the broad daylight, doing whatever they wished, free?
At Pershing Square (5th & Hill) they installed an Automated Public Toilet for $250,000, which resembles a green oblong tube sticking out of the ground like an ornate green steamship smokestack, and I saw a homeless guy enter to use it, urinating as the door rotated closed behind him. The Downtown News notes, “Each APT’s oval-shaped kiosk contains a small toilet and a sink. After every use, the door shuts and the toilet retracts into a behind-the-scenes cleaning area, where it is pressure-washed, disinfected and dried. Meanwhile, the unit’s floor and sink are pressurized with water and drained. The toilet bowl swings back around and is ready for use again within minutes. While some APTs cost 25 cents per use, the Skid Row facilities are free.” Nearby, two bicycle mounted cops wearing shorts and bike helmets listened to a homeless man.
Crossing Hill, below the immobilized Angel’s Flight Funicular draped in orange industrial netting and closed down in 2001 after it malfunctioned, crashed, killing an elderly tourist, we always look at the funicular wistfully because Dolores first lived in tenements on Bunker Hill when she came from Mexico, and took the funicular in its previous location, when Bunker Hill was actually a much taller hill full of old SRO old men’s hotels. That was the ghost city I recall from my father’s time, when we would visit him and he lived in furnished rooms in buildings which announced, in paint peeling off the brick, “hot water, shower and bath, fully furnished” or “rooms $10, monthly rates.” The current old folks residential towers and luxury condos on Bunker Hill bear no relation, except to evoke ghosts. For stories of that Bunker Hill neighborhood life, see John Fante’s stories and his 1939 novel, Ask the Dust. Across Hill we entered Grand Central Market, straight to the juice bar with its metal juice machine which has served all kinds of juice from carrot to pomegranate, from cherry to garlic, from celery to strawberry, for generations. I had pomegranate, Caius a cherry smoothie, Marcus a frozen coffee drink, and Dave a root beer float.
Of course into the market (dating to 1917), concrete floor strewn with sawdust, neon lights glowing in the dim piping and ducts of the high ceiling over the produce, confection, and cooked food stalls. Voices and street sounds reverberating inside the deepness of the open building from Hill Street to Broadway. The stalls have changed a lot over the years, and now, clearly, Centroamericanos and Mexicanos have made the market largely their own, with a few others, Koreans selling fried food, Chinese women waiting beside their massage tables, practically asleep under a big banner, “CHINESE MASSAGE.” There’s a 99 Cents store in the basement. I’ve never wandered through the whole establishment. It was one of those places our parents frequented. Dolores’s dad figured it was his duty as a Mexicano to barter with the vendors, arguing about the price, quality and worth of their produce. He used to bring home wilted, crummy old vegetables, proud he’d stood up to the cheap vendors; they couldn’t cheat him! Nowadays you can get a whole fried fish with some rice or French fries for a couple dollars, but who knows how long those fish sit under the overhead lamps. There’s gotta be some good eateries in all those stalls somewhere.
“The Million Dollar Movie Theater,” one of the big empty movie theaters on Broadway is next door; dad took us to see movies here when we were kids and he was living in an empty storefront on Wabash, years after he and mom had split up and he was in town from Central America or the merchant marine—maybe this theater was one my grandmother played keyboard or organ in as a teenager during silent movies, her job was to perform the soundtrack on sheet music, before she married my grandfather and they moved to the Bay Area because he (Long Beach chief of police) thought L.A. was “too dangerous” in the 1920s. They had lived in South Central when it was all white. Ah, what Los Angeles was that? Typically, no teenagers are interested at all in this type of information, but I feel bound to point out these traces of their ancestors as we go down the sidewalk. Cross Broadway at 3rd, I held open the door to the Bradbury Building, so they can check out the wrought iron grillwork, the 1893 architecture in the five story atrium lit by the skylight they’ve seen in numerous movies like Chinatown and Blade Runner, those movies most emblematic of the city. We can’t play in the two elevators, kids in one, adults in the other, chasing each other up and down the floors; the security would kick us out, the upper floors are LAPD Offices of Internal Affairs. It was all pretty quiet on a Thursday afternoon. The Smallhouses located a life-size bronze statue of Charlie Chaplin on a bench at the other entrance to the building and snapped pictures beside him. “Why is that here?” Marcus asked.
There is no why.
Outside, with a cop looking the other way, the teenagers and I ran across 3rd nto the parking lot and stood directly underneath one of the best murals in L.A., “the Pope of Broadway,” Eloy Torrez’s 8 story tall portrait of Anthony Quinn on the side of the Victor Clothing Company. I’d never seen the mural up this close before. We could touch his shoes. Up close, the brush strokes were wild and energetic. I could see the paint was peeling and sun-faded. Next to it, partially hidden by another brick commercial building from the previous century, appeared a mural of a flying horseman by Frank Romero that reminded me of the expressionist style of Carlos Almaraz. He was a terrific painter who died of AIDS in 1989, and Romero’s mural is ghostly, stripped and blasted by the weather of decades, almost entirely faded and gone. With their mom taking photos of us from the other side of 3rd street, the boys didn’t notice this secret mural; it’s just another ghost I saw from the corner of my eye—there’s one almost everywhere I look.
Down 3rd, left on Main Street, past the alley where the entrance to the Smell is located (where I had to park outside, waiting to pick up my daughter and her teen friends in the middle of the night), to the corner of 2nd (Santa Vibiana’s where Dolores went to Catholic school when she lived on Bunker Hill, now it’s been sold to a private developer, who will turn the church into a party or banquet hall), 2nd to Los Angeles Street where we crossed to the New Otani Hotel, enjoying the blast of air conditioning in the ritzy huge lobby with its grand piano and eateries, I held the door to the elevator for them. I took them out on the 4th floor garden level, but it’s been ruined—it used to be quiet little oasis of a Japanese garden several floors above the pavement and street noise, but the garden’s been taken over by restaurants, which set tables and chairs on the grass, lounge chairs and speaker systems on the pathways, and instead of the babbling brook only there’s lame disco lounge music. We walked through Little Tokyo down 2nd Street (we’ve been through here so many times and it’s so old now that it feels like “our town”), and the Japanese American National Museum was having a Thursday free day, but the kids were burnt out on museums so we skipped it, besides the famous Kogi Korean barbecue taco truck isn’t around so there’s less incentive. We strolled through the pedestrian alley behind the East West Theater, which used to be Union Church where they sent us when we were kids for our Christianity and Japanese Americanization, before we returned to East L.A. I still remember the old lady clothing rack and toiletries smell of that old church.
Nobody stops at the ugly monument to the 442nd World War 2 all JA regiment (anyway it’s not the ugliest war memorial around, we’ve seen worse) as we moved east along Alameda, fire engines spinning their light bars in front of the U.S. Metro Detention Center “downtown Hilton” jail whose tiny windows never open. Crossing over the 101 freeway (bumper to bumper traffic still, hours later), we strode through the high-ceilinged hall of Union Station, with the tables of the upscale restaurant Traxx cordoned off on the left and the postcard rack at the snack stand and people enjoying drinks at the bar to the right, and all kinds of travelers resting in the great old comfortable leather seats in the great space and golden afternoon light. The crowd was streaming through, lines waiting for Amtrak trains, but we headed upstairs to the Gold Line, jumping aboard the last car and zooming in snaky curves all along the Arroyo Seco, standing till we got some seats, and off at Mission Station, where we negotiated the crowd at the South Pasadena farmer’s market, and my sister and her husband picked out peaches and nectarines.
As we walked through the muggy late afternoon light of a summer’s day, toward the vehicle and other machines we would shortly wire or otherwise attach to our selves, we had weariness in our toes, we had perspiration in the fine hairs of the skin, we had peaches, plums and nectarines, we had the day away in the real L.A.—not to mention the ghost city of the past and all the ghosts we might conversate with on street corners tangential to the moment.
About the Author: Sesshu Foster has taught composition and literature in East L.A. for 25 years. He’s also taught writing at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts and the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. One of his last readings at St. Mark’s Poetry Project NYC is Mp3 archived at www.salon.com and local readings are archived at www.sicklyseason.com. He is currently collaborating with artist Arturo Romo and other writers on the website, www.ELAguide.org. His most recent books are the novel Atomik Aztex and World Ball Notebook (City Lights).
I spent a hot morning in Ukiah reading a book ofKay Ryan’spristine, turn-me-inside-out poems.“Carrying a Ladder” knocked a little hole in me. All day, I heard these lines repeat: As though / one had a way to climb / out of the damage / and apology.
Beneath the damage and apology, a yawning blackness obliterates the threat of collision. In this spaciousness, the weight of my regret and the binding straps of fear dissolve. They are not set aside, they are not resolved, they simply lose utility. My unfettered movement in this dark world gathers force, a cyclone of freedom, until it bursts above the midline, unconcerned with what the light of day can do. One burst of joy, a geyser of being-not-being, sizzling hot, spewing wild until light vaporizes lightness and gravity reclaims each drop, down, down, down into the earth, cold water in cold ground. A wet and ashy heap, unfit for any use, impossible to clean up, there is nothing to be done but wait until the last of it dries up and blows away.
These are the seasons of my life, glorious fits of unadorned joy followed by long patient silences during which the ghosts of roads-not-taken taunt me with the false beauty of what-could-have-been. Cruel and bitter with the life that I denied them, they eclipse the waning moments of my real life with impenetrable, leaden regret. The weight of my regret accumulates and drags me deep into the underworld where the cycle begins again. These are the seasons of my self-absorbed life.
But love, always and only love, liberates me from this self-concern. A will to serve recasts the thought of ‘me’, refashions my self-consciousness into a thin ribbon pulled taut like floss, past my eyes, through my brain into the vacuum where it all begins and ends. Dissipated in communion, a small bright cloud of newly-me forms at each fulfillment. The fall to earth is gentle but as I recongregate in breathe and blood, the lonely ache begins. This pain is different than the taunting shame or binding fear. This ache does not press me into myself, it accompanies me, reminding me of this flesh over this muscle over this bone, each step a sinewy ripple, particle and wave. I am here, we are alive.
