Das Baby: new exercises in ambivalence

so, today Xica da Silva has spent the morning telling me over and over that I am her love, and then that I'm not; then that I AM, then that I'm NOT. It's like this: "tú no eres mi amor. Sí, tu eres mi amor. [pause] Tú no eres mi amor. Tú eres mi amor." I'm not sure if Xica is herself ambivalent about whether i'm her love, or if she's playing games with me.

Last I heard, I was her amor. But now she has once again accosted me with folded arms and said that I am not her amor at this moment, that I'll have to get to the back of the line before I can approach the bench. I feel like she's at the juncture of psychoanalysis and Panamanian bureaucracy - her definitive statements are like passport-stamps from immigration services, whimsically retracted according to the dictator's caprice. The weirdest part is that she talks to inanimate objects and calls them her amor, and she keeps pretending to call her true amor on the phone and making me talk to him/her. Huh. I just want to write my dissertation here.

random internet thing of the day: serpent-handling Christians

aren't these reports on internetalia really enriching your life?

Serpent-Handling Christians: called a 'snake cult' by some, these are biblical literalists in pentecostal-holiness appalachian mysticism. see also here.

second round with baby ends in stalemate

yes, Xica is back in full force. the other day she was acting up - bored and ranting, stalking the rooms of the apartment like a predatory cat, freaking out the nana. she has this thing where she twists her mouth up into an authoritative little beak, and she already knows how to fold her arms disapprovingly. an early education in symbolic violence, indeed! this is what my friend M. was calling "the mask of command" - the imperial dance that those in power mustered before the natives, which orwell talks about in his writings on burma.

i feel bad for the kid, because she has nothing to do all day and is just sort of lonely and imperious. she spends all day pining for her mother, plaintively wailing "donde está mi mamá" over and over like that storybook bird. every time the door opens or closes, she runs to it and beats on the wooden panes in fits of postpartum anguish. i'm not kidding. i definitely wish that i could spend all day entertaining her, as she's a fascinating child, but i need to write my dissertation, i really do. in fact, i shouldn't even be blogging! okay, but i must. good for the arteries, the ventricles, the breathing.

so anyway, at some point yesterday, Xica decided to like me. she even hugged my knees with intense child-force. it was sudden and unexpected; i was used to her railing at me with swirls of paranoid xenophobia in her eyes, and here she was, smiling up into my lap in this very charming and impish way. and then today she drew on my arm with some paint. so i think we've had our armistice day, and i can only imagine the happy free trade agreements to come.

in which K. learns that her roommates are the "cool kids" of Panama

yes indeed. much has transpired of late, although for the most part i've been writing, writing, and retrieving things from the filing-cabinet of my brain for this article-cum-dissertation chapter. after about 50 pages of writing, i'm almost at the point where i can just have fun just playing around with chunks of text: altering syntax here, moving that piece there, making the thing into a sort of puzzle ("rompecabezas," or "break heads," en español) in which every part will eventually gravitate to its rightful place or be cut. an apt metaphor for life, with its sheep and goats, eh?

but anyhow, after two straight days of being glued to my chair and staring intently at the pixelated mess in front of me, i needed a bit of respite. my roommates had been intimating something about this party that was going on in san felipe, in the casco viejo (the colonial old town, with crumbling architecture and whatnot), and it sounded vaguely interesting, so i invited some friends to go down with me. but no one was intrepid enough, and so i went on my own. nonetheless, it turned out to be a completely, perfectly excellent party - one of those parties where everyone is very agreeable, where you feel like 70-80% of your fellow partygoers are in agreement with your political stances, etc. it was the classic definition of a scene: there were punks, queers, hippies, hipsters, leftist radicals, and lots of rastas - kind of refreshing to see these familiar "western" types, actually. there were also all of these art installations - nothing incredibly technically spectacular, but, you know, signs of life - and live reggae from a venerable panamanian band, "raices y cultura," which sported knee-length dreadlocks, and cheap beer and wine and whiskey and rum, and an open-air garden with little wooden stools planted in the hard, cool muck that made up the floor. i should mention that this club was owned by my third roommate's sister, a lady with flashing eyes commonly known as "la bruja." it's an old monastery that was about to be sucked up into the gentrification vacuum that is engulfing that area and forcing longtime residents out. so this was the farewell party for the space, and it was a really excellent venue indeed.

among the people at this party - which my roommates masterminded, i learned later - was this ex-couple consisting of a tiny, curvaceous black chilean/panamanian woman (i mean tiny: she was definitely the most beautiful midget i've ever met) and her ex-husband, this old and ugly pierced-up white chilean guy with a ponytail who reminded me of a composite of several people i've met in the past. apparently they were divorced but lived together across the street from la casona; he was a photographer and she another sort of artist. there were tons of chileans at this party, and amazing interracial couples like you never see in the lower 48. one had a sort of idealistic sense of racial utopia, a bit...

eventually it got to be 5 am, and i was dancing around to this reggae in a sort of half-asleep fashion, my body springing around like some kind of "fashed and fagged" yoyo. there was this funny guy dancing in these loopy orbits around me - he kind of reminded me of david byrne in his post-ironic movements, which combined the flailings of a naked mole-rat with the debka and assorted orientalized "cossack dancing." it was very reminiscent of how a platypus might dance - something between fish and mammal. anyhow, this guy was sort of hilarious, and he kept sweeping past me and muttering things like "ten cuidado con tu sonRISA" (be careful with your SMILE) and "jumping is good for your circulatory system" and "i am a citizen of the universe" and things of that nature. this was all in spanish, but at one point he said, in english, "you know about californication? well, they just prohibited the trans-fatty acids. this is excellent!" i responded, "and what about my barriga? i can't survive without trans-fatty acids!" he seemed to think that that was kind of funny. anyhow, the whole exchange was sort of great. an excellent night, on the whole.

on the subject of reggae, i should also mention that last night i was hanging out with some academics, including this one scholar, O., who's been studying ethnic autonomy and indigenous land-rights and working with the UN in some capacity for upwards of a decade. he's ngobe from colón and knows basically everything there is to know about panama and the canal, so we talked about political stuff (the death-day anniversary for omar torrijos is approaching, and O. thinks that the various electoral candidates, including Juan Carlos Navarro and the famous ball-breaker Balbina, will each host their own little spectacle in a power face-off, even though torrijos's party, the PRD, is supposed to command full rights to his death-anniversary celebration), and then we got to the subject of music - salsa, reggaetón, reggae-roots, and reggae-rap. let me tell you, this is an extremely interesting tangle of all sorts of politics and borrowings and conflicts and wounded pride and the like. you know what i'm going to say: this would make a great dissertation topic. i really hope that the person writing on this topic (because i know there's at least one) is handling it in the right way, which is to say, talking to people like O. - true fans who follow the fissures and infighting closely and have a huge collection of all the music and really kind of understand the fabric of what's going on.

regarding the salsa, and the strange and chimeric figure of Rubén Blades, there's a lot to say. In particular, I can report that I'm getting some good leads on Blades's two performances on the eve of the Canal Handover and their political import. The concerts were free, and thousands of people attended - basically everyone I've talked to in recent days was there. But because some of his songs are politically controversial, and he spoke out against the government while in Cuba, he was banned from taking the mainstage at this one event, and his lineup was curtailed...something like that. Also, his tension between being 'puro panameño' and having this cosmopolitan aesthetic are noteworthy, and there's also a lot of interesting stuff about his run for the presidency under the aegis of a wacky party named after the Emberá word for "mother earth."

Regarding the ins and outs of the various reggae styles, O. told me that initially deejays had been importing reggae from Jamaica and other Anglophone Caribbean locales and playing this in clubs, and Afro-Panamanians on the atlantic and pacific sides started adapting it with spanish lyrics, so that it became a form of reggae-rap. the premier guys - nando boom and some others whose names i can't recall, including one who disappointed everyone by giving up music and becoming evangelical - were largely "ugly" in the words of O. - that is, big and lumbering black guys. but the reggae-thing spread (and this is a subject of debate: no one knows quite how the spreading happened, or if it happened at all) to puerto rico, where reggae-rap was turned into reggaetón, with the frontmen being these good-looking and largely 'white' performers like daddy yankee and wisin y yandel. This puerto rican music then came back to panama, where some performers played it, some tried to outdo it following its forms, and others tried to differentiate this from panamanian musical forms, repudiating reggaetón as totally unlike panamanian reggae-rap. there's a definite racial-consciousness component to this, since (as O. notes) those listening to reggae-rap frequently assert their racial and cultural connections to the west indies. this goes against several individuals' statements that the current generations of afropanamanian youth with connections to the West Indian labor migration are not aware of their origins as afroantillanos, or they're in denial or something like this. the cultural amnesia is not so pronounced, i'd say.

anyhow, apparently reggae-roots in the style of bob marley had a resurgence in the mid-80s and is now really popular, though it doesn't seem to have much to do with reggae-rap. all my roommates are gung-ho about reggae-roots, and the guy below us is constantly playing it with his band, sitting on the balcony and strumming his guitar and drumming and whatnot. reggae-roots seems to have a very strong 'white' following. speaking of 'white' music, i noted that the rise of 'white' puerto rican reggaetón coincided with the rise of a weird sort of white-rap genre in the US, something combining indie rock with eminem and grime in the UK. i'm not a scholar of popular music, so this is all just speculation, but the whole thing is pretty interesting, and i hope to learn more.

this is kind of great

Flin Flon, Manitoba:

"The town's name is taken from the lead character in a paperback novel, The Sunless City by J. E. Preston Muddock. A prospector named Tom Creighton found the book in the wilderness. The story is about a man named Josiah Flintabbatey Flonatin, who piloted a submarine through a bottomless lake. Upon passing through a hole lined with gold, he found a strange underground world.

When Tom Creighton discovered a rich vein of almost pure copper, he thought of the book and called it Flin Flon's mine, mercifully shortening the name. The town that sprung up around the mine adopted the name. Flin Flon shares with Tarzana, California the distinction of being named after a character in a science fiction novel.

The character of "Flinty" is of such importance to the identity of the city that the local Chamber of Commerce commissioned the minting of a $3.00 coin, which was considered legal tender within the city during the year following its issue. A statue representing Flinty was designed by cartoonist Al Capp and is one of the points of interest of the city."

interesting intertrash of the day

let's see what we've picked out of the vast garbage can that is the internet:

narcocorridos. yes, mexican sung homages to drug-smugglers. a big fad, apparently.

read about them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcocorrido

and here: http://narcocorrido.wordpress.com/

walking around, feeling sudoriferous

well, i have much to blog about - like meeting these really cool former french-colonial subjects (namely, haitians and guadeloupeans) who visited the metropole and became artists and intellectuals and whatnot, and being hit upon (i like "hit upon" better than "hit on" - sounds classier, which is ironic considering the signified) by one of the curators of this exhibit at the sort of finale soiree, at which he appeared, stinking of liquor, at roughly noon. but sadly, nonexistent blogreading public, i don't have time to report any of this, for i am in the thick of the thicket of the lair of the wolf, you know - in the vampire's cave, writing things that were due last week. (speaking of vampires, yesterday i was struck with a stroke of logorrheic genius while eating this strange concoction called "greek pizza," and in reference to something that had recently got me excited - i think an archive - i said something to the effect of, "I was like a vampire, and it was like blood." a weird phrase there! i give you leave to repeat it at your leisure.) anyhow, so for lack of time and energy, i'm just going to give you a phenomenological reading of my status at the moment and say that i can feel the sweat leaching from my pores, i am sitting in my own stew like some kind of boeuf au jus, and i feel like not a day goes by that i don't wake up and immediately smell like a ham sandwich. it's unbelievable what the body sheds when it's hot and sticky - like this sort of blackish goo that collects in crevices and probably consists of some sort of epithelium. anyhow, rolling little balls of black skin-goo is sort of fun. but i'm a little tired of constantly smelling like a ham sandwich.
okay, more soon!

things still good, flipped off by baby

well, i'm in the thick of article-writing now, and my pulse rate has slowed to an appropriately meditative thud. things are still pretty good with me, although not with frogs - they're dying by the truckload, and i have decided to skip the Smithsonian lecture today by a Zimbabwean scientist, which looked interesting, to finish the article or at least make appreciable headway. the plight of the frogs sucks, though.

nonetheless, i'm in a cheerful frame of mind, having disdained a shower and a change of clothes for the past couple days. i have to report, however, that after approaching me in trucelike fashion, with arms extended and a smiling offer to teach me the parts of the body in spanish, das Baby (who i've given the aforementioned moniker Xica da Silva) has once again decided to revile me, yelling over and over the phrase "you are not my lover!" ("tú no eres mi amor!") whilst pointing to all the things in the room (door, chair, window, cough medicine, etc) that apparently are her lovers. well, it's probably better that way - for me, a lack of pedophilia, with its concomitant police record and negative newsprint publicity, is and will always be a good thing. anyhow, that's the status of the mercurical Xica. fort-da! this proto-lady is truly a freudian subject.

feeling quite quite good

all's right in my corner. things smell and taste good again. and i've made peace with the baby. that's enough for now.

Jorge Amado

for future reference.

time to write

it is time to write. Time to write! timetowritetimetowritetimetowrite.Time to Write, Already! no more going out on the balcony to look at the neighbors and listen to their 'reggae roots.'

no more eating of sardines both inside and out of the can.

no more cruising the internet for all of its myriad and sundry informational delights. these are turkish delights, they'll turn you to stone! you know that, it's happened before! too many commas, not enough substance!

Time

To

Write!

time to write

time to write

time/to write

time to/write

it is time it is time it is timetimetimetimetime : the caffeine has spoken.

okay.

preamble: rituals of various sorts

In the interest of time, this prolegomena will be brief: i need to force some concentrated effort into article-writing. but there are many things to tell, and so i'll just outline them here and then perhaps do some rigatino later.

Yesterday was one of those long and busy, multifarious ones: in the morning, i met up with josé to attend a meeting of leaders planning Panamá's upcoming general strike at the headquarters of one of the major organizations in town the Asociación de Profesores de la República de Panamá. representatives from two other related organizations, FRENADESO and SUNTRACS, showed up, but the meeting was basically closed to the public and limited to the planners of the strike. José wants to set up a 'frente cultural' to educate and serve members of these groups and the people in neighborhoods to which the groups cater, and so he brought me to see what i thought. anyhow, it was interesting, and i got some contact info and was thinking about ways to form a committee that would incorporate theatre and performance into their demonstrations or even day-to-day affairs and outreach efforts.

after drinking a few 30-cent cups of coffee at an excellent and incredibly cheap greek diner in perejil, we went to the headquarters of the panamanian communist party to hang out and take some photos with a sort of amazing social realist tapestry featuring a dapper-looking lenin. more on that later, though the idea of lenin's face on a rug is weird to me, since people will implicitly be treading on his five o'clock shadow and jaunty fisherman's cap.

we also spent a couple hours talking about the future of marxism with an 80-year-old west indian panamanian man, luther thomas, who seemed to hold a high position in the communist party. he was impeccably knowledgeable about the history of panamanian-US race relations and also quite well read on international communist or progressive-leftist goings-on. he commented admiringly on berlin's gay mayor and the spirit of cooperatism that informed some european politics...anyhow, interesting guy. and i got some names of people from Colón, who offered to take me to a central organization there, la Iglesia San José (which must be Saint Joseph's Church of West Indian fame). So that was cool.

i hated to leave Luther and his grumbly and awe-inspiring oratory, but i had to get on to the next meeting, at SAMAAP headquarters. that was largely uneventful but good for the research. also, there's one spirited and combative woman who i actually ran into this morning at the 7:30 am West Indian service at la Iglesia Episcopal San Cristóbal, an event for which i was up at dawn. i'll say, a drum kit really improves a religious service. also, I enjoyed shaking hands with everyone, receiving communion, and singing, "For there is pow'r, there is pow'r, there is wonder-working pow'r/in the blood/of the Lamb!" This was the extreme of bells and smells, let me tell you: bread, wine, crosses hoisted high on pikes, golden sacramental chalices, a secret bible-chamber, and tons of incense of the 'frank' variety. also, there were some unbelievably cute kids at this service: a skinny, sniffling trio and then a fat baby with a burgeoning afro and a matching set of rhinestone-studded headband and shoes. i wanted to hug them most terribly. also, several older women pressed me to their vast bosoms after i was compelled to introduce myself to the congregation (as all visitors were). one of them said, "I MUST hug the visitors" while embracing me with bone-crushing force. goooood feelings abounded.

so that, in short, brings us to today and this article which must must must be written. ho, canada! let's get this thing underway.

Captive Nations Week

Apparently, the third week in July is named "Captive Nations Week," in honor of Cold War hawks and their liberation theology horse-hockey (to quote a certain photosynthetic friend of mine). Apparently this commemorative day was started in 1959, and the list of “captive nations” reads: “Poland, Hungary, Lithuania, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Estonia, White Ruthenia, Rumania, East Germany, Bulgaria, mainland China, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, North Korea, Albania, Idel-Ural, Tibet, Cossackia, Turkestan, North Viet-Nam, and others [sic, throughout]”.

So let's hear it for the Cossacks, "White Ruthenia," and all of those other oppressed peoples in colorful folk garb and little tassled hats (or so I'd imagine)! Lev Dobriansky, what a guy.

Jose y Anita

Hannibal Gaddafi

a truly amazing name. And look at this face! He's like the violent Libyan Fabio or something.

reportings from the field

cutting business cards [look at that smile!] in the copy shop of la U. de Panamá


the real title of this blog is as formatted below:

Reportings from the Field

featuring:

Dinner with Mandatory Manicure

and

A Meeting with a Destitute Pianist,

or:

What Is To Be Done?

the past couple days have yielded much in the way of news and, i might add, have rendered me bone-tired, which could be one sign of a day well-spent, at least sometimes. so i'll briefly go into some of the details and the itinerary and whatnot, because i feel like this is an essential part of the process of thinking through some of the work that i'm doing here and also considering whether i need to adjust some of my practices in the future. i've accepted all of these invitations partly out of curiosity and the desire to socialize, and partly because i'm wondering if they could yield some sort of theoretical fruit. but then i realize that theoretical fruit (like this one, of which i currently possess an entire ramo) frequently needs to be cooked or processed mentally before it can be digested. there are a few steps between the observation/experience and the reflections that could emerge. so i'll consider this blog a step toward the processing of the goods, a sort of halfway house for errant ideas and erstwhile scenes. (speaking of the word erstwhile: god, i love that word, and i wish that it meant something else, so that i could use it more often. it needs to have at least three to four meanings, in my opinion, as do all mellifluous words. in fact, i think that we should really winnow down the english to about 100 very linguistigenic, polysemous words that are extremely pleasant on the tongue and in the ear. okay, i don't really think this, but.)

so on to the meat of the issue: yesterday, i was invited in the morning to do some follow-up interviewing and view performance footage that turned out to be immeasurably helpful and good for this article that i'm writing, and which is taking me for-fucking-ever to do but should turn out really well, i think. right now the ideas are really simmering - they're in that late stage of idea-development - and i'm adding some pretty magnificent seasonings, the cumin of my mind. En serio. anyhow, i'd also been invited to cook for some people from la Sociedad de los Amigos del Museo Afro-Antillano en Panamá (SAMAAP) later that evening in a different part of town. so after engaging in some important dialogue on a few details that needed clarification, we ate lunch with the mother-in-law of this playwright/activist/teacher. the mother-in-law was a 98-year-old lady who'd worked for the Canal but retained her jamaican citizenship. she was totally vivacious, with this long and impish tongue that she'd stick out while smiling the most endearing smile i've seen in a while. she was the kind of ole lady who had clearly been a sexy knockout in her youth. anyhow, she was obsessed with the color of my eyes and grabbed my hand with postpartum force. she was so alert and vivacious, even though her eyes looked like mussels in a tide pool exposed to the sun. also, i need to reiterate that the playwright/activist/teacher is intimidatingly brilliant and and empowered, and spending time with her has often made me feel sort of filled with a sense of things greater than myself and much work to do in the world. it's a good feeling with a considerable shelf life. there's more to tell about this lady and her teaching philosophy, including performance and/as pedagogy, but you're gonna have to read my article, folks! and that means that i really need to write it. but first, this.

so after that meeting, i went to the other neighborhood, picked up by another lady who's a teacher in Panama but has this thick and amazing brooklyn accent, and whose car is named "Baby" (she told us all to say "Thank you, Baby" to it when we got out, so as to keep the air conditioning running and the radio working and all that). she was conducting a meeting in the car with two other teachers, and one of them was taking minutes as we bumped along. of course, when i got in both of them wanted to know some things about me, like where i came from and whether i liked panama (the usual preliminary banter), but she said "No! No talking until this meeting's adjourned." At which point one of them protested that I ought to be allowed to take part in the meeting. so I said, "I have nothing to report at this point," making the other three laugh, and we left it at that.

we got to the house of the other lady, Marva, and just as i headed into the house it started to rain in this incredible monsoon way. it rained for several hours, flooding all of the yards and houses of everyone in this little neighborhood - each yard being a sort of box with high concrete walls, which dammed the water in and made little muddy square consecutive swimming pools. imagine a giant ice cube tray. so we watched the water roll off mango trees as these intriguing yellow-bellied squirrellike monkey creatures jumped from wall to wall and birds gathered to bathe themselves and eat some sort of gusano. i asked one guy what the bird was that i saw everywhere, and he said, "oh, that's just the regular bird," indicating that it was no big deal and didn't even have a name. then i told him about this bird with a yellow chest that i saw gripping the telephone wire outside my balcón, leonard cohen-style, and he told me that that one was called "Pecho Amarillo," which of course means "Yellow Chest." ah, birds.

anyhow, so the water was reaching comical levels - a flash flood of sorts - and people were running around trying to start their sump pumps and all that sort of thing. meanwhile, i was cooking: i made a salad of corn, culantro (which i feel sort of beats the hell out of cilantro, or at least can hold its own), beans, tomatoes, pimentón, and lime juice, as well as one of beets, onions, vinegar, potatoes, and herbs, which i let marinate for like 2 days. both turned out to be pretty great. i also made a sort of thick and intense sauce of pixbae, pimentón, aji chombo, onion, sugar, and vinegar, which i simmered for several hours. furthermore, i made these delicious sort of cookie-things that were somewhat rumpled-looking but awesome. okay, i'm lying a bit: some of these things had been made prior to the occasion, but some i made there, having lugged around this huge bag of corn and beans and other vegetable matter all day.

anyhow, at this point i was basically like a corpse, as i hadn't slept all night because of extreme caffeination. so while i was having fun cooking and watching the rain, i was also dying to go home and sleep. but the night continued, as more people showed up: pinky, this lady who specializes in nails (finger and toe); faraja, an elegant IB english teacher who works mainly out of africa, in senegal, cote d'ivoire, and now tunisia; and marshall, a former officer in the US military who i gathered was not afro-panamanian, since he didn't speak spanish or have a bajan accent, but about whom i never found out much; and various other people who came and left, including a cousin and some electricians who chatted and read magazines while fixing a device in the house. anyhow, it was eclectic company, and i felt totally at home. it was good to be swinging in someone's hammock, drinking wine, and watching the rain, i'll say.

the lady of the house, Cleotha (who everyone called Miss Christy), was the most sprightly 89-year-old i've ever met. this makes two unbelievably energetic and sharp old ladies in one day. No, three: Pinky, who looked to be about 26 (with incredibly smooth skin and seemingly no fat on her body) was 42, and she had this really collected air about her, as well as a very dry sense of humor. back to Cleotha: okay, so this lady was running around and looking like someone at the young end of her 60s, i'd have said if pressed. she readily informed me that she was 89 and "about to die" and smiled a hell of a lot while saying it. i said that i needed to learn her secret, and she said, "happiness." hm, good idea. anyhow, the whole time i should mention that i spoke in this weird mixture of spanish and english that everyone spoke in. i'm not sure why there was a need to mix the two like this, since everyone spoke spanish and english perfectly (except for me, of course - but my spanish is getting so good these days. en serio), but it seemed to be the thing to do. anyhow, i appreciated the bilingualism, and it amazed me that the majority of the afropanamanian community, with the exception of some children and older people, has this bilingualism and is therefore able to sort of exist in several circles at once.

Cleotha told me that she had worked for the post office in the US (i infer that she may have moved there after 1955, having achieved US citizenship, though she told me that the land on which the house was built has been in the family for something like 70 years, when it was a small farm - and it was partially autoconstructed "likkle by likkle," as Pinky informed me), and every time she mentioned her retirement pension, she said "God bless the USA" as a sort of coda. after dinner, she told me that i was getting fat, pounded me on the belly, and proceeded to stuff crackers into her mouth while telling me how much she liked eating fried things as she laughed and blew cracker dust in my face. hilarious lady.

Pinky came by once every two weeks to clean and paint the finger and toenails of the entire family, including the men. this was a time- and labor-intensive process involving some skin-scraping tools and things like that. pretty neat. i watched the whole thing unfold, and then Cleotha and her daughter, Marva, demanded that i have Pinky do my nails, "to attract a boyfriend." I should mention that they had tried to set me up with one of the electricians earlier in the evening, albeit in vain. he was sitting across from me, and they pointed to me and asked me my age, then to him, then back to me: "you should go out with him. he's your age." i didn't quite know if this gesture was in earnest or what, and both of them kept remarking that i would soon find a husband, since i was so young. well, uh, okay. sin comentario.

anyhow, so Pinky did my nails in this sort of bicolor style, with flowers and lunas and all these things that were, i was informed, very Panamanian. this was later confirmed somewhat disdainfully by my colombian roommate. so now i'm sporting these crazy uñas. the whole procedure involved clipping my cuticles and pushing around the skin on my fingers and filing and adjusting and balancing, and all of it was so pleasant that i was lulled into this sort of semi-conscious "pleasure coma" state, with rain sounds trickling in in the half-light of the porch. so nice.

dinner was also quite something; my labors paid off, and there were several more courses to the thing. also, faraja told us about her teaching experience in africa, and she wore this elegant senegalese garment and spoke in this low, soft voice that was measured and authoritative. very cool. she told us about a fight that she'd had with the administration, wherein she'd basically threatened to quit until she had the boss on his knees - and i regaled them with my various stories from the lectern. also, marshall turned out to be this very nice and gentlemanly guy, and i think he sort of started warming up to me. nobody else had seemed to mind the little white girl with the short hair and slightly disheveled air about her, but he was a little surprised and a bit prickly. i got the sense that he was from the States, you know? or maybe you don't. but if you want to know what i mean, we can talk later about the history of race relations in the US. uh-huh.

so that was really a good night, and when i got back to the apartment i crashed most gloriously and slept through the honking cranes and plowshares. to reapproach (and reproach) the bible: forget beating swords into plowshares - let's not beat anything for a while, okay? it's fucking noisy and leads to clamor and particulate matter in the air. and infrastructual chaos. and homeownership, which we know is a flawed system. blah!

on to the second part of the story: today i awoke all sticky and well-slept. went to meet this wacky and interesting guy, josé, at the university of panama, where he was stationed at something called the APUDEP or some such, the association of profesores of u-panama or what have you. he was tooling around on the computers there, and he told me that he'd successfully agitated for internet-wired computers in several parts of the university. huzzah! he's a marxist technocrat, and his dream is for venezuelans and cubans to invent a giant socialized system of computer-distributing and informational access to solve the world's problems. although i'm not a fan of raúl castro and i agree with my other friend josé that chávez is "un payaso," i'm not going to say anything.

josé's uniform consists of the following: jaunty maroon beret with a peace button and a canadian flag; a black shirt that says "Basta Ya!" which is also the name of one of his antiwar organizations; a long white beard; shorts (which he wears as a rebellion against the stifling attire associated with business culture, and its inappropriateness for the tropics); and this umbrella that he ties to his body with string, in similar fashion to the way that one carries a machine gun. José is involved in this organization here, in addition to sort of knowing everyone and being everywhere all the time. he does art, political organizing on a number of levels, and is a technological wizard. he walks around the campus of the university of panama knowing everyone, talking with all passers-by about their daily doings, and befriending students of all ages. we spent a while talking with the security guard, who was also a student majoring in environmental economics (something that he said went nowhere in panama, where the seco company herrera was dumping toxic waste into rivers and turning the water pink) and this group of water-rights activists who are inviting me to their next meeting; we also met a young female medical student and a teacher of "archivology," who said that she really liked my "accent," and a bunch of other people. it was lots of fun jawing away in spanish and surprising people with my conversational skills (though i think they were sort of pretending to be surprised). i felt quite the celebrity, being introduced as a professor of theatre from the US and all those bells and whistles.

anyhow, soon enough i realized that i needed some business cards to give out, and josé helped me make and print them (see picture above; note the harold arts residency shirt that i'm sporting for a product placement lark). so we made the cards, josé meticulously photographing each step, and then every time i gave one out he took a picture of the (re-staged) transaction - i'm not going to exhaust you with those, but you get the idea.

so anyhow, after having a cup of coffee and chatting with various students and profs in the café (which, i should add, was across the street from a teatro en el aire libre, as well as the cine universitario, which is having a series of showings on rainier werner fassbinder, and the health center, and a bunch of other really interesting-looking pockets of student activities and teachers' unions and things), we finally got going on our real task for the day: to find the home of this elderly, decrepit former piano savant, anita webster, and interview her a bit about her life performing in several major theatres and hotels in latin america, in addition to giving televised concerts and interviews on many radio stations in the 60s.

josé had told me a bit about this lady, but not much: he'd met her at the Café Coca-Cola, where she'd been treated to a meal and a cup of coffee, and he'd taken some photos with her and assorted other Coca-Cola regulars. he'd apparently first met her when he was a teenager and she was a famous classically trained pianist playing a bit. then, a few years ago, he'd contacted his friend, a "cineast" (his description), to make a documentary about her life. they'd conducted several hours of interviews, including a tutorial wherein she explained some of the internal functions of the piano, and she'd played a beethoven sonata in a fancy hotel in la Ciudad. however, his friend had soon returned to live in an anarchist co-op in spain and had apparently fallen somewhat out of touch. so this is what i knew on the way to visit this lady.

another thing: josé had never been to her house before, and he didn't have any contact information for her (for reasons i later found out). he only knew that she lived in a place called "la loma de morgan," about which no one else seemed to know. on our way out of the university, we flagged down about thirty people, none of whom knew where this place was save one guy who vaguely recalled hearing about it but thought that it was now called "la loma de los gringos." he told us where that was, and we went off in that direction.

we took a chiva, the People's Ride, and bounced around in our elementary-school seats to some reggaetón while josé talked to everyone on the bus. it turned out that we were squished in next to two mormons, 19-year-old corn-fed boys with pale golden skin and upturned noses, who had been living in the barrio of san miguelito for little over a year. they touted the new temple in corozal (it has white carpets, we learned, and you have to wear shoe covers when going in) and told us a bit about their practice. they were sort of impassive and seemed completely neutral about being in panama. weird. they both wore starched white shirts and ties and black pants and looked to be wilting in the heat. later on, josé introduced me to this afropanamanian guy studying "the impersonation of people like bonnie and clyde" (his words) at a school in the area and, in his spare time, leading architectural history tours down in the Casco Viejo. he was very polite and wiry, with a reggae-looking hat.

so we get off the bus still not quite knowing where we are, but i trust josé to figure it out. he keeps saying, "someone will know her." we ask everyone crossing our path, but no one seems to know where this place is, and it's kind of comical to hear him say, "conoce a una viejita que toca el piano, 'anita of panama,' ella era muy famosa en el pasado..." at some point we stop to buy her a few things - coffee and cakes - and we go into a police station (where a muslim man is being held on one seat, while two women look downcast on the other) to ask the guys about the whereabouts of this lady. none of them know anything, and they keep passing clips of ammunition back and forth and adjusting their khaki uniforms and grunting and blinking and fumbling with various objects in their pockets. they look nervous, and they're making me nervous, though josé seems very at ease and unfurls this long and sort of purple-prose speech about how they're doing really grand things for the country, etc. we realize they're not helpful in the least, though they should know the vicinity well enough. finally we encounter a taxi driver who tells us that it's something like to the left, past the school, up the hill, down, and over, and we head in that direction.

meanwhile, it's starting to rain pretty hard, and josé's taking pictures like mad of all sorts of things: autoconstructed houses built of corrugated iron and wood, the empty school (apparently the government is using some fiberglass scare to keep the kids out of school) plastered with signs advertising the local politicians (mireya lasso and someone else), and a building either being built or torn down, it's hard to say which. we keep going and hail about 30 other cabs, none of whom knows about "la loma de morgan" or the little old lady who plays the piano. none of the people walking know about it. no one. so this is a bit disenchanting, and i'm beginning to wonder if we're in the right place at all, since we got there on the advice of two random characters, one of whom nonetheless sported some pretty fancy gold teeth.

so finally we flag down a cab, and it turns out that the driver used to be some sort of low-level municipal politician, and he not only knows the neighborhood but also the lady in question. he himself is a thoroughly chistoso character with a low and raspy voice, and he tells us that we should help him write his memoirs (las memorias de un taxista or something like that) as he has "seen things that few have seen, and heard things that few have heard," and so on.

anyhow, he takes us to this house (which is fairly far away at the top of a hill that, he tells us, is also known as Cinco Pisos). the neighborhood consists largely of these small but new and brightly-painted, well-appointed homes, with gold-tipped plumbago fences and one-car garages. the suburbs. the glaring exception is Anita's house, which is made of rusted corrugated iron with giant holes and particle-board beams. the abject poverty of the house, compounded by Anita's emaciated frame, is shocking to me. also, several dozen extremely lean dogs gather around us, barking with teeth bared, as we approach. one of them keeps biting the hand and arm of Anita as if to snap it off, thin as it is. she's wearing a filthy smock and a bra, and old, rotting shoes.

Her male companion, who is never introduced and doesn't seem to speak, comes to the door first and waves away the hovering dogs with a giant stick. i am still sort of panicking at the immiseration here - a third woman is literally living in a hole in the ground, surrounded by cats, in the backyard of the place. josé now tells me the second goal of the visit: to take photographs and document this squalor, so that he might be able to enlist a team of people to help him fix this place up. he keeps saying, "what is to be done" in a way that is not really a question but more of an incantation.

and of course i'm inundated with all kinds of ideas and impulses and whatever else: extreme sadness for these two starving elderly people living in this way, with no food or electricity or water. it's insane as compared to the neighbors' houses, and as expected, the surrounding homeowners have their eyes on the property values and are trying to buy Anita out or drive her out, one way or the other. apparently a group of men came to the house recently with iron tools and attacked her dogs, breaking open the head of one of them. that one keeps running around, bleeding from the still-visible scar running over the length of his head. he seems extremely traumatized by the whole scene and keeps nervously pacing between Anita and the man. the third woman lumbers around in the back, but apparently she's lately become an enemy too: Anita took her in as a companion, and now the woman is pressuring them to give her the house. she, younger and clearly less decrepit, stays apart from the two starving old people the entire time.

while Anita talks about the death-threats made on her and her companion and the dogs (according to her, the entire neighborhood consists of jehovah's witnesses who are trying to murder her), josé takes pictures and urges me to get to the point. we sit down, and she begins to tell us about her training in Chile with a series of piano teachers; her repertoire, which consists of etudes, nocturnes, Spanish music, Chopin, Beethoven, and others; and her various gigs, in arequipe, peru; rio de janeiro; antofagasta, chile; and others that she didn't write down. i kept trying to speak to her in spanish, but she insisted that we speak only english, and her english was impeccable. in contrast to her emaciated, dirty frame, she spoke with an imperious tone about high-cultural themes: art, literature, her private education in Chile. she referred to Panama as "this hell" and cursed panamanians (who she compared to philistines, an argument that josé felt was implicitly racist). as we talked, several of the neighbors passed by and looked in disapprovingly. it was quite incredible: dogs crammed into a collapsing metal shed (Anita told us that there were 26 dogs and 3 cats living on this plot), and a roof filled with holes and with no utilities. she wouldn't let us inside but told us that she couldn't make coffee for lack of water and electricity. moreover, there was a large car sitting under this piece of roof that had fallen off (the "garage"), and it clearly had been sitting there for upwards of two decades.

so we talked some more, and she told us how she'd never had an agent but did all the contracting for gigs herself. she'd been invited on television in perú and had done several interviews, and josé really wanted some archival documentation of this, so we got her to recount some of the venues, dates, and locations for her performances so that i could scout around the archives a bit. a bit of a fight soon began to emerge: anita wanted badly to see the film that josé's friend had made of her playing piano, but josé told her that the friend would not produce any footage until the other components of the documentary - the archival texts and background narrative of her history - were in place. this seemed a bit excessive to me, and i proposed that the friend edit some of the footage into a promotional excerpt for distribution, something not too uncommon. but there seemed to be something else going on, a subtext that i didn't know, so josé and i decided to talk about this another time.

anita was obsessed with viewing the footage and appeared not to recognize her dire poverty and emaciation. josé later told me that her haughty attitude prevented her from seeking a job (she had held one as a teacher of english and 'civics,' but she was fired for some reason), and that when she'd had a good income, she'd frittered it away. i didn't quite believe this, but she did seem to be incredibly well-educated, the limit-case of an impoverished intellectual. apparently she walked several miles every day to beg for food in the casco viejo. i asked josé how she survived, and he said, "i don't know, but she fucking survives." what is to be done.

soon we realized that it was almost 5, fairly late. feeling desperate, i stuffed some dollars in her hand - basically all i had at that point - as well as some crackers that i had bought from a vendor aboard the chiva. she put the money inside her bra and started wolfing down the crackers, giving some to her companion and the traumatized dog, who also ate them with zeal. on the way back, i tried to think of possible solutions with josé, but my brain was sort of paralyzed, fogged with all of this intense stimulus. he seemed to apply some of the "blame" to Anita's intransigence, but i felt less able to adjudicate and more confused as to potential solutions. while there, he had been muttering "what is to be done," and we saw that some work had been started a while ago: someone had collected more corrugated metal for the roof, which needed fixing. but the metal lay in huge strips, and josé told me (because his own place used the same kind of metal) that you couldn't just lay it on there, you had to sort of fit it and work it in in a way that needed organization on the part of a specialized team. moreover, he noted that if we went into the house to clean and dig and rearrange, we'd encounter vastly more difficult unexpected obstacles in the piles of leafy mud and trash that lay everywhere. i saw what he meant.

so i suggested that we meet again to talk this over, and in the meantime we plan to bring the couple some cooked food, albeit food that they could chew (since neither had many teeth). but i don't exactly know what is to be done when one doesn't have family or friends. this came in striking contrast to the people of last night, who were not wealthy but had survived years of US racism and Panamanian xenophobia to form deep-set multigenerational connections and "make do" in that de certeauan sense. anyhow, vamos a ver.

another thing to know

"a la orden" = "at your service." this, according to an acquaintance, is a holdover from feudal times. always helpful finding out more ways to act like a serf.

katie vs. baby

first off, who recognizes the reference in this blogtitle? yep, it's cobra vs. baby.

and I'm referring to this incident because the baby of the house, this pouty three-year-old, has of late become bolder in her aggressive advances toward me, doing things like trying to stick her fingers up my nose. at first i thought that she was "playing," but now i feel like she was initiating a fight over her turf, baby-style.

the fight culminated yesterday in an ugly incident that has since rendered me a pariah not only to the baby but to her nana, Areli. Let me explain. So for the past few days, the baby (let's call her Xica da Silva) has been doing things like running into my room, stealing small objects like caramelos, trying to force these small objects into my mouth after rolling them around on the floor, sticking her fingers up my nose, etc. I thought that this was all harmless. but then yesterday morning i walk into my room and Xica has stolen my deoderant and is sort of examining it. i don't want her to eat it, so i start saying, no, no, no, that's not for babies, that's dangerous, etc. This - my stern, no-nonsense tone and hands-on-hips stance - prompts her to open her eyes and start jiggling her lower lip angrily and yell, "Fea!" at me, clearly mustering as much ire as she can. the word (the Word) came out in a sort of deep and threatening timbre, like "feeeeeaaaaaaaa." with an accusatory point of her finger (the same one she's been trying to stick in my nostril recently) she handed over the goods and slunk out of the room.

obviously you can't yell "fea" at a houseguest. so i reported this to her mother, who immediately looked apologetic but blamed it on Areli for not watching Xica closely enough. i really wanted to say, "no, it's not Areli's fault, your kid is incredibly spoiled," but i thought better of it. So now Areli hates me, and so does the kid. This morning I walked out of my room only to find Xica planted in front of the door on a tricycle. When she saw me (I made the mistake of saying good morning to her) she looked up at me spitefully, finger pointed at an invisible scarlet letter (F?) on my chest.

Oh well. I have to say, I don't really care. But I must say that Xica da Silva is threatening to become an overgrown brat, lazing around and watching telenovelas all day (as she already does), with her two little jaunty ponytails (I can imagine her as a 30-year-old with these vestigial ponytails) doing their best to counteract their owner's gloomy countenance.

Speaking of countenance, the other day she told me in no uncertain terms that she wanted to eat my face. Seriously. I'm only worried that this little explosion is going to prompt her to more assertive tasks of vengeance, like some sort of guerilla terrorist. maybe she'll bomb the bathroom. or maybe she'll hire some of the kids in the guardería to do it. i can see it now: a terrorist cell of kindergarten suicide bombers, the new vogue.

i should also mention

that lately the dueña of the house has needed to work nights, so she hired this indigenous-looking young woman (the "nana") to care for her 3-year-old (who is this kind of snotty kid with a bad-itude and a belly to match; she's been frogmarching around me lately and creeping me out with her twisted, sneering mouth. I suspect that she's older than her years, possessed of a snobby, demanding prescience, and everyone agrees). anyhow, because i've been hanging around the house during the day and trying to write my article lately, i've been talking to this nana (who is something like the nana of her mother and whose name is Areli), and have found out a few things about her. for example: she lives in an impoverished and "peligroso" shantytown next to la Ciudad called San Miguelito, and at night gangs roam the streets and assault and rob anyone who happens to be walking around after dark. Last night she got home at 10:30 and was robbed of all the money that she made cuidando la niña in Obarrio, this rich part of town where i've rented a room. Today and the rest of this week, she has to stay here until 10 or 11 at night, and she's worried that she'll run up against the same thing when she leaves here. But the mother also works like a fiend, and her kid's sick, and the guardería is to expensive for her right now. I should also, also mention that this apartment contains several lodgers and feels more like a festive boardinghouse than a comparatively boring single-family home. Two of the lodgers work in the Colón Free Zone and commute daily for like 2 hours. (Not sure if I've already said this. God, the memory is short, and the lazy hands refuse to search among archived blogposts! Sorry readers.) anyhow, the Free Zone is another story for another blog.

Back to Areli. She has a 10-month old baby who is sick with a fever right now. Areli hopes to one day study to be either a profesora or to work in the tourism industry (and attend school in Spain): big dreams for a little brown lady from the Panamanian equivalent of the sticks. How exactly would she go about pulling herself up by her bootstraps, I'd like to know. Human rights, people! Or a fairer distribution of wealth, perhaps. She has these sad black eyes. She has to spend her days caring for this ungrateful, mewling (and actually screaming) little white girl while her own child is feverish in the slums. Ah, life under das Kapital.

uneven development: some vignettes

so, today i'd had a meeting set up with a very interesting and important guy in Panama's theatre scene. we drove around and talked about the recent history of theatre and 'las artes escénicas' in Panama, and at some point we lurched (i had drunk a bit too much coffee made in the moka, so everything felt a bit lurchy to me) up a hill in Betánia to one of panama's grandest private universities, la universidad latina. unbelievable, the resources and air-conditioning there. as we approached, this really tricked-out ladystudent sauntered by - she had a designer purse hanging from each shoulder and perched unsteadily atop these stiletto-y shoes of shiny golden faux-snake or something. anyhow, this (along with the tight-and-revealing uniform of all panamanian women) was her 'learning' outfit, i guess.

and this place had computers! rooms full of computers! and wireless internet in the classrooms! the comparison to Panama's weedy, crumbling, virtually windowless public university was striking. i was also told that the school's director had studied in the States and therefore knew about things like putting the library's catalogue online. so depressing, for so many reasons. it's funny how privatization everywhere looks the same.

then we traveled to a few theatres sprinkled around the metropolitan landscape to check out their material resources and chat with some personnel. again, the lack of cultural things is funny to me, because demand for theatre is surely present (i'm not sure if i've blogged about attending the alarmingly spectacular disneyesque megamusical recently), but there's a lot of bureaucracy and struggle and etc., and private funding - which means essentially a few wealthy eccentrics taking an interest - seems to be the only way to make things happen here. so everything is very selective, a trickle. boal seems to have passed this place by. i am actually becoming convinced by those arguments about theatre-for-empowerment (let's call it this rather than theatre-for-development, as i can't really stomach the d-word right now). i feel like it tends to work, especially when paired with educational activities and 'delight,' but this commodity is so pricey, like happiness or crude oil. it takes place in selective spaces with macadamized floors and people in leotards. eh.

also, i learned recently that the president of the university of panama has a fake PhD that he purchased in Franco-era Spain. hmm.

sometimes the peripatetic and vertiginous nature of this place, with its extremes of quality of life, are hard to take, although i could also be feeling sick from the bumpy car-ride and large quantities of condensed consumed caffeine. rather than being puro colonialista in this instance, however, i feel like i'm connecting the landscape here more and more to conditions in the US and in other "rich," "western" and what have you locales. not so hard to do. this is my cosmopolitan education at work! anyhow, gasoline costs the same here as there.

ah, neoliberalism. what a terrible fucking idea! more could be said about that, but you probably know it.

Monday slinks by like a foxy lady

So it does. Today I was going to participate in a march like this one (though probably not as big and glamorous), but it turned out to be happening next month. Oh well. I did end up meeting a pretty cool and crazy old man and hanging out with these old-timer lefty radicals down at the Coca-Cola Café, a very cheap and storied hangout in the Casco Viejo from whose doorway a labor activist was disappeared many years ago, to be dug up recently. One of the dudes told me that his parents had sat at the corner table in the café twice a day for several decades. We ate corvina al ajillo and talked about politics, art, political art, and the like - including a new project to help some impoverished Embará children survive by doing some touristy-art things that also proved to be fun for them. The man liked parrots and kind of looked like one too. I'm trying to upload a photo of him, but for now it's stalled. Anyhow, he had a sort of site-specific project involving these colorful hats that he'd made and a portrait of "the Che," apparently the first portrait ever painted of said Che. I feel inclined to doubt that.

Anyhow, on a slightly unrelated note, I'm thinking that I kind of want to have a parrot as a pet, pirate-like. Those of you who know me know that I'm not really a pet kind of person, but parrots are sort of like humans, with their cocked heads and modulated voices and roving eyes. Recently I've seen some light green ones flapping about that have made me feel like having a parrot curl around my fingers might be the way to go.

Okay, must now sleep. Am bone-tired, too tired for articles. Tomorrow, up with the morning cranes and their industrial squawk.

Sunday evening randonnées

1) I've been eating a lot of beets of late, and I realize that I like them, and that they're incredibly cheap. How could I never have thought of this before? Beets, with their beautiful color and sort of tree-ring interior, should be the center of a vegetal cult.

2) Something I did tonight that I've never before thought to do: find out some stuff about Lyndon LaRouche. Up until now, I've known him as the source of hand-lettered signs on Riverside Drive.

3) If anyone ever wants to go with me to the Crop Over Festival in Barbados, I'd love to go. Calypsonians with names like Fat Childe facing off for two months straight? Sounds like a pretty excellent time to me.

Okay, good night to you.

panoply of fruits vs. contested histories

As may be guessed from the title of this post, today was rather schizoid. in the morning, i got up with the dredging machines (or whatever the machines are that are making hellish rackets - they're damn annoying, that's what i know) and sprang out of bed, despite having little sleep because of the evening construction. white noise this is not. if i were to color this noise, i'd say it was chartreuse - or a chartreuse-puce blend, like an 80s tennis uniform. anyhow, so i woke up and there was the little baby of the house, who has this giant bulging barriga and is always rubbing it like a lecherous old man. she doesn't seem to like me very much, or perhaps she's just sniffing out the new girl like some territorial creature. lately she'll do this thing where she walks really really close to me, passing within about an inch of my chair, and yet pretends not to see me, like a snobby cat. anyhow, she's 'cheeky,' or caprichosa, to quote my roommates. so she and i were the only ones up this morning, and she kept running around with this little purse filled with cookies and pretending to offer them to me, whereupon i'd pretend to take them, and she'd snatch them back with a triumphant look on her face. already learning freud's work, this one. anyhow, i started growling at her as if i were a hungry monster, and she got scared, and i felt triumphant. now i know how elementary school bullies think.

after a while the others started waking up, and i accompanied the really cool and funny colombian woman, as well as the mother of the person from whom i'm renting the apartment, to this fruit and vegetable market that they'd been hinting about all week. i should mention that when i first moved in, i noticed that the place was overflowing with a fruit-and-vegetable cornucopia like you've never seen in your life. we're talking ten papayas, various pineapples and mangoes and mangosteens and maracujá and this fruit called tomate de árbol that tastes sort of like a cross between a kiwi and a raspberry. and there was more: beets, leeks, carrots that looked like machine guns, or testosterone treatments gone horribly wrong; pounds of potatoes and onions and lettuce, etc. so naturally i wondered about this, because the nearby supermarket's selection of national-industry foods like that is skimpy to say the least. [note: when i say national-industry foods, i'm referring to a certain rhetoric of protectionism and import-substitution involving stuff from the interior and provinces like chiriquí. there's a lot growing there, i must say. and panamanian stores often feature it like some sort of social realist trophy. this type of thing reaches ridiculous heights when, for example, someone tries to sell you an onion from peru as some sort of imported luxury, as happened to us today.] anyhow, so it turned out that everything in this cornucopia came from a wholesale fruit market, which sold to supermarkets and other city vendors.

i had seen the place before on my way to the canal zone archives, but i'd never been inside. it's in a really strange area that borders the zone at ancon around 4th of july avenue/avenue of the martyrs (the theatrical ex-border of US-Panama territory): essentially, you have these old-style former zonian houses up on the hill, including the former canal zone theatre guild, and flush against the borderline is an autoconstructed shanty town of these precarious houses on stilts. then there's a panama railroad station, which i guess was the historic pacific-side end point for the railroad and now serves mainly decorative and freight functions; and then the whole militarized and heavily-guarded engineering and security part of the canal zone, now the ACP (autoridad del canal de Panamá) and formerly the PCC (Panama Canal Company/Commission). anyhow, the market: it's this huge labyrinthine place, some kind of corrugated-iron take on the Benjaminian arcades, with vendors perched in hammocks on the upper level and piles of fruit and veg on the lower. there was a woman cradling a giant carrot in her arms, and she stopped to finger my friend's earring...and we sort of plowed through the chaos of men hauling sacks of oranges (something like a 20-pound sack for 4 dollars) and other such things. i spent about $10 and came away with enough beets and potatoes and mangoes and habichuelas and pixbae and etc. to feed an army. which brought about a certain amount of guilt, since i'm just one. but we were promising to compartir the goods, and i should also mention that several metric tonnes of yuca were involved in our transactions. and something sweet and orange called the sapote. anyhow, so after haggling for several hours about the price of tomatoes (my companions would suck their teeth disapprovingly if they heard 50 centavos too much, while i just stood there and smiled), we got back to the apartment to find out that there was no water; a main had exploded during the construction. this made everyone sigh and look somewhat put out, and the water didn't come on until later that night. i should mention that the only kind of water in panama is cold water, since there's really no need for hot, and so i was bracing myself for my daily blast of freezing water, and i turned on the faucet, and nothing splattered me in the face. weird. it was sort of like the reverse of recoil. anyhow, nods to Soyini. water rights certainly are a big fucking deal.

that afternoon, i had committed myself to attending the weekly meeting of SAMAAP, la Sociedad de Amigos del Museo Afro-Antillano de Panamá (Society of Friends of the Afro-Antillean Museum of Panamá). i got to the museum's archival space, where the meeting was held, and felt sort of shy and new and all that, but then i reminded myself that i can actually hold my own in a variety of settings, and experience has borne this out, and so i sort of forgot my initial hesitancy. i introduced myself to half the members and then settled in to wait. the meeting room was packed within fifteen minutes, many members of the west indian panamanian community having arrived. they were socializing and clearly enjoying themselves, so i kept apart at first. there were a number of guests: two so-called female "latin-panamanian" (white panamanian? non-west indian (although this can't be known for sure)? the whole classification thing really gets sticky in panama) documentarians who were making a film about the canal, as well as a 6-year-old girl named celestina and a man who sold books to schools in panama and was trying to get the Sociedad to buy this silly-looking encyclopedic dictionary. anyhow, so i started talking to the documentarians, and at first i was really enthused, thinking that we'd hit it off (because they were making a film about the lives of west indian workers, and i was writing a dissertation about performances of memory and history of the panama canal, specifically of the west indian labor migration), but they actually turned out to be quite snobby and weird. well, i should differentiate: one of them, who had darker skin and looked slightly indígena, was pretty nice, but the other one, a statuesque and attractive and very pale lady in very hip clothes and with black-painted nails, kept scowling at me. at one point she asked me where i went to school, and i told her, and she shot back with "my son goes to notre dame," and i said, "notre dame is a good school," to sort of appease her and engage in some brinksmanship, and she said, "so is northwestern" with this tone that i can only describe as begrudging and incensed. anyhow, i tried to be nice: i told them that it was great that they were filmmakers, as i felt that there were too few women actually making films, and they looked at me like i was some crazy feminist. which i am, but still. so right away i was suspicious, as they hugged their knees in folding chairs off to the side of the assembled group. there was something weird about them.

and it got weirder: they had a sales pitch involving their documentary, called "Diarios del Canal," which was supposed to help viewers to visualize the stories of the West Indian, Panamanian, Spanish, and other workers who came to the canal for work. The West Indian part was what they stressed at this meeting, but i got the sense (for reasons that will emerge later) that they were sort of trying to bring forth everyone's stories. which can be fine, of course - i'll tip my hat to 'fair and balanced' - but was somewhat inappropriate when facing a roomful of people who were highly invested in specific narratives.

but i'll concede that they had done their homework. they'd been to the library of congress, where they'd examined some of the original hand-written letters of west indian workers who had answered a call for memoirs by the Isthmian Historical Society in 1963 or so. at this time, the IHS received hundreds of letters from men all over the caribbean, latin america, and other places, and they chose three winning entries but transcribed all letters into a printed book, of which the museo afro-antillano has one copy. what the lady documentarians wanted to do was to reenact some scenes of the canal construction (the 'heightened moments,' in places like contractor's hill and gold hill) and have actors narrate the texts. they also wanted to do oral histories, and when the mean, skinny one said the phrase 'oral history' her eyes lit up with a certain gleam that i found sort of repugnant and that, i admit, made me uncomfortable because it made me wonder whether i also came off this way: white, wealthy, privileged, ambitious, and sort of unreflexively awful. i noticed that some of the older west indian panamanian women were beginning to have a sort of toxic reaction to these younger "white" career-women and their businessy presentation, complete with powerpoint and resumés projected onto the wall where a dedicatory poem about the overlooked west indian workers usually stood. not only was this poem taken down for the presentation, but half of the wall contained the portraits of all of the presidents of SAMAAP up to the current one, Sr. Enrique Sanchez, and so the whole thing was superimposed on these images. anyhow, it made me feel somewhat ill at ease. also, the documentary-makers kept mentioning that they had a grant from spain to make the film, and they passed around some ridiculously slick and high-cost production materials, one of which showed some "canal workers" (actually actors with glossy nectarine lips) who seemed to be wearing american apparel clothes, down to their jaunty little bowties and decoratively smudged shirts.

at several points, the themes became contentious. in the first instance, one of the "white" women requested that the meeting be conducted at least partially in spanish, and an older outspoken lady yelled, "No, we will speak English here!" This made the president pound his gavel, as clusters of the members started bickering with each other about the history of language issues and their attendant ideological battles. the board concluded that the meeting would be conducted bilingually, but there were murmurs of dissent. later, the mean-skinny woman said something about the many workers who came to the panama canal, and one lady (maybe the same one) protested that the west indian workers constituted the bulk of the labor force and basically built the canal. then the mean-skinny lady shot back that spain had reportedly sent greater numbers of workers in the early days than had the west indies, and then half the people in the room jumped to their feet and started delivering (or, rather, yelling) statistics about how there were already thousands of west indians in panama from the french canal, banana plantation, and early railroad days, and how the west indians were not counted as meticulously as the spanish were, and so on. which is all true. the mean-skinny woman really looked like she'd had about enough of this, and she started yelling back, but then the president banged his gavel and the place quieted down. i don't think i've ever actually seen a gavel used as more than a formality, but that thing definitely proved its worth.

so that was it for the documentarians. after that, they got quiet, giving a couple of final, whimpering, salutatory speeches about how west indians were extremely important to the history of the canal and they hadn't meant to offend anyone and they recognized the important important importance of these laborers and blah blah blah. their goal was to ask the members of SAMAAP to connect them with people with whom they could do oral histories (kind of like my goal! shudder - research as exploitation. i can see it now. this would never have happened if i had stuck to the dead trees and people of the archives), and the president diplomatically said that they'd be happy to be of service, but everyone else seemed decided that they were interlopers and gave them a pronounced collective stink-eye. i myself wavered about them, not wanting to judge someone who could basically be a reflection of my own motives, but i wondered about the provenance of their interest and all that, which was never really explained. then, toward the end of the meeting, the president announced the very recent death of a member of the community, ms. ada thomas, aged 109. the mean-skinny woman immediately said, "i know! we called her to do the interview yesterday, but she wasn't able to stand, and so it was too late..." at this she licked her lips and looked decidedly like a vampire, at least in my paranoid imagination. blah! what kind of asshole tries to get an interview with someone on her deathbed? that just seems really abusive to me. anyhow, the movie women shuffled out soon after that, having said their piece.

so then the very panamanian-looking (by which i mean something that's hard to explain, so i'll just leave it at that) man stood up and gave his spiel about selling the encyclopedic dictionary to the organization to give as a prize to the winning school of this year's "Conozca su Canal/Know Your Canal" contest. (And thank you, A., for rendering me basically incapable of writing that phrase without thinking of certain images and wiggly arm-movements.) the president again said "that's very interesting" in a diplomatic way, and the idea of buying a bound encyclopedia for a school - rather than, say, a computer with internet access - struck me as so futile and sad that, once again, i squirmed around in my seat, feeling ill at ease. i wanted to suggest that the prize be a computer, since these books were very expensive and seemed like a drop in the bucket, but i didn't know if this would be offensive to some members present at the meeting, who would be satisfied with the idea of an encyclopedia (but what about the information getting dated! i yelled in my head, feeling like a petulant librarian. and what about wikipedia! and open source, and google scholar! and then i sort of shut myself up), so i mumbled it to the older, elegant professor who was seated next to me with her husband. the couple seemed to be of west indian descent and knew some people in Northwestern's Af-Am department, like Darlene Clark Hine, rather well. The woman was writing a book about the separation of West Indian families during canal construction, and she'd already written a book about children and slavery. anyhow, here she is. as someone who likes the company of profs, i immediately started chatting with her about the archives and some of the discourses on children that i'd encountered in this research. so that was really good.

anyhow, the meeting continued, and we learned that the president's daughter was exhibiting her art in vienna, and the museum itself was infested with rats, and other such things. first, the organization talked at length about the planning process for the week-long commemoration efforts happening in about a month; i'm going to be participating all week with the setup of the various dances and ceremonies, thanks to Melva, who has been so generous. seriously. she's great. anyhow, one of the activities is a ceremonial launch into the canal with schoolchildren and flower petals and a chorus and pastor, touring the historic west indian neighborhoods and sites of import along the zone, and then disembarking somewhere for some finalizing ritual. this is sort of the apex of the week, and i'm pretty excited to come along and, i don't know, hold the pastor's train or massage his feet between stints or something. then the president asked for 'sociales' and 'asuntos varios' and the like, and there were a lot of social things going on, like a play by west indian children about famous people of african descent that somehow got the children invited to breakfast at the Panamanian Supreme Court, because the actor playing one of the judges happened to be wearing the same outfit that the judge had on that day. also, melva went to see the new 13 million-dollar mormon temple in corozal and reported that it was wacky and needed to be seen, if only for the insane "lujo" of its mythological murals. my spanish was behaving today, and i was absorbing quite a bit of it. transparency! such a laudable thing.

after people started leaving, i stayed behind and got into a conversation with three really interesting people, and i learned that there are 28 black rights organizations in Panama right now, and that every May (Panama's black history month) these leaders organize a forum on race and ethnicity. i also learned - and i would really like to follow up on this information with an interview - that the civil rights movement in panama was positively and consciously modeled on that in the US, with an afro-panamanian leader, Cirilo McSween, working alongside MLK and others. moreover, panamanian black nationalism was modeled on the US, since the canal zone was basically a congealed microcosm of all the racism that the US could possibly muster. anyhow, a lot of theories of mine were confirmed, which is always good (though again - was i like those snide documentarians? was i overconfident? bombastic? too weird? all these things were dogging me, albeit in a gentle way, as i danced around the questions that i had listed virtually on the legal pad in my brain). i also learned about another afro-panamanian playwright, carlos russell, who has also written a lot of political essays. the new york connection was palpable: many in the room had arrived from brooklyn for their summer vacations. i learned that roman foster was really the one to talk to about canal history. and i made a date to cook all of these vegetables that i had bought with two of the ladies, and to design an ESL performance workshop for use in Panama's normal school in Santiago, and to someday ride a chiva parrandera, as colombianos and the hipper tourist set do, with this regal nigerian-panamanian woman and her friends. so it was a pretty good evening, and i realized once again how much i like panama, and how fascinating this place is. if the air is thick with pollution and the ground is leaching slippery red quicksand between cracked sidewalks, and if cabdrivers simultaneously hit on and overcharge me, i still think this is an excellent place. i love how panama doesn't fit neatly into any sector of "area studies" or what have you: it's a mess in so many ways, and much better for it, i think. and i'm sort of suspicious of any place boasting an extremely healthy quality of life anyway. oh, to live in a place without seatbelt laws and bourgeois children's clothing stores! it's refreshing.

archival exploits, and going to church

Today was a long one: in the morning, I awoke with the construction din as usual, then proceeded to the Museo Afro-Antillano, which is housed in a little blue Methodist church in Calidonia. there i started photographing and documenting the Panama Tribune, a West Indian newspaper started in 1928 by Sidney A. Young and continued after his death by George Westerman. The museum contains two crumbling volumes of this paper, which seem to be passing inevitably into decrepitude. I hope they don't. What I've found there is a burgeoning community of sociable, intelligent, hard-working, and highly race-conscious individuals of West Indian and Afro-Panamanian (so-called "Panaman") descent. It's totally cool. There are articles about Shaka Zulu, W.E.B. DuBois, the Tuskegee Institute, and basically every other racially-inflected detail of US and European, and occasionally Caribbean and African, news. I've learned that 1) first lady Hoover caused an uproar by inviting a black woman, Mrs. De Priest, to tea and then compounded the national furor by shaking hands with a black man while on the campaign trail in the South; 2) with the fad for suntans, several white couples in DC were turned away from popular restaurants because the management thought that they were trying to impersonate the "Negroes;" 3) black workers were prominent in the 1929 May Day celebration, along with Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese workers; 4) Bessie Coleman was a prominent black female pilot; and 5) during an early use of the X-Ray in Cincinnati, several people were killed as the experiment went wrong and some sort of gas started a fire in a hospital; many were saved by a heroic black man; and 6) a pastor in Harlem shocked his parishioners by giving an alternate explanation for why Judas finked on Jesus - he posited that Judas was carrying on with Mary Magdalene.

And more, of course. In addition, the paper has a back-page column that is extremely sharp and prescient on issues like citizenship, Canal Zone labor and wage relations, and building solidarity networks among West Indians of diverse national origins. Of special interest to me was an article about a spokesperson for the newly-formed "Central Organization" who went to speak at a meeting of the Grenadian Protective and Benevolent Society at the Hall of the Union Co-operative Guadeloupen - this speech basically talked about how the different lodges and orders, of which there seem to be about a million, need to link up in order to protect the community from the dual onslaughts of angry Panamanian nationalists and racist imperial Zonians. Suffice it to say that self-reflexivity is high when survival's at issue.

Of course, this invites a number of questions, and I'm trying to keep track of all of them with some scribblings in a yellow legal pad that is by now rather soggy after some Panamanian monsoonlike conditions. Many of these questions revolve around the actual workings of the newspaper, for example: where are the editors getting their international stories? Is there a wire service, or is this information coming from US news services in Chicago or New York (two cities most often mentioned) - for example, from a paper like The Defender? And why these particular stories? And what about the conspicuous near-absence of labor issues in the Canal Zone, despite the recent strike that Carla Burnett discusses in her dissertation on Marcus Garvey and the U.N.I.A. (United Negro Improvement Association) in Panama? Another interesting issue is that this one irate guy keeps writing into the paper, one C.A. Coleman, who appears to be a writer for the Panama Star & Herald and keeps asserting that he's a member of the Race but is also very vehemently opposed to many of the arguments made by Westerman and others. Anyhow, the whole thing is full of mysteries, and I can't wait to go back there and look at it some more.

In terms of theatre and performance, I'm happy to report that there is WAY more substance about theatre/drama/perf than in any of the other papers that I've seen so far, including the Zonian Canal Record. Where the Zonian talks about the bored housewives putting on these amateur theatricals, the West Indian news discusses jazz, plays, parades, lodge activities, and all manner of social outings in Panama and the black parts of the segregated Zone. Also, the retention of cultural traits and activities like cricket, food preferences, the English language, and British-style educational and entrepreneurial institutions is noteworthy. I get the impression that Panama afforded (at least in the late 20s) a certain measure of financial stability as compared to the islands, one to which Panama businesses were definitely pandering, while privately (and also publicly) berating West Indians as interlopers and symptoms of US imperialism in the Zone.

Anyhow, newspapers, as I've gone on and on about, are important for both making explicit a public sphere and determining that sphere, to some extent. With this newspaper, I definitely get a sense of a minority subculture struggling to have a voice and spread awareness, despite obvious racial and cultural constraints. The politics of respectability are very thickly laid on this reading, however, so I'm not sure how the sphere ties in to reality. I would imagine that the paper paints a rosier and more optimistic picture of the community than is really the case, because all papers sort of tend to do this at the time. English in the 1920s is a different language, and there's a lot of mediation, which would suggest that a newspaper is not the same as demographic data, a chart of infant mortality rates, the "hard stuff." I am well aware of this; but then what do we make of the news? What do we do with it? Should we treat it as something between fiction and brief historiography? And what do we do when there are few other records of the quotidian aspects of life of a community that is ever-shifting in its population traits?

I say this because the West Indian "community" in Panama seems to be somewhat of a contradiction in terms, at least in the beginning. I'm slowly learning that the migration wave that added over a quarter to Panama's population was not a monolithic thing, though the bulk of it did occur in the US Canal period - 1904-1914 - but was, rather, a continuous trickle that had been going on for centuries, especially around the banana plantations in places like Bocas del Toro and Limón, Costa Rica. It's pretty hard to chart migration "patterns," because people were continually going to and leaving Panama for their home-islands or other places where jobs could be had. Family stability seems to have been low because of economic necessity, and let's not even talk about remittances. I'm only really talking about the period of roughly 184?-1920, because after that things got even wackier, what with West Indians marrying into Panamanian society and/or living in Panama off and on, and especially with the Canal's change to hiring women in the 1930s (?), which spawned (I would imagine) quite a different migration. So unlike the Zonians, who all go back several generations in the Canal Zone, many never leaving because the benefits were so good, the West Indians were constantly moving around. Also, when did they start visiting and settling in New York? This seems to have deeper historical roots than is known (well, let's be honest: little has been written about the whole New York branch of the diaspora, with the exception of George Priestley's work).

Okay, so there are some questions. Now on to the second half of the day: this was spent flagging a taxi (much harder to get now, with the ridiculous gas prices) and traveling all the way across the city, from Calidonia to Parque Lefebvre, one of the historic West Indian areas in Panama (along with Rio Abajo). What transpired here was a drawn-out and complicated but highly festive cooking class for some of the female members of the church (and one male). I made the acquaintance of the pastor, Rev. Michael D., who hails from the US by way of Okinawa and Berkeley (arguably another country) and schools his Episcopalian congregation against literalist interpretations of the Bible that condemn homosexuality, among other issues. Yay! He gave me quite a lot to process, and the ladies made all sorts of weird and highly-wrought concoctions, such as Chicken Cordon Bleu and eclairs and some fishy things and a great deal more. I have to say that some of these recipes failed - sorry, ladies - but there were others that seemed wacky enough to work, like a fried ball of plantain and cheese and some other unidentifiable stuff. Anyhow, the best part was hearing the ladies discuss their exploits in the kitchen - each was encouraged to introduce the food and its making. One of them, this sort of awesome figure who was losing her voice, told a story about her lack of cooking skills and finally said grimly, "Maté la levadura [I killed the yeast]" after mixing it with boiling water against the advice of the course's teacher, this dapper and very animated man who was dressed in a red and black pinstriped uniform and toque. I should mention that all the ladies wore toques. The one varón was an older gentleman who bowed solemnly and said, "I made the eponymous Chow Mein," which had featured in another story about the class. He spoke in reverential and somewhat droll tones, cracking quiet inside jokes that made the whole room roar. Then gifts and certificates of achievement were presented, and the whole thing managed to impress on me the idea that this had been quite an ordeal and a bonding experience for those involved.

There were also some really excellent matriarchs present, old ladies who clearly had been total foxes in their youth, and still basically were. One of them took my hand and pumped it energetically (though she looked to be about 100 years old) as she asked me about my stay here. She seemed really approving when I told her that I walked around alone and took cabs and spoke Spanish, etc. At one point she said, "But how do you protect yourself here?" and I replied, "When the taxistas try to charge me too much, I say 'Señor, no soy panameña, pero no soy idiota!" She thought that was hilarious. Anyhow, I promised to return for the 7:30 am English-language Sunday mass, which is done in high Episcopalian style, with processional rituals and all sorts of "bells and smells." This is followed by the Spanish-language youth mass, which is a lot more laid-back, with live salsa music and etc. I'm especially excited for the jazz drummer - this is the only church I've seen with an entire drumkit in the middle of the sanctuary - as apparently he's good with the gospel. The pastor plays bass, having allegedly played in New Wave bands in San José during that time, and the whole thing sounds pretty great.

More soon, time to work on my article.

ARGH!

if i have one foot in chicago and the other in panama, me duele el pie de chicago. check out this news from greg:

Springfield Update - Rep. Greg Harris

Governor's Budget Vetoes

July 11, 2008

The goings-on at the State Capitol continue to get more bizarre and damaging. The Governor had previously announced his intention to make severe cuts to healthcare, senior and youth services, law enforcement, transit and other items unless the House agreed to new revenue sources such as issuances of Pension Obligation Bonds (POBs) his source for major new money to fund programs, expansion of gaming, lease of the State Lottery, and undisclosed fund sweeps.

We were all quite surprised when the Governor's Special Session Proclamations did not include consideration of the POBs, which took that revenue option off the table. As you recall, I and other House Democrats had requested a copy of the Gov's budget analysis showing the revenue projections that were the basis for the proposed budget cuts during a conference call with the Governor's staff. Despite promises that we would receive it, it was never provided. That caused many of us to wonder if the budget shortfall was in fact less than the Governor had announced when he said he had to slash the budget.

So, that left the House with the options of considering gaming expansion, the lottery lease and fund sweeps to raise new revenues. The House convened Wednesday and met to hear hours of testimony of expert witnesses from the business community, organized labor, policy think-tanks, local political leaders from across the State, investment bankers, lottery policy analysts, etc. to debate the pros and cons of the remaining revenue ideas.

To my surprise, even before we had finished hearing testimony and before we could even start voting on the revenue sources, the Governor issued his Veto Messages cutting the budget before any votes on additional funding could occur. This was quite shocking and made me wonder why these punitive cuts had to be made if there was a chance to plug the supposed budget hole.

Among the over $1.5 billion in cuts are:

· $97.7 million cuts to programs to provide home care to seniors

· $10 million cuts to community colleges

· Total veto of student success grants

· Total veto of the school construction program

· $500 million payment delays to Medicaid providers, hospitals, nursing homes, etc. (not truly a cut, but just pushes that obligation into the next fiscal year)

· $43 million for substance abuse treatment

· Total veto of addiction treatment for special populations

· Total veto of school health center funding

· Total veto of funding expansion for services to homeless youth

· Total veto of MAP grant and formula increase

· $14 million cuts to Foster Homes care and prevention

· $57 million cuts to law enforcement and corrections

· Total veto of funding for reduced fare transit rides for students and the disabled

· Total veto of funding to downstate transit for reduced far transit rides for students, disabled and the elderly

The list goes on and on for pages and pages in amounts big and small, but you can get the idea. These cuts are falling on the backs of our most vulnerable citizens.

The day after the Governor's vetoes were announced, the House began to consider the remaining revenue bills. These would have also provided funding for a capital program, but were inexplicably written so that if one of the bills failed, then all failed. The first bill the House considered, expansion of gaming, did fail by a huge margin, losing 47-55, amid opposition from the City of Chicago, the horseracing industry and others.

So here are the next steps. The House has been called back into Session next week. It is my hope that the most draconian and punitive of the budget vetoes can be overridden, although it remains to be seen if the Senate will even consider restoring these funds or just let the Governor's vetoes stand. The Senate President has said he may not call the Senate back within the constitutionally mandated 15 days after House action, and therefore the vetoes would take effect automatically.

Also, the House Executive Committee shelled some Senate bills to use as vehicles for possible revenue sources such as agreed fund sweeps. I, and other House Members, understand that we are facing a very difficult situation, and would be willing to sweep surplus funds from some accounts, as long as there was agreement on which funds would be swept, by how much and how the money would be used. There is no appetite whatsoever to give the Governor a blank check.

To me, all of this is governing by vendetta and not governing with the best interests of the people of Illinois at heart. Cutting the budget to punish political opponents is wrong. Proposing a capital program that raises hopes of creating thousands of jobs, fixing our roads, transit, schools and infrastructure, but that is structurally designed to fail is wrong.

You deserve better than 'my way or the highway' governing. I will try to do my part to make decisions based on principle rather than personalities. I hope we can all do better in the weeks ahead.