Cleveland’s Funeral
I'm told, by the way, that Cleveland's funeral was a strange affair, attended by drunks, mysterious riffraff, and all his shadowy family. Feldman and Lurch, with a dozen other bikers, formed the usual MC funeral formation around the hearse. The service itself was performed by Cleveland's great-uncle, the Reverend Arning, who was a dwarf; Cleveland's sister Anna, flown in from New York City, wore his leather jacket at graveside; his father's lover, Gerald, wept hysterically and had to return to the car. Abdullah stood the whole time, so he has said, with his arm across Jane's shoulders, dreading the moment that she should begin to cry, but, like the lover of a cancer victim who has been dying for a long time, she seemed strong and resigned and without bowing her head, watched impassively the Reverend's sorrowful, tiny hands, the subdued antics of the crowd. She wore a weird, pointy black dress that had been her mother's forty years before in rural Virginia, so that she lent her own touch of comic sadness to the funeral Cleveland could not have designed any better himself. I now regret very keenly that I missed it. I wanted to say good-bye.
When I remember that dizzy summer, that dull, stupid, lovely, dire summer, it seems that in those days I ate my lunches, smelled another's skin, noticed a shade of yellow, even simply sat, with greater lust and hopefulness -- and that I lusted with greater faith, hoped with greater abandon. The people I loved were celebrities, surrounded by rumor and fanfare; the places I sat with them, movie lots and monuments. No doubt all of this is not true remembrance but the ruinous work of nostalgia, which obliterates the past, and no doubt, as usual, I have exaggerated everything.
-- Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1988), 296-97.
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Scout’s Miwok Research
2. Miwok, First People of California: A Set on Flickr
4. Miwok Material Culture: Indian Life of the Yosemite Region (1933): Shelter
5. Miwok Material Culture: Indian Life of the Yosemite Region (1933): Sweat-House
6. Brandon Smith's Indian Tribe Report
8. Google: Miwok houses, clothing and food
9. California Indian Food and Culture (PDF)
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Central Booking
I can accept that there are budget constraints, and space constraints, such that it’s impossible to outfit the holding cells with, for example, bunk beds, and that therefore a number of us had to sleep on the floor. I don’t know why there are no blankets, but maybe this, too, is a budget issue—buying blankets, and keeping them clean, would be expensive. Finally, our copy of Social Anarchism aside, we were not allowed any newspapers or other reading materials in the cell, and I’m sure there is some logic that explains why this is so, though whatever that logic is, I suspect it is dubious.
But there simply cannot be any rule, or any carceral logic, or any arguments whatsoever, for filthy toilets. And sitting there, with the stench from our filthy toilet filling the room, and with the filth in our filthy sink making me less eager than I ought to have been to drink from it, despite being thirsty, I became angry—really, honestly, for the first time. I thought for the first time, with genuine venom, of the hypocrite mayor Michael Bloomberg, a billionaire, who shut down the Occupy Wall Street encampment for reasons of “health and safety†but has not deemed it worthwhile to make sure that the toilets in facilities that he has control of meet even the most minimal standards of health and safety, such that, while I watched, about forty men, eating a total of a hundred meals, over the course of a day and a half, refused to perform a single bowel movement. This was its own form of civil disobedience, I suppose, and if I’d had my wits about me maybe I could have organized a meeting of all the inmates at Bloomberg’s residence, on East Seventy-ninth Street, so that we could all take a giant shit on his front stoop. . . .
What does it all add up to? I went out into the street and got arrested because I was angry that the cops had tackled our drummer; irritated that most of the Wall Street types walking by could be so contemptuous of people who were more committed, more engaged, more interested in the future of this country than they are; and because I was curious—about what the process of arrest was like, what the inside of a jail was like. I learned more than I expected to. To be on the other side of the law-and-order machine in this country is awful. It is dehumanizing, and degrading, and deforming. It fills you with a helpless rage: because, once there, you can only make things worse for yourself by speaking up. From the brown phone in our cell at the Tombs, I’d called Emily a few times, and I called the office of n+1, the magazine where I’m an editor. But it felt like those people, my friends, might as well have been on a different planet. They could do what they pleased when they pleased. We could not. I left the world of jail with plenty of relief but more than anything with a sense of unease that I still can’t quite shake. We will be judged as a society and as a culture by how we treated our meanest and most vulnerable citizens. If we keep going the way we’re going, we will be judged very, very harshly—and sooner, perhaps, than we think.
-- Keith Gessen, "Central Booking," NewYorker.com, November 28, 2011.