Flashback 13

My life was not supposed to go this way.

A picture of me twelve years ago: stupid happy grin, sitting in the Mars Bar on Second Avenue, NYC, banging my head to the melodies of Lubricated Goat or some other goddamned alt-rock band, lacking the wisdom to refuse free drinks from the bartender, and only just recently sober enough to cut that ratty ponytail I'd let grow down to the middle of my back. If the barstool next to me had told me I would soon fall in love with a woman from a faraway land, I would have blinked, conjured up a vision of an Asian seductress--which were highly coveted accessories for white East Village hipster males in those days--and then I would have returned to the grinning of my grin.



I really thought I was a good dancer. I made a lot of money writing about rock stars for slick magazines. I slept with beautiful women. Someone in my position could only smirk at the prospect of hooking up with a Teutonic: German was the language of Mike Myers skits on Saturday Night Live, and "Eurotrash" was a pejorative for any young New Yorker who was truly with it. To people like me, Germans were the tightest, up-whitest people on the planet. If I had known that Austrians speak German, too--and I didn't--then I would have thought the same of them.

My prejudice, like others more and less insidious, was a lazy one. But it was also a disconnect from my life up to that minute. I'd grown up in Texas, and had defined myself by hating country music, racism and the Dallas Cowboys. As soon as I was old enough to watch public television, I fell for some of the weird old movies they would show, particularly The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis. When I got a bit older, I became a photographer because I saw pictures by Europeans like Robert Frank, Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy.

Austin, the most liberal town in Texas, was a good place for effete snobs, which was what I was becoming, but it wasn't old enough for me. It didn't have a real downtown, and whenever I went to towns that did, like Dallas, I mistook tall buildings for cosmopolitanism, and I swooned. All of this stuff--buildings with scars, the shadows and robots of German Expressionism, being part of a 'salon,' trading ideas about Art, and trading women too!--seemed unspeakably desirable to me. Literally unspeakable: I don't know if I ever told anyone else that I loved all this Euro-goop. It was just a lavender haze in my brain. An ideal.

Maybe Dr. Phil would say I just wanted to be someone else. But I liked myself just fine. I knew I was a suburban middle class kid, and I liked liking hard rock and pinball and the Rocky Mountains and all sorts of other goofy American shit. By the time I was twenty-five, I had even started liking country music a bit.

Then I saw New York City. I moved there a little more than a year later. I got lucky and I started writing for two dollars a word. And I stayed in New York for eighteen years.

Adinah's Birthday Index

(apologies to Harper's)

Number of (large) bowls of popcorn popped for Adinah's birthday party: 4

Number of cakes: 3

Varieties of bubbly drinks available for adult consumption: Cider (4.5% alcohol), Champagne, Proseco, mineral water

Number of face-painted clown cats in attendance: 1

Number of adopted children: 4

Number of adopted Ethiopian children: 3

Ratio of Ethiopian children to blond children: 1:1

Ratio of kids to adults: 11:13

Screaming fits: 4

Songs requested by the birthday girl: "El Paso" by Marty Robbins, "Monkey Man" by Toots and the Maytals, "You are My Sunshine" by Elizabeth Mitchell

Broken dishes: 2

Spilled juice cartons: 2

Blood shed: none

Party duration: 5 hours

Clean up time: 1 hour

LaVena

As a father, I do my best to take care of my little girl. I try to teach her the good stuff, try to be there if she falls down on the sidewalk, and I talk to her. But her mother and I can't take care of her all the time, and there's a short list of people we trust to watch over Adinah when we're not around. Our babysitter Rosa. Our friend Micha. The women and men at our Kindergarten.

As she gets older, our daughter will have to learn to take care of herself. I may find this a difficult process, but Adinah is gonna be just fine, I know. At the same time, she will entrust herself, first to her friends, and then to various institutions--we all do this as we become little league baseball players, university students, parents and responsible citizens of the place we call home.

We all want to be able to trust our institutions--our society--to take care of our children. But what if they don't?

This is a photograph of LaVena Johnson. She grew up in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri. She was an honor roll student at Hazelwood Central High School who played the violin in her spare time and volunteered for the American Heart Association. When LaVena finished school, she joined the Army. They sent her to Iraq. She died there on July 19, 2005. She was nineteen years old.

Army representatives initially told LaVena's parents that she died from "self-inflicted, non-combat injuries" but that she had not committed suicide. After an investigation, they changed their story and insisted LaVena had killed herself. But the Army also sent investigation photos and documents home to the Johnsons, and these documents suggest that LaVena was murdered. The evidence of foul play includes the disappearance of LaVena's debit card, lab results that indicate she may not have even touched the rifle she was said to have shot herself with, and indications that someone tried to set her body on fire. Despite these findings, the Army has declared the case closed and refused to make any further comment.

Last week, the St. Louis CBS-TV affiliate KMOV broadcast a report about LaVena's death. I learned about her from posts by Waveflux, Shakespeare's Sister and an Angry Black Bitch. As far as I can tell, there has been little media attention otherwise. That leaves LaVena's father, Dr. John Johnson, all alone in a fight to find out what really happened to his little girl.

As a father and a man who is living a long ways from home, I want to believe that people over there in the US are trying to do the right thing. And as Americans, we have to be able to trust our Army to take care of us and our children. But what if they don't?

In this case, it's possible that Army investigators really did try to discover the truth about LaVena's death in her tent in Iraq. If that is so, our message to them is simple: Try harder.



(PS: Waveflux suggests, as do we here at Euro Like Me, that anyone who cares about this case contact their US Senator, particularly if that Senator is on the Armed Services Committee. That Committee's membership is listed here:

Democrats
Carl Levin, Chairman (Michigan)
Claire McCaskill (Missouri)
Edward M. Kennedy (Massachusetts)
Robert C. Byrd (West Virginia)
Joseph I. Lieberman (Connecticut)
Jack Reed (Rhode Island)
Daniel K. Akaka (Hawaii)
Bill Nelson (Florida)
E. Benjamin Nelson (Nebraska)
Evan Bayh (Indiana)
Hillary Rodham Clinton (New York)
Mark L. Pryor (Arkansas)
Jim Webb (Virginia)

Republicans
John McCain, Ranking Member (Arizona)
John W. Warner (Virginia)
James M. Inhofe (Oklahoma)
Jeff Sessions (Alabama)
Susan M. Collins (Maine)
John Ensign (Nevada)
Saxby Chambliss (Georgia)
Lindsey O. Graham (South Carolina)
Elizabeth Dole (North Carolina)
John Cornyn (Texas)
John Thune (South Dakota)
Mel Martinez (Florida))

Yesterday's City of Tomorrow

Your industrious Euro Like Me reporter has been working on a film script (!) The movie is about a housing complex called Interbau, which was built in Berlin in 1957. The architects were pretty much the hot-shit superstars of concrete-and-glass at the time: Gropius, Aalvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer, and several others who perhaps should have been famous. In doing the work, I've come across a remarkable document: it's a booklet that was published at the time the buildings were opened for occupation, and it lays out the manifesto of what these builders were trying to achieve for the residents. It's by turns eerie, ridiculous and poignant, and it says a good deal about the European (leftie) intellectual head in the fifties. Some of it sounds totally five minutes ago, other parts sound like they were beamed in from Planet WonderWorld.
Anyway, the booklet is organized into a series of numbered Precepts (like, er, biblical verses). Here's a few of them, interspersed with some pictures I took of Interbau while I was there in January.....


"24 The family used to be a unit of several generations, living, working and spending their leisure time together. Today the large family has been reduced to a small one by the splitting of the old from the younger working generation.
25 Even this small family flies apart today towards its various places of work and interests. The members of the family drift apart."


"6 But none of us would voluntarily go on living in tenements, and each desires healthier dwellings in natural surroundings for his children.
7 All long to relax in the forests, wander among fields, bathe in clear lakes and rivers, and enjoy activity in little gardens."


" 17 Superficial and senseless distractions are on the increase as recreational activities.
18 The celebrity and the star are becoming universally accepted, delusive models.
19 Amidst this transformation the circle of politically and economically responsible persons has not yet achieved the character of a new elite, a genuine governing class.
20 There has arisen the type of professional official whose specialized capacity for thought does not move beyond the scope of devoluted duties.
21 Creative spirits, almost unknown to the masses, have their being in seclusion. But the value of their achievements has not yet been restored to general effectiveness."



" 4 In the city of tomorrow the people will live in urban residential areas with a free view and linked with their neighbors. At the same time each has the opportunity to lead his personal life."

(all quotes from The City of Tomorrow, Interbau GMBH/International Building Exhibition, Berlin 1957 booklet #1)

Bury My Heart

I guess it was a learning experience. That's what big people, otherwise known as adults, say when they make a mistake but still...don't...quite...get it.

It's been a busy week for Adinah. Last Wednesday, she went on a field trip to a bakery. Then Friday was Berufstag (Professions Day) at her Kindergarten. The kids learned about what people do for work, and they come dressed up for a job they'd like to do. Most of the other girls dressed up as ballerinas and actresses and cooks. Adinah dressed up as a doctor. I was so proud of her. Not that I'd want her to actually grow up be a doctor. I just think it's cool that she's testing meritocracy and confronting gender roles.

And yesterday, the kids had a Faschingfest, which is basically a Fat Tuesday party without Jello shots.

We'd been planning for it for a couple of weeks, because Adinah had decided to dress up as an Indianer (Native American). When she told us, I had turned to Anette and said, 'I got this one.' My father worked on a Sioux reservation when we were kids, and I'd grown up hearing lots of real stories about Native Americans. So I wanted Adinah to know a little bit more than Western movie stereotypes and myths about them. We went to the library and looked at some old photographs, and I started telling her a little bit of what I know about the Hopi and the Commanche. I wasn't gonna read her Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee or anything, but I had a program worked out. Sort of. I wanted her to know that the Indianer were beautiful, brave, sophisticated people of color--so much for good intentions. I didn't really think it through enough to realize that any real discussion of Native American history would make it clear to my Ethiopian daughter that brown people and white people have a history of violent conflict.



One morning, she pointed to a picture in one of the books we had borrowed for her, and asked me, "Papa, why did the white shoot the Indianer? Why did they say 'That is our land!' to the Indianer?" She was completely upset about it, and all I could do was tell her, "Well, sometimes people fight with each other, sweetie. Sometimes people are bad to each other."

The next day, Adinah decided she would be a cat instead of an Indianer for the party. I mentioned it to a friend, and she said, "Well, if you were her, would you want to dress up as someone who was cheated, robbed and murdered?"

I thought it was a pretty fucked up thing to say. But she had a point.

As it happened, Adinah the Cat had a good time at Kindergarten that day. She was still in her costume, rolling around on the ground in the garden when I picked her up in the afternoon. I haven't had the heart or courage to re-approach the subject of Native Americans. But...maybe somewhere down the road. Maybe there's a way I can explain it to her. Maybe not. She's just reacting plainly to an episode in American history that many of us have abstracted and intellectualized. And even for big people, there's something more than sad about these pictures....

Sopranos Pinball in Italy

On Saturday morning, I sit through a presentation by Jonas Ridderstraale, the bald and black-leather-wristbanded author of a "bestseller" called "Funky Business." He's here to talk about revitalizing the corporation, but he waxes sociological too, especially when he proclaims that the citizens of the Republic of Britney Spears now matter more as a market to most companies than do the citizens of, say, Belgium. Because you see, nation states no longer have a sense of themselves, and instead, people tend to group themselves into tribes. It's meant to be deep, but it's just a twenty dollar makeover of Ned Beatty's climactic speech at the end of Network, a film made in 1976.

A short while after this, I find that I must leave this place, this Fair of Ideas. So I walk across the street to the shopping mall with the pyramid on top of it. Shop & Play.

What I discover inside is lane after lane of stores so tacky and fake-fur-encrusted they would make the merchants of Manhattan's 14th Street blush. I look for a little something for Adinah, but the toy shop is filled with chinzy plastic action figures and cartoon characters I don't even recognize, so I flee. I have lust for an ice cream, but all I can find is an American Frozen Yogurt kiosk. I get a small cup of strawberry.

And I play pinball. The arcade has four games, so I try each, pick my favorite and have been amusing it for a few minutes before I realize what I am doing. I am playing a Sopranos pinball game in Italy.

It's pretty fun, although I'm not sure how any regulator could have ever thought it was an appropriate machine for children or adolescents. There's a plastic stripper figure who slides up and down a pole, there's a dot-matrix graphic of a guy getting beaten to death, and one object of the game is to advance from the rank of Soldier to Good Earner to Boss. I get to Acting Capo. And I smack the stripper target hard enough to get the backglass to flash the words "Totale Bing!" But the best part of it is the old man voice who keeps yelling something which sounds like, "Bambi la Gada!"

How odd it must be for some of the Italian teens milling around me to play this game and see a cliche of Italy filtered through an array of Hollywood bells and whistles. Do they recognize anything of their culture or their country or themselves in this contraption? Maybe it's just entertainment for them. But I think that if they do play Sopranos pinball in Italy (because not too many kids under thirty do play the game anywhere anymore), they will at least recognize that this mechanical cartoon of the Mafia and pasta is supposed to be somehow Italian. Some of them might even be self-possessed enough to say, 'Yo, that is not how you get to be an Acting Capo.'

So please, don't tell me people don't know who they are anymore. To that I say, 'Bambi La Gada!!'

Who Will Buy?

The short, balding curmudgeonly man is acerbically attacking the Information Technology Revolution, and particularly hugely successful social networking sites like My Space. Says they're a fad, no different from the hula hoop. The sixty-something female scientist next to him questions the nature of innovation itself. And the other guy up there, who says he teaches at the London School of Economics, but sounds suspiciously German, claims that the line between science and public relations is growing ever so thin. To shore up his argument, he cites the book Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurter.

Where the fuck am I? An academic conference for nattering nabobs? No. I am at InnovAction, a massive trade show and science fair in the smallish city of Udine, Italy. This auditorium, now thinly populated, was only this morning packed to the hilt to hear a roster of politicians and university rectors drone on about economic competition and the necessity for corporate tax breaks. The hallways and exhibition arcades are awash with go-to capitalists in suits, publicists with expensive watches and (eek!) lots and lots of policemen. Yet here they are, these doubting Thomases, these sceptics, these defilers of hype and buzz and everything else that makes late capitalism so, so special!

The speakers are Brian Winston, Helga Nowotny and Martin Bauer, and each one of them is completely compelling in their own way. After their panel, I ask each of them for an interview, if only because their attitude is so endearingly bemused and critical in the middle of this sea of sales pitches. Then I walk over to the Plaza of Culture, a section of the trade show that has seemingly been leased entirely by MTV Italy. It's all futuristic cubicles and melty chairs and last years' Morcheeba album and it's so cluelessly NOT critical that all the sudden InnovAction 2007 looks like the most brightly colored lonely place on the planet.

But then again, maybe I'm just missing my wife and daughter.