Dispatches from a Spring College Tour, Folk Punk Festival, Passover and a Vision Quest
I look at the world and wonder what I am doing here. On the one hand, community is ever expanding and contracting, ever-changing, family shifting, along with movements about us. The piles of pictures of our experiences, accumulating, ever disappearing and reappearing. And communities taking shape, with movements ever changing what is real, forces dueling.
Before the trip, my friend Craig invited me to join his reading group, where we unpacked, line by line, the Society of the Spectacle, the 1967 work of critical theory /Situationist thome by Guy Debord. "In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles," says Debord (1967/1992, p. 2). Paraphrasing Marx on the commodity fetish, Debort constructs a montage of images, scrapbook of pictures, some critical theory, others streets, cut outs from magazines, constructing a story.
We see oursleves spinning through it, taking part in the production and critique, looking for a way out, a way to find our own stories in between the instagram pics, culture industry, our means of production, the knowledge factory, school, life, Marx, a history of philosophy and stories, poems.
In the midst of it all, kids grow up, my kid on a college tour. We take in the news along the way, funding for Ukraine and Israel, a war machine funding permawar, as well as humanitarian aid from the bombs. And try to figure it out on the road through Springtime.
First stop, a senior art show with the teenager, wall after wall of paintings on oil, some of anime, sculptures, images of students on subways, in their case, portraits of friends, of Dion, Al, Dodi, themself. Austrian influences from Oskar kokoschka, Lucian Freud, Egon Schiele, little bits of our trip to Vienna when we saw it all, drafting mental notes, of approaches to content, images from pandemic high school generation, paintings in lockdown. I think about the years since that trip to Vienna, when they were in middle school, hiking across Spain, Italy, France, figuring out who they were, before a freshman year in the pandemic, at home listening to podcasts, painting all afternoon long, drum lessons, wondering, imagining, teenage dreams, into sophomore year, back in the classroom, all day long, off to punk shows, summer camp, new pronouns, new identities, friends and their struggles. Some made it, others disappeared, some cancelled, bullied, parents gone, losses and gains, into jr year in Berlin, writing poems on the way East to West, across town, working at Many Tentacles Print Shop, meeting friends, off to the Kit Kat Club, out late, before culture crash senior year back here, back writing about it all, banjo lessons, folk punk shows, college essays, trips to Red Hook, walking the Brooklyn Bridge, across the city, across the country, Montreal, Santa Cruz, Northampton, Boston, Cortland, on a quest for the next chapter.
Finishing the show, we made our way north for a weekend college road trip checking out the delights of the city of Northampton, home of the Calvin Coolidge library, a few colleges, vape shops, thrift stores, places for strolls, thinking about Sylvia Plath walking here, deep breaths, writing about it all, taking in all, “ the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.”
Its a little sleepy. No one is any more sure of things than when we began. Everyone is looking for community, in the midst of a blur of advertising, schools, ideas, careers, still looking for friends.
Book club in the afternoon back in town, we try to make sense of The Question of Palestine by Edward Said, unpacking the horror of history. We can do better. I know we can. Next book Infinite Jest. I’m still lost with Roberto Bolaño and the Savage Detectives, the visceral realists, dueling with Octavia Paz.
At some point, OJ shuffles off. Memories of a country consumed by a car chase and then a trial, our unfinished business around domestic violence and race played out on TV screen, one soap opera after another, from a football ad man, to a reality TV star turned president. Watching the Trump trial here in NYC, my friends are referred to daily by the national media, looking for Trump supporters only to find opponents here. In the meantime the trial. God help us. Been here over a quarter century. I have never seen 12 New Yorkers agree on anything. The law is an ass my dad used to say. All know is if any of us had called for violent riots with supporters killing cops or paying off sex workers, we'd be in jail. Justice is on trial. Is our system broken? I hope not.
A full week of classes follow, the students barely cracking their books, their heads in the sky, along with mine, my friends at Barbes and Bijans, telling stories, more photos and captions accumulated, pictures of springtime, finding their way into a blog.
Full days journey through a time of transition. Next stop, a journey out to a folk punk festival in Cortland New York, “Chapel of Dog Fest is a weekend-long fest with 2 nights of Folk Punk groups from across the country. Its part of a collective idea to bring musicians to the Cortland music community to give a platform to marginalized groups in the music scene that too often get overlooked.” First stop, Ditmas, past Sophie’s place, to grab a friend, a bestie, and make our way up to Columbia where the college president is busy taking tips from McCarthy and we were turned away from the campus by security guards after students were arrested the day before, many suspended, as the college criminalizes unpopular thought. And we make our way up state, past Bennington, listening to Paul Barribu sing Strawberry and AJJ, before we catch the first round of bands. The Rose Hall is of punks and piercings. A trio lead by singer with beard and banjelele, another with a washboard, and a guitarist performs songs about dogs and cops, drunk nights and hungover afternooos of wonder. And we make our way into the night. A magnificent dinner at Dennys, chicken friend steak and pancakes follows. There's lots to unpack along the road, what happened on the L word, family stories and recollections of cousins long lost and departed, councin Scotty on his way elsewhere, a teenager still here, before crashing in our little RV, out by a lake where we crash.
The next morning, we sip on coffee and hang out in our sleeping bags. Its a little nippy out. So, we read poems. The teenager leads with Gary Snyder and “Things To Do On Speed” their favorite poem by Ted Berrigan.
“fingers clatter over the keyboard
as intricate insights stream
out of your head;
this goes on for ten hours:
then, take a break: clean…”
I wish I had some of those insights.
On and on we share poem after poem. Singing along with King Missle. This is what its like at school, say the teenagers:
“I am a sensitive artist
Nobody understands me because I am so deep
In my work I make allusions to books that nobody else has read
Music that nobody else has heard
And art that nobody else has seen
I can't help it
Because I am so much more intelligent
And well-rounded
Than everyone who surrounds me.”
Our favorite, Jesus was Way Cool.”
“Jesus was way cool
Everybody liked Jesus
Everybody wanted to hang out with him
Anything he wanted to do, he did
He turned water into wine
And if he wanted to
He could have turned wheat into marijuana
Or sugar into cocaine
Or vitamin pills into amphetamines”
And off we make it to the cemetery and thrifting on a full day if exploring Cortland NY, laughing and singing songs, running about a hallowed out downtown, eating Mexican at a greasy dinner getting ready for the show. Night two of the Chapel of the Dog Folk Punk Fest, with crusty punks at Rose Hall. We arrive at 530, taking in band after band. Many lament the police in Cop City in Atlanta or busy arresting peaceful protesters at Columbia. Anguish and ambition, music and feelings working through struggle after struggle. "Maybe grieving is just another dream...." sang Small Void, on accordian. The Spud Bugs regale us with songs abouy trains and searching for home.
Apes of the State, the headliner, heat up the mosh pit. "I just want to be your big mistake..." we sing along with April, Molly and company, song after song, tales of outsiders finding a sense of community, of each other, coping with loss and addiction and looking for each other. “Folk punk saved my life,” April confesses telling the story of finding a voice in her room in recovery in Lancaster Pa. She invites the crowd surfing crowd to join her in the middle of the floor to sing and play along with her anthem, “On to the Next”:
“This city isn't big enough for the two of us …One of us has to go… Don't care about the old girlfriend…Gonna find myself a new girlfriend and it's…On to the next one, on to the next one.”
“On to the next one, On to the next one,” we all sing, a clarinet leading the collective jam, everyone joining in.
Finishing the show, we grabb a little more junk food on the way back to the RV.
Waking the next day, me and my bestie make our way across the railroad tracks, exploring, on our way back home, reflecting on high school, the XFiles, Apes of State lyrics, looking forward to whatever lies ahead, enjoying the road trips, precious times.
We read more and more stories about Columbia. Sometimes I think the idea of consciousness-raising is over rated. But dialogue matters. I recall the days after the LA Riots in Los Angeles as LA was literally burning. We had rally and march after march and speak out after speak out in Claremont, the smoke still filling the skyline. I listened a lot. Last week, I tried to go by Columbia. And security turned us away. Oh my, what a lost opportunity for Columbia. I have no idea what their leadership is thinking. But this could be a moment when the administration could say, this is complicated. Go talk with someone with a different viewpoint, try and listen and learn from each other, use your ears, share, learn, find common ground. Isn't that what college is all about? Can't we all find ways to agree that war is an epic breakdown in conversation, that we must condemn bombing hospitals or mass starvation. We all condemn the ways the Jews were treated in Warsaw and the Palestinians are treated in Israel. We all share the same water and air. I learned so much from those conversations in Claremont as we slowly came to a consensus about income inequality and institutional racism, the messy history of the LAPD, and the remnants of the old system that keeps people separated and divided. Sadly, three decades later Pomona and Columbia are now calling the cops to arrest protesters, stifling debate and conversation. And students are being suspended for participating in constitutionally protected First Amendment activity. My oh my what a failure.
My union the PSC issued a statement about what is going on.
My friend Peter has a different take. Peter Bratsis writes: “30 plus years ago, we built a shanty in the middle of the UMBC campus to protest apartheid in South Africa and call for divestment and boycott. One of the deans came to tell us that we had to remove it by the end of the day or they would call the police and have us arrested. We laughed and told him to go ahead and do that. His face turned red and he walked away never to return. Even after so many years of Reagan and Bush, in the late 80s it was still unthinkable that a university would call the cops and have their own students arrested for protesting on campus. They would have been out of a job the next day. Hopefully these shills at NYU, Columbia, and beyond, will be out of jobs soon once people can more clearly see how horribly they have treated their own students and faculty and how they have betrayed the mission of higher learning.”
The second night of passover, everyone came over. No one was really sure which Haggadah to read at the Seder table, to tell the story from the Book of Exodus, of God bringing the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, not the usual one, perhaps the Berlin one we read with Max and Marc last year.
"Before setting out on revenge first dig two graves" says the Chinese proverb for revenge, and inevitable annihilation. We read it during Seder Dinner, a raw emotional affair about liberation from oppression, to reflect on our struggles to heal a broken world. Last year we were in Berlin recalling that 80 years prior Jews were being annihilated there. This year in addition to the usual debates about old testament themed Broadway, we talked about cycles of violence, the propensity of oppressed peoples to become oppressors, violence that begets more violence, histories of British Colonial legacies from Ireland to Palestine. And recalled those no longer with us, pouring a glass for Elijah and all the strangers, a second for Penelope and Aunt Judy. Al recalled the passovees growing up and those things that went unsaid about his family in Europe during the war. We debated, poured a little wine, a few tears, and disbelief. Up the slope from us activists celebrated a public seder outside Chuck Schumer's office calling for a ceasefire among other things, some three hundred getting arrested as they did so. There's a lot to account for, a lot to try to reconcile, a lot of heavy hearts.
Each day new stories about campuses and this issue. The speaker of the House, Mike Johnson wants to bring in the national guard to Columbia, after he was shouted down during a campus visit Wednesday. "Tis like Kent State," says Caroline.
And another step in the road vision quest. Next stop Boston.
