On Forgetting

I nothing much to do and thought I'd go see a movie. Ran a search on what was playing near me, and clicked on the title of a film playing at the Roxie, which led me through to a review in The New York Times.

It was a documentary about an experimental music composer from, of all places, Oskaloosa, Iowa. I was born in Oskaloosa. It's not a big town, Osky. What are the odds that anyone from Oskaloosa would have a documentary made about them?And then I realized the composer was a childhood friend of my father's.

I only knew him from a few anecdotes: a friend who listened to James Brown, and owned the first Velvet Underground album as a preteen. That was an obscure, obscure album when it came out. How did a kid in rural Iowa even get it, let alone know to get it?

The legend about the Velvet Underground is that hardly anyone listened to their early concerts, but that every person who did went on to start a band. Arthur Russell may not have made it to any of the concerts, but he went one better - he became, not a band, but an experimental composer. An experiemental disco composer.

So how could I not go see the film? Oskaloosa needs to salute Oskaloosa, especially when Oskaloosa is within six blocks of saluting distance. It was a beautiful night in San Francisco, and I rode my bike from yoga to a sushi restaurant in the Castro to the Roxie and got there just a few minutes after the movie had started.

It was lovely. Obviously put together by someone who was a true believer in the theory that Russell was an ahead-of-his-time genius. But also possessing a real recognition that genius is an awkward thing to have, and a thing that is often remarkably hard to distinguish from solipsism.

The audience sighed a little over Russell's parents, who come across not only dry and acerbic in that particular Great Plains way, but as genuinely thoughtful people. New York during the AIDS crisis was a harsh place to be, and much of the current fight for marriage rights dates back to that time. Partners of men dying of AIDS frequently lost the right to make medical decisions (as well as apartments, shared possessions, and so forth) to the blood relatives of their lovers. Instead, Russell's parents handed over those rights to Russell's partner, Tom Lee, while Russell was ill and then dying - doing the right thing even when, they didn't have to socially or legally.

The film was less true than I like my documentaries to be (an enduring friendship between Lee and Russell's parents appears to have been exaggerated, possibly even manufactured.) But it's great as what it is: a beautiful fairytale about how you can be a sweet but kind of a socially maladept self-obsessed jerk artist from rural Iowa, have a severe paranoia regarding "finishing" any work of art, and still find a great creative community and love with a nice boy from New Jersey. And be remembered after your death by people who will describe you as better than the Beatles. Even though - let's not kid ourselves.


But Arthur Russell's music, which scores the entire movie, does have a particular beauty to it. Russell self-described it as "Buddhist Bubblegum" - you can see how the ecstatic tradtion of Indian devotional music met and cross-fertilized with all sorts of other experimental music genres. Including the aforementioned disco. I don't know if I'd describe it as feeling contemporary, which the musician Jans Leckman does late in the film, but it does possess the timelessness of the deeply eccentric.

Secret Histories...

A lot of what the impending Obama administration is promising reminds me not-inconsiderably of the New Deal. Which led me to local historian Gray Brechin's excellent site on California's remaining New Deal projects, and this interesting article in New Geography magazine about how they aren't always easy to find. Or rather, the wall or the bridge or the park may still there, but the history of its origins are largely forgotten:

"Since the New Deal agencies were all about centralization, I thought, I would find their records neatly filed back in Washington at the National Archives and Library of Congress.

I was wrong on all counts. I discovered, instead, a strange civilization buried beneath strata of forgetfulness, neglect, and even malice seventy-five years deep. Aborted by the Second World War, FDR’s sudden death, then covered with the congealed lava of the McCarthy reaction, the half dozen or so agencies that had created the physical and cultural infrastructure from which grew America’s post-war prosperity left few accessible records of their collective accomplishments."

San Francisco, and the Bay Area in general, appear to have been major beneficaries of the New Deal. Why, I wonder? Is it because we were such a huge union town then, and FDR or someone in his administration had some favors to repay?

Today In Food Adulteration News

Can one ever get tired of tainted food reporting? The Washington Post has a great article this morning that is, in its essence "A Star is Born: The Melamine Story." As it turns out, it's not just a tale of can-do scurrilous food additive entrepreneurs.

Dairy industry analysts who have inspected the melamine powder said it appeared to have been created by sophisticated chemical technicians. Qiao Fuming, a dairy consultant in Beijing, said it is impossible to take raw melamine and mix it with milk because it won't dissolve. The melamine had to be converted into a form that could be mixed with liquids, he said. How melamine became popular in the countryside has as much to do with greedy chemical companies as with poor farmers.

Also interesting is what I've read elsewhere - it takes very high doses of melamine over time to actually make someone sick. It's possible that many of the reported deaths may actually have been caused by low-grade melamine that was contaminated by other things, like cyanuric acid. Which would imply that melamine could be in almost everything dairy-related in China right now, and how sick you get is dependent on the quality of what your food is tainted with.

I hope this doesn't give melamine a bad rap. It may cause kidney failure, but when used as it was originally intended it does make a fine tabletop.

DFW, RIP.

I've been re-reading David Foster Wallace's essay on the Illinois State Fair, and then stumbled across this interview via Harpers.org.

Quoth DFW:

Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?... If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

I never managed to warm to DFW's fiction - but I think that his journalism did manage to pull this off. If you get a chance, I'd suggest picking up a copy of A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. Among other things, it contains the only two articles about tennis that I've ever read from start to finish.

More on the improbable rush for green fuel...

In the form of an article, Gut Reactions, in the Atlantic Monthly about the energetic promise of termite guts. It's by the very excellent Lisa Margonelli, who lets loose with an interesting bit of food history towards the end of the article:

Blanch has experienced the pitfalls of research driven by political goals. In the early 1970s, he worked on creating faux meat products from petroleum, which was then thought to be a cheap way to feed the world. For example, single-celled “chicken” proteins were produced by yeasts that fed on oil by-products, and then draped around plastic bones.

Mmmmm.... Oil-fed yeast chicken. If only that pesky oil crisis hadn't intervened.

A tiny glimpse into the occasional hell that is fact-checking...

Corrected on 4/2/08:

An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that General Mills had reduced the number of chocolate chips in its Turtle Cookies. The company said it had not reduced the number of chips, but changed how they were distributed in the cookie dough.

The more things change the more often you find yourself re-enacting Jonestown

When I first moved to San Francisco, six and a half years ago, I sought out experiences that felt as though they couldn't happen anywhere else. Trannyshack at the Stud were the apotheosis of that experience - a mutant lovechild of vaudeville, performance art, sincerity, punk, thrill-seeking and community. Also: manatee drag.

I was there to witness the nominal "end" of Trannyshack, though that ending is a very David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust thing - Trannyshack will still exist, it just won't occur every Tuesday, at the Stud. It will take place in more respectable venues, most likely large enough so that the whole experience will be less like spending two hours trapped in the business of a giant moist amoeba. Crowd-surfing drag queens will no longer be able to kick the ceiling with their stiletto boots. Peggy L'Eggs will probably still throw dead fish into the audience while lipsynching to the theme from Titanic, but she'll have to throw them farther. The audience will be less successful at throwing them back. Peggy will still vomit up seaweed, but not RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU. There will be a demure buffer of space between you and the hacking.

Certain mysteries remain unresolved. Why are you so much less likely to be elbowed in the head if you're standing on the left side of the stage? How does the bar make any money if it's too crowded for people to actually make it to the bar and buy drinks? Why is theater better when you're dehydrated? Is what I think is happening on stage actually what is happening?

The final number? The Bowie song "Memories of a Free Festival" played over the loudspeakers. Hippie maidens on stage passed out flowers to the audience, then vanished and re-appeared in fatiques and plastic submachine guns.Every drag queen, drag king, faux queen, and so forth in the audience filed on stage and pantomimed drinking FlavorAid before collapsing into an ever-increasing pile. The death throes seemed to go on and on. Metal Patricia stood behind it all in Jim Jones drag, arms raised in front of a flickering electric cross. The pile got larger and larger.

I spent the past week interviewing people who were personally affected by Jonestown (it didn't happen that long ago, after all, and the People's Temple had close ties to local progressive movements and San Francisco's city government.)

It left me wondering what other events in San Francisco history might be turned into performance art. The 1906 earthquake? The filling of the bay? The dot-com boom?

(mantee drag photo by Heklina, Jonestown photo by StarrSF)

Dirt.

I've been shoveling dirt and gravel for the past few days, helping to put together a victory garden in front of San Francisco's City Hall. At one point we all looked up from our shoveling and shimmering there in the heat like some kind of vision was the mayor, in a gorgeous suit and equally gorgeous thin leather shoes.

One of the sweat-begrimed volunteers began telling him that the city should keep on funding the garden, rather than ripping it up and replacing it with sod once Slow Food Nation and Carlo Petrini are safely out of town. "You all might enjoy working on it now," the mayor said in a cautionary tone. "But eventually it'll get weedy and people will start to complain."

"Portland has a full-time victory garden" said the volunteer. "You don't want to be behind Portland, do you?"

And with that, the mayor was gone.

"He didn't even pick up a shovel and pose with it!" one of the volunteers wailed.

People kept on stopping by the garden, and asking when they could come by and plant things. You know, once all the dirt-shoveling was finished. Oddly enough, planting day was already over-subscribed with volunteers, something which had not occurred so far with any of our days of staking, raking, and shoveling. Which reminded me of how my friend Novella complains about how people are always trying to persuade her to let them plant things in her garden. To this she says (I am paraphrasing) "find a vacant lot and start your own garden, chump." Planting = the sexy part.

Civic Center in San Francisco is between the Tenderloin and SOMA, which a fair amount of shitting in public. We discussed this as we shoveled. One person said that Civic Center is only a popular spot for congregating during the day, so stealth shitting in the lettuce by night was unlikely to be an issue. Others demurred. A nearby fountain at UN Plaza had been shut down entirely several years ago because it had acquired Ganges-like qualities. We continued to discuss. Hepatitis? Hep A could be a problem.

I'm glad to live in a city where "Garden in front of City Hall! Cool!" outweighs "We could get sued! For serving hepatitis lettuce from our victory garden!"

The plaza in front of City Hall is normally so stark and boring and International Style in nature. What I wish the city would do is turn it into a bench-lined swath of greenery like Washington Square Park in Philadelphia. Or a Gaudi-in-Barcelona-like plaza made out of San Francisco's smashed crockery.

I realize this is completely out of keeping with any California asthetic traditions, other than the Hearst tradition where you steal anything from Europe that seems nifty and smoosh it all together. Nonetheless, I am endorsing it.

I feel like I read this fairytale once.

NY Times: Albanian Custom Fades, Woman as Family Man.

Her father was killed in a blood feud, and there was no male heir. By custom, Ms. Keqi, now 78, took a vow of lifetime virginity. She lived as a man, the new patriarch, with all the swagger and trappings of male authority — including the obligation to avenge her father’s death.

In all of his books, Randy Shilts manages to write about history in the most sprawling, gossipy, harsh yet idealistic way. Its what I imagine Russian novels would be like, if I actually liked Russian novels. It's so interesting to be reading his last book and to see all the different social movements - civil rights, gay rights, women's rights - converge and both influence and perplex the lives of people in the military.

There's so much in here that I feel like I should have known about years ago. I remember being in high school, and the kids in my history class literally begging our AP History teacher to do a section on Vietnam. We were so earnest, and we totally got shot down. "It's too painful," said Ms Whatever-Her-Name-Was. "I'm not revisiting it." None of us even had the imagination then to ask for the first Gulf War. And none of us even knew there had been a Korean war.

Our history classes always ended with World War II. The Siege at Normandy. That guy kissing that girl in the middle of the ticker tape parade. We were so tired of World War II. Tired of the Nazis. Tired of Winston Churchill. Tired of France. Tired of the bomb, and Oppenheimer, and Stalin and of watching Empire of the Sun over and over again.

Is that how it was for everybody? History beginning with Egyptian Pharoahs, and ending with World War II?

I finished the second draft of a particularly tough article and headed down to the post office to pick up a Mystery Package whose orange slip had been stuck to the hallway door for roughly the last week and a half. It says something about my character to note that a) it was a copy of Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military by Randy Shilts which I b) had forgotten I had even ordered and that c) I was really, really delighted.

On the lobbyist train...

I've gotten fairly practiced over the years in the fine (and, occasionally, not-so-fine) art of Not Driving. I'm nowhere near the level of a woman that I knew in grad school, who just stuck out her thumb and hitchhiked everywhere, but that's the magic of living in Northern California. No matter what particular lifestyle you're enmeshed in, you're always going to run into someone more hardcore about it than you.

So, for me, every new story in a new location is also an experiment in figuring out how to not drive there. In this case, I had to interview a scientist at a bee laboratory in Davis, California. First I dug up a UC Berkeley-UC Davis shuttle, which I figured that I might be able to charm myself onto with my student ID. But the scheduling was all wrong for when I needed to be there. Then I stumbled upon the excellent Davis Wiki, where I found out that Davis is a bicyclist's paradise, and that the Capitol Corridor Amtrak train not only goes right through Davis and has bike facilities, but it also, wonder of wonders, runs on time (This is unheard-of for Amtrak these days. I took a cross-country train back from the Midwest this summer that wound up being about eight hours late.)

The only other guy waiting for the train with me at the Richmond BART stop turned out to be a lawyer. The train itself was the nicest I've ever seen - spotless. Every car had spacious tables (most occupied by guys in suits in ties, studiously typing away at their laptops, surrounded by a nest of leather-bound personal organizers and abstruse paperwork.)

Electrical sockets stretched down both sides of every railcar, ready to be plugged by a thicket of adapters. Gorgeous scenery rolled by on both sides, through the sparkling clean windows. Most amazingly, the food in the snack car was actually pretty good. The whole scenario looked like an advertisement for something. The train pulled up at the Davis train station exactly on time, and I unhooked my bicycle from the train's cunningly designed bike rack and rode on to my appointment.

The reason for all these marvels? Those of you who've been to Washington, DC will remember how the home of the feds has one of the most comprehensive public transit systems in the country. The Capitol Corridor is called that for a reason - it ferries people from Silicon Valley through the Bay Area and ultimately all the way up to Sacramento, California's capitol. It does seem like a bit of an astounding coincidence that the nicest transit does seem to spring up around the tightest aggregations of lawyers and lobbyists. Rather than, say, around the tightest aggregations of people who can't afford cars. Oh, the cynicism.