public space – somebody else's paradise

christmas eve

we went to david and clea this evening, for christmas eve. when clea invited me, she presented it as a dinner party for “lost souls” – i felt immediately addressed. i didn’t know at the time that marÃa and didier were already planning to go; marÃa later told me that holidays plans was the issue to be avoided with me for some weeks… it’s true, i had wanted to be with giulia in italy, with sara in beirut, and with my family – there had been little positive desire to stay in santa cruz. but here i was, a lost soul, in good company.

and so finally we get to meet clea’s daughter, alegra, who came down from alaska. a good part of the evening i find myself hanging on her lips listening to alaska stories. with a big beautiful atlas on my lap, to follow it all. 600.000 inhabitants (not so much more than the population of luxembourg) and the largest state in the union. a significant higher number of men, many of them strange solitary birds according to alegra. wilderness and wide-open space, minimal state regulation, rugged individualism – this is still frontier land. the utopian dream of being far from society, being self-sufficient.

and through her alaska stories, interestingly enough, we somehow get on the subject of suburbia. i get to ask her some of the “why and how” questions about suburbia that have been on my mind since a year now, and she tells the story of the birth of suburbia through the lens of hygiene. the threads of my little america book are slowly coming together: space / wilderness / suburbia / (social)hygiene. with the story that i really want to tell, somehow, being about freedom, independence, and individualism.

after dinner we go outside, in the hills of corralitos, singing christmas carols.

spots of light in the surrounding darkness of the forest: houses are lit not only with indoor lights, but also with outdoor christmas decorations of various kinds, the one more extravagant than the other. a hugh lit cross in front of one house, the scary imaginary of burning crosses.

this is my first christmas eve away from my family.

to knoxville

the coldest night in a motel in Murfreesboro (with heating this time).
a hamburger breakfast (lunch for the workers) in just the perfect
delightful home-cooking place (maggie definately has an eye).
buildings from the 1950s that suggest not much has changed since.
on the road to Knoxville.

at some point we get off the highway
and onto a small road that takes us through a beautiful landscape:
hills spread out with barns, meadows and old wooden houses
made soft and golden by the light of a late afternoon sun.

and i swear to god that it’s not much exaggerated when i say
that every second or third building along the road was a church.
looking for public spaces in this alien social geography deprived of
a center as we know them in Europe? here they are.
alongside the gas stations and the occasional small supermarket.
(that is before we hit mall-sized towns).

halloween

the noise of a helicopter policing the skies, sounds as if it keeps on making circles above our house, as if it were that damned mosquito one doesn’t manage to shake off. sirenes of police cars. halloween 2006 in Santa Cruz. because last year hell broke loose and downtown Santa Cruz was the scene of riots unseen in this small town, this year the police made sure that everybody knew last year’s gig was not to be repeated. warning adds in the local newspapers, massive law enforcement troops all around, extra lights on Pacific Avenue and a helicopter.

tonight was my cooking night, so i do a pumpkin and butter squash (from our garden still!) risotto to stay in the orange tune. we didn’t really plan on disguising, but as the trick-or-treaters come and the excitement in our kitchen grows, i all of a sudden see a black cat where marÃa stood just a second ago. after dinner, we go all together to stroll down Pacific Avenue. thousands and thousands of people. (and massive police forces.) walking up and down Pacific Avenue to show themselves, to look at others.

i had thought that i wouldn’t like it at all. downtown on an average friday or saturday night, when the streets are full of loud drunk (and puking) kids usually gets me depressed. but this is different. this is not usual santa cruz – people come from all over the valley and the hills. never seen santa cruz so brown, so latino. the air, the glances are filled with tension. the night is still young and we don’t stay long, yet we witness one arrest. i imagine how another set of riots this year might crack open the nicely cultivated weirdness of santa cruz. forget weirdness, this is real, albeit “pre-political” as the arrogant and annoying comrades would say… earlier tonight on the corner of our street, marÃa saw a group of latino kids disguised as a gang, looking for action. ah, i feel that i long for it… let this break open, at least for tonight, at least on halloween, when ghostly presences come to haunt… that politics comes to town in the guise of a ghost, seems more than appropriate. but police is everywhere, it’s scary (oh, this could have been made in a game, if the whisper would have spread: let everybody dress up like a police officer…). i want to sleep now, but i can’t escape the sound of this helicopter that keeps on circling around our house…

populated worlds

working on the porch today, reading marÃa’s beautiful article while she’s taking a nap. she must have just closed her eyes when three young guys decide the side-walk in front of our house is a good place to sit down and smoke pot and have a conversation. it’s the things they say…

… as long as if you take good care of yourself… it doesn’t matter if then you’re an asshole or a good person… cause if you take good care of yourself, nobody can hurt you… they can’t touch you… the most important thing is taking good care of yourself…

almost funny. if it weren’t for the fact that meanwhile i’ve heared too many americans say variations on that sad hermetic theme. soon the side-walk friends leave, in their own reality, stoned. i go back to marÃa’s writing, all about care for others, kinship and companionship, creating shared worlds and lives. how scarry it would be, to be here alone, with this rather wide-spread american illusion of fortress egos that can, with more protection (and security) remain untouched. (here they tend to call it independence, or even freedom.) but reading marÃa, and seeing her finally getting some sleep on the bench on the porch, brings me a smile of gratitude.

protest migra raids

a bus adventure to get to Watsonville. the autumn sun beats down on the watsonville plaza, where a bunch of people stand to demand justice for migrants. not very many, perhaps 150 or 200. as we walk towards the crowd, we talk about friends in santa cruz who didn’t see the sense in coming out here. what difference is it going to make? there will probably only be white and documented activists. but no, white people are rather absent (and frankly that doesn’t come as a surprise…). and yes, probably most or all people are documented here, which seems a logical division of labour, as long as these public meetings are not safe for undocumented people, in an economy of solidarity, no?

one moment i’m a bit taken aback by the situation. it’s almost the first public protest (there was a more spontaneous immediate one, in santa cruz, but they say that the group of protesters there was “really small”) after the raids and deportations, and there’s a nasty promise of more raids, yet so little people came out today. there’s no way you can stop it. but if everybody thinks like that, and clearly many many people do, it’s no wonder that the networks of collective action are so fragile. but slowly i get into the atmosphere of the gathering: there’s a sense of community and empowerment which is heart-warming. the shift in emotions is accompanied by one in moving bodies: moving away from the side-walk, where most protesters are standing with banners and slogans directed towards the street (how strange this sensation, cars as the main public of your protest), to the grass in the middle of the plaza. we sit down in a circle, and people talk.

the creation of a migra watch (already prepared by the Brown Berets), the mira migra, seeking to strenghten community connections and enable a fast-travelling alert system when the migra comes back to town. an agricultural laborer talks about working conditions. the head of a local school talks about the children whose parents been taken away, the children who’ve been taken out of school because of fear, and how the school now declares la migra unwelcome on their territory (oh, imagine all kinds of institutions doing that, declaring la migra unwelcome and organizing to keep them out…) fear is tangible and when one of the organizers asks if someone who was close to people who got deported wants to say something, there first is silence. then a woman steps up and talks about the children she works with, telling in fact the story of how she came to america, more than 14 years ago, and found herself working in the fields, not knowing english, and slowly slowly got herself into classes and trainings and now works in a kindergarten. a story of success, for which she is applauded. this should be possible for all, it is said. a member of the Watsonville City Council insists on how this country would crumble without migrant labor, how migrants in fact hold economic power. a black man running for the Santa Cruz City Council, holding a banner with “Black and Brown together”, invokes the image of latino workers bent over in the fields picking strawberries, and talks about how that image takes him back to his ancestors in the cottonfields. crucial that we make the connections, and building a struggle together. mireya gomez, who runs for the Watsonville City Council, speaks about the need to stand up, in the city council and at protest like these, and whereever you are, for those who cannot vote, and will not be officially represented. a refrain of Â¡Si, Se Puede!, and a people’s clap to wrap it up.

the Brown Berets are a discrete presence, without their uniforms, as agreed at the meeting. so that it can be a protest of “the people”. the other discussion last thursday now seems a bit unnecessary: what role the Brown Berets would take if the people want to go to the streets and march (the permit was for a rally at the plaza only). but it is not going to happen with this (small) crowd.

at some point marÃa and i stray to the taquerÃa, hang out for a while, search for a bus home. at the bus stop marÃa sees that bone-chilling advertisement for an agency that pays bail bonds, for sure they do good business in “gang” town Watsonville… Buy your freedom. still at the bus stop, a latino man who works here. when marÃa asks him, at some point in the conversation, whether he has friends here, he shakes his head. no.

as much as Santa Cruz makes me angry, Watsonville provokes a certain tenderness. both towns are equally small (~ 50.000 inhabitants) and have a basic agricultural layer, only Santa Cruz is on top of that a beach resort, a campus town, a silicon valley dorm-suburb, a hippie hang-out place, and supposedly the west-coast dyke capital. the things that give Santa Cruz a bit of an urban character, as people say. (but i keep on insisting that they got the notion of urban wrong.) and the things that make Santa Cruz so white and liberal – paradise as many here say. (but i’m sure by now you got my take on that.) oh, i have sudden strong fantasies of moving to watsonville. marÃa gives me a big sceptical smile, and of course i know she’s right (it would take us 4 hours a day to commute to campus by public transport, and since when do i like small rural places anyway… but i actually like this one, it is different from the white xenophobic place, where one gets beaten up if you are not “from” there, that shaped my visceral dislike of small rural places…). but it sure feels a good idea to spend more time here.

paradise now

i missed Paradise Now while it was playing in the movie theaters, so i couldn’t miss the special screening this evening. also the opportunity to check out the “outdoor movie theatre under the stars that springs up in the fields and industrial wastelands” that helps “reclaim public space and transform our urban environment into a joyful playground,” aka the guerilla drive in.

the setting: a bunch of semi-industrial buildings dropped in a piece of wasteland next to the railroad tracks. a wide white wall of one of the buildings serves as the screen. people on blankets, with wine and pizza, on the other side of the tracks. i kept thinking of how the images would be projected on a train, if one would pass by. but then, if a train would pass, the laptop, beamer and speakers on the tracks would be crushed. the thing is, trains don’t pass here. (at least not regularly.)

it was also my mood. i was folded into myself, longing to be anonymous in a movie theater. the guerilla drive-in included obligatory socializing. during the break between the shorts and Paradise Now we were called upon to meet our neighbor. i had no intentions to do so, but then of course other people considered me as their neighbor. “hi neighbor.” “hi.”

no doubt it was also my mood, but i didn’t really like the atmosphere. of course, there was lots of familiar punky d.i.y business (and i leave it up to you whether that’s part of the nice part or not…). and of course there were the stars. but there was something profoundly alienating.

it started with the shorts. two were non-american. a campaign video by Unicef Belgium in which peaceful Smurfland is all of a sudden bombed and destroyed, with baby-smurfs crying and dying. the message: “Laat de oorlog de wereld van de kinderen niet verwoesten” (Don’t let war destroy children’s worlds). the campaign was a tiny bit controversial when it came out last year (and the initial plan to have blow-away baby-smurf limbs in the picture was stopped). but not too much. but here the audience seemed impressed. someone whistled, “wow,” they said, “Unicef…” then there was the sky interview with George Galloway on Hezbollah, many of you must have come across it this summer, and if you haven’t, check it out here. (really, check it out.) i remember watching that video for the first time with nadia; we both were impressed and laughed in amazement. (and this time i saw that Galloway is a representative for Bethnal Green – emma, camille and giulia, what a neighborhood you girls moved to!) but the santa cruz crowed went almost silent, a silence that lingered on a bit after the video. bafflement or disbelief or… i’m not sure.

the other shorts were american. my turn to disconnect i guess. okay, there was some funny stuff. but what got the crowd really going was the Beavis and Butthead clip in which Beavis becomes president. (check it out here if it doesn’t put you off.) in between lots of snorty laughing on the screen, and a hilarious crowd (especially when Beavis asks who that bloke is, on television, standing next to Bush, and Butthead responds “Dick”), the extent of the emptiness of this “resistance” was striking. cause the clip was probably conceived, and for sure screened, as “resistance”. but there was no message other than showing that the discourse of bush & co is empty. the clip literary mirrored that emptiness. but 1) the fact that the regime covers up their actions with lies is nothing new, and 2) those cover-ups should not be mistaken for emptiness, it might actually be time for the left to understand a bit more of the strategies of the regime to come up with better forms of resistance, and 3) in any case effective resistance should be able formulate alternative visions, beyond denouncing. instead, i found the audience snuggling in empty sarcasm. we’ve talked before with susan about this kind of sarcasm supposedly directed against the regime (my first introduction to that was a talk by Juan Cole at UCSC some weeks after i arrived), but only preaching to the choir and failing to do any useful analytical and political work – and how infuriating it is.

and maybe i’m being too upset by a silly Beavis and Butthead clip while it really was about the audience’s respons to Paradise Now. but here i don’t know what to say – the film just didn’t go down well. at the end one of the organizers added that next week there would be more films of resistance, but “of different kind”, in a tone which gave away his low opinion about this film and made a good bunch of people laugh with complicity. and the stupid comments during the film – i’ll just give you the taste of one of them. commenting on the bad water in Nablus, a taxidriver says that Israeli settlers put something in the water that makes sperm infertile. a guy in the audience, also involved in the organization, cheers and shouts that this is the solution for overpopulation. (it kind of made me feel like shouting, what about starting to implement the solution here in santa cruz.) and then humour. there’s actually quite a bit of it in the movie, often a bit black. but i found myself laughing alone. and on other occasions the audience laughed, when i found laughter not appropriate and a bit embarassing. the aesthetics, the way of narrating and structuring the story (we’re not even talking about message, i felt)… it just did’t go down with this crowd. an alienating experience, i so much wanted “my” community afterwards.

but something made me leave the guerilla drive with half of a good feeling. this evening was co-organized with a new group that established itself this summer: the Santa Cruz anti-imperialist league. in their presentation they invoked the feeling that it was time to understand the extent of the harm done by U.S. foreign policy and react against it. if enough smart american kids start feeling that urge, if the urge is even felt in paradise santa cruz, there might be some hope…

SCPD

busy busy before leaving, but it feels too important to let it slip by. the Dakota story, part one and two. time to go to the Santa Cruz Police Department. i actually dress up a little (which is immediately overdressing here…), as i plan to play to the decent citizen, well resident, i mean, alien non-resident, you know.

“i want to speak to a police officer concerning a possible case of discrimination.” my request is treated with a seriousness that somewhat wears off into slight scepticism when i’m asked for the context – admission to a bar. i’m in for a long wait in the lobby of the SCPD. obviously not an emergency. i phone the dispatching three times to check on my officer, and each time i have to explain the situation again. each time i get a different kind of dismissal of the case. this promises to be frustrating.

then comes the officer. he invites me into one of the interrogation rooms. i explain both evenings in some detail, although i consider that the “this is a stupid American rule…” detail might best be skipped over. i mention the different IDs we had (turkish passport, german drivers licence, british student card, belgian passport, belgian drivers licence, iranian passport). the question: is that book the bouncer showed us (with north american IDs) indeed a legal base for accepting or refusing ID cards?

the officer grimaces, hesitates, shifts his weight (of which he has a lot) on his chair. yes and no. strictly speaking, the book the bouncer showed us has no legal value. but. she does have a legal obligation to check IDs. and the book helps her in distinguising valid IDs. for all other kind of IDs, she must feel confident on her judgement whether it is a valid ID or not. if she feels she can’t make that judgement, she can refuse. cause if someone is caught with a false or non-valid ID, the bar will be held responsible. so yes, if she doesn’t feel comfortable judging foreign IDs, she does have the right to refuse. then he gives a smart example. say she doesn’t feel comfortable judging the validity of an iranian passport, say she can’t read it properly, then she can refuse.

i want to get across that this is a structural exclusion and discrimination, but the framework is too different. when i try to bring it back to discrimination, he gets interested in what she said. “was she verbal abusive?” “well yes, the first time i did find her abusive.” “did she say, for example (oh the guy is smart in this examples…), dirty iranian go home?” “no she didn’t say that.” but whether she said stuff like that or not, we soon ended up home anyway. “hm, cause that would have been out of line. mind you, we do have freedom of speech in this country”.

this, of course, was not my point in raising discrimination. i try again. “but you have to understand,” he says, “that a bar is privately owned” oh god, here we go again… the white house is private, bars are private… once more i resist. they might not be fully public (argh… as if the english word Pub came falling out of the blue….) but they can’t be compared to a private house. he conceedes a tiny bit. okay, but they do control admission. “you must understand,” he insists, “that the Dakota is a special place. it caters to a diverse community.” ah, so that’s police talk here for a lesbian bar. “and so they follow the rules very strickly in order not to get into trouble. and they don’t cause trouble. take Blue Lagoon, they were shut down last year, lost their permit for a while, and had to pay a lot of money to get it back. and if they lose it one more time they won’t get it back. every weekend we’re called out for a stabbing or shooting. they are trouble. the Dakota doesn’t cause us any trouble, because they have a strict door policy.”

sigh. i try again to raise the issue of discrimination. how come one perfectly valid ID apparently doesn’t equal another. his respons takes off in yet a different direction. “but after they treated you like that, why would you even want to go there?” and he gets consumed by the maths of it. “so wait, 4 of you the first time, 4 the second and 5 more that would have joined you, that makes 17 people, imagine if everybody has two drinks of 5 dollars, and that’s not a lot for one evening, that makes 170 dollars, plus cover charge, we’re talking about more than 200 dollars here. do you want to give your money to a place that treats you like that? no, you’d want to take your money to a place where they treat you better.”

in between a total privatization of the place and a proposal for a economic boycott of it, the ground to argue about discrimination in terms of a structural measures that regulate access to a space was shrinking away… although my private (?) tutorial session with a representative of US law and order enforcement (a session that was filled with “in this country…”, “US laws say…”) did confirm that the sidewalk in front of the Dakota is public space. aha, it exists! not much, but something to begin with…

dakota

where do you go when you want to go out dancing in santa cruz? the obvious place in town is the Dakota, the lesbian bar on Pacific Avenue. obvious, because its the only queer one (officially listed as “gay friendly”) among the handful of places to dance downtown. i’ve actually never set a foot inside; it’s not that much of an obvious place for me to go. last time we tried to get in, if you remember, the expedition ended with the hysterical-aggressive bouncer calling the cops to get us away from the side-walk in front of the bar. [link to entry] but there aren’t really so many alternatives in town, and sahar wants to dance, so here we go…

as we’re walking up Pacific Avenue we make a code: i’ll say c’est elle if its the same bouncer. it sure is. marÃa goes first, she has in fact already been in the Dakota. she shows her Belgian driver’s license. the bouncer looks and hesitates. “hm, let’s see what the other IDs look like.” then there is sahar’s iranian passport. then there’s my belgian passport. she scrutinizes it. by that time i know that she recognized me and is most likely checking out my name. her hand finally takes lotte’s belgian passport while her head already shakes no. “no, there’s no weight and height on these.” lotte throws one of her killing you-must-be-joking looks, “you need our weight and height?” the bouncer stays very calm this time, i mean, rude and ignorant and stupid, but very calm. but these are valid passports, we respond, what more do you need? the point is of course not our weight and height, it’s about the IDs which she can accept “according to the book”. she goes in to get “the book” with pictures of different types of IDs from all the states, and even Canada. and ours are not in it. right, because we’re not from the states, nor Canada… as we argue she turns to me and acknowledges our previous encounter: “we had this conversation before, i even had to call the police, now move on.” i can’t help repeating that we’re on the side-walk and that this is public space. this time it is lotte and especially sahar who insist – just to get it clear: “so with a non-american ID we simply won’t be able to get in?” the bouncer kind of confirms this, although we all know it remains arbitrary – among the four of us marÃa was already in the Dakota, and in the company of last time, berna and bettina were as well. but the thing is precisely that non-american IDs are subject to this arbitrariness. when we finally leave we hear her say “sorry to spoil your holiday”. sure, when you don’t have a US ID you must be on a holiday. i turn around and say: “we live here. we’ll see more of each other no doubt.”

we walk down Pacific Avenue to Blue Lagoon. half naked men are screaming and molesting their musical instruments while moving their head in such a way that a 15 second imitation gives me a headache. heavy metal night. people getting drunk. an american flag at the bar. seems like a bar in Mississippi, lotte comments. i can’t really describe how depressed “going out” in small town america makes me. not that i’ve done a lot of that, i basically get depressed in the first half hour and don’t try again for many weeks.

we leave and on our way back up Pacific Avenue we bump into leta, jenn, mihui and two of their friends. they came from the Dakota, where leta had asked to peep in to see if their friends were there. the bouncer refused, but as they continued arguing with her, she asked leta who her friends were. when leta says “sarah” the woman tells them that she didn’t let us in and send us down the street. “no hard feelings,” she adds, as they follow our steps down Pacific.

khalas. time to act. a visit to the SCPD (santa cruz police department) soon. check out the legality of the refusal of non-US passports as legitimate IDs. if it’s not legal, file a complaint. imagine. taking legal action against the one lesbian bar on main street in the supposedly lesbian capital of the world. the bar where i will probably, if this saga continues, never set foot.

house meeting

a house meeting this evening during which we get to talk a about guests and hospitality.

1/ mihui remains with us. a bit of a strange transition. she came to the house through her old school friend cynthia, who actually insists on charging her rent for the month that she’d be staying. a month in which cynthia is kind of pushing her to find a job, a house, a life, while mihui wants to catch her breath after NY law firms and hang out unemployed for a while. then came the moment we realized: she could live in my room in august, and in marÃa’s in september, when we’re back in europe. the question of rent is brought up and of course marÃa and i insist that there is no need for mihui to pay rent to us (remember marie curie…). the situation is a bit uncomfortable. for cynthia – who must be interpellated in some way – and also a bit for leta who seeks to keep peace. but mihui remains with us.

2/ i bring up how offensive cynthia’s remark, in front of a guest (cooking for the whole house…) was. this is how she takes my comment. first it’s about a deeper meaning, an underlying problem of negative energy between both of us. i resist the non-acknowlegement of what happened in the kitchen. when i explain again why i find what happened unacceptable, it becomes something else (aided by peace keeper leta): cultural difference. what in “my culture” is not done is an innocent situation from cynthia’s perspective. (leta affirms, yes, for her friend jenn from new orleans it would also be not done – do you see the connection? – but in california it is different.)

you know what, i settle for this. why? perhaps cause part of me got convinced that sociability and notions of community in this place are far off from the things i feel connected to and that it’s impossible to tackle the whole of it. “my culture” then becomes a way of protecting some things to which i’m very attached and unwilling to compromise. moreover, “cultural difference”, “different life-styles” is a language that is understood here. it works. it worked before – when i was hesitating whether i would live into this house or into the student coop i had a conversation with leta in which i insisted that i could only join the house if it was able to accomodate the fact that i would have lots of guests for long periods of time and that i would be back to europe for substantial periods of time. the particular discourse of communal living in the washington house is about “supporting each other life-styles” and this is how leta translated my concerns at the time: if that is your life-style and we want you in the house then that means we are willing and able to support your life-style. with the beautiful marÃa connection-companionship and the flow of our beautiful guests in the last two months the house has changed a lot. having a shared ground between us that enables another kind of daily communal living makes all the difference and works in contagious ways. but somehow i don’t expect that we’ll manage to create that kind of common ground between all of our house-mates. i wouldn’t even know where to start with lost-in-new-age cynthia’s relationship to money. and this is where “culture” (oh… not for a moment do i think that hospitality is a “flemish” or “european” thing, don’t get confused with this part of the story…) and “life-style” seem to work.

let there be no misunderstanding: i would like it to be otherwise. “different” has a negative function here: protection, liberal public space in which we tolerate all our differences, cultural relativism, suburbia-subjectivity. i mean, really, what would be the formulation if we’d be describing this “culture” cynthia claims to be different: so your culture or life-style is about charging excessive rent to unemployed old-time friends and asking money when someone joins us for a meal? interesting, adds the anthropologist, tell me more of these cultural habits of yours…

community tv

“Our tv-stars just came in,” mihui said on the phone as we crossed her in the hall way. Our housemates definately shared the excitement. What a concidence, our local television performance. Tom, the father of Giulia’s housemate Ailin, invited us for what was a wonderful dinner in the good company of some other guests – like Neil, the italiophile who should have been treating his gourmet belly with good italian food and wine and his cultural interests with conversations about Italian cinema and music somewhere in trattoria in Roma but instead was melancholically lost in Santa Cruz (and a palm tree shirt), admittingly not a very good place for a classisist.

What are two feminists from europe were doing here, our table guests wanted to know, and what kind of research work were we up to. “You should invite these girls to your talkshow, Tom.” It turns out that Tom hosts a talkshow Voices on Santa Cruz community TV every Thursday. And what’s more, the first Thursday after this sweet dinner Tom didn’t have any guests for his show yet.

Religion and sex work. Piece of cake to bring them together: shisms within european feminism. The day before the show we meet up with Tom at Lulu Carpenter’s (Pacific Ave, near the Clocktower) to talk a bit more focused, although i’m not sure if that was what we were actually doing. i start off by saying stuff that makes me think “what the hell am i talking about”, afterwards giulia tells me that she was thinking the same thing. This was after Tom proposed us the title “world feminism” for the show – gosh no, it’s not because we’re not from here that we’d be able to represent the world… Let’s keep it european, that’s already impossible enough. But Tom wanted to bring in a third guest, he’d contacted a feminist from Mexico and a feminist from Lebanon and the Susie Bright. With every possible third guest we saw how the show would take a very different direction, so in any case it would be a surprise…

The community TV operates from a building on Pacific Ave (near the beach) with a shop front with three TV screens tuned in on their three channels. When some months ago marÃa and i stood for some minutes to watch, we were immediately invited to come in and join the audience in the studio. We arrive shortly before the show and find out that the third guest is a woman from the community TV crew, who is presented as a feminist single working mum. Just before we get on the studio stage Tom mentions something about how Claire can bring the issues back to women’s daily life… ay, the dreaded division of labour between who represents theory/politics and who “real life”…

Tom first has a conversation with Claire and this kind of sets the tone of the things we want to react or come back to. How is it to be a single mum in this country? If you really want it, if you are determined, you can do it. It’s tough, there are plenty of inequalities, but in the end it’s in your hands and if you fight for it you’ll make it. Did you get help? Claire takes pride in saying no, she did it without help. Nothing from the “other party”. Nothing from the goverment. Then she nuances that she did have a goverment job at some time, so if that counts as help… (Hell no, that doesn’t count. A job, trading your work force for money, since when would that be social welfare… okay, i know it’s all mixed up, but at least i want to be upset about it!). Tom had to probe further – help from friends maybe? Yes, other single mums, but Claire wraps up her story that basically she did it alone. What is it with this pride in independence and investment in the image of the one who stands alone, who fights alone, who got no help? When obviously she had community around her… Then there’s a strange disjuncture between how she talks about this wild west “at home” and the lack of opportunities “in other places”. In telling the story of her success as a single mum, she incorporates a visit to a village in Portugal where her father is from and ponders over how “back there” she obviously wouldn’t have had opportunities like a decent education and so on. Her story about women’s opportunities effectively fell apart in two pieces: full opportunities here and the absence of opportunities for women outside of this country.

I insisted that there is something very wrong with the idea that this is a land of opportunities, that what characterizes this country is not the fact that people have more opportunities here than in the rest of the world. What characterizes this country is the fact that people are being fed – in the media, in school,… – with this story of opportunities, that they believe they have so many opportunities, when it’s a lie, when (tax) money goes into war instead of education, child care,…

In the end there was not much space to talk about “european feminism” (there was not enough of a context to have a conversation about that) nor our work (although Giulia did manage to talk about sex work, complicating the choice in the pro-prostitution argument in a way which wasn’t really picked up by Tom or Claire.)

After the show we went for pizza on Pacific Ave (near the Clock Tower). In exchange for an ad for the pizza joint at the end of the show, the entire staff (with guests and audience…) gets free pizza here every Thursday night. We talk about the show and why nobody called, why there were no questions from the audience. The people around us agree: there was no disagreement or conflict between us. This came as a surprise to us. Giulia insisted that we were telling a really different story then Claire’s. Our conversation partners looked puzzled and wanted us to explain. The emphasis on individual choice, responsibility and opportunity versus a perspective on structural inequalities and collective political strategies. They nodded and concluded that for Santa Cruz it was all part of the liberal left, there was no disagreement on issues, so it was all the same thing. Oh that really counts as an indication of the omni-presence of neo-liberal ideology…

The next day Susan, who watched part of the show, expressed her scepticism of the whole thing. Good that you guys did the show, but the whole thing shows how inadequate these progressive voices are… As we were talking more about the problem with the set-up and arguments, she looked at me and asked, “Did you actually use the word neo-liberal? I bet nobody in Santa Cruz understands that concept.” Yep, Giulia is right, we need to learn how to do these kind of performances…