[From feb. 26 issue of Inprint]
Every year, would-be immigrants from Mexico, Central and South America endure grueling ordeals to reach the United States. Most come overland, and at the Mexican border they traverse miles of desert, often with little food and water, sometimes with fatal consequences. Over the past few years, because the government and volunteer/vigilante groups like the Minutemen have stepped up efforts to patrol the border regions, these desert trails have only grown longer and more perilous.
Many make it across—estimates of resident illegal immigrants in the United States range from 10 to 20 million—and many are able to find jobs and send money home to their families. But some of this human tide is caught—wasting thousands of dollars paid to less-than-reliable guides, or “coyotes”—and others die of exhaustion, heat stroke or dehydration, and their bodies are abandoned.
Essentially, getting here takes more than a jog through the park. That's what made last Thursday's "hunt" in Washington Square Park for Caitlin Kannall, an NYU sophomore from Illinois who wore an "illegal immigrant” placard, staged by NYU's College Republicans, so disgusting. It was impossible to ignore the event's racist, violent and paranoid connotations.
Sarah Chambers, president of the College Republicans, told NYU’s newspaper, *Washington Square News*, that the group wanted to provoke controversy. Even though no more than a dozen students donned the “I.N.S.” nametags, the group got what they wanted. The stunt attracted a mob of national news reporters and a crowd of over 300 counter-protestors. Struggling to contain them behind barricades, the police shut down one of the park’s adjoining streets.
Only an hour into the debacle, according to *WSN*, protestors climbed over the barricades, swarmed around the club’s information table and began chanting, “Racists out.”
Like most college students in the United States, these Republicans will probably never have to risk death, isolation, violence and poverty for their freedom. While it is abhorrent to see humans chased like animals, in this case, it was hard not to grin at the spectacle of the hunters becoming the hunted.
Unfortunately, this great debacle didn't lead to much thoughtful discussion or insight. In general, one thing we should hear more about is why so many immigrants continue to risk the strenuous passage to America. Of course, there are multitudes of answers: the opportunity to escape abject poverty or political persecution, to provide a better education for their children, to find hope or a fresh start. But without actually talking to "illegals"—as opposed to chasing them—we may never know for sure.
One also has to wonder how big of a problem undocumented immigration really is. For all of the comments posted on the *Washington Square News* website condemning illegal immigration, there were few that offered any concrete statistics to explain why it is such a problem. If anything, we have all benefited from immigrants who work horrid jobs to get paid measly wages.
The big question, of course, is what we should do about this influx. Building fences and hunting people down like animals are solutions, but regardless of your political views, they appear to be hopelessly impractical ones.
This is obviously something we need to talk about. So, let's convene a New School conference, invite academic experts, homeland security types, undocumented immigrants, and maybe even some College Republicans...that is, if they agree to check their hunting gear at the door.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Living all over again: Sebadoh returns with original lineup.
[This ran in this week's issue of San Diego CityBeat]
Photo: Eric Gaffney of Sebadoh
In 1989, things could get intense when Lou Barlow, Eric Gaffney and Jason Lowenstein holed up in Gaffney’s garage, puffed a bowl and churned out tunes.
“Nobody was really prepared to call themselves the leader [of Sebadoh],” Barlow recalls. While the egalitarianism was refreshing, Barlow says it was also “impossible to maintain.” He and Gaffney argued bitterly. Once, Gaffney decided to kick Lowenstein out of the band. Then Gaffney sat out for a few tours.
The tension became apparent in 1993 when Gaffney stormed off the stage during a Lollapalooza set and hurled a rock at Barlow. In 1994, he quit altogether.
“I thought it best to retire for a spell,” Gaffney says. “It wasn’t as fun as when it started, before we started making money.”
After the split, Gaffney and Barlow negotiated with Homestead Records to get their early records and singles re-released. The result is a double-disc re-release of 1991’s "III," an ambitious work of haunting acoustic ballads and unconventional, aggressive rock. After the release, the three entertained the idea of playing again. So they booked a tour for this spring.
“The reason I think we formed the band is that [Gaffney] had kind of this wellspring of enthusiasm about writing songs and going out and fucking with people,” Barlow says. Now that Gaffney is back on drums—the three are all multi-instrumentalists, trading off on guitar, bass and drums—Barlow says, “I’m immediately like, ‘Oh yeah.’”
“They are much louder than before is all,” Gaffney says.
It is only appropriate that the re-release of "III" comes with an extra disc of b-sides and rarities. Between the three members, there likely are multitudes of unreleased gems, curious alternate takes and pot-addled garage jams. On tour, Sebadoh will hawk another collection of their garage favorites.
Old-school fans might attribute all this excess to Barlow’s love of analog. He started fiddling around with tapes in 1978, when he was 12.
“I had a cousin of mine who took a tape recorder and pressed the fast-forward button and the record button at the same time and made a voice that sounded like ‘Guuuaaah,’” he recalls. Soon after, he picked up guitar, started singing in a made-up language and recording on a Tascam four-track cassette recorder in his “quest for noise from these household objects.”
Then he got into hardcore and started playing bass for the fuzzy, booming outfit Dinosaur Jr. In 1989, Dinosaur frontman J Mascis told Barlow, now 40, the band was breaking up. The next day, Mascis embarked on a tour with his new band—Dinosaur Jr minus Lou Barlow.
Around that time, Barlow met Gaffney and, using his special tongue, dubbed their new band “Sebadoh.” When they met Lowenstein, the whiz kid was still in high school. Other friends joined them throughout the years, and the group progressed from a crackly acoustic sideshow to an angular indie force. Barlow and Lowenstein have played as a two-piece since 2001’s "The Sebadoh."
It’s hard to say what will become of the original Sebadoh after this tour. Barlow will embark on a tour with Dinosaur Jr, and Lowenstein will be busy touring with the Fiery Furnaces and recording other bands. Gaffney is typically not forthcoming with his plans.
“Hopefully it will all go well,” Barlow says. “[But] we have our day jobs.”
Sebadoh plays with The Bent Moustache at The Casbah on Feb. 26. Doors open at 8:30 p.m. $15. 619-232-HELL.
02-21-07
Monday, February 19, 2007
lately
Lately I've been thinking a lot--a lot, believe me--about what I'm going to be doing after college. I feel like I've set up a lot of good stuff for myself and have gained a great deal of knowledge, but I know that I can't anticipate 50% of whatever happens. I want to write about Arabic and African cultures, or a specific culture therein, and want to write about the military. I don't know what's pulling me that direction, besides my interest and curiosity and wanting to do something about this war. But I know I can't really go to Iraq. I haven't figured this out yet but I'll keep you, my faithful non-readership, posted.
Sunday, February 18, 2007
B&N: A maze of tragedy
I was perusing the political science section of Barnes & Noble today. Between "Soulless: Ann Coulter and the Right Wing Church of Hate" and Ann Coulter's "Godless: the Church of Liberalism" lined title after title that discussed the black mysteries of the CIA, expounded on torture or drew a history of America's enterprising in the Middle East. I settled on "Ghost Wars: the Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001."
Were I to examine the culture section, what would I have found? Oh do tell, great mystifying book room.
Were I to examine the culture section, what would I have found? Oh do tell, great mystifying book room.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Cossacks Are
Reading Alexander Pushkin, I can't help but be taken by this fine bit of advice:
"I shall not judge a man by his tall sheepskin Persian hat or his painted fingernails."
"I shall not judge a man by his tall sheepskin Persian hat or his painted fingernails."
Monday, February 12, 2007
What Would Brian Boitano Do?
It was dark. A drag queen’s voice suddenly blared through the speakers. “Miss honey. What the fuck? Get your faggoty ass out here.” Brian Boitano wasn’t ready to come on stage. He was getting into character.
After a few moments, and a little more chiding, thumping techno burst on. Lights projected against the far wall. Brian came out. He bore thick, black eye shadow, a radiant smile, a bleached faux-hawk, shiny black briefs and black, leather platform boots. He donned the Canadian and American flags like a cape.
He draped the flags on either side of the floor and walked center stage. It was February 20th, 1988. Calgary, Canada. The Olympics.
Boitano danced. He flexed. He shook his ostentatious bulge. He sniffed lines of speed down his arm. “Ice,” he cried. “I love ice!”
It was the “Battle of the Brians.” Boitano pulled off three perfect triple axels and finished with his signature—a stunning 10 seconds of spread eagle. Canadian Brian Orser stuck seven triple jumps but faltered on his early triple flip and opted out of his final triple-axel. He did a double-axel instead.
The scores were close. The judges gave Orser a four, Boitano a five. Boitano tossed his head back. He just won the gold medal for ice-skating.
He ran to his beautiful wife.
The voice boomed in again. “Girl, I know the truth about your relationship,” the black queen, Boitano’s self-appointed fairy godmother, said.
Boitano froze. “But I’m a heterosexual,” he said. “I have a wife!”
Uh, uh. Godmother knew him.
Boitano shrugged, then fell into a sly smile. “Nobody knows how good the Battle of the Brians really was,” he revealed. A luscious synth bass line and a ramming beat came on. A video-tape started rolling in the background of the two Brians having sex in a hotel room.
About thirty people watched, sitting in black folding chairs, in a room of about 800 square feet. It was outfitted with small stage lights, speakers and a network of cables hanging from a low ceiling. There was no stage. It was the performance space at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, or BAX, in Park Slope.
Brian Boitano, really, was Michael Burke. Burke, a performance artist from rural Idaho in his early thirties, lives in Red Hook, directs the La Mama/Trinity college summer program in Manhattan for experimental theater and dance during the fall, teaches at Trinity College in New Haven, Connecticut during the week, and has been working on “APPROPRIATION/approach-fag-nation,” his foray into the deviant life of this ice-skating world champion, since November.
“At the moment, I have way too much material,” he told the audience, in a discussion session after the show. The piece began as an improv one night at Dixon Place, a performance space on the Bowery. He had just read Boitano’s biography, Boitano’s Edge: Inside the Real World of Figure Skating. “A terrible book,” Burke said, but rife with material: it compelled him to write a few sketches of Boitano’s gay-boy alter-ego. “It’s all Brian Boitano,” he told me.
Burke has been dancing since 1996, and doing dramatic performances that incorporate scenes, music and video since 1998. He writes by chewing the cud, so to speak. “I write every day, and I generate material every day. I sort of hover over topics,” he said. Mitchell Poland, a director who has worked with Burke since 2002, told me, “A lot of it is about otherness. A multiplicity of character.”
Mitchell recommends Burke’s 2006 piece “Pussy Trouble! The Secret History of Gilgamesh & Ekindu.” Using clips from an independent film of Burke having sex with a much older woman, he cast himself a new age Gilgamesh, a king of legendary proportions from around the 26th century B.C., believed to have built protective walls around the ancient city of Uruk.
At this night’s discussion session, Burke, his hawk flattened with sweat, wore black jeans and a black zip-up hoodie over his costume and sat in a metal folding chair. The woman sitting to his right, Jessica Cerullo, started the show with “Miracle Tomato.” In a read sweat shirt and jeans, she opened the piece on all fours, tended to wander towards the audience and address us directly and eventually produced both a tiny tomato and a foam tomato from her shirt. All the while, she mused on the tomato’s bearing witness to the brutalities of life.
In the audience sat three hip, vaguely athletic dancers. They had given an artfully bizarre, methodical and symmetric dance sequence, dubbed “A Howling Flower.” Marya Warshaw, BAX’s executive director, had seen the piece before. “They’re revealing themselves more as humans,” she observed. “It’s not easy,” said Nami Yamamoto, their director, a diminutive Japanese woman with a heavy accent, who was sitting to Burke’s left.
After ten years of solo autobiographical work, Burke told us, he didn’t want to be the main character anymore. So, he plans to bring in a real fairy godmother, Brian Orser, and two others. “With time,” he said, “they will come.”
Burke rehearses Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays either at a space in Carrol Gardens, at BAX or at La Mama in Manhattan. Over the next couple of weeks, Burke will carve into the rest of his Boitano material—a mess of writing and dialogue, more techno and video, and who knows what else.
“It’s going to change a lot, by tomorrow,” he told me after the discussion, with a titter.
In March, he performs “APPROPRIATION/approach-fag-nation” again at Dixon Place. In April, he takes the act to Green Mountain College, a small liberal arts college in Poultney, Vermont. In May, he performs in Berlin. Between then and now, it’s uncertain what transmutations the show may go through. The intrigue certainly begs that old question—what would Brian Boitano do?
After a few moments, and a little more chiding, thumping techno burst on. Lights projected against the far wall. Brian came out. He bore thick, black eye shadow, a radiant smile, a bleached faux-hawk, shiny black briefs and black, leather platform boots. He donned the Canadian and American flags like a cape.
He draped the flags on either side of the floor and walked center stage. It was February 20th, 1988. Calgary, Canada. The Olympics.
Boitano danced. He flexed. He shook his ostentatious bulge. He sniffed lines of speed down his arm. “Ice,” he cried. “I love ice!”
It was the “Battle of the Brians.” Boitano pulled off three perfect triple axels and finished with his signature—a stunning 10 seconds of spread eagle. Canadian Brian Orser stuck seven triple jumps but faltered on his early triple flip and opted out of his final triple-axel. He did a double-axel instead.
The scores were close. The judges gave Orser a four, Boitano a five. Boitano tossed his head back. He just won the gold medal for ice-skating.
He ran to his beautiful wife.
The voice boomed in again. “Girl, I know the truth about your relationship,” the black queen, Boitano’s self-appointed fairy godmother, said.
Boitano froze. “But I’m a heterosexual,” he said. “I have a wife!”
Uh, uh. Godmother knew him.
Boitano shrugged, then fell into a sly smile. “Nobody knows how good the Battle of the Brians really was,” he revealed. A luscious synth bass line and a ramming beat came on. A video-tape started rolling in the background of the two Brians having sex in a hotel room.
About thirty people watched, sitting in black folding chairs, in a room of about 800 square feet. It was outfitted with small stage lights, speakers and a network of cables hanging from a low ceiling. There was no stage. It was the performance space at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, or BAX, in Park Slope.
Brian Boitano, really, was Michael Burke. Burke, a performance artist from rural Idaho in his early thirties, lives in Red Hook, directs the La Mama/Trinity college summer program in Manhattan for experimental theater and dance during the fall, teaches at Trinity College in New Haven, Connecticut during the week, and has been working on “APPROPRIATION/approach-fag-nation,” his foray into the deviant life of this ice-skating world champion, since November.
“At the moment, I have way too much material,” he told the audience, in a discussion session after the show. The piece began as an improv one night at Dixon Place, a performance space on the Bowery. He had just read Boitano’s biography, Boitano’s Edge: Inside the Real World of Figure Skating. “A terrible book,” Burke said, but rife with material: it compelled him to write a few sketches of Boitano’s gay-boy alter-ego. “It’s all Brian Boitano,” he told me.
Burke has been dancing since 1996, and doing dramatic performances that incorporate scenes, music and video since 1998. He writes by chewing the cud, so to speak. “I write every day, and I generate material every day. I sort of hover over topics,” he said. Mitchell Poland, a director who has worked with Burke since 2002, told me, “A lot of it is about otherness. A multiplicity of character.”
Mitchell recommends Burke’s 2006 piece “Pussy Trouble! The Secret History of Gilgamesh & Ekindu.” Using clips from an independent film of Burke having sex with a much older woman, he cast himself a new age Gilgamesh, a king of legendary proportions from around the 26th century B.C., believed to have built protective walls around the ancient city of Uruk.
At this night’s discussion session, Burke, his hawk flattened with sweat, wore black jeans and a black zip-up hoodie over his costume and sat in a metal folding chair. The woman sitting to his right, Jessica Cerullo, started the show with “Miracle Tomato.” In a read sweat shirt and jeans, she opened the piece on all fours, tended to wander towards the audience and address us directly and eventually produced both a tiny tomato and a foam tomato from her shirt. All the while, she mused on the tomato’s bearing witness to the brutalities of life.
In the audience sat three hip, vaguely athletic dancers. They had given an artfully bizarre, methodical and symmetric dance sequence, dubbed “A Howling Flower.” Marya Warshaw, BAX’s executive director, had seen the piece before. “They’re revealing themselves more as humans,” she observed. “It’s not easy,” said Nami Yamamoto, their director, a diminutive Japanese woman with a heavy accent, who was sitting to Burke’s left.
After ten years of solo autobiographical work, Burke told us, he didn’t want to be the main character anymore. So, he plans to bring in a real fairy godmother, Brian Orser, and two others. “With time,” he said, “they will come.”
Burke rehearses Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays either at a space in Carrol Gardens, at BAX or at La Mama in Manhattan. Over the next couple of weeks, Burke will carve into the rest of his Boitano material—a mess of writing and dialogue, more techno and video, and who knows what else.
“It’s going to change a lot, by tomorrow,” he told me after the discussion, with a titter.
In March, he performs “APPROPRIATION/approach-fag-nation” again at Dixon Place. In April, he takes the act to Green Mountain College, a small liberal arts college in Poultney, Vermont. In May, he performs in Berlin. Between then and now, it’s uncertain what transmutations the show may go through. The intrigue certainly begs that old question—what would Brian Boitano do?
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