Move Over, Right Wing Radio: the Liberals Are Coming

Yes, BBB, everyone knows about City Lights, but how many can say they have spent hours among the stacks there?

No, the club is, I believe, on Telegraph but very near the Oakland city limits . . . I think it has a Hispanic-type name . . . Damn, it's still on the tip of my tongue . . .

BBB, hey, BBB, yoo hoo, BBB, wake up for this!

La Pena

La Pena
Yeah, I remember LaPena. Great place.

BumbleBeeBoogie

I am just newly here, thanks to PDiddie.

neoguin, I'm not familiar with Celtic Folk, but you don't know nuthin if you ain't within broadcast range of Blue Grass on WUNC. Back Porch Music on this NPR station, affilliated with WUNC-Chapel Hill, is one of the longest running and top rated folk music broadcasts on public radio.

I was at Berkeley in the (gasp) late fifties. Just before it all happened. That was an amazing time. I lived at the corner of College and Channing, and I learned later, having moved to DC and North Carolina, that we, on the West Coast, were light years ahead of our southeastern-US compadres.

I moved to Chapel Hill in 1977 and found that Main Street (Franklin St.) had two zones: above McDonald's and below. The darker ones sat on a wall abutting the main street and challenged any pale types who might wander down from the light zone northermost of Franklin and Columbia.

To an emigre from California, this was a bizarre division. Perhaps Berkeley was not a fair comparison. There, everyone mixed. No one looked at color or ethnicity, we were a mix of black, hispanic, asian, and white. Education, study, your field and expertise...these were the equalizers. I have wondered since: was this college city a unique zone outside of real life? Surely it was. Perhaps, after university, you become part of the larger world and sort out your own prejudices and stereotypes from then on. I have never thought that Berkeley stamped me. But it was amusing to come on the Iraq thread on A2K and find Perception type-casting me as a liberal because I was a Berkeley grad.

Sweet
Sweet, take a look at the La Pena Cultural Center site and remember:
http://www.lapena.org/

BumbleBeeBoogie

Oh, BBBoogie, thank you so much for the link to La Pena! Memories, yes, my goodness, yes. How could I have thought it was on Telegraph , Shattuck Avenue of course . . . and there were other nearby folk clubs which must also have been on Shattuck; the Ashkanaz? among others . . . "those were the days, my friend, we thought they'd never end . . . " Love ya, Sweetie

Kara wrote, in part:

" . . . neoguin, I'm not familiar with Celtic Folk . . . " oh, my, you really have been missing out and I'll bet you will find some on NPR as well . . .

and

". . . I have wondered since: was this college city a unique zone outside of real life? Surely it was. . . " although I am tempted to be as biased as you seem about Berkeley, The People's Republic Of, I imagine other college towns, say Madison for example, probably come pretty close . . .

and

". . . I have never thought that Berkeley stamped me. But it was amusing to come on the Iraq thread on A2K and find Perception type-casting me as a liberal because I was a Berkeley grad." Unfortunately, I have found that the more 'conservative people' one finds here or anywhere, for that matter, have a real need to pigeon-hole people in order to, I guess, make it safer for them to avoid any possible cognitive dissonance. Gosh, Perception needs to check out some of his/her perceptions :wink: , but I sincerely doubt that would happen because it might cause such a headache.

Kara, PDiddie is the one who invited me here as well. So, from one PDiddie invitee to another: welcome aboard!

Sweet
The Ashkanaz was on San Pablo Avenue. It suffered from a bad fire a few years ago and I don't remember if it was rebuilt before I moved last year. Great place for good music and dancing. They also had some improvisation theater there, too.

BumbleBeeBoogie

alright already, BBB, I guess I have to face the fact that the memories have faded ; so, what about the small folk club which I "remember" as being close to the Ashkanaz but still can't recall its name (surprise!)? It had one small room, you could certainly talk with the artists/performers, a "snack bar" on the right side as you face forward toward the stage (if one could actually call it a stage) and in the snack bar you could get organic juices, especialy apple; brownies and blondies from Just Desserts; espresso and that was about it? Do you know that one? Surely, that and not La Pena is the one to which I first referred . . . I definitely remember hearing someone (whose name, of course, escapes me now) singing various anti-war songs, the audience joining in when they knew the song . . . it had a real communal feeling . . .

BBB, thanks for the La Peña site. Brings it all back.

And howdy to you, too, SweetComplicity.

Back later. Packing for a trip.

Kara, safe journey! How about bringin' your soul as well as your body back to the left coast? Aren't both Carolinas a bit stifling . . . I still associate them with the police standing by as KKKluxers shot down the Jews and the Blacks marching some years ago . . . bad association. Upon returning from your trip, please tell me something nice about where you now live and you will make me feel ever so much better!

Thanks for the good wishes, SC. But I'd rather tell you something nice about where I'm going. My next posts will be from Ireland, on my lap top. I'll report on the weather which is always, invariably and inevitably, Showers with sunny spells or Sunny with frequent showers. We have a wee cottage there.

Chapel Hill is a college town, of course, and when I moved there in 1977, I expected to see the all-out liberalism of most college towns, notable among them being Berkeley. Well, did I get a surprise. There was a line down the middle of town -- invisible, but I could walk it today -- between black socializing and white same. Things have improved here in the last 25 years, and heads don't always swivel if an interracial couple walks down Franklin Street, but I always have the feeling that the divisions just went underground and into hiding.

I have been tempted many times to push for a return, body and soul, to God's Country, but Mr. K. has an aversion to CA traffic. I was born in Sacramento and grew up in the Bay Area. Met Mr. K. working in Yosemite for the summer, so I have many sentimental memories of the state.

Kara, here's what appears to be a somewhat relevant post from me to Tartarin on the racist/racial friction topic under politics, around page 46; which would have been posted before we began digressing and started slobbering over Don Cheadle, much to the chagrin of Craven as well as to other men referring to us as "evil wimmins":

" . . . Tartarin, as part of her previous post, wrote:
"...There are parts of the country -- social and professional areas -- where racism has all but disappeared. That is my experience of the art world in major urban areas..."

That was also my experience until some African-American friends in San Francisco disabused me of that misperception. I was told that sometimes they felt an undercurrent, apparently beneath our radar, of racism just below the surface of a lot of 'friendly', read politically correct, people and that they were quite uncomfortable with it. One person shared that he even thinks, although he never really would, of returning to a more backward area just to have the hatred straight out rather than feeling that he had to spend time just wading through what he perceived as a lot of insincere crap that left him wondering... I can understand that, but I find it very disheartening. Unfortunately, that has become my experience of life in one of the most progressive cities in the country . . ."

I think a lot of what passes for "liberalism" is rightly perceived by those affected as a thin veneer rather than a deep belief, but, then again, I'm quite cynical at this point!

I am so envious of your cottage and your trip to the Emerald Isle. Please do send updates . . . even PM's . . . I would love to go there someday <sigh>

Speaking of the liberalism of college towns, there is a classic quote from Jesse Helms who was our senator from NC for Lo, these many years.

At one time, a state zoo was being considered and up for funding by the state legislature. Jesse Helms weighed in, commenting that We do not need a new zoo. All we must do is put a fence around Chapel Hill.

I am of the opposite view on most things (maybe all things) from Jesse Helms, but I thought that comment was pretty funny. If you have ever walked down Franklin St. where town meets gown, and observed the passing crowds, Ol Jesse may have had a point.

I am sometimes perceived as a probable racist by people of color before they get to know me. I have a difficult time mingling among strangers of any race, even white. Once I relax they can see I am okay. But, the initial nervousness on my part, and the initial sizing up by the other, creates misunderstandings. I mention this because we sometimes misjudge others by making quick decisions.

Will We see Gore TV?

SC replied to Tartarin



That says it all. I have heard the same sentiment expressed more than once. I fear that our prejudices are so tribal, so deep, that they are ever only glossed over. Even among my liberal friends, I hear scepticism when I insist that the educational gap found in testing black and white school children is not an essential difference but one that is based on a decades of separate-but-equal education before forced integration, plus the cultural phenomenon of "don't study or look brainy, don't act 'white' " that is the natural outgrowth of lagging behind fellow students and needing a defense.

I read a fascinating but parallel theory about why women lag behind men in sport's times and records. A small portion of the difference is natural strength. Women at the turn of the century were not allowed to compete; it was considered bad for the female body and purpose. By the time physical conditioning and competition became possible for women in general, about the time of Title IX, they were beginning a journey that men had taken for decades, maybe centuries. Now, every year, the women's marathon time, for example, gets faster by a large increment, whereas the mens' times increase by a tiny fraction, pointing toward a natural limit to human speed.

Could this not be true of education as well? Blacks, and other minorities that were held back for years, might take leaps forward every year, as they get used to testing and as their cultural negatives against educational success disappear. Someone brilliant will tell me this analogy limps, so I'm waiting to hear it.

PDiddie, I had not heard about Al Gore backing a liberal cable news channel. He has gone up a notch on my opinion scale. I hope the channel ends up as a fair and balanced liberalism, not just the knee-jerk kind.

The first time I started liking Gore was after I learned that he can quote Dylan's songs verbatum without studying first. I think he is very capable, just a poor campaigner.

Kara
I think you make some very good points. I have always believed that when over three hundred years is spent enforcing the opinion on a group of people that they are inferior by every standard, except, perhaps physical, it becomes ingrained for generations. We are seeing this enforcement being stripped away and the oppressed group make ever more strides. I don't have any concept of how long it will take before the last vestige is wiped out. I do know I have seen a great deal of progress in my lifetime.

Good post, Edgar. I agree. The points you and I are making are not easily made in conversation or even in writing. I am so often accosted with, They are equal with us now, They have been given so many privileges via affirmative action, etc., etc. No one will sit still to listen to the story of the ages. They cannot comprehend a story going back a century that leads to what we see now. I have read that the current sad state of children of unwed moms -- the high percentages of all black children are born this way -- is a fallout of slavery when families were broken up and marriage became a sometime thing, and the women who were left -- most of them -- had to make it on their own. The men became adjuncts, appendages, who had no meaning in their childrens' lives, nor the lives of the birth mothers. In other words, marriage became a non-issue, an unimportant sacrament, in the lives of black people.

Marriage is an important sacrament in society. It is an institution that forms a basis for security of the family. Whether you are religious or not, you can see the importance of such institutions, and the institution was lost for black people at the time of slavery and for a century after.

Of course. One need not practice religion to do things human, just be open to living well. The reason I have less trouble than some in seeing this, I came from a broken home, with no real home of our own, and was placed under an oppressive stepfather, who systematically abused me. He worked to make me out to be stupid and incapable of any sort of useful thought using both verbal and physical torment. Sound vaguely familiar? I can easily see how generational such conditioning can do still more damage. I am 60 and barely over those times, because there are no vestiges of my oppression left to work against me. Not so, the people descended from slaves. Theirs is a cross to bear far heavier than mine.