Melendy Avenue Review 2021-08-27

Birthday Lecture! Quality books! Guster! Mithra!

Hello everybody! What a week! As many of you know my birthday is in late August. I like to do it up big, celebrate myself and my community. As it happens, the day of my big birthday party was also the same day a local Nazi group planned an action. So for the last several weeks, I had been running around both planning a big birthday party and a clandestine counter to a Nazi rally! Both came off gloriously. The Nazis fled at the first sight of me and my antifascist friends (it’s a good story- maybe I’ll write it down and share it here someday) and my birthday party was a smashing success. I’ve been recovering ever since! In this Review, I include the video recording of my birthday lecture, given at Peterfest 2021 after all that happened. There’s reviews, a discography, and a cat pic! 

If you want to do something nice for my birthday, consider upgrading your subscription to Citizenship! You’ll get to vote on what I read, get a free reading of a text of your choice (one a year!), previews of my writing, and that nice feeling you get when you support quality independent prose! In any event, enjoy the Review! 

CONTENTS

Video Content

• 2021 Birthday Lecture: Alternate History at the End of History and Beyond LIVE

Reviews

• Sarah Schulman, The Gentrification of the Mind

• Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

Discographies

• Guster!

Lagniappe

• Mithra Pic: Observant Kitty

VIDEO CONTENT

Well, last Saturday was Peterfest! It was the end of a long day. I was a few drinks in by the time I ascended the podium to give my lecture. It’s a long one, plus there’s QnA, interruptions, etc. But you won’t get a better idea of what it’s like to attend Peterfest and listen to the lecture than this video. I’ll put up a clean version eventually, as well as the text of the lecture. Enjoy! 

REVIEWS

Sarah Schulman, “The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination” (2012) - This is a short, hard to classify book from an odd transitional era. Published in 2012, Schulman seems to have written the book mostly in 2008 and 2009, which I think we can call transitional years. Schulman writes in a number of disciplines: she is a novelist, a playwright, a historian, an intellectual of a kind you don’t get often these days, complete with serious political commitments. She was a member of ACT-UP (her latest book is a massive history of the iconic AIDS group) and is an organizer in the lesbian community. 

I wonder why she isn’t more prominent than she is, given the breadth of her talents, and the high degree of insight and fine writing — conversational but precise, never patronizing — she must have if this work is any representation. Arguably, “The Gentrification of the Mind” is about why she isn’t better known, why less talented people are elevated in the cultural sphere, though she never puts it that way. She juxtaposes two phenomena: the mass death of gay people due to the AIDS crisis at the end of the twentieth century, and the gentrification of many cities, here understood as pricing out poor inhabitants of cities, and their cultures, to make room for rich people and a homogenized way of life. 

Schulman acknowledges she isn’t a social scientist. She’s something else: a witness. She came up in pre-gentrification New York, in its art scenes and its struggles. She literally held the hands of dying young gay men, abandoned by their society and often by their families, only to see their apartments rented out for quadruple their value, to see whole neighborhoods — much of residential Manhattan — go from working class, poor, diverse places to bywords for anodyne luxury living. 

Along with this gentrification of space, Schulman argues, comes the titular gentrification of thought. She sees the gay community as having traded its radicalism — the thing that kept it alive during the AIDS plague — for assimilation (there’s some brilliant and cutting depictions of Andrew Sullivan as the poster child of this process- I would’ve loved to have seen Schulman go after him in that interview they did in 1997). The idea that gay life represents an alternative to the values and ways of organizing life that compulsory heterosexuality seemed to have been lost in 2008, when the battle of the moment was the right for gay people to take part in the ur-heterosexual institution, marriage. This idea, that we can live differently from the way that’s sold to us, isn’t just a matter of sexual politics, though Schulman unabashedly depicts queer life as the flagship of the fleet of avant garde culture. 

The irony here is that commentators often make an implicit or explicit link between gentrification and gay people- like the old real estate industry saw of “follow the fairies” for soon-to-be-valuable urban properties. It’s true that gay men (usually white, generally rich) often do get in on the ground floor of “up and coming” urban neighborhoods and aren’t always good neighbors to poorer, browner inhabitants. But that’s a symptom, not the disease- Schulman’s enough of a red to know that there’s too much money (assisted by too much government policy) to make gentrification purely a matter of culture. In many respects, the whole point of this process is plucking out a few gay people — your Andrew Sullivans, not long after the monoculture would prop up Ellen Degeneres as the acceptable lesbian — as props for its supremacy. What Schulman fought for was gay power, to save their own lives, for the community to determine its own fate and make a new world in the process, and that isn’t happening. 

This is a passionate book, sad, angry, but hopeful, in that way of old militants who have taken a lot of knocks but keep fighting. It’s shot through with reminisces of her city, which could go wrong, bad wrong, the way people fetishize urban grime sometimes, but that’s not what she’s doing, and if she was, she earned it, she lived it. It’s not just bodegas and “feel” (though both enter into matters), it’s a matter of the availability of urban space for people without a ton of money. When that’s not available, art scenes become what they are now- playgrounds for the rich and fatuous. It needs to be cheap, and it needs to urban, to get any kind of real art scene- people need to be able to take risks, around other people doing the same. Between crippling rents (and tuitions, increasingly necessary to break into art, another stupid “innovation”), spiraling inequality, and the massive policing that comes with it, it’s just not there anymore. You don’t need to be a nostalgist to see that. 

All this and more in fewer than two hundred pages! This made me think, a lot. Here’s two lines of thought I had. I’m heterosexual and it’s not my business how the gay community defines myself. As it happens, I think at the very least positing an alternative to family life as understood by mainstream culture is a good idea and worth doing (if nothing else, a lot of American-style “family values” material accoutrements — single family homes full of plastic crap with a lawn and multiple cars out front — are helping to cook the planet). But I’ve known enough gay men to know that many of them aren’t necessarily interested in all that. They’re not necessarily apolitical — they will fight for themselves, and their communities — but they don’t understand themselves as conscripted into a battle against fairly fundamental (-seeming?) social structures by virtue of their sexuality. Should they? Schulman might suggest they should. Well, that’s her business, I suppose, and theirs, not this hetero’s. 

Second line of thought: a lot of my early leftist education came from reading The Baffler and other irreverent cultural critics of their sort. They injected materialism (and wit) into debates often sorely lacking it. Tom Frank and those (mostly) guys were deeply skeptical of the concept of subcultural resistance, the idea that the power of capitalism and other hegemonic forces could be meaningfully subverted by oppositional cultural practices. As an angry young nerd who always felt ill at ease with the subcultural identities I saw around me (including nerd identity), I ate that up. It’s funny- I don’t think Frank or any of the Baffler crew or the early Jacobin people or whoever I was reading at the time ever really got into the sexual politics of the thing. I’m sure if you asked them, they’d say they favor gay rights, as understood by gay people, and mean it. But they completely ignored the idea of a subculture challenging basic structures of our society in favor of mocking the spectacle of (generally, post-height-of-the-US-AIDS-crisis) absurd Burning-Man-esque cultural posturing by the comfortable. 

I think Frank, if he was feeling frisky, would say he ignored the potential of pre-AIDS gay subculture because it failed, and would have failed, AIDS or no AIDS. Maybe I’m being uncharitable to the old guy. I figure Schulman would say because of AIDS, and the great taking of space (physical and cultural) from the commons that real oppositional culture once held, that we will never know what could have been possible had AIDS and gentrification not come around. Who knows? There’s an alternate history for you, but the “point of departure” — our government giving a shit about gay people and public health — is something of a lift, alas. 

Anyway- this guy who uses “urban space” mostly to sit at pubs, drink beer, and read books (and not that many of them “experimental,” though I’ll look up some of the neglected works Schulman champions here), who avoids the theater, and who would love to save a baby seal in front of Christina Hendricks, picks up what Schulman’s putting down. If nothing else, the culture, especially literary culture, that we’ve got is so damned tired (and complicit) that it’s hard for me not to connect with a historical theory of why that might be. It does seem like a real oppositional politics — as material as it is cultural, fiercely both in the teeth of some vulgar materialist grumbling — is coming about, including challenging not just family structure but our ideas of gender, too. We probably haven’t ended the Great Gentrification, like Schulman maybe thought we did in the shadow of the 2008 recession, but we’re working on it. I plan on reading more Schulman! She bids fair to be one of the greats of our time. *****

Marlon James, “A Brief History of Seven Killings” (2014) (read by various actors) - Jamaica! What a contrast between the image I was sold of it as a kid — the era of “Cool Runnings,” a movie I saw dozens of times and which held up relatively well when I saw it a few years back — and the complex, often harrowing realities one learns as an adult. I’ve never been and have no plans to go. I just mean that by and by, one learns it’s not paradise, that the people have complex and difficult lives, that one of the things it suffers from is the contrast between white desires/expectations and the universe of black thought and dreams that nation has generated itself… like Haiti, I guess, but there were never any heartwarming movies about a Haitian bobsled team. 

Bob Marley plays an outsized role in the country’s tangled image (and image of self) - a transcendental figure in twentieth century music whose music, some of the purest pleasure you can find, both reflected and contrasted the mixture of grimness and beauty of his home, and his life. Did you know someone tried to assassinate him in his Kingston home in 1978? I didn’t, before I read this book! A novel that plays with history and journalism by a Jamaican writer who mixes literary and “genre” (this could be called crime fiction, and his latest is basically a fantasy novel), “A Brief History of Seven Killings” has a lot more than seven murders. Even if Marley avoided that fate (only to be killed not long after by a melanoma on a toe he refused to have amputated), the attempt on his life structures the action of the book.

This is a multiple-narrator novel, and different voice actors play the different narrators. Most of them start out as inhabitants of Kingston in the late seventies. Socialism and black revolution are in the air as the sort-of socialist Michael Manley is in office, but things are still stuff for most Jamaicans. Manley’s People’s National Party and the opposition Jamaica Labor Party (notice how nice and lefty both names sound! Different era) both strive for power by hiring gunmen in the various Kingston ghettos to deliver votes through corruption and violence, with emphasis on the latter. Wear the wrong color (drink the wrong beer! I’m told Heineken was the JLP beer and Red Stripe the PNP one) in the wrong neighborhood and bad things will happen. 

Two of our narrator characters, Papa-Lo and Josie Wales, are JLP-aligned gunman chieftains. Papa-Lo, older and more paternalistic, starts sending out peace feelers to the PNP, in large part through Bob Marley, whose star is on the ascendant and who is only referred to as “The Singer” throughout the book. The young and hungry Josie Wales sees a path to power through keeping the violence going. Papa-Lo and the singer want to see Jamaica achieve real independence for its people and the instantiation of something like Rasta values (honestly a mixed bag but probably better than open kleptocracy) in power. Josie Wales aligns himself with outside powers — the Colombian cartels and the CIA — with other plans. He’s involved in the abortive Marley assassination, but survives the fall out by pretending loyalty to Papa-Lo and concentrating on making Jamaica a hub in the cocaine trade. 

The coke trade and its consequences — all of them still tied in with Jamaican politics into the nineties — follow characters all the way to New York City. An ex-lover of Marley’s who fled to the city after witnessing the assassination attempt provides viewpoints into both Jamaican women’s labor minding very old and very young New Yorkers, and gets tied up when the crack wars invade her neighborhood. A journalist who started out writing about Marley for Rolling Stone and ends up writing about Jamaican “posses” and their propensity for ultraviolence — learned through ghetto brutalization, honed by CIA training and guns, accelerated by coke, its profits and its chemical effects — for the New Yorker has a harrowing experience with a new breed of gangster- slick, tied in to global capitalism. 

All in all this was pretty good. A lot of characters, some sprawl, some visits from the ghost world that were good not great, crime, coke, the CIA, AIDS, sexism and homophobia, lots of interesting stuff. It probably could have been shorter, but hey, it covers a lot of time in the life of some interesting places. It presents something like the complexity of Jamaica and the way the dreams, nightmares, and realities of the place refract off of each other. One of the better contemporary literary reads I’ve read lately. ****

DISCOGRAPHIES: Guster!

I love my sisters, but they are inveterate, unstoppable song-skippers. Here’s a good example of both our love for each other and their song-skipping habit: one of my sisters drove me either back or to New York, either when I was moving there or moving out or something, can’t remember. I brought my binder of CDs (this was how long ago this ride occurred). One was The Gipsy Kings’ “Allegria.” We agreed to play it- I had put some Gipsy Kings on a mix cd for this sister and she had liked it. But she wanted to hear the song I had put on. “The other songs on ‘Allegria’ are just as good! The album works as a whole, like they were hanging around a taverna and just decided to play a set!” I quailed. But my sister knew what she wanted, it wasn’t the (contrived, but I still love it) concept of the album, and it wasn’t on there, so we found other music. 

Both sisters are that way, but I remember one album my other sister never skipped around with, or not much, and that’s Guster’s “Lost and Gone Forever.” This would have been before I could drive, and I would accompany her on rides through the Massachusetts burbscape to go to where the good deals were (the women in my family are dedicated bargain shoppers) or just around, and she would play this album. 

When I listened to it again for this discography (inspired by a friend who is a big Guster fan), I could see why. Guster started out not far from me, at Tufts University. Tufts is a “good” school (and not cheap!) but one that, to the best of my knowledge, never formed an identity (maybe “brand” is more appropriate), living in the shadow of the many many colleges and universities of the Boston area. Tufts people I know are often proud of their school but with a kind of ironic asterisk next to it. In any event, Guster kind of reminds me of the better Tufts people I’ve known: self-aware but honest, wry, cynical but in a way they’ve earned, not cheap posturing or cruelty disguised as worldly wisdom. And they're accomplished even if they were somewhat out of sync with the grunge rock that surrounded them as they came up (and prefiguring a lot of the indie revival stuff that come later). Their first two albums seem to be them — mainly two guys, a guitarist and a guy playing a drum set with his hands like a bongo, both singing — finding their voice. Then “Lost and Gone Forever” came out, in 1999, and found its way to me and my sister.

They call Guster “jangle pop” and that makes sense to me. The songwriting in “Lost and Gone Forever” is infectious, earworm-y, but it also sounds weird in a good way: the odd drumming effect from being hand-played, the use of typewriter as a percussion instrument on my favorite track (and probably biggest hit- so I’m basic, sue me) “Barrel of a Gun,” the harmonies, and they’re not afraid of a riff either. It brings you along and jangles you too, I guess- hence, jangle pop? The lead singer’s voice (the guy with the higher voice took over most of the singing from the guy with the lower voice, I don’t know which one does which instrument, sorry) reaches a pitch that anyone from their era will know. Alan Moore observed how different kinds of faces come in and out with eras, somehow, and I’ve found that’s true of voices. The lead singer’s voice — high, reedy, a little nasal, the voice of a difficult child turned adult who realizes that his problems are both his fault but more than he’s earned — go perfectly with the lyrics. Think “nineties depression” and you think heroin, Cobain blasting his own head off, hot skinny women from Courtney Love to Elizabeth Wurzel pouting. Guster prefigured the less cinematic version we’ve come to live with since it became clear that those of us who aren’t stars or have more than nine percent body fat don’t experience depression as dramatic or sexy or all someone else’s fault. 

They kept making records after that, and they keep being good. I can’t tell if I go back to “Lost and Gone Forever” because it’s the best, or because radio airplay could convince me it’s the best even twenty years after the fact, or because I associate it with my youth, or what. “Ganging Up On the Sun” and “Evermotion” especially are great. Their latest, 2019’s “Look Alive,” is fine but a little overproduced for my taste. You can see why they wouldn’t try to sound like they’re in a Tufts dorm common room forever but it’s not my cup of tea. Either way, I put off writing this discography because of busy-ness so I don’t remember all the albums as well as I could, but “Lost and Gone Forever” I’ll never forget.

Next up on Discographies: a band everyone loved, then a lot of people hated, and now maybe people are coming around again?

LAGNIAPPE

Mithra Pic: Observant Kitty

What was Mithra scrutinizing that morning? Will I ever know?