Once again, the gripes about Occupy Wall Street are mounting: people keep saying that they have to come up with some coherent demands, or it’s all a waste. It’s time for all of us to step up and stop telling them what they have to say. It’s time for all of us to speak.
So here’s my response to the naysayers.
Occupy Wall Street has served a crucial function as a placeholder on two levels – and by placeholder, I mean something very, very important. A placeholder is someone who holds a space open, in order to make it possible for something to happen in that space.
On the material level, the people of OWS have held the space of Zuccotti Park open: they have created a physical space that encourages new thinking and new behavior, debate, consensus, and education. (It deeply disturbs me to call that place Zuccotti Park, as if the “owners” who named it after the chairman of Brookfield Properties, or as some accounts say after a family member who was on the City Council -- could rewrite the history of the space: from now on, I’ll refer to it as Liberty Plaza Park, its real name.)
Many people have complained dismissively that the people camping in Liberty Park are a “ragtag bunch of anarchists, drug addicts, and homeless people.” Those terms are an attempt to characterize the OWS occupiers as marginalized, less worthy of consideration than “respectable” people. It’s an attempt not to take them seriously – when every indication is that the occupiers have created a cultural space in which serious, reasoned argument is not only welcomed but encouraged. Of course it makes sense that those who can occupy Liberty Park consistently are those who don’t have demanding jobs, or high rent to pay – those who have chosen or been forced to live on the economic margins, or at least have more flexibility. All I can say is that I’m grateful to those people: they have taken the risk to be physical placeholders – to keep the park for the occupation, to run the risks of discomfort and police brutality, and thus to enable others to take part whenever they can. So I thank those whose sacrifice made that possible.
The exercise of democracy is exhilarating – and there’s something incredibly special and empowering about being in the public arena to do this. On the Tuesday morning after Bloomberg had cleared Liberty Park, I went down to show support. A judge had ruled that the park had to be reopened, but Bloomberg had refused to obey this ruling: he did not feel that his police officers needed to obey the rule of law. I walked around the park, reciting the first amendment to police officers, reading from the judge’s court order, and trying to engage people in conversation. It felt amazing. Standing in front of a phalanx of cops in riot gear who were defying a judge’s order clarified everything for me: I understood on a visceral level how wrong the city’s response has been. I understood how corrosive it is when a city’s law officers do not obey the law, when they feel empowered to beat peaceful protesters, and mace them, and mistreat them in prison. It was a moment of pure clarity. I could feel the money and greed and corruption that keeps this system in place, and sics the cops on protesters to maintain its power. And my moment of illumination could happen because the placeholders – the committed OWS occupiers – had kept Liberty Park open for the public. Public debate has to happen in pubic space.
On the level of discourse, OWS has held open the space where a reasoned argument about U.S. society needs to happen. The huge outpouring of support for OWS -- people showing up for Thursday’s day of action, those who’ve donated money, or those who tell pollsters they support the movement, and those across the country and the world who’ve taken their own space in solidarity – this wave of popular support indicates that vast numbers of Americans feel their own concerns have been excluded from public debate. In fact, the concerns of regular people – the 99% -- have often not even been acknowledged, let alone taken seriously. On the level of discourse, then, OWS has forced open a space of debate. No politician can now safely ignore the concerns of such a huge number of people.
The OWS placeholders have held open a space for us all. It’s not necessarily their job now to fashion a list of demands – it’s up to all of us who have been empowered by them to move forward and articulate our demands.
So here’s my demand:
Over the past 30 years, starting with Reagan and continuing through every president, Democratic and Republican, the financial system in this country has been tinkered with in order to make it more and more favorable to banks and businesses and those who make money from them, and less favorable to working people who live on salaries rather than on assets. The tinkering is deliberate and incremental: there is a network of laws and regulations – or rather, a process of deregulation – that allows banks and traders and corporations to pull huge profits out of the system, with no regard for the consequences. Banks can package toxic mortgage assets and sell them, making a profit; then, when the assets go bad, the banks can be bailed out with taxpayer money and still reward their executives with huge bonuses. They can do this because Congress has allowed them to do so. The banks have bought and paid for this system that favors them so highly – they pay millions into the campaigns of politicians who support them. This system is not an accident; it’s not a free market; it’s not a level playing field – and it’s not democracy.
Thus, I demand that Congress appoint an independent commission to review the banking regulation system. I demand that Congress put Elizabeth Warren in charge, because she has proven through her work with the Consumer Protection Bureau that she understands the system, can explain it clearly, and will fight for the rights of regular working people. I demand that this commission make specific recommendations for an overhaul of the regulations. I demand that Congress accept a new system. And I demand that those who have been seen to bend the old rules be brought to justice and held publicly accountable.
I am sending my demand to my state senator, my state governor, my U.S. senator, and to the White House. I invite you all to do the same thing. OWS has empowered me: now it’s time for me to do my job. Join me!
Saturday, November 19, 2011
The Engine of Plot Churns Through a Sea of (Muted) Grief
Watching John Kelly’s Find My Way Home, and the talkback afterwards, led me to musing once again about the structure of Kelly’s performances. As he was talking to the audience about the multi-layered, multi-genre elements of his works, I found myself using a term from literary criticism: the engine of plot. In a novel, the engine of plot is an emotional momentum that creates and maintains a plot line, a coherence, an arc or trajectory through the text. Find My Way Home – and some of Kelly’s other pieces – has an emotional narrative thread that’s utterly clear, powered by deep feeling. The engine of this plot is like a lifeline for the audience, stretching and pulling us through the performance, leading to the climax. If you know the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, then you know what will happen: that Orpheus, having found love, will lose his beloved through death; his attempt to cheat death and get her back will fail. He ends, like all of us, alone. On the level of plot structure, then, there’s no suspense: we know what will happen, and we’re free to ponder the immutable sadness of mortality, and the futility of our efforts to outwit it. The engine of plot moves us through, like Ariadne’s thread in the Minotaur’s labyrinth: it’s charged with emotional coherence – it’s a story strong enough to bear the weight of the audience’s expectations. Since this thread takes care of our need for a logical story-line, it also leaves us free to relax, and to allow ourselves to free-fall into the other layers of meaning. The anxiety that many avant-garde performances deliberately provoke through their rejection of conventional logic is missing – the challenge lies not there but in our willingness to play with genre, to let Kelly shower us with image and sound.
Kelly says that this piece is about his response to AIDS – to losing friends and lovers, to watching an entire generation of artists die without fulfilling their promise. Loss and grief, both personal and cultural. As he pointed out, if those promising artists who died in the eighties and nineties had survived, the current art scene would be unrecognizable. This piece, with its soaring, beautiful Gluck score, opens us to melancholia, as we meditate on what we have lost. And as with all Kelly pieces, there are multiple cultural references to draw us viscerally into grief: videos, music, dance, amazing images such as the vision of the underworld where the dead are forced to dance with dummies in some parody of a dime-a-dance competition – dance to the point of exhaustion, till they collapse. Some of those references, of course, work in ways Kelly can’t predict: when he uses the Noel Coward song “I’ll See You Again,” he couldn’t know that my mother singing that as she bustled around the house is one of my few enduring memories of her, since she died when I was young. I sometimes find myself singing it and thinking of her – so Kelly’s meditation on death and loss mingled with my own, deep in my heart.
And since he first performed this piece in 1988 with collaborators who later died themselves, the piece has mutated now into a new meditation – on how grief changes as time passes. The pain of loss is not so sharp, not so urgent. And the audience is different: a new generation didn’t experience the devastation of the AIDS years first hand: what might it mean to them?
Still moved by Kelly’s performance, I went the next day to a completely different venue: a conference about the catholic church and LGBT people. The connection between this and Kelly’s grief and loss may not be clear to everyone, but listening to the iconic Sister Jeannine Gramick and a powerful response by Jamie Manson re-opened an old wound that any queer who was raised catholic must at least recognize. The violence of the Vatican’s response to LGBT people has barely been acknowledged, let alone assuaged: I was moved to tears to hear it spoken of honestly, compassionately, thoughtfully, analytically, by outraged people who have begun to find language to describe the damage. The violence continues, whether one has left the church or tries to stay and fight from the inside (it continues to puzzle me why I should still feel this violence when I rationally do not feel an affinity for catholicism: is it that past damage can never be healed unless it is communally acknowledged?). The difference is that now there is a growing group of people whose work and language clearly tells what has been done – to women, and to queers. They tell us why it matters and what has been lost because of this violence; they tell us why it is wrong, why the Vatican is wrong, and how we could reclaim ourselves. To sit in a room full of people who are finally willing to acknowledge truth – to affirm our reality – is an experience so powerful as to shake me to the core. I began to dream of rituals that could possibly take this affirmation and embody it within a community – to create a witnessing that might heal, so that then one could move on.
So it turns out that there is more in common than one would think between John Kelly and people who want to talk about queer catholics: there is trauma, and grief, there is a lack of acknowledgment, and a violent fracturing of community when people are thrown out. When I think of the effects of AIDS, I think about people who died, but I also think about their families: for every wonderful mother who marched in a vigil with a candle for her dead child, there were too many of the other families – the ones who showed up after the death and threw their child’s partner out of the house, who took everything and claimed that their blood rights trumped any gay relationship. Those families are like the church, violating their own code of ethics, supposedly based on love. They deliberately break community by marking queers as non-people, people who don’t deserve even to belong. To be cast out of one’s family, one’s spiritual community -– that is traumatic.
Thinking of families and churches leads me to consider those whose grief is considered legitimate. Every year on 9/11, the families of those who died in the World Trade Center have their grief publicly validated -- in fact, their grief seems to allow them to claim special rights over everything related to their loss: on whether a mosque should be allowed near the WTC, on whether a hideous memorial should be built in Liberty State Park, on how much money they should get. Their grief, they say, is special, and no one dares challenge them, because the lost ones have been marked as innocent. Their innocence is doubled: not only were they merely working there, but the attackers were outsiders for whom Americans claim no responsibility (in contrast to the Oklahoma City bombing, which is not nationally commemorated every year, since its origins are more problematic). The WTC families insist on – and repeatedly receive -- the public acknowledgment of their loss -- yet no public, national acknowledgment has ever been made about the devastation of AIDS. People who die of AIDS are somehow not innocent; their deaths cannot be mourned. Kelly’s comment about the enduring loss to the arts community of all those who died, and everything they would have brought to fruition, reminded me of how no one ever publicly says this; no one even says what a terrible loss all those deaths were and are, just on a personal level. The death of gay people and people of color (the ones most affected by AIDS) still does not register as a real loss in the public consciousness, the way the deaths of the people in the WTC does. In the same way, the violence done to women and queers in the catholic church does not register as a problem in the public consciousness.
The families of the 9/11 lost ones feel good about how they behaved: they don’t look back and see themselves behaving badly – they feel they were patriotic and brave; the families who threw their AIDS children away don’t want to think about how they behaved – another reason for not wanting to commemorate AIDS deaths.
What mutes grief? Acknowledgment, community, ritual. And time. But first of all, acknowledgment. So I am deeply moved by those who have the courage to insist that what is done to queer catholics is wrong, just as I was moved twenty years ago by those who insisted that HIV/AIDS did not strip one of personhood.
Kelly says that this piece is about his response to AIDS – to losing friends and lovers, to watching an entire generation of artists die without fulfilling their promise. Loss and grief, both personal and cultural. As he pointed out, if those promising artists who died in the eighties and nineties had survived, the current art scene would be unrecognizable. This piece, with its soaring, beautiful Gluck score, opens us to melancholia, as we meditate on what we have lost. And as with all Kelly pieces, there are multiple cultural references to draw us viscerally into grief: videos, music, dance, amazing images such as the vision of the underworld where the dead are forced to dance with dummies in some parody of a dime-a-dance competition – dance to the point of exhaustion, till they collapse. Some of those references, of course, work in ways Kelly can’t predict: when he uses the Noel Coward song “I’ll See You Again,” he couldn’t know that my mother singing that as she bustled around the house is one of my few enduring memories of her, since she died when I was young. I sometimes find myself singing it and thinking of her – so Kelly’s meditation on death and loss mingled with my own, deep in my heart.
And since he first performed this piece in 1988 with collaborators who later died themselves, the piece has mutated now into a new meditation – on how grief changes as time passes. The pain of loss is not so sharp, not so urgent. And the audience is different: a new generation didn’t experience the devastation of the AIDS years first hand: what might it mean to them?
Still moved by Kelly’s performance, I went the next day to a completely different venue: a conference about the catholic church and LGBT people. The connection between this and Kelly’s grief and loss may not be clear to everyone, but listening to the iconic Sister Jeannine Gramick and a powerful response by Jamie Manson re-opened an old wound that any queer who was raised catholic must at least recognize. The violence of the Vatican’s response to LGBT people has barely been acknowledged, let alone assuaged: I was moved to tears to hear it spoken of honestly, compassionately, thoughtfully, analytically, by outraged people who have begun to find language to describe the damage. The violence continues, whether one has left the church or tries to stay and fight from the inside (it continues to puzzle me why I should still feel this violence when I rationally do not feel an affinity for catholicism: is it that past damage can never be healed unless it is communally acknowledged?). The difference is that now there is a growing group of people whose work and language clearly tells what has been done – to women, and to queers. They tell us why it matters and what has been lost because of this violence; they tell us why it is wrong, why the Vatican is wrong, and how we could reclaim ourselves. To sit in a room full of people who are finally willing to acknowledge truth – to affirm our reality – is an experience so powerful as to shake me to the core. I began to dream of rituals that could possibly take this affirmation and embody it within a community – to create a witnessing that might heal, so that then one could move on.
So it turns out that there is more in common than one would think between John Kelly and people who want to talk about queer catholics: there is trauma, and grief, there is a lack of acknowledgment, and a violent fracturing of community when people are thrown out. When I think of the effects of AIDS, I think about people who died, but I also think about their families: for every wonderful mother who marched in a vigil with a candle for her dead child, there were too many of the other families – the ones who showed up after the death and threw their child’s partner out of the house, who took everything and claimed that their blood rights trumped any gay relationship. Those families are like the church, violating their own code of ethics, supposedly based on love. They deliberately break community by marking queers as non-people, people who don’t deserve even to belong. To be cast out of one’s family, one’s spiritual community -– that is traumatic.
Thinking of families and churches leads me to consider those whose grief is considered legitimate. Every year on 9/11, the families of those who died in the World Trade Center have their grief publicly validated -- in fact, their grief seems to allow them to claim special rights over everything related to their loss: on whether a mosque should be allowed near the WTC, on whether a hideous memorial should be built in Liberty State Park, on how much money they should get. Their grief, they say, is special, and no one dares challenge them, because the lost ones have been marked as innocent. Their innocence is doubled: not only were they merely working there, but the attackers were outsiders for whom Americans claim no responsibility (in contrast to the Oklahoma City bombing, which is not nationally commemorated every year, since its origins are more problematic). The WTC families insist on – and repeatedly receive -- the public acknowledgment of their loss -- yet no public, national acknowledgment has ever been made about the devastation of AIDS. People who die of AIDS are somehow not innocent; their deaths cannot be mourned. Kelly’s comment about the enduring loss to the arts community of all those who died, and everything they would have brought to fruition, reminded me of how no one ever publicly says this; no one even says what a terrible loss all those deaths were and are, just on a personal level. The death of gay people and people of color (the ones most affected by AIDS) still does not register as a real loss in the public consciousness, the way the deaths of the people in the WTC does. In the same way, the violence done to women and queers in the catholic church does not register as a problem in the public consciousness.
The families of the 9/11 lost ones feel good about how they behaved: they don’t look back and see themselves behaving badly – they feel they were patriotic and brave; the families who threw their AIDS children away don’t want to think about how they behaved – another reason for not wanting to commemorate AIDS deaths.
What mutes grief? Acknowledgment, community, ritual. And time. But first of all, acknowledgment. So I am deeply moved by those who have the courage to insist that what is done to queer catholics is wrong, just as I was moved twenty years ago by those who insisted that HIV/AIDS did not strip one of personhood.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
We Were Here
We Were Here is an amazing documentary, which takes archival footage and photos from the whole period of the AIDS crisis in San Francisco, and interweaves it with current interviews with five very different people who were deeply involved. The best thing about it is the way it gives a human face to the epidemic and takes you back to the way the first days must have felt like -- the mounting fear as man after man got sick and died, and no one knew why. I teach a course in gay film and literature, which is a very introductory survey; I have a section on AIDS, and a couple of months ago, when I began that section, I said to my students that this was my least favorite part of the course; I was stunned when a student asked me why. It had never really occurred to me that my 20-year-old, mostly straight-identified students had no clue what the epidemic felt like, and that if they think about HIV/AIDS at all, it's probably as a manageable STD. So of course I'll be adding this film to the mix, so that I don't have to try to explain to them.
This film tries to re-create the gradual understanding of what was happening, and how people reacted. So for me, the archival material was the most powerful. Some people allowed themselves to be filmed as they went to the hospital when they first got sick; you can see them as they realize that they really have it -- you can watch a young man who's the same age as my students, maybe 20, and the look on his face as he realizes he's going to die ... maybe in a few days, maybe in a few weeks. You see people covered with KS lesions -- I'd forgotten (or blocked) what that looked like. You see gray, skeletal people who look as if they're in their nineties, but they're really 25. I'd forgotten what it all really looked like. This film puts you back, reminds you what it was like when gay men -- as someone in the movie puts it -- were dropping like flies.
That is what most haunts me: the faces of people who, on camera, realize that they are going to die. Everyone went so fast in the beginning, and there was nothing to do -- the nurses can only help people die as well as possible. I remember the feeling of helplessness when there were no drugs at all -- a friend who went to Denmark for some weird blood-boiling treatment, people who went to Kenya for a herbal infusion, all grasping at straws.
The experience of watching this is hard to describe: I'm happy the film was made, because my experience with my students jolted me into the realization of how fast history is forgotten, but being put back into that space is fairly terrible. I'm saving for another blog my thoughts on my own relationship to AIDS in the eighties, when I identified as a straight woman, but certainly that was one of the movie's effects -- making the audience think about where we were in relation to the crisis. Director David Weissman carefully frames the experience of AIDS through the lens of the community's response, and even though in the Q&A afterwards he talked about his hope that the film would relieve people of the guilt they felt about not doing enough, I don't see how that's possible. By definition, the five people he interviews are those who did a lot -- were there at the right time, stepped up, were creative and imaginative and passionate about crafting a response to the crisis. The title surely refers to them, too -- "we were here" is a plaintive cry from those who died too young, who must have been terrified that they were slipping unexpectedly away from the world before they'd had a chance to fully inhabit it, and might be forgotten or even blanked out by those who didn't want to remember gay men. But "we were here" is also the people who went through the fire, and made sure that the forgetting didn't happen, the ones who were on the front lines of response. How can we not measure ourselves against those who did so much of the right thing?
The very next night, I went to see Contagion: the contrast with We Were Here makes a bad film even worse. Because the film tracks the spread of a new virus -- one with a 30% mortality rate that's spread through touch or sneezing and kills people within a couple of days -- it's a perfect opportunity to think about fear and panic. It spreads across the world, from Patient Zero Gwyneth Paltrow, and the U.S. turns into a disaster zone, with states closing their borders, giant FEMA hospitals staffed by nuns (because nurses go on strike), looting, murders, food riots, etc. But Stephen Soderbergh should have read a little more Octavia Butler -- his vision of that disaster is glossed over, prettified, utterly unrealistic. This could have been a meditation on the limits of community -- a negative obverse to the way the gay community helped each other in We Were Here. Minneapolitans (where Paltrow's family lives) are clearly not gay: they seem quite happy to lock themselves up in their houses and watch from behind the curtains while looters shoot their neighbors. Amazingly, their houses seem to be warm and clean in the dead of winter, with running water and food -- despite the fact that most people have stopped going to work, and it's hard to imagine who might be keeping the water running and the cell phones working so teenagers can text each other about how rotten it is to be grounded: that's the worst effect of a plague, after all. Throw in a dash of potential racism as it's suggested that the virus originates in Kowloon when a bat infects a piglet -- we're supposed to think U.S. factory farms are much cleaner and nicer than the Chinese pig farm where this happens. All is saved in the end: a heroic researcher, apparently working single-handedly (?!), comes up with a vaccine within a few months, and we can breathe a sigh of relief. It's hard to tell why anyone bothered to make this film: it utterly refuses to face the reality of how people would behave in such an epidemic, and barely skims the surface of the emotional effects.
This film tries to re-create the gradual understanding of what was happening, and how people reacted. So for me, the archival material was the most powerful. Some people allowed themselves to be filmed as they went to the hospital when they first got sick; you can see them as they realize that they really have it -- you can watch a young man who's the same age as my students, maybe 20, and the look on his face as he realizes he's going to die ... maybe in a few days, maybe in a few weeks. You see people covered with KS lesions -- I'd forgotten (or blocked) what that looked like. You see gray, skeletal people who look as if they're in their nineties, but they're really 25. I'd forgotten what it all really looked like. This film puts you back, reminds you what it was like when gay men -- as someone in the movie puts it -- were dropping like flies.
That is what most haunts me: the faces of people who, on camera, realize that they are going to die. Everyone went so fast in the beginning, and there was nothing to do -- the nurses can only help people die as well as possible. I remember the feeling of helplessness when there were no drugs at all -- a friend who went to Denmark for some weird blood-boiling treatment, people who went to Kenya for a herbal infusion, all grasping at straws.
The experience of watching this is hard to describe: I'm happy the film was made, because my experience with my students jolted me into the realization of how fast history is forgotten, but being put back into that space is fairly terrible. I'm saving for another blog my thoughts on my own relationship to AIDS in the eighties, when I identified as a straight woman, but certainly that was one of the movie's effects -- making the audience think about where we were in relation to the crisis. Director David Weissman carefully frames the experience of AIDS through the lens of the community's response, and even though in the Q&A afterwards he talked about his hope that the film would relieve people of the guilt they felt about not doing enough, I don't see how that's possible. By definition, the five people he interviews are those who did a lot -- were there at the right time, stepped up, were creative and imaginative and passionate about crafting a response to the crisis. The title surely refers to them, too -- "we were here" is a plaintive cry from those who died too young, who must have been terrified that they were slipping unexpectedly away from the world before they'd had a chance to fully inhabit it, and might be forgotten or even blanked out by those who didn't want to remember gay men. But "we were here" is also the people who went through the fire, and made sure that the forgetting didn't happen, the ones who were on the front lines of response. How can we not measure ourselves against those who did so much of the right thing?
The very next night, I went to see Contagion: the contrast with We Were Here makes a bad film even worse. Because the film tracks the spread of a new virus -- one with a 30% mortality rate that's spread through touch or sneezing and kills people within a couple of days -- it's a perfect opportunity to think about fear and panic. It spreads across the world, from Patient Zero Gwyneth Paltrow, and the U.S. turns into a disaster zone, with states closing their borders, giant FEMA hospitals staffed by nuns (because nurses go on strike), looting, murders, food riots, etc. But Stephen Soderbergh should have read a little more Octavia Butler -- his vision of that disaster is glossed over, prettified, utterly unrealistic. This could have been a meditation on the limits of community -- a negative obverse to the way the gay community helped each other in We Were Here. Minneapolitans (where Paltrow's family lives) are clearly not gay: they seem quite happy to lock themselves up in their houses and watch from behind the curtains while looters shoot their neighbors. Amazingly, their houses seem to be warm and clean in the dead of winter, with running water and food -- despite the fact that most people have stopped going to work, and it's hard to imagine who might be keeping the water running and the cell phones working so teenagers can text each other about how rotten it is to be grounded: that's the worst effect of a plague, after all. Throw in a dash of potential racism as it's suggested that the virus originates in Kowloon when a bat infects a piglet -- we're supposed to think U.S. factory farms are much cleaner and nicer than the Chinese pig farm where this happens. All is saved in the end: a heroic researcher, apparently working single-handedly (?!), comes up with a vaccine within a few months, and we can breathe a sigh of relief. It's hard to tell why anyone bothered to make this film: it utterly refuses to face the reality of how people would behave in such an epidemic, and barely skims the surface of the emotional effects.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
GOLD RUSH
I think it's the Tea Partiers who've been driving the price of gold up -- it's been hitting record highs, because people seem to think it's the only stable currency in a time of economic uncertainty. So after the torrential rains brought heavy roof leaks and the certainty of a big repair bill, the idea that had been slopping around in the back of my head for a while came to the front: gather up the old gold jewelry, and take it to 47th Street. So we did.
First came the culling, which had its own emotional baggage. I had a bunch of 18 carat gold jewelry my father had given me years ago when he lived in the middle east -- it had nothing to do with my taste, and I'd never actually worn it. Also, I have a very problematic relationship with my father. Still, it's strange to give things away that people have given you -- feels very final, like making a decision on a break-up: it's a very definite statement about the impossibility of reconciliation.
Static had rings and chains from family and exes -- a motley assortment, some with small stones. There's always a story attached to jewelry, even when you don't really know what the story is because everyone's dead and gone -- so, more baggage.
Anyway, we excluded anything we felt queasy about, and were pretty clear that since we didn't desperately need to sell things just to pay the rent (interesting, because both of us have been in that position at various times in our lives), we could leave if we weren't happy. The 47th Street website suggests getting three price estimates at various places before deciding, so that's what we planned to do.
The first thing we weren't prepared for the was the shark-like feeding frenzy -- step onto 47th Street and you're instantly mobbed with people begging you to sell them gold -- guys rush up to you and try to pull you into shops and into booths, and they press cards into your hand. "Girls! Girls! over here! we buy!" It's very disconcerting. Apparently, everyone is responding to the gold rush by emptying out their jewelry boxes, and everywhere there were people like us doing the same thing -- tipping out little bags full of rings and chains and lockets. How many people were desperate, and how many were just cashing in? It had the chaotic, scary feel of Weimar Berlin - as if the whole economic structure were about to come crashing down.
We went first to a booth in one of the exchanges, and I chose one with a woman: she looked at the little pile, sorted it, weighed it quickly, and gave an estimate of $1800; she told us she'd have to test it if we chose to sell it. So then we went to a storefront, and went through the routine again -- it was a little calmer, because the store was quiet and protected from the mobs of hawkers outside. This time the storekeeper said he'd test it right away -- and I finally found out what "passing the acid test" means: he scraped each piece on a lead sheet, then dropped acid on it. He had different bottles for 18 carat, 14 carat, etc. If the gold disappeared under the acid, it meant it was a lower carat. He pulled out a clipper and clipped the stones out of the rings -- it seemed painful, like a medical procedure: we both winced and looked away, and he smiled wryly. The stones were of no interest to him -- even the diamonds. Finally he gave us a price, all the while lecturing us about how careful he had to be and how little profit he would make. His price was better than the first dealer, and we decided to settle rather than going on. I had a little fun trying to bargain him up, but not much success -- I got an extra $50.
Then I felt we had to rush to the bank and put the cash in right away -- not that it was so much, but the freaky atmosphere of desperation created by the hawkers really got to me and made me edgy. There was a smell of craziness in the air.
Finally, we sat down on a bench and tried to analyze why we felt so disturbed by the whole thing.
First, there's the emotional element: people give you gold because they find its value to represent something meaningful about their relationship with you. I always thought I was immune to this -- I just don't wear expensive jewelry: it makes me anxious, as if it's just another thing to worry about and take care of, something I'll lose or have stolen and then get upset about. My commitment ring is a tattoo. The only emotional jewelry pieces I have (since my long dead mother's opal ring was stolen soon after she died) are two rings my mother made in a jewelry making class: they're pretty but crude, with cheap stones -- just practice rings, but they mean something to me. Still, when people give gold, they surely intend it to be meaningful, and to sell it feels like a violation of their intent. My family wasn't rich, and god knows it was a family with a very skewed ability to give gifts (when I was about eight, my mother gave me an umbrella for Christmas: by that age, I'd already tried to learn to tamp down expectation, in order to short-circuit the inevitable disappointment that came with her gifts -- she just didn't have the knack, let alone the money, to give emotionally satisfying presents). I'm awkward about gifts myself, and have a hard time accepting them, so to give away gold that's been given to me feels a little ugly.
Then there's another piece: the stupefying frenzy of this gold rush seems to augur very bad things. If gold is booming because so many people mistrust our economic institutions, their very mistrust could trigger the disaster they fear. And if they're right-wing fringe people, they'd probably be happy about that; we have an economic system that isn't based on the actual value of anything -- as has become especially clear in the past three years. Wall Streeters don't make money by buying and selling goods, but by betting on the ups and downs of the market, and they can make just as much by betting when it goes down -- none of it is based in the value of a substance, and to most of us it looks like a shell game. We've already seen how easy it can be to disrupt this, and we know who pays. Gold rush frenzy seems like the sign of a bubble about to burst, with a bunch of people trying to profit from the curve rather than trying to shore up the economy.
Finally, as Static says, gold comes with some of its own baggage, because it's always recycled, never thrown away. That necklace you're wearing could be melted down from a mixture of an 18th-century coin, a few teeth fillings from a concentration camp, and a Roman brooch. That's creepy. Gold is just a thing -- why is it more precious than anything else? Why have we imbued it with special value? But right now you can watch as people are calling it the savior of their own personal finances, and creating a gold rush out of nothing. Diamonds are no longer meaningful; gold is king.
Maybe it's a good thing that Octavia Butler died prematurely. She'd probably be freaked out watching her Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents coming true: gated communities, huge fights over water, company towns that control the entire lives of their workers, people hoarding gold .... I just hope she's more wrong than she seems right now.
First came the culling, which had its own emotional baggage. I had a bunch of 18 carat gold jewelry my father had given me years ago when he lived in the middle east -- it had nothing to do with my taste, and I'd never actually worn it. Also, I have a very problematic relationship with my father. Still, it's strange to give things away that people have given you -- feels very final, like making a decision on a break-up: it's a very definite statement about the impossibility of reconciliation.
Static had rings and chains from family and exes -- a motley assortment, some with small stones. There's always a story attached to jewelry, even when you don't really know what the story is because everyone's dead and gone -- so, more baggage.
Anyway, we excluded anything we felt queasy about, and were pretty clear that since we didn't desperately need to sell things just to pay the rent (interesting, because both of us have been in that position at various times in our lives), we could leave if we weren't happy. The 47th Street website suggests getting three price estimates at various places before deciding, so that's what we planned to do.
The first thing we weren't prepared for the was the shark-like feeding frenzy -- step onto 47th Street and you're instantly mobbed with people begging you to sell them gold -- guys rush up to you and try to pull you into shops and into booths, and they press cards into your hand. "Girls! Girls! over here! we buy!" It's very disconcerting. Apparently, everyone is responding to the gold rush by emptying out their jewelry boxes, and everywhere there were people like us doing the same thing -- tipping out little bags full of rings and chains and lockets. How many people were desperate, and how many were just cashing in? It had the chaotic, scary feel of Weimar Berlin - as if the whole economic structure were about to come crashing down.
We went first to a booth in one of the exchanges, and I chose one with a woman: she looked at the little pile, sorted it, weighed it quickly, and gave an estimate of $1800; she told us she'd have to test it if we chose to sell it. So then we went to a storefront, and went through the routine again -- it was a little calmer, because the store was quiet and protected from the mobs of hawkers outside. This time the storekeeper said he'd test it right away -- and I finally found out what "passing the acid test" means: he scraped each piece on a lead sheet, then dropped acid on it. He had different bottles for 18 carat, 14 carat, etc. If the gold disappeared under the acid, it meant it was a lower carat. He pulled out a clipper and clipped the stones out of the rings -- it seemed painful, like a medical procedure: we both winced and looked away, and he smiled wryly. The stones were of no interest to him -- even the diamonds. Finally he gave us a price, all the while lecturing us about how careful he had to be and how little profit he would make. His price was better than the first dealer, and we decided to settle rather than going on. I had a little fun trying to bargain him up, but not much success -- I got an extra $50.
Then I felt we had to rush to the bank and put the cash in right away -- not that it was so much, but the freaky atmosphere of desperation created by the hawkers really got to me and made me edgy. There was a smell of craziness in the air.
Finally, we sat down on a bench and tried to analyze why we felt so disturbed by the whole thing.
First, there's the emotional element: people give you gold because they find its value to represent something meaningful about their relationship with you. I always thought I was immune to this -- I just don't wear expensive jewelry: it makes me anxious, as if it's just another thing to worry about and take care of, something I'll lose or have stolen and then get upset about. My commitment ring is a tattoo. The only emotional jewelry pieces I have (since my long dead mother's opal ring was stolen soon after she died) are two rings my mother made in a jewelry making class: they're pretty but crude, with cheap stones -- just practice rings, but they mean something to me. Still, when people give gold, they surely intend it to be meaningful, and to sell it feels like a violation of their intent. My family wasn't rich, and god knows it was a family with a very skewed ability to give gifts (when I was about eight, my mother gave me an umbrella for Christmas: by that age, I'd already tried to learn to tamp down expectation, in order to short-circuit the inevitable disappointment that came with her gifts -- she just didn't have the knack, let alone the money, to give emotionally satisfying presents). I'm awkward about gifts myself, and have a hard time accepting them, so to give away gold that's been given to me feels a little ugly.
Then there's another piece: the stupefying frenzy of this gold rush seems to augur very bad things. If gold is booming because so many people mistrust our economic institutions, their very mistrust could trigger the disaster they fear. And if they're right-wing fringe people, they'd probably be happy about that; we have an economic system that isn't based on the actual value of anything -- as has become especially clear in the past three years. Wall Streeters don't make money by buying and selling goods, but by betting on the ups and downs of the market, and they can make just as much by betting when it goes down -- none of it is based in the value of a substance, and to most of us it looks like a shell game. We've already seen how easy it can be to disrupt this, and we know who pays. Gold rush frenzy seems like the sign of a bubble about to burst, with a bunch of people trying to profit from the curve rather than trying to shore up the economy.
Finally, as Static says, gold comes with some of its own baggage, because it's always recycled, never thrown away. That necklace you're wearing could be melted down from a mixture of an 18th-century coin, a few teeth fillings from a concentration camp, and a Roman brooch. That's creepy. Gold is just a thing -- why is it more precious than anything else? Why have we imbued it with special value? But right now you can watch as people are calling it the savior of their own personal finances, and creating a gold rush out of nothing. Diamonds are no longer meaningful; gold is king.
Maybe it's a good thing that Octavia Butler died prematurely. She'd probably be freaked out watching her Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents coming true: gated communities, huge fights over water, company towns that control the entire lives of their workers, people hoarding gold .... I just hope she's more wrong than she seems right now.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Mushrooms
Written with Static
At Destiny, a perfect summer afternoon -- the meadow was empty because most people had gone down to the river to swim. We took a middling dose of mushrooms and lounged around on the yoga platform, looking at the view of the distant hills through the trees.
It was beautiful -- not enough to get nauseous, just a gentle rolling high that turned the left brain off and opened up the right-brain world. Mushrooms make it impossible to talk -- they make it impossible to think in narrative: how fabulous! what a relief! No language, no way to process linguistically, just a total rest from the incessant nattering. Most of my life I've privileged my left brain, protected it, nurtured, it, encouraged it; now I have no way to shut off and make it leave me in peace. Finally, a little hiatus.
Afterwards, we were thinking about that, and what happens. It's as if the organizing energy of the left brain moves over to the right brain: everything around you comes into clear focus -- nature looks incredible, fresh, bright, new. You see things clearly, and then the right brain tries to organize them into visual patterns -- complicated designs like extraordinary rugs: do rug designers do mushrooms or hashish to visualize those patterns they weave?
What you see is the same and different. Your brain sees things as unique, and then puts them in patterns to make them the same. There's a constant push/pull -- your brain wants both things, two opposite desires pulsing in different directions. But they're yoked together and can never be separated. They're in balance, taking turns, in a trembling equilibrium. Unique/universal. It's a new vision of the yin yang.
Our natural urge is to desire the new and then to familiarize it: we want the new, and yet we resist it when we want the comfort of the familiar. We want this in what we see around us, and in our art, and we want it in ourselves: we want to be special, but we want to be the same as everyone else.
Our human energy bursts in those two different directions at once. It explains the artistic avant garde, and the cooptation of new ideas. It explains the dialectic and the dionysian. But in order for it all to work, you have to let the right brain loose sometimes.
At Destiny, a perfect summer afternoon -- the meadow was empty because most people had gone down to the river to swim. We took a middling dose of mushrooms and lounged around on the yoga platform, looking at the view of the distant hills through the trees.
It was beautiful -- not enough to get nauseous, just a gentle rolling high that turned the left brain off and opened up the right-brain world. Mushrooms make it impossible to talk -- they make it impossible to think in narrative: how fabulous! what a relief! No language, no way to process linguistically, just a total rest from the incessant nattering. Most of my life I've privileged my left brain, protected it, nurtured, it, encouraged it; now I have no way to shut off and make it leave me in peace. Finally, a little hiatus.
Afterwards, we were thinking about that, and what happens. It's as if the organizing energy of the left brain moves over to the right brain: everything around you comes into clear focus -- nature looks incredible, fresh, bright, new. You see things clearly, and then the right brain tries to organize them into visual patterns -- complicated designs like extraordinary rugs: do rug designers do mushrooms or hashish to visualize those patterns they weave?
What you see is the same and different. Your brain sees things as unique, and then puts them in patterns to make them the same. There's a constant push/pull -- your brain wants both things, two opposite desires pulsing in different directions. But they're yoked together and can never be separated. They're in balance, taking turns, in a trembling equilibrium. Unique/universal. It's a new vision of the yin yang.
Our natural urge is to desire the new and then to familiarize it: we want the new, and yet we resist it when we want the comfort of the familiar. We want this in what we see around us, and in our art, and we want it in ourselves: we want to be special, but we want to be the same as everyone else.
Our human energy bursts in those two different directions at once. It explains the artistic avant garde, and the cooptation of new ideas. It explains the dialectic and the dionysian. But in order for it all to work, you have to let the right brain loose sometimes.
Free Pussy
I continue to mull over what gay marriage means to me, and find that so far it means what straight marriage always meant: something I wasn't interested in. I was there at the Stonewall the night the New York vote went down, and saw how happy lots of people were. It was peculiar that the crowd was a merging of two very different groups: the drag march had just wound up at the Stonewall, as usual, and by chance pro-marriage people were converging there to wait for the vote -- the crowd of faeries and queers in drag mixed in with the people who wanted to get married. I was there in one of my better drag costumes, feeling distinctly schizophrenic. It's always wonderful to be with a crowd of gay people when we get something we want -- recognition, acknowledgment, legitimation. But like many faeries, I have never felt a need for marriage. And as a woman, I think that's even more so: since when has marriage ever been good for women?
Marriage commodifies pussy. Marriage harnesses the free expression of sexuality into a legal structure. And it's no surprise that the legal structure has always worked in favor of those who made it: for many, many years, adultery was a main reason for divorce, but in practice only the woman's adultery counted. Have sex outside your marriage, get thrown out -- and lose your children, your property, and any means of support. So married pussy is never free.
I understand that queers with kids want to get married, but what they want doesn't look very similar to the way I wish to construct my relational landscape. So I think it's time for a proliferation of terms here: we need to go back in history to an older concept that makes sense out of the different things gay people might want.
Before 1700, in western Europe and America, getting married meant setting up a household: it was a social construction that provided a legal and physical haven for parents, children, relatives, apprentices, and servants. Living together under one roof, the members of the household worked to make a livable situation: the father was the legitimate head, the wife managed the household, different members made or grew necessary materials (soap, chickens, vegetables, bread, fabric). Apprentices and servants came to live in a household as children either to work or to learn a trade, and in exchange were supposed to be taken care of. Unmarried or widowed relatives might join the household and contribute as possible. It was an economic unit, and it provided social cohesion in the larger world.
Then along came the middle classes, and a new idea that you were supposed to romantically love the person you married. The self-reliant household gave way to splintered wage labor, the extended household gave way to the nuclear family. Everything narrowed down: you were supposed to find all your material and emotional sustenance in a tiny nuclear group of parents and children. The village-like commonality of life shrank behind walls -- in urban London, where it used to be that everyone knew her neighbors' business and much of life was lived in the streets, boundaries arose between "private" and "public": now you were supposed to keep your sexuality in the bedroom.
The one thing that didn't change was gender inequality, so the new form of marriage didn't do much for women. In fact, you could argue that new rules of respectability made things even harder: women still could not own property or sign a contract, but they were supposed to love their husbands now instead of just tolerate them -- more ideology, more rules of behavior. And the new system still provided a large sexual arena for men -- prostitutes proliferated, and there were no punishments or opprobrium for men who visited them, while women were no longer supposed to exhibit any sexual desire at all. Now women were supposed to be "nice," and men got to have sex with prostitutes.
Fast forward to now.
So here's the problem: free pussy. Many, many people (straight and gay) are falling over themselves to suggest to any gay person in a relationship that it's time to get married -- if you're in that position, count the times you've been asked the question, "So when are YOU guys going to tie the knot?" This suggests that marriage is assumed to contain sexuality, and that straight people are very anxious for gay people to be as sexually contained as they are. Marriage is assumed to fix people's sexual behavior like a dead butterfly pinned to a board.
Traditionally, there's one period when people are sexually free: after they become adults, and before they get married (which is supposed to happen after a reasonable amount of playing the field). It's assumed that women want to get married sooner than men do, and are more willing to give up sexual freedom; and that men are more reluctant to exchange the free bachelor life for the demands of conjugality. Parent blogs in Park Slope even suggest that women's erotic drive becomes attached to their children after they have them, which means they do seem to be creating the old-style "household" rather than a romantic coupling. In other words, the sequence of modern life suggests that people might have a short period of sexual freedom, but that it lies outside marriage.
Dan Savage has tried to address this with his vision of "monogamish" marriage, which attempts to maintain a stable household while allowing both partners to negotiate acceptable external sexual encounters. Savage's style of marriage probably works better for same-sex couples than it does for straight ones, who have a harder time blocking the world's gender stereotypes. But what Savage offers is an updated vision of a "household": a stable environment for raising children while acknowledging the real sexual needs of both partners. None of this does much to challenge the notion that people do best in pairs, as opposed to some other configuration, or that the financial ties that come with marriage may be problematic, or even that health insurance is best conceived of as a perk for married spouses.
Marriage implies that sexuality can be fixed, resolved, channeled, etc. It implies that this is for the social good. One of the old arguments about why homosexuality was bad was that gay sexuality threatened marriage and society, that gays couldn't be controlled sexually -- that they would be off having sex in bushes or back rooms, or jumping from lesbian bed to straight woman's bed, etc. Queers weren't good for the family, and the family was necessary for stable society.
So I'm wondering why so many queers are now jumping on the marriage bandwagon. Just when it seemed possible to question those old assumptions, we've been derailed by marriage.
Let's put children aside, because that's a different issue -- maybe it's true that "households" are the best place to raise children, but for those of us who don't have children, the question of sexuality -- free pussy -- is a pressing one.
The right to control our own sexuality keeps slipping away from us: look at the assault on women's reproductive rights in this country (access to abortion and birth control, to non-judgmental sex education and decent health care). Look at the surveillance on public space, which makes public sex harder. Look at the gentrification of New York, which means leather bars and clubs are closed and knocked down, leaving little space for those who want to practice any alternative sexuality.
Where's the public discussion that tries to de-couple health care benefits from marriage? Where is any questioning of the couple as the pre-eminent acceptable relationship? Why do we want to insist that sex and emotional relationships have to go together -- and that they all have to look the same?
Gay men seem to have an easier time side-stepping the traditional view of sex, so this is a call-out to lesbians: let's talk about free pussy!
And here's a link to Alexis Pauline Gumb's comments on marriage abolitionism:
http://www.thefeministwire.com/2011/07/27/%e2%80%98keep-your-sorry%e2%80%99-on-slavery-marriage-and-the-possibility-of-love/
Thursday, June 9, 2011
DSK
Dominique Strauss-Kahn fell out of the news for a while, so maybe now I can write about him. He induced such rage in me when he was indicted I could barely spit. Also, women who support him induce rage in me, when they talk about seduction, and about how wonderful flirting is, and how a man is more attractive when he acts this way. So, now that the case is going through its slow grind of the mills of justice, maybe I can think about the rage.
It all centers on that moment: the moment when you, a woman, think you're there for one thing, and a man tells you you're there for something else. It can be physical force, or just coercion. I've never been raped, and never had to fight off a physical assault, so I'll stick to the part I know, which is enough to bring up bile in my mouth. It can be a comment or suggestion out of the blue -- when you're at work, say, focusing on whatever project you're doing, and some guy you're working with says he thinks you'd look cuter in a shorter skirt -- after all, he says, your legs aren't bad. Or maybe at a job interview, the guy interviewing you doesn't offer you the job but asks you out instead. And there it is: the powerlessness. One moment, you were in control of your image, of what part of yourself you chose to present to the world; next minute, some guy has decided to ignore your choice, and reads you only in the sexually objectified way he's more comfortable with. For that man, at that moment, his choice of how to look at you is more important and more legitimate than yours. He has the power to override you. And of course he's right -- the social consensus gives him that power.
Seduction and flirting are wonderful, but they can only happen between equals. If a man flirts with you and you can't tell him to piss off because he's your boss or because he'll make fun of you, it's not fun -- it's actually a denial of your agency. A woman who decides to flirt with a man at work is not treated the same way -- her flirtation is seen as an attempt to gain power through a man, to sleep her way to the top. It's not seen as an expression of her desire at that moment; nor does the community grant her the power to turn the man she flirts with into a sexual object (thereby negating any other aspect of his personality).
Real seduction can't operate without equality; power inequality is only sexy when it's consensual. Men like DSK play it very safe: they don't seem to want the real tussle between equals that takes place when two people with equal power choose to play sex games. Flirting and seduction between two subjects (rather than subject/object) is a whole different deal: it's an arena in which both people get to choose what they will do, and to stop it if they want. It's fun to be in play, to get a charm check, to put yourself out there to whatever degree you want in order to feel attractive -- it's fun to be a subject, not an object.
The rage I feel when I think of DSK is the rage of obliteration -- the soul-crushing moment when someone tells you they can negate who you are and what you want; when they can impose their desire on you and get away with it; when you are told -- if you dare complain or reject the advances -- that you're not attractive anyway and that no one really wants you. This is the obliteration of female agency, which we put up with in varying degrees and thus also feel self-loathing for our own complicity.
And here's the final kicker, that makes the story itself even worse -- the media commentaries that seem to take seriously as explanation for DSK and all the other philandering men the notion that men are more highly sexed than women -- that men are in fact almost a different species than women (here we go, back to "Men Are From Mars, Women Are from Venus"). As a scholar of eighteenth-century studies, I am perplexed by the currency of this peculiar cultural concept: it's an idea that eighteenth-century people think about because it was invented then -- you can watch it come into focus over the course of about 60 years, from 1720 to 1780, and you can track the social and political reasons for that invention: it was very convenient for the rise of capitalism, for example, to re-imagine women as "naturally" virtuous and desexualized. It's peculiar to watch the old, earlier concept of women as inherently lustful disappear and be turned on its head, after it had lasted from Ancient Greece to the eighteenth century. Now we have the new enduring myth that girls and boys are deeply different, sexually and otherwise, and it's rearing its ugly head in new arenas: want an explanation for what boys are no longer performing well in school? It's because school systems are designed for girls, who are completely different than boys, so boys can't possibly learn. These are really dangerous ideas that make it even harder to think about real problems -- problems, for example, such as the inflexible, dysfunctional models of masculinity that are offered to modern boys. Problems such as economic, social, and power inequality between men and women. Which brings us back full circle to DSK.
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