The Loco-Motion Part one: The revolution

     Of the three songs that have adhered to each other in my mind in this past while: Ooby Dooby, Hokey Pokey, and The Locomotion, the last evokes the greatest complexity of imagination.  I knew it in my youth and no doubt danced to it, summer night skies, loud speakers, macadam, girls, but when I heard it driving to work one morning it lifted me up in ways I could not have known when young. 
     I became one among many dancing in the streets of Detroit stirring up the ashes of dashed hopes, breathing them in, tasting the bitter joke of unkept promises, and laughing at it because the spirit of man cannot be crippled by misfortune or controlled by corporate exploitation.  They stuff our mouths with death, they use us and toss us aside, yet we dance.  Joyful and defiant we celebrate what we are, what they can never be: human.
     In a life grown complex, in an America where big is beautiful and small is fodder for the Corporopolitical machine the hungers of humanity are a nuisance that must be demonized by Religiocorporate puppets who have sold their conscience for cash.  Passion has become a dirty word.  But I forget myself and have fallen into a Marxist rant remembered, unbidden, from those days in the late sixties when I believed in movements.
     Experience quickly made it clear to me that institutions are inherently inhuman, that those gathered under a banner or a flag abandon reason, reflection, and compassion.  It matters little whether you call it "The Movement" as we did back then or you call it Evangelical Christianity the goals are the same: destroy all that does not agree with it.  It is that part of us that will give rise to a Hitler, a Stalin, a Pol Pot, a Pope Gregory IX.  It is the abrogation of our own humanity, replacing our personal passions with institutional imperatives, becoming a part of the beast of the machine.
     But the truth is none of these subsequent reflections were a part of the experience of The Locomotion in my car on the way to work.  No, there was no politics in it, there was only the longing to dance like a fool in the streets, to be with others celebrating life.

    

Back to the blog: The Ooby Dooby

     I cannot say for certain that I have ever seen the Ooby Dooby done but there was one night in east Texas outside of Tyler when I witnessed, if not the thing itself, then something much like it.  It was in a private club that had, as far as I could understand, only two requirements for membership: to be white and to bring your own bottle, I qualified.  The place itself was unadorned, more of a hangout for working stiffs in their 20's, a place to dance and drink.  I was enjoying the latter when the Ooby Dooby moment came.
     There were two young women on the dance floor wearing the smallest, whitest, tightest pants I had ever seen worn in public.  The effect of the white was enhanced by the blacklight that was ubiquitous in that era.  So I, moderately oiled with gin, sat rapt, mesmerized by the fulness of these twin orbs that leapt and shook to the music in the hazy light.  They called me.
     It has been my good fortune to have a keen perception of the inherent decorum of any of the drinking establishments I have visited.  I know what is and what is not acceptable and have been able to avoid confrontation.  So I knew that no matter how much it seemed to me that these lovely young women appeared to beckon, it would be a serious breach of etiquette to approach them.  In one scenario I would slip onto the dance floor ask to join one or the other and dance with her, and talk, and share a drink, and perhaps step outside to share a moment of privacy, whereupon the local boys would beat the shit out of me to preserve the honor of their ladyfolk and my membership would be suspended.  I kept my seat.
     I chose to content myself with an appreciation of the aesthetics and the sociological import of this most delightful display that had all the elements of the Ooby Dooby: "wiggling to the left, wiggling to the right, a wiggle and a shake like a big rattlesnake."  Yes, I am convinced that this was it: a rockabilly ritual whose meaning could only be truly perceived by those in the cultural milieu of its origin.  Oh, I could tease it out intellectually, put aside the lust it inspired in me to imagine what long term contract the viewer was invited to consider, what mixed joy and sadness lay before them in this country that was too big for comfort, that would always drive them to seek some small nest of joy to shield them from the immense, uncaring land.  I could think it but never feel it.
     And yet, when I stumble upon the Ooby Dooby again it makes me dance, even alone, as I imagine I am one of them, that my heart beats to that rhythm, that life comes struttin' across the dancefloor lifting me from the ordinary to the divine.

Missing

I have been missing for a long time.  It is that way with me and I have come to accept it.  I drift from time to time, searching, collecting.  I rarely know why or what it was that caused me to be for a while lost but this time the beginning was clear and specific.  I was driving to work a couple of months ago and I heard this:

Well-a hey baby

jump over here

when you do the ooby dooby 

I wanna be near
Ooby dooby

At once it struck me that this was a song akin to The Locomotion and The Hokey Pokey, an anthem or communal celebration of the human condition. 

     I should explain.

     I grew up dancing, not like kids do nowadays, in Miss Whatever's school of dance but in the streets, on summer nights, or in gyms and dark wood wainscoated basements of churches or schools, whose dim, warm refuge made Winter bearable.  It is where we learned to touch each other, gently and with reverence, breathing in the essence of the other, thrilling to the excitement of the expectation of a union in flesh.  It is where we celebrated the mad passions of rock and roll, dancing not with just one but with the sky and the earth, dancing ecstatic in a universe that said yes to our passions that were too fearfully sexual for public touch.  We grew up dancing with each other or watching each other dance.

    We did the stroll together, and the twist, and the shimmy, and the frug and a dozen other dances that came and went.  We were lucky to be so blessed to have rhythm etched on us at so young an age, but much more, to have been together dancing.  To dance together is to make community:  The Ooby Dooby,

New Kicks: On the transformative power of shoes

     I do not have a foot or shoe fetish.  In the normal course of a day I notice neither my own shoes nor others.  I do, however, feel them, have a physical sense of them, notice how they affect my posture, my gait, how my foot makes contact with the ground.  I am speaking here of the shoes I am wearing, though I tend to the empathetic, I have no sense of what others feel in their shoes other than to note how they stand, walk, how their feet meet the ground which may or may not be attributable to their footwear.  So my opinion cannot claim to be generally true, only specifically true.
     Recently, and quite by accident, I bought a pair of shoes.  I was at a shoe store with Renee who takes a long time to choose shoes, and I became impatient, a common state for me, so I amused myself by browsing through the men's shoes trying to find any that were not made in China, no mean feat.  It was pretty much limited to Bierkenstock.  Even the Sperry Topsiders, which I thought were upscale, expensive for loafers, were from China.  This task having been completed I returned to Renee, my wife, who had found a pair, six pair really, that she might purchase.  After a while the choices were narrowed down to one, which was a problem.  The deal was that if she bought two the second would be half off and so it made sense to buy two.
     Now it had taken a long time for her to find even one pair that she might buy and I was pretty sure that it would take even longer to find a second.  This knowledge, coupled with the certainty that I had exhausted all the amusements of this store led me to take action.  I found a pair of shoes for me, they were cheap and inoffensive, Sketchers, brown leather uppers and rubber or neo-rubber bottoms.  They fit, Renee liked them, the price was right, so I decided to buy.  As it turned out Renee bought no shoes so we didn't get the half off deal but the ones I got were seriously discounted, I'm guessing they were out of style, so it was ok.
     I've had these shoes for about three weeks now and they have become accustomed to my feet and my feet to them and this union has taken on a life of its own, as is often the case with feet and shoes, and has begun to affect my aspect and outlook when I am wearing them.
     There is a rawness to these shoes, the leather looking like hides pieced together.  They look, to me, like the footwear of a barbarian Celtic warrior.  This is problematic because the Celts usually went into battle naked but for a torc worn around the neck.  I think they also painted themselves blue but am not sure.  So if they were naked did that mean they did not wear shoes?  This, of course, led to a larger question about the true meaning of being naked.  Were the Celts truly naked when wearing a torc?  They have been described so.  This being true, then is one not also naked when wearing shoes?  If someone were to come up to you on the street wearing nothing but shoes, would you say he/she was naked?  The naked condition, in public, engenders approbation in the general populace.  The wearing of shoes would do nothing to lessen this approbation so I think it is reasonable to suggest that the wearing of shoes does not preclude the naked condition. It could therefore be posited that these Celts could be both naked and shod at once.  But the question remains: did they, in fact, wear shoes?
     Certainly one going into battle, especially on rocky terrain, would prefer to have some protection for the feet as a practical concern which would argue for them wearing shoes.  On the other hand one is right to question the practicality of a people who go into battle naked in the first place.  If we were to chose to protect a single part of the body I believe most would chose a part other than the foot.  So whether or not they wore shoes will remain a mystery in fact but I choose to allow my imagination to believe they did and so when I look at my feet in these shoes I see the extremities of a savage Celt.
     Now to the point: I noticed this morning, on the way to the Viking Bakery, that I was taller and broader and stronger than I had been in some time, that I was, simply, not myself, that I was, for some moments, Rhohan Pierce, a physically imposing young warrior who trod upon the earth as if it were his to take or toss aside.  Being neither young nor physically imposing, I realize this is an aberration, a condition, if you will, the Walter Mitty syndrome wherein the afflicted one's being is suddenly displaced by another whose life is significantly more exciting.  I am often subject to these fits though never before as Rhohan Pierce, so, other than the identity, the transformation came as no surprise.  I imagine this, something akin to multiple personalities or at least multiple delusions, should be cause for concern or even shame. It might also be disconcerting for those who are near and dear to my basic being to suddenly find me both present and missing but I am fairly adept at shielding others from it.  I do have some control, can pretty much stop it if I want, but the truth is, I rather enjoy it.
     So, with the help of a pair of Sketchers and with the music of Moby's Play throbbing in my veins, I strode the earth: a mighty Titan, but only for a short time.  It would have confused the people at the bakery if I had entered as anyone but myself.

Non-Negotiable Demands

I was fortunate to have attended college (Paterson State was a college at that time, later became William Paterson College, I believe to disassociate itself from Paterson which had the image of being black and poor which it was in some areas, and would become somewhat violent in those summer days when the urban poor looked at their plight and seeing no positive way out took to the streets with stones and fire.  Of course it was no Watts nor Newark neither, the latter providing us the spectacle of tanks rolling down the street of this old American city to defend property by arresting, beating and shooting the natives) during exciting times.  Wearing the uniform of the non-conformist (in that time long hair, whatever beard I could muster, jeans, an army jacket, and beads) I protested with others against the war because it appeared to me that we were fighting on the wrong side, for a corrupt government propped up by a nascent global corporate power structure, and against the people who had shook off the yoke of French colonial exploitation.  Somehow that people and the people here at home in the USA became one in our minds, well in mine anyway.  The military industrial complex that Eisenhower had warned us about had become a supra-governmental power, killing those who would not submit, poisoning our rivers and inventing things like napalm and agent orange.  Dow Chemical's slogan was "Better Living Through Chemistry."  The irony eluded them.
     So there we were with a lot to be pissed about, with a government that was sending our youth off to kill and/or die defending capitalism in Asia.   With a government by the people but for the powerful and wealthy. 
With a government that sent tanks against its own people.
     Now mostly we had peaceful protests and teach-ins, mild stuff, though the Black Student Union did take over a building and we white radicals stood in solidarity outside the chained doors, but elsewhere, like in Columbia (the university, not the country) there was more violence and the development of the non-negotiable demand.  It seemed like a good idea to me at the time, after all, we were right and they were wrong and it was our duty to impose our righteous will by any means necessary.
     Now here's the point: isn't this exactly what Republicans have been doing ever since the American people had the temerity to elect not only a Democrat but a black man President?  You could argue that they did it during the Clinton era as well but never so egregiously as now.  Was it right when we did it and wrong now or is it always wrong?
     I have a memory of being with my mother in a department store, I was five or younger (I have a lot of old memories) and I had had enough of shopping so I consciously decided to force my mother's hand by throwing myself on the ground and refusing to get up.  It is not a fond memory.  It was not a proud moment but I was a child behaving like a child so it was understandable.  The hope was that I would grow up and learn to behave in a more decent fashion.  Eventually I did.

Eating Lunch

     I had a turkey club, but it could have been a BLT or even egg salad which is what came to mind as the corner of the sandwich first touched my tongue and my teeth and I breathed in the smell of white toast.  (I'm particularly fond of egg salad but rarely order it, preferring the way my mother made it, the way I make it.)  Then there was the lettuce and the mayonnaise and I was in a small diner, Main street Hackensack (NJ), with my mother.  We had just come from the allergist, Dr. Berkow, a short, square, hairy man who had given me a couple of shots and who explained to my mother the sources of allergies and asthma talking to her like she was a child, maybe because he was a doctor and she was not, or maybe because he was a man and she was not, or maybe both.  And my mother looked at him in the way (I had seen this before) that let the speaker know that she was letting him go on with his nonsense, that she knew the source and cause but she wouldn't bother to tell him because he wouldn't get it anyway.  It wasn't hostile, it just wasn't worth her while.
     So there we were, sharing silence, (we are not big on talking, especially when eating, we are, both of us, quite fond of food), when my heart shook, hit with a wave of what felt like love coming from my mother, more like a sea swell really, slow and strong, and warm.  I looked at my mother who was not looking at me but was holding her sandwich in both hands and staring off somewhere in thought, looking angry as she always did when thinking, but she wasn't angry, that was just her face.  If you didn't know her you'd think her's was a cold, hard love but that wasn't the case it just seemed that way because the heat of her heart was held in check by a will of steel, tempered in the fires of suffering, hammered by pain.  She was less given to loving looks than actions: we had ridden the bus to the doctor together and now we were sharing a meal, she cared for me and it made me want to cry, but I didn't.  After all, to the rest of the world I appeared to be at my desk at work and if I were to cry there it would prompt questions the answers to which would prompt more and I would find myself explaining myself when all I really wanted to do was spend some quiet time with Mom.  So I didn't cry then and there, I saved it for later.
     

Psychopaths, CEO's and Boss Christie

     Other than the possibility of supernatural retribution in some dark future it is hard to see a downside to being without a conscience.  The world, especially one dominated by Capitalist economic principles, favors those who simply take what they want, whose focus is primarily, sometimes solely, amassing personal wealth and power.  In this environment compunctions are a handicap, morality a luxury reserved for later in life when one "gives back" by using the money squeezed from the sweat of others to create foundations ostensibly for philanthropy, but really to buy a reputation for humanitarianism which had played no part in their lives.
     But what I really wanted to talk about is Jon Ronson whose latest work, The Psychopath Test, has landed him on "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," as well as NPR.  I have neither seen nor heard any of these, and I haven't read the book either, so, armed with this ignorance, I can blissfully disregard Ronson's real purpose and focus on the part that struck me as most curious in the NY Times review and in an interview by Jeff Bercovici for Forbes: the qualities of a psychopath that would contribute to his/her effectiveness as a CEO, namely a lack of empathy, remorse or loving kindness.
     We really ought to question the morality of any system in which these virtues are a handicap but that for another time.  What really strikes me right now is the curious coincidence of some comments made by Mrs. Christie.  She was asked if her husband, Chris, would make a good president.  Of course she said yes but she didn't stop there she also added, unbidden, that he would make a very good CEO and it seemed to me that she preferred that course which is not surprising as her world is the world of Wall Street.
     Now I have never met Boss Christie and he may be a very different person in private but his public persona is that of a bully, uncompromising, vocally aggressive, and certain that those who oppose him are not only wrong but stupid.  His wife, who does know him privately, thinks he would be a good CEO.  He does seem a good candidate, having demonstrated a marked absence of empathy, remorse, or loving kindness, and maybe someday he will take his abilities into that arena but for now he is our Governor here in New Jersey.
     I know it is Quixotic to believe that public servants should actually serve the public and not just themselves but I believe it nonetheless.  For the most part our elected officials have put up something of a good front, appearing to care, and sometimes I believe they even do.  Boss Christie doesn't even bother to pretend.  Shouldn't we be fearful?

Postscript:  After writing this I read that Christie was saddened by the death of Clarence Cleamons, I wondered is this empathy?  But no, his reason was, "I was struck with the overwhelming feeling that the days of my youth were now finally over."  Yes, it's all about you isn't it Boss Christie?