"Me and Mike Watt playing Guitar"

Watched the Minutemen documentary, "We Jam Econo," the other day. I am re-psyched on these guys. Such timeless music. And Double Nickels on the Dime is one of the greatest records ever. But what it mostly made me think of is playing music with Christopher. I've been fortunate in that I've basically only ever been in bands that have been populated with my best friends. I'm not really sure how else to make music (though I guess I will learn when I get to Portland). Being in That's All She Wrote with Christopher was very much like taking all of the experiences you had as a teenager, adding a dose of broadened musical taste and making a band out of it. There's something about being in a band, and all the component parts of that (practicing, writing, touring, etc), with people you love and you've known for a long time that elevates the experience to another level. Truly a beautiful thing. So if some day it's possible I hope to be able to make music with Christopher again.

The End of Fire&Flux

A couple of weeks ago Fire&Flux played what may be its last show. I would like to think this is not true but we'll be living 2000 miles apart so that makes it rather difficult to get together. That said, Rich is still planning a tour for us some time in the winter. Sounds good to me.

The last show was pretty fantastic. Christopher came down from Providence to play and Chris J came in with his new girlfriend Teresa. Some other excellent individuals came out too. We played well I thought though I don't know if it sounded as good to other people as it felt to us. It was a pretty intense set with some really screaming sections. Chris took 200 pictures of the event so it's rather well documented.

Throughout our set I did my best to forget that this was it, this was the last time we're going to play together. Improvised music really requires one to focus in a way that other doesn't - at least for me. So focus is always an issue and always something I'm working on. Those moments when you can forget yourself are the best moments of playing. And living. In scenarios like this, when there's substantial subtext to the playing, it's hard to get your mind in the position of only thinking about music.

Christopher's set was awesome. Intense and beautiful like all his music. Some dude got on stage afterward and tried to embarrass him though. I kind of flipped out at him afterwards cursing him up and down. There was definitely a part of me that wanted him to hit me so I could feel free to hurt him. It's the same thing as always: he hurt me (by trying to hurt Christopher) so I wanted revenge. There's part of me that thinks this is totally wrong and part of me that thinks people have to know what they can't get away with.

So it was exhilarating and sad and fun and exciting. Enough people showed so that I could give Christopher a non-embarrassing amount of money to get home with and we all left relatively happy. And then that part of my NYC life was over.

Reynols from Argentina

Saw a documentary over the weekend about a band called Reynols from Argentina. They play improvised avant-rock music (more or less). They are known mostly for having a singer/drummer who has Down Syndrome. The documentary was not well-made; the translation for the subtitles were particularly poor at times. It was certainly a unique topic though. Not sure I know what to think about the documentary or the band but it's another way that my interests seem to collapse into a single point. You know? You can look for Reynols on the Internets but it's difficult to find any thing on them that is useful. But do look.

A Guinea Pig is Not a Guinea Pig

Someone in Sound and Fury (a fascinating - albeit not terribly well-made movie - about the rift in the deaf community caused by cochlear implants) said, "a child is not a guinea pig!" And it occurred to me that a guinea pig is not a guinea pig. Know what I mean? The definition of this animal is to be experimented on. Ummm...need more be said?

Short term Immediate Relief (purgatory) vs. Long term Structural Change (Academia)

I've thought about the relative benefits of being part of projects that provide immediate relief and benefits to people (volunteering in soup kitchens, teaching, direct action) vs. working toward long term structural change (working in academia, politics, administration positions, etc). Despite regarding various activists as heroes (Malcolm X, Emma Goldman, Weather Underground, etc), I've always been drawn to long term projects. These long term projects almost invariably remove one from the community of people that you want to support. They are also comfortable and deceiving and often turn a radical activist into an armchair radical. And yet, a life of the short term is somewhat purgatorial. This is the connection I've just made today.
You can run the most amazing soup kitchen in the world and you will help many people and that is above reproach in every way. But for me, I just see the endless number of people that will need to be fed because of the structural elements that cause hunger. I think that people who do what I'm calling "short term" work (and I understand that working in a soup kitchen, for instance, is not necessarily accurately called "short term" - but feeding people is a shorter term goal than ending the causes of hunger) believe that it will be someone else's work to develop structural solutions to the problems that they are addressing in an immediate way. That is right. But I find this personally frustrating. I could teach for the next 25 years (and I might) but that probably won't cause an end to a racist, ableist, classist educational system that supports a social system I think should be dismantled.

I want to be clear in my unequivocal support for teachers, soup kitchens and the like and my unequivocal skepticism of politicians, academics, administrators, etc. However, I think sometimes that I want to attempt to change things so there will be no need for soup kitchens rather than spend a life spooning out food.

I think sometimes that I just want this in order to have an easier job - but I think the "easier" part of it is the possibility that things might change in part because of my work. As a teacher I believe that I contribute to change but I also know that the form of change I'm involved in is the 100 year kind in which I'll never see it myself (except in individual students - perhaps that should be enough).

So far I've taken the balanced road. Teaching is not terribly immediate and it is somewhat comfortable. I do some more immediate activities and I'm also more involved in academia. But this balance leaves less time for the rest of my life. Unless this is the rest of my life. And that's no so bad.

By Any Means

By Any Means- 1/8/06

While I imagine many people went to this show to hear either Rashied Ali (last drummer for John Coltrane) or Wiliam Parker (the IT bassist in the NYC downtown music scene - and for good reason), I went to see Charles Gayle, a saxophonist who has been around since the inception of free jazz but spent most of his career in complete obscurity, including many years without a home. What I find intriguing about Gayle is that he has historically been a big talker on stage. He was reviled for conservative views on abortion and talking about Christ on stage though he spent quite a bit of time also talking about inequality, homelessness and poverty - or so I've read. This led to his exclusion from the music scene to a large degree and only recently has he started to come back onto the radar.

Gayle is a monster player, part John Coltrane, part Albert Ayler mixed with bop technique, Gayle's music makes for great listening. Live he creates intricate and beautiful lines as well as screaming noises. What's also interesting about him is that he has abandoned free jazz at times in order to play gospel music - something he felt was more appropriate in order to revere God. Thankfully for us he seems to have decided that free jazz is worthy of God. There's much reading to do about Charles Gayle if you Google his name. You can also check him out in a great free jazz documentary called Rising Tones Cross. It was somewhat dissapointing that he said nothing at the show and the group was a little tentative at times. However, when they got going they made quite a beautiful ruckus. And they have a great name.

On Novels

For the most part, I stopped reading novels about six years ago. I have a degree in English Education and I teach eighth grade English Language Arts but I almost exclusively read non-fiction. I've thought a lot about why I do this and there are basically two reasons:

1) I get obsessive about particular topics. Right now it's disability. Before that it was anarchism. Before that it was sixties radicalism - mainly the Black Panther Party and SDS and before that it was String Theory. In the past year I've read about ten books and probably 50 articles on disability. When I've occassionally allowed myself to read something off topic it's been very rewarding. I bought and read most of a book that collected Robert Creeley's poetry. I also read Life of Pi this past summer. But other than these and a few others, it's been all disability, all the time. I did read one novel that was disability-related: "The Body's Memory." That was a nice intersection. I should maybe think about doing more of that.

2) I feel like one can study novels the way I study particular nonfiction topics. I've actually done this a bit. For a while in college I was really into mid-late nineteenth century American Literature - Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, etc. However, since this is a whole project onto itself, I stay away from novels all together. If I was going to read fiction well I would have to study it - I'd have to do author, period, style, or genre studies. That sounds fun but I've got disability to work on right now and I feel like reading novels now would be a distraction, a guilty pleasure - one that I shouldn't, for some reason, afford myself.

And anyway, fiction is so much harder to read. There's usually so much more you have to keep track of and it takes interpretative skills that I've allowed to get rusty. So the more I do stay away from novels, the more I will stay away from novels.

That said, my favorite books are all novels.

Starbucks and Disability

Standing in front of the 1st Starbucks I was thinking about how it didn't look at all like the other ones I've seen. All over the North West for the 2 weeks I was out there I was able to visit so many excellent, unique coffee shops. I thought a lot about how these were the 3rd places for the people in the surrounding communities. And I thought about what happens when everyone's 3rd place becomes the same. When your 3rd place is everywhere you go, you must feel less of a connection to the one at home - and the 3rd place is not really yours any more. It's a false 3rd place because it doesn't reflect your community or your home town at all. The original Starbucks looks right at home in Pike's Place Market, the other ones all look like boring iterations on a tired theme. Anyway, it seems to me that our desire for every thing to be comfortable and familiar does us a disservice in the long run.

Here is the connection to disability: we don't just want famililarity in our coffee houses, food (McDonald's, Taco Bell, etc), news (Fox) and shopping (Walmart), we want it in our people. It's so much easier to interact with people who remind us of ourselves just like it's so much easier to hang out at a place that reminds of us the places we hang out at home and just like it's so much easier to eat food that reminds of (or is exactly like) the food we eat at home. I won't go into the way in which this erodes the culture of the places that are overrun with chain stores or the way it erodes our experiences of travelling when we visit these places because you could read about that more thoroughly elsewhere. It does seem to me that our experience of other people is less interesting when we surround ourselves with people who look just like we do. The interest in not allowing ourselves to experiences differencel and in fact degrading difference makes for a much less interesting lived experience in the world. It seems to me anyway.

Peace (& Freedom?) in Aceh

I haven't been following this as closely as I wish I had been but I saw this today which gave me a lot of hope. Having known (very slightly) someone who died in the Free Aceh Movement I guess this makes me feel like his work continues to be meaningful. Though this peace deal is clearly problematic it seems like it's moving in the right directions more or less. It's still painfully disgusting that Aceh is still not free.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-indonesia-aceh.html
http://newsc.blogspot.com/
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/15/144204

Taking Their Lives Off the Table

I continue to be uncomfortable with the intersection of disability rights groups and the far right in physician assissted suicide and similar cases. I wonder what makes disability groups comfortable with this union. I appreciate that the value of a disabled person's life is questioned when we indiscriminately allow (and encourage) people with disabilities and illnesses to kill themselves. But I also believe one has the right to kill one self if one chooses. One also has the right to seek help to do so if one requires help. That said, I also recognize that the environment in which we live makes a burden out of people with a disabilities when no burden actually should exist and this often causes a person with a disability or illness to kill him or herself.

With all this said, I wonder if we can take this "negotiation" of the value of the lives of people with disabilities off the table. If it was the case that the life a disabled person was as valued as the life an "able" person, would disability groups no longer object to PAS? I don't know. But until the value of life is considered equal it won't be surprising to see ties created between groups whom I mostly support and groups whom I abhor.

The Basic Idea

In order to take advantage of someone you must other him or her. This is a required part of hierachical structures like, for instance, capitalism. We don't take advantage of people we identify strongly with. For people to play their part in a system of control we must look for and create reasons to separate "us" and "them". This othering of people allows to do nasty things to each other without the cognitive dissonance that would occur if we did these things to people that we thought were much more like us than not like us. We cannot treat people like machines when we think of them as people just like us.

Disability is a very important othering to undo. It's from disability that we take our most fundamental (and incorrect) measures of man [sic]. Our physicial prowess and mental capacity are accorded greater value than something like honesty, loyalty, humanity, etc. If these latter qualities were more highly regarded then we would have to stop othering people with disabilities. And then we would have to stop oppressing them.

Disability Socially Constructed?

Nah...

http://www.rightwheelchair.org/

I was blind to that

For years I've been calling religion a crutch. And I've taken from a movie with the guy who played Kramer on Seinfeld that it's OK to use a crutch if you need it. The other day I was writing this down in a assignment for a class and I realized that this too is abelist language. I imagine I'll be rooting out this language for years.

The Normal Pill

The question of whether people with disabilities would take a pill to make them "normal" if it was available has been asked at various times of various people with disabilities. It's interesting that a lot of them say no, particularly when they don't have access to resources that help mitigate some of the social factors that make living with a disability so difficult. It never occurred to me to flip this question on its head: Would I take a pill that would make me accept people for who they are? "I suspect that given the choice of taking a pill to become normal or giving normal people a pill to accept differences, most people with disabling labels would choose the latter." - Herbet Lovett.

Acting Like Animals - If Only We Would

Today I listened to a presentation about Jose Saramago's book Blindness. When everyone goes blind in the book the social order breaks down. People do terrible things to each other: raping ,starving, defecating any where, murdering, etc. Someone in the group said, "The people started acting like animals." I know it's been said before but clearly it's worth repeating: Non-human animals don't do the horrifying things we do. Certainly one could find all sorts of examples of non-human animal behavior that is shocking to us but it's fairly obvious that you could easily find examples of human behavior that go far, far beyond what any animal has ever done or will ever do. Someone in this same session said something about our humanity separating us from the animals. And that's right, but not the way she meant it. Our humanity is both one of caring and compassion but also of unbelievable destruction and genocide. Animals don't committ genocide; it is a strictly human trait and thus part of this thing we speak of reverentially called "humanity". If humans did act like non-human animals when the blindness stikes in Saramago's book, we wouldn't be shocked and outraged. It wouldn't be a story about how low humans can sink. It would be about adjusting to new circumstances and continuing to live in a sustainable way as best as one could. If only we would "act like animals" more often we all, human and non-human animals both, would be much better off.

Spring

This feeling has been creeping up on me. It has come up so gradually that I didn't really even notice it until this past week. Now I feel completely mired in it. It's strange to have this happen because I feel like I'm in pretty good touch with my emotions. I guess I always feel like that and then I realize I have no idea. Anyway, I've been overwhelmed with optimism lately and it's been absolutely beautiful. I feel like I've become a really sound teacher. I feel like I'm becoming a strong musician. It seems as though I'm becoming a better friend, son & brother...and all because the weather is nice. Honestly, it just seems like I can become the person I've always wanted to be. All winter I felt like I was struggling and struggling to keep my head above water, to remain happy about who I've become. Now that we're a few weeks into nice weather I can hardly remember what all the struggle was about. This happens every year and I never catch it until after it's already happened. Now I just want to sustain this feeling forever. If I could always feel this good about myself who knows how happy I could be?

Guaguas & Privillege

One of the things I enjoyed most about DR was travelling by guagua. Guaguas are like minibuses that seat about 24 people and travel between different cities and towns. To get on a guagua you just stand on the side of the road you want to travel on and flag one down. When you want to get off, you just shout "afuera!" and the guagua pulls over. They are ridiculously cheap to use (for us anyway) and they're fun. I really liked travelling on the equivalent of public transportation.

Some time during a trip on a guagua it occurred to me that it was a privillege to travel this way. Guaguas are totally inexcessible to people who have mobility disabilities. This made me think about how I would have enjoyed the trip if I was in a wheelchair. It would have been difficult. Traffic laws are less formal, sidewalks are narrow and obstructed, accessbility laws are either non-existant or ignored. Of course, it doesn't have to be this way. Laws can be changed and enforced, rennovations can be made. Often I'm so impatient with these kinds of situations in the US. The newer city buses are very accessible and the older ones are not. I can't stand that not all of the older buses have been replaced by the newer. An elevator is being installed at the subway on 125th St and it's frustrating that it's taking years (literally) to complete. These changes are occurring (though at an absurdly slow pace).

But I must confront my privillege once again here. It is only the privillege of living in a country like the US that makes me assume that these sorts of changes should come about now in order to reduce the ways that inaccesbility is built into our environment. In a country like DR, long exploited and colonized and now extremely poor, what hope is there that public transportation will be made accessible, curb cuts & other simple yet necessary modifications will occur.

After continuously confronting my privillege for years and years I am still taken by surprise at times by the sheer extent of my privillege.

In Medias Res

I'd like to leave aside introductions and just begin.

I just got back from DR. There was a moment when we were in the "taxi" from Sanchez to Las Terrenas when I thought, "I want to move here." This part of the country is near no cities of note and is actually just a mountain road in between two towns. But there was something in the look of it. I know that I'm romanticizing when I think about living there. And I know that I don't understand what it's like when I think about people living and dying on that little mountain in cinder block homes with no electricity or running water. And even though I know that, I still feel like it would be so good to put aside the game and just work to eat. Work to sleep. Work to talk to your neighbors and have a family. I guess I'm responding to a lack of material goods that I find appealing. I feel guilty for writing this because, again I know that the lives of the people who live on that mountain are not so simple, rustic or bohemian or whatever. I guess it just made me think about the weight that my life has to it with all of my things. (And I really limit myself. Comparitively speaking.)

Well, there it is. I think that might be the image I end up remembering from this trip: those houses and that mountain and the people and me thinking that I want to live right there.