The first line of the chorus—“Been wondering for days
. . .”—and the beat, together they are lyrical. The kind of lyricism that one
feels listening to the radio, stuck in rush hour. In the middle of ten lanes of
slow-moving traffic I turned to the left and the San Francisco Bay looked like
a lagoon, the Golden Gate small and fragile in the distance. Behind me cars
came off the Bay Bridge in a gentle arc. Ahead of me the cars stretched without
pause. This song played on the radio and my mind was in a commotion. To the
right of me I saw a car with three young people in it. A young woman in the
back seat, her hair in a bun. I could barely see the side of her face, but she was
beautiful in my imagination. I made up stuff about their conversation, dumb but full of warmth. I stole glances to see more of her and of them. They were
framed by the lake and the thin trees of Aquatic Park. I stood once on the
bridge that looks down on that lake, following the slow swimming of a turtle,
large and poetic just beneath the surface of the water. I wanted the radio to
keep playing this song over and over. Not because I love it any more than other
popular songs but because it made sense: the rhythm of the cars inching
forward; city life and its distinctive pulses; the attenuated lyricism of the radio.
When I go camping I resist the urge to find nature more meaningful than the
arbitrariness of the city. The Milky Way glowing above; the sound of animal life
in dark, unseen spaces; ashes blowing away revealing a burning ember beneath. We
make patterns out of stars and read them like stories. But sometimes the stars
just look like bite marks, and no one reads those. The car with the young
people pulled further ahead and my heart broke. I thought of Wallace Stevens,
that racist motherfucker, and his beautiful poem, “Sunday Morning”; a poem that
still makes my heart race as much as it did when I first read it as a teenager.
The traffic, the sight of the sea and the lake, the loss of the young people
were my “comforts of the sun,” my “pungent oranges and bright, green wings.” “Sunday
Morning” asked whether it was possible to find in beautiful everyday things
something that could fulfill our desire for the transcendental; whether we
could love the sun “not as a god, but as a god might be,” in communion with us
all. I want to love a traffic jam and the radio in the same way, to feel them
not as a thing which keeps me from experiencing life, but, rather, as a
sometimes unexpectedly beautiful part of life itself.
Sunday, December 13, 2015
Friday, October 23, 2015
Running Wild, Running Free
What is bourgeois culture? It is certainly not the depiction
of the factories, trading houses, corporate buildings, and warehouses that make
up the bone and blood of the life of capitalism. The monotonous hum of those mechanisms of industry
is almost anti-aesthetic. Like in Wilhelm Meister, when Wilhelm turns on his father, the merchant, and pursues a life
in the theater instead. A life in the service of capitalism is not a life worth
living, says the novel.
Films, like Up in the Air or About Schmidt for example,
sometimes depict the middle men and women of capital: the salesmen, the
accountants, the claims adjusters, and other assorted office types. But the
lives of these people are portrayed as generally grey and empty, a façade or a
charade that unravels with retirement, unemployment, or some kind of life
emergency. In most films and televisions shows, work is an insignificant aspect
of a character’s life, what separates the really important episodes of that
life. Unless work is considered heroic, like a firefighter or a detective or
something, but those kinds of jobs fit uneasily under the category of
capitalist labor. So bourgeois culture, which emerged because of capitalism,
depends on capitalism, and is made under the conditions of capitalism, seems to
want nothing to do with the basic structures of capitalism.
This is striking. For in this day and age the one freedom we
have surely lost is our ability to live outside of the necessity of wage labor,
which is another way of saying outside of the demands of capitalism. We must,
all of us, engage with the imperatives of capitalism. Capitalism conditions our
lives, insinuates itself into every aspect of our existence, and reshapes our
desires and emotions. But the economic system that gave rise to the
bourgeois class seems to play almost no part in its culture other than as representing
the unimportant part of life.
Franco Moretti describes it perfectly: the stronger the
social control of the bourgeois classes and of capitalism in general, the weaker
seems the identity of its agents. Bourgeois culture, we can say, is almost
anti-capitalist, but only in the sense that bourgeois culture allows you to
indulge yourself in the belief that the power of capitalism doesn’t affect you
because it does not provide any of the categories of your identity. YOU! You
are free from economic necessity. You are free from the need for work and the
desire to consume. You are free from the regulation and conformity of modern
life. You are free from compulsion and control. You are free to choose your own
life and define your identity as you see fit. YOU!
X Ambassadors’ “Renegades” is a perfect example of bourgeois
culture. It asks you to reject social conventions and expectations. It wants
you to “break the rules,” follow your heart, and runaway. It suggests there is
a better place out there, away from the demands of society, which it
understands as inessential at best and false at worst. It encourages you to
determine for yourself what matters. It allows you to identify with the
outcasts of society. Laws don’t matter. Work doesn’t matter. Money doesn’t
matter. By rejecting the requirements of capitalism, this song makes it easier
for us to live with them. We may have to get up every morning to make sure we
get to work on time but in our hearts we will always be running wild and
running free. And that is what really matters.
Sunday, September 6, 2015
Happiness and Freedom
“Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.”
Slippery phrase, this. Pharrell Williams doesn’t ask you to believe that
happiness is the truth in order to participate. You need only feel that the
comparison is possible, that happiness is close enough to the truth to be
comparable. And they are. I feel like happiness is the truth insofar as the
truth sometimes is elusive and happiness sometimes feels made up and both happiness
and the truth sometimes feel right as rain. “Clap along if you know what
happiness is to you.” How can you not clap along? It’s easier to clap than to
admit by not clapping the doubt in our hearts. The song makes us happy by
asserting that we are. Like “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” but without the imperatives. But much more effectively, too,
because it allows you to chose being happy, even if you don’t actually know
what being happy is or means. You can be happy like “a room without a roof.” That
sounds like a ruin to me. A happy one, I guess. Our desire for happiness is so
powerful and the song’s projection of happiness so compelling that there was a
while there when “Happy” was everywhere.
I have heard Williams’ new single, “Freedom,” only one time
on the radio, though I wish I could hear it more often. Like “Happy,” it also asks us to ponder
things we may not easily explain, but unlike the earlier song, in which not
knowing enabled feeling, in “Freedom” not knowing keeps us from experiencing
the transcendence contained in the concept of freedom. Moreover, not knowing in
“Happy” enables a sense of belonging, while knowing in “Freedom” entails a
joyous surrendering of particularity, something much more challenging in our
modern episteme.
The song is located centrally in what Paul Gilroy calls the
dissident cultures of the black Atlantic. Its call for freedom resonates with
the cultures that were born in the fires of racialized slavery and its macabre
aftermath. Cultures that responded to that terror with expressions of dignity
that affirmed the humanity of black people and encoded resistance to the brutal
racial realities that have continued in the modern system to the present day.
Gilroy also reminds us that one of the perverse effects of
the racial regime in which we live is that it constricts the full humanity of
everyone. Echoing Frantz Fanon and Martin Luther King, Jr., Gilroy suggests that
by continuing to deny the humanity of non-white peoples, Europeans and their
white descendants have made themselves more inhuman. The struggle for freedom
from racial oppression, then, is a struggle to free all people from the grip of the
particularity of racial identity and the hierarchies constructed from those
identities.
Monday, June 15, 2015
Dance Fever
She skimmed across
the dance floor in white see-through pants and a crop top. My friends had disappeared. We danced, brought together by an unaccountable
gravity. I offered her a drink and she came with me to the other part of the club,
where drag queens lip-synch to old pop songs. We watched and chatted. We went
back and danced until the lights came on. We went to an all-night diner. I made
up story about being a graduate student, coloring the conversation with terms I
half understood and probably mispronounced. She told me whatever she wanted me
to believe about her. Her dad was a strict Vietnamese father, she said, and she
lived in a shed in the backyard in order to have a little freedom. We drove up
to the west hills near Council Crest. I had my hand down her pants when she
asked me if I was Asian. We realized the sun was coming up when a runner went
by the car and startled us. She told me to meet her later back at the club and
I said “sure,” but I knew I would never show up.
This other time, I am at this club on the east side of
Portland. I have no memory of how I ended up there, but I’m with friends. Little
groups break off, tiny galaxies circling the dance floor. People vanish as the
night goes on. Eventually we—my one remaining friend, the two women we sort of
know, and me—are surrounded by strangers, pushing us closer together. My friend
and I are far away from home, and I ask the women for a ride back. They suggest
we drink wine at their house, which is close enough to home. Bottles are opened
and in the confusion of bottles I drink out of an old one swimming with soggy cigarettes.
It’s great fun. Everyone has a good laugh. We pair off. My friend passes out
and there is an extra person. She, full of the kind of confidence that eludes
me, comes into the bedroom and says, “So what are you guys up to?”
Just a few weeks ago, we wander together through downtown
Los Angeles. It’s warm and she says we should hit another place before catching
the Metro back. We hear cumbia thumping out of a place. We look at each other
with the same “why not?” expression and go in. On the floor short, round, brown
women turn past us. Beautiful wobbly tops become flesh. I remember that my mom
was once a taxi dancer. Cumbias, merengues, rumbas. Mostly older people and the
very serious dance, the rest of us watch. She asks me if we’re going to dance
but it hasn’t even occurred to me. But soon we’re out there sweating and
smiling through reggeaton, cumbia fusion, hip hop, and funk. Soaking in sweat
and tipsy as fuck, we run to catch the last train, laughing, laughing,
laughing.
“‘Oh don’t you dare look back. Keep your eyes on me.’/I said,‘You’re holding back.’/She said, ‘Shut up and dance with me!’” This phrasing is
beautiful and true. Sometimes we forget that music can be danced to, that its
pleasure can be an embodied experience, libidinal and erotic. Sometimes our
best statements about music are gestures, so shut up and dance.
Monday, June 1, 2015
Living and Such
I had my arms covered up to my elbows in chicken fry batter,
and he worked the fryer. It was steamy and warm, my glasses glazed with a layer
of grease and sweat that always seemed to be there no matter how often I
cleaned them. We talked over the hissing fryers for the hour that our shifts
overlapped. He had been in the South Vietnamese army and had been a prisoner of
war after Saigon fell. I believed the good guys had won that war, though I
tried never to say it. One day I asked him what it had been like to be a
prisoner of war. He didn’t say much. I suggested that at least the North
Vietnamese were not like the Khmer Rouge in executing their enemies. He
surprised me. He said that killing and dying were easy. He made a trigger with
his finger, held it up to an imaginary head, and pulled it. That’s easy, he
said. His life as a prisoner—he told me—that had been hard.
He got a second job as a postal worker. He delivered mail
along rural routes west of Hillsboro, Oregon. It pleased me so much to picture
this small and smiling Vietnamese man, bouncing along dirt roads in his mail truck
delivering letters and packages to rural Oregonians. The hour before he started
his shift at the store, I would try to get as much done for him as I could. We
all did. We all felt the same affection for him.
When his first child was stillborn everyone felt it. His
wife was young. They had met in a refugee camp in Thailand. I think he must
have been well into his forties but his small frame and his sparkling eyes made
him seem much younger. But even this death did not fundamentally change his
outlook on life. Eventually, he and his wife had a baby boy. He worked all day
and into the evening. He spent the rest of his time with his family. He gave me
a hard time for sleeping more than 5 hours a day. He jokingly wondered aloud
when I would start working hard, although I already worked 40 hours a week and
went to school full time on my two days off.
My work friends took me drinking on my last day as a
full-time grocery clerk. I had done that job for six years as I figured out how
to be something other than a manual laborer. It was one of the happiest days of
my life. I have many pictures of that last day, acting silly in the store and
getting very drunk afterwards. In one of my favorite pictures we are standing
in a large group and I have my arm around his shoulders, big smiles on both our
faces.
When he first started he didn’t speak much English and was unfamiliar with the equipment. It was very difficult to explain to him how
to use or clean the machines. I couldn’t see how he was ever going to be able
to do customer service. At the end of his first week, my boss asked me what I
thought of the new hire. I said that if I were her, I would fire him and find
someone else to do the job.
I’ll never forget that.
I’ll never forget that.
OneRepublic sings “I owned every second that this world could give/I saw so many places, the things that I did/With every broken bone, I swear I lived.” I can’t say the same
thing. But to be honest, I don’t think anyone has lived that way, including the
singer of this song. I would like to say, rather, that I lived life in the best
way I could. But even that’s not true. I have done so many things wrong, so
many things that I wish I had not done or wish I could have done differently.
From my experience, the only thing you get from having lived is the life you
lived.
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