Sleep to Dream

In an episode of Law & Order the NYPD detectives meet an uncooperative FBI, and Lenny Briscoe says afterwards, in traditional New York sarcasm, "Join the FBI. Learn to pass the buck." But it's not just the FBI, Lenny.

Because Amanda has absurd connections and a friendly family, she got four all-day passes for this first weekend of the TriBeCa ("not Tribeca," Mir would urge) Film Festival. That means the only money we have to spend is subway fare. While we did get complimentary mini-Zagat's at each showing equipping us with info about the best (read: priced moderately or above) shopping, food, hotels, and attractions in the neighborhoods that surrounded the TriBeCa theaters, which really sprawl far and with random array across lower Manhattan, not at all staying loyal to TriBeCa, it did feel like a uniquely New York crowd. Even if they weren't from New York they were willing to put on the facade of New York City. Maybe I haven't been here long enough, but I feel like this city, for a huge part, is really just a game of masks and costumes and attitudes. People say you can feel New York in your soul. I think you can feel the desire to be New York, but what is New York? So it wasn't a uniquely New York crowd - it was just a uniquely New York-esque crowd. And I was proud when filling out the cheap little questionnaire/marketing gimmick in the first pages of the Zagat's to say that my last purchase was a Metrocard. Can you get more New York than that? New York as an adjective. New York as a description. It is not a place, and it is not a state of being.

Impeccable style, impeccable delusions (Brasilia 18%)

The first film I saw was Brasilia 18%, by apparently one of the world's most prominent filmmakers (but of course, being an American, I had no idea who he was). He and some of his stars stepped up at the front of the screen before the movie started to modest applause. I picked out the movie because it was supposed to be about political corruption and crime in Brasilia, Brazil, and I was tired of all the "quirky romances" that make up most of TriBeCa's offerings. Of course, there was a weird spattering of romance in Brasilia 18% too - all of it very surreal and hallucinatory. But it did successfully discuss corruption, in a hugely over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek manner. At one point a Senator Romero says something along the lines of, "You brought an honest man in here? Who says I wanted honesty?" Everyone from the politicians to their drivers discuss pay-offs with calm, matter-of-fact blase. They don't see anything wrong with their actions. They see it as the way politics is done. When one politician, I believe from the opposition party, has to hold a press conference in response to charges of corruption, he is spoonfed his outrage and indignation at the accusation by a senior adviser.

The "honest man" is Dr. Bilac, a medical examiner from L.A. who was brought in to ID a corpse at the morgue as that of Eugenia Camara, a missing young woman who at first seems to be an actress, but then is realized to be an economist working on the budget with Senator Romero. At first her story is a successful product of a meritocratic civil service - she placed highest on the ministry exam, her mother explains, and she went straight to work, as her mind was obviously capable of doing. But then there's a "porn video" that's really a taped gang rape, there's the accusations that she was involved in indiscretions with various Congressmen, there's the budget that appears to have been altered - "fixed" - to help Senator Romero's causes.

Sex with a manuscript (Brasilia 18%)

Everybody in the city (perhaps the country) - Senator Romero and co., Senator Romero's licentious daughter Georgesand, the kingpin journalists, the unbelievably crooked cops - wants Dr. Bilac to say the body is Eugenia's, so they can nail her boyfriend on the murder and dispel further scandalization of the powerful. They can spare her moviemaker boyfriend (I think this was a bit of a self-deprecating move on the director's part, to make the wretched, junkie boyfriend a moviemaker - at one point Georgesand says, "Another stupid Brazilian movie, who cares?"), but not the whole fucking Congress. As the state medical examiner (and Dr. Bilac's brother-in-law) Martins says, "If hearings worked, half of Congress would be in jail." But Dr. Bilac is convinced that it's not Eugenia. He gets a phonecall from her, in fact. Hallucinations about seeing her in the shower tempered with hallucinations of his dead wife aside, it does seem highly possible - though hugely unconfirmed by the movie's inconclusive ending - that Eugenia is just in hiding, humiliated by the surfacing of the video of her being raped and probably intimidated into silence by the cops that are really the Congressmen's drivers and thugs. As he keeps refusing to sign the report saying it's her body, the establishment gives up trying to woo him with dinners and lunches and Georgesand's affections, and moves on to full-on threats.

Noam Chomsky's Top of the Food Chain (Brasilia 18%)

And Dr. Bilac gives in to save his sister and brother-in-law's reputations, as well as to save the life of a young prostitute. He gives the strand of hair Eugenia's mother gave him to Martins for safekeeping - "so we know the truth" - and then signs the report against his conscience. He then is escorted back to the United States. It's sad, but I don't think the movie could have ended any other way. Realistically, Dr. Bilac wasn't going to sacrifice everyone just to hoist his own moral pillar. Nor was he going to get a gun and battle the thugs to death and/or victory. Realistically, he was going to give in. Everybody has a price.

The doomed, doped-up filmmaker (Brasilia 18%)

That theme went on as the night did. The second film was a documentary called Cocaine Cowboys, by some young charismatic, edgy director with a cult following that applauded him whenever he made an appearance either on screen (his name) or in person (in an ironically Miami Vice white suit). It was tremendously hard to get to that theater, involving going over a very sketchy bridge that crossed one of the few highways I have seen in Manhattan, West Broadway. But the movie was worth it. I was there with Kim, who hates explosions and gunfire (which was of course what the film opened with... but most of the gore subdued after that, limited to photos of corpses with dozens of bullet holes every so often).

Hi, my name is Young, Hip Director... worship me, scenesters

The documentary concerns Miami in the late 70s, early 80s, when most of its income was from cocaine, when the borders were completely unpatrolled, when everyone, from the clubbers to the lawyers to the doctors, are lining up cocaine on glass tables. The movie's main interviewees were Jon (the New Yorker) and Mickey (the redneck) - they were not the cowboys, they were just the transporters. And they made unspeakable amounts of money coming up with an ingenious (really... it's kind of pathetic that as a species we can spend so much brain power on how to smuggle drugs into a country and we can't devote the same mental prowess to things like, you know, AIDS prevention) method of delivery involving airdrops of bags of cocaine, hollowed out boats, planes that landed in privately built and owned airstrips and held in hangars disguised as barns, their own towing company that could "tow" vehicles carrying cocaine and then get off scot-free if pulled aside because, hey, they're just the tow truck, going south instead of north to throw off the authorities, paying everybody on the block to keep watch for cops.

C Stands For Chic (Cocaine Cowboys)

While the two (who were at the movie, much to our alarm) - especially Mickey - would say that they weren't really hurting anybody, that the violence was what fucked up the whole business, and that resulted when the Colombians and Cubans started fighting each other on account of earning the most money selling cocaine, I'm not so sure if I buy that. It's a core question of the drug debate - do drugs, in and of themselves, violence from drug wars not included, actually hurt anyone? After all, it brought in millions for Miami. Half the skyline, so most of the film's interviewees admit, is built on drug money. It turned Miami into an actual city, not a place to die for retirees.

The drug-laden city

The first response to the question is the overdoses - two deaths a week from overdosing on cocaine is a pathetic waste of human life - and the second response is whether the violence that ensues isn't inevitable. Do drugs like cocaine ever let a city swimming in them rest in peace? Guns seem to follow naturally. Look at Medellin, Colombia, where it all started - probably up there in the most dangerous places of the world. I don't think that's because "drugs make people do crazy things", but because the money. That's what it all came down to, the film's interviewees pressed - it's the money, not the cocaine, that kept them in the business. One audience member asked, "Why didn't you just call it quits while you were ahead?" to which Jon responded, "Why would we? We could make so much more." And the audience member shouted, "You had millions of dollars!" But if you can have even more millions... that's the thing about money. I know that even as a poor college student surveying my bank account. You set a goal to yourself - I'm going to come home with X amount of money - but if you surpass that goal, you're not going to stop working, you're not going to stop saving. You're going to keep on raking it in. You always want more. It's called greed, it's called humanity.

Keep your balance, Mr. Policeman (Cocaine Cowboys)

So pretty soon all of Miami is drowning in their cocaine and in the drug money. The politicians weren't so hot on the drug, but the money they would be willing to accept. A doctor said that at one point you could take a random bill out of your wallet and it would have cocaine on it. I'm not surprised since there were entire banks devoted to managing the drug money - "cocaine banks", of course. Jon was a regular donor and welcomed guest of the Republican Party's inner circles (Strom Thurmond was a name frequently thrown around). The police force, woefully understaffed, tried to recruit new members and to do so had to reduce their requirements to, as a reporter said, "if you are not currently under the influence of drugs, you're hired". Of course this means the police is crawling with cocaine dealers too. Even the D.A., one of the supposed "good guys" of the movie, was revealed during the end credits to be tried on obstruction of justice. The only "straight" people in the movie turned out to be a couple veteran cops who obviously were so filled with hatred for the murder rate in Miami - in the 600s during 1981 - that they could not be bought off, although as the transporters said, a cop may not take a bribe of a $20, a $50, a $100 - but what about $100,000? "Everybody has a price," the movie sang, echoing Brasilia 18%. The difference is that here the prices are nominal - in Brasilia, they were "real" prices - the price of your family honor, the price of a human life.

Money sings (Cocaine Cowboys)

Sometimes I wonder about the relationship between fiction and money. We've created a very swollen and bumbling dream called Capitalism, and in this dream we're able to reap the benefits of our hard work, and we're able to earn more, and anyone who can't keep up is necessarily evil. There's actually several fictions going on in these movies. There's the fiction of an accountable government and law enforcement (Jon's ex-girlfriend said, "What I want to know is, where'd the money go?" Then she raised her eyebrows as an explosion sounded, and we knew - financing Manuel Noriega, financing the Contras - and the entire theater seemed to cower in embarrassment for our own government); the fiction of the perpetrators, that as President Soeharto said, "what you call corruption, we call family values", that everything done was justified, that, "well at least I wouldn't kill the kids"; and the fiction of the victims, of Eugenia refusing to cook the books and thinking she would live to work another day, of coming to America to make a good, decent, honest living - the fiction of hope.

Iran-Contra

The fiction that we live in a world above money politics. Ugh. As the doomed boyfriend/filmmaker in Brasilia 18% rants, money squawks louder above anything else. And while we sleep in our cocaine or money-induced dreams, what happens? People die on the streets - people who happened to be standing outside a restaurant whose owner had pissed off the Cocaine Godmother, people who were unfortunate enough to be driving around a marked man in a taxi cab - people die in our drug-financed wars. Maybe it's time to follow Fiona Apple's example: "I got my feet on the ground and I don't go to sleep to dream".

And meanwhile here we sit in our dorm room listening to "Fiction (Dreams in Digital)" by Orgy:
She's lost in a coma where it's beautiful/ intoxicated from the deep sleep, deep sleep/ do you wonder what it's like living in a permanent imagination?/ sleeping to escape reality, but you like it like that/ guilty by design she's nothing more than fiction./ she dreams in digital, 'cause it's better than nothing./ now that control is gone, it seems unreal, she's dreaming in digital. she dreams in digital/ And your pixel army can't save you now, my finger's on the kill switch/ I remember I used to compose your dreams, control your dreams/ and don't be afraid to expose yourself before I shut you down/ you made some changes since the virus caught you sleeping...

The Basket Case

We had an amazing speaker in Comparative Politics today. He was from CAPPS - the Center for African Policy & Peace Strategy - a non-profit thinktank that specializes in policy research, advocacy, and capacity building in Africa. He was talking about Africa's role on the global stage... and several things stuck out at me.

First, that until the 1950s this so-called role was essentially boiled down to colonization and slavery. My colonial angst responds instinctively to this. As he said, we have to deal with this history - the fact is colonization shaped Africa (along with basically all other developing countries) - it created the bad governance that dominated Africa's independent early years, it left behind the weak infrastructure that has not allowed even good-natured governments to provide properly for their citizens, it created the basis for the relationship between Africa and the West, a relationship that obviously everybody's trying to move past but can't quite seem to let go of. I think a lot of people, especially a lot of first-world-ers, like to say that "colonialism doesn't explain everything" - they want former colonies to start taking responsibility for themselves and not blame all their problems on their former penjajak, so to speak, and I admit, as did our speaker, that it is highly necessary for these countries to take responsibility and make their own decisions and implement these decisions, to plan their own futures with the interest of their own people at heart, but when more of your country's history is as a colony than as an independent sovereign state, you cannot ignore the impact of colonization. Furthermore, when so many current trends mirror colonization (or at least, marginalization), it's obvious that you're not the only ones unable to give up the role-playing that colonization encourages.

Where does the darkness really come from?

Second, "basket case theory". I admit that I suffer from this ailment, and now I feel very guilty for it. He talked about how Africa is always depicted as the emaciated child surrounded by flies, and while it's good that Africa is portrayed at all, movies like The Constant Gardener and Hotel Rwanda (two of my favorite movies, I'll admit, two movies I thought were very powerful) do not depict the totality of Africa. They encourage "basket case theory", which says, the whole continent's a basket case. They'll never stop killing each other. They'll never stop starving their people. They're hopeless. Of course this does not further efforts to help the continent. If it's all hopeless, then why try? But as our speaker stated, it's not hopeless. With the end of apartheid, Africa's leaders are moving forward (especially in the '90s), slowly but surely. I wish I had been old enough to be an active observer during the Nelson Mandela years, because apparently not only did he rescue South Africa from apartheid, but he broke another kind of "old boys' club" - the African military dictatorship club, where dictators on the continent basically enabled each other to maintain power and keep treating the people like shit. Nelson Mandela refused to honor this tacit principle and started insisting dictatorships like Nigeria's be held accountable by the United Nations. Now regionalism is developing - regionalism that means mutual peacekeeping (The Responsibility to Protect Mandate, something I think every country on the planet should look into) and something abbreviated as APRM - a peer-review for countries (absolutely ingenious. Whoever thought of it should be given a nobel prize, honestly). So yeah. It's not a basket case unless the international community insists upon it.

Mandela: the Modern Hero

Third, the incredible inequality in international organizations is frightening. I think what I found most alarming regarding this topic was what he said about the G8 - they're the eight strongest countries in the world, no one can hold them accountable, and they're the largest arms dealers to Africa. It makes me think of Lord of War - of Nicholas Cage just handing out guns to the villagers he crash-lands near to avoid getting caught with them. What the fuck? The first world really needs to get its priorities straight. Does it want to send peacekeepers or guns? Because right now, it's doing both.

Guns or your brother, Nicholas Cage? (Lord of War)

Fourth, even the more benevolent people in the first world who really sincerely want to help Africa's poverty plight can't seem to quite get the equation of inequality straight. His example was Live 8, Make Poverty History campaigns that are part of the current mainstream celeb-charity craze. No one really criticizes these campaigns, after all, something you can see even in class when he asked those who had been to Live 8 what they thought (answers: "Yeah, it was good", "it was good energy" - sort of cautious approval). But he did criticize Live 8 because there are never any Africans on stage. Except for the formerly emaciated Ethiopian girl, the "face of poverty", who goes to stand up there to symbolize the suffering. But not exactly any African celebrities or performers, because "they don't sell records". I guess this point was further validated by his point that China and India only get a say in world affairs and international dialogue now because they are economic powers. Good reason to minor in economics even though it's the science of the devil, eh.

Material Girl meets Face of Poverty

Kseniya and I went up at the end of his presentation to thank him for coming and try to express how humbled we felt by what was really a searing indictment of the international community's method of dealing with Africa. The general conclusion is, we (the G8, the celebrities, the voters, all of us) don't know what the hell we're doing. Ugh. It makes me want to go to Africa even more. I feel like with Professor Beck, the resident Africanist at Barnard's poli sci department, leaving -- well, it's not like I even have a chance to get the distant cold knife of studying Africa from afar. I'm still stuck with the illusions-of-Africa books in English: Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart... great books, both of them, as literature, as history that deserves a voice in the present. But as much as we need to respect history, we also need to respect Africa today, Africa not as a symbol of our colonial guilt, Africa not as a symbol of darkness or dismay, Africa not as a token colony, Africa not as tribal warfare. But Africa as...

That's just it. Fill in the blank yourself with what you find, is all I have to say. As I learned from Roald Dahl's book The BFG, the blank pages at the ends of atlases are for the countries that haven't been discovered yet, and you have to fill them in yourself. One wonders if we have to rediscover Africa.

The Centre for African Policy and Peace Strategy
The New Partnership for Africa's Development
The Commission for Africa's Report, "Our Common Interest"

The Winners of History, Part 1

I hate the Iliad and the Odyssey, the two canons of American high school and college literature courses - their two examples of ancient, persevering, set-in-stone literature with times that span the tests of time and space. And I hate them. I wonder if this is one of the reasons I wasn't meant to be an English major. I can't agree with the canon... the Core, as Columbia puts it. I'm pretty sure that the Western-centric Core includes the Iliad and the Odyssey, and I know that Reed College's "core" does, because Lindsey had to read it for the five millionth time.

Most of the people I know like one or the other better. The Iliad because it's violent, war-like. The Odyssey because there are monsters and Odysseus is cool ("a James Bond type", Avi admits, "You know, even if you're a feminist, you still think James Bond is cool...") and at least it doesn't dwell like the Iliad on the names and histories and gory ends of each fallen soldier. I just hate both. Chiefly because it convinces me that the world is a broken place with skewed priorities, where the worthy are punished and the malicious rewarded. I can take that if it's tongue-in-cheek, if it encourages you to keep fighting for some sense of good even if it will be crushed, a la Catch 22. But not when it expects you to side with the undeserving malicious folks, the "winners of history".

Andromache and Hector

I also hate the term "winners of history". It gives time and fate far too much power.

The Greeks are the winners of history in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Unfortunately they're also a throng of awful, awful people. They take prisoners, the women as sex slaves of course, and get into the most retarded cockfights over who gets which slave (I think the movie Troy tried to create some kind of affection between Achilles and Briseis, am I correct? Give me a break.). Achilles is of course a self-obsessed asshole with a brain the size of a pea. Agamemnon is pompous for no reason, especially seeing as how his wife is plotting to kill him back home, while Menelaus is a hugely incompetent leader and husband, seeing as how he's the one that failed to keep his wife from running away with a total stranger. Odysseus actually doesn't invite too much wrath in the Iliad. I credit him for acting insane to try to get out of Menelaus' draft. But he gets worse later... fear not.

It's not that the Trojans are amazing models of ethical society either - at least Paris isn't. But we all know that Paris is the foremost annoying little prick in the whole saga, sort of like Enoch in Things Fall Apart. But really, as a whole, they haven't done much wrong except raise a fool of a son and allow him back inside their walls.

And I'm weirdly obsessed with Hector and Andromache. I don't think the Greek legends or storytellers have ever crafted a better couple. I sometimes with I had thought up the name "Andromache the Brave" when I still had the opportunity to mess around with my screen name, though I suppose that srikandi116 is more fitting of my heritage. Still, Hector and Andromache's goodbye scene is the tearjerker of the book. This scene has been reproduced a thousand times in my own writing, and in other fictional couples whose exploits I follow. They form the model of the Martyr and His Wife that I have stubbornly adhered to for years now. Hector is after all the man who shows the most devotion and affection toward his wife in the whole of Greek mythos. And Andromache's begging him not to go, and the son being afraid of seeing his father in his battle gear. It all fits. And of course, Hector has to die. You know it as soon as you read that scene.

And he does die, in the worst way imaginable. I cannot believe Achilles made it to the Elysian Fields. I'm actually proud of Paris for killing the bastard, weak spot or not. I think it's noted elsewhere that Andromache is eventually captured by the Greeks and sold into slavery. Yeah, she becomes the concubine of a son of Achilles. Winners of history! The little boy is "flung from the walls of Troy by the Greeks" - Achilles' son himself, actually. Winners of history! Surprisingly enough Andromache goes on to become the wife of some king of a region of Greece after Achilles' son dies, a king who was a surviving prince of Troy - she actually finds her way back to her heritage, her rightful place in history. That's why I call her Andromache the Brave.

Cassandra, Hector's sister, gets a similar fate. She tries to help the gullible, idiotic Trojans (who accept random wooden horses from strangers, giving better insight to the truth of the phrase "don't look a gift horse in the mouth") and they don't believe her, and for all her struggles she becomes Agamemnon's concubine and is killed the second she steps foot in the wretched, cursed house by crazy Clytemnestra. Oh, yeah, and she's also raped by Ajax the Lesser in Athena's own temple, earning the Greeks a rough sea voyage home. Rape, seasickness. It's all the same, isn't it.
Winners of history get to take what they want.

And that is why I loathe the Iliad.

The Tortured Underground

My concert experience continued on Thursday night with Amanda and I going to the Hammerstein Ballroom, a very delapidated and yet baroque performance area with high ceilings painted with pastel angels and two mezzanine levels. We were there to see Franz Ferdinand and Death Cab for Cutie. Amanda had already expressed her fear that she not enjoy this concert as much now as she might have, say, last semester, when we bought the tickets in a frenzied rush on ticketmaster.com. Needless to say we went anyway. I didn't think that anything could possibly top the Coldplay experience, and as it turned out, I was correct. But the experience itself was interesting in its own right.

First off, when we got out of the subway at Herald Square I felt something fall on me - not a raindrop, not bird shit - something small and light and solid. I brushed it away, whatever it was. "Shit is falling from the sky," I muttered.

"What?" Amanda didn't believe me at first, but she said something similar a few moments later. As we walked toward the Hammerstein Ballroom, through the throngs of tourists and natives and highschoolers (a different species altogether), we found the proverbial "shit" increasing in volume.

"God, what the fuck," Amanda muttered, and I started laughing hysterically.

"It's in my shoes!" I said - I was wearing open-toed platforms without a heel strap - the strange substance was sweeping inside, under the soles of my feet. I tried to discern what it was by catching it in my palms, but the particles were blowing so quickly that it was impossible. It wasn't hail. And we weren't hallucinating - we could see it blow around in the sky.

"It's like paper punches!" Amanda suddenly said, and I realized she was right - we were walking alongside a huge building housing hundreds of businesses when we saw that the strange particles swirling in the air did look exactly like the byproducts of a paper puncher, small, white, circular, flat. Where was it coming from? It was swirling tempest-like all over Herald Square, but it seemed to have no origin. I thought immediately of the jokes about Enron's Christmas - they shred documents and dump the confetti out like snow.

Shit drops from the sky in New York

Just as we entered the Hammerstein it started to rain, of course, just like Amelia had predicted. The skies would be relatively shitty all through Thursday and Friday. Although it did not help the general demeanor of the city I found it strangely ironic... strangely funny. I also found it strangely, painfully funny that we were surrounded by highschoolers at the concert. In striking contrast to the Coldplay outing, there were very few adults there older than us (at eighteen and nineteen), but plenty of highschoolers and middleschoolers with their half-choppy, half-shaggy indie haircuts, smoky makeup, cellphones, digital cameras, and sodas. Ugh. One of them had even brought along (or was weighed down by) her mother, who in her long beaded hippie skirt and pseudo-tribal necklaces that remind me of my own mother's was clearly trying to look as cool as possible.

"They think that going to see Franz Ferdinand and Death Cab for Cutie on a Thursday night is the coolest thing in the world," said Amanda. "They don't know any better."

"Do we?" I asked.

She gave me an odd look. "Of course!" But I could tell that I had struck some doubt in her, as well. I must admit that I've never felt so adult and truly cool as I did during that concert, when I was sure that most of these nymphs had very little understanding of some of Death Cab's deeper songs. All they knew was Death Cab as the reigning patriarch of Emo in America - not really emo in themselves because they have earned nods from critics and are so broad and high musically that they really shouldn't be locked down with such a terrible title as emo - but still, yeah, admittedly emo.

And although Franz Ferdinand was jumpy and optimistic and generally hyper, they ended on the song "This Fire", the song that I've used on a playlist to juxtapose riots racing through a city: "This fire is out of control/we're gonna burn this city, burn this city". It's a very simple chorus, but when you have a thousand teenagers screaming it at the top of their lungs in what feels like an underground catacombs the song is more nerve-wrecking - a feeling I could only experience out of context, looking back on it. While I was screaming as part of the crowd it was only exhilarating with undertones of destruction. Rather like "The Destructers", that post-WWII short story that I read under lamplight while Amanda and Mir watched for the second time Donnie Darko. That capacity for destruction in youth is an interesting thing - I'm sure most adults are frightened of it, and I'm pretty sure that most teenagers aren't even aware of it. But it comes out, in spurts, in protests that arise sometimes out of intellectual qualms, as in the May 1998 riots in Jakarta, and sometimes out of "primordial" qualms, as in Paris last November. And when it does it looks very scary. Maybe it's the hormones thing.

It was also a strange theme to be chanting in New York City. Maybe it's just me, but it felt a little sacrilegious, a little treasonous, or maybe just a little tempting-fate-ous to be chanting such a violent chorus toward a city that withstood 9/11.

"baby alligators in New York sewers grow up fast"

Death Cab didn't play their "New York" song - "Marching Bands of Manhattan". That was alright. It isn't my favorite song anyway. I listened to all their pieces, many of them ones I had never heard because they're an old band with a lot of albums, and I'm willing to admit that I was not one of those intelligent pundits that foresaw their rise to glory - I was one of the mainstream masses that heard them after they were famous. I was blown away by the melancholy sorrow that runs through their songs. If I listen to "Transatlanticism" while reading the latter parts of book 7, "The Peace Chronicles", I'm almost moved to tears. I just need to hear "The Atlantic was born today, and I'll tell you how" and I feel my heart strings break. Death Cab pulls at your soul, makes you weak in the knees and in the heart, then wrenches everything in its grip to squeezing point. They're named after a song called "Death Cab for Cutie" about a girl who goes for a ride in a taxi from hell... and dies. So many of their songs are about death - and they are songs about young death, probably the reason so many young adults listen obsessively and plaintively to Death Cab late at night while trying not to write their papers and mulling the dark existentialism outside their windows.

My two favorites that were played were "What Sarah Said" and "I Will Follow You Into the Dark". I only recently discovered "What Sarah Said" because over winter break Lindsey told me it was even sadder than "I Will Follow You Into the Dark". I think in many ways she's right, because here the young couple is separated by death: "as each descending peak on the LCD took you a little farther away from me, away from me" whereas they are allowed the possibility of unity in death in "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" (his encore song, by the way): "Love of mine, someday you will die, but I'll be close behind, I'll follow you into the dark". Both are devastatingly sad and being one of those hypersensitive, dramatic types frequently afflicted by the muse of epic poetry, Calliope, they are almost too painful for me to listen to. If only they weren't such beautiful songs.

I think elders may ask what we have to mourn. I'm not sure. Maybe it's that death for us is also destruction of all future, all hope, all dreams. Death is a waste, more for youth than anyone else. We're old enough to know what it means but not old enough to have done anything to protect the memories of our selves of our actions from it, should it come. And chanting "So who's gonna watch you die?" in a crowded ballroom is about as angsty as us teenagers can get. And we lap up the angst, trying to find meaning in our lives that could be cut short any second.

Growing Up Mean

"Don't you mess with a little girl's dreams
Cuz she's liable to grow up mean"
- Poe: Control

There was a quiet, rumbling movement arising out of the bricks of Barnard on the 6th. Being first-years, I suppose it wasn't too surprising that many of us didn't know what it was, but it seemed the upperclass girls did. Flyers began appearing on posts showing disturbing statistics about sexual assault and its pervasiveness in American culture. Close to the 6th the entire elevator area on our third floor was covered in black and white paper, each showing some new horrific factoid, and at the top of each sheet were the words: We March Because...

Returning from the gym late Wednesday night I noticed that the bricks on the inside of Barnard's front gates, in front of Barnard Hall where Malcolm X gave his last speech, had been chalked with the huge words Take Back The Night. And on Thursday at dinner some girls were walking around with their hands clenched in the air "to practice"... but what the hell for? They were joking about it. We were at a loss.

The wolf at the door

That evening Miriam came into our room and asked if we were going to Take Back The Night - the rally, that is. I said I'd go with her. She came back at eight that night to collect on my word.

"They're out there," she said, leaning toward the window.

I peeked with her out my window that overlooks the front gates and Broadway. Indeed, some seventy or eighty girls were gathered in front of the front steps of Barnard Hall, and they were beginning to make noise. I put on shoes and my leather jacket, then headed out with Miriam, both of us vowing that we had lots of work to do and we would only go for a little while - that we were just seeing what was going on, no commitments, no promises... not before we knew what they were saying.

When we arrived I realized how cold it really was, even on a night in April, for open-toed shoes. A girl was reading an empowerment vow from a piece of paper, and after she finished a boy read some message on behalf of Men Against Violence. Yes, there were guys there. A stunning few.

"He must get laid a lot," chided Mir in a low voice. "Oh, I'm so sensitive."

Then their leader said the march would begin, and the first chant was: "Rape is a felony - even with C.U. ID". Mir and I looked at each other, trying not to chuckle. As the crowd drifted out the front gates, Mir and I were caught between going and staying.

We waffled for a few minutes, and then when forced to answer the question, "Are you guys going to march?" Mir suddenly said to me, "Yeah, come on, let's march! Do you want to?"

"Sure... but don't leave me!"

We waved goodbye to the friend who had asked us the question and then ran to join the crowd at its rear. I think realizing that they were going to be marching in the middle of the street - in the middle of Broadway, one of America's most famous avenues, at that - was what drove Mir to decide fervently to march. Girls wearing Take Back The Night shirts were marshalling - holding off traffic with their arms - although being a weeknight, there wasn't much, and we had official security guards along with us as well as a security car. Other TBTNers had handed out red rape whistles that girls blew in time with the chants. We had laughed about those whistles earlier in the year, figuring we're probably the only school in the country that actually gives our students rape whistles along with their orientation packets.

Take Back The Night, 2004

Mir and I didn't chant all through "Rape is a felony - even with C.U. ID". We turned the corner onto 116th street as the chant became "Hey hey - ho ho - sexual violence has got to go" and we didn't chant through that either. But as we skipped down the slight hill of 116th street and then turned onto Claremont Avenue, the chant became "Whatever we wear, wherever we go, yes means yes and no means no" and Mir decided she liked that one. So she started chanting.

I'm naturally afraid to shout because the sound of my own voice, that loud, is strange and foreign to me. Also, once I start shouting I can't stop until I feel all my adrenaline pouring out my lungs. I've discovered this after both the Coldplay concert and all the Nebraska Huskers football games I've gone to. But everyone - goddamn everyone around me was chanting, so I started - just the "yes means yes and no means no" part, and as I foresaw, I was not able to stop until blocks later when my throat had become raw and pained.

"Marching all the way to 120th," Mir whispered. "Radical."

After all, the unofficial rule for first-years is not to go above 120th street. After all, Columbia University's reign of terror ends there and Harlem's begins. As uptown girls we live in a white bread world... and as much as Barnard wants us to be "strong Barnard women" we also have some of the tightest security in campuslife nationwide.

As we turned onto 120th street, the chants turned into strong and loud, ear-piercing whistles. It was so loud. I didn't know what had happened but my attention turned to our left, where a couple cars were honking their horns - and then suddenly I understood. They were showing their support for us. An elderly couple in one of them was waving cheerfully at all of us - Mir and I waved back with the rest of the marchers.

"Okay... that feels good," I murmured.

We got other parcels of support, here and there - some students at Columbia, some students at 116th street as we made another trip around the block, some apartment dwellers. But it was not near enough, in my opinion, for a liberal city and a liberal campus. We paused in front of Columbia President Bollinger's house, on Amsterdam Avenue, screaming "University silence perpetuates the violence!" but he didn't come out and acknowledge us. It figures... it takes the president a long time to meet with any rallying groups around campus, whether their causes are Darfur or eliminating hate crimes. He's more interested in expanding Columbia to make up for our blessing-curse location, crammed and teeming New York City.

Bollinger

I must admit the most intimidating part of the march was the Columbia campus itself. After all, that's where the hate crimes take place. That's where the rapists on campus are. People sat on the steps of famous Low Library and watched us, their figures mere silhouettes in the dark. Others walked on by, giving us perplexed stares. As we paused for our moment of silence, fists raised in the air (that's what the girls at dinner were practicing for), a recording of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech was playing somewhere in the distance. It was eerie. Someone behind us suggested in passing, "Put down your arms!"

And I thought: No. No. I consider myself a pacifist. I remember getting chills hearing our school choir sing "Lay Down Your Arms" at the city's Holocaust Commemoration in 6th grade. But this is different. This is not a war with innocent casualties or collateral damage. The only casualties here arise out of inaction. So I thought: No. No. I will not put down my arm. Not in this case. This is not the time for compromise.

A night later, I've read up on Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani woman who was ordered to be gang-raped by a local council as payback for her brother's actions, who's since turned into a women's rights advocate, protected by fellow rape victims and continuously threatened by high-ranking government officials. President Musharraf thinks rape victims see crying rape as a money-making enterprise. I was again at the gym pounding away at the Stairmaster when I realized that some things are dealbreakers. And some of my more diehard liberal friends will attest that I am one to compromise for the sake of the greater good. But not on this. I don't really care if Pakistan is a necessary ally in the war on terrorism. Some people say it's traditional values. Other people say honor killings - honor rapes, a seeming contradiction in terms - are Muslim traditon. Bullshit. I grew up in Indonesia. I know all about ridiculous traditions and Muslim traditions alike. None of them include what happened to Mukhtar Mai.

Mukhtar Mai

And only about five percent of our student population was at Take Back The Night. It's shameful.

Decades have passed since women's emancipation in the U.S. Decades too since women's liberation in the 1960s. And the neocons among us, women and men both, say, "I just hope she's not still pissed..."

But I am. I'm still pissed. The world is forcing me to grow up mean.