…Leada came up from L.A. to escape the fires. She talked about electromagnetic fields, the ex-Mormon guy who gave her chlamydia, pyros and tweakers, the Rothschilds, the imminent Earthquake that would destroy everything, the entire state of California. She picked Leila up in her car that smelled of old Taco Bell and vape smoke and perfume and just drove, blasting different cloud rappers she’d fucked or tried to fuck or who’d tried to fuck her, who were too ugly to fuck, etc. Talia was in the front passenger seat. They crossed the bridge, weaving manically in and out of traffic, drove through the TL, ended up at Fisherman’s Wharf on a cold, desolate night.
Nation
I’m Not There: observations from the inaugurations
‘Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood / When blackness was a virtue…
I didn’t wake at 6am to face the winter’s dim dawn. I would leave the capital and its grand tradition of peaceful power to the deep chill of fridged temperatures and unforgiving winds. I pulled the bed covers higher and rolled over onto my left side.
Eight years ago I threaded my camera through the Virginia Avenue crowds to enter the mall and climb that shining monument on the hill. A crowd of hundreds (no more) ringed the giant vision. They clapped as their leader took an oath in light hard rain.
Martyrs Then and Now
Florida without sunshine is like a cup of bad coffee or scrambled eggs without salt or pepper, but we were stuck down there in the cold and the drizzle. To break the monotony my companion and I took a sleek little commuter train from Fort Lauderdale to Miami, with two amusements in mind — a seafood restaurant on the Miami River (Garcia’s: five stars!) and The Bay of Pigs Museum.
I think it could be easily argued that Florida itself has served as a laboratory where the agenda and tactics of our current administration were tested — from the cowardly war on woke, to epic grifting. It’s a state full of people who moved there because of the weather, a reason for relocation I find bewildering. I asked one old guy — he was my age! — if he missed his friends back in Boston, and he laughed and said he liked to think of them pulling their hats down to cover their ears while they shoveled their sidewalks. You would rather wear shorts than see your friends? I countered. Ab-so-fucking-lutely he replied.
Along with the sundowners you’ve got your Cubans. There are so many things that make Florida unappealing, it would be unfair and inaccurate to pin the woeful current state of affairs on Miami’s Cuban exile population, but once the Cubans left their expropriated fincas behind and repatriated to Miami, Florida suddenly had a reliable reactionary voting bloc that no ambitious politician could ignore.
The Stupid, the Incompetent, and the Ugly…
A possible title if Sergio Leone directed a film about Trump’s first weeks in office. Who knows? Clint Eastwood might even agree to star.
Urged by Evangelical Christians, The U.S. Returns to Her Rapist (January 20, 2025)
Free from the horrors of the next four years,
the quiet dead rot peacefully
beneath offerings of flowers.
Willie B. Wazir Peacock (We Will Remember You)
There’s one poem credited to Bob Moses in the grand online archive of Civil Rights Movement poetry here. Moses put his own spin on an Odetta spiritual as he bowed to one of the Mississippians, Willie B. Wazir Peacock (1937-2016), at the core of the Movement in the early 60s. Moses’s song calls out in all CAPS to his Brother Willie who went under the hill with scarcely anyone outside Black ‘Sippi knowing what he gave them and this fuct country…
IT WAS WILLIE
WHAT GOT FREEDOM
IN THE DEEP BLACK ‘SIPPI
Shame Games (Reflections on the Election Sparked by Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame and the Rise of the Right”)
Those election post-mortems that blame Democrats for not going on podcasts or hiring influencers too late, or that give Trump’s team more credit for tapping streaming media are missing the bigger picture. I want to offer a deeper point, drawing on the work of Arlie Russell Hochschild. Much of the time, we think about media consumption simply in the context of the attention economy. That is, humans have a limited amount of time in each day, and so it matters a lot what we focus our attention on. The rise of digital media destabilized the old attention economy, where just a few programs and people dominated. Now competition for attention is fierce, with influencers and other new media creators building audiences as big or bigger than the ones consuming legacy media. So, if a new format like podcasting or streaming video becomes the “place” attracting attention from sought-after demographics like right-leaning young men, it makes sense to figure out how to compete for attention there.
What’s missing from this whole conversation, though, is why the Joe Rogans of our changing media world are attracting attention in the first place. The medium is only partly the message here—new formats alone and the Trump campaign’s willingness to flood them with content are not why he won this election.
This is where Hochschild offers some very useful ideas, I think.
Homegoing: Watching “The Burial” & Assessing the Value of Attorney Halbert Dockins’ Mentorship
n+1‘s editors sent out an end-of-the-year appeal, noting that 2024 was their journal’s 20th year. They trumpeted “a viral essay (‘Casual Viewing,’ by Will Tavlin) in our new issue that’s on track to become one of our top-five most read pieces of all time.” I don’t keep up with n+1. The editors’ little magazine (say what?) notion of what they’ve called “The Intellectual Situation” has always seemed narrow and inorganic — a tweak on the insular thing the original New York Intellectuals termed “Mind in America.” Still, what the hey, I gave “Casual Viewing” a shot.
American X-mas Party
Shane and I used to finger each other. Don’t worry mom, this isn’t me coming out. Fingering is a bit dramatic. It was just pre-pubescent exploring. I remember one time when we had our pants off, figuring out each other’s, in Shane’s room—my mom and Shane’s mom knocked on the door. We hadn’t heard them make their way from the living room. Shane and I rushed to button up. My mom didn’t notice the way my pants hung loosely from my hips.
I went to see Shane for the first time in ten years. His mom, an ex-police detective who had moved out to California, was hosting a Christmas party on her return to New York. I could discern which retro-fitted Harlem apartment building was Shane’s.
Kafka’s Blues
Mark Christian Thompson, a professor of English at Johns Hopkins, is a scholar to reckon with: he is the author of Kafka’s Blues, a work on Kafka and racial blackness, or as the book’s subtitle puts it, “Figurations of Racial Blackness in the Construction of an Aesthetic.”[i] You might not think this field of inquiry the most urgent domain for reflection right now, but Thompson’s scholarly energy and originality are exemplary.
An icy night of snow and blues
It was bitterly cold on a late December night, and snow was starting to blow when I went out to listen to Slim Harpo at Steve Paul’s Scene, a club on West 46th Street and 8th Avenue in New York City that was one of the hippest rock and roll joints the city has ever seen. Hendrix played there in ’67, it was the first place the Doors ever played in New York, and it was a home-away-from-home for touring British acts like Traffic and Jeff Beck. Most of all, it was the premier blues venue in the city.
On this night, with the wind howling and the temperature hovering somewhere in single digits and Slim Harpo playing, I went early. He was supposed to go on at 10:00, and me, I’m thinking it’s fucking Slim Harpo and the place is going to be packed, so I arrived around 8:00. Steve sat me down right in front of the stage at this little table about the size of a dinner plate. There was a one-drink minimum, and I figured I could afford one beer. That was it. I was determined to nurse it through the entire show.
Well, I waited and waited, and I was nursing my beer and checking the door for the crowds I thought would show up any minute, but nobody did. Around 9:30, Steve opened the door and stepped outside, checking up and down the street. Snow was blowing through the open door, and finally Steve came back inside and sat down across from me at the table and introduced himself. Other than the bartender and a couple of waitresses, we were the only two people in the place.
“I guess the blizzard kept everyone at home,” Steve said. “You’re my only customer. I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’re going to have a show tonight. Let me get you another beer. I’m going to go and talk to Slim.”
He came back about five minutes later, followed by Slim and a guy who played a snare drum and a guy who played an old Fender Telecaster. Steve sat down next to me and said, “Slim told me if there’s a paying customer out there, we’re putting on a show.”
Did they ever! They played all of his hits, like “I’m a King Bee,” “Baby Scratch My Back,” “Rainin’ in My Heart,” and “I Got Love If You Want it,” plus covering half the blues canon of the time. All three of them were sitting on stools. They were in their 40s, but to me they looked like Moses coming down from the Mount. Slim wasn’t well, health-wise — he would die two years later — but he wailed on that harmonica and barked out his songs, and between songs, they chatted with Steve and me from the bandstand, which was about a foot high and two feet away. An hour or so later they were still playing when Steve said, “Let’s call it a night.”
We stood there talking while Slim and his guys packed up their instruments — no roadies needed for one electric guitar case, the smallest Fender amp you ever saw, and one snare drum case and a stand. Slim stuck his harmonicas in his pockets and we all headed out the door. Outside, more than a foot of snow had fallen. Steve said good night and tromped off into the blowing snow. Slim turned to me and asked, “You got any plans?” I said no. “Why don’t you come on along with us?” Why not?
Brotherhood
Early afternoon that Christmas, I went up to the Enlisted Men’s Club. It was already pretty crowded with the troops who hadn’t been rounded up to make an audience for the Bob Hope show down at the main post.
There was a spot at the bar, though, and I sat down next to Smitty, the black dude who was the clerk at one of the rifle companies. Smitty basically ran that company; he was a master fixer who knew everything there was to know about the workings of Camp Hovey, which was about 30 miles from the DMZ that divided North and South Korea.
We drank slow beers and bullshitted. I played a lot of cards with Smitty and the Hawaiian guys in his company and we were pretty tight.
“What are you going to do the rest of the day?” Smitty said.
“I don’t know. Why?”
“Come on out to the Texas Club with me,” he said. “We’re going to have a real Christmas dinner out there – not that jive shit in the mess hall.”
“Jeez, will that be all right?”
“You’re with me,” was all he said.
There were six clubs in the village on the other side of the battle group gate. And then, way off about a mile over the rice paddies, all by itself, was the Texas Club. An old mama-san everybody called Agnes ran it; by use over time it had become exclusively for black guys and everybody in the battle group knew it. Smitty was the ex officio mayor of the Texas Club, and he had used his endless connections to extravagantly furnish it. It was a small legend. The MPs never went out there.
Deliver Us From Evil: Legal Opiates in Post-prohibition America
“Is this just getting older?” The crying jags had become more frequent. Color drained from my life and usual distractions. Color drained from my face and skin. The days were interchangeable, tense, and brief. Hurry hurry til you crawl back home half-dead. But there was no cocoon of safety or “me”-ness to return to anymore. I watched the minutes domino mindlessly with no sensation more concrete than dread.
It wasn’t the getting older. And it wasn’t any of the problems (probably projections) I had with my loved ones. A light inside me had turned off. Motions were gone through but nobody was home. Maybe my struggle was part of something bigger, but mostly in a “class-action” lawsuit kinda way. I don’t think it was just the delusions and deficiencies coming home to roost in middle age. Or, it was probably all of that stuff too. But it was also the kratom.
I picked up a bag after reading it mentioned half-positively online.
Decapitation Strike (December)
Timothy Snyder asked his readers “to share this post with people who might benefit from reading it” and appended a note at the top of his essay: “I wrote this two weeks ago, on 15 November. This update accounts for things I have learned since, and for Trump’s further appointments, who confirm the thesis.”)
Each of Trump’s proposed appointments is a surprise. It is comforting to think that he is simply a vengeful old man, lashing out this way and that. This is unlikely. He and Musk and Putin have been talking for years. And the whole idea of his campaign was that this time he had a plan.
We should be wary of shock, which excuses inaction. Who could have known? What could I have done? If there is a plan, shock is part of the plan. We have to get through the surprise and the shock to see the design and the risk. We don’t have much time. Nor is outrage the point. Of course we are outraged. But our own reactions can distract is from the larger pattern.
The newspapers address the surprise and the shock by investigating each proposed appointment individually. And we need this. With detail comes leverage and power. But clarity must also come, and quickly. Each appointment is part of a larger picture. Taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.
Impardonable?
So quite the hullabaloo over Joe’s pardon of Hunter. And I get it, I guess. He said he wouldn’t. Then he did. Not a good look.
Late October 2024
Ghouls in the bushes, bones on lawns.
Leaves reach the height of their fire
and the veil between the worlds thins
toward the only day that I am
once again my mother’s child.
Some people avoid this doom-focused revelry –
children’s faces bloody and scarred,
plastic fangs crammed in their small mouths,
spider webs and gravestones in suburban yards.
But it’s the living who can hurt us.
I’m hollow-eyed from too much news,
my family fractured,
democracy unravelling.
Words don’t come
Just names say it all…
Stefanik, Patel,
Rubio, Noem, Hegseth, and Huckabee
Perfumed in Musk,
A vanguard selection
buttressed by Supreme Court
benedictions
on a sanctified election
On Thanksgiving, I Miss My Family (I had a dream of being the only person in America receiving both Social Security and Chanukah gelt.)
My grandmother, Gussie Belinsky Wadler, and my uncle, Artie, in 1950 in the Catskills.
I grew up in the Catskills, in a fading resort town called Fleischmans, where the population in the 1950s exploded in summer with refugees from Hitler.
There was, in fact, a story I came across on a Facebook group, that two sisters, who had assumed the other to have died in the concentration camps, discovered each other at the movies in Fleischmanns.
“Then everybody around them hollered, ‘Sit down!’ Herb says when I tell him about it.
Herb is not a sentimental guy, especially around families.
What the Fuck!
Once again, the polls got it wrong, and so did the media, unable to accurately capture an electorate that included so many “shy” Trump voters. None of the pros predicted the breadth of his victory. It was a dark comedy to watch them be bolloxed by the results. They were prepared for a nail-biter, but the election wasn’t even close.