Getting through this thing called life

I should be working right now. I have clients who are expecting stuff from me. So, apologies there. I'll get back to you soon. Promise!

The sudden death of Prince yesterday morning has turned everything upside down. I've been able to get back to work periodically by shutting off my social media feeds. This, however, is nearly impossible when social media is one of the tools that you use to earn a living. So most of the last two days have been consumed with me consuming a non-stop stream of Prince related material: tributes, personal reflections, videos, news reports. It is what social media does best, creating community out of a far flung network of friends, associates and the friends and associates of friends and associates. (Read it slowly. It does make sense.)

It also raises questions. What does it mean when you are brought to tears, like I have been repeatedly over the last two days, by someone you don't really know? The answer lies, I think, in the power of art, but it also lies in each of us and how we have reacted to that art. In the case of Prince, everything - his music, of course, but also his style, his attitude, his willingness to be confrontational, his honesty that masqueraded itself as fantasy, his spirituality, his sexuality - was his art.

I loved Prince. No, let me change that to the present tense. I love Prince. Because, for most of us, Prince is a collection of impressions forged through media. Even those of us who were lucky enough to see a live performance, well, that's what it was, a performance, those impressions brought magically to life for a brief time. And all of that still exists, even if only in our minds. Hell, in the coming days, months and years there will be even more. So, yes, I love Prince. Present tense.

I find writing somewhat difficult. I'm methodical. I relentlessly self-edit. Words might tumble out of my fingers, but they will be sliced and diced a thousand times before anyone gets to read them, and even then I'll have regrets. This is not a particularly useful trait in the internet and social media age, where being first is a prized advantage. As a consequence, you'll never see long Facebook posts from me about anything. I just don't trust myself enough to rush anything out there.

But the last 24 hours of reading other people trying to make sense out of their grief over Prince's death has been quite amazing. Reading them has provided me an insight into who they are that I previously lacked. One was from a work colleague from two decades ago. A gay African-American man in his 40's (dude, I'm sorry if I'm guessing wrong) who has since moved to New York, wrote a long and illuminating post that said, in part, "I think PRINCE was the first being who I recognized did not give a single f*uck what you thought about him. I remember in the 80's being more than a little afraid of PRINCE. He exuded a black gender bending sexuality that dared you to look. He confronted my own awakening queerness with a bravery I didn't possess. And he not only made it ok to be other, he rejoiced in it."

Another couldn't come from a more different source, but then again, maybe not. A 30-ish (again, apologies if I got that part wrong) Mexican-American woman that I just met in January wrote "Imagine being 13, pretty sheltered, Catholic-school educated and discovering songs like Cream, Horny Toad, Erotic City, Darling Nikki, Get Off and Sexy MF... at a time when the message I got constantly and from all directions that sex was wrong and dirty, Prince offered an opposing message and for that I'm forever grateful."

A third friend is a filmmaker and undoubtedly the biggest Prince fan I know. You know that language that Prince invented, the one that substitutes pictures, numerals and single letters for words? A week hasn't gone by in the last decade where I didn't see a post of his that employed that vocabulary. Of course my friend is posting about Prince regularly, but mostly upbeat stuff accompanied by statements of faith and, dare I say it, joy. Perhaps he is masking his grief, or, equally possible, perhaps he understands Prince in a different way than the rest of us. But I've also noticed something else, a community of people I don't know at all reaching out to my friend to offer him condolences, like you do with family.

Another was a re-purposed Twitter post from someone that I don't even know: "Thinking about how we mourn artists we've never met. We don't cry because we knew them, we cry because they helped us know ourselves." 

And, finally, a brief exchange that I had with a fellow culture writer whose work I enjoy. We found ourselves on different parts of the Bowie-Prince continuum. I love Prince, admire Bowie. For her, the other way around.

So, why do I love Prince? I have to look to the 80s and where I was when I first became aware of him. So, where was I? Pretty much right where I was born, the south side of Chicago, and already a veteran of what we used to call the "record business". Totally into music, mostly rock but also R&B and even some disco. And I was getting divorced and working in a dive bar, taking advantage of my huge record collection, using it to fill a tiny dance floor. 

And Prince filled that damn dance floor, this sexy music from this ambiguously but very sexy little dude writing songs with a fearless freedom that my own life lacked. I saw the world a little differently after hearing Prince. With 1999, Prince seemed to peer into the future, see the apocalypse, and respond with hedonistic joy. Good news for all of us facing our tiny, private apocalypses every day. By Purple Rain he was already working both sides of the spiritual/sexual divide in astonishing fashion. It was a great soundtrack for a pretty chaotic time of my life, and it helped me find my way.

I generally respond to music feet first. If it doesn't make me want to move, then I have to consciously set my internal machinery to appreciation mode to give it a fair listen. Prince, of course, had this covered. I was hooked from the first four bars and had plenty of time later to admire its complexity and innovation. And that, I think, is why I merely admire David Bowie. It's no surprise that I actually like his Young Americans and Let's Dance stuff better, even if it's not acknowledged as his most creative stuff, even when I know Heroes or Ziggy are superior albums. To me, Bowie always felt like a method actor inhabiting and discarding radically different roles. An amazing artistic achievement, to be sure, but not one that spoke directly to my rock & soul aesthetic the way Prince did.

But I gotta give some props to David Bowie. 

Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix and James Brown are often cited as Prince's antecedents, and even a casual listen brings all of those to the surface pretty quickly. Bowie's music would seem to be the antitheses of these, a deliberately artful construction designed for the head, not the body. But the outpourings that came in the wake of Bowie's death earlier this year have a remarkable similarity to those I've read in the last two days: Bowie made it OK for me to be me. I can't help but think that Prince saw that too.

Adios, sweet Prince. I'll see you in the after world. 

 

'Friends' and friends, 'Likes' and likes

A lot of us, it seems, have a conflicted relationship with Facebook.

There's no getting around its benefits. I myself use it practically as my primary news source. Whether it's NPR or WBEZ or Mother Jones or Al Jazeera, every news outlet has a Facebook presence and I hear from them several times a day. When it comes to my personal obsessions, blogs like Colorlines, The Root, Havana Times, Eater and Ask a Mexican post a steady stream of updates. Facebook helps me keep track of my beloved New Orleans through the pages of WWOZ, Kermit Ruffins and Antoine's Restaurant as well as the personal pages of friends who live there. My day is brightened by beautiful photographs posted at Antigua Guatemala and Playas Boricuas. Writers I admire like Junot Díaz and Walter Mosley share their thoughts on Facebook. Of course musicians and performance spaces and cultural organizations and music bloggers all have their own pages. Even my own city is somehow closer, with neighborhood pages and even regular reports from my alderman.

And, of course, I'll use Facebook to get more people to read this.

And then there's my friends. That's a bit of a strange category, yes? For every one of my genuine real-life-really-like to-spend-time-with friends, there are nine more who are casual acquaintances or people I've met along the way or people who are 'friends with' my friends.  By and large, I imagine that they are good people, just not friends in the traditional sense. But that one in ten... it's simply wonderful to hear from them about the contours of their daily lives. Especially gratifying to hear from are the ones, because of divergent paths, I don't often see in the flesh and blood world.

I've been on Facebook for, well, a long ass time. I've also managed pages for a small handful of arts organizations. And perhaps I should have taken it as a sign a couple of weeks ago when I launched my own professional  business page and on the same day I came across a video entitled The Innovation of Loneliness in an article called Here's What Facebook is Doing to Your Brain. (Naturally, I saw it on Facebook, and when you follow the link to the website a pop-up asks you to share it on, well, you know...)  It's one of those typically geeky things full of animated line drawings and a narration that argues the interconnectedness we feel in a social media network is a technologically superior but humanly inferior substitute for real life conversations that are, by their very definition, quite limited in number.

The video deployed science to affirm a position I've long held, that there is a certain amount of artifice inherent in a Facebook profile. That's not to say deception, although I'm sure there's some of that too. It simply means that we have the power of editing at our command, and thus the persona we present on Facebook is shaped by this more than it would be in an uncontrolled environment like, say, over drinks in a bar. Still, most of us are pretty honest, and what we choose to share is a reflection of what we care about. We put stuff up there, then hope for likes and comments. When they don't come, well, I think that is what the video is getting at when it speaks of the innovation of loneliness. After a while, I think, we start to make choices based on our craving for likes, or, to put it another way, our need for validation. Sentimentality is good, as are pictures. Combine them both and voilà!, you have likes.

And, by and large, that's fine. Who doesn't want to be popular? Who willingly shows their bad side if they can avoid it? Who doesn't want to share that beautiful sunset or tropical hideaway or hang out with friends or social injustice we observe or band we really like with others? It's simply another way of saying, "I am here. I matter." Yes, we want the gratification of a like, but if it doesn't always come, c'est la vie. 

One of the roots of our ambivalence about Facebook is knowing that it is tracking our every move so that a small handful of people can get very rich. Thus, the periodic brouhaha about privacy settings and so on. But here's the thing: Like airport security, those settings are a bit of a ruse to make us feel safer. Meanwhile, we assiduously go about tagging our text and photo postings so that more people see them and maybe get us a few more likes, temporarily easing the craving. Like any highly monetized drug, the hit is short lived. By then, though, Facebook has the data and is already packaging it for advertisers. And we're on to our next post.

So, that's the backdrop for the launch of my professional Facebook page. And if I learned anything in a very short time, it's that the shit gets real when you try to consciously position yourself and your service as something vital on social media. It's no longer simply "Hi, I think _____ is cool / interesting / funny, what do you think?"  All of a sudden, those likes become simultaneously more and less than those cravings. They become measurements of your success. And when they don't come, you are puzzled and maybe even a bit needy. I'm left wondering why people who are my Facebook friends haven't liked my Facebook page. It feels personal, even though it's the farthest thing from it. And the reality is, a bit over one in ten of my friends has liked my page, so the numbers make sense. The really horrifying thing, though, is that I'm spending more time than ever in the technologically superior but considerably less human virtual world, thus compounding the unease that I'm feeling.

Lady Gaga was by no means the first person to deploy the fame monster metaphor. And certainly what we are seeking on Facebook is some kind of fame, however modest. But I don't think of Facebook as a monster. More of a devil, seductive and full of promise. Be careful what you wish for.

Puerto Rico en Chicago

photo by Don Macica

Within hours of arriving home from a recent visit to New Orleans, a place I've described as having a Caribbean soul, I found more of the same as I entered the welcoming confines of the Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center on Chicago's northwest side. A friend of mine who, remarkably, makes his living as a musician was debuting a new free jazz/Latin group dubbed Proyecto Libre, or Free Project. I reviewed the performance for Agúzate, an Afro-Latin cultural organization, and you can read that here.  The music was wonderful, and I'm truly impressed (and often amazed) by the adventurous spirit that guides my friend's artistic endeavors.

But that's not what this post is about.

photo by Silvia Gonzales

The concert was occasioned by the grand re-opening of Segundo Ruiz Belvis, which has been dedicated to preserving Puerto Rican culture outside of the island for over 42 years. Hermosa, the neighborhood in which the center is currently located, is, especially on a cold winter night, rather grim. It's poor, and there are problems with gangs and crime. The center, once located in Wicker Park (a neighborhood that I passingly referred to in a recent post about gentrification), occupies a large space in a former movie theater that it bought. It is quite beautiful in a loft apartment sort of way, with exposed brick walls, colorful artwork, and stylish seating areas. They can afford the large building because the smaller space that they previously owned in Wicker Park sold for millions in a newly desirable neighborhood that was no longer so desiring of having poor ethnic folks live there. The current building lies somewhere that nobody would live in if they could afford to live elsewhere.

photo by Silvia Gonzales

Except that is not necessarily true. Communities may be poor, but that is not to say they are without culture or resources, and Segundo Ruiz Belvis is a manifestation of this. Culture, family, community: These are indeed desirable things, and especially so when you are separated by many thousands of miles (and perhaps even generations) from your home. In this context, art and culture are not pastimes or luxuries, but necessities for keeping the spirit alive. Real lives are no doubt saved as well, when young people feel cultural pride and turn away from gangs and crime.

photo by Don Macica

I couldn't help thinking of Central City in New Orleans, a poor community by any economic measure, but one in which I had the good fortune of participating in a second line parade just a few days earlier. A second line, as I described in my last post, is a joyously exuberant cultural expression of traditions that go back generations and, here and now, a way for the community to take to the streets and take a stand against crime, violence and, as the event flyer put it, "foolishness".

Segundo Ruiz Belvis takes a stand against foolishness as well.

May it long continue to do so.