Monthly Archives: November 2009

Zombie

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I can’t seem to get away from them either.

The Daily Beast recently unpacked what appears to be a trending topic in our cultural lexicon.

So what is it about zombies? Arguably, they are the perfect interchangeable metaphor for everything from Nazis, to consumerism, to the loss of individuality, to the collapse of civilization, to the impending doom of swine flu, and most recently representing mindless bankers, stumbling around and feeding on whatever fetid bad debt they can, however unsavory it later turns out to be.

Unlike other more glamorous monsters that always come across as a little too cool and a little too chiselled, the zombie is the reassuringly accessible underdog—often vulnerable, powerless and alone, but also blissfully unaware. Theirs is a condition that is far closer to that of the human being than we would like to admit, and it is perhaps for this reason that zombies will always have resonance in times of social and economic upheaval: We start losing our jobs and homes, and before long we’re all completely lost, left to shamble around mindlessly until someone takes pity on us and shoots us in the head.

So this isn’t just coincidence. Insolvent banks are commonly known as zombie banks. And with good reason; practically every Friday, a new bank failure failures. One of them was a beast. I’ve come to expect announcements of bank failures around 4:30 PM -7:00 PM every Friday with a bit of disaffection. I don’t know if that’s good or not. But with the threat of something so familiar in ‘normal’ life as a un-dead flesh eating beast, there isn’t any room for nostalgia. Continue reading →

something else i’m working on…

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A friend mentioned to me that I should post some of my fiction work. I’ve been resistant in doing that. I’m still working on pieces, and like any other artists, I like to keep my ‘brainchildren’ close. After some thought, I’ve decided to post an excerpt from a short story I am working now.
________
METAFICTION

My grandmother calls me to pitch a story idea.

You know you’re a hard person to get in touch with, she says.
I lost my cellphone, I say.
Oh. I didn’t have your number.
It didn’t change.
Well, I was hoping you can help me with something, she continues. She sounds anxious and playful. I want to write a story based on my big brother. I want it to be a Rod Serling kind of story you know. I have a title for it already.

Wow, I say. Sounds like you’ve down most of the work already.

No, not at all, she says. But I do know that you’re better with words. You can make them do what I can’t. I write little stuff here and there. I wouldn’t be able to do it the way you do it.

I give in. So what’s the story? I brace myself.

There’s this man who causes people to get sick. And then they die. But he has to be really diabolical. He destroys everyone he loves.

Huh, I say. I don’t know what else to.

What do you think?

I’m thinking that this is a seriously dark and twisty turn for my grandmother. I wonder if she’s told her children about this idea of hers. In my head, I picture an episode of the Twilight Zone, in grainy black and white. The episode where the boy who was narcissistic and selfish wishes everyone away and ultimately ends up alone.  I tell her that I think the story’s interesting. I tell her that I’ve had trouble writing about all that’s happened too. I ask her does the character have any moment of redemption at the end of the story. She says no. I ask her the title of her phantasmagoric tale.

Kill ‘em With Kindness. You get it?

It beats me over on the head.

*****

I should explain.

My grandmother’s older brother is a well-known megalomaniac. I think everyone’s family has one. Maybe. My great uncle is a dick. The older I get, the more the old folks reveal how much of a dick he actually is. His crimes are numerous, however, he’s oblivious to all of them.

I’ll name a few:

  • For their 50th wedding anniversary, he gave his wife a box of popsicles.
  • They had separate phones with separate phone numbers that rested on the coffee table side by side. He got these phones because he felt his wife talked on the phone too much and drove up the phone bill.
  • He had three children during the years of their marriage. My aunt is barren.
  • When my aunt had a stroke a few years ago, he left her on the floor. My mother’s brother who lived downstairs eventually came to rescue her.
  • My grandmother’s youngest brother had suffered a seizure and later died hours after he spoke to my uncle over the phone. My family still blames him.

I see why she wants to get this all down.

****

I’ve looked for ways in to writing this tale of marital violence. Here’s my stab at it:

The stuffed dog sat on the front porch under a spotlight of sunset. No telling when she put it there, but there it sat, life sized, adorable brown and white beagle dog with a cardboard dog collar that read “Fiona” in big black Sharpie block letters. The dog was intended to send a message, loud and spectacularly clear that there would be a new dog to kick around the house since she left him six months ago after a brief stay in local hospital after she had a stroke.

I’ve tried looking at it through the prism of poetry. When my uncle died, I tried to construct this narrative:

That night Jacob wrestled with the angel, it wasn’t gentle tumbling

Or firm embrace, but a violent thrashing. A blood vessel swollen to a boil

Then burst and a body shook to wake itself.

The rest is a blank page. There was always a little bit of Esau and Jacob, Cain and Abel dynamic between James and Louis. The younger brother found greater favor in the eyes of god and father. One who used might and brawn; the other used wit and humor. Always at odds with each other.

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Comments are welcome. Please handle my ‘brainchild’ gingerly.

green the cities, create the jobs, save the planet…

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Or something like that. I think about sustainability a lot. In a previous life, I worked on the development of new construction residential buildings, and very slowly, applied green building practices and materials to those buildings.

I’ve also been thinking about the intersection of green job creation and sustainability in cities. Very quietly, I follow stories about urban gardening/agriculture movements. In 2007, President Clinton was the keynote speaker for an awards dinner at ACORN (yeah, I know… whatever) that I attended and flagged two major issues that we’ve now seen come to pass: job crisis and credit burden. To a crowd of affordable housing professionals, the 42nd President of the United States teased out practical solutions to these problems.  In 2007, 38% of US greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings. As some of us who were awares that the housing bubble would inevitably pop and create a crisis in jobs, Clinton talked to this small crowd about the link between green jobs and affordable housing, specifically pointing to jobs modernizing the existing housing stock with by making them more energy efficient beasts (high-efficiency boilers, energy efficient lighting and appliances, smart building technologies, green roof replacement, etc.) Even then, you could tell that some of these ideas came from folks like Van Jones and Majora Carter, because they’ve already witnessed how these incremental changes created benefits to individual and community.

I could geek out even further on this; water waste in multi family buildings has a solution too. For every flush, 5 gallons of potable water is wasted. The first luxury rental building in NYC to get a gold LEED certification, uses a gray water reclamation system, a very expensive system in its upfront costs. However, if it is an idea we mandate, then we’d be able to eliminate millions of gallons potable water waste.

I might be a little OCD in my interest in sustainability. But it’s nice to know I have noble company.

From GOOD:

“I made this trip,” explained Matt Victoriano, a Marine who served in Iraq, “because it became painfully aware to me that our current energy policy is a direct threat to our national security and the troops.” Marine General Anthony Zinni, former head of U.S. Central Command, takes it a step further: “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll.” In other words, to best support our troops, support a clean energy future.”

And this post from TAPPED:

Often these are people returning from prison, people who have lived in generational poverty, or returning combat veterans – some fit all three of these demographics. Each group commonly suffers from, among other things, a deep sense of social isolation that inhibits their participation in the marketplace, increases their social services footprint, and negatively affects the health and educational outcomes of both themselves and the people around them. Typically, these places are the environmental sacrifice zones that make our dirty-energy economy possible.

They have been creating expensive and ever-widening cost vectors for decades – if one looks at how many people are coming out of our prisons, going into poverty, and coming back from multiple deployments for wars with no end in sight. We need to turn those cost vectors around as soon as possible using the tools we can control on regional and community levels.

<snip>

Horticultural infrastructure work is highly therapeutic for certain psychological barriers to full participation in society. It’s more cost-effective than pharmaceutical methods too, so this can contribute to public heath savings.

Projects like these, on a massive scale throughout our cities, shorelines, and over-stressed water management systems, can turn some of our most expensive citizens into some of our most productive in three important ways.

Do you see that?  The connection in building a sustainable future could also mean jobs for veterans and under/unemployed in communities of color.

And then there’s my favorite word again: infrastructure.

the things we still carry…

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epilogue1

© peter van atgamael

The Fort Hood tragedy raises the tempo on yet another aspect to our health care debate. Mental Health. While we’re still trying to parse out the motives of the shooter (i don’t need to rehash here), it’s clear to me that mental health is at the core. It’s too critical an issue to ignore. I’m not alone. Still, our national conversation about health care has held the issue of mental health at the margins. The fringe right has held the center on demonizing Obama to such an extent that MSM has barely devoted any attention to the individual messages from the President and First Lady about veteran services, particularly treatment for PTSD.

Writers have always been sensitive to this issue. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, is a masterpiece. But it’s more than that. It’s a record. The entire collection of short stories follows a soldier in Vietnam through his return home. I don’t think I can ever really appreciate what these men and women have to endure on our behalf, whether I agree with it or not. You don’t go through an experience like that without it changing you internally.

I’ve never really been able to write in a vacuum. Looking at my own short fiction, I seem to write characters who are veterans. Below is a clip from a very, very old short story I wrote.

He still wore his medals. His Purple Heart. His Medal of Honor. This one liked to talk in fast staccato clichés, yet buried between, there was something of the truth of his horror. Why he’ll never sleep a full night. Why he’ll never be able to work. Why he was homeless. Why his skin was so ashen and colorless. How his homie split into pieces like coal cinders, almost like the big fireworks you see at the top of Reservoir Hill every Fourth of July. They open real big and fall on you like raindrops. That was how he blew up when he stepped on that mine. But it was daylight and it didn’t look purple then white. It was just red. “Man red. Man. Red man. That’s the way… the way of the world…” Behind her was the vet. To her right, through the window she could see the second floor classrooms of the elementary school, their yellow ribbons cut from construction paper hanging like paper snowflakes in the windows. Corin tried to concentrate on the light breaks streaming through the window of the bus as it made its next turning point.

Enrich Maria Remarque’s All’s Quiet on The Western Front, predates O’Brien’s book. It was the first novel I’ve ever read about the realities soldiers face in wartime and their challenges in living ‘normal’ lives in peacetime. Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, also dramatizes the difficulties for a war veteran assimilating back into civilian life. Last fall, my poet friend wondered aloud about our oncoming crisis, as more men and women return home from Iraq and Afghanistan, “They’re returning home to the worse economy since the great depression, after serving multiple tours of duty and the thanks we can give them amount to what? Health care they can barely afford, no jobs, and barely any money to send them to school so that they can work at McDonalds? These were not the ‘freedoms’ we sent them to fight for.”

The current issue of A Public Space features a story by Danielle Evans, giving us a window of the interior life of our new generation of veterans returning from Iraq and trying to recreate ‘normal’.

But Esther couldn’t forget about it. Mindy was on the side of the bus they took to the zoo. Mindy was on the nightly news, and every commercial between kids’ TV shows . Mindy was on the radio, lisping Pop my bub-ble, pop pop my bub-ble. What he felt for Mindy was barely short of violence. He restrained himself from shouting back at posters, and the radio, and the television: What is your position on civilians in combat zones? Mindy, what’s your position on waterboarding? Mindy, do you think Iraq was a mistake? He got letters occassionally, from people who were still there -one from Jones, one from Ramirez, three from guys he didn’t know that well and fgured must have been lonely enough that they’d write to anyone. He hadn’t read them.

Evan’s story takes on PTSD directly while her main character looks at it sideways. More recently, we’re seeing films emerge that dig deeper into the lives of men and women at war. Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, although mostly set in Iraq, gives a contrasting snapshot when a soldier comes home. Faced with the banal reality of home, the main character goes back. Not really an outcome we’d all assume. I plan to see Brothers, which comes out in December. From the previews alone, it flags another issue that the military is forced to be honest about. General Casey expounds further in his recent interview on Meet The Press.
From the NYT:

General Casey acknowledged that fighting two wars at the same time have put strains on the Army and its soldiers. But he said the Army had taken steps to ensure that soldiers are prepared for the mental stress of combat and treated well if they suffer psychologically.

“We’ve also worked very, very hard to enhance what we’re doing to — for the mental fitness of the force,” he said on “Meet the Press. “ He cited a “stigma reduction program” started in 2007 that “resulted in about a 40 percent increase in soldiers willing to come forward saying they have some symptoms of post-traumatic stress.”

He said that last year the suicide rate exceeded the civilian rate for the first time and as a result the Army is spending $5 million to have the National Institute of Health study the problem. More recently, he said, the Army has started a program called Comprehensive Soldier Fitness designed to give soldiers skills “to build the resilience to deal with some of the challenges that they’re facing.” will provide us with another window into the struggles of veterans returning home and challenges their caregivers face.

Our generation is overwhelmingly defined by one word: Iraq. The first short story I ever wrote is from the point of view of a woman who shares a bus ride with a Vietnam vet during the first gulf war. The first decade of the 21st century is dominated by the fact of war. For almost twenty years, Iraq has been part of my imagination and nightmare. I wonder about the lasting effects of two wars on our overall psyche. I wonder still if there will ever be any relief from the weight of all these things…

The Berlin Wall, 20 years gone – The Big Picture

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via boston.com

I was a freshmen in high school in 1989.

What I remember most about that moment is not the continuing coverage from our three national news networks, but a visit from two West Berliners in my World History class. We were talking about the sweeping changes in Eastern Europe. It was the last week of October. And I asked them if they thought the wall would come down. I remember how quiet the room got when I asked the question. I remember the look of controlled hope and sincerity behind their eyes. One of them responded and said, ‘Dear God I hope it does.’

Some in my class didn’t believe it was possible. When they left, I said to someone, ‘that wall is coming down.’ We’d taken many history classes together, class trips… most of the kids in my freshmen World History class had been in classes with since Golda Meir Elementary. We debated what we understood of world affairs between periods and lunch. We had studied much history together. American History, the Cold War, World War 2, transatlantic slave trade, pogroms. Some of my classmates remained skeptical.

Three weeks later, Jeremy runs to class saying to me, ‘You called it! You called it! How’d you do that? How’d you know it would come down?’ I can’t say now that I knew anything. Now, I can only say that people dream in a common language. And if you saw the truth in the eyes of those two West Berliners in my class in the fall of 1989, three weeks before East Berliners took sledgehammers to concrete, you’d know it was coming. All I can say is that in that moment, I felt the urgency of now, the change that was coming and bent toward the arc of history and watched walls come tumbling down.

remember, remember the 5th of november

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Allison Kilkenny takes a deeper look.

A quest for accountability really was the root of Fawkes’s plot. Admittedly, he picked the crudest, most violent means to express his disdain for the governing principles of the royals. However, a suppressed people who feel they lack representation in their government usually lash out in “uncivilized” ways. Human beings can only be beaten, mistreated, and marginalized for so long before they snap.

[snip]

The oligarchy is misbehaving once again. Corrupt, overfed, and cruel to their constituents – who are poorer, sicker, and angrier than ever — the residents of the Houses of Power should not raise their brows in surprise when a flaming effigy floats by them. It’s just a sign that the people finally recognize the true villains of history — and it’s not some dead dude who wore a funny hat.

Despite the awesome casting choice of Hugo Weaving as “V” in V for Vendetta, the film overall was… meh. However, watching and reading the news of our times now, the film still resonates. The fact that I value fake news over the establishment, a flu pandemic, the backlash and undeniably repressive stance our fellow Americans take against same sex couples, the fact that we’re debating the legalities of torture and fail to hold ourselves accountable to our own rule of law. Jeez, am I stealing plot lines from a Hollywood blockbuster or am I talking our lives now? Even today, the “Right” and its fringe are convening a rally bemoaning the ‘loss’ of American values and whining about persecution because of the specter of universal health care reform or in its most weakest incarnation, the public option.

This speech in the beginning of the film totes the line between fiction and reality.

Crazy right? Personally, I’m interested in topics and solutions in our national conversation that lead toward a sustainable future. I’m not a mother yet, but I’m an aunt and godmother to some. Somehow, during this time of great difficulty, more of us will have to rise to the occasion and make the ‘right’ choice: to affirm life.

Remember, we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.