Seven Red

So it’s been a big month over at the Seven Red household, as may have been noticed by our two and a half readers based on virtual non-activity on this blog. So here’s the news from Seven Red Land:

1) topspun finally, finally, finally defended his dang dissertation. Now, most people say “Huh? I thought you already did that!” Well, no. I hadn’t. It was a long and painful slog, not helped by a variety of factors that I don’t feel much like going into like, ever again. Life got in the way. Other things. My own insistence on doing it right the way I wanted to. But that’s done now, and I’m not really in the mood to apologize for it taking so long, to myself or others. In the end, it came out better than if I had kept to the route (and the chapters) that I had in the Spring of 2007, and I can live with it. During this whole long and – wait, did I say “painful?” – process, the worst days were the last day of each month. I’d go to bed on the last day of each month saying “There’s another month that I told myself I would be finished by, and here we are.” That’s the gut check time: lights out and alone in the dark with that burden. But on the last day of last month, I had submitted what I was going to submit. And on the last day of this month I can go to sleep without that hanging question hovering there in the dark. I’m going to sleep like a baby. Well, maybe not like a baby, but you feel me.In any case, it’s now time to take up the projects that have had to go on the back burner while this thing was eating away at my soul. I also have a new motivation to guide me: vendetta. I’ll leave that a mystery for now.

2) Bigger and more importantly, Seven Red – as so many facebook messages have indicated – is expecting another baby in April. babygirldos or babyboy, we’ll know (for the most part) on Tuesday, when we get the big twenty week sonogram. Let the gendering begin! We are, of course, thrilled and scared and wondering how we’re going to manage it all, but mostly thrilled (and scared). More on Tuesday.

3) Despite the near collapse of on of the nation’s Giant Financial Institutions, she (who works for said Giant Financial Institution) has thus far managed to keep her job, and also successfully completed her First Graduate Class (thanks for the tuition, Employer Institution!). As our friends who we had over for Thanksgiving said, full time job in an industry in crisis, a two and a half year old at home, four months pregnant, and still manages to ace her first class in ten (or so…) years! Not effing bad. If I don’t say it enough: you rock, baby!

So, all-in-all a good month. Seven Red is all smiles. Oh, and there’s also that little thing called Barack Fucking Hussein Obama getting elected President of these United States. After an awful October, and an awful eight years, it is a sweet November.

Interesting way to phrase things from today’s New York Times article titled What Would Keynes Have Done? To wit:

Keynesian economists often dismiss these long-run concerns when the economy has short-run problems. “In the long run we are all dead,” Keynes famously quipped.

The longer-term problem we now face, however, may be more serious than any that Keynes ever envisioned. Passing a larger national debt to the next generation may look attractive to those without children. (Keynes himself was childless.) But the rest of us cannot feel much comfort knowing that, in the long run, when we are dead, our children and grandchildren will be dealing with our fiscal legacy.

Get it? Keynes was – ahem – childless. Wink wink. Given the current environment, that’s a fairly uncomfortable set of assumptions there for those in on the “joke.” I didn’t realize the Times went in for this kind of nonsense. Or maybe the terribly clever N. Gregory Mankiw just slipped one by the editor.

First Story: You’re getting off the bus with your friend K. at Main Street Flushing. Your friend goes to one of the local Catholic high schools, where he’s developed some beef with a group of kids, call them XYZ. They don’t know you, and they really have no problem with you, but they’re looking for K. off school grounds, and if they see him, he can pretty much count on an ass kicking. So you’re stepping off the bus, and talking, but you don’t notice eight or nine XYZ kids hanging out in the doorway of the old Alexander’s, right where you’re getting off. You see them too late, after you’ve already disembarked. And they see you. Your friend tells you to jet. It’s fairly crowded, so you could walk away easily, just blend in. So K. says “Walk, dude.” He knows it’s coming down on him, but why should you get it, too? You can walk or you can stand, but you can’t really walk. And then they’re on you.

*     *     *

It’s really a simple principle: You don’t leave your friend hanging out to dry. Now, the whole history of ethics, from Aristotle to Spinoza to Kant to Levinas to Irigaray to Peter Singer could be considered a set of variations on this theme, with the major disputes really involving definitional arguments about what constitutes “the friend,” and when and to what extent the friend can be said to have been left hanging out to dry. Certainly, the gang version of the friend and the stranger is the narrowest sort of definition: it mirrors the definitions of the State form almost exactly, but in miniature (everybody learns from the State form). As Nas once said, “Brothers on the block posted up like they own it/ That’s they corner, from New York to California…” So that’s a dead end definitionally speaking, but it teaches you something in practice that is as important as the definitional cues. It teaches you that the definitions stage a formal system that, at best, trains you in a particular mode of “decision.” Some people consider decision to be the essence of ethics, and this is the version that gets trafficked in all the ethical culture industry products of late, which I wrote about elsewhere. What I like about Kant – and this is what Adorno adores about Kant as well, though it infuriates him (see The Problem of Moral Philosophy lectures) – is the notion of the imperative. How do you square the imperative with the decision? This is a hanging out to dry question; the friend is, of course, universal for Kant – not your boys on the corner, but everyone in a formal sense. But it’s what you feel in practice, regardless of circumstance, the moment when you can either walk away or stand, but you can’t really walk away either, even though you can. That’s why Kant says, basically, consequences be damned.

I think people completely misunderstand Aristotle when they fetishize the Golden Mean, some half-assed compromise between walking away and standing, where the first is cowardly, and the second is foolhardy, while some laudable middle path makes up “courage” (what would that compromise be in our case?). It sounds like the description of somebody who’s never felt the force of the imperative, and it usually is. Another reading would say that this “middle path” is nothing but Aristotle registering the idea that you can walk away, but you can’t walk away – a problem of the excluded middle in a formal system that requires non-contradiction. How else to stage the imperative for Aristotle? Invent the middle. It doesn’t exist, of course: the middle participates in both the foolhardy and the cowardly; it involves both, in the technical sense. (Nobody is better at playing this out than Tim O’Brien in his Vietnam stories: everybody learns from the State form).

You can walk away or you can stand, but you can’t walk away. That’s an imperative. And as I see more in life, I see it as an imperative that some have the capacity to sense, and some do not. The problem with the whole discourse of “decision” is that it establishes equivalence, as if everybody feels the situation the same way, and it’s merely a matter of hashing out the “right” decision. I don’t think that’s it. I think you either have the capacity to sense that imperative or you don’t. Where something like ontology meets the everyday, maybe average everydayness even, that point of contact, you either feel that imperative, or you don’t. It has very little to do with decision, and this is what Kant is all torn up about in the second critique. Capacity. We don’t even know what a body can do.

Second Story: That you can feel it doesn’t mean that you can always live up to it. We were cruising around one day, Joe, Sulli, and me. We passed by a big group, maybe 50 kids, up on Francis Lewis. They were guys from The Next Neighborhood Over (TNNO), not particularly friendly, but not enemies. Well, not really. I had a little bit of beef going on with one of them – we’ll call him J. – over some blackbook stuff, nothing major, but you never know how these things develop. But Sulli was dating C., whose sister M. was dating Frank, one of the TNNO guys. And there was Frank and M. out near the curb, so Sulli said “Pull over. I wanna talk to Frank about something.” It’s never a good idea to be three guys walking into a group of 50, especially when there’s some minor blackbook beef going on and it’s 11pm and everybody’s been drinking. “I dunno,” I said. Sulli says “Don’t worry about it,” so I don’t. But, of course, after being there 5 minutes, J.’s friends call me over and they’re all like “You gotta problem with my boy?” blah blah, the usual. So we’re about to get beat down, I figure. But Sulli and Frank step in and try to squash stuff and put me back in the car, and I’m keeping my mouth shut for once because there’s 50 of them, and three of us.

A week later, two of the TNNO guys come by the park where we’re hanging out, and they’re basically talking shit because they thought they got the better of us that night on Francis Lewis, so Sulli tells them in no uncertain terms to beat sand if they want to walk away at all, and suddenly Sulli’s up off the bench he’d been sitting on, and the air gets all silent, and other guys are up off benches and walking towards these two, walking without swinging their arms, which is always the sign, the tense-up, the coil. They get the message, and head back toward their car, but they didn’t take it too kindly. You just knew they were coming back with numbers. But our own numbers dwindled through the night, until there were maybe 12 of us left. I walk away, probably to take a piss or something, and that’s when you see them. About 40 TNNO guys coming up the block on the double, roll up time. What do I do? I’m at a distance from the group. I fucking split. I ditched. Took off. You can walk or you can stand, but you can’t really walk. When I come back, I see Sulli ended up taking a beating, as did four or five other guys. My friends. Who I ditched. Who I stood with every other time, consequences be damned, but not that night. It turns out, J. was walking around with a crowbar asking everybody “Where’s topspun?” So I would have caught a bad one if I stayed. Utilitarian calculus tells me I made a good “decision,” since I didn’t get my head bashed in. But that shit has haunted me since then. You don’t leave your friends hanging out to fucking dry. It’s a simple principle, and hard to live. But it shouldn’t be hard to feel.

*     *     *

So, how does this cash out now? Now that I can walk into my office filled with books, and I’m supposedd to have forgotten about the guys walking around with crowbars, or the brawls on Main Street, Flushing. I see a dim shadow of this principle circulating as the professional creed of “collegiality,” which is apparently all the rage these days. I should be clear that I’m not speaking here about anyone at current Employer Institution. I’m speaking in general terms about this famous “collegiality.” A more piss-poor version of an ethics would be hard to develop. And indeed, in my experience I’ve found that the high priests of collegiality in any institution are usually the ones who will leave you hanging out to dry at the first opportunity. Conversely, the people I’ve met who seem to be most intellectually “aggressive” suddenly appear there standing with you when they could just as easily have left you hanging out to dry. It’s an interesting juxtaposition. So this “collegiality” strikes me as essentially cynicism with a happy face, the discourse of the one who not only walks away, but feels no imperative to stand – a justification for that set of capacities that cannot feel the imperative. It is, of course, pretention to say that everything you needed to know about X you learned at Y. And the examples here are hyper-masculinized, to be sure. But this collegiality business doesn’t sit right with me. There’s something utterly reactive about it.

I know. I know. Too much youtube. In a few weeks, back to more writing on this here Seven Red. Been kept away by circumstance. Until then, I’ll continue my fanboy lobbying for “Dear Science,” as a must have record for 2008 (and maybe this year’s In Rainbows). Is there a better lyric than “Angry young mannequin/ American, apparently/ Still to the rhythm/ Better get to the back of me” out there? I can’t find it.

As most of my readers will know, I’m not exactly Mr. Patriotism. Still, the following clips are interesting in all kinds of ways. The first is from the East Village in New York City, the second from Portland, Oregon. Both are places that have been told repeatedly over the last 20 years or so that they represent the worst of this country; they are rhetorically excised from the (imaginary) community as a matter of course. So it’s interesting to me, anyway, to see a kind of reclaiming of that imaginary status in this way. I think the deeply discriminatory and unjust results on the LGBT marriage and adoption propositions shows that we have a long way to go indeed. Still (and I hesitate to “but” or “still” it, given how horrendous those propositions actually are), these are remarkable rhetorical artifacts. Multitude?

Vote, goddammit.

Here’s this, written on Day 1,000 of this fucking war:

In the heady days of January 1991, we used to cut out of our senior year of high school early and go smoke joints at R.L.’s apartment. We’d often have beer as well. From about 2 pm to 6 pm, a large group of us would chill there, maybe with CNN or MTV or cartoons on the television in the background. It was the line in the sand day, or thereabouts, and CNN was on. The war had not yet started, but we were waiting for it, full of bravado. We were sure that if the war started, it would lead to a general Mideast conflagration, and we would all be called to service. We were all 17 years old, and in good health, if often high.

I left R.L.’s at about 6, heading home to dinner. I walked back to my apartment with Sulli and Steve. We were pretty lit by this time, and the electricity in the air said it all: the war is imminent. Steve started belting out the lines as we walked down the Queens street: All we are say-ing/ Is give war a chance! I remember laughing. When I got home I found my mother standing in front of the television, her hand over her mouth. “What’s going…” but she shushed me, and I looked at the television. The eerie green light, the tracers going up over the minarets, the stentorian intonations of some spokesman or other. War. I went into the bedroom I shared with my brother, my heart filled with joy…

*****

Why doncha come on back to the War. – Leonard Cohen

September 10, 2001. I have dinner with an old friend at an Italian restaurant in the East Village. Then we go to DBA, a bar. Jay-Z’s “Hova” comes on the bar’s sound system: H to the Izzo, V to the Izzay, what else can I say, dude, I gets bizzay. We talk about how great it is. I’m drunk at this point, and I have to get back to Brooklyn. I have to be up early tomorrow to do campaign work in Lower Manhattan before I head to work at my building near the Ferry terminal. I take a cab back over the Manhattan Bridge, with a final glance at the lights flickering in the Manhattan skyline just as we hit the center of the Bridge. Goddamn is it beautiful.

*****

One…we are the people
Two…a little bit louder
Three…we’re gonna stop this fucking war, now
One…

March, 2003. The first Saturday of the War. I am at a conference in New York, but I stay at my brother’s place in Brooklyn rather than in the conference hotel. I don’t live here anymore. On Friday I got food poisoning. My brother, his wife, and my wife went to a French restaurant in Fort Green, but I stayed at his place, sick as a dog, watching the lead-up to the War on television. On Saturday I go to Midtown to see a friend’s panel, but the war is on television there, too, real now, green-lit tracers over the minarets, Shock and Awe booming through the hotel lobby. I leave after the panel, and wander into the anti-war march that is just beginning. The crowds are tremendous. I walk downtown with the march, but on the sidewalk. Hard for me to be a joiner that way, I guess. Earnestness irritates me, but I’m with them. When I get down to 10th street I encounter the drummers – a group of Latinos and Latinas leading the chant: One…we are the people, Two…a little bit louder, Three…we’re gonna stop this fucking war, now. Everyone on the march and on the sidewalks is cheering. On a third floor balcony above the march, a woman comes out with a little boy and a conch shell. She starts blowing it in beat with the drum. Everyone’s eyes seem to move from the drummers to the balcony and back. The drummers acknowledge her, and the little boy dances. There he is dancing on the first Saturday of the War.

*****

And we looked at each other and gazed on the green meadow over which the cool evening was running just then, and we wept together. But then life was dearer to me than all my wisdom ever was. –Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Other Dancing Song”

One Thousand Days. I should have waited another one, and led with One Thousand One Arabian Nights. Too clever by far. And no history or stories will save me, like Scheherazade. It is the one thousandth day of the War. I often wondered when I was a child how people could live normally on the home front when a war was going on. How do they face it everyday, I wondered, knowing what must be happening, knowing that everything is at stake? How do they go out to dinner, play sports, make love, gesture to each other on the street? It bothered me. I’d think of the swing clubs during World War II – everyone dressed up and dancing. A sip from a bottle of beer, or a Tom Collins. How? It is the one thousandth day of the war. No stories will save me. In March, if all goes well, my first child will be born. Perhaps on the first Saturday of the fourth year of the War. I want her to dance to something else. I want some other occasion for her joy and even for her heartbreaks, something other than what Langston Hughes once called “the same old stupid game, of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.” I want for her some other dancing song. But it is the one thousandth day of the war and no stories will save me.

*****

Now back to the present, today, election day, 2008. And another one on the way. Another child, another dancing song. For the first one, now our dear babygirl (life is dearer than all that wisdom ever was), and for this second one, whoever he or she will be, and whatever he or she will dance to: VOTE. Vote some other dancing song. Vote OBAMA.

Radiohead does Headmaster Ritual

“…spineless swine, cemented minds…”

Indeed. A story that will need telling later.

So I posted the following cryptic message on my buddy Joe’s facebook wall:

“MEDIC!!! MEDIC!!! I’m hit!!!”

I knew he’d know what I was talking about, and he’d get a kick out of it. He replied with the following email, which is, in my view, a perfect retelling of events. I’ll leave it without comment:

October 31,1991, I had just finished fixing the brakes on my car and now was making my way to 146th street and Willets [Point Boulevard] to pick up some friends to hang out for Halloween. This was to be the first all hallows eve of my life without the joy of filling a backpack with shaving cream and eggs for a night of innocent ultraviolence.This might have been because we spent most of the summer dodging bottles, pepper spray and the occasional stolen car. The obvious plan for the night was to get fourties, some weed and perhaps some nitrous oxide from the “Happy Iraqis” on Northern Boulevard and cruise around Whitestone. The crew that night I believe were Patty S., Mike T., topspun and myself. Perhaps not using the best judgment topspun came out that night wearing a brand new flight jacket and an extremely rare Negro League fitted Baltimore Black Sox hat. To watch the four of us examining the cap was to be likened to the scene in American Psycho where the twentysomthing yuppies compare and envy each others business cards. The hat was that Dope. With the possibility of being struck by some form of Halloween ordnance topspun took the back seat of my 1985 Monte Carlo SS right behind the driver seat. We came upon some kids covered in Barbassol and realized by there curves that they were female and decided to turn around and get a better look. I remember not considering this as a threat due to obvious gender misconceptions, but a single Grade AA jumbo egg came through a three inch opening in the window whistling past my left ear and blasting topspun in the face, spraying egg all over his jacket and hat. Enraged and stunned of the hail mary quality throw all he could yell was “I’m hit,I’m hit medic”.

I find myself now trick or treating with my five year old nephew looking over my shoulder for stray eggs wondering if my friend topspun hundreds of miles away is recalling the same memory. I get an alert on my cell phone that topspun wrote on my Facebook wall “I’m hit,I’m hit medic” and I cant help but smile and actually well up close to tears.

New York, early 90′s. Ahhhh. Miss my guys, for sure.