Evel Knievel dies

He did Ninja Warrior years before anyone else thought of it, and he did it on a motorcycle:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2220208,00.html

His father taught my grandfather how to drive. For the record, grandpa was a safe driver.

Japan n' stuff

Current t-shirt: Skull and cross-bones with hearts
Current music: George Crumb

I have a friend who's half Japanese, Anne Ishii—please check out her excellent blog, http://ill-iterate-anne.blogspot.com/—who writes a great deal about Asian issues, etc. Recently she linked to a piece about the Canadian government asking for an apology from Japan over Japanese comfort women.

I'm in my thirties, and back reading (and reviewing) comics, which means lots of manga. I love the freshness of the medium. And Japanese culture is huge in design and art now. Ok, that's the sort of over-arching statement Anne rails against, so apologies.

While I was home, I got to talking w/Dad about my Uncle Fil, or Fillipus Ishmael Goeltom, an Indonesian nobleman who married Dad's sister, Fontaine. Fil and Fontaine died a few years back, but their son recently went to Indonesia, and returned with pictures of the dozens of Goeltoms and of the Batak Lutheran church Fil's Dad built. I remember Fil and Fontaine explaining to me that, according to Batak rules, I and every other Maury niece, nephew, and cousin was now a Batak relative, and considered family. That's a lot of white Southerners with a lot of acknowledged brown relatives, but when my aunt and uncle said it, it seemed warm and real. When my cousin H went back, they treated him like a cousin, even requiring his very blonde and Western wife to be silent during dinner like a good Batak woman.

Fil spent time in a Japanes concentration camp. They hanged his Dad in front of him. He was nearly nailed into an airplane against his will to be a Kamikaze. We believe he was tortured.

Then he came to America, met a pretty young and very opinionated brunette at an inter-faith social, and married her. Fil was very dear to my Dad and to my Grandpa, and we like to think the Maurys gave him some happiness, or at least a sense of peace. There are a lot of us, and we tend to be bookish and boisterous. But as a teenager, I knew he was sad. Which made me sad. He was one of the gentlest people I've ever known.

So I've got a squicky internal relationship with Japanese culture. I admire many Japanese artists, but then I know a bit about what Japanese soldiers did to the Batak. I know the generation who did those things is dying out, but the silence still knaws at me.

I have no idea how to talk to people about this, especially the Asians who are my friends. (Hell, I'd like to talk about it to any of my friends, but they don't get how moved I am by my uncle, and for many people I know, anything before 1969 might as well be Victorian.) And for all I understand the racial dynamics of the South, I'm still a neophyte to the social dynamics of Asia. But I loved Fil, and I love my cousin H a lot, and need to understand.

I imagine many people feel this way about America.

Love and confusion,

The Red Pooka!

Fairly large apology

Hi,

A few blogs ago, I said something about the South being about as racist as the North. Well, I ate crow along with my turkey a few days ago.

An article appeared in the Washington Post about hate crimes being more prevalent in the South. It had that horrible ring of truth, that oh-shit bell tone to it. I'm guessing they're right.

I've found a lot of racism in New York. I'm not sure what to call the 99 44/100 % pure white offices at The New Yorker. I've also found a lot of classism. Kinda blows my mind when I hear a person dressed as an unwashed E. Village hippie start on the tacky evils of the middle class. For those of you who live outside NYC, the translation is that the young man is a trust-funder slumming it, but this phenomenon is confusing the artistic scene to no end. Translation: I don't trust the well-off to save the world through money, art, or good deeds.

But yes, racism is in the South. I only have to hear my mom talk to her black house-cleaner to find it. I love my mom, and I love Ms. M, and it's vaguely entertaining to hear them do a Jeeves and Jim or rather a wily-black-servant and gracious dim massa routine. Ms. M. gets huge amounts of furniture from us each year, donations her partner, Mr. F. would rather not arrive "She's a damn pack-rat, I'll tell ya!" And mom feels more comfortable having an older black woman around. Some white people in the South, if they're of a certain age, the only tenderness they received was from black people. And the line between love and pay discretely buried.

Love, clean floors, and a guilty conscience,

The Red Pooka!

Back in Maryland (still)

Home taking care of my Dad. He had a hip operation. Is doing swell (not as in imflamation-swell, though that's a whole 'nother story), but swell as in that word meaning "great" that first appeared in a New Yorker review of some restaurant back in the '20s.

Thank you for asking, but Dad is doing swell.

The more time I spend in the South (or is it outside of New York, I sometimes can't tell), the more freaked I become. It's -not- alright for damn-Yankees (yes, you still exist) like most of my friends (don't worry, I still love you) to bitch about the South without context. I may. And I'll bet my more than 50 cousins that I know more about the actuality of the place than any graduate degree in American studies focusing on Georgia.

Yeah, scrap me and I'm that kinda of hick. The cousins galore-kind. I have fantasies about selecting, say, 12 of them and bringing them to some hip par-tay in Brooklyn and watching them form an immovable clot in the midst of the living room.


Anyway, I went to the Bare Essentials makeup counter at Annapolis Mall yesterday. My face has been breaking out, and I wanted some coverage. Didn't buy any. I asked what was in the cover-up, and the woman said "all natural minerals."

"What minerals?" sez I.

"All natural minerals," sez she.

"Yeah, but which?"

"Well it doesn't contain things like talc." (Talc -is- a natural mineral, but I let this one slide.)

"Could you find out for me?" sez I. Much rummaging around in back.

"We don't have the ingredients, but it's all natural minerals?"

I decided to get snippy.

"You mean all natural minerals, like arsenic and asbestos?" Some really blank looks.


Ok, maybe that wasn't fair. And if a New York makeup salesgirl was wearing makeup as cracked as miss natural minerals, she'd be canned. But it's a facet of the suburban South that people take things from commercials as if they're the scientific truth straight out of NIH.

Grumble. Fuck the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, Wizard, n'get me outta here.


BTW, Princeton U has a book coming out Democracy and Torture, by Darius Regali, that gives the history of various torture practices, tracing their lineage. And where lineage goes, follow backwards, and you have origin. And when you have origin, you know who to blame.

Back to Maryland

Current t-shirt: white cashmere T (Trying to channel them fifties movie stars)
Current music: Tilly and the Wall "Night of the Living Dead" (Love that song).

Heading back to Maryland today - didn't go yesterday.

Recently read the NYTimes review of the new Gone with the Wind sequel. And it came to me again, like a hammer to the head, followed by a sigh—because it's always a hammer to the head—that the North still doesn't get the South. They write about it as if it's a cartoon.

I remember my mother, who's from Georgia, telling me about the first time she read Gone with the Wind. She was on a train for fourteen hours, and she read it in one go, ten hours of reading. (Her great-grandmother, who lived to be 102, attended that ball Scarlett attends right as war breaks out.)

Thing is, Mom got that it was hokum. Blarney. A sweet dream. Integration was underway. All the propaganda from everywhere was all about how awful the South was. That it was a place where no human kindness could seep through the cracks of racism, feudalism, and awful men who, like the owner of the town store in Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, enjoyed their sadistic hold on their small portion of civilization.

And here was a book that gave an image of heroes and lovely women. Of course people loved it. But outside of the Junior League, St. Cecelia's Society (Charleston) and other such groups, I'm not sure people exactly believed it. Or rather, they did that very human thing, and held two realities in their head.

Who hasn't done that?

Can't Southerners be complex enough to be conflicted?

***

A few thoughts:

I've found far more kindness—black and white—among people who live below DC than among people who live above it. Especially among strangers.

I don't find the institutionalized racism in the North and the South to be different in quantity. The main difference is that upper-class people in the North tend to be less racist in word than upper-class people in the South, but in the South, people are more likely to actually know people across class and color lines. (Up here, when rich people know poor people, it's through college, and through college only.) Old money in the North doesn't realize how much their privilege buys immunity from racial tension, while old money in the South does. On the other hand, old Southern money and old white Southern families (rich and poor) will speak openly about problems with 'coloreds' at the dinner table. (I can never tell how much this is normal or how much it's to annoy the cousin (me) who's gone Yankee on them.)

My granddaddy was horrendously angry at the North. Not because of the war, but because of the economic sanctions that kept him and his brothers and sisters in extreme poverty, living off the land. I believe he knew people who starved and may have amost starved himself. But though he didn't agree with the economic sanctions and other laws, including integration, he believed in the rule of law. When integration came to the high school where he was principal, he informed the teachers that the law was the law, and any law-breakers could consider themselves fired. The school integrated peacefully.

Never, when looking at sanctions at Iraq, Iran, or Cuba do people bring up the close to home example of sanctions against the South. If you want a lesson in how to bring about feudalism, ethnic violence, and endemic starvation, I can think of no better classroom. And the accounts are all in English.

Men are far nicer to women in the South, at least in casual relations. (I imagine the same percentage of bastards exists everywhere.) It wasn't until I went to school in Vermont that I heard men flagrantly bragging about how many women they'd bagged. Many of the profoundly accomplished and often pretty women I know in New York who can't get a date would be mobbed with admirers in any city below the Potomac.

The South isn't all one place. It's a lot of different places. The Appalachians, the coast and the plains have different issues. Virginia is way different from northwest Georgia. No one above Baltimore gets this.

When actors want to put on a Southern accent, they rely on some standard cornball that isn't really spoken anywhere. There are many, many different accents, from the Scots-influenced areas to the heavily African-influenced ways of speaking in parts of Georgia and Alabama. And whites and blacks speak differently in the cities, but their accents are far closer in the small towns, and can be indistinguishable in the countryside, especially in the deep South away from the coasts.

***

Finally, I find many people in New York who have extremely strong opinions about the South without really having spent much time there. Or any time there. I sometimes feel the place gets grouped with Saudi for civil rights violations.

Love and grits,
(which, by the way, aren't cooked with cheese)

The Red Pooka!

Home again home again jiggety-jog

Back in da' bronx. Remember September 11, back when we were still calling it things like "The Bombing of the World Trade Center," and "The Fall of the Twin Towers? There was this joke:

"New Yawkers."

(audience answer) "Yeah."

"New Yawkers!"

(audience answer) "Yeah!"

"This means war, you know dat?"

(audience answer) "Yeah?"

"You ready fo' war?"

(audience doesn't answer)

"You ain't ready for da' bronx!"

***

Dad had his right hip replaced. He was supposed to go from the hospital into a rehab clinic. But Dad, being Dad, decided he was going to do the Maury uber-healthy thing, get out of the hospital early, and go right home. Actually, the doctors kicked him out. He's 75 and healing like someone thirty years younger. His dad once outran a forest fire for 54 miles to warn a town in Montana. Dad's not quite that, but despite some pudge has legs like tree-trunks.

***

If you're feeling happy without feeling properly guilty about being happy (and Darfur isn't ruining your sweet smile) go read Mary Jo Bang's book "Elegy." It's -almost- a great book of poems. Let's call it a minor classic. Her son died, and it turned her from a good poet to one with something to say. She was very flip and '90s once. Now she's deep.

I guess, when good people go on vacation to hell, they hide flashlights in sulphurous corners for other folk, in case we get stranded, too. Mary Jo Bang has hidden lots of flashlights.

And she still has bangs.

***