Animal Matter

Occupy Wall Street:

I just came home, it’s about 2am on a weeknight and I had an interesting conversation with my doorman. Tonight’s guy is Illya, a young 22 year old Russian immigrant who asked me what I thought of the protest on Wall Street. The more I thought about it, the more clearly I was able to communicate some position, because frankly, I have been without one.

I asked him how old he was and he said, “I’m 22 and I can’t go down there because I have to work to pay my rent and you know…” He has a girlfriend who just finished college and can’t pay her loan, etc, etc. I get it. I have been there. I have been young, and broke, with no options, and no hope for a future. But I am in my forties now, and no one I know of my age has either not been there, or feared being there…we are products of Reaganonimcs after all. It is what has kept many of us from settling down and having kids, again, etc, etc.

So here’s what I think, take it or leave it: If the folks at the wall street protest, (not all of them, just the young kids) could get those of us, who are in our 40’s and single, without children (there’s tons of us) to look at them differently, not like the struggling 20 somethings that we were, who made it to as comfortable as we some of us are, but as a generation that should have surpassed us, than maybe they’d get the attention of more of those like me, and again there are tons of us, to sway to their cause.

Make us think of you as a generation that should have better than us or be better than us, rather than like us (to have no opportunity to have something, anything, or make your dreams a reality other than to wait it out), then you could sway some support. Because sadly, we are apt at waiting things out….only none of us remembers that.

At the end of the day, despite our snarkiness or lack of family love, we do understand that the generation directly behind should be poised to do better than we did…and these kids are fucked…almost as bad as we were if not worse, and if we could rise, than we should support their cry to rise up, affect some actual change and say to the powers that be, your idea of america doesn’t work anymore, but needs to shift, to accept the new old thinking and let people, not corporations grow. Give these kids a fighting chance, and make a stand along side of them.

I’m not an idiot, I know that the protest isn’t all young kids, but those were the majority of faces I saw down there, and they are 22 yr old Illya’s friends, and at the end of the day, they are the one’s I give a damn about.

Come on America, don’t shaft them like you did us, the painstaking kids of the Reagan years. Give this generation a break, the world is newer now and more globally competitive and your bad ass nation, is no longer the big dog. Your corporations have seen to that.

Fix it. You know how.

Hipsterrican ride on the LES.
When i get married or carried off to my funeral, i want this to be the chariot awaiting me.

4 am in the Dam. Day 2 is another sleepless night in a warehouse apartment that is old and haunted with time and old timber.

The Sun won’t come up until very late in the morning here. It’s a bit off-putting when one of the reliable constants in your life can just change schedule like that, and why not, i guess, what are we to the celestial greats.

And it seems, my schedule has changed to accommodate it.

Out amongst the throngs of party-goers and wayward travelers gathered along the streets of the Neuimarket district of Amsterdam, was this little band of dancing boys, young men to be precise, no more than 16 or 17 years old, having the time of their lives, setting off fireworks, squealing like little boys, and having not a thought of yesterday or tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

La Res

There was a time in New York City when you could go to any number of bars or clubs and get your daily dose fix of rock and roll…sometimes several times a night, if you knew the right people, or picked the right places, but the city was ripe for the picking then and it was fun and easy. Good music, played hard and right. And tonight, if just for a fleeting moment, that vibe was back, in significantly understated proportions through the efforts one band called La Res.

La Res resurrected the rock gods at the National Underground, one of the few places left in this city to hear guitar shreds and sick clean vocals flow over a hard hitting bass line. K. Lorrel Manning singing lines like “Can you brave the fire?,” in a song written to express the state of affairs in the world today, starts with a simple guitar riff that builds deep, fueled by Manning’s outstretched voice, drawing you in, bigger than life.

If you are in NY and have a chance, go to the National Underground (159 East Houston), where La Res is playing a three-week residency, with two shows left on September 23rd and the 30. And by all means, check out there site: http://www.vivelares.com/index.php

The Cemitério da Consolação

I walked past the sign reading “no photography without permission,” hoping to play up the gringa card if busted by the locals and snuck my camera out of mi bolsa. This place was safe, free of the gritty tweaked out feeling on the street outside. It felt as if divinity itself sat here, and screamed out of the front gate, “Don’t even think about coming in here if you just rubbed coke on your gums you cracked out bastards.” This city feels like 1980s cocaine induced paranoia, from the suits all the way down to the grey haired grandma’s driving their little Fiats around. Grandma’s packing heat, and if she’s not, she should be.
Once through the grand stone archway the stickiness ends. Silence fills in and this is my exotica: The Cemitério da Consolação. Finely chiseled marble and stone statues slumped over in sorrow looking down on the tombs of the dead, weeping eternally at lost life. The tall buildings and gas station signs disappearing slowly into the background as you head down the slope under the cover of overgrown, finely pruned trees and angels. With the wind comes the steady, slow syncopated sound of thick tropical leaves falling on marble and tiny yellow butterflies dancing for the dead.

Once I got up the nerve to get past the safety of Frei Caneca, with it’s gay pride boasting local boys and small row of ateliers, I walked in a direction that felt right, steering myself further and further from the protection of the local shop owners who came to notice me daily and have my morning coffee ready. That initial moment when you’re in a foreign country and feel for the first time that you are truly alone is distinct. It’s like the small string that kept you connected just snapped, you feel it, and it’s too late to look back and try to grab hold of it, you just have to walk forward, feeling your way in the dark because that is what not understanding the language feels like, and you walk.

This was Sao Paolo at it’s best. Found by accident during a lone walk in the wrong direction, which revealed a piece of the city that left behind the blustering corporate, commercial tensions of the Avenida Paulista, or the pulsing sex of the late night Samba parties, and took you deeper into the belly of the people who live here. The young family walking their small child to the children’s hospital, likely for his annual check-up; the afternoon gathering of working woman, secretaries maybe, at a lunch counter having a leisurely meal with a freedom about them that I envied; the homeless guy sprawled out in front of a tree like it was always his home. These are the parts I can be a part of.