My Old Neighborhood

 I almost hate to contribute to the ICE discourse, because it doesn’t seem like there needs to be discourse. ICE is blatantly evil. That should be enough. 

First, there’s the gravity of the moment. I’d like to write cool, dreamy analysis about art and landscape. That makes me happier than writing twitchy current-events prose. But fuck, the moment is pulling me in. Load a John Dos Passos newsreel, let’s go baybee.

Renee Good was murdered on the south side of Minneapolis, on the corner of 34th and Portland, just a few blocks over from 38th and Chicago, where George Floyd was murdered. Contrary to what you may see on the right-wing news, this part of Minneapolis isn’t a violent inner-city slum in which the only law is the law of the jungle while liberal politicians helplessly flail, and contrary to what you may see on lefty social media, it isn’t a quilombo of BIPOC resistance either. It’s a neighborhood like many others, remarkably diverse, with significant white, black, and Latino populations, largely working class, but with a fair number of comfortably middle-class homeowners as well. Sure, it’s a little worse for wear, but the area has a fine and well-preserved stock of Victorian and Edwardian homes, lovely little parks and lakes, and an abundance of independent merchants serving the local community, hippie cafes and hopelessly unprofitable record shops next to Ecuadorian butchers and Ethiopian salons.

And, once upon a time, it was the neighborhood I called home.

 

So fuck it, I don’t want to spend too much time in this shitty, shitty moment. Let’s get cool and dreamy about art and landscape. The landscape that has, much to my shock, set much of the political tenor of the past decade.

It was one of those living arrangements that one can only have when young and free. My roommate was several years older, a graduate from the same college spinning his wheels between political campaign work, hosting tables at the Bennigan’s out by the airport, and supposedly writing a book about Deep Space Nine. We had three cats. Our neighbors an agoraphobic lesbian across the hall, and a rotund middle-aged woman who drove an Escalade with a leopard-print steering wheel cover below. Wealthier neighborhoods were just on the other side of Blaisdell Avenue. On one side of the street was a minimalist Stella Artois billboard. On the other side was a Modelo billboard in Spanish with fake-titty Mexican telenovela blondes in crop tops. The local branch of the sureños kept tagging the building, only to be painted over by the landlord. Their little arms race. I looked up our local gang. They had a Myspace.

I barely worked, because I really didn’t need to pay for much more than my rent, and had a bit of cash saved up that I could burn through. What little I owned could fit in a ’95 Camry. I scrounged a mattress from an alley – don’t judge me – and who needs a bedframe when you’re 20? We didn’t have internet, although we could sometimes get onto our neighbors’ wi-fi networks. We skinny dipped in Lake Nokomis. We drank Pabst and Evan Williams bourbon and smoked rose-flavored hookah and listened to Justice and Glass Candy on our second-floor porch – a Minneapolis specialty, ideal for cool Northern summer evenings. We got yelled at by the tweakers in the building next door who threatened to call the cops on us, and we yelled back that they wouldn’t call the cops because they were tweaker trash. Apologies were made in the morning, and we’d put on Joni Mitchell’s Blue and spark a joint and sweep the floors and empty the ashtrays from the night before.

And then, my roommate left, packed up his things, leaving me with an apartment empty, save for a mattress, a sofa, and a floor lamp. With no work, nothing to do, I spent my days reading library books, as well as the countless used books I’d brought, stacked up on the floor, next to my mattress. The sunlight came in over the wooden floors in the afternoon as hookers smoked in the parking lot. I got an awful sunburn tubing on the Apple River, and I ripped a postcard-sized bit of dead skin from my back, and I couldn’t believe how beautifully it caught the light. I would walk everywhere. Maybe down Minnehaha, past the old grain elevators painted with the verdant fields of the hinterlands, a little bit WPA, a little bit Stalin. Or maybe just over to the bodega above the basement mosque. Maybe I’d buy something, maybe not. I lost a good 30 pounds that summer, and when I returned to college for my senior year, I was, for the first time, considered “hot” by some.

And other than a few visits, that was it for me and Minneapolis.

And yet Minneapolis followed me.

The din of Cedar Avenue after late-night punk rock shows and quiz nights with cheap pints of Summit Extra Pale ended in the Somalian delis, eating spicy as hell falafels, long before anyone started talking about daycare fraud.

Stopping for gas in Brooklyn Park, before that suburb’s representative, Melissa Hortman, at that time minority leader in the Minnesota Statehouse, and later speaker, a competent, well-meaning technocrat if ever there was one with a strong sense of a social mission in her good Catholic heart, was murdered by a Christian nationalist with Mittyish operator fantasies as delineated in his wildly exaggerated CV, an estranged family, and a laundry list of grievances against imagined enemies.

And that bodega with the basement masjid I mentioned earlier? A feckless George Floyd tried to pass counterfeit bills there only to be shot down by Derek Chauvin. The city burned, on the precise streets where I’d once read Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s “Empire.” And in the aftermath, any serious calls for racial justice quickly devolved into hollow rhetoric, faux-radical stances being adopted by the professional classes with a complete lack of skin in the game, consultants being called in to convince consumers that Unilever actually cared about anyone, mewling performing arts collectives trying to “decolonize” their abstruse set pieces, Black Lives Matter transformed into a floating signifier, actual black Americans as poor and fucked over as ever, police budgets still proudly high, complete with a new stock of Halo Warthogs to prepare for the Fallujahfication of American cities.

Until that fateful day last week where a mother of three got merc’d by a fat fuck in tactical gear as she tried to make a three-point turn in the middle of Portland Avenue while ICE goons went about their usual business of harassing random people of color.

 

But even when I lived there, there were signs. That August, the I-35W bridge collapsed into the Mississippi River at the peak of rush hour, the first sign that America’s proud mid-century Keynesian infrastructure was reaching the end of its natural life, with no one willing to foot the bill to replace it.

And the past nearly two decades play back, quickly, in reverse, until I’m in the Minneapolis summer, riding my bike through the summer night to the house party in Como, and the horizon still seems endless, the midsummer sun dipping behind the lake.

The World You Were Born In...

You know the phrases. “Hold my beer.” “The perfect ___ does not exi…” You get the idea. The tired cliches plunged from the depths of the discourse, irredeemable mass-market quips. Some of them, to be fair, were once clever, before multiplying like anaerobic bacteria in the hogshit lagoons of 4chan, Reddit, etc., repeated by 14 year olds and bots until their mere invocation becomes repulsive. You can call them memes, but you could argue that all idioms, sayings, and turns of phrase were really just memes before we called them memes. However, these phrases are used more like memes – impervious to creativity and lacking defined by their repetition, they are a pure statement of one’s own social and discursive standing. Sometimes deployed sincerely, sometimes ironically, almost always repulsively.

But sometimes one actually makes an impact -- not much of one, perhaps, but enough to spark inquiry rather than a dismissive snarl. 

1970s grain, VHS font, doomed buildings. If it was in a gallery, it would get far higher praise.

A memory of years ago, right before I first stepped off American soil for a long period, for my first travel adventure in Asia. I sent out a Facebook message on blast to maybe 20 or so people one day, saying I’d be camped out at the Redwood on Howell and Belmont (RIP) that evening. And I drank dirt-cheap pints of PBR and read library books in the interim – I finished Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things and started Andrei Codrescu’s Wakefield if I remember correctly – and friends came by in ones and twos and threes, most of them not saying when or if they were swinging by, just coming and going, on their way to or from other loose hangout sessions, gigs, theatrical rehearsals, shifts at the bar or the café, while All the President’s Men played silently on the projector and someone put Guided by Voices on the jukebox.

It's hard to even imagine a world like that now.

But look a little bit further, and a certain hollowness emerges. The memelords, while they get the feels right, seem to lack that sort of long, telescopic view of their own past. They’re pretty young, and despite the aesthetic cribbing from other eras, they’re not talking about the longue durée of history, but like 2017. When you have fewer rings on your trunk, you think about time in more compressed terms. Remember those “Only ‘90s kids will remember this!” posts from back in the day, posted shockingly quickly after the ‘90s had themselves ended? That being said, the past decade or so in particular has been a motherfucker. COVID, of course, being the big thing, but many, many more things have happened in the interim – and it’s only natural for younger and youngish people to contrast the chaotic present with the more sedate if bovine world they associate with the ’90s and even ‘00s. 

Therefore, it’s unfortunate but unsurprising that the term in question has its origins and has had its greatest currency in the world of online “traditionalists,” a cadre that seems to mostly consist of alienated boys and men, mostly young, but with quite a few divorce dads and the like in there, who in their worse moments fancy themselves as Saxon warriors or Goldwater Republican picket-fence patriarchs deprived of their destiny. Men who believe that in a better world they would be slaying Saracens right now, or puffing their pipe in the study while wifey massages their shoulders and pours them another dry martini (although something tells me many of their taste buds are nowhere near mature enough to enjoy an actual dry martini). Plenty of ink has been dedicated to this kind of modern creature, but it’s hard to see how this could be anything other than the logical end result of a mirror maze of signifiers without signified, and every single moment of one’s life becoming a consumer choice, with minimal regard to what it is to be human. Their solutions are idiotic and often psychotic, but their instincts are not too far off. 

I would like to dance through the chaos, to take this Spinozist joy in the present, even amid the ugly world, but it’s tough to find the energy. Beer and peanuts and Paul Auster at a long-gone Seattle tavern. Did any of us know what was coming?

A Subject/Object/Charlie Brown Christmas

 There’s nothing original or interesting about being a Christmas hater. Indeed, it’s just a seasonal riff on “that thing everyone likes, lemme tell you what, I think it BLOWS!” (OK, I kind of do that a lot).

 But I can’t say I’ve been much of a fan of Christmas ever since it stopped meaning Matchbox cars and Encyclopedia Brown books. It’s not too hard to figure out why – the crass commercialism, the religious simpering, counterpointed with Sunday-suit Southerners bemoaning the secular war on Christmas (in which I proudly believed myself to be at least a corporal), and of course the awful music. So I hid my head under the rocks, and around holiday time, if I was lucky, in response to Bob Geldof’s question, the answer was “no.”

However, no matter how bitter my experience with the holidays, I still always loved A Charlie Brown Christmas, if for no other reason than that Charlie Brown seemed to get it, and when he moped around Charles Schulz’s magical-realist version of snowbound Minnesota to Vince Guaraldi’s piano lines, it seemed deeply and truly real. Yes, Christmas is a pay grab, and his holiday blues are a frankly reasonable response.  His teacher wants him to read Dostoyevsky over Christmas break. Lucy offers him therapy for 5 cents, and of course she’s also the one who pulls away the football.

It’s now behind a paywall on Apple TV+. Fuck you.

Furthermore, even if I couldn’t stand Christmas music, even if I still feel a frisson of horror with the first department store carol of the season I hear, there were two songs that I could always rely on.

“I wish I had a river I could skate away on.” – Joni Mitchell, “River,” 1971

“Charlie, if you wanna know the truth of it I don’t have a husband, he don’t play the trombone, I need to borrow money to pay this lawyer, Charlie, hey, I’ll be eligible for parole come Valentine’s Day” – Tom Waits, “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis,” 1978

 Because for most of my adult life that was my Christmas – in milder climates, away from the meter-high snowbanks and goose down coats and hot spiced beverages on abandoned train bridges and candlelit fairytale evenings of my youth. Trying to figure out what it was to live on my own terms, to the extent I could.

And every Christmas, I had to determine whether or not I’d be bowling alone.

But sometimes the stars align.

Two old friends – Jordan and Amanda, if you’re reading, I love both of you dearly – needed someone to housesit and dogsit on Christmas Eve, and they were kind enough to leave me a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, a joint, 30 bucks for delivery Chinese, Almost Famous on VHS, and the company of their lovely if overactive husky in their house in North Seattle. Which would itself have been a lovely if anesthetized evening. Hold me closer Tiny Dancer.

But what made it truly special was the following night, when homeboy had to pick up a shift at a frankly sinister dive bar-slash-pizza place on Pike Street (any Seattleite should be able to figure out where I’m talking about). Black glass tables left over from the ‘70s, boxes of Franzia, burnt-out fairy lights, and a decidedly marginal customer base. It was the sort of place where I could and did take Jager bombs with the crust punk on one side of me and the philosophy professor reading Derrida in the original in the other, none of the three of us particularly liking either Jager or Red Bull, but all three of us enjoying the goofy ritual of it. And on that December 25th, it was full of the people I needed to be around.

It became obvious, as the Rainiers and the Seven-and-Sevens flowed. I met another guy with a passion for writing, who’d just gotten out of Snohomish County Jail for beating some dude into the hospital. A middle-aged woman in a white fur coat and a few solicitation charges kept buying me shots of Rumpleminze. It’s a story I tell to anyone in earshot around this time of year, the story of our one-night-only little Island of Misfit Toys, the Jews and the Indians and the disowned gays and, as it happened, a skinny and lost Midwesterner with literary pretensions, scarves, and a bad attitude, who felt, for the first time, like he’d finally found that milieu he’d come looking for.

Charlie Brown never got to grow up, or maybe he never had to He began life in the Truman administration and departed this planet along with Schulz himself, the man having left a missive typed out by Snoopy on top of the doghouse, in February of 2000, in the last few months of the end of history.

Maybe they would have all made it. Maybe Linus would have become a meek and mild liberal Lutheran pastor in the kindly and deeply vanilla Upper Midwest tradition. Maybe Lucy would have realized that she didn’t need to be a shit and gracefully aged into a delightfully cynical old bat who still leaves her husband on read just to fuck with him, but loves him to death all the same. Maybe Schroeder would have gotten into Juilliard and written an opera in between visits to Greenwich Village backrooms. Maybe Peppermint Patty would likewise have made it onto the women’s basketball team at the U of M, with Marcie pining for her down the hall. Maybe Pigpen would get the right meds. Maybe Charlie Brown would be sitting there across the bar, a little too serious, having finally gotten around to that copy of Crime and Punishment he’d had to read, which he was the only one in class to actually read, cigarette burns on his matching scarf, and maybe we’d talk for a bit about some random shit, and he’d be a little too serious and a little too intense and we’d go out to smoke a spliff in the sleet and he’d mention all the dumb crap he’d done as a kid just to get the attention of a little red-haired girl.

Or maybe not.

But there’s always hope.

Merry Christmas you fuckers.

The Remnants of Iowa, or Iowa, a Remnant

One does, periodically, have to go back home, doesn’t one?

The pandemic was over, I guess. I popped a 15 mg edible right before passport control, put on Avatar: The Way of Water, had a rough encounter with a loud fellow Amurrican on an escalator at the Doha Airport (him: “SERIOUSLY?! Well, FINE, go ahead, SPEED RACER!”) and flew over two oceans to O’Hare (more ugly upper middle class Americans in golf apparel, do these fuckers reproduce by mitosis?), wondering why the hell I was in transit, to arrive on someplace that seemed as familiar as a much-loved hoodie and as remote as the surface of the moon.

I sit, on a beautiful and perfect Middle American autumn day, on the patio, with my iced jasmine tea. I’d probably sat at this table before, how could I not have? Back when sitting at a vaguely trendy café was still a complete novelty in this part of the world, and back when this very same iced jasmine tea – cold and unsweetened and smelling more like perfume than anything I was ever expected to drink -- seemed like a portal to something I could barely conceive of, but something which seemed important.

"I took it in my hand, tilted the shell back into my mouth as instructed by the by now beaming Monsieur Saint-Jour and with one bite and a slurp, wolfed it down. It tasted of seawater . . . of brine and flesh . . . and, somehow . . . of the future."

– Anthony Bourdain on eating his first oyster.

Memories of memories – that’s what your hometown is, right?

I look over at the couple next to me – a time warp, the two of them. A girl with blonde braids and oughties Paris Hilton-style oversized sunglasses, a guy still looking like Chuck Klosterman wearing a cringe ironic graphic tee. And with that sip of jasmine tea, with the sun filtering through the cedars, golden retrievers playing in the fallen leaves, it was as if the weird times had never happened. The world, here, at least for the moment, and for many moments over the course of the next week, seemed fully a place where the weird times had never happened, an eternally sincere 2014, an outlier in a world far scarier, in which pessimism had long since been superseded by nihilism.

And my god is that hookah bar left over from the mid-‘00s still open?!

Even if I’m just a little too irony-poisoned and a little too insincere for this particular world, I appreciate the diorama. The sign reads “spice up your hair, pumpkin,” presented without comment.

So I walked and walked, biked and biked. I drank local gin and met strangers, people I probably would have wound up being friends with if I’d stayed around this part of the world, autodidacts and grad-school dropouts, snarky young farmers with excellent taste in whiskey and sad-eyed small town queer artists. A bartender saluting my taste in ordering a Last Word, instead of groaning about me taking up part of the world’s dwindling Chartreuse stock. I smoked far too much weed with good people in a house I once trick-or-treated at and watched the latest Maison Margiela runway and bummed an American Spirit on the porch and felt the presence of myself on another timeline, his aura overlapping mine.

But the more I walked, the darker I felt the aura to be. The Marine Corps recruitment center in the same strip mall as the Gamestop and the donut shop, across the street from the tobacconist loudly advertising kratom -- all of the supposed antidotes to the creeping misery.

And perhaps that single windswept strip mall, where I had once rented Poltergeist movies and bought Sour Patch Kids, was the skeleton key. After that, the more apparent the fundamental rot became.

It became apparent in the newly empty lots of the streets I had once walked, wastelands of cracked asphalt and crabgrass, the blank storefronts, the increasingly peeling paint, the usual Spirit Halloween dead mall, the gas station where I had once bought countless bottles of Sobe on summer nights, now feeling like a trap house, the chattering meth-teeth, the all the manifestations of the slow, general immiseration of the American populace over the past few decades. Even the solitary sneaker in the parking lot of the pharmacy seemed a horrifying portent.

To be accompanied conversely, of course, by the polyp-like clusters of HOA cul-de-sacs and Chevy Tahoes on the margins in what had once been field and pasture, where there had once been a darkness on the edge of town that had felt so comforting, distant lights flickering from town on one side, infinite fallow fields and thin strands of hickory and red oak beyond.

Enough to make me call into question the reliquary quality I had once seen. Because even if it’s there, it’s not my reliquary.

And that is why it’s a memory of a memory. The memory itself is gone. Somewhere that aura remains.