Shit is Magic!

Anyone who knows me well knows how obsessed I am with years and people's ages and the relationship between these and historical events. I don't know what it is, but years have a magical quality to me. Each historical year is like a different holy name freighted with so much history and countless associations.
Year are so casually invoked. How many times have you heard someone say, “Well, let's see, I think 'at was back in '79 or 80” or “Yeah, uh, I graduated '94, and um got my B.A. at Rutgers in '98...” Mostly we think nothing of it. To me, however, to reference a year is to mutter an incantation, to cast a spell, to casually lift your shirt to reveal the gun tucked in your waistband. To mention a year, especially an old one, is to say, “I was there, motherfucker...where were you?”
This year fetish of mine is endlessly diverting when you mix it with a little history. By and by you begin to weave a large knotty tapestry, and all you need to know is a person's age and you can weave them right in too.
The Rolling Stones tune “Memo from Turner”, featured prominently in Donald Cammel's 1970 film Performance contains the lyric “I remember you in Hemlock Grove, 1956”, funny, that, seeing as how Mick Jagger was only thirteen at the time. Alan Ginsberg, on the other hand, turned thirty in June of that year. In January, he wrote the poem "America", one month before a young woman named Norma Jean Mortenson, just two days older than Ginsberg, would change her name to Marilyn Monroe. Six months later and a few weeks after her (and Ginsberg's) thirtieth birthday she would marry playwright Arthur Miller while an adolescent Mick Jagger was loafing about on Summer holiday and the death penalty was being abolished in his native England.
Mick was born in 1943, along with Robert DeNiro, R.L. Stein, Penny Rimbaud (the drummer for seminal anarcho-punk band Crass) Tony Basil (“Oh Mickey, you're so fine!”) and my Aunt Leela. These people, it seems to me, were the perfect age to appreciate the sixties, and did in varying degrees. Rimbaud was a vegetarian pacifist who made the leap to punk and made socially relevant avante- garde music during the repressive Thatcher regime. Jagger faded into obscurity after a few mildly-succesful gigs at working class taverns in Dartford (LOL). My Aunt Leela moved to the United States and married a white hippie psychiatrist-in-training named Bruce.
She arrived here in 1967, the year Liz Phair, Kurt Cobain, Judd Apatow and Guy Pierce were born and the year a twelve year old Jamaican boy named Clive Campbell moved to the South Bronx with his family. She was thirty-one years old when she gave birth to her first child in 1975, and thirty two when a female drug dealer from Jamaica Queens gave birth to Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson in 1976. 50 cent would achieve success by following in the footsteps of young Clive Campbell, who as DJ Kool Herc, began spinning two copies of the same record, at parties he threw in his building's rec room, so as to isolate the “break” and loop it to create beats, paving the way for what would become hip hop.
Herc was born in April of 1955, one year before Ginsberg wrote America and Monroe wrote herself into another doomed marriage. She and Miller were able to obtain a divorce in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico in January of 1961.
Six months earlier, and a thousand-or-so miles to the south in Cuernavaca, a young Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary was having his first trip on psilocybin mushrooms. Meanwhile, in various parts of the world, Vincent Gallo, Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman, and Steve Poltz were all being born.
Killing Joke released their most controversial album, Outside the Gate, in 1988, while Steve Poltz's friend Jewell Kilcher, at twelve, was busking with her father in Alaskan taverns to make ends meet and Vincent Gallo's friend and erstwhile bandmate Jean-Michel Basquiat: Warhol-protege, legendary old-school grafitti artist and darling of the New York art scene died of an overdose of heroin and cocaine. This was also the year I was born.
If you find this kinda shit fascinating, just think of what I left out. Where do you and yours fit in?

Ten Little Indians

So I know I said I'd stop talking about India. I don't generally like talking about my racial background mainly because (and I'm sure most ethnic or racially nonwhite people will agree) I want to be about more than my ethnicity, especially in my writing. I also avoid the subject because Indians in this country tend to be conservative, clannish, and possessed of that corny, slightly creepy esprit de corps that small, relatively unsettled minorities tend to have in spades.

Nonetheless, I guess I can't escape my preoccupations, and it's safe to say my race is one of them. I tend to keep my eyes peeled for Indians on the street and in the news, and I'm always curious about the interactions between the two countries (America and India) which inform my cultural identity.

Which brings me to an unpleasant realization I had today: famous Indian-Americans tend to suck really hard. Seriously! There are only a very few Indian-American celebrities but of those few, the vast majority are huge assholes! Indeed, so totally lame are the majority of famous Indians in this country that, with them as principle examples, it's a wonder we're known in this country for engineering, vari-colored gods and tikka masala instead of as a race of thoroughly reprehensible shitheads.

Let's start with one of the most prominent of these Desi disgraces: professional Punya-pimp and mystical hustler Deepak Chopra. Fuck this guy. Now I know white people love the shit out of him, and everyone seems to think he's super-spiritual and all, but come on! In the eighties, Bhagavan Sri Rajneesh(aka Osho) managed to swindle his nutcase acolytes out of enough frogskins to build a five star ashram in Pune, with enough left over to buy a Saddam Hussein-style fleet of Rolls Royces. But at least that guy had the decency to grow a beard, wear robes and make with the mystical shit. Chopra looks like a professor at MIT, and with his MD, one wonders why he's not, i dunno, practicing medicine somewhere and leaving our immortal souls in the hands of more skilled (as well as beaded and dreadlocked) professionals.

But one would be missing the point. It's precisely because Chopra looks like a buttoned-down white-collar type that he's able to woo so many spiritually bankrupt American professionals desperate for an easy enlightenment-fix and with plenty of money to burn. Chopra looks like your kindly Indian doctor, and his lifestyle suggests that you don't have to renounce your plasma screen TV and six car garage to find spiritual satisfaction. After all if you can't find God in the marketplace...

Lastly, but not least annoying, his mystical shit mixed in with middlebrow Chicken Soup for the Soul style “wisdom” and white collar audience makes for the most nauseating sort of language as business cliches stroll arm-in-arm with New Agey truisms. Now I'll admit that I've never read one of his books, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that they say stuff like “You don't have to give up that luxury car and live in a shack” (perish the thought) “you can see god in the face of a child, experience Brahman at a board meeting, or mukti with your morning mocha!”. Barf.

So we've got Chopra, as well as dudes like Farid Zakaria, establishment desis. Professional, neat, polite conservative and serene, they remind me of my uncles. Except no one's ever given my oldass uncles fucking book deals, TV interviews and membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. My uncles don't kick it with Anderson Cooper!

But these guys are nothing compared to the raging neocon Indians. I'd call them race-traitors but I don't want to buy into the same nationalist rhetoric that gets these folks all fired up. Bobby Jindal is just the tip of the iceberg. Have you guys ever heard of Dinesh D'Souza?

D'Souza's politics swing past conservatism into reaction and hate. While a student at Dartmouth, D'Souza outed closeted members of the Gay Student Alliance and edited a conservative paper called The Prospect which criticized the schools “minority admissions policies” and was described as “outwardly destructive and irresponsible” by the schools Vice President of public Affairs. D'Souza appears to believe that African American culture at large is inherently poisonous, since it has it's roots in a tradition of rebellion against slavery, making modern day blacks rebellious and anti-authoritarian. He stops short of describing their murky, foul-smelling blood and insatiable hunger for non-consensual sex with white women. Asshole. D'Souza also dated Ann Coulter and has a wife named Dixie (no bullshit).

Then we have Sanjaya. Now, Sanjaya is an obvious target, but I don't hate him because he's egotistical or shrill, or flamboyant or untalented. In fact, I admire his courage and uniqueness. Too many Indians in these country are mousy little people made invisible by their shyness. Sanjaya is loud and bright, distinct and bold. Unafraid to take risks and be himself in front of a hostile crowd.

But he's also shallow and vapid and a part of the sick American Idol machine with it's Hollywood glitz, commercialism, hallmark card aesthetic and Simon Cowell- Schadenfreude. So no thanks.

Moving along we come to the most irredeemable villain on our list: Anand Jon, fashion designer and convicted serial rapist! Sweet!

During his trial his victims tearfully upbraided him before he was convicted of sixteen of twenty three counts of sexual abuse. Among the charges was the forcible rape of seven women, some as young as fourteen.

Shit, I mean say what you will about the other guys on this list, but at least they don't fucking rape children (although I think D'Souza fucks dogs). And what did he do before he was a rapist? He was a fashion designer, a part of that culture which makes young women insecure enough to be taken in by sleazebags like Anand Jon in the first place.


Recently, I was thinking about how much I love Dr. Sanjay Gupta. I mean, I am seriously in awe of the guy, he's just so...So what? Polite? Sane? Not-a-rapist?

This is where we've gotten to with our famous Indian Americans. For me personally, guys like Sanjay Gupta and Kal Penn aren't likable because they're particularly great at what they do, or because they make art which moves me to tears, or because they have such well informed enlightening opinions. It's because they're regular people, famous Indian-Americans that I don't have to be ashamed of.

The picture is a bit rosier in other countries, especially the UK, where Indians form proto-punk groups and man green-anarchist info shops. Where lumpenproletariat desis live alongside poor Africans and whites in council estates and make Marxist electronica.

But until Indian Americans expand into these progressive, fringe-niches, until we have Indian gangster rappers and pacifist indie-cartoonists and squatters and tranny bash-back cell members and anti-capitalist grafitti artists bringing a DiY ethic and rock and roll aesthetic to the Indian American cultural landscape, we'll have to settle for the honest, shy smile, the kindly bedside manor and honest demeanor of Sanjay Gupta and Kal Penn, who's oatmeal-normality makes us feel like decent people. True American Heroes.