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…

spanish II

Physical Science building. my first real class at UCSC. the room filled with undergrad students, many of them freshmen. i’m excited.

the teacher turns out to be a man of my heart. (does one say that in english?) he speaks no word of english in class, and his announcement that he speaks very little and bad english in general, reveals itself to be true when he reads the names of students (but he is playing, imagine for instance how non-english you can pronounce “jennifer”) and when he is dealing with students after the class (here the misunderstandings get a bit worrying, like when he is trying to say to a student that she must “wait” and she keeps understanding “why” and repeats him her reasons over and over again…). but more than that, he starts with a mini-lecture on the importance of grammar. my hero of the day. in the states and here at UCSC, he says, when you learn a language quieren hablar hablar hablar. be able to speak as soon as possible and have conversations. but you don’t manage to speak a language well because you don’t learn grammar. and you don’t manage well with grammar because you don’t know english grammar. there is nothing particularly difficult about spanish grammar, but it is grammar. so it’s difficult because you’re learning about grammar for the first time, while you’re learning a new language. but there is no escape, you must know about grammar. (and all of this in spanish)

i instinctively love the guy.

i was expecting and kind of looking forward to learn spanish in one of its latin american forms, as in most of the classes here, but guess what, alvaro is from madrid. don’t worry, you’ll get used to my accent, he told the students.

it’s not sure yet that i can stay in the class. there seems to be a real problem with non-students taking classes when they are full, and this one is. but alvaro is helpful, advises to stick around for at least another week or two, and by then students always drop out. meanwhile monday there’s another examen de nivel. i’ll be studying spanish grammar all weekend…

brown berets

before the meeting sandino wants to flyer for the march on sunday, protesting the migra raids, and october 7 event, the 13th annual peace and unity march. we enter some taquerías on the Watsonville plaza and put posters up. the Brown Berets meet in a backroom just off the plaza.

the room is filled with objects, posters and symbols of chicano power, black power and revolutionary movements in Latin America. once more the Che poster, familiar from sharon’s place in san francisco, which i’ve come to appreciate so much: At the risk of sounding ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love. the meeting is well structured, but full of humour and animo, in a combination that is starting to feel distinct (particular to a certain kind of US style leftwing groups) and familiar (the Chavez student coop, the Student Worker Coalition for Justice). although i must say i was happy that the meeting wasn’t as structured as in the other groups. it was a bit more fluid and warm.

many young people, i was reminded that the Brown Berets indeed remains, among many other things, a youth movement. (giulia, un mouvement de jeunesse! je retourne aux sources, pour apprendre comment les renouveller, pour quand on commence notre mouvement de jeunesse…). a meeting ground of students (high school and college) and youngsters with a past in the gangs, and these are overlapping categories. which do, on first sight, seem to be gendered: many of the students are (beautiful and intelligent) women, many of those with a gang past (and i have a vague, no doubt possibly mistaken, sense that i can distinguish, not so much on the basis of postures and looks, but in the way they are addressed by others) are young men. a third constituency: farmers and agricultural laborers. they are not there in actual presence, but by proxy, through some of the students and organizations working on issues of local agriculture, the Farmers Market…

coming out of violence, dealing with violence all the time. the woman who is keeping track of the killings announces that since last week, when they made the poster for the 13th annual peace and unity march – a poster on which they put all the names of people who died – she counted four more deaths. all homeless kids and people this time, one of them killed by other homeless people. she also tells the group that the stories of those killed are running through her head at night and preventing her from sleeping.

education to overcome violence. learning about history and legacies of resistance as a way to liberation. the room where the meeting takes place is called “the classroom”. apart from a sense of on-going education throughout all activities, it’s a separate point on the agenda. every week somebody prepares a talk. this week mario speaks about what he learned from living in El Salvador this summer.

these kids are from the states, from california, as i am reminded on several occassions. my surprise reflects problematic presumptions about connections with countries one’s family (used to) come(s) from. like i had expected the meeting to be at least partly in spanish, but english, infused with spanish words and expressions (¡sí, se puede!), was clearly the language of communication. it seems, i find out, that some of them don’t know spanish very well. or like mario’s story of going to El Salvador. his father lives there, was part of the resistance. yet mario organized his stay through a US organization. at some point it started to feel strange, he comments, to be working with white north americans in the country of his father. but before leaving this had seemed an obvious way to go there.
and more: throughout his presentation he insisted very much on the need for north americans to learn from a widely politicised culture such as the El Salvadorian one, a bit in the line of the conversation i had earlier with sandino. but then mario pointed to a terrain where he felt that “they” could learn from “us”: through all the violence in that society, starting in the times of Christopher “fucking” Columbus, as the guy is called in this classroom, their souls and spirituality were broken, and maybe some of the people from here could go back there and share spirituality. ay, i couldn’t help thinking, more californian nerve-wrecking spirituality, as an export product this time… but i shouldn’t let traumatic encounters with cali spirituality ruin this, it still remains to be discovered what kind of spirituality the Brown Berets seek to embody.

and of course these young people are californian, it’s my problematic surprise which should be questioned. complex and fractured threads of belonging in which the power of your actual physical location cannot be minimalized, even (or especially?…) if you’re invested in other belongings and build up a worldview to which other locations are central. [it reminds me of the story one of the students at the women’s studies summer school in madrid, when the planes crashed in the towers. she was mexican and had been brought up with a very critical anti-imperialist stance towards the US. then she got an opportunity to do a masters degree in NYC, a chance of a million which she didn’t want to waste. in 2001 she must have been based in NYC for about two years. the contrast between her own emotional reaction to 9/11 and the politicized reactions (“this is a respons to US hegemony”) of her family and friends back home, and how upsetting that difference was to her. after two years, which is nothing…]

and how different complex and fractured threads of belonging sometimes translate in harsh political realities. in the car sandino was shaking his head in disappointment while saying that, stupidly enough, there is quite some antagonism between the established latino communities and the newer immigrants from Latin America. as much as the Brown Berets talk about “our communities”, they are working with the knowledge that community is a political project in construction, that it’s about bonds and culture in the making.

political culture

it’s after closing time at the Resource Center for Nonviolence, the Victorian house with a peace sign on Broadway. sandino lets me in. sandino – si, it comes from augusto sandino (who headed the sandinistas). sandino’s father was all into the sandinistas, made a documentary video about them. we go to his place: he just started renting the apartment attached to the center. convenient and scary to have work and home so close. i plan to come back during office hours some other day, to learn more about the center itself.

during our quick dinner, we talk about political consciousness and organizing in the US. it started as i brought up international peace day, asking if the Resource Center had organized something, and carefully checking out what sandino thought of the big santa cruz light show for peace. he grimaces. he gets up and gets me an interview in the Good Times with the artist behind the project. read this, he insists. and i would suggest you’d read some fragments as well:

“Kirby Scudder has seen the light. Actually give him a week and we’ll all be seeing it, too. Five hundred of them to be exact, aligned along a three-mile stretch of West Clif Drive. The project is dubbed “Night-Light,” in which hundreds of battery-operated mega lights will suddenly brighten the coastline, their beams rocketing up to the heavens. It unfolds on Sept. 21 and it is, perhaps, one of the boldest, technically obtuse ventures a local has ever undertaken – all for the love of peace. And, in a day and age when American attitudes are heading south – the post 9/11 aftermcht and that thing called a war in Iraq – a local vigil for peace couldn’t come at a better time.”

“It actually has a lot to do with my upbringing as a Quaker in New York and being accountable for world events. We as citizens are accountable for who we are around the world. […] because I actually believe, whatever side of the war you are on, no matter who you vote for, were you are in the world, we are all Americans and all accountable. And I believe in accountability and that sort of spurred me to bring all these pieces together. And I thought, what can I do as an artist in this community about peace? And this is what I thought of.”

our responses to the big santa cruz international peace day event pass through grimaces and complicit glances. when sandino comments, he speaks of the need to work with what is there. given that political consciousness is so low in the U.S. every person getting out and contributing to a political cause in some kind of way, deserves support. at some point i sense his professional posture coming through: whether that means holding a silent vigil (grimace) or dressing up in black and covering your face (a supposedly neutral look, but the picture of el subcomandante on the fridge gives him away…), we need to respect these different forms. and work together. cause we already have so little political culture in the U.S., compared to other countries in the world (and i find out he lived a while in Nicaragua, and visited a number of other Latin American countries, including El Salvador). and sandino goes on with sketching the bleak picture till the point, imagine this dear friends, that i feel the need to bring up the sparks of hope in this country…
– “No wait, what about the immigrant marches. The sheer masses that got out on the streets, and at least they made the men and women in Washington DC a bit uncomfortable…”
– “Well funny that you should say that,” he responds, and bangs the flyer of the march on sunday, against the raids on undocumented people, on the table.

true. the timing is not a funny coincidence. and i learn that this was the first raid of this scale on migrants in the area. and la migra (all entities that enforce US immigration law) will be back, apparently they made that clear. repression after powerful mobilization. and it’s true that the mobilizations would need to be sustained to remain their power – something which doesn’t seem to be happening. and while where at it, it is true that it feels so very unlikely in this time and place, the idea of masses in the streets bringing a government to fall (and then i spare you sandino’s litany on the political system of the country…). but as we were on our way to a political meeting, we didn’t actually feel that disempowered at all.

feels good to get to know sandino a bit. he graduated from Community Studies, which seems to be a cool place (and where i’m trying to get in the social documentary course next quarter). he worked on alterglobalisation and his favorite medium is radio, you might try to check him out at Free Radio Santa Cruz, on Mondays from 7pm till 9pm, when he does a program called The Global Local.

peace day

today is international peace day. makes me slightly uncomfortable in this place. happy that i’ll drop by the Resource Center for Nonviolence later this afternoon, but even more happy that i’ll go to the Brown Berets meeting this evening. cause when Leta told me about the celebrations for international peace day here in SC, it made me… well, seriously sceptical. a great show of light on the ocean, and dancing together in the Veterans Hall, with the idea that if everybody did that all over the world (okay, at this point i’m sure this is Leta’s interpretation, i’m not ready to believe that the organizers would present the event like that), the world would be a better place.

hate to be cynical, and lightshows and dancing can be beautiful things, but i can’t help thinking: what about actually organizing against the warmongers called your government? and i couldn’t help thinking of one of Mazen Kerbaj‘s amazing drawings, from a tour to the nordic countries not long after the official cease-fire in Lebanon. inspired by a visit to the hippie kristiania area in copenhagen:

red-eyes by mazen kerbaj “what is more ugly,
war or
peace and love?”

hands

alone in the house tonight, wrap the space in some of the beautiful new music i got in brussels (sounds better than saying that i put the music really loud, doesn’t it…) and as i take all the time in the world to cook for myself i kind of enjoy the tiredness of a long day of work.

i sit down to phone sandino. he’s the guy from the Brown Berets that i met at the march and rally against violence in july. he’s very sweet. i find out that he works at the Resource Center for Nonviolence. i already came across people from the center both at the talk of Rabbi Lerner here in SC and at the Spiritual Activism conference in Washington DC. we decide to meet up at the center tomorrow, so i’ll get to see more of them.

sandino tells me more about the recent raids on migrants that took place in Watsonwille, SC and Hollister, on september 7th and 8th. basically the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency kidnapped people from there homes; more than 100 were arrested, and almost hundred were immediately deported. many of them were comrades, sandino says. there will be a march in Watsonville this sunday, and more activities planned in the next weeks. tomorrow the Brown Berets have there weekly meeting. sandino drives down to Watsonville every thursday for the meeting, and offers me the possibility to join him whenever i want. i’m curious and excited. a good time to joins us, he adds, we’ll need all the hands we can get.

geography

new kids are arriving on campus. buses are overcrowded. some look cute, others’ postures and conversations are quite unbearable. a kid in front of me is wearing a black T-shirt with a white outline of the U.S. the state of NY is filled in red, and California is filled in orange. three arrows with names: New York, California, and then one pointing to the black hole in the middle, saying “other”.

clases de español

in the previous months i failed to find the spanish classes i was looking for – somewhere in town, as part of some nice project or organization. and the experience of the summer classes organized by the city was awful enough not to try city language courses again. so now i’m checking out what might have been the obvious: the language program on campus.

“high impact” as they put it, with three classes a week. and in principle for students only, but staff can negotiate to get in. after having settled that with the language center, a question remained: to get in which class. (ay, this is where i get all nervous and sweaty when thinking back of the city course and sitting through a full hour of learning the spanish alphabet…) the point is, i’ll be pretty unhappy if i have to start with a total beginners class. but it’s perfectly true that i have as good a no spanish grammar, and when i try to speak italian comes out. i explain the situation in full details to the language center people but they don’t really take the time to consider the story. instead, they give me an access code to the on-line placement test. i take a deep breath (ay, if i had known i could have minimally prepared myself…) and take a chance: i go for the intermediate level test, not the beginners one. the weird structure of my basic knowledge of spanish becomes visible: no mistakes at all in reading and listening comprehension, but one mistake after the other in the grammar part.

the test takes me automatically back to level one. oh shit. then it seems that for some reason (well… the grammar questions about verbs concerned the present tense, while in the second level test they were about various past tenses. hereby confirmed that inventing grammar is more easy in the present than in the past) i pass the test without problems. declared fit to start classes in level two, this friday, three days a week, during lunch break, on campus, for free. me siento muy afortunada.

back in SC (light)

i enjoy the jetlag this way around. get up at 6.30, feeling fresh and eager. breakfast with leta. the chilly evening and morning air had made be believe that autumn had already installed itself, but leta tells me there’s a bit of an indian summer in the afternoons. she’s right. the light is so golden and tender.

yet autumn is in the air. the overwhelming thick and sweet smell of blooming flowers and trees that had filled the streets around our house during spring and summer is gone. the air is brisk now. (and what a pleasure to breath in fresh oxygen after more than 14 hours of flying and passing time in airports…)

and then there are the redwoods and the smell of autumn forest. i realize it’s the redwoods that impress me most here, far more than the ocean.

something monastic about coming back in this season. preparing for a period of writing in the quietness and natural beauty of this place. (meaning i’ve put up a number of walls, shutting out the parts of santa cruz i don’t like)

uncanny locations

left on a kitchen table: a magazine which introduces Santa Cruz to the new students. as a glance through it i find out that Hitchcock lived just around the corner, in Scott’s Valey, for a good number of years. that the infamous house in Psycho stood not far from here. that the story for Birds was based on a real story that took place in a Californian village a bit up north. how the uncanny character of this place can be very inspiring…