Posts Tagged ‘America’
This Is What 2012 Looks Like
by Ayesha Adamo
This is what 2012 looks like, in case you were wondering. I spent my New Year’s Eve in Liberty Square here in New York, ready to occupy the New Year. If you were there, then you know. If you weren’t, then let me tell you that as I watched the team from Direct Action swoop in and pull barricades down, winning a tug-of-war against the cops who were outnumbered for once, thanks to the festivities in Times Square, I knew that this was the best New Year’s Eve of my life.
I knew it even more so as I, with my fellow occupiers, climbed the great pile of barricades that the people had tossed into the middle of the park. We stood on top, looked out over the sea of faces that had gathered, and shook the ground. And you could just tell—the myths are finally here: this is what 2012 was always meant to be. This is what I’ve been waiting for all my life.
Later the NYPD battalions in riot gear would descend upon the park, kicking out the few of us who decided not to go on the march to the East Village, but it was already too late: the ground had already been shaken and the barricades had already toppled. The symbol, the ritual, had already been completed, set into motion…the magick button had been pressed and no matter how many arrests were made that night, nothing could change it. Standing outside the 9th Precinct at 4 in the morning to cheer our warriors as they exited the paddy wagon, and get an idea of names to pass on to the National Lawyers Guild, the night was winding down, but with the knowledge that nothing was over. Far far from it. Viva la revolución! Viva 2012!
View from atop the Barricades
Four-letter words like Love and Hope
Sometimes a song comes along with a shitty, repetitive chorus, and it all goes down like melba toast…like when John Mayer once encouraged us to “Say what (we) mean to say” in eight not-so-different ways. Other times, there’s the repetitive chorus that we’re meant to be able to remember—even while shit-faced on Patron…like when Taio Cruz tells that “Little Bad Girl” to just “Go” already, stamping along in time to some David Guetta beats.
But once in a while the simplest, most repetitive phrase in a song can mean everything. This is when you’re breathing that rare air of The Doors’ “Indian Summer.” Jim Morrison and Robby Krieger work their magic(k), and suddenly, “I love you the best. Better than all the rest” is like the most profound lyric you’ve ever heard. Sometimes a pop song comes along and hits in just the right way, at just the right time. Such is the case with Rihanna’s new song, “We Found Love.”
“We found love in a hopeless place.” There it is: the moment. You don’t need to say anything else. There’s no need to riff on an explanation of that; you’ve probably known what it means since the beginning of time. “We found love in a hopeless place.” That’s everything. You know exactly what it is.
Hearing this song while thrift store shopping for used clothes that the character in my new play might wear does things to me. Powerful things. It’s like a huge homage to a time in my life when I did have hope, and I don’t just mean a general kind of universal hope for the future, the suspension of doom that was the 1990’s, I mean on a personal level. It’s those opening synth sounds that remind you of Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman”…it’s like you already know this song, could recognize it anywhere, always knew it. When you listen to what Calvin Harris did, the reference to 90’s house music right from the very first moments of the track, already you’re transported to a time when people weren’t glued to their cell phones or email, when there was this new kind of strangely innocent thing, this dance music, this acid house, this scene that had its grisly dark side of OD’s on the dancefloor, but more than that just had a lot of love. This is the synthesized voice of love in analog.
And then there’s the video. This is no Lady Gaga over-priced hack-job imitation of the material girl’s ambitiously blond anthology, in which Gaga, the born-rich “artiste,” stares gauntly into the camera in an attempt to convince you that there’s something big and emotional and powerful in her when in fact it’s just another shade of neon in her vacancy sign.
No!
The beauty from Barbados actually feels things in this video and we feel them too. The people who put this video together knew what the hell they were doing. They stole all the right stuff: the dilating pupils and bathtub moments from Requiem for a Dream, the grey-skied open fields and flop houses from Trainspotting…this is divine 90’s montage: this video is perfect. It’s perfect because it’s actually presenting images from an era that was hopeful, in the same way that Harris’ musical track calls on the sounds of some seemingly-ancient rave time, so you feel the hopelessness of now even more. Sure, they could have shown images of children playing joyfully by fracking wells, or couples embracing while on the unemployment line in, like, Gary, Indiana or something. That would have been love in a hopeless place too, but that would have been too explicit. All that is already implied. And it doesn’t matter that there are shades of Rihanna and Chris Brown’s relationship in the video. Nobody cares. Chris Brown is just fuel for the story. And the story is beautiful. This past weekend, a poet friend of mine asked me if I’ve ever really been in love. I think you know love when you see it and the real thing looks just like this music video and sounds just like this song. I might as well just say it: I wish I could afford to do something this good…and I can’t.
Instead, I spend time at Zuccotti Park and sometimes I sing down there with just the voice that I have, a voice that can almost sort of compete with the sound of jack-hammers and the general assembly. And it is beautiful. It is one of the only beautiful things I’ve experienced for myself as a performer in a long time. It is beautiful, but it is small. Too small for me. I always long to do something meaningful. I’m not always that hopeful about it. For now, I’m just one RSS feed in a giant trough of RSS feed. So I become a part of something, something that I’m already a part of: the 99 percent. I’m no Rihanna. I wish I could be Rihanna. I wish this were my song, but I’m faceless and nameless and the best my voice can hope for is to be a part of the roar of the great din, the crashing on the shore, which has its own cacophonous majesty. In a sea of stars, there’s no shine in particular, just sameness. But it’s an amazing kind of sameness. Invisibility is a kind of superhero power too. This coming moment might be the end of the era of having a name. In so many Guy Fawkes masks, we’re all Anonymous and who knows what kind of songs will come from the nameless, but maybe we will find a more hopeful place.
Thanks to Michael Geffner for the photo at OWS Poetry Assembly, above.
Sweeping the Park, Sweeping the Nation
Yes, that's a broom in the air.
By Ayesha Adamo
Everyone has heard about the occupation. Everyone has seen the Youtube videos of police arrests and celebrity interviews. But on the eve of eviction, in the sometimes-pouring rain and thunder, in the middle of the night…there is another story to be told.
This is what you don’t get to see or hear as much about: the simple beauty of the exhausted, damp and nameless pushing brooms in a slow moving swarm from one end of the park to the other, here in the evening’s damp haze made shimmering by the remaining lights from the buildings above. This is when the celebrities and their spotlights and agendas are nowhere to be found (except that we were sweeping with none other than Santa Claus himself, all dressed in red). During the quiet moments, everyone’s a leader and no one’s a leader.
Part of me was thinking with concern about the runoff contamination from the cleaning agents in these suds, as we were mopping along a stream of soap bubbles, leaves, bits of salami and abandoned hair elastics, but it also seemed to be a necessary evil. It’s likely that the cleaning effort had a big impact on the city’s decision not to evict the protesters.
Throughout the night and into the morning, truckers would drive past and honk their horns loudly in solidarity, which was always met with cheers, no matter the hour. We slept on the plain ground covered with only a plastic bag to keep dry because the plan that night was to minimize the amount of sleeping bags and bedding in the park. As 5am approached, a girl came by giving out dry socks to people. Others passed around Sharpies to write the phone number of the lawyers on their body in case of arrest.
More and more people were showing up at the park, and by 6am, it was a sea of bodies as far as you could see in any direction—so far out that any statement over the people’s mic needed to be repeated in three or four ripples. So many faces, so many lights!—from cell phones, candles, video cameras…But when the breaking news came over the crowd—the news that the cleaning/eviction had been canceled—this enormous group was so unified that the words needed no repetition. From the cheers of joy alone, everybody knew. And everybody knew that they had just experienced something absolutely historic, I dare say absolutely spiritual.
The Beginning is Here
by Ayesha Adamo
With a clear blue sky and weather almost warm enough to go topless (and there were some who did), they couldn’t have picked a better day for a protest. On Wednesday 10/5/11, I came down to Occupy with the Columbia University contingent, a truly boisterous group that kept the chanting going non-stop using “the people’s mic” technique, which has proved so helpful in an action where no amplification is allowed (everyone repeats after the central speaker so that the message travels out to rings of people further and further away).
Down at Wall Street, all the groups seemed to melt into one another. There were union groups, student groups, a marching band with four tubas, a kindergarten class holding a banner together and chanting in tiny voices to share and not be greedy…just people of every sort imaginable coming together to express the need for a real change in the way things are now. And there didn’t need to be just one reason to be there because this is the new way of protesting, of understanding. This is the rhizome, like the world wide web, and the links and connections between one thing and another don’t need to make sense in a linear format. They only need to be. Just to be seen by the people in those tall buildings who don’t touch public pavement is a win, and a person would have to be cold-as-dead to look out on a crowd like this and not be moved. When I look around at all these faces—their eyes, hearts, the blood in their veins—I feel like I’ve been waiting for this all my life, and finally…The Beginning is Here.
May Day in Berlin: All That and a Bag of Tea
by Ayesha Adamo
By fate or by accident, I found myself in Berlin on May Day this year. May Day is not widely recognized as a holiday/day of demonstration in the United States, even though the date was officially chosen for international recognition because of the Chicago workers’ strike-turned-riot in 1886.
But most Americans are unaware of both the Chicago riots and the fact that the rest of the world has a socio-politically vibrant workers’ holiday associated with them.
Instead, America has so-called “Labor Day” at the end of the summer, with its barbeques and one-day sales. May Day in the US has gone the way of house music, which was also born in Chicago, but instead of celebrating Frankie Knuckles, we celebrate Lady Gaga, who kind of reminds me of a barbeque and one-day sale (think consumerism and slathering ribs in a high-gloss varnish of high fructose corn syrup).
But I digress. Back in Berlin, I had the chance to listen to German folks complain about the people in their country for a change. Many longed for the good old days, when supermarkets were burned to the ground in riots that “really meant something.” Many spoke of how May Day has now become a theatre of rage, how the young want to throw their stones and the police play their role dutifully, but the script has lost its meaning compared to what it was like in the 1980’s. They likened today’s May Day to a ritualized rebellion, a stage on which to act out one’s discontent with society on a single scheduled day of the year so that the other days might remain peaceful. It’s a bit like carnival: a day when the rules don’t count.
But this year, one meaningful demonstration rose above the usual melee. At this May Day action, 10,000 peaceful demonstrators gathered in Prenzlauer Berg and blocked all possible paths of a Neo-Nazi march across Berlin. According to those I met who were there, the cops were obligated to help the Nazi group push through the crowd or find a different route, in protection of their free speech and all that. Reportedly, the cops lived up to this expectation, albeit somewhat feebly, but when all paths were filled with masses of opposing protesters, they had no choice but to send the Nazis home.
“Who are these Nazis, anyway?” I asked. It was then explained to me that they weren’t officially a “Nazi” party – that would be illegal – but rather a group of ultra conservatives, “You know, like in America you have the Tea Party. It’s people like that.” I soon found out that this was hardly an isolated analogy. “You know, Nazi’s. You guys call them the Tea Party.” In fact, this is what I heard at every dinner party when the subject came up, which it inevitably did, and without the slightest note of force or hatred in the statement, but as though it were just another simple fact – as though this one to one relationship between “Nazi” and “Tea Party” were as natural as breathing Berlin’s spring air…which is much fresher than New York’s spring air, by the way.
Now, I had never thought of it quite in those terms, but I knew what they meant. Sure, the flagrant stars-n-stripes nationalism is a bit of a social gaffe in the international arena, and there’s a hyper-awareness about overt nationalism in a country like Germany, not just because of social sophistication, but because it’s ingredient #1 in a fascist regime…and Germans know how to spot a fascist regime a mile away by now. Practice makes perfect, but it would be better if America didn’t have to repeat the same exercises to learn the lesson.
Then there’s the fact that nobody who’s ever lived in a country with socialized healthcare (myself included) has the faintest idea why anyone would be against it – unless of course, you’re one of those greedy assholes who runs a health insurance company. Do the ‘Baggers just think people should die if they can’t afford to be healthy? Can’t they imagine that they might one day be in the dollars-or-die quandary? Do they just not care about anyone else? In Berlin, someone reasoned, “They’ve read Foucault and they’re against biopower!” Naturally, everybody laughed, for obvious reasons. After all, a poll by CBS News reported that for all that Tea Baggers are “better educated than most Americans,” many having graduated from college and such, only eight percent of those polled knew that the meaning of the word “socialism” had something to do with a redistribution of wealth. But then 77 percent of Tea Party activists get their news from Fox News, proving that the ancient art of hypnotism is alive and well. CBSNews
And how about Fox News. You know, when you think about it, maybe it took a group of righties to revive the dead artforms known as protest and demonstration in America. No one in the Murdoch-manipulated press wants to give airtime to lefty protests, even if it’s a movement too large to be ignored. You don’t even see mention of the less conservative Coffee Party that’s conquered Facebook. If the Tea Party’s legacy ends up being that they made public demonstration a viable activity in America again, it’s not a bad legacy, but if the lefties want any press in the old media, they’re going to need to jump on the Tea Party’s frock and coattails for it, maybe do what they did in Berlin.
What’s most amazing about Tea Party PR is the way that they, and even their more extreme sub-groups like the American Third Position, have adopted retro lefty lingo from the golden age of protests by calling themselves “anti-establishment” without even a breath of irony. True Tea Party supporters don’t seem to realize that they’ve latched on to a movement that’s sponsored by corporate giants, the very people that the movement is supposed to be in opposition to. What kind of grassroots movement can afford to pay Sarah Palin $100,000 for just one appearance? Here at Loss of Eden, we could have told ‘em first-hand that this wasn’t a grassroots movement back in early 2009, when David and I handed over a copy of our song “Here’s Your Revolution” to someone at Clear Channel who was gathering music for “…a protest, this little Tea Party thing they were hoping to organize.” Something like that. Who knew that the little-tea-party-that-could would go so far? Rupert Murdoch? The Clear Channel Conspiracy? What else can one think when all the early press shows up in the same predictable places?
On the other hand, it’s hard to completely write off any group that so vocally opposes bailouts of the financial industry. Now, I can’t really read the German newspapers, but from the looks of the headlines, it doesn’t seem like they’re so excited to bail out Greece, but at least Greece has something to offer Germany: beaches, sunshine, naked statues…When was the last time the Wall Streeters brought anything half that good to the table for Americans?
And yet, that’s when you have to ask yourself: why would the rich guys at Fox and Clear Channel want to pretend to be against the rich guys on Wall Street? So that they can actually push the real agenda of less regulations for the big, powerful companies? It’s like a sneaky kind of bailout that keeps on giving, and keeps on taking from the people who need it most, like the fishermen on the Gulf Coast who are going to suffer for the lack of enforced regulations on the big guys for a long, long time. Kind of reminds me of the way that J.P. Morgan gained support for central banking by spreading rumors that lead to the Panic of 1907, and Warburg kept the volley going by selectively quoting Abe Lincoln to make the central banking idea sound more legit. Our current financial crisis doesn’t have a spiffy name yet, not like “The Panic of 1907,” and the Tea Party prefers The Constitution to Honest Abe, but the point is to gain popular support for deregulation of any sort – cap and trade, for example – which helps the big corporations, just like the central banking system helps the big financiers. Resisting cap and trade doesn’t make more jobs for the people who need them. You would think that with the Grand Ole Opry under water, or the destruction of revenue for fishermen, tourism and ultimately much more on the Gulf, the true Tea Baggers would understand that this kind of action, an action against the environment that we all have to live in, only helps the Halliburtons of the world.
You would think…but you would be wrong, somehow.
But on May Day in Berlin, we’re pouring wine and clinking glasses, distancing ourselves from the insurrection that we might already be in the middle of, and waiting for the big meltdown. The expat next to me mentioned how surprised and embarrassed he was on his first European theatre tour when he heard that the money allotted to the Arts in the city of Frankfurt was equal to the entire budget for the National Endowment for the Arts in America. But America does have its theatre, no doubt. When I heard about the man who suicide bombed the IRS in Texas a few months back, it was hard not to be moved by the performance. It hardly mattered that the far right had adopted this fallen pilot as a hero; it was the gesture itself and the reasoning behind it that meant something. In Berlin, you can tell from the ease in a person’s step, the ease in their lifestyle, the funding of their Art and their healthcare, the way that all their trains run smoothly and on-time: however imperfect it may be, these Germans have a government that cares enough to support people. Americans do not. As I always say, “when you have nothing to lose, you become capable of anything.” So many in America are reaching that point, the point of having nothing to lose. It is no longer theatre, or perhaps it’s theatre of the best sort: the theatre of rage that is real.
On my very first day of acting class, I learned that Sandy Meisner defined acting as “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.” Is it any wonder that crashing a plane into an IRS building seemed to one man the most truthful way to live, and die, under the imaginary system of market economy, now that we’ve taken capitalism all the way? The man with a plane is the proof that when America finally decides to do theatre, America does it all the way, too. Maybe it’s those living truthfully in the imaginary circumstances of our economy that are the only ones living truthfully at all.
Across the table, Thomas, who had long ago abandoned the rebel life of a pre-teen Maoist who lived to beat up cops to embrace academic life as an anthropologist, pointed out the sound of the May Day helicopters circling above us – the sound of keeping order, but it’s really more for show. He said, “When I hear that, I start treading in my stall.”
Me too.
