Bloomberg Will Win + Gates Arrest

Was it really 20 years ago that David Dinkins was elected New York's first, and so far only, black mayor? I listened to him chatting with Brian Lehrer on WNYC this morning, talking about his election and that era, when New York was shifting from the often dangerous and gritty but also very culturally exciting city it had been for more than a decade and a half into the increasingly prosperous, safe, museum-like, rich people-friendly (but economically teetering) metropolis it is today. (And to make it even more rich-people friendly, the city is currently shipping homeless families down South, to Paris, to Puerto Rico, to Johannesburg, anywhere but here. NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has articulated it as simply as possible: "We love rich people.")

According to at least one poll that's been touted over the last few days, Mayor Bloomberg's 22-point lead has slipped to 10 points over Comptroller Bill Thompson. Were Thompson able to gain any traction and assemble anything close to Dinkins's original coalition, or to counter the cynicism that Bloomberg's imperial mayoralty has generated, he might squeak by. Yet nearly everyone I speak with assumes Thompson doesn't have a chance of winning, especially given Bloomberg's financial dominance and the lukewarm support from the White House (at this point should we be surprised that Barack Obama is backing a neoliberal over someone who is truly liberal?). As a result, I predict Bloomberg will probably get his third term, which he finagled from the appalling supine City Council, and many New Yorkers will just shrug and not blink an eye. The devil you know is better than...? And when you have vastly more money than anyone else around, you can usually get your way. Just ask Goldman Sachs.

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I had been refraining from publicly commenting on the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. incident or arrest for a variety of reasons, but primarily because I figured there'd be a lot more swift and penetrating online commentaries--from bloggers, not the legacy media, that is--than anything I might offer. I did respond to a few private queries to say that I immediately read it as another awful racist spectacle. (I mean, can anyone name any other Harvard professor--full professor, holding a chair, internationally known, etc.--who has been arrested after identifying himself or herself, in his home, in the over 350+ years of that university's existence?)

I added that the situation really did defied explanation and reconfirmed yet again that racism, even in one of the most liberal cities in the United States, is alive and well. Others have said as much, and have pointed out that racial profiling goes on 24/7/365; that countless men of color are arrested and jailed disproportionately; that we have a prison-industrial situation that is awry; that we do not live in a police state and no one should internalize authoritarianism nor be arrested for exercising her or his First Amendment rights; and, as Stanley Fish beautifully put it in a July New York Times blog post, this isn't the first time that Professor Gates has had to endure racist nonsense. Of course this prior history will be lost or ignored by the broader media. Whether we're talking about college professors or former National Security Advisors, he isn't the only one and, unfortunately, he won't be the last.

I also suggested to C that President Obama's response to Chicago Tribune reporter Lynn Sweet's question about the Gates imbroglio would be all the legacy media focused on over the next few days. Unfortunately they proved me right.

Gates's arrest reminded me a situation that a very dear friend of mine, no longer in academe, experienced shortly after he got his first teaching job. A young black man with a Ph.D. from one of the most prestigious universities, he took a job at a major urban research university that is known, as academic institutions go, for being pretty progressive. Yet within his first year of being hired, he was stopped several times by security guards who did not believe that he was a faculty member. Not that it matters, but he always carried himself professionally and found it very hard to accept that this occurred; when he asked colleagues if they had had similar experiences, they told him they hadn't. What made the situation really upsetting for him, and what we discussed more than once, was that he worried if he complained (he did, I believe) about this treatment that it might adversely affect him, particularly with the dean of his division, his senior colleagues, and perhaps the institution itself. The fear of being labeled a troublemaker, a whiner and complainer, too sensitive, "uppity" (as some called Obama before the election, and as many an outspoken person of color or woman has been called in the past), a "racist" (as Gates himself has now been labeled by people on the net and anonymous Net posters), and so on, were all things he feared, not because because he invested any of them with truth, but because he knew that others might, and that people experiencing the kind of profiling he was encountering had been so tagged, and saw their careers derailed, in the past. If I recall correctly, he received sympathetic responses from all quarters, and as it turned it, he left the institution before his tenure case came up. But I did think of this situation almost as soon as I'd heard about what Gates experienced.

It also made me think of that horrible joke about Colin Powell (or any famous black person) walking down a darkened DC street: "What do you call him when he steps into the shadows?" Well, you know the answer. And the violence that could easily be enacted upon his body also knows none of the boundaries erected, however tenuously, by the social, political or economic capital he possesses.

I predict this incident and its aftermath will all be forgotten about soon enough, after the moment of spectacle passes, and the many issues raised by will be subsumed, as so many things are these days at the speed of light (or a new scandal or brouhaha), into anecdote.

"I was myself within in the circle; so that I neither saw nor heard as those without might see or hear." -- Frederick Douglass, quoted in Henry Louis Gates, Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self (Oxford, 1989), p. xxiv, p. 97.

Commencement Day + Life Thus Far + Photos

Today is Commencement Day at the university, so I can now say to all of the students, mine and others', undergraduate and graduate, CONGRATULATIONS! I won't enumerate all the wonderful students I've had the opportunity to work with over the last few years who've finished up this June, but they've been terrific, and I wish them all the very best, in full confidence that they will all make their distinctive marks upon the world.

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The end of the school year means my return home, and my unshakeable belief, despite years of contrary evidence, that I'll finally have some (more) time to devote to my creative work. This week, however, has proved that life always has its own plans for us, and this is especially the case when you own a home (or condo, or any other costly piece of real estate for which you're responsible for the upkeep). As I've noted on here before, a great deal--perhaps half--of my time spent at home in New Jersey has coincided with the presence of contractors. This has included the initial renovators and subsequent repairers--the painters, one of whom moved to Hollywood to direct films, another of whom coughed so badly that I thought his lungs would fly out of his mouth as he hovered on a ladder high above the backyard; the electricians, a gaggle that included one who set off sparks as he was installing a light and wondered why I looked ready to call the fire department; the plumbers; the succession of roofers, one of whom went mad and another of whom had the brilliant idea of covering our then-unlined chimney in chicken wire and stucco (we passed on that); a porch builder who promptly vanished from the tri-state area after some of the wood cracked within a week of his installing it; the doormaker-carpenter, the only sane and economic of all the doormaker-carpenters we've dealt with, who'd gone to MIT and produced work worthy of a prize; innumerable hucksters whose mercurial behavior made us wonder how they managed to stay in business at all; and so on--and others unforeseen, like the representatives from the private water contracting company our municipal water company, now privatized, employs. These skillful people not only cracked a 100-year-old water pipe once while deinstalling our water meter, but recracked it while putting it back in! And so now this pipe, which was dripping, is now seeping water, which a series of towels are sopping up. Every day this week, the water company contractor has assured me--promised me--he will show up "after 8 am," though that has meant 11:30 or not at all, if he "forgets." So today, after both C and I called first thing in the morning, I waited, he showed up, we chatted about the state of the pipe, he denounced Jersey City's placement of trees on the sidewalk and galvanized lead, we inspected the curb and learned that 100 years ago, the developers had thought through infrastructure placement quite well, and so now rather than shutting off the entire neighborhood's water supply, they may be able to target their efforts and fix this pipe (replacing it would be the best option). I am sincerely hoping they complete this sooner rather than later (and that, though I had to broach the subject, no lawyers have to get involved), since in adulthood no season ever feels more fleeting than the summer.

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When we were packing up things in Chicago, C asked if we could spend a little time having lunch at the nearby beach. For all of my time in that city I've always lived in walking distance of one and, as past photos on here will attest, I've walked and snapped shots of them. My favorite time to visit them is when a heavy fog is blanketing both them and the Lake. We went and sat on a (not so comfortable but convenient) bench on the concrete walkway and observed people lying out on the sand, walking their dogs, dipping into the water, and basically enjoying a break from the drear of weeks of cold mornings and rain, and this got me thinking about how this essential feature of Chicago life is almost never portrayed on film or TV. When movies and TV shows depict contemporary Chicago, we see the skyscrapers, the immense suburban homes and the bungalows, the El, sometimes the (remaining) projects, some of the city's unforgettable cultural and architectural highlights (the Art Institute, Frank Lloyd Wright architecture, etc.), the baseball stadia (especially Wrigley Field), various restaurants (i.e., anything having to do with food), and the Lake.

But interestingly enough, rarely do they show the city's beaches that line the Lake for miles, from Rogers Park (Howard and Jarvis Parks) all the way south to the Indiana border (Rainbow Park and Beach). As a result, I imagine that many people, like C., are probably unaware that Chicago, like Los Angeles, New York City, Boston, San Diego, and Miami, just to name some of the more obvious US examples, has pleasant, sandy beaches, real beaches, at its doorstep. (In noting this I'm not suggesting that Lake Michigan is the same as either the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans, or that the sand or beach quality is the same.) Yet I have not met a single native Chicagoan, or anyone who's lived in the city for a while, even those resident far inland to the south, north, or west, who doesn't know about the city's beaches. I also didn't know how extensive or pretty the the beaches were for a good while.

This leads me to ask J's Theater readers, when you think of the cities and towns where they you or have lived, what are some notable aspects or features that everyone who's a native or a longtime resident knows about, but that are never depicted in films or TV shows? What are some of those major hidden elements of the city that might transform how people think about it? Please post a few of these in the comments, and append your name (or a name) in case screenwriters happen upon this blog page (not likely, but you never know).

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And to conclude today's entry, a few photos from the last few months.


A late-night snapshot of artist in his studio in Rogers Park

Morse Avenue El (towards Lake Michigan)

Harris Sockel, the literature honors student I supervised, holding the students' cake at the lit honors celebration (part of his thesis topic is highlighted in the lighter frosting to the left: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. (He also was co-winner of the Best Senior Literature Major award: congratulations, Harris!)

Marvelous poet and scholar Evie Shockley, reading at the university

Election day a few months ago, Jersey City

The ubiquitous signs (in NYC and Chicago)

One of my favorite NYC statues, Gertrude Stein, in Bryant Park

Gray's Papaya in the West Village, recession special (and they were already a great deal)