Every night josephine & other lurid stories

This was not the cover of the book I was caught reading in 6th grade. The cover of that previous edition didn’t show the poodle, and did have a by-line – “My First True Love Story”

Caught reading this ‘trash’ while everyone else was studying for a Hindi exam, our Arts & Crafts teacher, the only male teacher at the school, hauled me up, then announced to the class the ‘terrible’ things I was reading.

Every Night Josephine

GASP

My First True Love Story

OH!

I remember standing there, absolutely still, stone-faced. ITS ABOUT A DOG I wanted to yell, and Jacqueline Susann’s story about how the dog takes over her life, and Jaqueline falls in love with the DOG … but in moments like this, bureacracy doesn’t listen. Too late they figure out that there’s a joke, and its on them. I just let it play out all the way to the hyper-concerned parent-teacher meeting on my precocious behavior (I agreed with the general assessment even though the specifics were ridiculous, so I just let them go at it)

In subsequent years, someone changed the cover of the book to the sober one shown here.

But Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez’s story is a one-up …

“… I needed a business license from THE CITY of Albuquerque No problem. Or so I thought. They called today, to tell me they had decided to reject my application for a business license. “On what grounds?” we asked. “Because you are a pornographic establishment,” said the brilliant people at City Hall. “

Here’s the rest.

Dizzy with Muezzins in Calcutta

The chairs were wooden. The stage was rudimentary. We sat under blurred Calcutta skies. But the sounds were heavenly.

Dizzy Gillespie was throwing his trumpet’s innovations to the self-professed cultural capital of India, Calcutta. Jazz. It may have been music, but for me it was everything – everything that was different from my teenage perception of straitjacket India and our old masters, stodgy rule-ridden backward and aristocratic England. Instead, it was America.

And all this before the real hallelujah moment.

A pause. The next number’s coming soon. The trumpet is at Gillespie’s lips. When suddenly another sound fills the air. It’s the muezzins from Calcutta minarets hailing prayer-time for the city’s Muslims. Clashing sensibilities – how dare our native sounds interrupt this 1st world gift!

But Gillespie, my American hero, is not thrown. Gillespie, he pauses, trumpet to lips, allowing his craven audience a moment to distance it self from coarser instant reactions. We begin to hear the muezzins anew. As mostly non-muslims, the sounds finally take on a haloed tone, framed as they are this evening by a foreign meter and a foreign man. As always in India, if the Western master honors, so do the colonial servants.

The muezzins’ melodies tail off. (Had I never noticed before that muezzins’ called out together, their voices interlacing in what seemed, through my overblown teenage imagination, to be in fact – Jazz?) And as the audience slowly readjusts, my American hero’s innovations take off. Gillespie takes the muezzins’ lead, picking up their melody, then taking it away to somewhere else.

And what an amazing place that was. The ascendance of America for me, was confirmed. Where else, I asked, who else, could produce this strange and wonderful music in this unpredictable manner. Who else could produce this ability to be so fluid with boundaries, driven only by the sense of possibility, and creating something unconscionably new.

[Post script: Of course, today I know that my foreign inability to parse out the different Americas allowed me to lump this uniquely African American musical tradition with it's built-in openness and innovation, with a monolithic perception of America. ]

America as Gillespie & Ali

It dawned on me recently that while I was growing up in Calcutta, a series of introductions to America were all black.

Two key informers of my vision of America, both mediated through my father, were Dizzy Gillespie (and jazz in general) and Muhammad Ali’s autobiography. The former as a live interaction under Calcutta skies, the latter, read off family bookcases, but reinforced and regurgitated as ‘Elocution’ at my school, La Martiniere. More on these soon.

Born into Commerce; Dead at Birth.

Met some great folks the other day. Walked into a home, crowded with pieces of a long life waiting, it turns out, to get out. My hosts, Peter and Juthika Stangl, were moving and their life needed to be off the walls and floors of their Palo Alto home to make sure that others could reimagine their own lives in the space.

First, Peter and Juthika warmed me immediately. In short order I learned more about the foundation they’ve been running for a while now – Shadika – my Saturday blind date for volunteering hours. Not that I did any volunteer work that Saturday, but I did a lot of volunteer basking in the glow of something very very good.

Shadika garners funds from the SF bay area, and delivers it to the door of projects that serve sex workers and their children in Kolkata (the Calcutta of my past). I thought – aha ! isn’t this the same domain as the film ‘born into brothels’ that just won the oscars? So up I piped with (the obviously obvious) tip – why not use the publicity around the film, and screenings of the film, to help fundraise? The depressing answer: we contacted the film maker, but after what seemed like a positive start, we were told, that a deal was made with a distributor, and when the time was right we should talk to the distributor.

I stood aghast. I know I know there are multiple complex politics on who represents, who uses, who gives back to the represented, academic articles, activist tomes, many hours of many peoples lives discussing – but this was just very simply unbelievable. A film made to highlight the plight (and creativity from disaster) of the children of sex workers in Kolkata was not available to those who have worked to serve these people for more than a decade. I can think of many well-meaning ways to explain the mindset of those behind this travesty, or the series of small decisions made, and larger ones never considered, that brought us to this point, but the thing of it remains too hypocritical to comprehend. Perhaps its because I’m immersed in a world where we already understand the implications of default copyright, restrictive distribution agreements, etc. But help me, anyone, to understand how this makes sense.