Tag: Friday Night at 8

Yeah, you got Lady Day and Ella and Sarah, the triumverate of jazz singers.  Don’t get better that.

But then there’s Anita O’Day.

She went out on her own at 14 years of age, during the Depression, was a dancer in the “endurathons” popular at the time, had a wild young life and fell into singing, ending up making her name with Gene Krupa, Roy Eldridge, the girl singer, sometimes wearing the usual evening gowns, other times an altered kind of suit that took better the knocks of the hard tours on bus or car.

She lived the jazz life.

It was back in the day, early 80s, right before AIDs made it problematic to be promiscuous.

After hours club on 9th Avenue and 14th Street, dark with little tacky Christmas-tree lights and cheap drinks, a place of the imagination, one could be whomever or whatever one pleased, indulging the neverending child’s fantasy of make-believe.

My entrance was predatory, taking in the entire room as I walked to the front bar, accepting or discarding (mostly discarding) the hungry looks on the faces of all the lovely men, who outnumbered the women by a very satisfactory ratio.

Heh.

So this is Friday Night at 8.  And as our digital dictator would say “Here I Am!”

Wrote a poem and recorded it at Gabcast as well.  This one is also untitled.

Here’s the poem:

of course there’s

a big search for

a new language

for new times

maybe a kind of

esperanto of the soul

a word appears

here and there

but it is immediately

devoured  in

pacmans of

orgiastic

marketry

gibsonian wetware

epiphanies

as we merge

with our

great

machines

caravans of

digital wagons

carrying

strange new loads!

Avatars exploding

in infinite number

while wizards

laugh

over their

strange new

dominions.

And below is the gabcast thingy to click.

I like to write this series spontaneously so that it is timely.  I usually write it on Friday right before it publishes on the Front Page of Docudharma.

Tonight I read Robyn’s Friday Philosophy essay right when I logged on to the intertubes.

She speaks of fairness and games and such.

I think that’s an interesting conversation and I’d like to continue it here.

Robyn writes:

To many people I suppose that makes me appear to be a fool. If that’s how you see it, so be it. I still believe it is more important that a good game played fairly is more important than who wins or loses. I revel in Tiger Woods and Ernie Els going stroke for stroke in the President’s Cup until it is too dark to play anymore…and then calling it a draw. To me, the view of life as an exercise in trying to be a winner rather than a loser is nearly the very definition I have for labeling someone a loser.

I’d like to riff off that notion.

Both in high school and for the two years I attended college, I was a member of the debate squad.  I was brought up listening to my brothers and father argue and search for what was real when it came to whatever topic arose.  It was always an education for me.

In debate we were told we had to back up everything we said when we made our case.  What made it even more interesting was that we all had to argue both sides of the issue, depending on which “round” of the debates was in session.  So my partner and I would argue the “pro” against another school and the next round we’d argue the “con” against another team.

Sure there was all the snark and obnoxiousness one could imagine among us all, in a way it was very similar to the blogs.

But then Kirby Boner came along.

Yep, that was his real name, and I am putting it out there deliberately as praise for him is long overdue.

S:  Mr. Smith’s office, may I help you?

CALLER:  LET MY PEOPLE GO!

S:  Excuse me?

CALLER:  I AM MOSES.  LET MY PEOPLE GO!

S:  Well, Mr. Moses, this is Mr. Smith’s office and I don’t see any people …

CALLER:  LET MY PEOPLE GO!

S:  Well I’m TRYING to tell you that we don’t HAVE your people!  Are you quite sure you have the right number?

CALLER:  MOSES SAYS LET MY PEOPLE GO!

S:  All right, all right.  I think it’s Pharoah you are looking for, Mr. Moses.  I think he’s the one that has your people, if I recall correctly.

BBRRRIIINGGG!

Well I don’t have a lot to say tonight — but given my proclivities, I’m sure I’ll use a lot of words anyway.

I’ve had a tough couple of blogging weeks.  Mostly dealing with the issue of public housing in New Orleans.  ‘Course I also got in some scathing comments on a couple of immigration diaries.  Oddly, some of my enemies and I are beginning to acquire a bizarre form of camaraderie.  Ah, familiarity breeds a whole lot of things, it seems.

It wasn’t so much that I was fighting folks as struggling to communicate, which was frustrating.  Nightprowlkitty, SuperKitty of Justice(!) does not LIKE to be patient!  Seems, though, that patience is a requirement.

ek hornbeck has, though his writing, helped me enormously when it comes to another quality I have found is necessary if one is to engage in the dirty work of real communication of ideas and information and values – often to folks who may not know or trust me – and that is toughness.

To illustrate this helpfulness, I shall link a comment and response from one of his issues of the Stars Hollow Gazette.  I had commented one needs toughness to “save the internets” and his response has become my new mantra for 2008:

You can’t expect that people will treat you in any particular way.

There’s an essay by NLinStPaul that I just can’t stop thinking about.

It’s about how with the right resources, we can keep vulnerable children from a life of hopelessness and poverty.

I’ve been blogging about New Orleans and public housing lately.  There was one photo posted by the Times-Picayune showing a black woman who had complained about her new home, the plumbing was bad, the door was broken, etc.  The picture showed this woman in her apartment — it was very neat and clean.  But what caused a big buzz was her 60-inch television set.

In a visceral reaction, many folks condemned both the woman and a system that would enable “freeloaders” to have giant TV’s that other hard working and deserving folks couldn’t afford.  It just wasn’t fair.  That’s what I heard every time I’d read these comments, the eternal cry of a child who feels they are missing out on someone else’s good fortune.  “It isn’t fair!”

This reaction is nothing new.  Ronald Reagan pandered to this feeling when he blasted a woman on welfare for having a Cadillac and successfully turned middle-class Americans against the poor, because “It isn’t fair!”

‘Course this isn’t rational, we know that.  In our times, we are being robbed blind by our own federal government for wars of occupation, graft, patronage, you name it.

But we can’t fight the government, it seems, because the government is too big and powerful.

We can, however, find a scapegoat.  And the poor have always been there for that role.

It’s a shell game, of course.  And we all can be prey to it at one time or another, depending on which part of our psyche would make us cry out, “It isn’t fair!”  

I’m trying to figure out how to write about why I started blogging over at the Great Orange Satan on immigration.

There’s so much information I have packed into my poor brain over the past several months, that I don’t know where to begin.

Guess perhaps I should start at the beginning!

Ok, will do.

kyledeb’s The Correct Term is Migrant on August 22.  

It is impossible to have a real conversation about immigration in the U.S. if people can’t even agree on the terminology that they are debating with. Conservatives automatically become hostile when they read or hear the word “undocumented immigrant”, and progressives often call people that use the term “illegal alien” racists. Both terms are incorrect.

When describing the 12 million people that have illegally immigrated into the U.S. the best term to use is the word “migrant”. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if people opposed this, this shouldn’t be a controversial claim. The rest of the world uses the term migrant to describe people that immigrate into the country illegally. The BBC uses the word migrant. So does Prensa Libre, Guatemala’s main newspaper. The list goes on and on.

Immigration is actually a U.S.-centric term. An immigrant is someone who migrates into your country, an emigrant describes someone who migrates out of your country, but the accurate term to describe this population from a global perspective is migrant. It flies in the face of the U.S. citizen ego, but most migrants come to the U.S. with the intention of returning, and many do. Migration describes their movements better than immigration does.

The typical comment:

You can respectfully disagree

with the actual definitions of words all you want.

But using your special definitions of words instead of the generally agreed upon definitions will achieve only one thing – guaranteeing that you will not effectively communicate with anyone who does not already agree with you.

My very first comment was a response to Mariachi Mama’s comment:

sorry too late to tip or rec nt

To which I added one of my most insightful comments:

ditto. nt.

December 1 is my birthday.  It is the day of my mother’s funeral, back in 1992.  The day that Brown v. Board of education ended segregation in our nation’s school

It is also World AIDS day.

I moved to New York City in September of 1981.  My best friend and soulmate, Jeff, lived there and I was going to stay with him and his lover until I got my own apartment.

My first job was at a lawfirm, I remember a gay friend and co-worker telling me about the “gay cancer.”  I quickly forgot about it, knowing Tom was a terrible hypochondriac.

Jeff was a renaissance man in many ways.  He was always active, never idle.  He painted, worked hard as a photo retoucher, danced beautifully and went out constantly to the bars to party till the break of dawn.  His cooking was legendary.  His sense of humor was what bonded us the most — I loved to make him laugh.  He had no tact and often got in trouble with folks because of that, but would usually win them back by having them over for dinner.

His sexual exploits were also legendary and I was his confidante for many stories.

His temper was terrible as well and we often fought, though we always made up.

When I had my mental problems back in the late 70’s, Jeff would call my mother to comfort her (I only found this out several years later).  He wrote me a little picture book to cheer me up, a humerous biography with hand-made pop-out drawings of my plight.  I still have that book.

All block quotes are from And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts (1987):

By October 2, 1985, the morning Rock Hudson died, the word was familiar to almost every household in the Western World.

AIDS

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome had seemed a comfortably distant threat to most of those who had heard of it before, the misfortune of people who fit into rather distinct classes of outcasts and social pariahs.  But suddenly, in the summer of 1985, when a movie star was diagnosed with the disease and the newspapers couldn’t stop talking about it, the AIDS epidemic became palpable and the threat loomed everywhere.

Suddenly there were children with AIDS who wanted to go to school, laborers with AIDS who wanted to work, and researchers who wanted funding, and there was a threat to the nation’s public health that could no longer be ignored.  Most significantly, there were the first glimmers of awareness that the future would always contain this strange new word.  AIDS would become a part of American culture and indelibly change the course of our lives.

The implications would not be fleshed out for another few years, but on that October day in 1985 the first awareness existed just the same.  Rock Hudson riveted America’s attention upon this deadly new threat for the first time, and his diagnosis became a demarcation that would separate the history of America before AIDS from the history that came after.

Last week, I tried to explain as best I could what I felt could be part of a solid, sound, moral, ethical and spiritual basis to rely upon in fighting for social justice.  To be a witness rather than a bystander when confronting man’s inhumanity to man.  In that essay, Journey to the Core of the Human Spirit, I tried to be as substantive as I could about an aspect of ourselves that is in so many ways intangible and open to misinterpretation.

This essay will be about an even more seemingly intangible phenomenon.

It’s all well and good to have an ethical and spiritual foundation in order to fight for social justice.

But as in all dangerous and difficult quests, once you set out, obstacles appear.

My latest obstacle is not a huge one, but it is extremely irritating!

When I enter and comment in diaries about immigration (yes, over at the Great Orange Satan, but it could be anywhere among Democrats), I have found a new meme floating around.  It goes something like this:

“Yeah, and if you don’t agree 100% with them then they call you a racist or a xenophobe!”

There are hundreds of variations on this tired theme.  One of the most annoying (though, in retrospect, funny if it weren’t so sad) new variations I encountered was when someone said that calling a person a racist is using the “biggest beat stick” be it secular or religious and thus implying this was akin to both hate speech and, perhaps, causing someone to lose their life in a fiery explosion from hell.

So I have tried to come up with an answer to that meme, to overcome this obstacle to real dialogue.

So in my blogging around the b’sphere, I have been battling memes.  I am a meme killer!  Woo hoo!

Latest is over the immigration issue, Spitzer, the Dems, the third rail, all that jazz.  The meme that makes me most murderous is the notion “What is it about illegal you don’t understand?”  All of a sudden seemingly liberal bloggers have become law & order Wyatt Earp’s, deciding that the rule of law is far more important than silly feel-good stuff like human rights and human rights abuses.  It appears to me that if someone has broken a law, it is then very easy to hide behind that thought even when the enforcement of that law entails violence and punishments far outweighing the crime.

But this essay is not about the immigration issue.  One of the biggest frustrations in blogging about what is called “social justice” is there are so many injustices?  Which do I choose?  New Orleans?  Burma?  Mexico?  Darfur?  Gaza?

I choose not to choose.  I choose to deny any lines between these injustices.  For they all have the same root cause.

I’d like to introduce everyone (or re-introduce if you already know her) to Helen Bamber.  She is a remarkable woman with a remarkable story.

From a New York Times review by Sara Ivy of Helen’s biography, “The Good Listener,” by Neil Belton:

Helen Bamber grew up in London during World War II in an embittered Jewish refugee family and was scarcely an adult when she traveled as a relief worker to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just after the end of the war. Struck by the physical and spiritual wreckage she witnessed among the survivors of Nazi persecution, she decided to spend her life helping to rehabilitate torture victims by listening to their stories and advocating against similar abuses.

In his first book, ”The Good Listener,” Neil Belton suggests that for Bamber this work has fulfilled a moral imperative; ignoring human rights violations means being an acomplice in such behavior. It also means invalidating the victim’s experience of suffering and hampering his ability to recover.

Belton has written a comprehensive, thoughtful biography of a woman who possesses a near compulsion to challenge the brutality that those in power sometimes inflict. He includes wrenching recent examples of torture of political prisoners in Chile, South Africa and Israel. He proposes that systematic mental and physical abuses are neither impulsive nor merely sadistic; in this century, torture has become a ”bureaucratic industry’…

I read this book years ago and have recently thought again of Helen Bamber.  She was a complex person, did not consider herself a “good” person.  Her father read Mein Kampf to her when she was little, he was a fearful and bitter man.  Her mother compensated by being overly frivolous and indulgent in socializing.

They do, you know.  Fisherman can’t always go out to sea, bad weather sometimes makes it impossible, among other obstacles.  But they’re always busy, there’s always something to do.

Same can be said of politics, I think.

A year ago I was happy because Democrats took the majority, yay!

Now I’m not so happy because the Democratic leadership is a bunch of damned fools and they’re doing everything but leading (Pelosi’s snark notwithstanding).