politics

by

Dean Spade Speaking at the Radical Book Pavillion at the Baltimore Book Fair

image

I hadn’t been on my bike since Wednesday, which was far too long, but I wasn’t driving–I was just in New York, where nobody I know ever even thinks about cars. Oh, it is magical there! I didn’t have time for a bike ride, busy as I was with the fantastic Barnard Center for Research on Women conference and a side trip wandering through Harlem, visiting a couple national parks, but there were bikes and bike lanes everywhere, and C. reports the one on Second Ave is about to go all the way to the tippy top of the island. I can’t wait to bring my bike there and just go wild. Sigh. I took the train back to Baltimore, rested a bit, and then took my bike to the book fair to hear D. talk and lead the kind of discussion you hope to get at that sort of thing but rarely do–thing is, the state is the site of so much violence, we kind of need to think of strategies other than going to that same state for redress or protection if we really want all of us to be safe, in the most expansive sense of that term. It was a weekend full of reports, ideas, new plans, and old friends, such a treat. But it was good to ride my bike to the coffee shop, grade some papers, and then climb back up the hill, because that’s the sort of thing that feels like home.

by

Baltimore City Police Department 24/7 Believe Blue Light Camera at 22nd & Calvert

Tonight’s ride took me down to the pizza place for dinner and wine with the new colleagues. We were set to meet at 7:00pm, the same time that Troy Davis was set to die at the hands of the state of Georgia. It was a strange feeling, riding my bike down the hill for pizza when the state was setting up to kill a man. Continue reading →

by

High Security at the Inner Harbor’s 9/11 Memorial

Today’s bike ride took me to Waverly to meet R. for brunch and bike comparison–she’s got the blue Long Haul Trucker with big ol’ upright handlebars, and I have a feeling our bikes have some mutual exploring of bike trails to do together. Afterward we rode our bicycles our separate ways, and I headed down to the Inner Harbor to check out the sunny Sunday crowds. Continue reading →

by

Presentation at Red Emma’s Bookstore and Cafe in Mt. Vernon

 I spent the day at work and stopped into the gym to get some exercise in out of the rain. Surprise, surprise, though, the sun came out this afternoon! Well, maybe not the sun, but the rain was gone, so I took the bike and flew down the hill to see Dulcey Lewis’s presentation of her senior thesis research on the Lesbian Avengers at the anarchist collective coffee shop and bookstore.
The place was packed and I enjoyed listening to the Avengers being talked about like an ancient cult–I guess the early 90s are a historical netherworld in some circles. We have got to remember our histories, and I’m glad folks are on the case. I stayed after to mix and mingle, went for a beer and a snack with V., and then rode back up the hill in the cool breeze of September in Baltimore, a lovely Friday night in the bag.

by

Block of Empty Rowhouses at Oliver & Brentwood

I woke up this morning to gray skies and the promise of rain for the rest of the weekend, so I hopped up, sucked down a breakfast smoothie (thanks, E., for the gifts!), and took the bike over to Collington Square Park to meet Odette Ramos, candidate for City Council from the 12th district for a bike tour of the district. Continue reading →

by

Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center Super Max Prison at Madison & Fallsway

image

After another long day at the new job I got on the bike and headed downtown for my first trip to the Whole Foods to get frozen berries and flax seeds for my breakfast, but mostly I just needed a bike ride to shake off the whole sitting-at-a-table-and-listening thing. I rode home up the hill in a super easy gear, all loaded down with the stuff you get when you go shopping hungry. The ride home quickly turns from tourist harbor to the outskirts of downtown to emptiness. I stopped to take a picture of the building at Fallsway and Madison. It is ringed with barbed wire and has rusted-out windows on one side and the tiny slits in the walls on the other, because it’s a prison. I figured it was a jail, it being practically in downtown Baltimore. Turns out it’s a supermax prison, where people are confined to cages 23 hours a day, 24 on the weekends. They are allowed no physical contact, ever; visits are through plexiglass, and time outside of cages is spent alone, one day inside, another day outside, one hour a day, five days a week. We do that to people, to human beings. I am ashamed of us. And I’m going to spend the foreseeable future riding by here on my bicycle all loaded up with blueberries, brewer’s yeast, and vitamins, pedal, pedal, pedal. I’m going to have to think about this one. So should you, because there’s a supermax prison somewhere near you. Baltimore just isn’t hiding its one.

by

Shame On The Cordish Company on Pratt Street

image

After a quick ride to the coffee shop to avail myself of coffee and the internet while finishing up a few quick revisions on an article, I rode down to the Inner Harbor to meet the new colleagues for a get-to-know-you lunch. Baltimore is a hilly place, as I may have mentioned, so the ride down is just that, and it’s speedy. I whipped around to the bike lane on Pratt, only to be stopped by a truck in my bike lane, and it wasn’t the only one. Sigh. I snapped a picture of a couple of men guarding a sign and stopped to ask them about the Cordish Company and what they are up to that is so shameful. Turns out they are developers who are developing lots of properties in the harbor area and around the city. They subcontract to nonunion labor, undercutting wages for everybody. Then the guy had to throw in a comment about “illegals,” and I thought to myself, hey, eyes on the prize. The trouble’s obviously this Cordish fellow, though theguy also said the man himself is a good guy, it’s what he does that sucks. Well, ok. I took a right on President where folks were protesting the labor practices of another company. this whole economic downturn is used far too often as an alibi to further erode labor rights. Why are the same people always being asked to tighten their belts, when they barely have any holes left on the thing? It’s immoral. Oh, and the chances you are going to stop to ask a follow up question when driving a car are about zero–another good reason to ride a bike, even if it is uphill to get home.

by

Malcolm Suber Speaking at the Anti-ALEC Rally at the Federal Courthouse on Poydras

image

Today’s ride took me down to the Federal Courthouse on Poydras, a place that saw a lot of action today. The verdicts were in on the Danziger 7: guilty, guilty, guilty, all 25 counts. I was shocked. I am not used to the police being held accountable for violence against people of color, not at all. Now, I am under no illusions that putting a few individual men in prison fixes a social problem–I mean, we’ve got to reckon with the part where this just might be the system working like it’s supposed to. And I don’t think we should be putting anybody in prison–that’s not the safety I want. But these convictions mean something, that police can’t do these things under the cover of disaster. That is huge, and it is good for all of us. This afternoon the place was the stage for a different show, a protest against the meeting of ALEC, a right wing think tank with a purchased place at the government table. I took this picture of Malcolm Suber as he reminded us that we are in a class war, but it’s rich against poor, and we best start fighting back. And then we walked, me pushing my bicycle as I listened to R. tell me stories about learning to be an activist, talking about how we teach those lessons. Round and round the Marriot we went, so many lessons in this day.

by

Domino’s American Legends at Common & Carondelet

image

Warning: this blog will expose some of my latent angry lesbian feminist tendencies. I spent most of my day inside, cursing the vicious rains that are keeping me off my bike. Damn you, Nature! But it is what it is, and I managed to get quite a bit of work done, so, meh, good for me. I was working on my Introduction to Gender and Women’s syllabus for the fall semester, so that’s where my head was at when I headed out for the Britney Spears/Nicki Minag Femme Fatale 2011 tour at New Orleans Arena. I have liked Brtiney since she was a little girl. I wrote my master’s exams to her second album on repeat. I showed clips of Crossroads in my first Intro to Women’s Studies course in 2002; it really does offer a rare representation of class politics, plus, when Brit sings “I Love Rock and Roll,” well, um, I just really like that part. Every semester I talk to students about this quandary, where women’s  sexual power and pleasure is an essential feminst right and fight, but also the way that the narrowing of women’s power to the sexual realm is dangerous, especially for women who have long been imagined as always already hypersexual. So, I ask my students, is Britney (or Nicki or Beyonce or Lady Gaga) a feminist figure, or is she just playing up to old damaging tropes of women’s sexual availabilty? Thing is, it’s both and neither and all of that. Nothing is either revolutionary or not, subversive or not. It depends on who’s doing the looking, what the one being looked at is putting on display, where it’s happening. It depends on the rhetorical situation. Tonight, watching so many women hobbling in heels they couldn’t trust and wearing skirts they couldn’t sit in, it just didn’t seem like the kind of feminism I want us to be fighting for, even if Britney’s show is all about her “power” as a femme fatale. It seemed like feminism as just another consumer choice, and it reminded me of this sign outside a Domino’s I passed as I pushed my bike through the rush hour crowds, America’s legends reduced to pizza with ham and pineapple on top, politics reduced to what you buy or wear. And that’s not even to touch the weird Orientalism, the “sexy” prisoner/guard motif, how we all know nobody’s actually making music but we don’t say anything,  the endless dance fighting, white versus black, good versus evil, and so on. But that’s just how I read it tonight–we’ll see what I think about it in the morning. What I am sure of is that the bike is the way to get to a giant show. from the grossly underused rack and whizzing by all those suckers sitting in their cars in traffic. Ride a bike, people!

by

NOPD Shirts For Sale at the Station on Royal Street

image

Today’s ride took me Uptown from my current digs in the Marigny for lunch with N. and then to the office where I took care of last minute things for my trip to Baltimore tomorrow. I had meant to also stop by the courthouse as the Danziger trial started again, but the skies opened up and kept me and my bicycle in the office for most of the afternoon. I rode home under crazy thundering skies, stopping for a treat and then coffee with S. I had a bee in my bonnet about how little I have been taught about Frederick Douglass–he was one of our premier statesman! Why don’t they teach us that in schools!–and she filled in some blanks for me–friends, man, they’re the best. After a quick stop at home to get the cat out of the rain, I was back on the bike to meet R. and her kid for dinner. I pedaled up Royal as fast as I could to beat the rain, just stopping to take a picture of this sign outside the 8th District police station. T-shirts for sale? Really? I wonder who buys such things, and if the market’s been hit by the fallout from Danziger or Henry Glover or the cops arrested during their own prostitution stings (I thought we had decided to decriminalize!) or the other cops giving instructions to keep a special eye on all the Black men in town for Essence Fest or any of the other scandals showing this to be one of the most corrupt forces in the nation. Nah, I’ll pass on the shirt. After dinner I did my loop around the Bywater, deftly avoiding collision with that driver taking a left turn in front of me at the intersection of Poland and St. Claude. Look alive, people. It’s dangerous out there, but that’s no reason to stay off your bicycle.