My mother survives, but I’m still not sure she’s lived much. After the divorce, we moved north, first to her sister’s, then to a one-bedroom apartment — I don’t remember if we shared a bed, or if we had two mattresses, or if she slept in the living room and I in the bedroom. (I just realized I don’t remember this, which kind of freaks me out.) She worked hard, and I was mortified to be the child always picked up last at day care, especially when the watcher pityingly told me that child protective services would come if my mom weren’t more punctual. I repeated this to my mother, often, but did not note a change in her behavior.

My mother defines nearly everything in terms of strict utility. A pen is a pen, whether a $.20 Bic or a $60 fountain pen. Walking is walking; our street’s sidewalk is equivalent to the bike path behind the house, which is equivalent to a fire trail around the reservoir, a rocky tread up a mountain, or a bright, sterile aquarium at the mall. Food is necessary for survival, and although she is capable of enjoying it, she prefers to stay in the cave (see, e.g., her opening the fridge this weekend and me pseudo-vomiting 20 yards away, due to the rotting seafood she hadn’t realized was unsuitable for consumption).

Love seems to inspire humans more than any other phenomenon. We breed, of course; we devote ourselves to our passions; we are restless, seeking, hungry for something to love. We read and write and sing and work, work, work, all in the name of love. We build cities for love. We clean hospitals for love. We do nearly everything for love. I worry about my mother because I had shut down her love, and today she loves so few that I’m unsure she’s alive.

As a fourth grader, all you want is the boy you adore to like you back. But once you’ve been in love, if not sooner, you realize that, of course, humans love love not because we need someone else to protect us and keep us warm — after all, that isn’t love. Instead, we love love because we love how the act of loving another makes us feel. To be in love is to be most alive and human — to be generous, to be expansive, to try your best, because you decide that is the best way to honor your loved one. Being in love is wonderful, not Love Actually’s ”terrible agony” — said agony is that of Florentino Ariza, not the actual manifested love of the hundreds of miracles we see every day, or, in fiction, of Tami and Eric Taylor.

Especially after the divorce, my mother needed to love. She picked me up for bear hugs, smothered me with kisses, told me she loved me again and again, and begged for me to kiss her back. I squirmed, I turned my cheek, I kicked her, I told her I didn’t want to kiss her, I wanted to watch Power Rangers and read books and get a dog and play the clarinet and be an astronomer and climb trees and love my friends and miss my dad. I rebuffed her, refusing to let her fully manifest her love, her humanity.

It seems to me that we do not need others to love us so much as we need others not to shut down our love. Maybe I’m just more callous than most, or refuse to recognize my needs, but it seems that we think we need to be loved, not because we necessarily need other people to luxuriate in loving us — after all, we, personally, don’t get to feel those feelings — but because we need others not to shut down our love. We want to love, and we don’t want anyone taking that high away from us. We think that those most likely to let us fully manifest love are those who love us, in turn — this might be true. But the millions who love Justin Bieber certainly don’t expect him to love them back, individually. Instead, it is enough to give, and give, and love, because the act of loving is so self-renewing that one may sustain — may exhilarate — in it as long as one wants.

At least once a week for the next four years, I implored my mother to let me learn the clarinet. I looked forward to the fourth grade like other little girls did their imagined wedding days, excited for the free lessons the public schools would bestow. My mother said no, again and again and again; then she said maybe, but I would have to learn the piano, first. I did this. She still said no. Finally, when I was a  year behind, a rented plastic model lent gravitas to my palms, and as soon as my first class let out, Dad drove us to Campana, where he found a Benny Goodman cassette tape that we played in the car for years on end. And although my clarinet was more beaten, less fashionable, its case more bulky than my classmates’, from my first class on, I squawked, squealed, squeaked, and screeched to my heart’s content.

Obviously, I still can’t tell you why I loved, demanded, the clarinet.

[Nor, frankly, can I articulate why I like most things. I love music, but I rarely notice lyrics. I love novels, but perform pedestrian literary analysis. I love eating, but love both one-note and "complex" flavors. I am typing this while watching Fiddler on the Roof for the twentieth time, although I often cannot make it through a new movie on my couch. (P.S. "Sunrise, Sunset." Oh God. Oh God. Oh my God. Also, this wedding scene, generally, and its extended music, has to be one of the greatest forces of all time. Not just because it heavily features the clarinet. I'm still kind of sad Kevin and I never actually got together that klezmer band.)]

That said, although I may never know why I fell in love with the clarinet, I know why I love it. I love its weight in my hands. I love how the grenadilla wood smells, and how the cold silver-plated copper keys quickly warm to my touch. I love how it feels when I push the keys that push the fishskin pads that gently give when they hit the firm wood. I love the ritual of opening the case, smelling my instrument, gently, firmly, lovingly guiding the joints together, pressing them into each other, aligning them for maximum performance, test-blowing because, as perfect as this professional-grade instrument is, the middle barrels need just a bit of tweaking to ensure their clarity. I love to pull half a dozen reeds out of the box and inspect each’s grains to determine what I will attempt to play that day, even though God knows that shit is just impossible and I can barely tell what may or may not be semipassable that day. I love that I do know if a reed will be good once it’s in my mouth, and how its wood smell contrasts with the instrument’s.

And then there is the sound. I don’t know if I’d be so crazy about the sound if I did not play it, myself; maybe not, because, based on its relative dearth of repertoire, I assume I’d be more enamored of another. But, as my life actually stands, little is more beautiful than how Brahms melds it with cello, or how Copland distills it into a Western spirit, or its centrality in eastern European wedding music — and, of course, that original, scratchy 1930s Benny Goodman recording, with Gene Krupa whaling away in tandem.

Three weeks ago, I loitered on my hotel bed in Collinsville, waiting to go home, when, thanks to Twitter, I first saw Youtube videos of my hometown at war. Already raw from the events at work, I was shocked to see men in body armor marching through my downtown against a hazy orange sky. I teared up at the smoke clouds before my BART station, and pre-angrily clenched my fists at my city as war zone.

My criticism of both Slutwalk and #Occupy comes down to, I think, essentially two intersecting points:

1. They’re nondirectional, in that there is not a particular, discrete target of either. I mean, maybe there is. Misogyny? Capitalism? But the “misogyny” aspect of Slutwalk is so obscured — see, e.g., the blatant racism and classism endorsed by many — and come on, like the vast majority of Americans/the 99/even the Occupiers think that capitalism, itself, needs to go.

2. Both are targeted — if they’re targeted — at forces that don’t necessarily respond to democratic protest. For example, in high school, I, too, participated in protests against going to war in Iraq, but I still stand by that now, because, at least nominally, those decisionmakers are supposed to listen to the electorate. Goldman Sachs, however, or whoever, doesn’t have to listen to us at all.

So, against this backdrop, why have I rallied for #occupyoakland? Frankly, because of the insane, overwrought police backlash.

I don’t need to beat a dead horse. If you know me, I’ve probably subjected you to an interminable newsfeed of horrendous OPD behavior over the past few weeks. But for a recent example, today, the newspaper reports that at last night’s raid, most police officers covered their name tags and badges with tape or body armor — directly defying California Penal Code § 830.10, which requires all uniformed law enforcement personnel to display their name or identification number on their uniform.

Again, if you want more background, I’d be happy to talk to you about it, or to point you to some specific resources. But my own personal perspective is that when I have needed, have requested, the OPD, they have never been there. My one-on-one interactions with OPD officers largely have been absolutely fine, and even during the event I’m about to mention, have been perfectly pleasant. But there has got to be an institutional issue.

I have called the OPD, at one o’clock on a weekday morning, several times in a row, asking for their assistance in an emergency. And they showed up — two hours later. And they walked him away, telling him to sleep it off at a friend’s house, but he came back thirty minutes later.

And all I’m saying here is that: when you have an emergency, and it takes them so long to come that the potential crisis would not have been averted; and when you live in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the city, and “sound white,” and describe the imminent threat to your dispatch agent, and still must wait so long; and when there is a one-foot, sixty-pound discrepancy between you and your antagonist, and all the police do is walk him to the front door –

And then you see hundreds of officers converge on a peaceful protest, at which there had been, at that point, no property destruction, no violent incidents, no crime out of the ordinary, and all this congregating was located in a business district in which the protestors were not keeping local residents awake at night, because there are none –

And you see the OPD and the city do this, again and again, and both parties attempt to absolve themselves of responsibility –

And you hear the OPD and the city complain that the protestors need to leave so the police officers can “go back to their jobs” and police the rest of the city –

And you remember that the FBI considers Oakland the fifth most dangerous city in the United States, and that all parts of the city except the site on which the protestors congregate are considered fairly dangerous, and that girls go missing every day, and over one hundred people have been killed with guns so far in 2011 (seven of them by the OPD), and this rate has increased this year, and there is prostitution, and open drug dealing, and shootings, and break-ins, and beatings, and theft, and burglary, in most of the city, and the police do very little to help these residents in any zip code but my own, and my neighbors’ –

And you know that the Oakland Unified School District had been (has been, is) so plagued by failure that the state took it over for five years, and that the OPD has manifested such utter disregard for the rule of law that it has been under the monitoring of a federal judge since 2003, per a U.S. Department of Justice inquiry –

And you see Cal students peacefully, loudly protesting in Sproul Plaza, when the UC cops suddenly lose their shit and start waling on the students with their batons, again, and again, and again, while scared students shriek in confusion and anguish, but hold their line –

And you remember that, on the night the police first congregated and laid waste to #occupyoakland, it was just another night in Oakland, on which most of us were sleeping comfortably in our beds but too many were scared, were endangered, were dangers, were hungry, were cold, were exhausted, were hopeless –

And you remember that the protestors organically decided to rename Frank Ogawa Plaza Oscar Grant Plaza, in remembrance of the poor young man, lying face-down on a BART platform, shot and killed in the back by a BART officer on New Year’s Day 2009, well before all this occupy v. police insanity ever went down –

while I might think #occupy overall is a little too amorphous for my own tastes, the instant I saw my beloved Oakland as a war zone, I, too, thought that, fucking finally, the world can’t deny the OPD’s institutional failures.

P.S. Another time — Renaming the Plaza and the Erasure of Asian-American Political Influence

Twenty-six years ago, the client was born in St. Louis to Nigerian parents. By intermediate school, the client’s father saw his son’s academic social and progress hampered by stereotype: his scrawny son’s teachers suggested that, while he might never be any good at math, he most likely would be great at football, and the son had begun emulating the majority of African-American men he saw in the popular consciousness: entertainers. Therefore, the father decided to send his son to boarding school abroad.

The son spent some summers at home in the States, and eventually came back from boarding school to attend Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville.

Although the son was a pretty bad student, when later questioned by the police, his professors had nothing bad to say about him. Nor did his police-interviewed friends and acquaintances. By the time of his arrest, he was the president of his (African-American) fraternity. He was an aspiring entrepreneur and rapper. Of the 2000 or so pages from his notebooks entered into evidence and sent back with the jury, at least 80% of the writing devoted to his nascent rap lyrics and various business plans. He had performed on campus (and actually had released a single featuring Project Pat in late summer 2011).

He loved music, throwing parties, girls, and guns. He was a registered firearms owner and had recently purchased three .380 hi-points for approximately half their market value. He purchased these three pistols at the same time as a semi-automatic Mac-10, hoping to resell the pistols to fund the more interesting gun.

July 2007 was a busy time for the client. He was enrolled in summer school classes, and also in the process of moving between apartments on/near campus. He was a 22-year-old male college student, and gradually moving between the nearby locations. His car was not only filled with the usual car junk, but also extra items he was moving, including his winter clothes.

Moreover, his girlfriend lived in St. Louis, about 25 minutes away. As he drove back from her place one day, he ran out of gas, approximately two blocks from his on-campus apartment. He pulled over and parked his car on the rural campus road, intending to come back for it once he got gas money.

Over 48 hours later, campus police considered the detritus-filled car abandoned and began the process of towing it, including entering the locked vehicle and rifling through its contents. The car was filled with notebooks, loose papers, trash, CDs, clothing, and other items one might typically find in a 22-year-old-boy-in-the-process-of-moving’s car. On the floor between the center console and the driver’s seat, the police found a crumpled-up piece of paper, about 2″ by 4″, from a promotional asthma inhaler prescription pad. The paper had various notes on each side, including the words, “send $2 to….paypal account if this account doesnt reach $50,000 in the next 7 days then a murderous rampage similar to the VT shooting will occur at another prestigious highly populated university. THIS IS NOT A JOKE!”

Upon rifling through his car and finding this crumpled-up note on the floor, the police arrested the client. The grand jury charged him with attempt to make a terrorist threat, which is the act of committing one or more substantial steps toward committing the following crime (in relevant part):

“(a) A person is guilty of making a terrorist threat when, with the intent to intimidate or coerce a significant portion of a civilian population, he or she in any manner knowingly threatens to commit or threatens to cause the commission of a terrorist act as defined in Section 29D-10(1) and thereby causes a reasonable expectation or fear of the imminent commission of a terrorist act as defined in Section 29D-10(1) or of another terrorist act as defined in Section 29D-10(1). (b) It is not a defense to a prosecution under this Section that at the time the defendant made the terrorist threat, unknown to the defendant, it was impossible to carry out the threat, nor is it a defense that the threat was not made to a person who was a subject or intended victim of the threatened act.”*

*IL ST CH 720 § 5/29D-20

**http://www.thetelegraph.com/articles/oduwole-61067-threat-evidence.html#ixzz1bzMGfpgm

Singer (Star Search-style)
Teacher
First woman NBA player (Magic Johnson-style)
Artist
Astronaut
Astronomer
Writer (Fiction)
Teacher
Musician
Fashion Designer
Architect
Politician
Lawyer
Journalist
Engineer (Structural) (see above)
City Planner
Professor
Musician
Lawyer

Dreams do come true.

He, sprightly, lumbers in, filling the doorway, tripping as the dog pushes his own way through Dad’s infinite legs to run to your bathroom, your closet, your corners, your trash can, to get as much of himself on your bed while ensuring his back paws graze the carpet. Dad throws a scuff the way of your blue, tie-dyed bean bag chair, smiles that his joints won’t let him partake, and folds himself into your bunk, his arms, legs, and head against exactly what you had just avoided. He tucks you in, feet up, as you squirm; then you are still, for fear of ruining the tuck. Soon you’ll squirm again, knowing he’ll secure you as many times as you want.

Tonight you want the watch story, or the Valentine’s story, or the fire story, or the death story, or the golf story, or the writing story. So he tells you he shouldn’t have gone ice skating with his birthday watch, or that the pretty girl was unkind (but she was your age), or that candles were Christmas tree lights’ precursors, or there was a heart attack, or his brother went to Penn, or he won the state essay contest. You have heard this story bimonthly for your existence, but you love to hear him say it again. You love to see him so alive, so bright, so animated. It’s not that he isn’t so joyful the rest of the day. But at bedtime, when he tells you a stor’, you bask in the gluttony of getting three of him at once: Dad, Boy Dad, Performance of Boy Dad.

When this story has finished, you’ll make him tell you another. Sometimes he will, sometimes he won’t. Regardless, he will retuck you, feet up, and kiss you, and pat your face. He will tell you he loves you, again, and again, and again, and then he’ll tell you some more. You never will get too old for this. Because you know that, any day, this ritual will be impossible, snuffed out from the world. And then you’re not too old for it because it is, it has been.

The dog will follow him out the door as he shuts off your lights, shuts your closet door, shuts your bathroom door, shuts off the hall light, trundles back downstairs. Most nights you will lie awake, still as you can, grasping at your tuck with every skin cell, praying you don’t fuck it up and lose your treasure. You will love and be loved, but you also will worry. You will worry about him; you will worry about getting yelled at by the other one. You will worry about fire, and earthquake, and, in 1998, about blowjobs and flood.

You will retrace the steps you would take to your stashed emergency ladder, reimagine how to break your window while minimizing its glass pulling apart your flesh; you will know that you would tie that rope tighter than any girl, but also acknowledge that you are terrified of heights, even from this puny second story, and that you might become paralyzed and burn because you can’t bear the thought of the wobbly trip down to supposed safety.

Years later, when you’re in love with the man you wish you’d introduced him to, your 6’5” teddy bear keeps bedtime fears at bay. But when he’s away, you scour the apartment for intruders. You start with the balcony, to leave yourself an exit route; then rush to the bathroom, the tub, the closets.

Today you’re alone and unafraid. You lock your doors, but you don’t belabor the issue. You walk everywhere, alone, unlit, unarmed. You only need to live for yourself, and maybe your mother, and if shit gets real, it’s not like you’d be around to be sad about it, anyway.

Who knew that having everything you wanted, luxuriating in freedom, would erase the paranoia of losing it? Opportunity, and fortune, abound. There are only incredible paths – fantasy that you worry will somehow be phantasmagory. The choices are between types of happiness, all intrinsically legitimate, if not free of some sort of superimposed, ill-fitting, pseudo-moral characterization. And yet, I second-guess them anyway.

Saturday night in a city of eight million, and I’m bored, and there’s nothing to do. Friday morning, with good coffee, and trees, and sky, and the air isn’t crisp enough. Wednesday afternoon, clambered inside a $6000 skirt, and all I want is to wear it up a mountain.

In the shower, I open my mouth, expecting salt or chlorine. Marching up the subway exit, anticipating hill-backed skyscrapers, receiving skyscraper-backed skyscrapers. There is no terra cotta, no dead gold grass; no deer shit, about the same amount of derelict shit. There are people, and they look interesting, if caricatures of themselves. There is music! And so much! And sheet music stores even more comforting than the best used bookstore, and the scores’ mongers fall over themselves when you ask for Hindemith and Mucyznski. The caricatures are kind, and they expand and caress and adore when you give them the chance to be the ones who made you fall in love again. And it’s nice, really, and you smile when boys text you, “whatever you do, don’t go to Seattle,” and men send flowers to your hotel, and girls want your foreigner’s approval.

But when you remember basking, naked, in that warm straw; swimming through the cold to numbness in your home ocean; knowing a San Diego or Bakersfield or Los Angeles or San Francisco tortilla by the way it disintegrates in your mouth; remembering where this trail is sand, and where it is dry, crumbly, slippery dirt, and where it is the clay you used to take home to mold, and where it is buggy mud, and how your squelches will sound from one yard to the next – you know you have to go away for a little longer, or you’ll never respect yourself, but god damn it, all I want is an avocado, a spoon, a glass of Paso Robles old vine zin, and fetid, raw ocean that somehow elevates the wine’s bouquet.

My musical tastes run to the tactile. I like sticky sounds, drunken rhythms, sliding meter, cardiac percussion. I rarely know lyrics, but I can breathe and coo and cry and belt in unison with every record I own. I always come in on time, and usually in tune, but maybe with the wrong consonant.

The Antlers have the remarkable ability to smolder and entice despite a near-constant 48 bpm-ish pulse. They are that type of band whose albums present relatively straightforward meter in such a clean manner that this sharp backdrop, accompanied by diverse instrumentation and respectful use of rests, creates works worth your intimacy.

Tonight, The Antlers built upon their relatively understated source tracks with intensity, purity, drive, and ambition, transcending said steady dynamics and pace. Despite their songs’ generally straight meter, The Antlers seem to be even more rhythm-focused than most bands: not only the bassist, but also the singer/guitarist, and even the keyboardist, constantly circle back to their drummer — not just during clichéd riffs, bridges, and anthems, but continually checking in. I find this even more remarkable because, frankly, the drums are not the instrument setting up anything particularly tricky or flashy.

The Antlers’s live act throws some references into sharp relief. Any listener cannot help but hear Arcade Fire’s classic Funeral opener, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” in the sustained, arpeggiated transition chord into “Kettering.” Similarly, to a person of a certain age and class (me), the militant snare of “Parentheses” and “Sylvia” evokes Arcade Fire EP’s “No Cars Go.” Interestingly (to me), most of the first third of the band’s set seemed quite 1960s John Cage-influenced in its pseudo-chaotic, thumb-biting riff-play. Or, perhaps, some late Pink Floyd.

Although I found The Antlers interesting intellectually because their drum-centricity surprised me, let’s be frank: who gives a shit about that? Although I was already a fan and ready to get blown, two of my companions had never listened to the band before and still were thrilled.

This band blew the fucking roof off the place with songs you don’t anticipate having the potential to express such coital expanse. The Antlers might be smart, but they make you fucking howl, and feel and dance and smile, and if that’s not a great fucking show, I don’t know what is.

P.S. The bassist came out to the hallway to say hi to everybody as we left! That doesn’t hurt, either.

The criticism I’ve heard most is simply that Brown v. Plata isn’t really going to change things, as Governor Brown’s proposal is to meet the holding by shifting people from the state prison (felony) system to county jails (traditionally for temporary and misdemeanor holdings). Essentially, so the argument goes, this holding does nothing more than take the exact same problem and shove it into a very slightly different bureaucracy.

Well, fucking duh! Since when have we expected exceptional practicality from the Supreme Court? The fact of the matter is, in the eyes of the American people, the Supreme Court is important because, sure, it somehow exerts force over our day-to-day lives, being the ultimate legal arbiter, and all. However, the vast majority of Supreme Court decisions, individually, have relatively minor effects on the vast majority of everyday citizens, at least in terms determining what our day-to-day activities will be. While the aggregate of Supreme Court decisions over the past 250 years certainly has helped created the paradigm in which we all structure our individual decisions, I’d argue that, in most respects, how we choose to behave each day is not all that different from how our equivalents in most other Western democracies do, despite the fact that they have not had the precise same case law.**

The Supreme Court matters much more to laypeople in the sense that we expect it to reflect Americans’ general public consciousness and positivist morality. After all, it’s arguable that K-12 schools are nearly as segregated today as they were before Brown v. Board of Education, but that doesn’t change the fact that most of us view that decision as completely necessary and correct. Loving v. Virginia didn’t end bias against interracial romance, but it at least took the normative stand that the government would no longer openly tolerate anti-miscegenation policies. Lawrence v. Texas told the state to butt out of our bedrooms, pun intended, but that doesn’t mean that all members of society respect homosexuality, or that even more people still frown upon women who also have anal sex. Mount Laurel* asserted that New Jersey should find stratification-promoting state action repugnant, but that doesn’t mean that there are still rich and poor towns, with all of the corresponding property tax and public services issues.

The importance, here, is that the Supreme Court recognized that prison overcrowding is a serious fucking problem that deserves the nation’s attention, energy, and creativity. The importance is that this incredibly well-respected governmental branch deigned the issue important enough to even hear it in the first place, and then actually decided that yes, prison overcrowding is, indeed, something for which we should not stand.

It’s easy to bitch that the Supreme Court didn’t truly fix the problem, because the prisoners, at the moment, will just go to another incarceration facility. However, first of all, the judiciary’s job is to arbitrate, not to execute; frankly, it is not the “pragmatic” branch. It is not the Supreme Court’s place to actually sit around and draw up a plan for how California can fix itself.

Second, while Governor Brown’s plan does have the prisoners going to county jails, this plan is hardly set in stone. Moreover, Plata still has significant persuasive force over the states and will incentivize California, in particular, to keep in mind its underlying rationale when structuring its prisoner shuffling. Plata also catalyzes much-needed prison reform by catapulting the issue into kitchens and water coolers across the state and country, providing fertile ground for grassroots support of true institutional change.

Thesis: quit fucking bitching. The United States would be a worse fucking country if the Court had swung the other way.

N.B. This is not to say that California’s entire political system isn’t completely fucked up. See., e.g., the “California,” “Education,” and/or “Public Policy” tabs above.

P.S. The people of California were not the only ones who almost legalized marijuana; since the economy tanked, even state legislators have entered this bill into committee. Legalizing California’s favorite crop (other than avocados) alone would dramatically reduce the prison population. (And, of course, the color of those who actually are incarcerated for narcotics sale and possession most certainly is not in proportion with that of all involved parties.)

*not a U.S. Supreme Court case

** Of course, there still are significant differences between, say, how we look at sexual harassment in France versus the United States, or vacation time between Great Britain and Spain, or collective bargaining in Germany versus Norway, but again, my point is that, on the whole, the social-political contexts of most of these countries overwhelmingly overlap, and, in the aggregate, most of us structure our public behavior in similar ways.

“I have established General Tso’s chicken as my baseline standard for measuring Chinese food, ever since I had it at Dragon Inn.”

http://www.yelp.com/biz/may-flower-chicago