being there

So I'm having a premiere on the 18th of January, and the group (Cantate Chamber Singers) is bringing me to Washington D.C. and putting me up for the nights of the 16th through the 18th. And then I'm heading back home. Yeah, leaving D.C. on Monday the 19th. :)

It may sound a little crazy, but I'm not that attached to physically being near the inauguration -- spending a January day attempting to cram in somewhere among a crush of 4 million people that's already making the city of D.C. pretty much throw its hands up.

If I want to spend time with other people in celebration mode, I'll be able to do it on Saturday, when the party certainly will have started. (I'm mostly excited about spending Saturday and Monday daytimes in the Smithsonian museums and galleries, which I imagine will be feeling verrrrry festive and crowded.)

My trip back to NYC on the 19th will be very easy and uncrowded... the ultimate reverse-commute. And on the 20th, there will undoubtedly be something going on up here in the way of celebration. :)

It's the little joys.

Beyond the dancing in the streets, beyond the promise for the Supreme Court and the cabinet and the Constitution and the world at large, I'm still realizing the tiny joyful things about Obama. Take the Post Office, for example.

For somebody who's so bent on being as paperless as possible, I still have to head for the Post Office surprisingly often. In NYC, that means waiting in line at the Post Office. And, in most of the branches I end up using, what do I have to stare at every time? The framed portrait of George W. Bush watching over the line with his creepy simian warmongering Constitution-shredding grin.

Well, just two more months of that... then Obama smile instead, and everything it means presiding over a Post Office line full of progressive, tolerant, every-colored people. What will it mean to have a president who makes me feel relaxed rather than queasy when he smiles at me?

flußsehnsucht... riverlonging

Spending this momentous night in a city that feels, for a couple of strong reasons, like a place I belong and a place I love. Even more than I thought I would, though, I wish I were home. I want to share this night with NYC. I doubt I would want to be at a party or even with other people at all; it feels very good to be alone (and especially valuable to be relaxing, in silence, rather than following the results minute by minute).

But I wanted to stand in line today, in my familiar position as one dot in the wild dizzying mix of people and origins and stories. I wanted to wake up tomorrow and walk in that river and feel my country moving further -- symbolically and otherwise -- towards the real mix. the dream of equal opportunities, the dream of common languages and spaces for every language. the dream of fear dissolved into opening, open minds and open eyes.

evolution eve.

Beautiful afternoon and evening at a North Carolina Obama volunteer outpost (the Corner Oak B&B, should anybody reading this in the future be interested in supporting a business that stayed closed for days in order to host an Obama volunteer operation!).

After doing some data cleanup, I switched over to making phone calls. During this campaign, I've gotten to experience both pre-vetting and post-vetting phone lists. A few weeks ago, there were many more hangups, wrong numbers, and angry "Will you people stop calling me?" moments; tonight's calling, on the other hand, involved a much higher percentage of people who were happy to hear from me. Many people tonight seemed genuinely excited and thanked me repeatedly (I've never experienced that critical mass of grateful people in any other phone-banking situation).

And for my part, I was fed amazing vegan soup (and homemade fudge) and I got to work among an ever-rotating cast of interesting people including typically hot activist types. :) And it looks like my work tomorrow will be more social: after some more computer work, I'll probably be among the group headed for the polls to support people with food/water/conversation (the campaign is expecting extremely long lines, lasting well after the polls close).

When I'm done with that work I will probably disconnect from media, take a deep breath, and not look again until the results are very likely to be clear. Letting go is deeply valuable on a night like tomorrow night.

Let all the evil machinations and vote-stealing and disenfranchisement and open brazen lies unfold and float away. Desperate tattered little flags trying to hold back the winds of change.

John Adams, terrorist

An interestingly broad mix of people in my life have pointed me to an article in The Guardian about John Adams (well-known American composer of the documentary operas Nixon in China; The Death of Klinghoffer; and now Doctor Atomic, currently running at the Met). This weekend, Adams told BBC Radio he's "blacklisted" in his own country because he's found himself on the terrorist watchlist that results in harsh receptions and interrogations each time a person on the list goes to an airport.

Now, while I would be the last to deny the reality that the government's keeping a close eye on artists who do politically-charged work (at least two groups I was part of were on the NYPD's "Hip Hop Task Force" surveillance list when that story broke a few years ago, and no doubt my Axis of Beauty project has perked up the metaphorical ears of Carnivore and its various spawn)... it's also likely that a guy named "John Adams" now gets harassed at every airport just because the watchlists are so broken that it's impossible to make distinctions among people who have the same name (and the more common a name, the more likely it's on at least one of the lists).

So a distinguished composer joins the endless litany of toddlers, nationally known politicians, and even top Homeland Security officials who've gotten caught in this head-spinningly haphazard and unregulated system. "Blacklisting" in the historical sense might not be the most accurate name for the experience -- he's not being prevented from having his work performed and recorded -- but clearly, the situation is shameful.

Four years in federal prison for thought crimes?

Earlier this month a Tampa court announced a sentence of 46 months in federal prison in the Max Hardcore case. So far I haven't heard any discussions about it that don't dismiss his case as a laughable curiosity and/or disintegrate into not-the-point debates over people's personal reactions to his videos.

Am I the only one thinking it's a serious leap into scariness for our country to send a man to federal prison for four years on "obscenity" charges? He produced hardcore consensual porn videos using only adult actors. No one's disputing that. He was sentenced based on the usual obscenity test of offending "community standards" (trial was in Tampa but charges are federal). Don't obscenity charges typically lead to financial penalties (fines and/or confiscation of the materials in question) rather than prison time?

Is this case getting ignored because free speech advocates aren't crazy about a hardcore gonzo porn producer as a First Amendment test case? Well, test cases for free speech are, almost by definition, not comfortable for everyone. I'm personally way happier arguing for hardcore porn or for 2 Live Crew lyrics than arguing for Neo-Nazis' right to march down Main Street -- but I will argue for all of them. Personal comfort is not the point.

I absolutely believe the slippery slope of criminally prosecuting speech is more dangerous than any speech itself. What's next -- and who's next?

how sweet it tasted

(Meanwhile, my experiment with twitter is serving its intended purpose nicely, as a record of "tasting the strawberries" moments outside the complexities & distractions of life. I want to get more consistent at posting there when I encounter or think of something really wonderful.)

belief systems

Slowly relaxing now, after a stretch of being unwillingly thrust into Big Complex Drama even when I had no part in it initially... and no desire for it... and, even more than usual, no time for it. :) The mellow/peaceful can still stumble into the occasional battlefield.

All a useful experience. Needing to understand people whose perspectives are extremely different from one's own is always useful.

... as is being able to shake one's head in wonder, rather than anger, at the distortions and falsehoods that can pop up just one step away in the telephone game.

... as is accepting that the most local version of truth (or at least emotional truth) might depend on another person genuinely believing something that in one's own mind seems materially -- factually -- impossible to believe.

I've been described more than once by that peculiar and telling phrase, "honest to a fault." In many contexts, honesty puts one at a disadvantage. In many contexts, honesty is considered un-American, unsophisticated, naïve. But in some cases, the lines are quite fuzzy. And recently I've dealt with fallout from the whole spectrum of people's actions ranging from lies to misunderstandings. Unambiguously-on-purpose lies; actions with unclear purpose or unclear origin; and misunderstandings that only caused damage because they were inappropriately shared in public.

The answer is always trying to see the biggest possible picture -- the broadest range of perspectives and possible motivations. Especially when one is dealing with humans one cares about, intent and perspective matter as much as the actions that come from them. The real work, the often hard and dizzying work, is in uncovering intent and perspective. As for the situation at hand, even if some of the intent/perspective isn't yet obvious, the key is that I'm still trying to understand it.

one life

[UPDATE: emergency Supreme Court session did happen, and Davis received a stay an hour before his execution time. One life saved, for some block of time... and it only took 100K+ calls and faxes, protest marches on three continents, and personal appeals from Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, and the Pope......]

In a way, it's illogical to care as much as I do about whether or not the state of Georgia will kill Troy Davis tonight. One life in the sea of lives our government has ended. Why is Troy Davis more important than someone in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in a cell at Guantanamo? Well: he's symbolic. Our justice system killing him means something very different, for America in general, than our war machine killing one of the masses it dehumanized so effectively with "Axis of Evil" propaganda.

He's symbolic in that he hasn't received a retrial, or even a stay of execution, after his case has utterly fallen apart over the 17 years he's spent on death row. No physical evidence against him; seven of nine witnesses recanting and an eighth who didn't identify Davis until two years after the fact; proof of police fabricating witness statements (a "written statement" by a man who, it turns out, can't read or write); and physical evidence against the ninth "witness," who most of the other former witnesses say is the real killer.

Today, a last-minute flood of media attention... and a supposed emergency Supreme Court hearing, although I'm not hearing anything about it and it's after 5pm. So for the moment I'm just refreshing the CNN article, which seems to be most frequently updated. Which process is kind of gruesome in itself. The oddly voyeuristic detail. "NEW: Davis refuses his final meal." Updated 4:57pm. The meal consists of "macaroni and cheese, pinto beans, green beans, lettuce and tomato salad, corn bread, fruit cobbler and tea."

For me, what is Twitter for?

I do understand the appeal of watching, and being woven into, a fabric of many people's daily minutiae. There's comfort there, above and beyond the various usefulnesses of connecting with other people. There's a feeling of fitting into place, being significant yet insignificant (another puppy in the pile), making sense even to near-strangers. But for me, I think, twitter's benefits will come from making myself get very specific.

For example, a while ago I did a month-long experiment with a subject-specific twitter account, and I found the primary benefit for me was the increased feeling of accountability. If you're reporting what you're doing in a way that's sustained and 'public' to any degree at all, you do feel moved to have things to report. I know I engaged more with that account's subject matter than I would've otherwise, which was beneficial all around. This suggests it might be useful, in a life that's still so full of administrivia and the business of supporting myself, to have a composing twitter where I only report on the moments when I've made time for actually composing. "Working on Gather These Mirrors." "Working on Shahida." Entries like that wouldn't have any broad appeal, but number of followers isn't important -- just publicness-to-any-extent. Could I make myself make at least one entry like that every day?

In the same vein, my new experiment is a twitter account just for "what's wonderful" -- another area where I'm interested in accountability, in making myself both focus on and articulate/preserve something specific. There's so much random beauty and so many small joyful thoughts in any given day, but these things get displaced by logistics and responsibilities and unpleasant surprises and all the enervating mechanics of living in an expensive, competitive, overcrowded city.

So this new account is strictly for recording some of the random joys that flash into my head -- just taking a minute to fix each of them in a form that says, "This is important too." This gorgeous pattern the sun's making on the wall; this mind-opening image I just saw in somebody's blog; this rush of happiness at the IM thread; this out-loud laugh at the terrible pun. "Delight is important too." Not frivolous, not a waste -- not distraction but core.

FOV sympathetic vibrations

Several of my friends/partners come back today from the first edition of Fires of Venus, where I would've been this weekend if I'd ended up having the time and money (it was way more important for me to have a focused work-weekend, given how crazy-full this month has been).

I'm so delighted FOV has gone well, and I'm so grateful to Cat and the rest of the organizers for making FOV & Beltane happen. As far as I know, no other east coast sex event series is so richly varied, relaxed, low-key/mellow and open. I really wish I could've been part of it. Next time!

A Farewell to CrackBerries, and a hello to (!) AOL

So I'm past my contractual obligation with T-Mobile and it's time to let the BlackBerry service go -- even though BB service was my perfect solution for super-cheap data access all over northern Serbia and Sweden (and even though "Woo, I have five bars of unlimited EDGE in small-town Serbia, exactly like I have in NYC, for $1.50 a day" gave me the same global-village thrill I'd gotten during the 2006 elections with "Woo, I'm making all my MoveOn.org calls for free with SkypeOut from my rented room in Vienna, exactly like I would in NYC").

There will be better options for next summer's Serbia/Eurotrails (perhaps some hacktastic -- or even Apple-sanctioned, by that point -- VOIP on an iPod Touch). And my BB has never worked consistently for laptop tethering, which was my other main intent for it (for that, I'm still using my seven-year-old Sprint phone, which is slow but rock-solid as a cell modem, and which is at least grandfathered into $10/mo unlimited data :)).

I did find BB service mildly addictive (which for me is saying a LOT, since I have one of the least addictive personalities of anybody I know).

But the only important element of BB service for me to replace was sms. I tried a few web-to-sms services that had beautifully implemented websites but were, in terms of the actual sms delivery, either not ready for prime time or ad-supported. I've finally settled on the free, two-way IM-to-sms feature in AIM. After years of helping various friends try to use AOL's main email client, I'd developed an instinct that AOL products weren't that usable either... but it's good to get over that instinct. AIM-to-sms is reliable and stable and ad-free, and I'm really grateful it exists!

And I do still have warm fuzzy feelings about AOL as a company, given that they paid me $6K for about 300 hours of the most pleasant work I've ever done for money (back in those heady pre-dotcom-crash days when they were still throwing cash at their fledgling Digital City network and I was "principal classical music writer" for New York, which mostly involved writing concert/event previews and was the holy grail of a telecommuting job where I never even met my boss in person, much less set foot in an office).

I do need to record -- for use in AIM, or just for posterity -- the new-sms alert sound I've been using on my BlackBerry, which became such an amazing Pavlovian trigger for fast heartbeats and delight and horniness during those first few months of my relationship with B. (speaking of heady early days :)).

Questioning that instinct

This was the first September 11th anniversary that felt essentially like an ordinary day to me. I had a great workday and then a lovely (surprise) night of sex, very simple and sweet and relaxed, both of us sort of agreeing in an unspoken way to be in the light. I remember the first sex I had after 9/11, so intense and amplified -- still not breathing normally, still with ash-lungs and still with hypersensitivity to the sounds of planes and helicopters circling our city -- both of us wondering if we'd ever stop feeling caught between life and death or feeling the presence in our own bodies of the fragmented human bodies we knew we'd inhaled.

I do still sometimes look at the streets and remember the mountains of ash piled higher than the cars, or that first morning in the middle of the cloud when the world was opaque -- but those flashes aren't really connected to a point on the calendar. I feel like the day itself has lost significance as it's expanded into so much more horror, in the occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq and the dizzying range of terrorist actions by the U.S. theoretically in response to that day. The day has been diluted as a moment of human horror and certainly as a moment of Terrorism, even as Americans have been stripped of so much in the name of 'preparing' for terrorism.

Over the course of this summer I've had reason to put a lot of thought into the idea of living in a state of readiness, that state of 'being prepared for the worst' that's been drummed into Americans and especially New Yorkers since 9/11. Earlier this summer I wrote a poem, the start of which was: "Oh yes. I remember the sickness of living in a State of Readiness. Pairs of soldiers with automatic rifles standing, silent, in every subway station; the collective nightmares so clear, unspeakable but unmistakable, pulsing in strangers' eyes. Eight million bodies waking up in the same sweat. And almost seven years later, the stations still infested, now with the latest poster campaign -- If You See Something, Say Something -- and seven years later every backpack still subject to random search. (Surveillance and blank suggestible fear, the tattered security blankets we won't travel without.) You must imagine the scenario in detail in order to survive it. Preparation is control, the only possible control. If you have no agency, you must imagine a state of emergency-agency: what you would do, who you would be, what you would take and leave behind."

Interestingly, part of the ease and non-event-ness of this September 11th is connected to my process, this summer, of being forced to re-examine and really question that instinct toward 'readiness for the worst.' That instinct is definitely not a natural one for me (nor should it be for anybody who's lucky enough to live in a relatively stable, secure, free country). My process of reaffirming my natural orientation toward intense investment in the present, with 'planning' implying optimism and confidence rather than fear.

Goodnight, Astroland.

New Yorkers have known for a few years that Astroland (Coney Island's last surviving theme park) would have to shut down, as we watched Thor Equities buy up most of central Coney Island with plans to turn it into a Vegas-scale luxury resort.

Carol Hill Albert, co-owner of Astroland, said yesterday: "I have given up on trying to get Thor to negotiate, which I have attempted to do every month since June, and numerous times in August. Each time their response was, 'We have no answer.' ... It takes six months to pack up a three-acre amusement park that has been in operation for 46 years, so a January 31st deadline means start packing yesterday. We are out of time. [Astroland] will cease operations permanently at the end of the day on Sunday, September 7th."

Development on Coney actually started out in "grand playground for the rich" mode, with the island's various sections gradually cycling over the decades into "backyard getaway for everybody" mode, and finally (over the last few decades) decaying physically but starting to blossom culturally. There were annual art/costume parades that were focal points of summer for many New Yorkers, the Village Voice's annual Siren Festival, and exhibits and installation projects from the likes of Creative Time (NYC's biggest public-art funding/producing org). In the broadest view, this might be just another swing toward grand-playground land that eventually gives way to another era of freewheeling arts/culture for the people. But it's certainly -- at least for the moment -- the end of an era.

A few of my Astroland snapshots from a fun visit there with Alex, five years ago:

one day in the river

Happy birthday to me. Many gifts! Much love, and much good work, over the last year.

Best material gift of the moment is the deeee-luxe housesitting / catsitting gig. Huge artists' loft in Brooklyn, where I get to work surrounded by two people's paintings-in-progress (and surrounded by trade magazines and self-promotion brochures and lists of galleries to contact... I know working artists' lives are full of admin work no matter their field, but it's still funny to see other people's admin-flotsam). I also get to remind myself how great it feels to make a cat roll around on the floor in pleasure.

Incredibly useful to be alone in a new place while I finish a piece as intense as Wild Illuminating. And now is a perfect time for mostly being a hermit, since the fall concert season doesn't really rev up until later in September anyway. (I did unhermit tonight for a very sweet birthday dinner with Alex.)

On my last birthday I was in Stockholm for the first time, and I wondered whether I could pull off "every future birthday in a place I've never been." Nope: I'm home in NYC today. But maybe I can pull it off bienially. :) Next birthday, I'm likely to be outside the U.S. at least....