Tag: Binghamton

PC, LGBT, 8-tracks, malls and dystopia

If you were beamed down from the USS Enterprise into most malls, you’d be hard pressed to know where you were geographically.

7.21.08 Blitt Obama.inddUthaclena, who I know in terrestrial life, asks:

Okay: at what point does Political Correctness become absurd? Do public facilities need to be sanitized of all things religious to ensure separation of church and state? On Halloween can you only wear costumes of your own race/ethnicity/religion?

Okay. Here’s the thing; I don’t know what different people’s boiling points are, because I’m not them. For instance, it is the groups of Native Americans who have complained about the name of the Washington Redskins NFL team that makes me believe in the rightness of the complaint.

Too often, people wear the badge of political incorrectness, to show how much cooler they are than the “hung up” other people, and it ends up being a way for them to justify their racist and/or sexist and or/homophobic behavior.

Dan Van Riper noted: “As far back in the 1990s, Dan Clowes predicted the rise of this cultural phenomenon in David Boring (one of the last Eightballs.) If you complain about this kind of racist reference, then ‘you just don’t get it.’ Is it a way of depowering racism by appropriating it for entertainment, or is it providing a new kind of refuge for racist tendencies?” Or it’s framed as “you just don’t have a sense of humor,” and I do, but it’s STILL not funny.

Thom Wade would call it Bigotedly Correct. The general term is hipster racism.

See, e.g., this article about the Minneapolis area theater scene that Dan sent me, which I subsequently saw in BoingBoing. Referring to a purported talk-back session, in which a Native American woman protester was supposedly given an opportunity to speak, but she wasn’t:

“That’s the thing about privilege. It shows itself in many ways. This time, it just happened to pop up as a group of authoritative white people publicly tag-teaming a lone woman of color, and being so oblivious to the prevailing power dynamic that it never occurred to them that this was a problem, or that the reporter in the room might notice.”

And to that end, I thought this was rather entertaining: ‘Columbusing’: When White People Think They Discovered Something They Didn’t.

However, I DID think this July 2008 New Yorker cover was funny, because, I thought, it was making a commentary about how the Obamas were perceived, not as they actually were. Still, Colin Powell spoke well about the lie.

We don’t need to remove the Ten Commandments from the Supreme Court building. But I think those public, mostly Christian, prayers recently allowed by the Supreme Court suggest the establishment of religion. That’s not about being PC; that’s about following the Constitution.

I don’t believe white people should wear blackface for Halloween. But that doesn’t mean that blackface should NEVER happen, in an educational setting explaining why it’s so offensive to some people.

Occasionally, I see these stories about a teacher going “too far” in an educational demonstration showing racism or Antisemitism, e.g. About 2/3 of the time, I think the teachers have it right, and about 1/3 of the time, the proper context is not related, and it becomes a humiliation to those participating.

Former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s attacks on large sodas annoyed me. But is that a PC argument or a nanny state argument?

I think the elimination of Halloween, in favor of a “fall festival”, is a bit silly, yet I’m good with celebrating “the holidays,” because there are several of them (Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa). Still, “Merry Christmas” is pretty innocuous, to me, because Christmas in America is not a particularly Christian holiday.

Did I ever tell you that I wished someone visiting my current church on Christmas Eve “Merry Christmas, and he said, “I don’t celebrate Christmas”? I stifled a laugh.

I’m in the Potter Stewart school; I know the PC line when I see it.

Arthur the AmeriNZ notes:

Yes, I did steal borrow the idea from you, but I do it far less regularly. Here’s a query for you: Tell us about the first time you realised that someone you knew was LGBT, like, how you came to realise that, consequences, that sort of thing. I’m thinking about someone you actually knew, though it could be someone in pop culture or whatever.

Well, the first person I knew to be gay was my late friend Vito Mastrogiovanni, who my sister had a crush on in high school. He was out to his friends, but not everyone at the time, I believe. Frankly, it wasn’t a big deal, and there were no “consequences.” He and I were part of that oddball intellectual, politically aware clique that opposed the Vietnam war, fought racism, and the like.

Now that you ask it, maybe I SHOULD have been more reactive, but I just wasn’t.

Now my freshman year in college, the guy next door was hostile, and as I’ve noted, he was possibly being preemptively nasty before I could be nasty to him; I thought it was sad.

But I knew a lot more lesbians, starting at that same time frame. Alice was the roommate of my future wife, the Okie. She fought the war with me, hitchhiked with me. Not sure what consequences I really discovered except this: with straight people, I generally preferred the company of women. With gay people, I generally preferred the company of women. This was informative because I realized that I wasn’t friends with them just so I could hit on them. Did I ever mention I went skinny-dipping with six lesbians back in the late 1970s?

In fact, most of the gay people I knew were women until I got to my current church in this century, which, I believe, has more openly gay men than lesbians, though I haven’t done a formal count.

Amy, with her Sharp Little Pencil, wants to know:

Why did cassette tapes overtake the 8-track market?

Because the eight-track was a stupid technology. I remember exactly when I realized this. I was in a car listening to someone’s Beatles Again/Hey Jude 8-track. The song Rain came on, and IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SONG, it did that weird grinding noise in the middle of it. I should note that Rain is a three-minute song.

I NEVER owned an eight-track machine.

Jaquandor over at Byzantium Shores, wonders:

1. Are there any topics that you’re surprised don’t come up more often during your Ask Me Anything’s?

Yes. Some REALLY embarrassing stuff. But if no one’s gonna bring it up, why should I?

2. I’ve heard your hometown of Binghamton described rather unfavorably at times. Do you LIKE Binghamton, or has it gone downhill?

I like Binghamton, and yes, it’s gone downhill. It had 75,000 in 1960, about 47,000 now. They built Route 17 so one can get through there more quickly. Like a lot of Rust Belt cities, it’s struggling economically; I always want it to do well.

3. I read an article the other day about the death of the shopping mall in America. Did you ever like malls, and if so, do you mourn their passing at all?

There was a place in Binghamton that had what we’d now consider a large strip mall when I was growing up. Had one anchor store, and I liked it well enough.

But, no I would not mourn their passing. I think attention to the malls have starved the downtown areas, which need to grow for a city, and its surroundings, to be socially and economically healthy. Moreover, malls are private property, so their presence had dampened the public square.

For the most part, the stores in a mall are the same, so the homogenization suffocates local personality and culture. If you were beamed down from the USS Enterprise into most malls, you’d be hard-pressed to know where you were geographically.

4. I’ve expressed dismay on my own blog and elsewhere about the dominant tropes in popular culture today being dystopian settings and a HUGE focus on anti-heroes — what I call “Awful People At Work And Play”. What are your thoughts on the tone of popular culture right now?

Not only am I uncomfortable with dystopian culture, but I’m also bored with it. Bored with the word “dystopian.”

Initially, I thought I was just getting older, but I now realize that these antiheroes just don’t interest me, don’t inspire me, but, rather, irritate me. I don’t need to identify with schmucks. I think a lot of people do, and they end up going online, emulating their schmuck heroes’ behavior. Yes, I’m pretty tuned out of most of it.

You can still Ask Roger Anything.

Bullies

I managed to hit poor Danny in the nose, and it drew blood.

bullyingI had reason recently to reflect on the bullies in my life. Growing up in the First Ward of Binghamton, NY, it was what I suppose one would call a lower-middle-class life, with some doing well enough to get by, but others living a more hardscrabble existence.

My school, Daniel S. Dickinson, which I loved – and which I wrote about in 2012 – was a K-9 school that, I learned much later, didn’t always get the most current resources. For instance, we had an ancient music book that still had Old Black Joe in it, which prompted an incident I described WAY back in 2006.

Some of the older kids bullied the younger kids. One time, some guys from fifth or sixth grade, none of whom I knew specifically, thought it would be fun to get a couple of little kids to box. They picked me to fight with this kid named Danny Dervey (or Durvey) who was in my sister’s class three semesters behind me. We were to mix it up so it looked real, or they were going to beat the crap out of us.

Somehow or other, I managed to hit poor Danny in the nose, and it drew blood. The bullies were ecstatic, but I was mortified. I held no malice towards the kid. Far as I know, he never held a grudge against me. And I didn’t get in trouble for this, either from the school or my parents.

I have some vague recollection of being in fifth or sixth grade and getting roughed up, but I wasn’t hurt much, and have all but forgotten it.

The only time I ever willingly got into a fight – I thought I wrote about this, but cannot find it – was in fifth grade. This annoying kid named Robert, who was the only other black kid in my class, decided to attack my friend David Doyle, who was the shortest kid of us all; he was not to be confused with David Tita, who was the tallest. Anyway, David Doyle and I were Cub Scouts together, before I quit after a year. An attack on him was like an attack on me, rather like those alliances before World War I.

Robert and I, and there may have been others involved, started mixing it up right in front of the school. But it did not last long; the assistant principal, and junior high school English teacher, Mr. Frenchko, yelled out an upper-floor window, and we scattered.

Robert was academically challenged. He flunked so often, he was eventually in sister Leslie’s class. Later, he somehow managed to pull off a perfect robbery, and only was caught when he told some out-of-town cops so that he might get a ride back home; he went to prison instead.

Then there was the time I was attacked when I was 16, which is a LONG story.

Point is, I’ve somehow managed to avoid the fisticuffs rather well, so far.

(And yes, this is one of those posts that I wrote so I can write about something else.)

Binghamton: Butch Skeene, and Spaulding Krullers

Spaulding krullers came in an unmistakable orange- and white-striped boxes. This was “our” doughnut because their bakery was in Binghamton.

ButchIt was like a tsunami of memories of my hometown, Binghamton, NY in a 48-hour period, and it took me quite by surprise since I usually don’t think that much about the place.

ITEM: There’s a guy named John who remembered my parents and grandmothers. He’s been following me on Facebook for the last few months. He attended the church I attended, Trinity A.M.E. Zion in the hometown, and was in the junior choir about a decade before I was, under the direction of Fred Goodall, who was there for decades.

John had a good friend named Butch Skeene, (b. 1940) also in my church junior choir before I was, who performed in the music business from 1958 to 2013 in that area and beyond. I’m sure I’d heard him perform at some point; I know one of my sisters did quite often in our Binghamton days. Anyway, he died this week of cancer, and I was oddly saddened, as though I had lost a relative.

ITEM: I’m at the dinner table, and suddenly I remember these doughnuts we used to get when my sisters and I were kids, either white powder or plain. Three rows of four, with a cellophane top so you could see inside. I remembered that the logo was blue and white, but I couldn’t remember the BRAND name.

I wrote to my sisters and the elder of them remembered. I found this article from 2009:

After doing an Internet search, I’ve discovered a whole world of upstate New York Baby Boomers all in a desperate search for Spaulding Krullers! Apparently I wasn’t the only one hooked on these wonderful doughnuts with their delicious nutmeg flavor

More informative was this piece from an Oneonta newspaper last year:

Another iconic doughnut was the Spaulding kruller. They came in an unmistakable orange- and white-striped boxes. This was “our” doughnut because their bakery was in Binghamton, their distribution center was on Market Street in Oneonta and they could be found in every mom-and-pop store in every community no matter how big or how small.
spaulding
They mastered the art of making the sugar doughnut. Rather than just being a snowy dust ball that ended up flaking all over your new shirt, the Spaulding sugar kruller had a mysterious paste-like quality to it that allowed the sugar to stay (mostly) on the doughnut and not on your clothes. Spaulding eventually went out of business, being bought up by Stroehmanns and today is owned by (believe it or not) Bimbo Bakeries!

Spaulding krullers still come in the familiar orange-and-white-striped box that carries their company slogan, “famous for flavor.” It may be just me but now that they’re made by Bimbo they don’t taste anything like the ones that came out of the bakery on Exchange Street in Binghamton oh those many years ago.

How the heck did I forget that striped box? I DO recall that, unlike most powdered sugar donuts you’d eat now, the powder DID stay with the donut, as also noted in this piece and this one. Apparently, Bimbo has discontinued the brand at the end of last year, alas.

ITEM: My baby sister saw a name on Facebook and the surname reminded her of Binghamton, where she hasn’t lived since 1974. I knew of some of these folks too, but the kicker for me is that the very first girl I ever kissed, named Mary, had the same surname. It may have been a mistletoe-fueled passion, and nothing ever came from that moment, but still..

ITEM: What’s Goin’ On in Binghamton. A newish website, about six months old.

L is for Les, Leslie and Roger, the Green Family Singers

“We all have a knack for singing, and we do relatively little rehearsing… We’ve even sung songs spontaneously and they come out as if they’ve been practiced.”

My sister MARCIA found this and put it on Facebook:

It’s a promo sheet my father created for himself as a “singer of folk songs,” never as a “folk singer,” which was too limiting a term for him.

I’m particularly interested in the setlist, I’m guessing from the late 1950s. Some of the songs he was still singing a decade later, when my father, sister Leslie, and I sang together, while there are others (Twenty Souls) I don’t even recognize. I’m always fascinated to hear other people sing the songs he, or we, performed, such as Cindy (Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer), Sinnerman (some early incarnation of Three Dog Night), and Hole in the Bucket, which Leslie and I stole from Dad (Harry Belafonte).

I must say we were pretty darned good, but Dad had a natural excellence, not just in singing, but in introducing the songs, that was very appealing to audiences. From an interview from February 23, 1970, Binghamton Press: “I’ll never sing a folk song publicly without explaining the reason behind the song, whether it relates to history or folklore. And I also have to explain my feelings to an audience… [so that they can] understand the emotions behind a song.”

Leslie Green, Roger Green, Les Green

If memory serves – it often doesn’t – I started singing one or two songs with Dad on stage, definitely including the Car Song (“Daddy, won’t you take me for a ride in the car?”)

During the summer of 1966 or, more likely, 1967, the family, Dad noted, was “camping at one of the local sites. In the evening, we were sitting around the campfire and I brought out my guitar and Leslie hers. We started strumming and singing and harmonizing. Before we knew it, other families who were camping nearby wandered over. And before we knew it, everyone was joining in. The owners of the camping site booked us for the next summer.”

The story noted that Leslie and I had brought in some of the recent folk-rock songs into the repertoire. It also said that, during the interview, while Dad strummed his guitar, I pulled out a comb and a piece of paper and “began playing a blues melody,” with Leslie playing bongos.

As Dad explained: “We all have a knack for singing, and we do relatively little rehearsing… We’ve even sung songs spontaneously and they come out as if they’ve been practiced. And every time we do a song, we do it differently.”


ABC Wednesday – Round 13

I is for I

There was a lilac bush right next to the house; it didn’t look very impressive, but it smelled wonderful. Still the single smell that reminds me most of growing up.

Lacking any INSPIRATION for a topic, I defaulted to writing about me this week. It is I, during my significant birthday week. But what to write about that I haven’t addressed before?

I spent the first 18 years of my life in the same house, at 5 Gaines Street in Binghamton, NY. Gaines was a very short street between Oak Street and Front Street, with only 16 possible addresses, and actually fewer buildings than that.

At the corner of Gaines and Front was O’Leary’s convenience store. I went there and bought packs of baseball cards, but I also had to buy my father’s Winston cigarettes, which irritated me greatly.

In the yard at 1 Gaines Street was a huge gnarled tree which terrified me. It looked just one of those angry apple trees from the movie The Wizard of Oz. At some point, the family that had moved in there decided to take it down. My father told the owner that the way they were cutting the tree, it was going to crash into their house. The guy told my father to shut up and mind his own business; the tree crashed into their house, doing considerable damage to the roof.

The folks at 11 Gaines had an extra-large lot with a huge garden and chickens. When a foul ball would fall into that yard, the fence was too high, yet too wobbly to climb, and we had to wait for someone to throw the ball back.

The family at 13 Gaines was named Greene. We often got their mail, and vice versa.

There was a factory across from our house, but I never knew what was made there. It changed hands several times.

We had our tiny lot at 5 Gaines, where I played kickball with my sisters. Our house was actually green, with asbestos on the exterior. There was a lilac bush right next to the house; it didn’t look very impressive, but it smelled wonderful. Still the single smell that reminds me most of growing up.

When I was born, we lived upstairs in the two-family dwelling, but by the following year, when my first sister was born, we had moved downstairs, and my paternal grandparents had moved upstairs.

Our half of the house was quite small. When my second sister was born, my room was carved out of what was essentially a large hallway. But it was OK. My father painted the solar system on my ceiling, with the proportions from an encyclopedia entry I found.

Dad was always painting on the walls; I don’t mean painting the walls. In the living room, on one wall, were snow-peaked mountains. On another was a scene in the tradition of a busy Western European marketplace; I assume he tried to recreate an existing painting, but don’t know which one.

I’d go up and visit my grandparents often. One time, when I was about three, I fell down the steps. To this day, I have a bump just below my lower lip where I cannot grow facial hair.

Our Christmas decorations were kept upstairs, “under the house,” which is to say in the room off the kitchen where the roof slanted so that an adult could not stand.

When I was born, our church, Trinity A.M. E. Zion was downtown. But when that street was turned into a city park, the church moved to within two blocks of our house, at Oak Street and Lydia Street. (Hmm – I wonder if the naming of my daughter was affected by the street on which I spent a LOT of time.)

Enough about me for this week.

The guy in the middle is my father; the woman on the right is his mom. Not sure who the others are, though I suspect the boy is a cousin of dad’s; he has the Walker “look.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 12

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