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Is it better to be lost or found?
Tonight's dinner was a very large bowl of spaghetti with meat sauce, such as one makes with one's husband after an evening full of crowds, public transit, and cold. It's been a peculiar day.
I attended the rapid-response rally on Boston Common. I can't estimate the number of people holding signs on the tree-and-streetlight hillside below the state house, shouting "Hands off Mueller!" and "Step up, Congress, do your job!" Last time I thought a crowd was five hundred people it was a thousand, so let's say more than a thousand tonight. It was packed. I'm not sure what to think of the dude with the ukelele performing a kind of hipster ska version of "We Shall Overcome," but I liked that there was at least one activist tuba plonking out bass notes somewhere uphill of me. At least three helicopters were circling low overhead, sometimes drowning out the speakers; I expect they were the news, but I don't like that they made me nervous. The speakers when I could hear them were all impassioned, technical, and totally invisible to me in the upward slope of the crowd. Their audience hissed, cheered, clapped, booed; it is still less strange to me to hear callback chants than to hear real-life names treated like Haman at a Purimspiel, but I can't say the infamy levels are undeserved. One speaker alluded to lights in the darkness and all around me people started pulling out their smartphones, swiping their flashlights on: it was like a searchlight swept the crowd. "Keep your lights on!" she called and because my brain is ninety-eight percent allusion I was suddenly hearing the final anti-isolationist broadcast of Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940), which I rewatched a couple of nights ago: Hello, America! Hang on to your lights. They're the only lights left in the world. It has been long enough since I was part of a congregation that I didn't expect to get ken y'hi ratzon off the rhythm of speaker litany and audience response, especially when the speaker was enumerating the misdeeds of 45 and the audience was echoing after each one "Enough is enough!" (My grandmother used to say "Genug!") The last speaker closed the rally with "Stay in the streets! Stay in the streets until Trump is impeached!" I didn't catch anyone's names or introductions, although I think one of the speakers I especially liked may in hindsight have been Elizabeth Warren. [edit: Looks like Marian Ryan.] I am not sure if she was the woman who said that a narcissist is most dangerous when frightened. Still, let him be frightened. Let him die and she may not converse with him behind a fence.
Earlier in the afternoon I had an extraordinarily unpleasant experience in a taxi. The driver did nothing that made me feel unsafe except that he was listening to the radio when I got into the car and within a couple of minutes it became clear that it was an Evangelical station delivering what I would call a really anti-Semitic sermon, although I suppose it was just Christianity as usual, all about the failures of the "Old Covenant" and the reasons that "Jesus is better." Lots of inaccuracies about Jewish ideas of sin and atonement and the role of the priestly class. Lots of supersession and redemption and blood. The preacher sounded young; he sounded specifically like a millennial podcast host rather than a minister, with a tendency to gloss his Biblical verses with interjections like "and I like to think Peter was like, 'So what did you tell him?'" which somehow made it worse. I was already frustrated that I had had to flag down a taxi instead of catching the bus which had adamantly refused to arrive, thanks, Baker. I scratch up the money for my MBTA pass every month in the expectation that I will actually be able to use it. I was not looking forward to paying for the privilege of having been told as if it were as fundamental as gravity that mine is a false, corrupt, and mercenary tradition from which Christ had to wrest the real salvation of souls rather than the hell-bound lining of pockets. And I realized that I did not feel safe asking the driver to change the station because I didn't know he would react—how badly things would escalate if at any point I said I was Jewish, with the backdrop of podcast preacher perkily explaining how the old Jewish priesthood prevented people from getting to heaven, as if people meant Christians-in-waiting being kept by those greedy Jews from their rightful reward. Would I get ordered out of the taxi? Interrogated about my politics? Physically threatened? Maybe he would just have flipped the dial. I didn't want to take the chance. I think that's new. I don't like it.
I can't believe the Film Forum just announced a centenary festival of Ida Lupino exactly when I can't make any of it. End of November, early December, maybe. The next two weeks starting this Friday? Not a chance. Now it feels personal.
I attended the rapid-response rally on Boston Common. I can't estimate the number of people holding signs on the tree-and-streetlight hillside below the state house, shouting "Hands off Mueller!" and "Step up, Congress, do your job!" Last time I thought a crowd was five hundred people it was a thousand, so let's say more than a thousand tonight. It was packed. I'm not sure what to think of the dude with the ukelele performing a kind of hipster ska version of "We Shall Overcome," but I liked that there was at least one activist tuba plonking out bass notes somewhere uphill of me. At least three helicopters were circling low overhead, sometimes drowning out the speakers; I expect they were the news, but I don't like that they made me nervous. The speakers when I could hear them were all impassioned, technical, and totally invisible to me in the upward slope of the crowd. Their audience hissed, cheered, clapped, booed; it is still less strange to me to hear callback chants than to hear real-life names treated like Haman at a Purimspiel, but I can't say the infamy levels are undeserved. One speaker alluded to lights in the darkness and all around me people started pulling out their smartphones, swiping their flashlights on: it was like a searchlight swept the crowd. "Keep your lights on!" she called and because my brain is ninety-eight percent allusion I was suddenly hearing the final anti-isolationist broadcast of Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940), which I rewatched a couple of nights ago: Hello, America! Hang on to your lights. They're the only lights left in the world. It has been long enough since I was part of a congregation that I didn't expect to get ken y'hi ratzon off the rhythm of speaker litany and audience response, especially when the speaker was enumerating the misdeeds of 45 and the audience was echoing after each one "Enough is enough!" (My grandmother used to say "Genug!") The last speaker closed the rally with "Stay in the streets! Stay in the streets until Trump is impeached!" I didn't catch anyone's names or introductions, although I think one of the speakers I especially liked may in hindsight have been Elizabeth Warren. [edit: Looks like Marian Ryan.] I am not sure if she was the woman who said that a narcissist is most dangerous when frightened. Still, let him be frightened. Let him die and she may not converse with him behind a fence.
Earlier in the afternoon I had an extraordinarily unpleasant experience in a taxi. The driver did nothing that made me feel unsafe except that he was listening to the radio when I got into the car and within a couple of minutes it became clear that it was an Evangelical station delivering what I would call a really anti-Semitic sermon, although I suppose it was just Christianity as usual, all about the failures of the "Old Covenant" and the reasons that "Jesus is better." Lots of inaccuracies about Jewish ideas of sin and atonement and the role of the priestly class. Lots of supersession and redemption and blood. The preacher sounded young; he sounded specifically like a millennial podcast host rather than a minister, with a tendency to gloss his Biblical verses with interjections like "and I like to think Peter was like, 'So what did you tell him?'" which somehow made it worse. I was already frustrated that I had had to flag down a taxi instead of catching the bus which had adamantly refused to arrive, thanks, Baker. I scratch up the money for my MBTA pass every month in the expectation that I will actually be able to use it. I was not looking forward to paying for the privilege of having been told as if it were as fundamental as gravity that mine is a false, corrupt, and mercenary tradition from which Christ had to wrest the real salvation of souls rather than the hell-bound lining of pockets. And I realized that I did not feel safe asking the driver to change the station because I didn't know he would react—how badly things would escalate if at any point I said I was Jewish, with the backdrop of podcast preacher perkily explaining how the old Jewish priesthood prevented people from getting to heaven, as if people meant Christians-in-waiting being kept by those greedy Jews from their rightful reward. Would I get ordered out of the taxi? Interrogated about my politics? Physically threatened? Maybe he would just have flipped the dial. I didn't want to take the chance. I think that's new. I don't like it.
I can't believe the Film Forum just announced a centenary festival of Ida Lupino exactly when I can't make any of it. End of November, early December, maybe. The next two weeks starting this Friday? Not a chance. Now it feels personal.
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That's cool. I'm sorry to have missed you! I got there about a quarter after five.
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(But hey, good protest.)
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It's not like the beliefs are a surprise to me. But I try to avoid having them in my ears.
(But hey, good protest.)
(It was! Another of the species "I hate that it has to be done, but it was done well.")
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Ugh. :(
I'm sorry. :(
I catch taxis A LOT and often the radio is on horrible right wing radio stations.
I've taken to saying as soon as I get into the taxi "Would it be okay to turn the radio off? It tends to give me a headache."
This is usually accepted with minimal pushback.
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Thank you; that's usefully neutral. I don't tend to think of inventing physical excuses for things I don't want. I bet it's a social lying thing.
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loud noise often gives me a headache
also right wing radio causes me stress/anxiety, which often gives me a headache.
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That helps with saying it, then, although I'm sorry.
I wear earplugs for noise, but the radio wasn't loud, just awful.
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Me, staring blankly at them: "Hi! I'm sorry, every word of Yiddish has just gone out of my head...?"
(Me, two minutes later, to the friends I was there with: "I could have said 'gut!' or 'mishkoshe!' or 'frag nisht!' or 'men shlepn zikh!' I KNOW ALL THOSE ANSWERS, AND YET I FAILED THIS POP QUIZ."
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You have my sympathies! I'm pretty sure I memorized "oysgemutshet" for just this eventuality.
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I like the idea of an activist tuba.
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Harry, it sucked.
I like the idea of an activist tuba.
You could hear it agreeing with people. More rallies should have one.
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I once had a taxi driver who told me about the quintet for bassoons he was composing. I wish you could have caught his cab instead.
Nine
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The activist tuba is deeply lovable.
I once had a taxi driver who told me about the quintet for bassoons he was composing. I wish you could have caught his cab instead.
That does sound much nicer.
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Nine
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Nine
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I can't believe the Film Forum just announced a centenary festival of Ida Lupino exactly when I can't make any of it. End of November, early December, maybe. The next two weeks starting this Friday? Not a chance. Now it feels personal.
I think, at this point, it must be! Either that or the universe is trying to give you Ida Lupino and having serious problems with the delivery service.
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Thank you on both counts!
Either that or the universe is trying to give you Ida Lupino and having serious problems with the delivery service.
Dear universe: I don't live in New York! It is an ancestral city, but I just like it a lot! I can't magically appear in it any time I want! (It would solve a lot of problems if I could, though.)
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*gets out little slender sharp precise bone toothpick*
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You're a wonderful person.
protest
Protests on the Common evoke, for me, a particular sense of historical continuity with rowdy colonial patriots. At a time when centrist pundits deplore as a civic tragedy people not wanting to serve the administration's henchmen in their restaurants, it is pleasant to reflect on the time when Bostonians dragged a customs' commissioners boat through the streets, condemned it in a mock trial at the Liberty Tree, and then burnt it on the Common. Popular conceptions of history constantly undersell the important of passionate protests to abolitionists, union organizers, suffragettes, and rebels.
Indeed, the location of Liberty Tree doesn't appear on the Freedom Trail. I'm not at all certain that naming a shopping mall after it mitigates the erasure.
Re: protest
Nice. I just kept seeing more people every time I looked behind me.
Popular conceptions of history constantly undersell the important of passionate protests to abolitionists, union organizers, suffragettes, and rebels.
Agreed. And I didn't even know about the trial of the boat.
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Thank you.
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I wish people would occasionally remember that Rabbi Jeshua bar Joseph was Jewish!
And he didn't just talk about throwing out the greedmongers- he did it!
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