Shorewood versus 53206

Perhaps nothing explains the problem better than the numbers: The clip below of Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn has gotten nearly a million hits, despite being on YouTube only since last November. But the clip of University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Professor Lois Quinn, who was commissioned by the NAACP to look at rates of incarceration of black men in the entire state of Wisconsin? It’s been up on YouTube three months longer, and has had 86 hits.

I came upon both Flynn and Quinn through a BBC video clip entitled “Why Does Wisconsin Send So Many Black People to Jail,” and that was jarring enough. Shouldn’t the BBC be writing about the mystery of Wisconsin’s famous cheeses, or the remaining legacy of Vince Lombardi in Green Bay? Sorry, guys—this is where we are now.

And I got to that clip because I had read a news story—again in the BBC—about, well, here’s a screen shot of what I saw:

  

Right, so people the world over are reading about what happened to a 19-year old black kid on the near east side of Madison, Wisconsin; it’s a place I know well, since I lived over there, and still have good friends over there. So I should know the area, the city, and the state—right?

I’m not so sure….

Certainly, the professor is a type I know well: Earnest, sincere, well-meaning. Her points are valid: It’s not just the city of Milwaukee that has an horrific are of incarceration of young black men, but the entire state of Wisconsin. And why is that? Well, the mandatory sentencing guidelines play a part, as do the stepped-up efforts of the Milwaukee Police Department to crack down on driving offenses. Why should that affect black people adversely?

Several reasons, the first of which is that the police are probably targeting the black population. But the real reason is simple: Once you have gone to jail, it is nearly impossible to stay out of jail again.

Everything is against you: The jobs that are available are not on the bus lines, so you need a car. But wait, your license has been suspended, so you drive in fear of being stopped. And even if you have a car and your license hasn’t been suspended? Well, what do you tell your boss, after you have been late three times to work this month, after all these stops?

Assuming, by the way, that there is any job at all, since telling your prospective employer you’ve been a guest of the state of Wisconsin for the last 2.4 years (the average time a prisoners spends in prison for a non-violent drug offense)? Inexplicably, it seems to have a dampening affect on the interview….

So it’s a problem, since Milwaukee has the third highest number of young black men per capita in the country, and do those guys have a high school education? A lot don’t, but it’s more than the lack of jobs and the lack of education. At one point in the clip, Quinn talks about one zip code in the inner city of Milwaukee, and I was interested to learn that she had studied it, and reported this:

This 2007 publication introduces two new sections addressing critical (and previously unexamined) issues facing the neighborhood: the unprecedented increases in subprime and high-interest rate housing loans to neighborhood residents and investors, and the growing population of ex-offenders of prime working age in the neighborhood. These new measures stand in sharp contrast with prior indicators which have generally shown relatively slow downturns and in some cases modest improvements. The new analyses, however, show substantial movement in a negative direction, particularly in the last 4-5 years as prisoners released to these neighborhoods have risen dramatically and subprime lending for refinancing mortgages has escalated.

Melancholy, isn’t it? Because apparently the neighborhood has been studied for the last twenty years, since 1993, and the neighborhood had been struggling, but not plummeting. Oh, and by the way, see that “this 2007 publication,” right up there in the first sentence of the paragraph above?  2007 was before the economic collapse, and remember, all of that subprime lending affected the poor more than the middle class or rich. No one will shed a tear for a rich guy buying ten apartments on spec to flip who then ends up shirtless, but a family who ends up on the streets, or sleeping in their car, because the bank has leant them money? All so that the bank could turn around and sell a package of mortgages to Korea? Sorry, that pulls my heartstrings.

Am I just another do-good liberal, then? Because Ed Flynn, the police chief of Milwaukee certainly lost it in the clip below, and with good reason. Yes, cops are out there putting their lives at risk while I sleep away, only waking up to go out and protest that black lives matter, but never showing up when a black kid is shot in a drive-by killing—as was the case with Flynn, during the protest—or worrying about the 80% of crime victims who are black, and their 80% of perpetrators who are black.

Nor is it really fair to point out that, statistically, crime tends to take place in the same neighborhoods as the perpetrators: If I live in zip code 53206—the zip code studied by the professor—am I going to hop a bus up to Shorewood or Fox Point to knock over a gas station?

No, the real problem is this. But wait: Let’s stop this finger-pointing and go back to basics. Ask any little black kid what he wants to be when he grows up, and what are you going to hear? That he wants to be an ex-con? A drug dealer? The biggest pimp in the neighborhood?
Don’t think so. He or she will want to be a doctor or a fireman or a policeman or a teacher. And somehow—those dreams are getting realized for little kids up in Shorewood or Fox Point, but not for 53206. And I suspect that however unequal things were in the Madison I grew up in, they are infinitely worse now. And it starts, as it always does, at the beginning: From prenatal care that is substandard in 53206 to the single-parent home to the underfunded schools to the societal norm of pushers and drug dealers on the street to the reality of drive-by killings and drug murders to gangs to school dropout rates to…. Do I have to go on?

One of Quinn’s points is that for Shorewood residents there’s a pass, when a rich kid gets in trouble with the law. He was swerving through the main drag in Shorewood with a blood alcohol level of .15? Kids will be kids! But one tangle with the law in 53206 is a life sentence.

So by all means watch the clip of Flynn, who is feeling understandably besieged. What shouldn’t you do? Read the comments by the viewers—all 5,681 comments, who may have been inflamed by the chief, as well as by the poster of the clip, Brian Solonge. He ends his introduction with this:

If black people in America dont wake up we are going to be an endangered specie like the Native American within the next 100 years,bet on it.

In order not to have to use a decade's worth of “sic” above, I will only say that the spelling and punctuation are as in the original.

So it’s a war, Shorewood versus 53206. Now then, we can fight it, or we can stop, take a deep breath, and look at all the systemic issues that keep this war going on. But for anyone disinclined to do that, let me tell you, there will never be a winner in this war. 

Not the way we’re fighting it.  

   

Ballet's Good Boy?

If there’s a moral to this story, it may be that you’re better off stupid as a post, or maybe possessed of a peasant sensibility, inclined to do hard work and happy to be paid for it. Or maybe not, since would I have known anything about Sergei Polunin had he not done the unthinkable, the unimaginable, and walked out of the  Royal Ballet, where at age 19 he had become the youngest principal dancer in the company’s history…if all of that improbable stuff hadn’t happened, would I have seen him, with millions of others last month, dancing to something called “Take me to Church?”

But I was a Lady’s house, talking about the ballet, and Lady—being significantly more in the world than I (OK, there’s Emeritus Pope Benedict)—immediately played me the clip. So I admired, I ogled, and I put that away as one of those interesting experiences: A talented dancer, a likeable tune, interesting shots. And it’s nice to see that ballet can grab seven million hits on YouTube. Yes!

A few days later, I was looking up Swan Lake on YouTube, and the site suggested “Take me to Church,” so I clicked on it again. And that led, as so often it does, to seeing the original “Take me to Church,” which has garnered 135 million hits. This would automatically disqualify it as anything I might ever imaginably see, since the shaded area of the Venn Diagram of Marc and 135 million people is impossible to imagine. But I was curious, since I read that the clip was in protest of the treatment of LGBT people in Russia.

And that was an issue, since Naïa, Lady’s 13-year old daughter, had appeared a few days earlier in tears, asking if it was true: Lady and her husband could go to jail in Russia if they said anything about gay people to Naïa. Lady gulped, and said yes.

“And Marc could go to jail, just for being gay?”

No way out: Lady had to say yes.

Naïa was silent for a moment, then turned and announced she was going to go cry in her room. Oh, and then she said…

“…I’ve lost all faith in humanity.”

Well, we both agreed: 13 is young for such an existential state. It does, however, occur to me now that that speaks more to our fortunate state than it does to the conditions of the world today.

So I called Naïa a few days later, and told her: I’m more confident about the state of humanity than I ever have been. Imagine, I said, when I was thirteen I could not even admit that I was gay, much less that one day I would marry. In fact, as a child I was terrified of my wedding day—since of course it would happen (it does to adults, right?) and I knew that I would be horribly unhappy. Oh, and also make my wife utterly miserable. So we agreed: When the Supreme Court strikes down all the marriage bans in the country, Raf and I will get married in Puerto Rico, and Naïa will be part of the wedding party.

“Marc, I was just kidding!”

So today’s conundrum: What in hell is going on in the mind of Sergei Polunin? Because I had now read that he had been born in the Ukraine, that he had been pushed into first gymnastics and then ballet at the age when most kids are contemplating the breach between kindergarten and first grade. And that came with a price, since it meant that he was separated from his mother. How did that feel? Well, according to one source, Polunin has refused to allow his mother to see any of his performances. She does, however, follow his career electronically via the fan pages.

I was then looking at the clip of why Polunin left the Royal Ballet, and the reasons stated—a need for artistic growth—seemed a little unlikely. Here, I give you the Guardian:

The fact that he was pushed into ballet training, sent off to the Royal Ballet school when he was just 13, left Polunin with a deeply conflicted relationship to his own prodigious talent. Three years ago he suddenly exited the Royal, claiming he was unable to work within the constraints of the company’s discipline. And although he subsequently moved to Russia to dance with the Stanislavsky and Novosibirsk ballet companies, he still did not settle. In September last year he announced his intention to leave ballet altogether and begin a Hollywood career, and while he is still dancing it’s unclear for how long.

While in Russia working with the Stanislavsky and Novosibirsk ballet companies, he had as a mentor—something he apparently never had—Igor somebody-or-other (and my apologies both to him and to you, since the Internet is taking an afternoon nap, or perhaps has snuck out for a little illicit Friday afternoon golf… So be warned, anything I write after this is completely unverified….)

Igor was a famous dancer, and is now choreographer for the Stanislavsky and Novosibirsk ballet companies; more importantly, he was also rich. And that, from what I remember from this morning, was the big thing. Because Polunin said that ballet is not cool, baseball is cool, since that way you can make a real killing.

Oh, and one more thing about Polunin: He likes tattoos, and one of the tattoos he sports—all of which have to be covered with makeup before each performance—is the flag of Chechnya. The Educated Readers of this blog don’t have to be reminded that there was a little unpleasantness between Russia and Chechnya, just as there is that little pebble in the path between the Ukraine and Russia, and just as there is—OK, skip the ironic tone—enormous enmity between Russia and gay people. And that was the point of “Take me to Church,” since it became to protest song for the treatment of gays in Russia. And if you have Internet, and parental advisement, you can see the clip, which features gangs of masked youth attacking and throwing onto a fire a gay man.

I’m about as stunned as I would be if I were thrown into the ring with Mohammed Ali in his prime.

And what has happened to Polunin? Is he still in Russia, and if so, in how many pieces? There’s a phenomenal talent there, but is that enough? And more, what is it that drives a dancer at the absolute pinnacle to walk away? And I asked myself…

…is it moral?

Then I thought, ‘well, haven’t I spent four hours this week doing something I really have no interest in doing?’ Because after all, I have been teaching a very nice lady English these last weeks, and five days ago, she wrote me a check. Because I teach well, does that mean I can’t walk away from it? Just because Polunin gets called “fabulous” by The New York Times, does that mean he has to crank out a decade or two of Coppelias and Nutcrackers?

There’s a difference, I say, but is there?

My head has no answer. My gut tells me that it’s unspeakably sad, the life that Polunin has had, the prices he has paid, the sacrifices he has made, but more especially, the terrible price he will pay if he has done all of this just in the pursuit of more money. People venerate the arts, worship the great artists, bring to performances all the awe and adoration that the masses brought to the church, all those centuries ago. Polunin poses the question…

…have we been wrong? 

Wednesday Musings

How do you know it was a good performance?

Well, a good musician doing a good job can control his instrument—in this case, her instrument, which is the human voice—but a great musician stops playing the instrument or the music, and plays the room. And the proof of that? The audience applauds on her cue, not on theirs.

That’s what the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, singing Handel’s Piangero from Giulio Cesare, does in the clip below, which I’m terribly sure was pirated off a cell phone from a live performance in the Teatro Colón. But wherever the performance came from, DiDonato is riveting; nobody, nobody, is going to clap until she relinquishes the experience, stops being Cleopatra, stops bewailing her cruel fate, stops realizing that she—a queen—has been vanquished and stripped of everything.

There’s no other aria that is quite as desolate, no other aria that has stripped the flesh off the character and burned it in the desert sun, until it is as beautiful and brittle as a Georgia O’Keefe skull. You touch it, and it disintegrates—poof!—into the finest powder; the desert wind takes it—the avenging angel—to its next state of existence.

This is not an aria. This is a person pulling an audience through the birth channel of inner pain and psychic anguish. This is a person who is drawn to a hideous flame, as is the moth, but who knows that the flame will consume her, and knows that it is not just useless but sinful to refuse the flame. The flame? That’s her destiny.

Is it sad music? No, of course not. We have left “sad” far behind, nor is it any other emotion, unless it’s an emotion for which we have still no word. For no one ventures back from this emotion, no one returns from this voyage, when you have arrived here, there is no return. Death could no be more final.

This morning, on my morning walk, I wanted to remember my mother, who died almost five years ago. Fortunately, that’s easy, since there is something about seeing—as I was—huge ocean swells crash against rocks until they explode into jets of water, spray, droplets and salt air…well, all that prompts thoughts of mortality. Each one of us is born somewhere deep in the ocean, stirred by the twirling of the plant, whispered by the phases of the moon. We travel through space and time, less a wave than the energy of one, the potential of one, and then, the rock! And for one glorious moment, the wave explodes into its potential, becomes the fusion of air and rock and time and water and space and…death.

And so, did I turn to Piangero, when I wanted to remember my mother?

Nope—rather, I turned to Bach’s Bist du bei Mir. And I was about to tell you that Bist du bei Mir is simply sadness on a human scale, whereas Piangero?

Could it be that a man or woman can move through personal suffering so acutely that he or she enters another realm: The suffering of the world? Or perhaps suffering as Plato imagined it: a form, an object as real as a rock. And as ephemeral as a droplet of wave water falling onto the rock.

And yet, not matter—because matter has changed, as well as time. It’s slower in this world, this world where we will meet the inevitable that horrifies us, that repels us, that is inescapable and inevitable.

Slower, yes—but there is a muted drum, or a throb, or a heartbeat heard through tissues and bones and amniotic fluid. Did I say heard? No—felt, for to pause to hear it would destroy the moment, the moment that is consuming you, the moment for which you have been born. The moment of dread and liberation.

I have been through the death of love and the death of a mother: This music is nothing of that. This music is about 3 AM, when I woke up and prayed for help, since I knew, I absolutely knew, that there was a musician inside me. And I knew the musician was good. So I sat in a darkened living room, and listened to the message, or perhaps the drum, the muffled drum, which was accompanying the coffin carrying the rotted, putrid corpse, stinking and oozing and repelling. The corpse that was my dream, the corpse that I had killed, since it was my doing, my choices, my temperament that had killed that dream. Music would be important in my life; it would not be my life.

The death of a dream—it was curiously more personal and less personal than the death of my mother. And it was cleaner and dirtier than my mother’s death as well. Because when my mother died, I was a witness, somebody who however dear I had been to her, was not experiencing death’s dark night. I was peering on, stunned and amazed as we always are, when the shadow of the sickle passes over a brow.

But that moment at three o’clock, when time had stood still enough for me to see it, when the world had decided that yes, it would cease its turning, stop in its track, stop the inane and senseless rotation, rest… And then, the coffin had come, and I looked in, and the stench and the horror and the burnt and charred flesh, the protruding bones, the visage of unspeakable anguish wrench across what had been a face…all that happened.

I looked, I saw the person I had neglected and starved, and poisoned and crushed into that state, all the while thinking that it hadn’t been I, it hadn’t been anything but bad luck and bad timing and bad genetics and maybe—just maybe—bad karma.

But no.

Piangero—I shall weep. But wrong—it is the only false thing in the aria.

For weeping is has been left far, far behind. We have left the world of feelings, where anyone might legitimately weep. Weeping is gone.

Wonder remains.

        

(For better sound quality, and an amazing interpretation, see the above….)

Our Young Gay Prisoners

Statistically, it’s not a problem that I probably need to think about, since do they go after white guys in their fifties who are still clinging somehow to the middle class? Of course not, which is why I’m worrying about Montalvo, a 22-year old self-proclaimed nigger, who developed, while in a profoundly chemical state, a mystic attraction to a blue macaw. The attraction grew and grew until it took flight—no, not the macaw’s flight, but human flight, with the police in hot pursuit of a purloined parrot.

The whole thing was stupid. Yes, Montalvo was stoned; yes, Montalvo had walked off with the bird; yes, he had even taken selfies with the bird, thus providing nice evidence for the entire world to see that he was utterly and jubilantly guilty. So what would a sensible judge have done?

I don’t know, and it may not be the point, because we went wackoo back there in the 80’s and set up mandatory sentencing, which seemed like a good idea at the time. So that meant that Montalvo was not a stupid, stoned 20-year old kid but an adult felon, since the value of blue macaws is over 500$ or 1000$ or whatever it was. Which meant that we all sat around in the café, one day last year, scratching our heads about the monetary value of a used macaw. Presumably, the bird was not in the springtime of its life—so that was one strike against it. Still, it was a working bird—as anybody could see from the constant and blinding flashes produced for the pleasure of grinning tourists, since who could resist being photographed with five parrots / macaws resting on your shoulders and head? And each flash was twenty dollars, and that all added up.

So Montalvo was—in the eyes of the criminal justice system—a felon: What to do with him? The answer was to convict him, put him on probation, and make him go to a drug rehabilitation program.

Was it the right thing? Does Montalvo need a drub rehabilitation program? From my point of view, the drugs aren’t the problem—the problem is that we have a stupid kid with too much time on his hands and too ready access to a drug that has been manipulated to twice its natural potency. So what would I do with Montalvo? Send him up to the mountains and make him pick coffee for a couple of years, or have him repair all the basket ball courts that are in ruinous condition, or clean up the schools, which are rat infested. In short, put him to work, tire him out, and get some use out of him.

Well, I thought of Montalvo because of T. J. Parsell, a gay ex-con who got raped in the first 24 hours of being in a men’s prison. And how old was Parsell? Seventeen, and the crime for which he was convicted was of holding up a photo mat with a toy gun. A toy guy, you ask? Can anyone take this seriously?

Well, the cashier did, and so in the eyes of the law a toy gun is just the same as a real gun. Oh, and if the cashier had been eighty and had keeled over in a heart attack, Parsell would have been charged with murder.

Well it worked out well for Parsell, at least to the extent that he graduated from high school, went to the university, and wrote a book—Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man’s Prison, which I’m now reading, and for which Parsell started a Kickstarter project in 2010, in order to turn the book into film.

The book is compulsive reading, and only the Bolshoi Ballet transmission of Swan Lake, yesterday, stopped me from reading it in one sitting.

Consider that last sentence, and consider the experience that separated me from Parsell, since he grew up white and blue-eyed in the Michigan four years after I grew up white and blue-eyed in Wisconsin. But he grew up in a family marked by alcoholism, divorce, abandonment, and incarceration. My world? Well, ever seen Leave It to Beaver?      

And so it was Beaver’s world yesterday, since the audience in the theater was elderly, white, cultured / upper class. All the things, in short, that Montalvo isn’t when he landed in jail for a week after being separated and adjudicated from the parrot, or that Parsell wasn’t when the toy gun was taken from him, and the state of Michigan decided it needed to correct him for two and a half years.

Going to the Bolshoi Ballet confers no protection against incarceration: Growing up, however, in an environment where people might know about the ballet and go to the ballet does, however. And gay people are—hold tightly to your seats here—not unknown among ballet audiences. So what has the gay community been worrying itself with for the last five or six years? Oh, and shouldn’t being gay confer some protection against incarceration? If—according to stereotype—we are the intellectual, artistic, introverted type, well, why would any gay kid land in jail?

Answer to the questions: The gay community has been focusing on marriage equality, which I support. But it’s feeling more and more to me that this is almost a classist issue, and especially when I read that…well, here’s Wikipedia on the “LGBT_People_in_Prison”

According to some studies, LGBT youth are particularly at risk for arrest and detention.^[34] Jody Marksamer, Shannan Wilber, and Katayoon Majd, writing on behalf of the Equity Project, a collaboration between Legal Services for Children, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, and the National Juvenile Defender Center, say that LGBT youth are overrepresented in the populations of youth who are at risk of arrest and of those who are confined in juvenile justice facilities in the United States.^[34]

A brief by the Center for American Progress found that each year approximately 300,000 gay, trans, and gender nonconforming youth are arrested or detained each year, 60% of whom are Black or Hispanic. These queer youth make up 13-15 percent of the juvenile incarceration system, compared to their overall population of 5-7 percent. Similar to how transgender adults are often placed into solitary confinement, allegedly for their own protection, these youth are “protected” in the same way. Often, however, it is because they are seen as sexual predators rather than potential victims. To add insult to injury, courts also commonly assign queer youth to sex offender treatment programs even when convicted of a non-sexual crime.

In short, we lock up twice as many gay kids as you would expect from their prevalence in the total population. But is that really any surprise? We know, for example, that there are a lot of gay kids on the streets, and where does that lead? To drug use, prostitution, and crime.

And what happens when we lock these kids up—especially these 17 to 20-year-old who weigh 150 or 160 pounds, and who are coming up against guys with 100 pounds more muscle? Guys who know the system, know how to play it, and know how to manipulate and conquer? The wonder is that Parsell lasted 24 hours….

And Montalvo? Well, I asked, and however much the prison scene might have changed since the passing of the Prison Rape Elimination Act in 2003, it didn’t transfer to La Regional two years ago, on that day when Montalvo go sent there. Two things happened—catcalls and obscene suggestions / propositions, and the immediate question: What gang was he in? So he chose the most common gang, and was promptly initiated into it by having the shit beaten out of him, as well as being marked.

Part of the obscenity of this system—for me—is the sheer waste of it all. The prisons have been privatized, many of them, and a lot of money is flowing from the public sector to the “private”—quotes because presumably a lot of that money flows back in the form of bribes or “legal” campaign contributions to the politicians who awarded the contracts in the first place. But does society get anything from having prisons? A university adds value to society, but what good does it do us to lock up people?

Even worse, we are locking up people whose lives we have wasted in one way or another: Through poor education, broken families, draconian drug laws, and persistent and ruinous social stigmatization. And the final waste?

It costs, I recently learned, almost $40,000 a year to lock up a prisoner in the state of Wisconsin. Undergraduate tuition and fees are $10,410 at the University of Wisconsin, which means that we could give every inmate a college education for what it costs to incarcerate them.

Of course, the university comes a little too late. For a look at what might be truly effective, check out the video on the Harmony Project below….