Woodie at 100

Concert for Woodie Guthrie at Brooklyn College

Gatherings to celebrate heroes of folk music and the old left sometimes feel like events for senior citizens.  Last night's concert at Brooklyn  College to celebrate the centennial of Woodie Guthrie's birth was an exception. Despite the abundance of gray hair,  there were enough young people and enough inspired renderings of Woodie's lyrics that the future of folk music and fights for social justice felt secure for another 100 years.

The key to this is the Woodie Guthrie Archive, run by Woodie's daughter Nora. In the archive, along with artwork and more, are almost 3,000 lyrics that Woodie wrote. Over the years, Nora has encouraged musicians to put them to new uses.

Two of the best products of this splendid idea could be heard last night.

Billy Bragg, a great interpreter of Woodie's songs, performed "God Down to the Water," which draws on Woodie's years as a merchant  seaman in World War II. The lyrics, which Bragg set to the haunting tune for he Irish song "She Moved Through the Fair," are a beautiful mediation on love, distance, and the danger of loss.

Equally beautiful, and very different, was the Klezmatics' version of "Mermaid Avenue," Woodie's splendid tribute to that thoroughfare in Brooklyn.  The opening verse alone makes it one of the greatest New York City songs:

Mermaid Avenue that’s the street
Where the lox and bagels meet,
Where the sour meets the sweet;
Where the beer flows to the ocean
Where the wine runs to the sea;
Why they call it Mermaid Avenue
That’s more than I can see.

To get the sound of "Mermaid Avenue," check out this Klezmatics version on YouTube, recorded at the Tarrytown Music Hall.

Woodie's centennial will culminate soon in a concert in Washington, DC. But as far as I'm concerned, his spirit  lives in raised voices, honest struggles, and the sounds of Mermaid Avenue.

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Along the Bronx River

The restoration of the Bronx River is one the great victories of New York environmentalism. Earlier this summer, I got a close look at all the good work the Bronx River Alliance has done to help this waterway when I paddled a 2-person kayak with my friend Jason Barr from Shoelace Park, at 219th Street, to the handsome Hunts Point Riverside Park. If you care at all about environmental justice and beautiful park design, or even if you just hanker to visit places that most people ignore, you owe it to yourself to make this trip. 

River levels were low but passable when we pushed off and we only ran aground a few times. (If you make this trip, bring a boat that can take some scratches.) There were a few falls and rapids that were too dangerous to run, but the portages for these are clearly marked (in English and Spanish) and we never lost our way.

The range of landscapes that you pass through varies from forests in the upper reaches of the river to industrial zones near its mouth. We saw plenty of birds, including egrets and herons. The river runs right through the Wild Asia exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, and I thought I notices some kind of Asian antelope behind the discrete fencing of the zoo.


We stopped for lunch by this falls, which is in the vicinity of the Bronx Zoo. Gazing at the tumbling water, I thought I might have been in the Adirondacks. For folks who live in the Bronx, it's a great gift to have a landscape like this right in their backyard.


To learn more about the restoration of Bronx River, check out a recent piece in the New York Times by Michael Kimmelman, who as architecture critic does a great job of linking design, the urban ecosystem, and social justice.


To learn more about the good work of the Bronx River Alliance, and pick up some tips on paddling this splendid river, visit the homepage of the Alliance.

"Inventing Our Life"

In my youthful travels in the 1970s and 1980s, I encountered three institutions that deeply impressed me as visions of a good and just way of life: the kibbutz, the British National Health Service, and the BBC. All of these have fallen on difficult times in recent decades, but it is the kibbutz that is the subject of an interesting documentary by Toby Perl Frelich, "Inventing our Lives," now playing at the Quad in Greenwich Village. "Inventing Our Lives" explores the history and current crisis of the kibbutz movement, which has fallen victim to a turn away from socialist ideals in Israel, the movement's own internal fights, the rightward turn in Israeli politics, and the passing of the generation that led kibbutzim from their founding into the 1960s.


The film is a friendly look at the kibbutz, but it doesn't ignore the kibbutz movement's contradictions. Communal child-rearing practices sometimes stifled "normal" family life but left women with the jobs of running childcare for everyone. One kibbutz that she looks at was built, to the distress of its American-born kibbutzniks, on abandoned Palestinian homes. And for all the movement's professed egalitarianism, it could be quite elitist in its own way. In the old Israel, kibbutzniks considered themselves part of the vanguard of Israeli society. One consequence of this was that they never embraced the Middle Eastern Jews who immigrated after 1948, thereby cutting themselves off from what would become a large and growing sector in of Israel's population. This failure, "Inventing Our Lives" notes, was one of many factors that undermined the kibbutzim in the long run.


For all the problems that have befallen the movement, and for all the agonizing that accompanies efforts to either revive or privatize the kibbutzim, Frelich's interviews with founders, their children and their grandchildren convey what was best and most compelling about kibbutz life: the freedom that children enjoyed on the kibbutz grounds, the strong sense of solidarity that could turn a campfire singalong into a a swelling chorus that strengthened the voice of the weakest singer, and the beauty of a life that was lived close to nature and close to the artistic and intellectual heritage that kibbutzniks drew from European humanism.


I encountered all of these at Kibbutz Gvat in the Jezreel Valley in the 1980s, where I was a guest and worked briefly in a small workshop making parts for irrigation systems. I remember how a print of a classical painting hung outside one workroom. The painting, along with the shaded walkways between houses, the cultivated fields around, and the lives my friends there enjoyed as singers and musicians,  seemed to me like the perfect blend of the outdoors life, hard work, culture and learning.


Since the 1980s,  Gvat--like the kibbutzim portrayed in "Inventing Our Lives"--has gone through changes that I'm not in a good position to explain or understand. Whether the kibbutzim disappear or reinvent themselves is an open question left hanging at the end of "Inventing Our Lives." Something similar could be said for the BBC and the National Health Service in Britain. The social democratic ideals that animated all of these, and brought out some of the best in the 20th century, are beleaguered but still relevant. Here's hoping that the kibbutz movement  reinvents itself in a way that creates a more just and democratic Israel.

Hiking in Harriman

The hiking paths of Harriman State Park crisscross rocky ridges, military routes of the Revolutionary War, and forty years of my own memories as a backpacker. I shared all of these on a recent three-day trip with my daughter Allison.

She's in the background of this photo, making camp at the William Brien Memorial Shelter. We camped here on a route that scribed a great if lopsided circle, from the Bear Mountain Inn to West Mountain Shelter to the Brien shelter and back to the Inn. Over three days I visited some places I haven't seen in decades and checked out some new ones as well.  

The view from West Mountain Shelter looking down the Hudson Valley to New York City remains one of my favorites. It's a great destination for a first-time backpacker: the route to the shelter on the Suffern-Bear Mountain Trail climbs enough to make things challenging without making things so hard that a novice will get discouraged.

Even more impressive, though, was the view from the summit of Black Mountain ascended from the east on the Appalachian Trail. I had never walked this stretch before, and it involved a sprint where the Appalachian Trail crosses the Palisades Interstate Parkway. Once you cross the Parkway, the path climbs gradually and then steeply to a beautifully contoured stretch of trail that runs along the summit of Black Mountain. The view towards Bear Mountain to the east, and the great ridges of Harriman State Park to the west, is spectacular. If you stay on the Appalachian Trail from this point, you can then walk to the Brien shelter and camp for the night. 

From the Brien shelter, we returned to the Bear Mountain Inn via  Popolopen Gorge, a route that I can't recommend at this time because all sorts of earth moving efforts turn your walk into something like a hike through a construction site. Nevertheless, we eventually came back to Hessian Lake and the Bear Mountain Inn, which marked handsome end to our journey.
 
It was great to share old memories with Allison, a skilled backpacker in her own right, who at the age of 16 already has stories of outdoor adventures to pass on. Doubtless she will accumulate more.

In our crowded metropolitan region, Harriman remains an invaluable resource that makes the pleasures of the outdoors available to everyone. To learn more about the park, and hiking in our region, check out the NY/NJ Trail Conference. Their good work makes possible the great hiking opportunities of Greater New York.

Bonticou Crag

My lifelong love of mountaintop vistas has one complication: I have an ambivalent relationship to heights. For years, I put off an ascent of Bonticou Crag (left) in the Shawangunks because it has a reputation of requiring a head for altitude. So it was with special joy that I climbed it and stood on its summit yesterday with my son Max.

We got up early, drove to Mohonk Preserve, and hiked an easy route of carriage roads and paths to the start of the ascent. Like other scrambles in the Shawangunks, Bonticou Crag is basically a succession of moves: scramble over big boulders, walk along a ledge, squirm up a rock slab, and repeat. 

The difference with Bonticou Crag is that the handholds are trickier, the footholds aren't obvious, and everything is steeper. Twice I recited to myself the joking motto of an American expedition to the base of Mount Everest in the 1950s, which adopted a phrase posted in a school in a Himalayan village: "Gather courage, don't be a chicken-hearted fellow." (For more on this, read the fascinating, insightful and well-written Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes by Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver.)

Finally, with a few grunts, gasps and narrow squeezes, we stood atop Bonticou Crag. The view was spectacular, and the classic Shawangunk combination of barren rock and gnarled trees made us feel that we were in an alpine environment. We took a long and pleasantly winding route back to our car, then drove back to New Paltz with Bob Dylan blasting on our CD player.

I have been hiking and cross-country skiing in the Shawangunks for forty years. Going there yesterday with my teenage son Max (and his Bob Dylan CDs) was a great way to combine past and present, along with future prospects for more good hikes.

Of course, for real mountaineers Bonticou would be an easy scramble. For me, it was a strong challenge but an enjoyable one. That's the great thing about hiking: we can all find our Everests according to our abilities. (There is also an easy route up Bonticou that requires no scrambling.) 

And wherever you walk, if you find yourself in a tough ascent, remember the motto: "Gather courage, don't be a chicken-hearted fellow." You'll reach your summit in good time.

A Class Act

As a surpassingly ideological woman, Margaret Thatcher would probably recoil at how the new film The Iron Lady depicts her in distinctly personal terms as an aging, widowed, out-of-power politician struggling with dementia. But in at least one way the film reflects a political sea change that Thatcher helped set in motion: the decline of the idea that class is a relationship that structures both inequality and solidarity.

In The Iron Lady, class is a form of social distinction, a kind of snobbery that Thatcher overcomes in her own Conservative Party (along with sexism) to become prime minister. In this view, her rise is a triumph for pluck and meritocracy. The Labor Party politicians that she battles and the demonstrators arrayed against her are cardboard figures, either simpletons or hooligans.

Thatcher triumphed as a politician, the film suggests, because she remained true to herself in the face of all opposition. The content of her policies, and their impact, receive comparatively little attention. Yet this is the woman who did as much as anyone to popularize the neoliberal world we live in today, where society is a fiction, greed and gain are the engines of progress, and the most modest forms of social democracy are decried as nothing more than socialist dictatorship.

Some of this is unavoidable in a feature film organized around one central character. But I can't shake the feeling that some viewers will come away from The Iron Lady seeing Thatcher's career as a triumph for diversity (grocer's daughter overcomes the snobs) while never thinking that her vision of politics and government, which denied inequalities of class and exalted individualism at the expense of solidarity, brought us to the atomized, insecure, and massively unequal world that we inhabit today.

Hitch

Everybody’s writing about Christopher Hitchens, so I thought I would add my two cents. I never met him, never exchanged apercus over aperitifs, and was never the recipient of his kindnesses or intellectual benefactions. Like other readers of the Nation over the past three decades, I just read him regularly, agreed with him sometimes, disagreed with him other times. Of course, he wrote brilliantly and facilely on any topic of his choosing, and generally asked the big questions, those worth asking. But he was basically a provocateur, a distiller of outrage, generally (except in his marvelous literary essays),a disdainer and avoider of nuance.

His politics were basically limited to foreign policy.(In this he is unlike his great model, George Orwell, most of whose best work was on the class structure in England.) His basic instincts were always right, insisting on the importance of asking about God’s existence, of the need to maximize human freedom, for eliminating the barriers against liberty. But figuring out to achieve this in an unfree world, with plenty of bad guys, and no unalloyed good guys, is always the rub.

I basically agreed with him on Serbia and Bosnia, which I think was his great turning point in his world-view, with his acquiescence in the use of western power to liberate peoples from tyrannical dictatorship. And I understand, and sympathized with his anger at Clinton in not doing enough in the Balkans, and doing what he did tardily and clumsily to advance this goal.

But I simply don’t understand how he went from blasting Clinton for his bombing of a purported munitions factory in 1998,to, three years later, starring in the Amen corner of cheerleaders for Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. It seems so unnecessary— there were plenty of leftists and liberals who managed to combine a detestation for Saddam Hussein with opposition to the war, but he was defeated by his basic inability to see nuance in any situation, and this was a war, with horrible people on both sides, that needed nuance slavered into every crevice. And when the war became a fiasco, he had ample opportunity to admit that he had been wrong, but I guess his vaunted courage deserted him.

Anyway his legacy is obscure. His politics for the last decade of his life, a hodge-podge of ultraleftist remnants and his newfound conservative human rights realpolitik, simply did not make much sense. He left no useful political legacy except as a cautionary reminder if how difficult it is to make one’s way through the mine field of our post-post Cold War world.

If he resembles anyone, its a funnier hipper less sententious version of Whittaker Chambers for our time (with Sidney Blumenthal a stand-in for Alger Hiss.) . He will be remembered, and pardoned by many, for writing extraordinarily well. I don’t think he would have thought that was enough.

Journalists Under Arrest

According to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and spokesmen for the Bloomberg administration, the reporters arrested at the breakup of Occupied Wall Street and ensuing protests in lower Manhattan were arrested for their own safety. Or because they were trespassing on private property. Or because they had no right to be at the scene of an ongoing police operation. Hogwash. Reporters have been visiting crime scenes and accompanying police officers on dangerous and not so dangerous operations since the nineteenth century. The only conclusion I can come to is that the NYPD preferred to do its work in the dark, without independent observers. And that speaks badly for the NYPD.

The press passes that reporters carry--which are issued by the police department--clearly state that they permit the bearer to cross police lines in pursuit of a story. The idea behind the practice dates to 1836, when the newspaper editor James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald was admitted to a downtown brothel that was the scene of the murder of one Helen Jewett. As Bennett was admitted to the premises while others were kept outside, the story goes, a guard explained, "He is an editor--he is on public duty."

The notion of journalists as the eyes and ears of the public is thus an old one in New York City. It's an ideal worth taking seriously because police officers, like elected officials, act in the name of the public. If we don't have a chance to observe them in action through the eyes of reporters, then we are blinded to what is being done in the name of our city. And a blind democracy is not a healthy democracy.

Zuccotti Park may be spic and span, but something smells when the NYPD insists on arresting journalists who want to watch cops make arrests.

Order Reigns on Wall Street

I arrived at Zuccotti Park today around 1 pm, too late to have seen the eviction in the early morning hours. I did, however, see plenty of examples of how NYPD policing strategies raise tension and curb dissent. I also got a chance to think about how the Occupy movement can grow from this latest turn of events.


Along Broadway at the eastern edge of the park, around 1 pm today, the police had demonstrators and pedestrians squeezed between metal police barriers on the park side and a double line of police officers on the Broadway side. On the sidewalk, that made passing by the park crowded and at times tense.

For me, it was one more example of a problem that dates back to the Giuliani years: the practice of treating public assembly as a problem to be controlled. In the end, that makes for demonstrations hemmed into holding pens patrolled by lines of grim looking cops. On both the police and demonstrators' sides, this was not a situation conceived to cool down hotheads.

I also want to note that the Times reported that reporters were barred from the park when the evictions took place. As was noted in "Police Clear Zuccotti Park..."

Reporters in the park were forced to leave. Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said it was for their safety. But many journalists said that they had been prevented from seeing the police take action in the park, and that they had been roughly handled by officers. Mr. Browne said television camera trucks on Church Street, along the park’s western border, were able to capture images.

That's more proof, if you need any, that the fate of honest and independent journalism is inextricably linked to other freedoms like the right to protest. The First Amendment, as my late friend Jim Carey liked to point out, is more than a guarantee of freedom for journalists: it is an exhortation to gather and speak freely in a democratic way of life.

In the long run, I've always thought that the Occupy movement should value a continued presence in the park over holding turf for 24 hours around the clock. Equally important, it has to make some demands or make itself the street protest division of a movement that raises coherent demands of its own to get us out of this economic crisis.

In the long run, OWS lost to the cops last night and the right to demonstrate took another beating. In the long run, however, this can become a chance to regroup and come back fighting for a more just future.