Seven Red

The last stretch of our adventures took us home, which is to say, to Brooklyn. Sure, the time we’ve spent elsewhere has by now long dwarfed the few paltry years we spent in Brooklyn, but when we walk down Smith Street in the dimming light, we know this is our spiritual home – a tribal and intense feeling that she and I share. So we were thrilled to visit the Brooklyn famiglia in their Cobble Hill apartment, where we spent two short days last week. babygirl got to stroll the cracked sidewalks through the brownstones of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, and even got to play in a real live New York City playground. We got good wine, killer porterhouse, real buffalo mozzarella, and then a fantastic, Bloody Mary soaked brunch at Bocca Lupo.  And Chelsea beat  Newcastle, much to Loung*rati’s delight.

Here’s babygirl doing whatchoo do in Brooklyn: stoop-sittin’ with the best of them:

A view from the Brooklyn famiglia’s back porch, Lower Manhattan in the background:

And finally, this from the Carroll Gardens park where babygirl played. They have two bocce ball courts in this particular park, one open to all – and in disgusting shape, and one locked in an enclosed area, with the key to said enclosure mysteriously handed out to old Italian men who will kick your bony ass in bocce, and insult your pathetic skills in the bargain. Somehow, Loung*rati managed to get one of these keys – being Italian, but not old. The locked up and free bocce courts are the vestige of the old Court Street/ Carroll Gardens Italians, now overrun with other populations.

There was always a bit of tension when we lived in a quickly regentrifying neighborhood to the east. In some faint imagining of solidarity, I’d nod affirmatively when we saw “WHITE FOLKS GO HOME!!!” graffiti that proliferated on 5th Avenue south of Flatbush. In one spot, some hipster had spray-painted a cringing “LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR” around a naive heart. The anti-gentrification folks had brilliantly transformed it into “YUPPIES LOVE $$$!!! THIS IS NOT YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD!” Smackdown, I told she at the time, smiling. “You do understand,” she said, “that we’re the regentrifying white folks, right? We’re the yuppies.” Oh, right.  So, then. This, from the Carroll Gardens park:

We left Queens Xmas morning and made the three hour drive to Schoharie County to visit with she‘s people. They’re all mathematicians. This is ~ Queens:

From the back porch

From the front yard

This is not an outhouse

View from the driveway

One: A Two Hour Flight – We leave the apartment at 9 am, destination, O’Hare. We have two large roller suitcases, a travel crib, a diaper bag, my laptop bag, a small duffel, and the car seat. We curb check most of it, and rack up an impressive eight gray bins at the security checkpoint. Waiting. The flight boards on time at 11:45, O’Hare to Laguardia. Nothing moves for an hour. They “boarded” the flight, so it wasn’t late. That they didn’t bother unloading the previous luggage and loading ours until 10 minutes after our scheduled departure does not perturb the statistics. We’re on the plane, we’re on time. One lucky stroke: she‘s boss advised her to book seats D and F, meaning somebody would have to book E, sitting between us with babygirl lap-riding. His theory was that the airlines won’t sit somebody there unless absolutely necessary. He was right, so babygirl gets her own seat, which was goddamn nice. babygirl laughs maniacally when we take off: speed and angle appeal to her. She’s an angel for the whole flight, falls asleep when we touch down in NYC. A luggage disaster later, we’re in the hotel, looking out over the Grand Central, the shining water, and the Laguardia terminals. It’s beautiful. It’s 5:45 Eastern Standard, or damn near 5 pm Central. Our one-hour forty five minute flight has taken us eight hours door-to-door. We were lucky. One hundred fifty flights were canceled due to weather at O’Hare on December 23; we may have been in the last group to clear take off.

Two: A Bar, Flushing – After dinner with the folks, I drop she and babygirl back at the hotel, then get to a bar in the old neighborhood. I’m meeting my brother and my buddy Joe for drinks. The bar has had ten names since I was fifteen, but the clients haven’t changed at all. Local guys, and mostly guys. When I was fifteen, it was one set of 20 and 30 somethings; we’d hang out in the pizzeria a few stores down, playing Outrun or pinball, walking up to the park to puff a fatty. Once in a while we’d get into it with the bar patrons, usually after the Giants lost a tough one in late season; teenagers fighting grown men on the street, Sunday afternoon. Now we are the patrons. Kids of those guys now frequent the same bar, generations on generations. It’s the outer boroughs. The bar tender has little cups of water functioning as ashtrays; the smoking ban doesn’t apply out here. You walk in and know people; if you don’t, you’d probably walk out in a hurry. It’s that kind of place, thick with camaraderie that borders on the xenophobic.

I walk in and know people. One guy is my age. A bunch of guys were in the next generation coming up behind mine, and a few from the one after that. Queens. The guy I know does the handshake embrace. “What’s up, ****.” He calls me by my old tag, another world, another me. He’s already drunk. I see another guy. Handshake embrace: “Oh, shit. Look what the motherfucking cat dragged in.” He’s slurring his words badly, tells me he passed a test for elevator construction, names a union Local. Nice, I say. Bullshit, he tells me. If they have no mechanics work, I’m laid off. Fucking test, he mutters. Apparently, passing this test is not a good thing. He’s drinking some yellow concoction.

One of the younger guys asks me what I do for a living. When I tell him, he looks at me like I just stepped off a spaceship. Impossible. I don’t think he believes me. “Hmm,” he says. “There’s bucks in that, yeah?” I don’t have the heart to tell him or to lie, so I just grunt, sarcastically an inscrutably.

I take a seat and watch as the guys discuss football. Then the topic turns to some song that one of them put on the jukebox. It’s “gah-bage,” one says in the vernacular. The song’s defender mentions casually that the singer is a “n*gger.” I think I visibly blanched, and it was only when this point became a debate topic, along the lines of “He’s not a fucking n*gger, ya dickhead,” with that particular vocabulary used by all that I remembered. Yes, this is how they talk, how they talk, how we talk, how I used to talk, even. It’s decided that the singer – impossibly – is probably a Puerto Rican Jew and therefore not a n*gger, as I sip my beer in stunned and shamed silence. Only the bar tender noticed how horrified I was, and understood why. He was laughing at me.

My brother shows up and then Joe, then another friend from way back, named Rob, who I haven’t seen in maybe ten years. He looks exactly the same. We’re the old school cats here, and the younger guys treat us with a mix of respect and friendliness that feels like a ritual. There was a time when my younger brother would mention my name, and people would back off; now it’s the reverse. They don’t know me (I’m introduced to several), but they know him, and I know their older brothers, etc. We drink beer and do the glory days routine, spliced with some contemporary discussion. Remember when? Yes. You tell the whole story; this whole game is about story telling. This whole bar is about story telling.

“I saw something was going down, so I was looking up over the bar,” my brother is saying. “This guy could have just hit Mike, who was closer, but instead he launched his Heinekin bottle at me all the way across the bar. I saw green. Smash. Right in my mouth. I was picking glass out of my mouth.” He’s doing all the necessary gestures, his hand tracing the trajectory of the flipping bottle as it approached his face, hit. He mimes the thrower’s motion, noting that he should have been signed by the Mets, what with that aim across a crowded bar. We’re dying laughing. “Fucking green glass in my mouth.” Joe chimes in: “The next day I noticed I had a pool cue welt across my whole back. Motherfucker.” We’re cracking up now at this bar in Queens. My brother: “I got the jack out of the car. Three guys were on top of Frank, kicking his ass on the street. I took the jack and slammed the first guy in the head. He fell over like this…” My brother mimes the sudden blank look, and a guy falling sideways like a felled tree. “Boom,” he says, slamming his hand on the bar. “His friends were carrying him away. His fucking eyes were rolling around in his head. Fucking blood everywhere.” Bar brawl, Flushing, early nineties.

There’s an unspeakable pleasure in these stories. It’s compulsive and utterly satisfying. One after the other we tell them. Joe and I relate the story of being surrounded by twenty guys at the old Fort Totten Fair, our buddy Pat challenging them all to bring it. Let’s do it, motherfuckers. We stood back to back in a small field, fists raised. It’s true. I was there. The MP’s came by and broke it up. Remember the time? “We almost caught a bad one that day.” We’re roaring. Fucking Patty, we laugh. That crazy fuck. Then Rob and I: remember when **** came up looking for your brother, and Simon was like, “Never hearda ya.” The look on that fucking guy’s face. Rob laughs. “You shoulda seen four of those fucking pussies jet when they saw us coming out of the candy store. Didn’t expect to see the big boys that day.” It’s true. I was there. Those guys took one look at us and split. Queens, Winter 1992.

It’s always these stories, the won fight, the act of incredible bravery, the currency of this war culture, and all the boys in it. If it’s a story about you getting your ass kicked, it’s only because you were fucking crazy to have fought in the first place, yes. It’s never the the time when you saw the roll-up coming and split, or the time when three guys confronted you and you talked your way out of it, though these are as plentiful as the other kind. It’s never the story about when you couldn’t face another day of it, the cars rolling by, the hostile vibe, the sense of danger, the keg parties so thick with tension that you just went in expecting a broken jaw and ended up relieved when it didn’t come, or if you only got sliced up or beat down. It’s never the stories about when you just wanted to get out of it, as far away from it as possible, halfway across the country to get away from it, to get away from them, to get away from yourself, that fucking self that thrived on it and hated it, this self that comes back once a year now to maybe remember some of it. It’s never the stories about being so goddamn tired and scared of it that you’d concoct some unlikely profession for yourself, some unlikely life for yourself, so unlikely that they’d stare at you like you just stepped off a spaceship when you came back. Never that.

“Me and Stevie, drunk as fuck at 11 o’clock in the morning, telling him, ‘You tell that motherfucker if he’s got a problem, he knows where to find me.’ The guy couldn’t fucking believe it.” We’re laughing our asses off now, at this bar in Queens…

Damn.

There’s a funny moment in the Žižek documentary when he is being interviewed on some talking head show. The interviewer tells him that the book is the most complicated he ever tried to read. Naturally, Žižek tells him it is quite simple, actually, and launches into a little parable. On the one hand, you have the father who tells his kid “We’re going to grandma’s house.” The kid doesn’t want to go, and the father says “Well, you’re going. Now!” On the other hand, you have today’s parent. When the kid says he doesn’t want to go to grandma’s, the father says, “OK, if that’s what you want, but your grandmother would really love to see you, and she’d be awfully disappointed if you didn’t show up.” The kid instantly understands that he must go, etc. The interviewer has a sudden flash of understanding, and suggests that Žižek prefers the first version, and we should go back to the time when parents just told their kids what to do. Of course, Žižek says. Yes. It was more honest. He pronounces the “h” in honest, like “hah-nest,” the way my father does with his accent.

It’s funny because the interviewer didn’t really understand the parable as a parable: the super ego structured as repression (the Law of the Father) as opposed to enjoyment – the whole Žižek bit, really. But I was reminded of this moment after watching The Kingdom tonight. One of a slew of recent War-on-Terror flicks, The Kingdom follows an FBI team (Jamie Fox, Jason Bateman, Chris Cooper, and Jennifer Garner) as they investigate a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia. Unlike the “Arab terrorist” films of the past (the despicable True Lies being the obvious forerunner), The Kingdom deploys narrative tools to humanize the Saudi other, the most obvious being Fox’s relationship with the Saudi police colonel Faris al Ghazi (played by Ashraf Barhom). The Showtime series Sleeper Cell does something similar, but brings it even closer; there, the black undercover g-man is himself a Koran-quoting Muslim, and the sleeper cell terrorists are even sympathetically drawn. Yet when the bullets start flying in the “bad neighborhood” of Riyadh, The Kingdom still looks very much like True Lies (why can’t trained terrorists shoot straight?). Yes, yes. They are people, not caricatures, these films seem to say. Now let’s get on with this nasty business of killing them. So are all these “humanizing” stories akin to the permissive parent in Žižek’s parable? Is True Lies, in Žižek’s sense, more honest?

Adorno says somewhere that during the Enlightenment, writers like Kant addressed the king as “your glorious majesty,” and signed off “your most humble servant,” all the while undermining the king’s power with every word, while today we call our bosses by their first names and begin our emails with “hey,” all the while descending into the most humble subservience. (It’s a really glorious Adornian reversal). Maybe the transformation in the terrorist flick is the same. We used to see the caricature of the Arab monster, with Islam looming as a monolithic malevolence, but we understood Schwartzenegger to be ridiculous as well. Today we see Arabs who are fully human and sympathetic, who love their children the way we do; we are shown Islam as a nuanced and divided set of beliefs. And all the more resolutely do we approve of bombing the shit out of them when they step out of line.

And the Law of the Father, to be sure. One of the devices that The Kingdom uses as a symbolic bludgeon is the parent-child or adult-child relationship, and really, what the Fathers tell their Kids. At nearly every important moment in the film, you get framed shots of the father-child couple: Jamie Fox describing the birth of his son to a roomful of six year olds; the terrorists watching an attack from a distant balcony, and handing the binoculars over to a horrified son at the moment of truth; a small boy watching his father get gunned down; the grandchildren of the terrorist mastermind assembled for the final confrontation.

The role of the child is also emphasized through games. The initial terrorist attack takes place during a company picnic at the Western compound. The adults and kids are all playing softball; the terrorist watching and waiting urges his son to watch the game, noting that it is a “good match.” The children’s game of marbles also plays a major role in the film, since the terrorists use distinct children’s marbles rather than conventional ball bearings in their terrible bombs.

Finally, the film highlights the transmission of information from the father to the child. The film is structured around parallel information transfers of this kind. What does the FBI man tell his kid? What does al Ghazi tell his kids? What do the terrorists tell their kids? (This last parallelism results in one of The Kingdom‘s more bizarre displacements, since the inaudible whisper between the terror leader and his pubescent granddaughter is meant to parallel an inaudible whisper between Jamie Fox and the full grown Jennifer Garner, who ends up being rather instantly infantilized in the bargain, despite the lofty rhetoric of Western feminism sticking it to the Saudi patriarchy that we get in the rest of the film!). One would think that we’re getting the completely tired message that “we shouldn’t teach our kids to hate,” or some other such Sunday school pablum, except that everyone seems to tell the kids that they’re going to well and truly kill all those monsters under the bed, whether they come in the form of the Great Satan, or the Ev-ul Terrists. At least that’s honest.

I know I’ve been on the theme of the Child this week, but I didn’t really expect to see it so blatantly played out in this particular film, and really, it doesn’t take a particularly adept reader to to pick out the way The Kingdom is structured around its children. Why do these relationships become important now? How does the role and position of the child shape our response to terrorism? I don’t think it’s a case of mere “children are the future” claptrap in The Kingdom, though it could certainly be read that way. Why, of all the ways to narrate these problems, does the Child and the adult-child relationship become a particular point of narrative intensity?

What do you get when you mix a bit of Foucault’s biopower with Debord’s spectacle, and imagine it as fiction in the style of more experimental Delillo (like, say, Cosmopolis) presented in the, well, austere prose style of a Paul Auster? That would be Benoit Duteurtre’s stark little novella The Little Girl and the Cigarette, the prolific young French writer’s only book appearing in English translation.

Yes, this really is the book’s cover, and I’ll leave it to Gunther Kress and the image semioticians to work out its implications. The thing to note here is that the little girl and the cigarette appear in different scales, indicating different planes, a choice between the two. Now, she is probably going to take this as my argument against quitting smoking (the babygirl and the cigarette), but it’s really not. For now it’s enough to say that the choice bumps up against the title, “the little girl and the cigarette,” the mysterious absence of which on the cover portends the tension played out in the novella.

The book develops three main plots which could be said to incorporate a single theme: LONG LIVE LIFE. As we know, Foucault saw modernity as the emergence of a new form of power, called biopower or the biopolitical. Rather than the monarchical power, which could make die (or let live), this new form of power was concerned with life, the ability to make live (or let die). Capital punishment is the form of monarchical power, the more brutal the better. Medical bureaucracy is the form of biopower, and gentle, now. Dutreutre’s novella seizes on this distinction to draw out the dystopia of biopower.

In the first plot, Desire Johnson, a dim-witted or brilliant convicted murderer faces the very gentle lethal injection. All he wants is a cigarette, his right according to the archaic Article 47 of the Law (and yes, the Law is a Kafkaesque presence in TLGATC). But in this near-future nameless country (though obviously France, despite the mention of President Bush Boulevard), smoking is prohibited in the prisons – and pretty much everywhere else, for that matter – for the health of both the prisoners and the guards, so the warden faces a conundrum: let Johnson smoke, and thereby violate the prohibition, or forbid him from smoking, and thereby violate his rights according to Article 47. Like all good bureaucrats, he defers to a higher power – the Supreme Court. Johnson’s case becomes a media spectacle, with the nation divided over whether he should be allowed his request, debates throughout the city about the paradox of preventing a condemned man from harming his health, machinations by a giant tobacco company to use the case for advantage, headlines and breathless reportage. Throughout it all, Johnson is almost impassive, although he seems to understand that granting his request will require sending him out of the prison, during which time he can make his very spectacular escape, with the paradoxical help of ubiquitous surveillance.

In the second plot, a first person narrator tells his own story of the current absurdity. The nation so much believes in life – in making live – that it has glorified children over everything, since they are at once life and future life. The narrator – a minor government researcher and avowed epicure – despises this development, and despises children of all ages. He wonders what will happen to the 40-60 year old men, the most oppressed group in the society, he thinks. He also smokes like a chimney, though his habit now requires him to engage in illegal bathroom smoking, since the administrative offices of the city have been turned into a daycare center in which children run wild (according to him). He complains bitterly about this, but the other people seem to prefer the children to his rantings. This isn’t even a nanny state; it’s a permissive parent state. During one of his bathroom smoke operations, he forgets to fully bar the door, and a little girl walks in on him. He kicks her out, hissing “Get out of here, you stupid idiot!” Of course, this infraction snowballs into a massive criminal charge, called crimes against children, with all the insinuation, and ultimately outright accusation, of sexual abuse. He is even forced to undergo a mock prosecution in a children’s court, the mayor’s attempt to relieve the daycare center/administration building’s children of their psychological trauma (though everyone admits they have a long road of therapy ahead – especially the little girl).

In the third plot, told in third person, a terrorist group called John Wayne’s Conscience have taken a multicultural and decidedly multi-aged band of hostages; the terrorists support (and this is pure Debordian snark) better conditions for terrorism. Rather than offering the hostages for ransom or just publicly offing them, however, they arrange a reality TV show – called A Martyr Idol – which will require the hostages to perform for an audience of voters, with the loser getting the head-cut-off treatment. Perhaps the funniest sentence in the book, then is the following:

For the first test of this morbid competition, the disciples of John Wayne had organized a karaoke contest.

At first, few people vote, but when the Kuwaiti wins the first round (the rules of the contest, which includes singing as well as Jeopardy-like game show fare, are extremely complex, and Duteurtre doesn’t really bother explaining them), and when Desire Johnson, now a celebrity, advocates for the hostages, the whole world begins watching and voting – the game has turned into a global media spectacle. At times, this part of the story seems the most forced, a bit like a thought experiment in which we are asked to consider the absurdity of the 9/11 attacks as spectacle, and what it would mean to truly grasp the synoptic logic of contemporary spectacle as a tool for terrorism (the 9/11 guys were amateurs in this regard, seems to be the argument). Whatever value there may be in showing up the strange imitative relationship between terrorism and contemporary media, Duteurtre still manages to convey that hooked-in sensibility, with the global public debating who is more deserving of life among the various hostages. And isn’t this really what we’re secretly and sometimes not so secretly debating when we watch American Idol or Survivor?

Needless to say, the three plots intersect and build together towards the terrifying – because mild – conclusion.

To read TLGATC, you’d think its author was an American reactionary, peddling the worst kind of libertarian tripe and white male anger. The whole smokers’ rights uprising is classic libertarian fare, and almost as noxious (and obnoxious) as thick tobacco exhaust hovering in a crowded bar (and I smoke!). Moreover, even minor characters have their nationality and ethnicity mentioned with an audible sneer, as if the narrative itself is mocking some multiculti quota system, real or imagined, for the arts. The first person narrator’s pathetic belly-aching about the fate of 40-60 year old men is similarly Limbaugh-esque in outlook and effect. When you learn that the author is actually a French anarchist, however, you might get a little reflective. The full administration of life is just as obnoxious in the story, as is the drooling adulation of the Child, the backfiring and anti-scientific anti-pollution programs, and the deep hypocrisy of particular versions of multiculturalism.

Perhaps the big move in America was not the co-opting of 60′s counter-culture by the right wing, but the co-opting of turn of the century anarchism by that vicious version of American capitalist libertarianism, a theme also taken up to brilliant effect in Pynchon’s stunning Against the Day (about which more later). We know the libertarians inveigh against the so-called “nanny state,” and so good liberals are meant to harrumph and call them children, and thereby argue for the effectiveness of good government. As Foucault and others argued in France, this response is not particularly useful. Yet to do the opposite would seem to support the free market system against regulation (the master articulation of the contemporary and not-so-contemporary right wing). This was always the quandary of the May 68 thinkers. And it’s the quandary contemplated in its French context by The Little Girl and the Cigarette. In the American context, we might ask What has become of American anarchism?

The contemporary left almost cannot contemplate the conflict between support for the state apparatus as a regulatory arm aimed at social amelioration and condemnation of the state apparatus as some kind of “Big Brother” type repression engine. Look at the relative value of the Central Intelligence Agency, which is one week the noble Bush resistor, and the next week a depraved pack of torturers, one week a terrifying surveillance mafia, the next week the supporter of the very upright Ms. Plame-Wilson. The left’s relationship to the state apparatus turns out to be just as incoherent and childlike as the awful me-me-me-ism of the libertarians. The first group substitutes the good state for the bad state, a laughable contrivance; the second substitutes the market for the state, an absurdity because the market requires a state (see uber-moron Lou Dobbs and the densely stupid support that has glommed on to Ron Paul). And lurking in there somewhere is the tradition of American anarchism, filleted and vivisected into the libertarian zombie. But is there and can there be an American anarchism that isn’t immediately capitalist and reactionary libertarianism in practice? Or are we constantly pushed into the choice between the little girl and the cigarette?

For Monday morning hilarity, I suggest a reading of Stanley Fish’s crotchetiest column yet, in which he complains about not being invited to the VIP opening for the painfully 80′s pomo New Museum, then proceeds to thrash the exhibits (and their purported underlying aesthetic) soundly. From Fish’s description, you’d think the New Museum was stocked with works by that long forgotten artist, Mallory’s boyfriend Nick from Family Ties. I heard this joke already, in other words, and it involved Alex P. Keaton. But when a critic writes “you can’t make this stuff up” about your exhibit description, you know you’ve had your clock cleaned but good.

Fish’s more curious argument is that he prefers those depth pieces that are seemingly divorced from the politics of the day, as opposed to all this surface (glitz) that presumes itself to be actively tied to an outside, which is to say, contemporary politics, the agora rather than the interior spaces of the oikus. I suppose that’s fine, but I don’t see any necessary connection between depth and home, anymore than I see a connection between the surface and the agora. Indeed, I thought the last 40+ years of cultural criticism was doing a pretty good job of upending precisely these distinctions. And I’m pretty sure Stanley Fish knows that. Better to let the readers of the New York Times nod along, serious and amused, I guess. One aesthetic then, not two, but one aesthetic folded quite deviously, folds upon folds. And maybe we’re closest to the political when we’re farthest from the agora?

Lots of fluff this week, I know, but busy busy busy. Maybe will get back to some projects after we get through these holidays. At least our trip back to NYC will give us something to yap about. In the meanwhile, The New Pornographers with “My Rights Versus Yours” (on Letterman). TNP’s album, Challengers, is probably my favorite record of the year, just solid all the way through. You may have heard “Myriad Harbour,” which has gotten some radio play and landed at 79 on Rolling Stones Top 100 Songs of 2007 (all the boys with their homemade microphones…), but the whole record is just great, and definitely worth a listen.

Heidi: Du, formerly fat mutti. You say you like diese outfit, but I have judged you to be anuzzuh kind of  hausfrau altogezzah. Zis is clozzing fur Vest Coast new age loony designer, not fur dich, fat Mutti. Zerefore, I reject your appeal .

This has been another edition of Heidi Says: Wisdom from the Runway

Well, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union made it on to Salon’s Top Five Fiction Picks of 2007. Yay me. Now I have to read the other four. I do really want to read Tree of Smoke, which I’ve heard great things about everywhere, and the description for Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games sounds really interesting as well – more noir in “strange places.” Does the noir genre have some kind of special purchase on contemplating fanaticism?