Sure, he has spoken to cheering crowds on behalf of Troy Davis and Occupy Atlanta. He has teared up when he speaks of his family––his father, a former cop; his mother, a former drug dealer; and his grandmother, a civil rights activist––and sputtered out a list of their grievances, bellowed of how they have become our grievances. But Killer Mike has never sounded as entrenched in our unrest as he does in his fifth album. Solely produced by El-P, R.A.P. Music is Killer Mike becoming the authority figure that he’s long wanted to become––not a politician or a priest, but the South’s own Ice Cube, sneering fearlessly at everyone daring to inflict the pain and strife that, in his eyes, has made his music all the more necessary.

El-P is credited for revamping New York underground hip-hop in the ’90s; Killer Mike bred off the same decade’s Stankonia standards, though still equipped with battling quips like, “Give you men a pause just like a comma, bitch.” So like friends diving into each other’s record collections, they leap into a few good-natured homages to highly revered rap standards. Breaks resembling the introductory beats of Apache’s “Tonto” ignite “Jojo’s Chillin’,” the album’s tribute to Slick Rick’s storytelling. And in “Southern Fried,” Killer Mike seems to revisit OutKast’s dirt-floor basement studio the Dungeon––where, apparently, the humidity would randomly trigger its drum machine––as he revs up his Georgian gait to a flow that could match Big Boi’s spit for spit.

But being the hip-hop pyromaniacs they are, Killer Mike and El-P rekindle far more than their love for old-school music. In “Untitled,” helium-fueled infrequencies cue Killer Mike’s pacing through his greatest fear––dying before his wife. (“Will my woman be Coretta, take my name and cherish it?” he says. “Or will she Jackie O, drop the Kennedy, remarry it?”) In “Don’t Die,” even the smallest worms of synths inspire Killer Mike to blast a generation-old story of police abusing their badge-bestowed power. And before that, El-P sends out snippets of addresses regarding the Iran-Contra affair into a sick, unsettling fog––all Killer Mike needs to recall the presidency that loomed over his childhood: “They declared a war on drugs, like a war on terror / but what they really did was let the police terrorize whoever / but mostly black boys…”

Some of R.A.P.‘s stories are endearingly familiar, others disturbingly so. Many of them break down why he turned to Public Enemy and N.W.A.’s unflinching reporting-to-tape of the West Coast crack epidemic. Few remind us of whom Killer Mike trusts with his future. (The answer, right now––the people creating R.A.P., which stands for Rebellious African People’s music and ranges from Ray Charles to Sade.) On paper, R.A.P. Music is Killer Mike absolutely certain of how his past has played out––knowing fully well why he needed rap as an ’80s child and precisely how it inspired him to speak louder, be heard. And when set to El-P’s retro-futuristic flourishes, R.A.P. Music reiterates that yes, Killer Mike can scorn like his childhood idols while also necessarily––at times disconcertingly––sounding very much in the present.

While the English soccer season always seems to last a gloriously long time, this year it seemed particularly lengthy due to the drama that filled the calendar from its beginning in mid-August right up until the last day, Sunday May 13. Billed as “Survival Sunday” by the English Premier League (EPL), all the games had identical start times (3 p.m. in England; 10 a.m. E.D.T. in the U.S.) so that there was no funny business. Many of the games on this last Sunday had implications, both at the top and bottom of the table. The league title came down to, literally, the very last minute. The Fanzine sports desk takes a look back on this 2011-2012 season, and recalls some of the most memorable stories.

1. Forty-Four Years is a Long Time to Wait 

The biggest story of the season, by far, is the mere fact that Manchester City won the title. The EPL isn’t known for parity. Since Blackburn Rovers won the league in the 1994-95 season, only three teams won the EPL title until this year: Arsenal, Manchester United, and Chelsea. By way of comparison, in the big four North American sports during the same time period, 10 different teams have won the MLB World Series; 11 have raised hockey’s Stanley Cup; 12 have triumphed in the Super Bowl; and eight teams have taken the NBA title.

The last time that City wore the crown of the top-tier of English football was 1968, 24 years before the creation (and slight restructuring) of what is now called the EPL. As any City fan will tell you, their team’s on-again, off-again march to the top spot could not have happened any other way. That is, giving its fans—through the season and especially through the 90+ minutes of their final game—equal doses of agony and ecstasy.

We wrote a few weeks ago of City’s tumultuous season, so we won’t rehash all that. Everything that preceded Sunday is prelude, and if you just tuned in, all you need to know is this: heading into Sunday’s last game of the season, the title was City’s for the taking. All they had to do was win, at home, against the 17th place team, Queen’s Park Rangers. On paper, things certainly looked easy for The Blues: they hadn’t lost at home all season, posting 17 wins and one draw. Conversely, QPR had a dismal away record, winning only three times on the road. But, if there’s one thing any sports fan learns, the words ‘on paper’ mean nothing, that’s why they play the games.

City took the lead 1-0 late in the first half, but QPR equalized early in the second half. Then, catastrophe for QPR. Their captain and nutcase extraordinaire Joey Barton did what he does best: suffered a moment of sheer insanity. He was caught elbowing City striker Carlos Tevez in the head, tossed from the game with a straight-red card, and for good measure, rabbit-punched City’s other Argentine striker Sergio Aguero in the kidney on his way off the field. Despite the 1-1 score at the time, City fans were salivating: scoring one goal with eleven men against ten must have seemed like child’s play. Except that QPR, incredibly, in their lone foray downfield after the Barton incident, managed to score off a counter-attack, taking a 2-1 lead. They then collapsed all nine field players in their own box, making it nearly impossible for City to find any room to get a clear shot on goal.

The 10 QPR men played like 20, and cleared every attempt City made to penetrate. 90 minutes went by and the score remained 2-1. City would need a miracle; indeed, cut-away shots to Man United’s away match at Sunderland showed United fans in the stands celebrating another title. Into extra time the match went, five minutes of time added, thanks to the Barton incident taking up so much time early in the half. Then, suddenly, in the 92nd minute, Edin Dzeko, City’s out-of-favor striker, headed in a corner kick to tie the game. Two minutes later, with a mere 90 seconds or so left in the game, Aguero broke free in the box and booted home the winner. Pandemonium ensued, in the stands, on the field, in the Blue side of Manchester, in the Mad Hatter’s on Third Avenue in Manhattan, anywhere and everywhere long-suffering City fans watched. And now wept in joy.

2. Promotion and Relegation

In that great tradition of English football, the bottom three teams from the EPL are relegated to the second-tier league (currently referred to as the NPower Championship) and the top three teams from there are promoted to EPL punching-bag status for next season. As of this writing, only two of the promoted teams are known, Reading and Southampton. The third team will be the winner of a one-game playoff between Blackpool and West Ham United next weekend; both teams played in the EPL last season.

As far as relegation, in a strange coincidence all three teams with nicknames synonymous with ‘traveling’ were relegated. Farewell then, ye travelers: Bolton Wanderers, Wolverhampton Wanderers, and Blackburn Rovers. Going into Sunday’s final matches, Blackburn and Wolves were already relegated, but had Bolton won, they would have pressured the above-mentioned QPR to win their match at Manchester City. It was a strange sight, at the end of that match, seeing the QPR bench and fans celebrating their EPL reprieve (after finding out that Bolton had only drawn in their match), despite losing the game. Indeed, QPRs loss became moot, and that game turned into a win-win for both teams, and had both teams celebrating on the pitch after the game.

3. Player-on-Player Racial Abuse

Sadly, in soccer, it’s not uncommon for black players to be racially abused by opposing fans, but it’s unusual when player-on-player incidents occr. Two of the EPLs biggest stars, were involved in two separate on-field racial altercations, which marred the season.

Liverpool’s Uruguayan keg o’ dynamite, Luis Suarez was banned for eight games by the Football Association, England’s governing body of soccer, after finding him guilty of racially abusing  Man United’s captain Patrice Evra, a black Frenchman. Suarez’s defense was the old “huh? the word I used isn’t an epithet where I’m from”; but the F.A. didn’t buy it, possibly because Suarez ain’t no choirboy. (Among a long list of questionable behavior, my favorite: while with his previous team, Dutch side Ajax, he was suspended for biting an opposing player.) According to Evra, Suarez told him he ‘kicked him because he was black,’ and that ‘he didn’t speak to blacks.’ Liverpool ended up looking bad because of the unconditional support the club officially showed for Suarez’s bad behavior, including the entire team wearing pre-match, supportive t-shirts after the F.A. ruling came down. Suarez added gasoline to the fire when, in the second Liverpool v Man United match later in the season, he snubbed Evra in the traditional, pre-game handshake line, inflaming an already charged and tense lead-up to the match.

The other incident involved the man who is quite possibly the biggest dickhead playing soccer today, Chelsea’s captain John Terry. During a game, Terry allegedly called QPR’s Anton Ferdinand, and I quote, a fucking black cunt. Terry’s story is that, no, no, he didn’t call him that, he was actually asking Ferdinand if he, Ferdinand, thought he called him a fucking black cunt. Or something like that. The logic is fairly twisted and has a whiff of lawyerly rhetoric about it. Let’s add another layer. Anton Ferdinand’s brother, Rio, is an England national teammate of John Terry, and is now saying he doesn’t feel comfortable playing on the national team with Terry this summer in the European Cup. The newly-hired England manager, Roy Hodgson, is considering leaving Terry off the roster, fearing the scandal will be a distraction. Ya think?

It’s possible that Terry is telling the truth, but frankly, he ain’t no Boy Scout either, and has an even longer list than Suarez of questionable on- and off-field behavior. To my mind, he’s poison, and the sooner England see the back of him as not only captain, but team member, the better off they’ll be in international competitions. Terry was the England national team captain, until they stripped him of the captaincy while this case is pending. He goes to court in July, conveniently, after the Euro Cup is over, should England feel the absolute need to include him in their squad.

4. Yeah, But Why Do They Call Him The Assassin?

Arsenal’s Dutch striker Robin Van Persie, lived up to his nickname, The Assassin this year by scoring 30 EPL goals for the north London side. As a team, Arsenal scored 74 goals this season, so van Persie’s tallies were an astounding 41% of his team’s output. For what it’s worth, he was/will be voted EPL player of the year by just about any newspaper/reporter organization/football group that votes on such things. And the best news for Arsenal fans: as of now, he plans on staying with the club, denying year-long rumors that he wants out.

After a rocky start, including the wrong end of an embarrassing 8-2 mauling by Man United back in late August, Arsenal steadily climbed the table, from a low of 17th place to a solid third place finish, securing a berth in next year’s Champions League, where they will need van Persie’s magic touch even more than in their EPL games.

5. Golazos Galore

Okay, so English soccer announcers don’t do the long-drawn-out “Goooooooolllllllllll” freakout that their Spanish-speaking counterparts do, but we can still borrow a term from the Spanish-language soccer world: golazo. Basically, this term means an amazing goal, and announcers don’t throw it around lightly. In every season in every league there are muchos muchos golazos, so let’s embrace that term here and point out some golazos from the EPL season.

To my mind, the Best Goal goes to Newcastle’s Papiss Cisse, whose goal against Chelsea in early May was both powerful and sublime. It was one of those “I sort of meant to but probably couldn’t do it again in a million years” goals, meaning these guys certainly have the skill to do such a thing, but still, it was a little bit lucky. Late in the game, already up 1-0 on Cisse’s first goal, Newcastle took a throw-in about 35-yards from Chelsea’s goal. Another Newcastle player received the ball on his chest and knocked it over to Cisse, who took it on one bounce and, with the outside of his right foot, struck the ball which curved away from, and over the head of, Chelsea’s keeper Peter Cech. The curve on the ball has to be seen to be believed. Cisse was not only about 20 yards out, but right next to the sideline, meaning he was probably about 35 yards away from the goalkeeper. It was one of those goals where coach, teammate and especially goal-scorer just shake their head and laugh in sheer disbelieving joy at the beauty they have witnessed.

Four other golazos that receive honorable mention include:

1) Robin van Persie’s left-footed, full-volley, received from over his shoulder on a dead run that screamed past Everton’s Tim Howard.

2) A half-slapstick, half-incredible-athleticism goal: Arsenal’s Theo Walcott is surrounded by three or four Chelsea defenders as he approaches the 18-yard box, trips and falls flat on his face, his momentum continues to carry him forward, he pops up instantly still controlling the ball, deftly splits two shocked defenders at about 12 yards out and beats keeper Peter Cech with a clean strike [at 3:27].

3) A rare goal by a goalkeeper, in this case Everton’s American keeper Tim Howard, who cleared a backpass by knocking it 90 yards downfield, the ball skips on a wet surface and takes an abnormally high bounce over the head of the Bolton goalkeeper who was way off his line.

4) Stoke’s Peter Crouch is about eight feet tall and weighs––maybe––80 lbs., so that when you see him, your brain automatically thinks that he’s uncoordinated (he is most definitely not). Against Manchester City in late March, Crouch heads a punted ball from his own goalkeeper to a teammate, receives the ball back from the teammate and from about 35 yards out, juggles the ball once with on his right foot, and then scorches a right-footed full-volley past City’s keeper. (As a side note, Crouch said the funniest thing ever to come from the mouth of sports figure. When asked to speculate what he thought he would have been if he hadn’t become a professional footballer, he replied: a virgin.)

Let’s hope that next year’s season has every bit the fun, excitement, and drama that this year’s did. Until August, then.

__________

Photo credit: The Lion’s Pitch

While peppered with a healthy amount of grunts, his verses are often reiterations of a familiar rap tale––in this case, precisely how he became Teflon Don. But the Rick Ross that often pops to mind is the Rick Ross who appears in the music video for Lil Wayne’s “John”––the Rick Ross who plops his Jabba the Hutt frame onto a wheelchair with spinners, who appears to have not experienced any hardship whatsoever. This is the Rick Ross that people like and remember most, as when GQ profiled Ross last year and noted his choice in food––roasted chicken with sides, fried cheese bread, artichoke dip and three slices of key lime pie, two of those to go––and the number of singles he once took to Kamal’s 21 in Atlanta––$10,000 in singles, which accumulated by three to four inches on the strip club floor. (Yes, I know these statistics by heart.)

Rick Ross is my Rachel McAdams: a highly-sought actor who’s hired to read from a well-worn script and wouldn’t dare do otherwise. For his latest single off Looking for Myself, out June 12, Usher wanted precisely that. (“It needed a boss on it,” the singer said to MTV.) So the endings presented in “Lemme See”

are, predictably, happy ones: Usher emerges victorious after he and his date get drunk off Merlot, before Ross rhymes ‘hottest’ with ‘hottest’ in reassuring us that yes, he’s still a bawse––as in, “Rozay and Usher Raymond, girl we the hottest / rocking the most ice, I said we the hottest.” But before he does, Ross jolted the song out of its club-driven ecstasy with choice words: “Had the valet parking, Chanel hoodie on / looking like Trayvon Martin / George Zimmerman, I’m wanted.”

When the Sanford, Fla. shooting made national headlines, and immediately after Geraldo Rivera advised parents of black and Latino children not to wear hoodies (“What’s the instant association? It’s those crime scene surveillance tapes“) reporters asked mainstream rappers to make their stance known, whether they’d do so with a song. Hundreds of rapped tributes to Trayvon Martin now exist on YouTube, but without star power backing them up, even those among the first had to be sought out, as they were too easy to avoid. (Full disclosure: Up until a week ago, I’d only seen one and heard of three of them.) On one hand, it’s no wonder that more than a month ago, Public Enemy’s Chuck D said that Ross, with three No. 1 albums to his name, should make a song. After all, Ross grew up in the Carol community of Miami, where much-younger rapper SpaceGhostPurrp used to see Martin walk to school.

Turned out, Chuck D may have been the only one who wanted that of Ross, of this persona who is always seen on nights out but never caught while making his money. Blogs called the verse tacky, awkward, misplaced. “Cool solidarity, bro,” Gawker wrote. ” … would have been the perfect mixture of sex, drums and R&B if Rick Ross hadn’t [sic] almost ruined it with his distracting Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman reference,” The Urban Daily said. But Ross’ timing in this shimmering, slithering Jim Jonsin-produced track is precisely what makes this verse perfect––necessary, important. By the time Ross slips in, Usher has already alternated back and forth between slipping into his own falsetto and Merlot-induced bliss and slinging out status updates at Twitter’s pace. Skirt’s off, shirt’s off, he sings with more sleaze than the average cat-caller.

But for a brief second Ross’ verse conjures up a different image––one that he posted on Twitter, with a caption that reads, “We need justice for #TrayvonMartin Im [sic] overseas waiting on that call.” Sure, he makes sure that his ring, chain, and watch are seen, and he is indeed wearing a sweatshirt bearing his label logo. But other things are obscured: the brands, perhaps Cartier and Chanel, names he takes care to note in “Lemme See;” and his eyes, typically shielded by designer glasses, since he’s pulled his hood over his head. With that hoodie on, Ross doesn’t appear menacing, like he could hurt someone. He appears smaller, meeker, this man who usually appears larger than life in a fucking velour tracksuit. And to hear him liken himself to a 17-year-old boy who had barely grown into his 6-foot, 3-inch frame, purposefully interrupt this pop escapism to momentarily go off the script, is a necessary reminder of a sad truth: No matter how much money he could be making or what brand he’s wearing, White America may not let him escape that comparison, either.

Actually, since I arrived just in time to be a part of a generation that took joy in spectacular linguistic rituals—changing meanings as a concession to the impossibility of altering reality–it was no longer being called the ghetto.  At least not by those who lived there, or by those of a certain age who lived there.  This was the very late 70s and the early 80s.  We’d ended up in Inglewood, California, biking distance from South Central L.A.  Hip-hop, Rodney King, and the riots hadn’t happened yet.  Radio was still segregated, “immigrant” meant those who spoke Spanish, and only a bold and truly dangerous few dared wear their trousers below their waists and hips.  However the linguistic and affective transformation had begun.  Inglewood was in the process of being renamed as first “the wood” and then “the hood.”  Or was it the other way around?  It’s hard to remember now because when hip-hop did hit, its attitude to history was distinctly scorched earth.  By the time NWA and other rap groups emerged to crystallize everything I’d been learning about the area into a coherent set of intentions, attitude had became synonymous with history and resentment turned memory into myth and counter-myth.

By the time “hood” had become official I’d joined my generation in exaggerating its location until it became larger than any map could hold yet so small that only we could tell where its borders actually ended.  Even now I encounter people who claim to have grown up in my “hood” only to hear them describe streets far closer to the ocean than any of us had ever gone or farther up in the hills than we were welcome.  We have the riots to blame for that geographic elasticity.  After they happened, most black people my age wanted to have been involved.  The riots enabled anyone to append him- or herself to what was now seen as a mere chapter in a larger struggle, widening its significance though erasing its specificity.  By the time I felt the need to claim a particular “hood,” I’d begun evolving into an American, or to be more specific about the trajectory of my assimilation, African-American.  I’d discovered very early on that there were two Americas, one black and one white, two distinct regimes of pain and promise.  Black immigrants had to assimilate into one or the other, not both.  We then made an enduring spectacle of our choice to contend with the never-ending suspicion that we were frauds—meaning, anyone who had the luxury to choose in the first place.

I’d thought we were immigrants in paradise, or at least a distant suburb of it.  My whole family thought so, as did those few other black immigrant families we knew that were sprinkled through the area and those even fewer that had moved enough beyond the neighborhood to speak of Inglewood or South Central without regret.  In Jamaica where we’d most recently arrived from, the word ghetto meant much more than it did in Los Angeles.  It was never used casually and didn’t amplify one’s virtue as it often does now.  In Jamaica—or at least, our Jamaica––it loomed so large in the cultural imagination that people who lived there did their best to diminish its size and scale so as to imagine its borders near enough to cross.  It was something other than poor, which I knew because poor was everywhere.  Our Jamaica was without the luxury of economic and social segregation: everyone was everywhere at once all together.  It was a kaleidoscope of want and fear, need and hope.

In Jamaica “ghetto” didn’t mean hot and cold running water, a television in every or any room, fast food on every corner and a beneficent government that doled out delightful colored paper with which to buy Kool-Aid, bread, canned vegetables, and full meals that could be kept in the freezer.  I’d imagined these to be middle class or elite luxuries.  Along with free education and regular electricity, they were why I thought our family had come here.  We’d arrived from countries where the state was largely nominal.  To imagine that a government could actually do things for its people or to even expect it to was not part of our notion of citizenship.

For my mother, aunts, and uncles, however, those “free” items were signs of decadence, as much to be guarded against as the envy they could inspire.  There were times I told my mother that I’d spent the evening with friends next door or down the street enjoying these gifts of the state purchased freely with food stamps that looked oddly like our now valueless native currencies.  She would punish me as if I had stolen them.  And when I told her the economics of things, that for example, there were ways to use food stamps to buy items not earmarked for their use, she threatened to send me back to places that could no longer be called home.

To my mother these things weren’t free at all.  Their costs were just too vague for children to acknowledge.  Along with my uncles and aunts, she worked hard to inculcate a strong sense of guilt for what I’d seen as innocent pleasures or as the privileges of a democracy we’d been lucky enough to append ourselves to.  This was not so noble as it might seem, for it was accompanied by a suspicion of those who embraced welfare as a right or an obligation.  As you can imagine, my family’s fierce denials and rejections made no sense to me as a child.  How could we reject free food?  What was wrong with lining up with the other kids while strong-shouldered men handed out hard bricks of cheese in the grocery store parking lot?  It was like a carnival: everybody was there.

Whenever I used the term ghetto at home as a sign of my growing ease with my new world it was guaranteed a sharp slap across the lips.  For example, to laugh at the absurdities of life in our neighborhood; to nod knowingly at the violence around us; or to celebrate that violence as in keeping with an emergent understanding of black male “cool.”  To my family it all signified a too-eagerness to become something else and we were not to exult in that process.  Before that I don’t recall the word ever being used to describe anywhere other than parts of Kingston.  That city had taken on a reputation for violence that we assumed no American city could possibly have.  The American television shows we watched in Jamaica didn’t convince us that there was more violence in America, just more heroism and better-structured narratives.  So when I saw street-gangs ambling along Crenshaw Boulevard or Manchester Avenue, and as my new friends dragged me into the doorways and bushes to let them pass, it took time to learn how to fear them.  It took only a few severe bloodlettings and many near misses to teach me.  A few weren’t so lucky.  But given the state-sponsored fury of late 70s Kingston and the arrogance of immigrants who migrate to softer surroundings, these boys at first seemed quaint.  They wore colorful scarves and shiny glasses and were given to elaborate and endearing hand signals.  They trumpeted names like Inglewood Family, Blood Stone Pirus, and Rolling Sixties.  Even when they started singling me out due to my accent and my inability to tell them apart, they seemed more a threat to themselves, not to anything as small as an island or as unknowable as a nation.

For the Nigerian side of my family, ghetto wasn’t even a recognizable word.  Sure, in Lagos there were surreal places like Ajegunle or areas where people had built islands out of decades of untreated waste or dwelled literally on mountains of garbage.  There were zones in that city that could be differentiated from a whole that would seem uniform to Americans in its shabby and desperate madness.  Unlike the “hood,” those areas in Nigeria were immune to metaphor.  They could not be made to signify other things.  These areas were also immune to nostalgia because they would only seem truly horrific upon arrival in America, when we would realize just how far we had been from this country and its privileges.  We would be marked by the true size of a world that could hold such extremes in it and would therefore resist any identity—racial or otherwise––that would separate us from traumas greater than those America imposed.

The word ghetto had yet to seep over to West Africa with its complex posturing and claims of authenticity.  In those days satellite dishes were uncommon.  There was no Internet and no cellphones.  Migration seemed close to oblivion.  America remained a secret, or a rumor that could bend to the storyteller’s needs.  Tales of racial suffering or economic disparity brought back by the fortunate were signs of an enviable cosmopolitanism.  It was a case of those with wings to fly complaining about the thin air above.  But I can guarantee that for the Nigerian immigrants in the family, ghetto easily meant shame.  It was not a space of imprisonment but instead the architecture of choice.  As such, it was in some way connected to the African-Americans who lived there and whom we met first upon arrival—after all, we’d assumed it their country too and their hostility to us only confirmed that it was.  To find them in neighborhoods like these was for us to think them in a world utterly of their own making.  We were too preoccupied with our own history and the difficulties of our arrival to think charitably of theirs.

Photo: Robert Prather 2008 / airpanther

As is the case with many immigrants, black Americans were the front line of our experience with this country’s ambivalence towards new arrivals.  Being of the same “race” was meaningless to us.  We didn’t share that method of self-knowing.  In this crucible of Inglewood and South Central LA, the term ghetto said more about how different black Americans were from us than it did about how this glorious new society treated them.  It had to because if it didn’t we would have had to abandon the sometimes-unrealistic hopes that fueled our migration and take seriously the suggestion that our “race” had something to do with our possibilities.  Failure was not an option and so like many immigrants before us we projected it onto our black neighbors.  What they projected onto us deserves its own essay, books even despite the known reluctance to engage it.  But at its root was ambivalence towards their historical origins and a deep sense of resentment towards us for having arrived from those origins and beginning to excel in this country despite their belief that racism made such ambition impossible.  After all, if racism was what they said it was and what they believed it was, then why didn’t it seem to impact us?  And if it didn’t affect us, then what did that do to those claims of racism and beliefs in the intransigence of white supremacy?

Unlike our neighbors, racism had yet to introduce the sometimes crippling doubt that seemed central to their sense of identity and their view of the country they had been brought to.  But it did affect us, just in ways that would take years to recognize.  It inspired quite different responses, some so subtle that they seemed unruffled or naive.  For example, given that whites at times seemed willing, sometimes eager to accept us in preference to native-born blacks did not initially signify racism.  It seemed its opposite.  It would become clear that this acceptance, these flamboyant gestures of welcome were given as a rebuke to African-Americans whom they continued to resent and who continued to resent them.  We were without that history and could afford to be exotic; but since we were also black we were not allowed the luxury of indifference.

In retrospect it makes more sense to see that old neighborhood as a space of competing views of America rather than the static prison-house of possibilities we now often mean by the term ghetto.  While for many of our black neighbors it was a sign of America’s failure, for our immigrant families it was merely the first stage of a promise.  Both communities did find a way of sharing the neighborhood but it was proximity without much intimacy.  Our parents insisted that we see space as wider and borderless as our sense of the world.  We shouldn’t claim the ghetto because to do so would be to accept its limitations.  And though we were the same color as our neighbors, we shouldn’t accept the suggestion of similarity.  Race in this country seemed to signify a special intimacy between African-Americans and whites and there was little room for others in this particular relationship.  We were to steer clear of it despite its voyeuristic pleasures.  This meant we essentially lived in different cities.  The streets we shared led to different destinations from our neighbors and our economies never merged.  I’ll go one further and say that we lived in different countries, shaped less by race or our shared condition but by the nature of our arrivals.

To be then told years after my arrival that my family’s great accomplishment in simply getting here was in fact the failure of others—ghetto being the sign of systemic indifference or institutional conspiracy—was bewildering.  It was tantamount to having mistaken hell for heaven, or less dramatically, discovering that you had merely moved to a bigger island.  And to learn that living there wasn’t a choice and that “choice” might in fact be one of the great myths that immigrants are particularly susceptible to was traumatic.  There was nowhere else left to go.  My family, a combination of migrant and refugee, was tired.  We’d lost too many and too many depended on us.  But I was learning that the appropriate response to what I’d thought an incalculable privilege should instead be resentment.  That was how I should carry myself, embittered, a walking sign of blame.  My initial gratitude for all things American embarrassed me.  It marked me an easy mark, worthy of whatever came my way in that long walk down Florence to Crenshaw and then up Slauson and back.  Thus another education began while walking to and from Crozier Junior High, bounded by Inglewood High School and the public library on one side, Juvenile Hall on the other and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s building across the street.

In what I’d assumed a sincere gesture of welcome, of wising up the newcomer, my new friends and neighbors made to teach me new ways of thinking.  Looking back, I know they also resented my optimism.  Remember, racism had clouded their sense of possibility.  So their generosity was also a kind of violence, against what they’d never been allowed to feel.  Their cynicism eventually began to seep into me just as my accent began to change and I began to acquire a taste for the type of violence that generated a certain type of respect.  I began walking like the boys who’d beat us up in grocery store parking lots, began dressing like them and went into the streets seeking provocation.  I still blamed myself for having been such a dupe.  It would still take some time before I began to blame America for my failures (that, I would discover, was what universities were for).  Then I would be embittered by my proximity to those who lived in a world that I had begun to see as intolerable, so much so that to endure it was proof of moral weakness.  It was evidence that my family had traveled all this way just to be victim of something far worse than poverty or racism: pity.  I was still too young to understand the power of victimization or the games of guilt and moral authority I could play with it (that, I would discover, was what graduate school was for).

Photo: Adebayo Alao, Sept. 2007

I could never report back to Nigeria or Jamaica that I lived in something that fell this far short of a dream that both those countries now shared in the wake of the faded dreams of British imperium.  You must understand that immigrants are held hostage by their own optimism.  We cannot betray the dreams of those left behind.  To those eagerly anticipating our phone calls, packages and remittances the only limits and failures possible in America are individual ones.  There is no room for racism, systemic, institutional or casual in this way of seeing.  My letters to Jamaica and Nigeria began to dry up.  They had turned into grievances and complaints, which because they came from America sounded like boasting.  I was asking for even more of what they didn’t have.  Consequently immigration, which had seemed a heroic achievement even for someone too young to make significant choices, became rendered in my mind as a kind of fall.  What had been a source of pride became shameful; and in that shame I felt myself becoming a citizen, not of the United States, but of this particular province within it, one as much marked by space as by race.

I was also ashamed of having believed what my parents said about America, especially as assimilation and manhood became intertwined.  I was no longer proud of my hopes and dreams because hopes and dreams began to take on a distinctly feminine cast.  Perhaps I could have blamed those few American television programs I’d seen in Jamaica for my illusions, and the comic books and occasional magazines left behind by tourists.  More than anything else I began to blame the novels I’d been devouring since before I’d started school.  I was a reader before my arrival in America, an obsessive one.  Now I began to suspect that that was what was essentially wrong with me.  Unlike in Jamaica where reading guaranteed respect, here it seemed a crime.  A political crime, it brought charges of racial treachery—“acting white.”  A moral crime, it was seen by many as “unnatural,” proof that one’s “blackness” and one’s masculinity were suspect.  The written word unmanned you before your first wet dream.

Being young and increasingly American, it made more sense to blame my family.  They were immigrants after all, what did they know?  It was they who continued to stress work, education, religion and responsibility—things that I was now being told didn’t matter and were in fact being used against me (though the word “oppression” had yet to enter my lexicon, the idea that one’s view of things was not only incorrect but had been actively made so had only ever been encountered in science fiction).  My path through America was beset with snares my elders couldn’t know anything about.  My friends who told me these things would know, they were American and they were black––the specific type of black that mattered in this country.  It was my family who were naïve, insisting that reading was stronger than racism and that books were key to an achievement that was beginning to seem to me so fantastical as to be unworthy of effort.  This, of course, is how self-doubt finally found its way into my mind, through the narrative of racial conspiracy and the melodrama of rebellion against it.  It displaced responsibility for my own insecurities.  It made my fears systemic, institutional, and therefore always beyond my control.  Yet innocence was no consolation.

Thank God this period was temporary, though its impact would last what I can now call a lifetime.  As is often the case, the country we now lived in strengthened the values of my family, made them fanatical actually.  In response to my dual assimilations, my mother, uncles, and aunts became vicious, downright fundamentalist about traditions that were never so inflexible as after our arrival.  Tradition, it must be said, is never as unyielding as where children are concerned.  I could never fully abandon certain habits.  Whenever I attempted to rebel, like many other immigrant kids I would be sent back to our old countries for a stringent dose of perspective and a reminder that neither black nor white Americans thought of us as kin and that our freedom here lay in that knowledge.

My family’s intransigence meant that even though the desire to read had been abandoned the daily practice was inescapable.  Reading became a chore instead of something I craved.  This would serve me well because when the expectation of pleasure was gone I began reading things I normally wouldn’t have.  Reading became a discipline, and it is that which sustains you far more than mere passion or inclination.  Eventually it became an escape from my environment, better still a lens through which to see it.  I sought endless space, less littered landscapes and peoples I had much more in common with than assumed trauma.  In books I could avoid the prejudices of black immigrants and the harshness of our traditions while simultaneously dodging the indifference of my teachers and the often-violent intolerance of my black neighbors and schoolmates.

As a compromise with my environment I learned to hide my books as well as I did my accent.  It was safer not to distinguish myself with foreignness or academic prowess.  I began to lift weights obsessively in hopes of being ignored by the street gangs and so that no one would ever take me for a reader.  I eventually took up football.  Along with the gangs it was an inevitable option for those craving respect and eager to meet violence head on.  I affected a certain swagger, learned to project indifference and inculcate doubt in others.  In other words, I began to pass not for African-American, but for what passed as African-American in the hood.  I was so successful at it that I was the first to abuse those who were new to the neighborhood and who saw in my aggression an unquestionable authenticity.

Thankfully deception can return us to ourselves.  It’s possible to avoid something by becoming it or at least appearing to do so.  Because of this relationship between racial identity and disguise, my experiences in the neighborhood didn’t lead to sympathetic alchemy.  In other words, I didn’t assimilate despite becoming indistinguishable from those around me.  No matter how I tried, the cultural lines between our neighbors and me remained as clear as they were when my family first arrived.  Inglewood or Los Angeles never became home because we remained foreigners even to those who’d become friends and lovers.  I emphasize this because some could argue that race or more accurately, racism should transmute the cultural and historical differences between African-Americans and immigrants into shared wealth, into a community.  They could argue that my neighbors and new peers laid bare the system for someone like me who was ripe for exploitation by it; that by choosing a racial side, the contradictory values of our cultures would easily subside as solidarity was forged.  Solidarity, however, is a powerful placebo, as narcotic as it can be erotic; and once you blame whites for history, it becomes necessary to blame them for whatever is left and that is too much to lose.  Despite years of academic indoctrination, I thank science fiction stories about possession, invasion or brainwashing for reminding me of this: those who reduce the world to sides wish to control your affiliations.  And where there is no choice there is coercion and where there is identity there is also conscription and fear.

What was true about my experience is that these new meanings of ghetto and race didn’t necessarily lead to me “becoming black” or to that political “coming into consciousness” so beloved of racial mystics, ideologues and peddlers of irresolvable grievance.  Because just as ghetto had divergent meanings for us as immigrants, so did black.  For example, the Jamaican side of my family had long achieved “lower-brown” status due to education and a work ethic that would terrify Protestants.  In Jamaica, “brown” was not black and the lines between the two were as guarded as the lines between black and white, perhaps even more so due to their visible similarities.  Their sense of identity had entirely different meanings, expectations and pressures that were not reducible to American racial categories, this despite being treated as black in America.  Though there was racism in their self fashioning, there was no self-hate: it was just that the maniacal upward mobility of Jamaican brown militated against an American blackness that in that neighborhood seemed to them a relentlessly downward spiral.  The Nigerian side of my family were too busy being Igbo in the wake of the Biafra war to subordinate their identities to American ones.  Racism for them was a distraction and so they cultivated heartlessness towards it and towards those who they thought defined themselves by it.  In their minds African-American grievances were often a sign of opportunities being actively denied in order to claim unearned privileges.

What these admittedly complex and arguably racist views of African-Americans made possible upon arrival, however, was a reluctance to reduce our experiences to race.  We were not at ease filtering the cosmos through it or seeing in it the primary explanation for phenomena.  Another way to guarantee myself a smack across the lips was to come home from school or from the street with any kind of racial grievance, even if it were true.  For people who’d survived genocide—one where murderers and victims were of the same race—my complaints about certain teachers or police officers or other students or store clerks or Korean grocers were intolerable.  For people who had known racism of a far more virulent and violent sort—for example in England during the 1950s or colonial Nigeria and Jamaica–to hear me use racism as a justification for my responses to this country was an insult.  And to hear racism claimed as something that was stronger than we were, was enough to guarantee a sore back on the way to school the next day.  It wasn’t that my family didn’t believe in the existence of racism or didn’t suffer its effects.  They simply feared me so believing in it that I would be either crippled or debauched by it.  In other words, they feared me becoming ghetto or as a notorious uncle once defined it, becoming too free to be any good to anybody.

So even after learning to pass so well for African-American that the boys who owned the streets knew my name; even after learning far more about racism and American history than most would care to; even after my cousins in Nigeria and Jamaica began to imitate my way of speaking so as to hasten their long distance Americanization, assimilation still remained incomplete.  The word ghetto would come to define a hesitant space between racial solidarity and cultural disparity, between a neighborhood and its choices and a planet with its demands.  As such it featured an endless back and forth amongst communities and histories, political habits and cultural options; like migrating all the time.  This drama did have its upside, though.  It had everything to do with me being one of the only people in the neighborhood to go to college.  As immigrants it was an expectation but for most of my neighbors and friends wasn’t even a thought.  Though I thought a football scholarship would have done it, it turned out to be those science fiction books after all, as well as friendships with other readers who also had to be maintained in secret for they too ran afoul of what passed for black in my hood.  UCLA was just a few miles across town.  But to them with whom I’d spent those years in “the wood,” it turned out to be further than the distance traveled to America in the first place.

The initial premise of the show, which has since spiraled out into a fantasy playground of doppelgängers and hybrids, sire-bonds, ghosts, and Mayflower-era high priestesses, recounted the dramas of one teen ingenue who’s a magnet for the supernatural. The setting is Mystic Falls, a rather suggestively titled heritage town in Virginia. When we meet poor Elena Gilbert, she is preparing to return to high school after a summer of great tragedy. Both of her parents perished in a car crash, of which she was the sole survivor. But a studly, new kid at school, with impeccably coifed hair, presents himself as just the distraction that dear Elena requires. Little does she know that this is one of two vampire brethren that she will be poise betwixt for who-knows-how-many seasons to come, and hopefully just as many steamy promotional photo shoots. Her high school paramour is the 535-years-young Stefan, our show’s eternal-teen vegan vampire, who controls his urges in a very, well, Edward Cullen-esque capacity. When his evil older brother, the id-fueled Damon shows up, then the real fun begins. At first it’s all mysterious vapor clouds and crows, then Damon arrives fitting in some brutal and fun killing sprees, before normalizing into a potential love interest for Elena as the program ebbs into more delirious soap fodder. Launching twists and turns for our smitten kittens, Vampire Diaries sports many a cliffhanger that kept me up nights, far later than I should have, taking up Netflix on its instant-suggestion, to play the following episode, rather than be left guessing.

Oh, I was hooked. Season One of the show was especially darling, and the best, in my humble opinion, since humble, too, was the budget, which necessitated that scant sets provide the setting for Mystic Falls’ denizens. Spinning the town like some delicious 50s B-movie, just everyone seemed to naturally congregate to the local roadhouse (the Mystic Grill, of course). Which made it adorably quaint, in a way that worked for it. It made every conflict feel like a storm in a teacup. Mimicking the histrionics of teen life, this modesty of scale and almost school play-range of cast and set caused every plight to seem at once overblown, of mortal consequence and still restrained or local. It wasn’t necessarily in the show’s best interest to get all epic, which it did, and all-too-briskly, during a storyline in Season Two which introduced the Originals, a family of vamps that started it all. Since then, the program has sped along through three seasons, launching spectacular narratives that thrill. But oh, when one of those actors is forced to talk through the nonsense! In the few moments where the soapy, spectral proceedings are explained in dialogue, I get a glimpse of just what my obsession must look like from the outside. Trying with a straight face to defend the nature of a sire-bond or the logics of a doppelgänger curse yields no poetics. But fortunately, the show just guilelessly chugs along, never stopping too long to think about its swell swells.

Vampire Diaries is perhaps best understood as evolving from its original format, which were Young Adult trade paperbacks intended for avid (and ADD) teen consumption. First published in 1991, then relaunched in 2007, after Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series proved publishing gold, the series penned by L. J. Smith, who, I guess publicly brought on a ghostwriter to relaunch the franchise, counts 10 books in its cycle. The success of Twilight and the CW network’s bloodlust for some similar, spooky syndicate defines the show, which was developed from the books by Scream and Dawson’s Creek-helmer, Kevin Williamson. A Twilight knock-off of the most immaculately generic pedigree, Vampire Diaries was initially explained to me as Dawson’s Creek with fangs and somehow, in the glorious and glossy nature of teen-marketed television, this is perhaps its greatest accomplishment. The show is a rubric for approximation, tacking tidbits from other successful and popular programs together, shamelessly, and blending them into a harrowing yet uncomplicated smoothie (and I’m not even going to go into the Civil War-era flashback sequences). Which could sound like an insult, if it weren’t so totally difficult to get the balance right, as far as pop entertainment is concerned. It explains the craze that’s built up around the show––the crossover appeal that it holds. I kept it close, as a guilty pleasure, for a while, but soon found out the reach of its appeal. Once a close friend and esteemed gallery director sung its praises, I threw caution to the wind and told strangers on the street about my new favorite show, rejoicing in the unfettered joy of the facsimile.

Like Dynasty before it (which was a Dallas knock off gone gold), Vampire Diaries emerges with a startlingly female gaze, objectifying the male physique, exemplified by both of Elena’s blood-sucking suitors, who are absurdly hot in the manner that befits the teen-marketed CW. Paul Wesley (Stefan Salvatore), a pouty television actor, who arrives to us courtesy of The Guiding Light (RIP), and the smoldering Ian Somerhalder (Damon Salvatore) who you’ll remember as a baddie from Lost, but I cling to more distant memories of the gay brooder in the forgettable Brett Easton Ellis adaptation, The Rules of Attraction. Here they’re both tarted up for mainstream consumption, wearing entirely too much makeup and lusty expressions to undie for. That wan patina has kept them from aging these three years, and, judging by the ratings, they’re not going anywhere for a while. Which makes the humans hilarious as they endlessly draw out high school story arcs. Surprisingly little has changed, for a show about death and the life beyond. Season Three comes to a close this Thursday and it seems as though we might lose a regular or two. But like most soaps of its now staple stature, Vampire Diaries never kills off anyone for very long. With witches, werewolves, ghosts, and vamps abound in the murky woods of Mystic Falls, it’s so much simpler––not to mention addictively enjoyable––to bring them back for another go, to revive the well-tread territory one more time, just like this delicious taste of familiar fruit.

“I knew inside the dream that you were going to stab me in the chest ten years later, but for right then you were my good friend, and we were holding hands and taking pictures, and there was a mold growing on the moon.”

or

“The shortbread smelled like babies, but I couldn’t breathe through my nose because there was so much hair up my nostrils, and yet the smell got in and I could feel it in my belly. It was making me pregnant with you.”

or

“Before I’d died before, I’d been a dog, and inside me there was a window to the bedroom where your parents made me, but I couldn’t fit my arm quite down my throat.”

Clearly the pull here is of an interior logic, one that lingers only briefly even in the unconscious brain where it was born––as, often, if we do not write down or think incessantly upon the idea, these areas and our performances there inside them slip away, become impossible to drum up, no matter how clear they’d seemed even in waking. Sometimes just a feeling or a terror bulb is left behind. Sometimes a blank beyond the blanking, made of knowing without knowing what you will never know again. Other times those images might sear themselves so hard on the brain it is impossible to shake them, and nothing thereafter quite seems where it was. There might be whole batteries of back language in a second of those hallways. A whole kind of leering might derive from one way of being looked at by someone in some small room in a building you know you’ve been in but can’t remember where. A whole life might be contained inside one head nod, one second walking in a night.

The populations of these “dream districts often also function in meta-juxtaposed conditions, adding layers of experience to a person or a place by what you experience of it in your mind:

(1) People you know inside your every day: the ones you live or work with, love or hate, see constantly and might even sleep beside––who herein operate among a way you’ve never known out of them, uniquely terrified, or saying words you’d never heard out from them, but herein press so hard into your skin you can hardly see.

(2) People you used to know a long time ago but haven’t seen in forever and are suddenly there inside your mind, or ones you might not know at all really but have spent short time with somewhere, or caught looking one way on the street––revealing themselves as wedged or buried deep within you, layers in layers you’d folded or forgot, clammed so well in there they have been not blinking, but still singing thought inside your thought.

(3) People you have never seen outside your sleeping, and yet who seem to have existed to you for all time, or who are so new in their light they seem someone you could live with, live inside of, love, ornately know––these are those who might only exist again forever in those few minutes of the sleeping, in that light, which make their closing out or on that much more horrendous, like extermination, resulting in a haunting in you, fat with dead.

You might hear music made of hours, walk through buildings that branch of ones you thought you knew. Time might be a liquid worn inside our bodies, years passed in hours on the blip. Light might speak in languages that making clothing on your skin. Whatever form of other the sleep state manifests, it is often of a language and a breadth available nowhere but in that brain, a medicine of nothing, self-created––if formed of those waking parts rendered in tracing. The sleeping’s skewed up reconstruction lends our waking light another light of several kinds, both in transition and in what is held, what is coming and has been.

The dream cycle is therefore important as a kind of wiping of the brain’s lens, the integration of language and image collected through the waking periods––something indefinably valuable in the garble-hash of dream immersion and unconscious negotiation of where you have and have not been. In many ways it seems that dream speech and making is just as important, if not more so, a part of conscious understanding, as if those worlds contained only in-brain are just as real and palpable a part of life architecture as any waking. Finding one ejected and cut off, then, can feel like rooms of your home have been rendered underwater, new locks on old doors.

Put to paper, in the notation of actual dreaming, the hyper-senses recorded among increasing waking seem bizarre, sometimes profane. Here, bits of doubled nodules of sound and sense as found in Joseph Cornell’s supposed 30,000 pages of journaling, snippets of the nowhere sent to page

the astonishing “ice” image

talking to Uncle Frank K. over phone thinking description of knot of large tree (seemingly a flower too narcissus?) would cheer him up––then told over phone he’d just passed on

a fantastic object a wicker form swan? inside a cage mounted high; cage comprised of thick wicker pcs. widely spaced––dark marble base or the like, tremend. heavy––immensely appealing but did not want it for self

We all can understand these modes in their diffusion, if not by waking translation of the moving art, like cinema, then in the experiential residue we’ve been supplied with in our own exploration––and yet, we can’t quite name the name of these hours, ours or anybody’s without eventually ending up silented or digressing, embarrassed, covered on––as Cornell himself saw no difference between waking and dreaming––as these are rooms like wombs where the time is our time and translatable in us as only we can laugh. I can listen all day to you tell me the light of that magic but will only ever understand it as in mine. And yet this is our air.

Less direct but just as apt comes the hyper-senses and other-modes of a sort of stolen speaking––stolen, I mean, from those nested worlds, their logics. Other, waking speakings might gain the most propulsion off the same gas as those hid under sleeping, but translated through another conscious pen––finding the tunnels and enmeshings where those sunk worlds hit the ice of light any one of us around can see ever, if at angles. Here, a bit from Heather Christle’s poem, ‘The Fledgling Crocus’: “It is all there. In the short books / of the future. What is here, in this / room, is a small lamp and a vase / that needs changing. Is cubic / space interfered with by hi, / my human form. And there are / other rooms with other forms, / there is a future not prone / to contain me.”

Here time is not time. Light is not. The question of “cubic space” quantifiable not by something with a name or number, but a body fit full of further bodies, surrounded inside and out. Sleeping while not sleeping. Blue air. America, Not America. If there is anywhere beyond the cranium these disappearing walls can remain held, while maintaining those hyper-senses estranged so real inside of sleep, it is in infernal languages and attuned speaking. Black books fatter than they look. Not even photographs, or music, of the fusion of the two, in film, seem capable of making the meta-senses replicate. This seems because in concrete speaking media, there is a definition gazed––the walls here have a color, a hallway, they will replay and replay. And yet, inside of language, there is an other: the uncontrollable control. Even the code disrupts the code, its very fulfillment upon entering the mind ill-defined, a representation to be affixed like a blank drug upon the head. The word into the eyes into the body is a reflection of reflection, the signifier’s signifier’s signifier, in some ways, with the right spells and a good mind, reopening those unworlds.

Joyelle McSweeney’s novel Flet is stuffed end to end with trembling example of the transduction of new senses. In the midst of scenery where sound is meat and eyes see through their lids, the titular narrator continues strobing forth in and around herself in the midst of cities evacuated for “Emergency,” attempting to locate among file transmissions and weird architecture some kind of attitude of palpability or sense. Via McSweeney’s predatory language that mixes the visceral with the defunct, the reader becomes literally thrown along inside replicating hallways and fluorescent air shafts, trafficking in terrain stolen deep from in some other sleep:

Each fall made a channel. Each time split. Each catastrophe acquiesced to its event, welcomed her into its principles. What lapse had allowed them to conduct her hence. Calm at the center like all storms and narrow enough for one traveler. Through primary-hued sweating structures, faces and arms of little children poking from slides and bars. Her spread hands ripped with thorns and closed on water, a stinging fragrance stopped her mouth and her pasted-over eyes, and when she opened her mouth to scream she was converted to a metallic fish that could breathe through a laking mask.

By giving buildings human properties, weather the texture of organs, smells fat as potatoes (and yet without name), metamorphoses invoked by involuntary response, Flet invents a whole horrific catalog of nightmare movement, as stung among itself as in its general insistence of abstract specificity in imbibing. They recall the sound-image and number-color of synesthesia, wherein the body, by new default, bears sensory linkings in its pathways, such as numbers occupying space (the number 1990, for instance, somehow seeming nearer to the body than 1965, or a stretch of time occupying 3D space) and the relation of emotion (or even orgasm, pain) to a specific color, sound, or smell. Often those experiencing these kinds of default relations do not realize them as unusual until suddenly brought into the light of different mounts; others keep them private in the finding, hidden in themselves––each way a method of staying rapt within the body, set off, in the way one opens new land, in the texture, of the right-there-nowhere of the dream. Severe conditions of synesthesia have been found to cause mental disorder in the form of sociopathic behaviors, also much like the state caused in advanced cases of the lack of or burps in sleep, as well as sometimes in hypnosis.

Some of this fever-riding writing seems rooted at least in the spirit of the tongue inventions in James Joyce’s professed dream manual 68 years earlier, the terrific monster of Finnegans Wake. Famously beginning and ending in the middle of the same sentence, Joyce’s seventeen-year composition operates as perhaps the most acutely rendered guidebook for the nowhere of the night, or as Donald Barthelme described it, “the book remaining always there, like the landscape surrounding the reader’s home or the buildings bounding the reader’s apartment. The book remains unproblematic, unexhausted.” A sleepless architecture, combed and uncombing, eating and eternally uneaten. Many casual references to Wake in online forums in association with insomnia refer to the book as an antidote to the phenomenon, referring if not to the hypnotizing onset of the dream language, then simply the tendency for most readers to be put to sleep by its ramrod syllables in collision, speaking from a multi-meter and melodious kind of incursion, like sleep itself on paper. One can almost hear the rhythmic breathing of critics and grad students in their beds for years and ever with the book fat and folded soft against their chests. In certain ways surely the book could be seen as improbable object, a rune, a maze laid in language to direct the reader away from any center and toward the sort of nowhere by physical requirement removed from written text.

More directly, among the whole 628 page monolith there are only two direct references to the term insomnia, one a kind of incantation or a spell: “He points the deathbone and the quick are still. Insomnia, somnia somniorum. Awmawm” (120) and the other an instruction for the navigation of the text itself: “look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded, very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia: all those red raddled obeli cayennepeppercast over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments: that (probably local or personal) variant maggers for the more generally accepted majesty which is but a trifle and yet may quietly amuse.”

These are literal invocations among the stream of otherwise entirely sleep ripped goings, on and on. Any sentence of Wake could in a sense by seen as part of a catalog of every hour sub-aware, line by line in reeling and yet in great attendance to the letter and the whole. A line at random, picked with eyes closed: That’s how our oxyggent has gotten ahold of half their world.

Half the world, yes. Half-embedded, half sunk in some unburst body ruined for deep. But how long, trapped in a body, can this kind of physical nowhere be held off? Despite whatever totems replicate the district, there is a wanting in the body for its true entry, the dissolve. The residue piles up. Terror. Magic hours. Stuffing in and stuffing in. You begin to feel thicker and thinner at the same time. Fat in new places, with a strange flesh. A gleam in the forehead or the shins. Blood in your blood from other bodies. Overflowing. When did this room shrink this small?

–––––
1st image a box construction by Joseph Cornell

Broken Piano for President

I received a package from Patrick Wensink last week. It arrived to my office via media mail, padded and wrapped heavily in packaging tape. Inside the envelope was a copy of his new novel, Broken Piano for President, a personal note from Patrick written with what appeared to be magic marker in a child-like cursive script (“child-like” in this case referring to its excellent adherence to the fundamentals), and a cassette tape. It was the cassette tape that obviously intrigued me most—since I was already three-quarters of the way through the digital version of his book (by the way, I’ve never read an ebook before and found reading a book in its PDF form not very much fun). What was even more interesting was that Patrick knew before sending me the tape, which turned out to be an audio book on side A—apparently read by Wensink himself—and 8 tracks by a band called Total Neutral on side B, that I still had a cassette deck. There it is, the JVC TD-W205 dual cassette deck given to me by an old roommate. I also noticed while writing this that I haven’t owned a CD player in almost eight years. I put the tape in and hit play.

The tape starts out tranquil and quiet, dare I say, bucolic, like the theme song to Fishing With John (with John Lurie), before meandering off in dark, brooding vibraphone patterns with occasional guest appearances by Brian Chippendale, the frenetic drummer from Lightning Bolt, and some female vocals drifting in and out of the atmosphere. The novel, on the other hand, starts out with a hangover, a screwdriver, and a bloody, matted mess of hair. Our protagonist, one Deshler Dean, we find, is used to mornings such as these. In fact, Wensink treats us, on occasion, to short lists such as these: “Deshler Dean’s Hangover Hall of Fame” which includes waking up in a pile of ingredients at a Dunkin Donuts and regaining sentience in the middle of a presentation in a marketing class. Dean is also the singer in an experimental art-core noise band backed by his roommate who moonlights as an assassin and a meth-head on drums. (Not unsurprisingly, the guest appearance of Chippendale on the Total Neutral accompaniment might have been an influence to the fictional drummer, known as Juan Pandemic, though not as the bone-thin character with picked-over skin who lives in a shack with a bunch of feral cats.) Unwittingly, or in Dean’s case, unknowingly, each of the these three friends are involved and intertwined in a much bigger plot—a seemingly never-ending battle of deep-fried deliciousness, skyrocketing calories, heart attacks, and chronic and cosmic one-upsmanship known as the Burger Wars.

The Burger Wars are waged between arch-enemies Winters Old-Tyme Burgers and their next door neighbor, Bust-A-Gut Burger, a revolving door of intermingling characters, and an endless supply of burger products ranging from the Fried Monte Cristo, the Winters’ Reuben Sandwich Burger, the Teriyaki Jerky Burger, the Bonzo Breakfast Burger (“three alternating layers of beef, cheese, fried egg and country sausage stacked Dagwood-style between two waffles.”), the flu Burger, and the revolutionary Space Burger, which apparently tastes like a crunchy, crispy, freeze-dried burger version of space ice cream. Lives will be lost in this Cold War nuclear stockpiling of sorts, and many condiments will be spilled. Our hero in all of this is, of course, Deshler Dean, only the space he occupies is that of an Alcoholic Werewolf: the many contributions he makes to the Burger Wars are lost to him in a state of blackout drunken-ness. “Friends call Dean the Cliff Drinker. Meaning when our hero goes out and has more than two, he falls off a boozy edge and forgets everything.” When he’s in this state of Cliff Drinking, Dean is the innovator of many of these products. He’s a double agent and a freelancer, playing both Winters Old-Tyme Burgers and Bust-A-Gut against each other in a drunken world of espionage and sabotage, none of which he remembers in the morning. From there, it unravels for him.

Dean sings for a band called Lothario Speedwagon. He cites in Chapter 16 his four most influential singers, each with their own caveat: Iggy Pop, David Yow, Nick Cave, and Gibby Haynes, whom Dean frequently conjures in his decision-making process. It’s Wensink’s inclusion of the number three, Nick “But only when he was in the Birthday Party” Cave because Wensink’s work is often referred to as absurdist humor. It’s striking to me because Broken Piano often reminds me in ways of Cave’s last novel, The Death of Bunny Munroe, in which our hero is a cocksman of the highest order who begins to lose his touch in the trade. When he’s unable to control that aspect of his life, and the more he tries, he is haunted by living nightmares, women he’s seduced run from him screaming, and he grows desperate. In a similar way, Wensink’s hero’s life is governed by forces he cannot fully explain or control—in this case Dean’s alter-drunken ego creates deals and expectations beyond what his sober self can possess. Everyone around him sees Dean as one in the same, except for Dean himself. As he struggles to put together the pieces of his shattered memories, bullshitting his way through business lunches while on break from his job as a valet, he’s also confronted with the responsibilities of a job he’s apparently really good at, but can’t reason how or why, and creating art that most everyone agrees is pretty terrible, except for some inexplicable reason, punk zinesters in Japan. Then again, the Japanese are into really weird shit. The more Dean attempts control, like staying sober for instance, the more everything crashes around him. His multiple bosses demand more innovation. His bandmates abandon him. His relationships go in the shitter, only to rebound with more drunken ideas, but he’s never quite sure why.

Wensink’s second novel has earned praises of being “Pynchon-esque” (I know I read that somewhere… oh yeah it’s on the cover), and I must say it’s true in creating a landscape of such ludicrous proportions. I think the best praise I can give it, aside from conceding its similarities to Cave and some of Pynchon’s works, is that twice during reading Broken Piano did I have to get up and urgently get a burger down the street.

Eugene Feichtner
President, ITT Technical Institute
13000 N. Meridian Street
Carmel, IN 46032-1404

Dear President Feichtner,

With the recent passing of author Harry Crews, I discovered that the University of Georgia library purchased his collected papers in 2006. Soon, I learned that many writers’ manuscripts, letters and doodles are frequently bought by colleges for scholarly research. For example, the University of Texas’ library owns every scrap of Don Delillo’s filing cabinets. This led to ask the obvious question: “Why not me?”

I am writing to offer ITT Technical Institute’s library (You guys have a library, right?) exclusive rights to obtaining the Patrick Wensink Papers.

I’m prepared to clear out my office and deliver ITT my entire personal output for an undisclosed sum (Papers seem to always sell for undisclosed sums. Let’s shoot for that). This includes numerous manuscripts of all three of my books, a hard drive containing multiple electronic drafts of every novel, short story and essay I’ve ever penned. All of my notebooks, filled with regrettable book title ideas, like “Big Shadow Shits Little Shadow,” and late-night epiphanies such as “Why aren’t there more doo-wop groups in literature?” This deal also entitles ITT Tech to the entirety of my email correspondences (George Saunders once politely declined to blurb my book!) and all 544 Tweets I have thus far written.

Ah, but that’s not all!

ITT students can learn about persistence from my numerous failures. Included in the Patrick Wensink Papers will be the hundreds of rejections my latest novel, Broken Piano for President (Lazy Fascist Press) received, including one Viking Press editor who called it “Nauseating.” As a special treat, I still have a few hate mails I got as a rock critic in Dayton, OH, stemming from a 2002 article about how the new Trail of Dead album sucked.

Need more? Okay. I see Harry Crews’ papers also consist of royalty statements. Consider it done! (Including that dismal statement from June 2010 when I banked $3.63.)

Sounds pretty tempting, right? But you’re thinking: Why ITT Tech?

True, I never attended your fine institute of higher learning. But Crews didn’t go to Georgia, and I’m pretty sure Don Delillo has never set foot outside the New York metropolitan area, so I think we’re okay on that front. My papers will be a great learning tool for ITT academics. Students could write theses about me! I could come and speak to stenography classes on the importance of typing!

President Feichtner, you’re probably also thinking: Yeah, but those guys were all famous authors. You’re no Don Delillo, Mr. Wensink.

Right again. But you’re not exactly Harvard.

Or even Middle Tennessee State, for that matter.

That’s why we’re perfect for each other! ITT is America’s third most-popular degree mill and I’m America’s 103rd most-popular humorist (right behind Dane Cook.).

You’re looking at the ITT Tech of humor writers.

Plus, I might still get famous. It could happen. My chances of publishing a Pulitzer-winning novel might be slim, but my likelihood of gaining notoriety by impregnating Snooki or falling down a well, Baby Jessica-style, are astronomically high (I drink a lot). When that happens, owning The Wensink Archive will be a terrific boon for ITT Tech.

And, because of this kinship, the Patrick Wensink Papers are offered at a bargain rate. Crews, Delillo, and the like sold their papers when they were well-respected pillars of literature, probably for hundreds of thousands of dollars (T.C. Boyle’s papers just sold for a whopping $425,000). My literary estate can be yours for an undisclosed sum that hovers right around the price of a club sandwich and a Dr. Pepper.

Please keep in mind that I could have taken this juicy, once-in-a-lifetime educational offer to those jokers at DeVry or the University of Phoenix. But I chose ITT Tech, Mr. Feichtner. I am soliciting you and your institute because of your relentless dedication to the student body and the paralegal arts.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts on ITT Technical Institute acquiring the Patrick Wensink Papers. I am willing to meet at any of your 140 campuses. Frankly, the sooner the better. My wife is pretty pissed about how messy my office has become. So, ITT would, obviously, be doing me a solid.

Best,
Patrick Wensink
America’s 103rd Most-Popular Humorist

Way back in August, seemingly 100 years ago, Mancini had glowing praise for United, and a pithy prediction for the coming season: “[United] are on the top. They’re a strong team, they won the last Premier League… and at the moment they are over us. We are very close but United have maybe five yards more than us.” To be fair, Mancini said this to a Guardian reporter in the context of the comparative squad size, and how he felt that City needed a few more players to seriously contend. But, still. C’mon. Can’t you have a bit more faith in your team?

Growing up watching North American sports, I have never quite gotten used to this all-too-common tendency toward capitulation by Euro soccer coaches. It’s drilled into us here in the New World: a team is never out of a title race until the mathematics dictate. How many epic baseball collapses have there been in the last half dozen years? Back-to-back Met swoons in the late aughts, Atlanta and Boston last year, both knocked from playoff contention on the last night of the season, within minutes of one another. In the NFL, the New York Giants seemingly either win the Super Bowl, or lose every game in December to miss the playoffs. Shouldn’t these examples give succor to the chasers, to the second-place, second-fiddle teams everywhere in every sport?

Imagine Joe Girardi and the Yankees heading to Boston in September for a four-game series with the Sox, two games behind, say, and imagine Girardi saying something to the effect that the Sox are a better team, and that he doesn’t think that the Yankees will catch them this year. Wouldn’t. Happen. Ever. And yet, in the wake of City pulling within three points of United after last week’s matches, here’s the headline from another article in the Guardian: “United Will Probably Still Win Title, Roberto Mancini Says.” I could expand on this, but the headline really says it all.

If you’ve joined us in medias res, Monday’s clash between Red and Blue Manchester is the 36th game—third to last—in the 38-game English Premier League season. Right from the starting gate back in mid-August, the two Manchesters have duked it out from the one-two spots atop the EPL table. In the third week of the season, a scheduling coincidence had each Manchester team playing a North London side. The Manchesters ran rough shod over the not-too-shabby Londoners, with City crushing Tottenham Hotspur 5-1 and United schooling Arsenal 8-2. The sporting editorials followed fast, loud and thick, about how the center of the soccer world—at least the British soccer world—had emphatically shifted from London to Manchester.

City and United traded off first and second place a few times until the 8th game of the season, when City took over at the top. City held that lead for the next twenty games, until a late-season dip in form saw United pass them again. A five-game span during March and early April was City’s undoing, with the Blues taking only five points from a possible 15, while their Red brethern took all 15. What was worse, United not only vaulted over City to retake the lead, but they added 12 tallies to their goal differential—the deciding tie-breaker should two teams end the season in the same place in the table—while City went a minus-1 in the same period.

So, the only way Monday’s 162nd Manchester Derby could be any more exciting and meaningful, would be if it was the last game of the season, instead of the third-to-last. Still, it’s mostly agreed that whoever wins Monday will win the league, what with only two games left after that. And still, Mancini dismisses the importance of the game, in maddening understatement, saying blandly that he is happy where they are, and that the team have already bested last year by ten points, and that what’s important is that they finish the season well. Granted, reading quotes from a coach on the internet, nuance and purpose get lost. For all I know, Mancini is simply the world’s biggest prankster, and purposely says these vanilla things to get a rise out of journalists; it’s been suggested that he’s really running some sort of reverse-psychology con game, to put the pressure on United.

And, yet, I don’t believe those explanations, simply because of the season-long frequency of Mancini’s undervaluing his team and their accomplishments. As both a neutral observer of this strange surrender-monkey mentality, and as a casual fan of Manchester City, I find it perplexing and negative. Perhaps I am merely displaying the cloying optimism the rest of the world seems to find so endearing and/or annoying in Americans. Though Barbara Ehrenreich (and Christopher Hitchens, god rest his atheist soul) might disagree, a healthy dose of sunny optimism works well with sports.

At least there is a voice of sanity and realism here, in United’s coach Sir Alex Ferguson. After United’s draw with Everton last week—coupled with City’s win—put City back within a win of the top, Sir Alex admits that the turn of events had “given City the initiative” and that it was “game on” again for the title race. If only his Italian counterpart would publicly state the same. Who knows what these mind games are doing to his players.

Realism and optimism can co-exist within a sporting mentality, be you a coach, fan or player. As such, you can look at a seemingly dire situation and understand the challenge perfectly well, yet still think your team has a shot at winning. Like Brad Richards, of the New York Rangers, who after his team lost Game 5 to fall into a 3-2 hole in their NHL playoff series with the Ottawa Senators, simply pointed out that to win a seven-game series, you have to win four games, and neither team had done that yet. (The Rangers won the next two, taking the series in seven games). I laugh to think what these poor soccer coaches would have to endure if soccer played anything close to a seven-game series. If they lost the first game, some of them would undoubtedly throw in the towel.

This is why I’m not a journalist: I’d have found it impossible to be sitting in a tunnel 45 feet deep, under a saltwater channel, imagining five massive strata of sedimentary rock behind the concrete walls, and sacrifice unhinged speculation to cool irony. In that situation, inexpertly wired as I am, I’d be thinking of how in Miami transmodular shipping––or containerization––has literally left the surface of the city. It has brought us to where we find it commonplace to dig subsea floor connectors and raise extra highway lanes in the name of efficiency and convenience. Which is just another way of saying that we’ve hit some kind of threshold beyond which we have no qualms about altering the urban landscape in unprecedented ways in order to respond to the demands of transnational capital, to have its flows intensify as they cut through our city at the cost of everything else.

When we begin to think of it in these terms the supposedly super savvy language of journalistic irony––of the journalist as unimpressed skeptic––seems to me to falter. What this language begins to reveal in its blasé mode is that it recoils from the magnitude of the things it faces. It settles into its unbendable demands for empirical observation, for facts, for some kind of relationship with common sense. Unfortunately, it is precisely common sense and the possibility of “capturing” what is happening through empirical observation that we have left behind. The news here is not in how taxpayer money is being misspent or some such thing––an exposé assembled by unearthing a few documents, turning out a whistle blower, and connecting the dots. The news here is of an altogether different kind. It’s in how self-guided transnational forces are splitting the city: on one side, we continue to drive to work, go to restaurants, ride our bikes, read the paper; on the other, the movement of resources has been optimized as a way to capture some of that investment capital that floats around unanchored to any dusty and now laughable old configurations like the nation-state. That is, a whole new lattice of axes is being grafted to the city for the sole purpose of moving resources faster in order to generate more profit, to seem competitive and desirable in a global race for the lowest cost. And this is happening in a city whose latest large-scale urban project is Miami 21––a re-zoning plan, developed by the New Urbanists, whose goal is to turn the city into a quaint little town.

This foreign lattice of axes becomes easier to discern if we zoom out from the port and look out over other parts of the city. Drive east from the Turnpike on Northwest 25th Street (12 miles east of the water) and eventually the street will split in two––regular car lanes on the right and a ramp exclusively for trucks on the left. It’s as if these trucks were being lifted onto a plane that has been “de-laminated” from the surface of the city. Its sole goal is the unimpeded movement of cargo. We see here again, as in the port tunnel, the city divided into two planes. They may be connected at certain points, but their use couldn’t be more incompatible. On one, as I was saying above, we live. It’s synchronized to our schedules. Rush hour, Heat games, school speed zones, etc. On the other, nothing but the movement of goods, which means an extension of global transmodal circulation lines. It has no schedule, no stoplights, no shifts. It is open round-the-clock; it participates in the effort to turn the entire surface of the planet into a synchronized, always-open-for-business space. Eventually, one level of the city will swallow the other through the institution of privatized infrastructures, the recalibrating of the city’s financial sector, and investments in the ascendancy of politicians with the “proper” interests and vision.

Irony in the face of this amazing reconfiguration of the city––which, by the way, may be leaving the idea of the city itself behind––seems the work of myopia or terror at the monstrous magnitude of what is at stake. That is, the work of the journalist crafted for a different kind of city or the erection of psychic barrier walls to fend off the unassimilable shock of a planet reorganizing itself, like some soft cephalopod, to respond to the demands of an economic system allergic to equilibria and loss––a system whose imaginary is based on eternal growth. Instead of hardboiled fact gathering, this calls for rampant speculation. And this speculative opening seems to demand a language that functions on a different register than that of the respectable reporter’s. I suppose for some this means a serious language of projective analysis and for others one of fiery political rhetoric. For me, claiming the benefits of the unregulated non-professional and not averse to going way lower than Jules Verne on the Philistine’s literary totem pole, it’d be something closer to the language of H. P. Lovecraft––a discourse of the monstrous, in all its pulp glory, sustained by a bedrock of rigorous materialism. I’d begin by speaking of the Anthropocene and the Chthonic. The former, among geologists and other scholars, is the name that is increasingly being accepted for our Age––an age in which humans unleashed their Earth-shaping powers and altered the planet irrevocably. A period which ends––in a politicized conclusion synthesized out of what the scientists have said, but who knows if endorsed by any of them––with the subsuming of these Earth-shaping powers by the drive to grow and accumulate capital at a global scale, increasingly moving toward an automated production and trade that is slowly and ironically displacing the bio-mass that powered the transformations that characterize the Age in the first place.

And then, there is the Chthonic––a distribution of power that reminds us, puny humans, of our unimpressive and transient slot in the universal scheme of things. The Chthonic is something like an altered and assailed Earth given agency and allowed to unleash its own powers of retaliation. It seems to me this sets the stage for an epic battle between two massive forces: the drive toward eternal capital accumulation, unleashed through a system of containerization (and other things, like disembodied financial markets) that has re-carved the planet into a series of networks and interfaces in a measly 50 years, and the resistance of the Chthonic through things like increasingly unpredictable weather systems, surprise volcanic eruptions that paralyze entire continents, and melting polar caps that will soon put a number of port cities under water.

Recasting the tunnel project––and the grafting to the city of a lattice of axes employed exclusively to move resources and goods––into a fantastic scenario of engaged global forces endowed with non-human agency may offend the no nonsense empiricism of reporters––not to mention that it would certainly elicit a searing dagger of a stare from any of their editors––but it brings us closer to shedding light on what is at stake in this city: a wager to completely reconfigure it into an important node in a global transportation network. It’s a quiet but epic struggle for identity––or, better yet, for that amorphous, unstable, slippery Thing that lurks just beneath a city’s identity markers. It’s a struggle that has happened elsewhere––even if in ways that responded to different historical circumstances. In Newark in the late 1960s, for instance. Global containerization was at the heart of it in that case, as it is in this one. But what is unique in our case is that the front-line forces on the ground have changed. Resistance these days, if it comes at all, will no longer come from labor. It will come, instead, from a strange collection of interested parties, which will include environmentalists and civic groups as much as the tourist and culture industries. A weak first line of defense by any measure. But of course there will be the obstacles that the landscape itself generates, the Chthonic’s black ops––endangered coral species, raised sea levels, Harriet-busting limestone, high-octane hurricanes eager to topple the alien arachnoid cranes that tattoo themselves on the horizon every morning, and the ferocious storm surge that follows in their wake determine to burst the massive floodgates that are supposed to seal the Port of Miami tunnel when the weather threatens inclemency.