Smokler

Amiri Baraka at UCLA

Hearing this old name brought some memories from the good old days in New Haven. When I was an undergrad I wrote my senior thesis in Art History on Images of Masculinity and Race in the Early 20th Century Drawings of Hugo Gellert. (Check out his bizarre illustrations of Das Kapital, which are pretty racially provocative for the 1930’s. This image of the peasant, Teutonic? Black? What about the homo erotic workers?). Yeah, that work of scholarship definitely prepared me for life in the real world.

One of the advisers who read my work was a scholar named Kelly Jones. When I asked her how she got into some of scholarship on African-American art, she mentioned her father, LeRoi Jones. It took a minute to put two and two together, to realize that her dad was the Poet Laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka.

He came and spoke at Yale after I graduated to 100 people at the African-American House on campus. His poem, Somebody Blew Up America caused a minor storm when he read it and got a standing ovation. A lot of Jews interpreted it to be reheated, unoriginal conspiracy theory against the Jewish people and Israel. The ADL came out in typical fashion, against something they didn’t seem to fully understand, but smacked of potential anti-Semitism.

The thing is, its much more insidious than that. Baraka’s poem, as I read it at least, isn’t typical anti-Semitism or racist rants. It’s just bullshit. See, a lie is when you know the truth and willfully deceive. The truth still exists in a lie, your just hiding it, or contradicting it. Bullshit, on the other hand, is where you have no regard for the truth. You could be telling it, or not. It doesn’t matter. You are simply putting out speech without regard to any factual claim. That’s where Baraka seems to be coming from in his poem.

He spells out a litany of legit crimes against people and peoples:

"Who got fat from plantations Who genocided Indians Tried to waste the Black nation
Who live on Wall Street…
Who bought the slaves, who sold them
Who called you them names Who say Dahmer wasn't insane..."

These are not minor events, they just ain’t that simple. I wish we could collapse every tragedy in history into a single indictment against evil. I guess if you believe the devil is up to his dirty work in this world, than you can. But if not, than history is complicated and messy.
From my perspective as a Jew, we have a deep interest in bringing truth to bear on racism at work in our society, like the flying of a civil war battle flag over state capitals, or allowing senators and congressmen who ran for office on racist, segregationist platforms to go unreformed, unrepentant and unexamined as they carry on in political life.

And we have an obligation to call to attention the issues of racism and abuse of power in the Jewish homeland. My friend Sasha recently wrote about Israeli/South African military cooperation in the 1970’s. As a Jewish society, there needs to be an open examination of military assistance and investment that Israel provided to the apartheid state. But the fact that Jews have committed their share of wrongs, does not exonerate our adversaries from examination. This is the major pitfall of my colleagues on the left. We assume that because Israeli policy is problematic or just plain atrocious, that this somehow justifies the racism of groups like the ISO. I, for one, don’t think so.
Truth is a fragile thing. Arendt correctly points out that in the struggle of truth and power, truth usually looses.

“The chances of factual truth surviving the onslaught of power are very slim indeed; it is always in danger of being maneuvered out of the world not only for a time but, potentially forever. Facts and events are infinitely more fragile things than axioms, discoveries, theories – even the most wildly speculative ones – produced by the human mind; they occur in the field of ever changing affairs of men. In whose flux there is nothing more permanent than the admittedly relative permanence of the human mind’s structure. Once they are lost, no rational effort will ever bring them back.” The Portable Hanna Arendt. p. 545-576

Facts, like flowers, can be trampled over with ease, and are cultivated with difficulty. Once they’re gone, they are often gone forever.

That’s why the Talmud quotes a verse from the torah portion this week: Keep Far away from Falsehood! (Exodus 23:7), to make this astounding claim about being a judge in a Jewish court:

“…any judge who judges truthfully for even an hour--the verse sees him as if he were a partner of the Holy One in the creation of the world. Here it is written: "And the people stood with Moshe from morning until evening." and there it is written: "And there was morning and there was evening, one day." TB Shabbat 10a.

Being a judge is so precarious, so fraught with the possibility of perverting justice, that even for a learned, righteous person to judge truthfully for an hour, makes a person a partner in Gd’s project. How much more difficult is it to conduct your life with rigorous honesty? It sure seems a lot less pernicious not to lie, but just to disregard to the rigor that truth requires and breeze through with bullshit.

Jerusalem and Los Angeles

Today my friend Elon Langbeheim, who founded the ‘realist’ camp of the religious Zionist movement, challenged me about my new found love of Los Angeles. Could I point to anything significant about living here beyond the pleasant weather? Was it just that Los Angeles was the farthest American City I could find from Jerusalem, where I lived this past year, or did my interest have a deeper logic? Elon looks forward to returning to Jerusalem, where his family and friends live. He reminds me that anyone with a lick of intelligence could see the plastic quality of life here, the hollowness of the ‘dreams’ that bring people to this city, the lonely isolation of sitting in your car all day, the lack of any real intellectual life. Sure the weather is nice. But if that’s it, why not move to Boca Raton, where my grandparents and parents settled (and indeed, where almost every Jew’s parents and grandparents are destined to settle)?

A great deal of ink has been spilled trying to understand the appeal and repulsion of Los Angeles. Both detractors and boosters recognize that in the last two generations, the population and physical boundaries of the LA region have grown faster and larger than almost anywhere else in the developed world. People like coming here. Moreover, it is the geographic center of the culture that now dominates world tastes. People like what comes from here.. Like it or not, there’s something unique about this place. But what is it?

The classic book on the question is Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Banham was a British Historian of Architecture closely tied to British Independent group, the precursors of Pop Art. He came to LA in the 1960’s and remarked:

“A city seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep apart from a small downtown not yet two centuries old and a few other pockets of ancientry, Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape. Most of its building are the firsthand only structures on their particular parcels of land; they are couched in a dozen different styles, most of them imported, exploited, and ruined within living memory.”

This is not so different from Sarte, who came to LA two decades earlier and pooh-poohed the city:

“Los Angeles, in particular, is rather like a big earthworm that might be chopped into twenty pieces without being killed…In America…cities..that move at a rapid rate are not constructed in order to grow old, but move forward like modern armies, encircling the islands of resistance they are unable to destroy…”

And indeed, Banham is well aware of the baggage LA carries in the mind of the cultural elite, but attributes it to a misunderstanding of LA’s uniqueness:

“So when most observers report monotony, not unity, and within that monotony, confusion rather than variety, this is usually because the context has escaped them; and it has escaped them because it is unique (like all the best unities) and without any handy terms of comparison.”

What is that uniqueness?

“One must properly begin by learning the local language; and the language of design, architecture and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality there to a unique degree…and the city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the glow of its unprecedented life.”

And in surely one of the finest sentences in Art History writing, Banahm concludes dutifully:

“So, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.”

From this perspective, Los Angeles is the farthest thing from Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, there is no non-monumental architecture. Everything is built on top of other monumental architecture. Walk with me 400 yards from where I lived in Jerusalem and see: Our apartment was in an old Arab house, from before the 1948 war, complete with the floor tiles and thick walls of limestone. Across the street was a templar house shaped in a perfect rectangle, built by German Christian missionaries, and now housing a machon, one of the infinite, indescript institutes where some scholar or charismatic figure presides over a trust of money to preserve and promote or protect something. Maybe 200 yards to the northeast from the templar house was the cease fire line of 1967, that divided the city between Israel and Jordan. Along the walk to that now vanished line are abandoned Zionist social engineering projects, like the Jerusalem Institute for the Study of Textile Structures, where two chocolate labs now chase each other in circles in the yard. In the valley beyond that cease fire line is the Cinematec, the temple of non-religious culture, open on the Sabbath, serving non-kosher food and foreign movies. And ironically or not, its perched above the valley that used to be Geihinom, the place were Baal and Molach were worshiped with idolatrous sacrifices. Once, I saw The Big Lebowski open the Jerusalem film festival almost a decade ago in that valley, subtitled and misunderstood in Hebrew.

Here in my neighborhood in Los Angeles, our house is the only structure that ever stood on this ground. The closest thing to ancient is Santa Monica Blvd, maybe a mile to the North. It was a Spanish road from the original settlement downtown to the beach. In this sense. there is a weightiness of what was to Jerusalem, where in LA we tend to feel the levity for what we might become.

But the similarities are deeper than one might imagine. Here, there is a smog report every morning. Red means ‘don’t go outside’, yellow is ‘be careful’, and green is ‘feel free to breathe’. Jerusalem has its own smog. Yehuda Amichai, the late modern psalmist of Jerusalem wrote:

“The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams

like the air over industrial cities.

It’s hard to breathe.

From time to time a new shipment of history arrives

And the houses and towers are its packing materials.

Later these are discarded and pled up in dumps.”

I once had the great pleasure of walking with Amichai through Yemin Moshe, the neighborhood, directly opposite the Old City walls, (where the 1967 border ran). He lived not far from there, and took sometimes took groups of students, like the one I was with, on tours of favorite spots in the neighborhood. Every so often he would stop and read one of his poems. This was maybe five years before he died. Amichai had the well worn face of a middle aged Israeli. If you spend time there, you can see it immediately. The Jewish men and women of my parents’ generation are of nearly identical genetic stock as their Jewish counterparts in Israel, and yet the Israelis have a tiredness, a kind of brooding seriousness etched in their face, even when they are happy. Amichai had those lines on his cheeks, and deep sad eyes that took the world in and held onto it tightly. He spoke quietly.

Jerusalem, as much as it is a city built in monuments, is an imagined place. To anyone familiar with Rabbinic Literature, that’s not a revelation. The Rabbis always spoke of the earthly Jerusalem, which could lay in ruins, and the heavenly Jerusalem which sat at the center of the universe.

Los Angeles too, is an imagined and real place at the same time. Unlike the Greek’s Atlantis, or Garcia-Marquez’ Macondo, that never had to deal with the stubborn facts of daily life, both Jerusalem and Los Angeles were cities that had imagined realities as strong if not stronger than their daily life. For Los Angeles, the monumental architecture, Banham and others point out is not the buildings but the films and television. Drive from my house to the beach, and go past the opening shots of fifty different pieces of culture: the diner from the opening scenes of Pulp Fiction, the establishing shots in Beverly Hills Cop, the place where Axl Rose gets off the bus in the video Welcome to the Jungle, or Santa Monica Blvd from a Sherlyn Crow song. I think about these things all the time when I drive around. They are not holy, nor Jewish, but they communicate the aspirations and frustrations of the culture I grew up knowing and, it’s the culture that so much of the world now consumes as well.

A city of less than three hundred years is hard to compare to a city that just celebrated its 3000^th birthday. While it is lived differently in both, the two cities share the experience of existing as powerfully as a fantasy as they do a reality. Los Angeles promises social mobility, riches, beauty, fame, rebirth and pleasure to all who come. Anyone who has seen a movie, or watched television, let alone my generation who has seen thousands of movies and watched hours of television every day, know this. Once you get here, you can’t help but feel the possibility, real or imagined, everywhere. You’re in LA.

Jerusalem promises eternity, holiness, the end of exile, redemption, a place of Gd’s kingdom on this earth. It is the disparity between the imagined life and the difficulty of daily existence that make these two places so poignant. Sit in Hollywood by the bus station, and you can see the incoming bus with pretty young people taking their leap into the unknown. A half our later, the outgoing bus from Hollywood takes the washed up, the fried, the burnt out, majority that didn’t make it, home, or wherever they called the place before here.

“Jerusalem is full of tired Jews.” Amichai wrote.

“always goaded on again for holidays, for memorial days,

like circus bears dancing on aching legs.

What does Jerusalem need? It doesn’t need a mayor,

it needs a ring-master, whip in hand,

who can tame prophecieis, train prophets to gallop

around and around in a circle, teach its stones to line up

in a bold, risky formation for the grand finale.

Later they’ll jump back down again

to the sound of applause and wars.”

I felt that tiredness this last year. Amichai was not a hater. He wrote as a lifetime Jerusalemite in a long, complicated and painful love affair with the city. But he felt both the imagined and real Jerusalem in all its contradictions at the same time. Fantasy and reality were not two distinct modes of being, as much as factors that acted with different, but equal weight on us all.

Ah, pinche Los Angeles.

I have been looking at the beautiful mountains and languid boulevards of LA ever since re-reading Tiny Ladies. The title made me think of another tiny lady in shiny pants, quite unlike those mentioned in the book: Jenny Rivera, the so called Reina de Los Angeles, the Queen of LA. I first heard about her from the show ‘Cucuy de la Manana’, a Spanish morning program that almost everybody on the other side of town listened to, until a guy name Piolin came in and split the radio market). Jenny has a voice that is something like a Spanish Ethel Merman. It’s brassy, bold, and every bit deserving of the title “Reina”. Her voice is laid over corridas, those Mexican western songs lilting out of every kitchen in every restaurant in LA. But her music is also cross bred with everything else you hear on the radio in LA, hip hop, regeatton and even Indy rock.

You see, until you could play iPods in cars recently (and in some, like mine, you still can’t), you had two choices: either find something to listen to in your car as you drove, or spend all you’re anytime minutes and call everybody you knew. After running out of things to talk about with the people in my phone book, I started listen to explore the radio. Everyone who moves out here goes through a phase of trying books on tape, or some other do-gooder audio. I listened to a 15 part lecture on Mark Twain, which I lost, had to pay back to the Beverly Hills Public Library. Beth listened to My Life, the autobiography of Bill Clinton read by none other than, Bill Clinton.

I still listen to Rabbi tapes, and other Jewish lectures. But on the whole I make mix tapes, go hot and cold on the too-cool program ‘morning becomes eclectic’ and try to make sense of the indy station 88.9. When I’m going from one to the other, the radio spits out some corrida from some Mexican station.

The interesting thing about corridas, and Ranchera music in general, is that the instruments for it, and all the sounds are actually from the French occupation of Mexico. That’s why there are Mexican guys playing accordions and the tuba instead of a Spanish guitar. But who is to say how another people comes up with their national symbols?

I personally can’t stand the music most days. It’s saccharin tunes about leaving and coming back, leaving again and then being upset you came back in the first play. But occasionally, like today, when I drove down Eagle Rock Blvd, just past downtown, on a clear day, in the bright sun, in my crumby little Honda, as the only white guy for miles, I felt like I could use a little corrida. I sang along and bobbed my head to the Tuba, and smiled thinking there was a Queen of LA and nobody on my side of town new it.

Here were some tunes I was listening to:

More Specifically, LA.

But it’s not just California. For me it’s Los Angeles. I grew up in a small liberal mid-western college town that valued its independent bookstore, its boutique record shops, and its 5,000 person legalize pot festival every spring. Los Angeles was the place of plastic where some of my cousins lived. Fake, empty, and too hot.

Then I actually came out here. Jill Soloway describes it much better than I ever could in her book Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants, which just came out in paperback. She writes

“Los Angeles is Magic. Its yellow-orange-red and the smog makes everything blurry in a good way. I hate when people come to Los Angeles and just bitch, bitch bitch. I know its not New York. I know it’s not Chicago. Yes, some of the people here are fake. Shut up and go home. I love landing here. When I emerge into the sun at LAX after I’ve been away, I hear Joni Mitchell singing her song….”

The more I leave and come back, the more these sentences resonate with me. Oddly enough, when I was living in Jerusalem during the cold rainy winter, with everyone coughing from the fog and ideology in the air, I would sit back and drink my crappy coffee at Café Hillel at think of landing at LAX.

When we finally got home, some friends came to visit. Sure enough, it just was like Jill described in that same essay:

“When I visit other cities, I go out of my way to praise them in a fake high voice, “Wow, Chicago is getting so cosmopolitan!” and “Hey! Boston has some great shops!” When people come here, the’yre not five minutes on the ride in from the airport before they say flatly from the back of their throat, “I could never live here”. I really don’t care if you could ever live here. Magic happens here and maybe you just can’t handle.”

She goes on to paint a beautiful, lyrical picture of LA, capturing a lot of the feelings I get day to day just driving around. It’s a complete heresy to say if went to college on the east coast, or you’re a serious Jew, (or even a Rabbi…) like me, but I sure like living here a lot more than Jerusalem…More on this later.

Clinton came to California on Friday to push prop 87, our next big energy initiative. Basically, it creates an extraction tax on oil that will go to build a superfund for energy research. It’s not the be all and end all of the foreign oil/global warming energy crisis, but it is a good step in the right direction. I have no sympathy for oil companies that kvetch about having to pay taxes to extract a natural resource with the way gas prices are now, and the kinds of profits they’re pulling.

This is part of what makes California so damn great. You see, we are the 6^th largest economy in the world. Some put us at 10^th at worst. Economically, California is bigger than Italy, Canada and yes, even China. The California economy is more diversified than you can imagine, from entertainment to real estate, to agriculture, to defense -based manufacturing. We have a population that’s more diverse than just about anywhere else in the country as well. And we have an actor for a Governor. With all that big business and amateur politics, this state still comes up with some of the smartest, most innovative policies. (California also pays way more than it receives to the federal government in tax benefits. What would happen to all those folks in the red states who bitch about paying the federal government taxes if a state like California actually stopped paying? It would suck to try and get Medicare in Mississippi is what.)

Take a look at the Public Policy Institute of California for some of the figures they have. Compare it to anything else in the US (besides New York) and its just staggering.

I mean, it’s nice when Vermont puts up laws that are smart and deal with the issues like oil security and climate change, but who cares? It’s Vermont. They have lovely scenery, tasty fudge, and nearly as many cows as people.

There’s a reason everyone wants to come and live here.