Leaving The Ironbound

After four years of living in this neighborhood part time, and two and a half years full time, I am moving out of the Ironbound.  This is primarily because wife and I need more space, now that we have two kids.  I think over the last year our cramped living environment, complete with a needy cat and barky dog, has been making us a little crazy.  We are moving into a house in Maplewood this week, and are doing so with a mix of excitement and elegy.

On the latter point, the Ironbound is a special place, and hard to leave.  By leaving here, I feel that in a way, I am moving back to America.  In so many respects Newark is not America, but a place abandoned by America and left for dead.  While the Ironbound is less economically devastated than other parts of Newark, its immigrant population and culture make it a place truly apart.  Portuguese and Spanish are more commonly heard on the streets than English, and I stick out like a sore thumb.  However, knowing that there was no way I was going to fit in here took a lot of pressure off of me.  People are friendly in a genuine manner that still exists in Europe and South America but is absent in this country, where a dagger seems to sit behind so many smiles.  More than the custard pastries, salted cod, Brazilian barbecue, roast chicken, and cheap and tasty Portuguese table wines, it is the manner and way of being in this neighborhood that I will miss the most.

Posts on this blog might be fewer and shorter in coming days because of this move.  This may well be an opportunity to change the blog, because its title will no longer be applicable.  In any case, expect some more reflections on the Ironbound, Newark, and the importance of place.

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Track of the Week: Miles Davis "Blue Xmas (To Whom It May Concern)"

When the holiday season began, I was in a fantastic mood.  I really got into the spirit, started listening to my favorite non-shitty Christmas music (trust me, it actually exists) and sipping egg nog at the end of the day.  Now, as the day approaches, I am burnt out on Christmas.  I certainly enjoyed shopping for gifts after work today, but the public discourse around the holiday is wearing me down.  I am just sick and tired of the idiotic "War on Christmas" bullshit, which seems to be a ploy for middle-class white Christians to think of themselves as victims.

Year after year I get depressed when I hear someone say "Merry Christmas!" as a weapon or political statement.  (The way it's practically spat out of the mouths of certain Fox News viewers is a dead giveaway.)  There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that so effectively drains the joy out of the season than that.  Ironically, it is the supposed defenders of Christmas like Bill O'Reilly, who have killed its spirit deader than any Scrooge or Grinch could have hoped for.

It is with that knowledge that I recommend that you listen to "Blue Xmas (To Whom It May Concern)."  It's an odd track, because Miles Davis is the last guy you'd expect to cut a Christmas song, and it has a vocal over it by Bob Dorough to boot.  The words pretty baldly criticize the consumerism, cynicism, "bad taste" and increased hassles that come with the Christmas season.  At its base, it laments the joylessness of what's supposed to be a joyful season, which is all too appropriate living in a time when the same people who get apoplectic over someone daring to wish them a "happy holidays" are more than happy to cut off unemployment benefits right after Christmas.  At least when I listen to this song I can get an antidote to all the hypocrisy, with some tasty jazz licks to go with it.

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The Case For Diner As a Classic Holiday Film

It's that time of year again when horrible dreck like the Beach Boys' "Little Saint Nick" invades public space and all manner of sugary, treacly holiday films and specials take over my television.  I tend to avoid this stuff by re-reading Dickens' A Christmas Carol, which has a truer and more political core to it.

In my quest to find holiday entertainment that doesn't give me a sugar-induced bellyache, I've realized that Diner, one of my favorite films, is in actuality a holiday classic.  In case you don't know, it's a film made in 1982, but set in 1959.  The main characters are men in their 20s living in Baltimore who are no longer teenagers, but are drifting and haven't quite yet made the transition to adulthood.  Having spent the bulk of my twenties in grad school, it's a feeling I know all too well.  They go out, hang around, and always end up at the end of the night at their favorite diner for conversation.  It really captures a certain time in life, and a life transition that is awfully tricky to handle.

There are some plot points, like one character owing money to bookies, another having troubles with his marriage, and another about to get married while feeling ambivalent about it.  However, it's mostly a character study of a bunch of guys going through their lives over the course of a week.  The week itself is significant: the week between Christmas and New Year's.  

Plenty of holiday movies use Christmas and New Year's for their setting, but Diner is the only one, to my knowledge, that gets at the supreme importance of the days between those holidays.  At the fraught, early 20s age of the characters, that week is when you visit home, catch up with old friends, and generally have time to kill with your buddies.  It's a time when I always feel, even to this day, that I am recharging my batteries and can afford to get a little silly.  

Holiday fare tends to emphasize the role of family, but the holidays are also an important time to be with your friends.  For years, every New Year's Eve I would visit a close friend in Lincoln, Nebraska, and we would spend the evening with his circle, eating an elaborate home-cooked dinner topped off with wine and a bottle of quality Irish whiskey.  We would then spend the next day watching samurai movies, preferably by Kurosawa.  Now, with my family responsibilities and the greater difficulty of journeying home, this wonderful ritual is no longer part of my life.  I've long made the transition to settling down, but what I would give for one of those New Year's celebrations with my friends.  That Diner understands the meaning of friendship in the holidays is why it ought to be screened just as much on cable TV this time of year as It's a Wonderful Life.

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America's Gun Problem Hits (My) Home

The story faded after a day, but on Friday we narrowly avoided yet another mass shooting tragedy in Colorado.  A student at Arapahoe High School in Centennial came to school armed and ready to kill, but only ended up killing himself after wounding a couple of students with random fire.  Sadly, one of the wounded students is severely hurt and in a coma.  It was fortunate, nonetheless, that he had a shotgun rather than an assault weapon.  Had that been the case, the carnage would certainly have been worse.  That might very well be due to new laws limiting gun sales in Colorado, since the gunman could not get ahold of the deadliest weapons.

This incident, which like so many others has quickly been forgotten, hit home hard for me.  One of cousins is a teacher at Arapahoe, and when I heard the news about an active shooter in the school, I feared the absolute worst.  I spent my commute home from work just trying to keep it together and felt incredible waves of relief released when I finally learned from my cousin that she was alive doing okay.

This potential slaughter came one day before the anniversary of Newtown, a truly horrifying event, and one that has exposed the complete moral bankruptcy of our society.  If a pile of dead first graders is not sufficient to change our gun laws and our sick national addiction to firearms, then nothing ever will be.  We have become so inured to school shootings that unless there is one with a high body count, we really don't even bother to pay attention.  The incident at Arapahoe is one of many of these horrible events that easily fade into the background.  Because it could have claimed the life of a loved one, I simply can't let it go.

Gun control is hardly a panacea, of course, but some sensible laws are in order, and this is hardly a matter of much dispute.  Americans overwhelmingly support universal background checks to eliminate obvious loopholes in the system, but the NRA and others have successfully fought them tooth and nail. There is no real reason for allowing high capacity magazines, either, but the 2nd Amendment crowd defends even these deadly devices.

Even where new laws exist, roadblocks remain.  In states like New York and Colorado, which have passed gun control measures, county sheriffs are now refusing to enforce the law.  Reading the comments section on this Times article on the phenomenon is a quick primer in just how active and committed gun rights advocate are.  To them, limiting 30 round clips of ammo is tantamount to tyranny.  I can only hope that in the horrible event that another shooting would happen in the Denver area, that if the shooter got his gear illegally in rural Colorado, the local sheriff would be proseccuted as an accessory to murder.

I somehow don't believe that will ever happen, though.  It all seems to boil down to an underlying cultural-political chasm that is growing ever wider in this country.  Every time I go home to my rural Nebraska hometown, the vehemence about guns and other culturally-grounded political issues seems that much more extreme.  People in these places think they are the "real America" and as such have a right to veto or not follow restrictions on guns that originate in other places, even if, in today's world, it is urban America that is more "real," since it represents a much larger number of people.

 There are only two options: that rural America is allowed to be a country in a country, withering further into irrelevance yet still having its way on gun control, or that the issue is forced and majority rule is actually allowed to hold sway.  The latter course of action is the only way our gun problem will be resolved, but it seems to be so fractious and fraught with conflict that we have decided not to bother, even when a tragedy like Sandy Hook occurs.  The dead children appear to be an acceptable price for political peace for most in this country, and I don't know if anything can change that.  

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SantaCon Is The Ultimate Expression of White Privilege

The media and blogosphere has been burning up over the last few days over Megyn Kelly's stupid and racist assertions about the whiteness of Santa Claus and Jesus.  I can't come close to skewering or analyzing her statements as well as others, so I thought I'd focus on another manifestation of whiteness this Christmas season: SantaCon.

In case you don't know about SantaCon, it is a St. Patrick's-type event where drunken revelers dressed in Santa costumes spend a Saturday bar hopping as a mob, leaving a trail of puke, piss, and disorder in their wake.  It appears to be a way for monied twenty and thirtysomethings to transform Christmas into a time for the kind of stupid drunk partying they loved in college.

Now, you would normally think that a mob of disorderly drunks might be countered by the police, but no less a personage than NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly has given SantaCon his approval.  That's right, the same guy who gives fiery justifications for stop and frisk is openly supportive of roving, drunken gangs of former frat boys.  Evidently being a black or brown person going about your daily business is reason enough to be harassed by police, but if you're white you can cause disturbances and paint the streets yellow with your urine to your heart's content.

Can you imagine the reaction of the police if 30,000 people of color in Santa suits descended on lower Manhattan, roaming from bar to bar acting in an obnoxious fashion?  It would be called a "wilding" and the cops would be sent in to break it up immediately.  30,000 predominately white people can do that, and the police actually openly support it!  Beyond the whole frat-boy groupthink party culture element of SantaCon, its reliance on white privilege leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

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Why Pope Francis' Words Matter

There's been much hullaballoo these last two days over the fact that Time magazine has named Pope Francis its Man of the Year.  Some, like Glenn Greenwald, have lambasted the magazine for wussing out and putting Edward Snowden in the runner-up spot.  Others, like Glenn Beck, have been blowing their tops about the pontiff's supposed Marxism and the lamestream media's love of said Leftist subversion.  (He has also been uttering the Beckian oxymoron "progressive Fascism."  When are the men in the white coats finally going to come and take him home?)  I'm quite surprised that so many people still care about Time magazine.

All that said, I think now's a good time to reflect on Pope Francis' importance.  While he is known now more for words than deeds, I think his words are incredibly meaningful.  For the past forty years or so, the world has been in the throws of a vast neoliberal globalization that has funneled money into the hands of the wealthy at the expense of the many.  It has caused unaccounted misery in its rapacious, never-ending quest for lucre, the human and environmental consequences be damned.  Those who criticize this monstrous state of affairs have often found themselves to be lone voices crying out in the wilderness.  With the Occupy movement and various other rumblings, from Arab Spring to Chilean student protests, it is evident that there is a growing pushback against the neoliberal tide.

Behind the various critiques lies the belief that unfettered capitalism is fundamentally immoral.  The various religious and moral leaders of the world, however, have been much more interested in enforcing their very narrow standards of personal morality than addressing the moral economy.  Conservatives have feasted on this omission, since it has given their greed and avarice a free pass.  Pope Francis, by using his position as the most powerful religious figure in the world to criticize capitalism, has given critics of neoliberalism a tremendous amount of legitimacy.  If an institution as traditional and conservative as the Catholic Church assails economic inequality and laissez-faire ideology it gives moderates the courage they need go against the lying cant of "job creators" and trickle down.

This, by the way, is why the likes of Limbaugh and Beck wail and gnash their teeth at this pope's pronouncements.  They know, deep down, that unfettered capitalism is an affront to any real sense of fairness and morality, and that once the broader public is willing and able to see that fact, their political power is ruined.  And that is why Pope Francis' words matter.

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Track of the Week: Tom Waits, "Christmas Card From a Hooker In Minneapolis"

Christmas cards are a tradition I don't engage in, but they make sense to me.  At the end of the year I too usually take stock of my life and think about all that has happened since my last go 'round the sun.  It's good to get letters from friends and family about what they've been up to themselves.  I look forward especially to my sister's Christmas card and letter each year, since it gives me a great sense of what's been going on in her life over a thousand miles away.

Of course, my private thoughts about my life over the past year would need a great deal of editing before they could be doled out for public consumption.  Some people's Christmas cards might also make for harrowing reading.  That's the darkly humorous conceit behind Tom Waits' "Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis." The narrator frankly discusses destitution, pregnancy, drug addiction, and hitting bottom.  This is not a letter full of brags about children on the honor roll or vacations in Spain, so much so that anyone who sends Christmas letter like that ought to receive a copy of this song in the mail in reply to remind them that others don't have it so easy.

"Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis" comes off of Blue Valentine, which is the last of Waits' 1970s jazz piano-based records.  It's never been among my favorite albums of his, mostly because he seemed to know that his original persona and musical style were getting played out.  (He previously brought it close to perfection on Small Change, and would soon switch gears in a bluesier direction on Heartattack and Vine.)  However, the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, and this song beautifully combines the low-life stories, tender growl, and moody jazz accompaniment that defines Waits' best work in this period.

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