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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