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Something borrowed, something new

200705_lethem.jpgA close reading of Jonathan Lethem’s novel You Don’t Love Me Yet.


200705_lethem.jpgA few years ago, author Jonathan Lethem found himself well on his way to becoming the Philip Roth of Brooklyn with his two most well-acclaimed novels, Motherless Brooklyn (1999) and The Fortress of Solitude (2003) — both colorful and incisive accounts of his hometown borough — quickly propelling him into the somewhat reluctant role of a Brooklynite mouthpiece.

It was for this very reason that Lethem felt compelled to set his new novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, in the complex maelstrom that is Los Angeles. It’s a bold move, not only because of the notorious competition between New York and Los Angeles, but because Los Angeles is a difficult place to penetrate — even for those who live there.

“There’s that famous Joyce quote about ‘artists need silence, exile, and cunning,’” Lethem told me over the phone in late March, “and I guess I’d just been looking for that ‘exile’ part of things; working from the margins, doing preposterous things, disavowing one’s credentials.”

The novel — Lethem’s seventh — stars Lucinda Hoekke, a bass player stumbling into her thirties while living in Echo Park, an up-and-coming, yuppie-hipster Los Angeles neighborhood. Like many of the city’s residents, Lucinda works odd jobs as she tries to make it with her wannabe rock band. Her latest career move is answering phones at the Complaint Line, an anonymous help line conceived by her conceptual artist friend. Eight hours a day she fields complaints from callers responding to randomly placed stickers that read, “Complaints? Call 213-291-7778.” (The number really works: Try it.)

It’s there that Lucinda falls for a regular caller named Carlton Vogelsong — affectionately nicknamed “the Complainer” — who confides to Lucinda at length about his sexual escapades, but also about his feelings of emptiness and dissatisfaction with life. The Complainer also happens to be a professional slogan writer and, indeed, his utterances beguile the wayward Lucinda, who makes note of them and passes them on to her band’s lead singer and songwriter. The Complainer’s words soon become the lyrics for some of the band’s best songs, calling the material’s ownership into question as the band starts to grow more popular. As the songs take on a life of their own, no one is quite sure just where they originated.

The plotline recalls Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” which was published in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The essay explores the phenomenon of cultural borrowing and appropriation, and the effects of intellectual property rights. “The demarcation between various possible uses is beautifully graded and hard to define,” wrote Lethem in that essay, “the more so as artifacts distill into and repercuss through the realm of culture into which they’ve been entered, the more so as they engage the receptive minds for whom they were presumably intended.”

Appropriation is essential to creative vitality, Lethem reminds his readers, and strict copyright laws are consequently detrimental to artistic innovation. The essay urges consideration of the world of art and culture as a sort of public commons, impervious to possession by a singular person. “Copyright is a ‘right’ in no absolute sense; it is a government-granted monopoly on the use of creative results,” writes Lethem. “Whether the monopolizing beneficiary is a living artist or some artist's heirs or some corporation’s shareholders, the loser is the community, including living artists who might make splendid use of a healthy public domain.”

In that spirit, Lethem has initiated a project through his website called Promiscuous Materials that offers up his stories and lyrics at no cost for other artists to use, rework, and reinterpret at will. Already, artists such as One Ring Zero and John Linnell from They Might Be Giants have recorded songs to Lethem’s lyrics, and some short films are in the works.

Lethem has also recently announced that he will option out the film rights to You Don’t Love Me Yet to a filmmaker of his choice in exchange for just 2 percent of the profits once that film is made. In addition, both he and the filmmaker will give up ancillary rights to their respective creations five years after the film’s debut. By offering this nontraditional option, Lethem hopes to spark a reexamination of the typical ways in which art is commodified. “I also realized that sometimes giving things away — things that are usually seen to have an important and intrinsic ‘value,’ like a film option æ already felt like a meaningful part of what I do,” he writes on his website. “I wanted to do more of it.”

Lethem is not the originator of the battle against the increasingly tight grip of copyright laws; he points to Open Source theory and the Free Culture Movement as influences, as well as longtime collage artists like the American experimental band Negativland. But as a successful mainstream author, Lethem is a uniquely compelling advocate. “Almost everyone you find clamoring for strengthening the public domain or for reexamining the regime of intellectual property control that’s so typical right now is not so much like me,” Lethem told me. “I think there’s a really kind of sad abdication of this conversation by more established artists. That’s why I felt that I had a role to play in this talk.”

Projects such as Promiscuous Materials and the You Don’t Love Me Yet film rights option are potent responses to the rampant propagation of intellectual property rights — more effective, probably, than the latent messages encoded in the plot of Lethem’s new novel. It would be easy to create parallels. For instance, in the book, when the Complainer learns that the band’s hit songs contain his lyrics, he burrows his way into becoming a member — “Do you want to destroy the band?” the drummer asks the Complainer when he claims credit for the songs. “How could I want to do that?” he responds. “I basically am the band.” But this unpopular addition results in the band’s demise. Thus, the Complainer’s aggressive move to assert creative ownership ultimately destroys the artistic product.

Yet Lethem is quick to downplay the connection. “Of course, it comes out of a similar instinct, but it’s not like the book was written as a heavy way of bearing down on any idea. It sort of glances off those thoughts. But the book is, I hope, a little too frisky to seem like it’s got a big and ponderous agenda like that.”

As advised, it’s best to read You Don’t Love Me Yet as a light and playful “sex and rock ‘n’ roll” novel rather than overestimate its relation to Lethem’s crusade against what he calls “usemonopoly.” Though some reviewers are dismayed by the novel’s slightness as compared to the wondrous complexities of Lethem’s more major works such as Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, it is not definitively disastrous for an author to maintain some equilibrium of tone and substance. As the Complainer says in the novel, “You can’t be deep without a surface.” Jonathan Lethem has sufficiently proved his depth as a writer; let us allow him his surface.

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Commentary

Alone in the forest

Discovering the kindness of strangers in Cuba.


A truck had dropped me off at a crossroads. But instead of driving away, the well-meaning driver was still trying to tell me something. Probably, “No cars are coming. You’re in the middle of nowhere. Are you crazy? What are you doing, little lady?”

I got the gist, even though I didn’t speak Spanish. I started walking, and as the distance between us grew, I could hear him yelling that maybe this was a bad idea, and he motioned for me to get back into the truck. He honked again.

But I kept on walking. No time for debate.

I passed a man wearing a suit and a felt hat, who was also headed for San Diego de los Banos, a town known for its thermal baths. He was just standing there, waiting in the middle of nowhere, as if it were a bus stop. But there was no bus stop. No car or another person in sight.

Perhaps he is still waiting there.

The man said that San Diego de los Banos was a long way off — 15 kilometers at least. But rather than join him, standing in the countryside, with the chance that a car may never show up, I decided that if I walked fast enough, perhaps I could still reach the town by nightfall.

It was now 3:30 p.m. The sky was overcast. About three more hours of sunlight left. Remembering the distance of bygone high school cross-country races, I calculated that 3.1 miles equaled five kilometers. If I can walk three miles per hour, surely I can reach town by dark, I thought. It is doable.

So I began walking. And I walked and walked.

And not a single car came by.

The road through the countryside rose and fell, and soon, the flatness of the land gave way to a forest of pines and cedars. Not far from here, Che Guevara had moved his headquarters into a cave during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was just me and this forest, and if I shouted, I’d spook myself.

Suddenly, two men emerged from nowhere, walking next to their bikes. Perhaps there was a house tucked away in the forest that I couldn’t see. I began to walk a little faster, but the two men were gaining on me.

Why are they walking next to their bikes? I asked myself.

My duffel was heavy, and I tried to pick up the pace, but they were getting closer.

I could totally be raped and robbed right now, I thought, clenching my teeth.

I stopped and let them overtake me. A teenager with his father on a bicycle ride, it appeared. They happened to be walking next to their bikes because the hill was on an incline.

“Hola,” they said, after I gamely raised my hand and said, “hi.” I knew I was safe after I asked them how far San Diego de los Banos was, and the man replied with a wave of his hand into the distance, “twelve kilometers. It’s far away.” I reassured him that I was hoping to flag a car that came this way. He nodded, and they soon passed me.

I walked a few more kilometers when I saw two other men approaching from behind — again walking with their bikes.

There is nobody around, so I am really at their mercy here, I began to think. Suppose I get killed in this forest. The Cuban police might take a week to identify my rotting body from my passport photo. My imagination was getting the better of me again; I began to wonder how much media coverage the story would get at home.

And then, the men were next to me. One of them offered to put my bag on his bike. I said no, that I can carry it myself. Now there is a ploy, I thought. Put the tourist’s bag on the bike and ride off.

It was not until the younger of the two men smiled sympathetically and said something about confianza that I softened. I said “si,” and put my duffel on his bike. I recognized the word from the French confiance, which means “trust.”

And so began our 12-kilometer ride to San Diego de los Banos, where the two men lived. The sun emerged, and the skies then revealed the depth of their blue heights, with wispy clouds soaring high above. When we would reach the summit of a hill, I would sit atop the horizontal bar of the bike, “sidesaddle,” in front of the younger man, and hold onto the inner handle bar while he, wearing my backpack, would steer us both downhill, with the older man following close behind.

We’d breeze past palm trees and lush vegetation, the young man applying the brakes generously and carefully avoiding the road’s potholes, until the hill petered out. Then the three of us would hop off the bikes and walk them up to the next summit, get back on, and ride downhill again.

A strange grunting noise seemed to follow us each time we stopped. And then came a long squeal.

Poking out of the slits of two sacks tied onto each bike were two snouts, each sniffing the air as if to figure out what was going on. We were biking with a couple of hogs.

“Musica,” joked the younger man as we navigated down yet another hill.

As we approached town, we passed people who looked up and stared. Sometimes, I heard laughs and “Chiiiiina.”

I am American, but I let people think I was from China during this trip to see Cuba on my own. “Chairman Mao!” some would offer generously in a eureka moment of finding common ground. “Lejos,” or “far,” people would say, in remarking how long my plane trip must have been from Asia.

I often got those comments while walking — or waiting for transport.

This is a country where you often have to stick your thumb out to get somewhere, especially when off the beaten track, because of a shortage of buses. No hitch aboard a tractor, truck, or even motorcycle sidecar prepared me, however, for the possibility of catching a ride aboard somebody’s bicycle.

When the younger man had first motioned for me to jump on his bike, I balked. How did he want me to sit, I wondered. Did he want me to straddle it?

“You’re from China,” he said, laughing. “You don’t know how?” He then stuck out his butt to demonstrate that the best way was to sit sideways.

I do know this. I would probably still be walking in the dark in that uninhabited forest, were it not for those two men. Not once did a car pass along the road that entire time.

We made it to town just before nightfall.

Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
News

The culture of being

200705_adopt2.jpgTransnational adoptees come of age and search for home.


Jennifer Cerami garnered a flirty smile from the guard at the Colombian consulate in midtown Manhattan. She was 27, with dark eyes and curtain of long hair. Around her in the waiting room sat a scattering of Colombians with official business back home. It was her first visit, in August of 2005, and Cerami looked uncertain, but not out of place. She cradled a stack of old papers and photographs.

When her number was called, Cerami leaned in to the window, whispering.

“I was adopted in Colombia.”

“Don’t worry,” the consular officer told her, leaning in from the other side. “We all have secrets.”

Like many adoptees, Cerami’s story has several beginnings. One of these is with Linda and Michael Cerami, a young couple from Lindenhurst, Long Island, a blue-collar community of single-family homes and above-ground pools. A high fever had damaged Linda’s fallopian tubes. Michael had lupus, which made domestic adoption difficult. So Linda began to look for a newborn overseas.

Since then, every April, on Jennifer’s birthday, Linda told her daughter this story.

“We wanted a baby very badly,” Linda would say. “And we had to go very far to find you, all the way to a country in South America. I put in the papers, and nine months later, the call came telling us that a beautiful baby girl was waiting for us in Bogotá. You had been left on the doorsteps of the orphanage. Your father and I flew down. No, we never met your mother. But we met the woman who took you in. She led us in to a room with rows and rows of bassinets, and said, ‘Guess who your daughter is?’ Well I walked down the row right past you. But your father stopped there in front of your crib and started crying. And that’s how we were blessed with a wonderful daughter, who is you.”

Jennifer’s adoption was a big event in the closely-knit neighborhood. The Heinzes and the Duffys brought their children to the Cerami front yard for the baby’s arrival, and their daughters — Teresa, Sabrina and Rebekah — became Jennifer’s life-long friends. Summers were games of hide-and-seek and Red Rover, lemonade stands, collecting fireflies. “You wouldn’t have found anything Colombian in our house,” Cerami says. “Nothing.”

Cerami thought of herself as white but there were things every now and then that didn’t jibe. When in second grade other children wrote “basketball” and “butterfly” for words that begin with B, she chose “Bogotá.” While they burnt to red in the sun, Cerami merely darkened. By the time she was ready for prom, Cerami could see the irony of choosing Rodrigo, the only other Latino she knew, for a date.

At Boston College things began to get perplexing for Cerami. She was recruited to the Latino student union, OLAA, though she spoke no Spanish. At a meeting of AHANA, a campus minority group for Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans and African Americans, the leader played “I Believe I Can Fly,” then gave a speech Cerami calls “don’t let the white man bring me down.”

“What was I supposed to do?” Cerami says about storming out of the meeting. “The white man raised me.”

During her second year she moved into the romance language dorm on campus, and studied some Spanish. For a school publication, she wrote an article called “What kind of Latina am I?” “I love my mother dearly,” it reads, “but she raised me as she was raised — Italian.”

Taking the country out of the children

Last year, the U.S. State Department issued immigrant visas to over 20,000 foreign-born orphans, up from roughly 2,000 in 1969. Nearly 200,000 of the 1.6 million adopted minors living in the U.S. are foreign born. Today, exchanging children is a $1.4 billion industry, with travel and adoption agencies, visa wallahs and psychologists to fill every available economic niche.

Inter-country adoption flows in the wake of foreign war and poverty. Developed nations sheltered Koreans after the Korean war. Romanians and Russians followed the fall of Ceausescu and Communism in the early nineties. China’s one-child policy bolstered its top ranking among donor countries in the last decade. But as China’s supply levels off, Ethiopia, Liberia and other African nations are now opening up. In Latin America, and Colombia in particular, the orphan boom came in the wake of civil conflict of the late 1970s and 1980s, which means the largest group of Latino adoptees like Cerami is currently coming of age.

Still, modern international adoption has only been going on for 50 years. It remains an unfinished social experiment, bred from compassion, infertility and post-war economic divides. The legality, propriety and ethics of transnational adoption — its effect on parents, children and societies — is still hotly contested. What began as an idea about “saving kids” has turned into an acute expression of a global society. New laws, such as the Hague Adoption Convention, designed to protect children from trafficking, are allowing transnational adoptees greater access to their pasts. Both cosmopolitan and provincial, adoptees magnify the broader changes in the way we answer the basic question of where we come from.

The biggest development in the history of transnational adoption, though, is the death of the myth of a “clean break” from biological and cultural roots. Today, agencies encourage adoptive parents to foster multiple identities, through organized “culture camps” or sponsored trips home. “Cultural citizenship” spurs South American-themed wallpaper, dress-up clothes, and peculiar show-and-tell moments. As cultural anthropologist Toby Alice Volkman describes in the academic journal Social Text, transnational adoption “forges new, even fluid, kinds of kinship and affiliation on a global stage.” In other words, transnational adoptees, with their socially-constructed identities, are the avant-garde of the present global age.

Jerri Wegner, who has three adopted Colombians of her own, helps educate new families on managing their children’s identity. “I tell parents,” she says, “that we have to take our children out of Colombia in order to bring them home, but we never have to take Colombia out of our children.” Her agency, Friends of FANA, organizes Spanish-language camps in Colombia, and country-themed gatherings in upstate New York, where kids are fed Colombian food and encouraged to play soccer wearing Colombia’s yellow national team jersey.

Hollee McGinnis, a sociologist at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute who studies identity in adoptees, wonders whether this is the best approach. She argues that “culture camp” may unnecessarily complicate the development of a healthy identity. Her research describes two layers of culture that every adoptee has. The first is an “external” layer of food, attire, language and history — things anyone with a little curiosity can pick up. But the second layer of culture is more elusive: “the culture of being,” which can only be acquired by living it. “It’s how you walk, interpret the world, your internal values,” McGinnis says. “Most adoptees lose that.”

A shifting sense of home

The Colombian in Cerami’s face is visible, but she moves like a girl from Long Island, with a wide, forward-pressing gait. These days, Cerami works as an analyst at Ann Taylor’s online marketing division, in Midtown. Before that, she did a stint on the floor for Sephora. She squeezes appointments in before racing off to the New York Sports Club, then heads home to a Lower East Side one-bedroom where her open laptop chirps with instant messages. She talks to her mother every day. “I had fights with my mother just like any teenager,” she says, “but now she’s my best friend.” And still, Cerami holds on to a desire “to be from some place.”

Like for many adoptees, Cerami’s search began with documents. Her first came in a DHL envelope, just a week after her visit to the consulate: a birth certificate. “Not a mystery solved,” she says, “but more like answers to questions I didn’t realize I had.” Her own name is Constanza Cruz. She had not been left on a doorstep.

That winter, Cerami got in touch with her orphanage in Colombia. A friend’s wedding in South America had given her an excuse to stop off in Bogotá, the first time any Cerami had returned to Colombia since Jennifer was three months old. Through a contact at the consulate, Cerami sent out an announcement on Colombian radio asking Constanza Cruz’s mother to call, but nobody responded. Colleagues at Cerami’s office, who had been following her revelations, offered donations for the orphanage, which Cerami planned to visit. Come Christmas, Linda drove her adopted daughter to the airport.

“I’m afraid I’m not going to feel,” Cerami told her mother in the car. “I’m afraid I’m going to go down to this country and be completely not affected by what I see. My life is not going to change. This isn’t going to have a connection with me, and what does that mean then?”

Pages: 1 2

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A man brings a spare bike home from the repair shop in Candelaria, a town on the road from San Diego de los Baños. October 1999. (Alastair Smith)
San Diego de los Baños
Commentary

Alone in the Forest

Discovering the kindness of strangers in Cuba.

By Lita Wong
A man brings a spare bike home from the repair shop in Candelaria, a town on the road to San Diego de los Baños. October 1999. Alastair Smith

First in a two-part series. Click here for the second part.

A truck had dropped me off at a crossroads. But instead of driving away, the well-meaning driver was still trying to tell me something. Probably, “No cars are coming. You’re in the middle of nowhere. Are you crazy? What are you doing, little lady?”

I got the gist, even though I didn’t speak Spanish. I started walking, and as the distance between us grew, I could hear him yelling that maybe this was a bad idea, and he motioned for me to get back into the truck. He honked again.

But I kept on walking. No time for debate.

I passed a man wearing a suit and a felt hat, who was also headed for San Diego de los Baños, a town known for its thermal baths. He was just standing there, waiting in the middle of nowhere, as if it were a bus stop. But there was no bus stop. No car or another person in sight.

Perhaps he is still waiting there.

The man said that San Diego de los Baños was a long way off — fifteen kilometers at least. But rather than join him, standing in the countryside, with the chance that a car may never show up, I decided that if I walked fast enough, perhaps I could still reach the town by nightfall.

It was now 3:30 p.m. The sky was overcast. About three more hours of sunlight left. Remembering the distance of bygone high school cross-country races, I calculated that 3.1 miles equaled five kilometers. If I can walk three miles per hour, surely I can reach town by dark, I thought. It is doable.

So I began walking. And I walked and walked.

And not a single car came by.

The road through the countryside rose and fell, and soon, the flatness of the land gave way to a forest of pines and cedars. Not far from here, Che Guevara had moved his headquarters into a cave during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was just me and this forest, and if I shouted, I’d spook myself.

Suddenly, two men emerged from nowhere, walking next to their bikes. Perhaps there was a house tucked away in the forest that I couldn’t see. I began to walk a little faster, but the two men were gaining on me.

Why are they walking next to their bikes? I asked myself.

My duffel was heavy, and I tried to pick up the pace, but they were getting closer.

I could totally be raped and robbed right now, I thought, clenching my teeth.

I stopped and let them overtake me. A teenager with his father on a bicycle ride, it appeared. They happened to be walking next to their bikes because the hill was on an incline.

“Hola,” they said, after I gamely raised my hand and said, “Hi.” I knew I was safe after I asked them how far San Diego de los Baños was, and the man replied with a wave of his hand into the distance, “Twelve kilometers. It’s far away.” I reassured him that I was hoping to flag a car that came this way. He nodded, and they soon passed me.

I walked a few more kilometers when I saw two other men approaching from behind — again walking with their bikes.

There is nobody around, so I am really at their mercy here, I began to think. Suppose I get killed in this forest. The Cuban police might take a week to identify my rotting body from my passport photo. My imagination was getting the better of me again; I began to wonder how much media coverage the story would get at home.

And then, the men were next to me. One of them offered to put my bag on his bike. I said no, that I can carry it myself. Now there is a ploy, I thought. Put the tourist’s bag on the bike and ride off.

It was not until the younger of the two men smiled sympathetically and said something about confianza that I softened. I said “Sí,” and put my duffel on his bike. I recognized the word from the French confiance, which means “trust.”

And so began our twelve-kilometer ride to San Diego de los Baños, where the two men lived. The sun emerged, and the skies then revealed the depth of their blue heights, with wispy clouds soaring high above. When we would reach the summit of a hill, I would sit atop the horizontal bar of the bike, “sidesaddle,” in front of the younger man, and hold onto the inner handle bar while he, wearing my backpack, would steer us both downhill, with the older man following close behind.

We’d breeze past palm trees and lush vegetation, the young man applying the brakes generously and carefully avoiding the road’s potholes, until the hill petered out. Then the three of us would hop off the bikes and walk them up to the next summit, get back on, and ride downhill again.

A strange grunting noise seemed to follow us each time we stopped. And then came a long squeal.

Poking out of the slits of two sacks tied onto each bike were two snouts, each sniffing the air as if to figure out what was going on. We were biking with a couple of hogs.

“Música,” joked the younger man as we navigated down yet another hill.

As we approached town, we passed people who looked up and stared. Sometimes, I heard laughs and “Chiiiiina.”

I am American, but I let people think I was from China during this trip to see Cuba on my own. “Chairman Mao!” some would offer generously in a eureka moment of finding common ground. “Lejos,” or “far,” people would say, in remarking how long my plane trip must have been from Asia.

I often got those comments while walking — or waiting for transport.

This is a country where you often have to stick your thumb out to get somewhere, especially when off the beaten track, because of a shortage of buses. No hitch aboard a tractor, truck, or even motorcycle sidecar prepared me, however, for the possibility of catching a ride aboard somebody’s bicycle.

When the younger man had first motioned for me to jump on his bike, I balked. How did he want me to sit, I wondered. Did he want me to straddle it?

“You’re from China,” he said, laughing. “You don’t know how?” He then stuck out his butt to demonstrate that the best way was to sit sideways.

I do know this. I would probably still be walking in the dark in that uninhabited forest, were it not for those two men. Not once did a car pass along the road that entire time.

We made it to town just before nightfall.

November 2, 1999

First in a two-part series. Click here for the second part.

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Commentary

Finding solace in cyberspace

savage.jpg

Stricken with the loneliest of illnesses, people with rare forms of cancer have built their own online communities.


Savage, a Boston Globe correspondent and ITF contributor, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. This story was originally published June 4, 2001.

 

“No man is an island,” the poet John Donne assures us. But on October 5, 1998, I had a hard time sharing his optimism. That was the day I found out I had LMS — leiomyosarcoma, a rare cancer of soft muscle tissue that strikes fewer than four people out of a million.

But despite those numbers, I never really felt alone. Today, people with extremely rare medical conditions around the world are banding together via email groups. It is, in every sense, a revolution in terms of patient empowerment, one that has quickly spread in the past couple of years.

Cancers like LMS are among the loneliest of illnesses. While those with more common cancers can usually find a network of others in the same city who have the same condition and who are going through the same thing, my chances of ever meeting another LMS patient seemed slim.

Only a few years ago, that isolation would have been my new reality. It certainly was for Orland Hetherington, a native of Ontario, Canada, who had LMS diagnosed in 1994. “I spent two years trying desperately to find another living soul with LMS,” Hetherington said. “I was alone with this and scared. I became somewhat obsessed with finding someone else on the planet with LMS and searching harder for more and more information.”

In March 1997, LaDonna Backmeyer, an LMS patient in Rock Island, Illinois, found Hetherington on a cancer online support list. She asked him to help her start an online discussion group specifically for LMS patients and their families and friends. From just four members then, that email group has grown to more than 560 subscribers.

For a while, I was one of them. The group instantly welcomed me to its ranks with both personal notes of understanding and a barrage of advice on treatment options and research information that helped me know more about what lay ahead during my recovery.

The group “has given information to several hundred patients since its founding,” Backmeyer said. “Some of the patients check in for a small amount of time in order to get the information they need; others find a group of welcoming friends, and they stay.”

All this from a machine

In my case, the group helped me learn about a then-experimental surgical technique developed by Dr. Steven Curley at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I flew to Houston and underwent Curley's surgery, which removed all traces of tumor from my liver in December 1998. As of my last trimonthly check up, I remain cancer-free without having had to undergo chemotherapy.

In October 2000, Curley was quoted in a U.S. News & World Report article about a successful new generation of cancer-fighting techniques; because of the help of the LMS group, I found him two years before the general public learned of his existence.

There are similar email lists for about sixty other cancers. All are the offspring of a single group list started three years ago by the not-for-profit Association of Cancer Online Resources, founded by Gilles Frydman, a New York City computer entrepreneur. Frydman's wife was stricken with breast cancer and found information through an email list that helped her avoid a mastectomy.

"I started to look at how cancer patients use the Internet," Frydman said. He found that people with a variety of cancers all seemed to end up on a single, general-cancer email list. "I thought it was outrageous that only people suffering from very common forms, like breast and prostate cancer, got their own specific mailing list. So it seemed to me that what we should do was create a mailing list for every known type of cancer." Today, there are more than 125 email groups, with a total enrollment in the tens of thousands.

"Everyone comes to this support group with no idea of the vast information that is going to be shared with them," said one LMS group member, Cynthia Whitson of LaGrange, Georgia. "We all just come to selfishly help ourselves find the way through the maze of doctors, facilities, treatments, and side effects. We find that we become a part of an emotional movement to collectively find the answer to each one's question."

For many, helping others on the list find answers becomes a way to cope themselves. "I had every intention of getting off the group during this three-month break between treatments while I waited for the next scan date," Whitson said. "But you can't leave it. It becomes a part of your life, just as cancer will forever be a part of your everyday life."

Many members of these rare-cancer communities attest to this sense of involvement–becoming, in the words of Donne’s poem, not an island but a “part of the main … involved in Mankind.”

“The list, for me, has meant longer time here on Earth and incredible satisfaction in trying to help others with LMS,”

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News

Growing pains

200704_hazleton1.jpg

Two city ordinances bring racial tensions to the surface in a small town that has seen a recent influx of Latino immigrants.


 

A catch in Amilcar Arroyo’s Spanish-accented voice conveyed his shock and hurt as much as his words. The slender, bright-eyed legal immigrant told a mix of Latinos and Anglos in the common room of a city church that, after 18 years of living in his adopted country, he recently felt as though he were an outsider once again. While covering a press conference at which Mayor Louis Barletta announced he would run for a third term, Arroyo, president of a Latino media company, found the silent animosity among his fellow U.S. citizens nearly palpable.

“I felt the atmosphere there. People there looked at me like a leper,” Arroyo said.

Arroyo would discover that feeling shunned was only the beginning. Asked if he would renew his support for Barletta, Arroyo said no. Arroyo had endorsed the mayor in a previous campaign but a pair of anti-illegal immigration ordinances Barletta spearheaded led Arroyo to withdraw his support. The day after the press conference Arroyo heard from a dozen callers criticizing his change of heart. Some said they had previously considered him an honest man and a respected community figure, but that his comments about the mayor had changed their views. Other calls were more ominous. “You’d better watch out. You’d better take care of yourself because you’re going to get hurt,” Arroyo said one caller warned.

Arroyo spoke at a January 22 meeting convened in the common room of Faith United Church of Christ by the Greater Hazleton Ministerium, an interfaith clergy association. The Ministerium does not take an official position on the ordinance and is seeking common ground between those on both sides of the issue. Attendees included residents, clergy, city Latino leaders, a representative of the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission and a Luzerne county commissioner. A big-eyed baby watched the discussions from an infant carrier slung over his mother’s shoulder.

One of the ordinances would have prohibited renting to undocumented immigrants and called for a $1,000 per day fine for landlords who did so. Of the 4,216 rental units in the city, 236 are Latino-occupied, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. Another ordinance would have revoked the business permits of establishments which employed illegal immigrants.

Legal challenges have prevented the ordinances from being enforced although their original versions were passed in July. In response to a lawsuit by advocacy organizations, landlords and residents, U.S. District Court Judge James Munley in October deemed the ordinances temporarily unenforceable and is slated to determine the long-term fate of the laws this month. If enforced, the laws could disrupt the education of child citizens who must leave the country with their deported parents, force a plaintiff who is a legal immigrant to be evicted because she is waiting for documentation of her status, and hurt the profits of business owners and landlords, Judge Munley stated in court papers explaining his decision.

Although the ordinances are intended to curb crime, city officials did not offer statistical evidence that increasing immigration has caused an increase in crime, Judge Munley said. The city has passed revised versions of the ordinances, which critics say have harmed the Latino community even though the laws are not in effect.

“It sort of became open season on a lot of Latinos, regardless of their status,” said Fabricio Rodriguez, executive director of Philadelphia Area Jobs With Justice, which organized a September rally opposing the ordinances. Racist graffiti, vandalism and fights in school are some of the problems local Latinos reported when Rodriguez surveyed them on the impact of the ordinances.

The ordinances address only illegal immigration, but xenophobic hecklers have taken them as a cue to publicly harass legal immigrants along with those who lack papers because it is impossible to differentiate the two groups based only on appearance, said Agapito Lopez, vice president of the Hazleton Area Latino Association and a member of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs, in a telephone interview. Cultural differences make innocent Latinos seem suspect to their Anglo neighbors and the ordinances embolden residents to express their suspicion, Lopez said. Latinos frequently meet outdoors to share jokes and stories as they do in their native countries, Lopez said.

“When they see people gathering outside and speaking a different language, they think it’s a gang,” Lopez said. Far from being meetings of criminal cabals, the outside gatherings merely reflect how many Latinos’ sensibilities differ from those of many Anglos, Lopez said. “We don’t like to be inside because we come from tropical countries,” he said. Some Anglos’ misperceptions have led them to lash out at their Latino neighbors, Lopez said.

“There are people who are being called names in the street,” Lopez said.

 

Struggles to cross a racial divide

On a frigid January day shortly after the Ministerium meeting, people did not appear to linger in the street long enough to insult or be insulted. On Broad Street, the Roads End Pub and Club was dark inside and below the Blues Brothers statues on its facade a sign stated “All Legals Served.” A hat-snatching wind rushed down Wyoming Street, where well-kept older model cars lined the curbs. The vivid yellow clapboard walls of Lechuga’s market offered the eye a welcome change from the gray-stained gobs of old snow piled along the icy sidewalks. Latino grocery stores chock-a-block with sundries and tropical products, money transfer bureaus and travel agencies shared the street with employment agencies and Italian restaurants. A handful of stores stood empty; some had permits taped to their plate glass windows suggesting that new occupants were preparing to move in.

Those who work on Wyoming Street, noted for its concentration of Latino businesses, said that the consequences of the ordinances are economic as well as interpersonal. Owners of establishments that primarily serve Latinos have seen a drop in business which they trace to the ordinances. One grocery store employee said business had declined by about five percent since the ordinances passed because many immigrants have left town after raids by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

“Immigration came down here and took people away,” said Julian Figueroa, an employee of Jazmin’s Grocery on Wyoming Street. Immigration officials did not target Jazmin’s, but did visit businesses on Wyoming Street, Figueroa said one recent afternoon after waiting on a young customer whom he advised about keeping track of her small bills. Other business owners also noticed a decline in customers.

“A lot of people just left town. You notice the drop at least as far as the money transfers that you do, calling card sales which is more of what the immigrant population buys,” said Chris Rubio, an employee of Isabel’s Gifts on Wyoming Street while staffing the counter at the shop one recent weekday. Some businesses have closed due to lack of customers. Rosa and Jose Luis Lechuga, plaintiffs in the lawsuit, closed their restaurant due to a decline in business, according to court papers. The restaurant served 45 to 130 customers before a previous version of the ordinances passed, but had only six or seven patrons daily afterward. The Lechugas’ Latino grocery store served 95 to130 customers a day before the ordinances passed, but had 20 to 23 patrons daily afterward. Jose Lechuga said by phone on January 30 that he was moving to Texas and had sold the store. The city does not keep statistics on business owners’ nationality so municipal employees do not know how many Latino-owned businesses have closed or how many new immigrant-owned establishments have opened since the ordinances passed.

City officials said the ordinances were intended to protect city residents from crime, not to harm Latinos socially or economically. Shootings committed by undocumented immigrants inspired the ordinances, said Joe Yannuzzi, council president, who supported the ordinances. Municipal law did not provide for punishing crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, Yannuzzi said by phone.

Shootings are rare occurrences in the city which had about 23,000 people as of the 2000 Census. Latino advocates have said that the population has increased by about 10,000 people since 2000. Mayor Barletta has said in published reports that the population had increased by at least 7,000 since the last census. “The only thing we could do is punish the people who are here legally,” Yannuzzi said. City officials began by exploring the appropriate response to several recent shootings, and later noticed a connection between the crimes and undocumented immigrants, Yannuzzi said.

“The violent crimes were being committed by illegal aliens,” Yannuzzi said. The ordinances allow the city to protect all residents, including Latinos, Yannuzzi said. “They live here the same as we do. They don’t want to see shootings either,” he said. Yannuzzi said that Latino residents’ departures should not cause concern that Hazleton’s population has nose-dived. Those who left were quickly replaced by other Latinos, he said. “The place is still booming and there’s a lot of Latinos still living here attending the schools and getting along with everybody,” Yannuzzi said.

A fellow council member echoed Yannuzzi’s concern with crime but had voted against the ordinances. “The rationale should have been to combat crime,” said councilman Bob Nilles in a telephone interview. Nilles opposes tying anti-crime ordinances to immigration issues because doing so creates legal problems for the city.

Those who attended the Ministerium meeting also expressed concern with violent crime and said that opposing it could be a common cause for those who might disagree about the immigration ordinances. “We know violence has gone up. We know that violence is connected to the drugs,” said the Rev. Tom Cvammen of Trinity Lutheran Church in West Hazleton, who facilitated the meeting.

With a calm voice and demeanor, the Rev. Cvammen appeared ready to help attendees stay focused on the goal of reconciliation should the conversation become overheated. Some who attended the Ministerium meeting said that focusing on crimes committed by illegal immigrants obscures a general increase in crime related to drug sales in the city. One attendee objected to the Mayor’s emphasis on illegal Latino immigrants when he endorsed the ordinances and touted them a means of stemming crime.

“He failed to mention that a non-Hispanic killed my cousin,” Anna Arias, president of the Hazleton Area Latino Association and a member of the Governor’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs, said sharply. Mayor Barletta did not return calls. Arias said that the person who killed her cousin had sold drugs and that he committed suicide after the crime. The room was silent.

Attendees defined reducing drug sales and other crimes as a primary goal of one of the three working groups that formed at the meeting. Members of each working group gathered around a folding table in the common room to brainstorm and develop action plans. The working groups included Latinos and Anglos who were Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Quakers and those who did not state a religious affiliation. Almost all appeared to be in their forties or older. Members of the working group on crime planned to invite David Wilkerson, founder of Teen Challenge, an international Christian-based drug rehabilitation and education program, to speak to members of church youth groups throughout the city. The crime working group also planned to invite members of Unidos, a diversity group at Hazleton Area High School, to the next Ministerium meeting on February 27.

Members of the working group dedicated to addressing public fears of Latinos said they sought to reduce fear by replacing it with the truth about people of whom others might be afraid. “A lot of the fear is based on untruth or exaggerations,” said the Rev. Jane Hess of Faith UCC. Group members considered creating a public forum in which immigrants would share their memories of becoming citizens. “At that moment, you have to put aside the country where you were born. You have to love this country a lot to do that,” Arroyo said.

To help community members get to know each other across ethnic divides, a third working group planned a series of cross-cultural activities. The working group planned to connect events for the May 3 National Day of Prayer to the Cinco de Mayo (Mexican Independence Day) celebrations and to dedicate the day to appreciating diversity. Working group members also planned to ask organizers to dedicate this year’s Fun Fest to celebrating diversity and to ask Wyoming Street merchants to hold a block party to coincide with the annual festival of music, food and crafts. The working group intended to start an inter-ethnic hiking and biking club for young people.

 

An age-old debate

Attendees have reason to hope for greater inter-cultural understanding, the Rev. Cvammen said. Catholics and Protestants once divided the city into sections along religious lines and used to attack each other on the streets of Hazleton but have long since ceased segregating themselves and brawling. Discrimination against Italians, Irish and Poles also used to be common in the city, Lopez and Arias said. “It’s something that was worked on before,” the Rev. Cvammen said.

The ebbing of historic inter-group tensions in Hazleton makes the city representative of a national trend. A century ago, public immigration debate centered on determining if Greeks and Poles could fit into U.S. society, said Randy Capps, senior research associate at the Center on Labor, Human Services and Population at the Urban Institute, a non-partisan research organization. Historic immigration debates have subsided nationwide only to be replaced by new ones.

“Now we’re debating whether or not immigrants from Mexico and Latin America are going to fit in,” Capps said. Attitudes of those participating in current debates are shaped by a different set of experiences than their early 20th century predecessors. Although the U.S. has historically been a nation of immigrants, many politicians now in office came of age during a 40-year period of relatively low immigration, Capps said. Immigration slowed between the 1920s and the 1960s due in part to ceilings on the number of people who could enter the U.S. from each country. The Great Depression also made the U.S. less attractive to immigrants seeking to escape poverty in their native lands. “We went through a period when we weren’t country of immigration, so it seems new and out of control,” Capps said.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have also changed attitudes toward immigration. The hijackers who crashed airliners into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and the Pennsylvania countryside were legal immigrants, but their actions have shaped attitudes toward those who enter the country with or without documents. Some U.S. citizens believe that cracking down on illegal immigration ensures national security.

“People feel they are acting against terrorism,” said Myriam Torres, director of the Arnold School of Public Health Consortium for Latino Immigration Studies at the University of South Carolina. Latino immigrants who enter the country intending to do harm are rare, Torres said. “The majority of immigrants from Latin America, they are not coming to commit crimes, they are coming to work,” Torres said. Immigrants who do not have enough money to qualify for visas often enter the country illegally to assist their families by taking jobs rejected by U.S. citizens, Torres said.

“They will do anything they are asked to do, because they know whatever they are earning here, even if it is a low wage, it is much higher than they would be earning at home,” Torres said. Policymakers seeking to control illegal immigration should address the human costs of a global economy in which developing countries fare poorly, Torres said. “I do think that there is a need to work with the countries who are sending people here,” Torres said.

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Reviews

A desert of dreams

A review of Brian Doherty’s This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground.


In 1980, I took a semester off from college to live in Summertown, Tennessee, in a spiritual community/social experiment known as The Farm. It was founded by a man named Steven Gaskin and a group of dissatisfied, creative, expatriate Berkeley intellectuals with a taste for anarchy and a penchant for mind-altering chemicals. The Farm tried to create that elusive creature in American culture — a society based on the free exchange of goods and services.

As happens with many such experiments, the inclusion, sharing, and freedom that the Farm embraced eventually led to its morphing into a microcosm of the society from which it was hatched: co-opted, subtly capitalistic, justifiably paranoid, and full of loonies. I’ve always been proud of my Farm experience, though. Despite its flaws, its existence and my part in it represented, for me, an important part of our national identity: we’re this paradoxical mixture of wanting to be self-sufficient, and yet we’re desperate for a social connection that reaffirms that we can justify the space we take up on the planet.

A similar proprietary fondness comes across in Brian Doherty’s This is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground, a balanced and well-organized chronicle of an event that began with two men — Larry Harvey and Jerry James — burning an eight-foot wooden man on a beach in San Francisco in 1986. Now their brainchild has become cause for a week-long festival in a “temporary city dedicated to art, liberty, and inspired insanity” 150 miles outside of Las Vegas. Last Labor Day, the celebration attracted over 30,000 participants.

Despite keeping what I thought was a firm finger on the pulse of popular culture, I had never heard of Burning Man until I read the book. Most of my friends and acquaintances had heard of Burning Man. How had this cultural phenomenon stayed off my radar? Okay, I’ve been out of the country since 1999. And I don’t own a television. But this is a big deal, right? An experiment in which you go to the boiling desert for a week and are expected to bring along everything you need to live and create art. An event in which our social norms are tested and broken. An event in which people coexist without violence, without commerce, and without judgment.

Doherty’s book fills a surprising void in the extensive “literature” surrounding this phenomenon. “If you don’t know what it is,” he writes on his website, “then you need a book to explain it.” And it’s true. His task is doubly difficult: The event has spawned blogs, newsgroups, bulletin boards, online clothing stores, documentaries, and a host of sociological and cultural studies and articles that make you wonder how anyone can contribute more usefully to the body of information on the event and its history. Serving as a testament to Burning Man’s Silicon Valley, California origins and information technology acumen, the event’s website is one of the most professional, user-friendly, and thorough sites I have ever seen. Based on his nine-year involvement with the Burning Man event as both participant and volunteer, Doherty decided that the event finally merited and needed a historical and cultural documentary. In a well-organized work of moderate length, he manages to compress a chronology of the event and its political and social landscape, biographies, and a surprisingly objective philosophy of social experiments that would pass muster with fanatics and detractors alike.

From his carefully crafted writing style, it’s obvious that Doherty — a self-described student of anarchy with a fondness for fire and things that make loud noises — is an ardent disciple of Burning Man. It is his dedication to the event that has allowed him access to a host of sources, including organizers, longtime attendees and performers, and past participants who've since broken with Burning Man, but whose insights are necessary to get a complete sense of the event's history and evolution.

He also demonstrates, without being too heavy-handed, what others feel is so important about Burning Man — its intent to bring people together in a creative community based on the free exchange of ideas and the concept of, for lack of a better term, reciprocal survival. He avoids making judgments about the event other than to quietly reiterate through example and anecdote that this yearly festival is important to American culture on a variety of levels, even if one takes issue with the temporary “society” that is created there.

The result is evident in Doherty’s vivid description of the festival’s early organizers. As if Doherty is ashamed to admit that the Burning Man “regulars” are, for the most part, the Bay Area community of literati not usually found in ghetto or on reservation, he downplays their level of education and professional backgrounds. The reader gradually realizes that, for the most part, this is a club of privileged white guys, however disenfranchised, creative, and rebellious.

Doherty is at his most effective when showing through history and example how the organizers of Burning Man learned to adapt and grow into their environment without forgetting the intent of their original experiment. With its compelling chronicling of a social experiment, This is Burning Man’s carefully detailed information allows even a detractor to understand and admire the vision of people who did not let growth stand in the way of their original intent. Even in the face of more rigid restrictions by the Bureau of Land Management and the neighboring town of Gerlach, Nevada, Burning Man basically remained three guys with a coffee can of money, paying to have the world participate.

It is this vision, however, that, suggests Doherty, polarized the two main organizers at that time — John Law and Larry Harvey. Doherty’s account of some of Law’s objections to Burning Man’s growth is one of the few times Doherty strays from the objectivity he has tried to maintain. Law became concerned about, among other things, the health of the desert and the permanent scars that thousands of visitors were leaving on an ecosystem that only appeared barren. Doherty writes, “To sincerely lament damage to the playa by Burning Man requires an almost mystical belief that there are certain surfaces mankind just should not touch.” This is key to the heart of this book and this event: Burning Man can be viewed as life-affirming, but it also implies a proprietary interest in anything we can get our hands on. Doherty doesn’t have a problem with that, and seems to have little patience for people who do. But his mindset belies the criticisms that Burning Man is mono-racial, quintessentially Anglo American, and economically and socially biased. The events that attract people to the desert for this week — self-reinvention, lack of sexual inhibition, willful and usually mandated destruction, absence of rules or control — are not seen as attractive by all cultures and classes, nor are they economically feasible (tickets now range from $220-$350 for admission; equipment and transportation can cost hundreds more).

It’s a small bone to pick when evaluating the effectiveness with which Doherty handles a lot of contradictory and volatile material. But when some proponents and organizers define the event by its creation of “a broad sense of participatory, collaborative, creative work,” it should be understood that this participation and collaboration is subjectively based, and therefore not as broad as some would infer.

If there is anyone remaining in North America who has not heard of Burning Man, This is Burning Man serves as the most complete primer possible. Future students of social movements who will only be able to experience this event as history will be well served by it, though it is likely the hope of Doherty and all fans of Burning Man that this particular history live forever.

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Photo Essays

The martyrs are home

Martyrs01.jpgPost-war reparations in Guatemala.


Surrounded by coffins, ribbons, and three forensic anthropologists, families of victims from Guatemala’s 36-year internal conflict received their deceased relatives’ remains on January 25, 2007. The families fathered in a church in Xaxmoxan, Chajul, Quiché, Guatemala, finding closure more than two years after the National Coordination of Widows in Guatemala (CONAVIGUA) began compling witness testimonies from villages in the municipality of Chajul. During the internal conflict from 1960 to 1996, Quiché’s population suffered 263 massacres, according to the Recuperation of Historic Memory report, known as REMHI and entitled Guatemala: Never Again. In the words of one son who received his father’s remains: “This is a great moment. My father has arrived. The martyrs are home.”

[Click here to enter the visual essay.]

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Commentary

A bad day in Cambodia

200703_ttlg2.jpgHow traveling puts turning 30 into perspective.


I had come to Cambodia to turn 30. My twenties were not nearly as fabulous as I had planned, and I needed a dose of perspective to shake the decade off. Nowhere is perspective so easily gained as in Cambodia, and nowhere is the Cambodian trifecta of poverty, corruption, and genocide more apparent than in the capital city of Phnom Penh.

After days of trekking around the exquisite temples of Angkor Wat in the northern countryside, Phnom Penh is a shock to my system. My husband and I see kids sniffing glue on the street, white men parading around with prostitutes, and legions of homeless people sleeping and bathing on the banks of the Ton Le Sap. Phnom Penh is a city of non-governmental organization workers, not tourists, and after two days, we are quickly running out of attractions to visit. Only two essential stops are left on our trip: S-21, the prison camp where many suspected spies were tortured by the Khmer Rouge, and the killing fields, where those same prisoners were executed and buried.

When the Khmer Rouge seized power, Phnom Penh was evacuated within two days. Khmer Rouge soldiers, some as young as 11, had the French colonial city at their disposal. They turned mansions into barracks, hospitals into weapon storehouses, and schools into torture centers. One such torture center was Toul Sleng prison, also known as S-21, a former primary school in what had been a quiet, tree-lined, upper middle-class suburb. Today, the S-21 complex is a museum. The surrounding neighborhood is full of barbed wire, stray dogs, and trash-littered gravel roads. It seems sketchy even for a city as lawless as Phnom Penh.

Our guide at S-21 is a quiet woman in her late thirties who lost most of her family during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. “First they killed my father,” she says, echoing the title of Luang Ung’s haunting memoir of growing up under the regime. The rest of her family was split up and sent to camps in rural areas at opposite ends of the country, she tells us. The guide and her mother were transferred to a camp near the Vietnamese border; they survived by walking to Vietnam in the middle of the night. The guide was nine at the time. She never saw her siblings again.

S-21 is a series of four four-story buildings, which, though worn and weather-stained, give no outward clues to the torture endured by 20,000 prisoners inside. One step into the first building, however, and we are immediately confronted with its grim history. The former classrooms have been divided up into cells, each with a rusty, sagging bed frame. Next to each bed lie cattle prods and other rusty instruments of torture. Fuzzy, blown-up black-and-white photographs reveal how each room looked when the Vietnamese army arrived to overthrow the Khmer Rouge: torched corpses chained to the bed frames, bodies unrecognizable. Wild pigs and rats had already eaten many of the bodies.

Our guide is surrounded by an aura of profound sorrow. She walks into each room, delivers a sentence or two about what happened there, and immediately turns and walks out into the open-air corridor to wait for us. It is as if she cannot handle an extra second inside the walls.

In one cell, the biggest moth I have ever seen flutters about. Its wingspan must be 12 inches, and its brown markings match the dust and rust inside S-21. The moth is eerily beautiful, the product of a warped ecosystem in which pigs scavenge for human flesh and children tote machine guns. I imagine the impossible: that this moth has been around for decades, flitting about this room, quietly watching the transformation from school to torture cell to tourist attraction. The moth reminds me that life goes on, even in the face of insanity.

Our guide leads us to the next building, where hundreds more black-and-white photos of prisoners are displayed. Like the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous records, photographing each prisoner with a numbered plaque upon arrival at S-21. Looking at these photos feels like staring into the eyes of ghosts, each staring back, aware of his or her rapidly approaching death. Out of the 20,000 people housed at S-21, only seven survived.

In the next building, we view an exhibit of present-day photographs of and interviews with former Khmer Rouge soldiers, most of whom are now middle-aged farmers, eking out an existence in the countryside. None of them express regret about their involvement with the Khmer Rouge. Many feel like victims themselves, having been recruited as child soldiers. No one, including these former soldiers, has ever been tried for the atrocities that took place under the regime.

When I ask my guide how she feels about the movement to bring former Khmer Rouge officers to justice, she looks at me with sad, scared eyes and says, “It’s very difficult to talk about politics in my country.” Apparently, more than two decades after the Khmer Rouge, the walls at S-21 still have ears.

Leaving S-21, we negotiate with a tuk-tuk driver to take us to one of the killing fields — former rice paddies where political prisoners were executed and buried in shallow mass graves. The killing fields are now a memorial, but active farms surround them on three sides. Barbed wire demarcates the farmland from the graves. Young boys stand behind the barbed wire, offering to pose as prisoners for the equivalent of $1. In Cambodia, where the average monthly salary is about $17, that is a tremendous sum of money. These kids — some as young as seven — are already master capitalists. Some tourists take them up on the offer, getting the perfect shot of Cambodian boys standing behind barbed wire.

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News

The Vintage DJ

200703_vintage4.jpgSpinning the present into the past.


 

 

Click above to hear “Eleanor Rigby.”

 

If ever there was someone in need of a time machine, it’s Jonathan Jacobs.

Amid the buzz of bar talk and acid-tripping hipsters, Jacobs leans over two Audiotronics Classroom record players, circa 1950. His shaved head and crisp grey suit — and his bulky headphones — stand in stark contrast to the increasingly raucous crowd, which doesn’t quite seem to notice him as he moves, trance-like, over the magic machines. It’s a Valentine’s Day-themed bash in a drafty, multi-level Brooklyn warehouse, and people are warming themselves with $3 Pabst Blue Ribbon and pot brownies. A huddle of especially enthusiastic partygoers plays a pickup game of spin-the-bottle opposite from the corner where Jacobs intently filters through boxes and boxes of weathered albums.

Jacobs, for his part, doesn’t appear to notice the crowd either, the blurring eyes and spilling beers and occasional loss of footing. Not even the drag queen in a pink tutu and six-inch platforms or the girl so drunk she’s fallen head-first into the spin-the-bottle table can shake his focus. He’s utterly entranced by his records, and the world that he’s creating. Like many DJs, Jacobs loves what he does but supplements his income with a day job to make ends meet. He takes requests when he spins, because his goal is to understand the vibe of the crowd wherever he manages to line up gigs: bars, cocktail parties, weddings, benefit shows, and most recently, the warehouse rager. But unlike other DJs, Jacobs aims to transport listeners into a totally separate universe. If Jacobs had his way, the year would be 1963, not 2007.

Jacobs, AKA The Vintage DJ, spins an eclectic mix of tunes from the 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, and early 70’s, all from the original 78’s, 45’s, and 33’s. Sometimes he’s accompanied by his dance team, the The Salesmen — two male dancers (actor friends of Jacobs) wearing sharpie suits and carrying brown suitcases. Sometimes he projects montages of old films or live feed of the audience. His goal: to immerse listeners in a dreamlike world, an “audio time warp” that transports them to a prohibition era speakeasy, a roadside juke-joint, a mod London hotspot, or an explosive Afro-Cuban nightclub.

In other words, to take them away from here.

Not just a mac-and-cheese kind of comfort

So who is The Vintage DJ, and what makes him tick? Up until five years ago, even The Vintage DJ himself didn’t know. Like any other thirtysomething with a 9-to-5, the former theater major didn’t have much time to spend on his predilection for old jazz and AM radio stations.

Then he bought an old record player for his friend James as a birthday gift. The sound in a small room was so amazing that Jacobs began to wonder what would happen if you could have more of the same: preserving the song, but amplifying it. From thrift stores, he bought himself two record players, then four more. Not having any older, wiser Vintage DJs to act as muses or guides, Jacobs forged ahead into uncharted territory, creating The Vintage DJ persona as he went along.

He did know one thing: when he laid the needle to vinyl, “there was a weird nostalgia, and with the nostalgia came warmth, and with the warmth came an emotional response — not just a mac-and-cheese kind of comfort, but something more complete.”

Jacobs kicked off his career in 2003 by working a small benefit where he connected the headphone jack into the mixer and played directly off the records. The crowd responded, and The Vintage DJ was born. He hit the streets of New York City on the weekends, when he wasn’t working his day job, hunting down gigs. It was summertime, and that made for a lot of sweat, because Jacobs had decided that The Vintage DJ must be properly suited (and hatted, when out on the street). Plus, he had to lug around a record player and a suitcase full of albums. He made a list of the top ten most interesting bars in Manhattan — not because he liked the nightlife, but because that’s where DJs do their thing — and went to every single one looking for a chance to show his stuff. But not everyone opened their doors.

“When you create as an artist, you really have no clue how odd your work is,” Jacobs says. “People wanted to know if I had a following, which I didn’t at the time. It wasn’t only risky musically for them, but inconvenient because of all the special equipment and hookups.” While there aren’t that many technical logistics associated with his craft, Jacobs has had to figure out how to work with different systems. “When you hear a song on vinyl, you’re hearing it in a different way,” he says. “The sound quality, and the fact that you can see and hold the record jacket, it’s authentic, and it is a porthole to the past. I’m playing an object that is 40 years old and has a life. It’s a vestige and a relic. And a relic is something that will eventually be extinct, so I’m trying to keep this thing alive, to share it with people in a special way.”

The path to fame for The Vintage DJ isn’t always easy, although Jacobs is quick to point out that he makes more money as The Vintage DJ than at any of his day jobs. “I’m making a living following my passion, getting paid to be who I really am,” he says. This week, however, he’s being paid in pizza for a gig he put on for a pizza parlor-owning friend.

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Hair to dye for

200703_grayhair.jpg A quirky look at the first gray hair.


She was a wise woman.

Heads turned as she pushed her metal shopping cart down supermarket aisles. Strangers at stop lights turned to see if she was wearing a fake attachable halo like the ones children might don with their Halloween angel costumes. Even the kindergarteners she taught noticed — and gave her silent reverent bows as she walked by.

The wise woman’s mane of pure, majestic white hair was unsettling.

People rarely dared to speak openly about it.

Women over 30 were the only ones who blurted out their fears in little bursts of self-conscious comments.

“I wish my hair were striking white. Not this awful, lifeless ash,” they said mournfully, always lifting a portion of their own hair and letting it fall back to their scalps like washed-out pieces of dead seaweed.

“You’re so lucky. Once you dye your hair, you can’t stop. But I guess with hair like yours, you’ve never had to dye it, have you?”

The wise woman would shake her head silently. Never.

“I can’t believe that. I remember when I got my first gray hair, I was devastated.”

She knew that even if she tried to say something to help them acknowledge their inner light, they would not hear it.

So she stayed quiet, as the women, wrapped up in the tragedy of aging, prattled on about their fear of becoming obsolete, of losing their husbands to younger women with thick, vibrant, undyed hair that tumbled down their backs.

“Just like the ones in the Pantene Pro-V commercials — you know which ones I mean?”

They sputtered about feeling threatened by airbrushed TV goddesses, whose sexiness and confidence seemed to flow into their bouncy hair.

The women would eventually finish their monologues and drift away, muttering about models and the latest haircuts on “Grey’s Anatomy.”

Never once really seeing the woman of wisdom’s luminous white hair.

If they had looked a little longer, they might have glimpsed the icy tips of the highest mountains piercing crystal blue skies.

If they had stilled their minds for a moment, they’d catch a soft aura and glimpse Buddha sitting under the Bodhi tree and awakening.

They might feel the gentle warmth of a church candle between their palms. Or a pool of tranquility deep inside their bellies, like an untouched lake in a forgotten grove.

Instead, the women walked on without looking back.

Without even a silent kindergarten bow.

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On vintage handkerchiefs

Impressions of a grandmother.


Toward the end of her life, my grandmother went shopping for birthday and holiday gifts in her own apartment. Some years I received pantyhose; others, a milk glass vase or a brass alligator nutcracker.

Although I never used the last present I received from her, I kept them: three pristine, precisely creased, embroidered muslin handkerchiefs. They have survived college in one state, graduate school in another, and the arrival of my own family in a third. Aside from the figurative ties they give me to my grandmother, whose nose I have inherited, I have always considered them valuable.

But value has a different meaning when it comes to eBay.

One day I was browsing its “clothing, shoes and accessories: vintage” category when I found a listing for an inordinate amount of women’s handkerchiefs. In fact, 238 lots were for sale that very week. The cheapest, a set of four holly-embroidered Christmas hankies, was going for 99 cents. The most expensive, an assortment of 154 floral “everyday ladies” hankies, was on sale for under $60. At 38 cents a pop each, these weren’t exactly Caspian caviar.

On a visceral level, I was a bit disappointed in these anonymous sellers. I know that many dealers bought these products from estate sales and have no attachment to them other than the scant money they paid. But other sellers are daughters and granddaughters who may have cleaned out closets after the owner’s final stroke or battle with cancer. Isn’t the hawking of these long-held possessions akin to the selling of memories?

And at rock-bottom prices, no less.

Sentiment aside, I have no practical use for these tiny patches of gauze, trimmed with faded cross-stitch and permanently scarred with folds. What does one do with such items? Turn them into appliqué lampshades? They’re more suitable for polishing the furniture than they are for clearing the sinuses.

But thanks to my robust love for fiction and a vivid imagination — something else I inherited from Grandma — I can visualize one of these lace-and-linen confections tucked up her three-quarter sleeve.

Each brings back a piece of her. The off-white one with the scalloped edges reminds me that Grandma Min pickled the neighborhood’s best herring in sour cream sauce, heavy on the onions the way my dad and I like it. The eggshell one, with the crocheted border, takes me back to her fragmented square of a linoleum kitchen table, where I sat in my nightgown, watching as she cooked breakfast. She always salted the eggs before scrambling them rather than after, making them taste so much better. The handkerchief that was imported from Europe — and still in its original packaging — takes me to my grandmother's girlhood during World War I. She escaped in a covered wagon driven by her mother across the continent to a ship that would take them to America.

Although in the final decade of her life, Grandma Min blew into disposable tissues like the rest of us, and these vintage handkerchiefs are no longer intended for use, their personal history will always be nose-worthy.

Chances are, my own grandkids are going to receive them, and while they may be initially puzzled, perhaps in the end, they will discern the handkerchiefs’ true value.

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