My head's about to explode from days and days and days and days of meetings with artists, activists, non-profit committees, grants coordinators, arts administrators, urban planners, and lawyers. I can't wait to actually make something. All this conceptualization & organization can feel so pedestrian - my skin gets to aching. Necessary and brilliant but mundane. Oh the actual work work, the physical pull, the action. Yea!
I was invited to a screening of a documentary some inspired NYC high school kids (YOTV) made on evacuees/exiled New Orleanians. The screening was in a converted church, St. Mary's, deep in the 9th Ward, taken over by Common Ground. What a bunch of dirty (literally) activists from, like, Oregon and New England. And they're helping the people here gut their houses and eat and fight to keep rich people from bulldozing them because the insurance companies won't pay and the city's slapping occupation notices on buildings (like eviction notices) and people aren't even able to get home to gut their houses because they're in Houston or Atlanta or Minnetonka and it's been over a year and how are you supposed to get home to gut and live in your house when your insurance company is dragging their heels endlessly and the city seems to want that: the big condos can come in then; and who fights for these people? I love Common Ground.
This in a neighborhood completely ... well: picture a city after a bombing.
Houses split in half, guts of houses strewn everywhere, rot and trees and weeds overtaking, starved dogs, no electricity, potholes as big as kitchen tables, everything wrecked and poor and dark. No streetlights, no road signs. And St.Mary's glowing like a beacon in the middle of a ravaged, scraped, broken sad Sad. They were serving a free spaghetti dinner to anyone who showed up - paper plates and grimy blistered hands and eyes as big and tired as the oldest river from the oldest sea full of poverty and misery.
I swear people, y'all have no idea what it's like here. I don't say that to alienate but to educate: oh my oh my, it's really something criminal and tragic and heroic. It's daily and small and ordinary and bigger than any of us put together can figure out how it can be.
The movie was quite good and made me cry, with its footage of hotel living and FEMA bullshit and exile, which punched me in the gut with its familiarity and loneliness and never-ending fighting-ness. That's my story! Sometimes I forget.
And gosh it is so nice to stroll out after a long day's work of this to have an Eli (Meyer's w/soda, a splash of bitters, a lime) and not get screamed at by bartenders when it's 2 a.m. and sneak a smoke and watch a blues singer shimmy all around her guitarist like a fish on a pole and dance to A Tribe Called Quest in a big dank warehouse with Meehan spinning and dipping you. Even better at lunch to gently wait for the space to open up to talk to the construction workers and the cops about the violence, the this of the that of the this. To open the Picayune to really read it at the bar while nursing a Barq's. I don't need to push my way in, I don't need to insist, I don't need anyone to pay attention: I am home. I like the soft quiet of just being in this.
Even when it stinks so bad around 3 a.m. - paper, bones, skin burning - and the white cat who lives in the house behind the trailer randomly decides to climb the bamboo and drop on the top of the trailer like a ninja at all hours of the night so there I am standing in the dew looking up at his big blue eyes that aren't a rat's but they keep me up just the same. Isn't this the future? Where are my pills that I can eat that make me feel like I've had a good night's sleep on a level firm bed with clean dry sheets? Because I'd like to say, "No thank you, I don't require those pills, I've invented a new game!" and I'll roll some dice as big as my Mazda that yes, is running again, and we'll all chase the dice because it's in the chasing that we're well-slept and well-fed and wide wide awake.
