The New Yorker shows up at my door, every Tuesday. It doesnt let me catch up on other reading, so Im usually fighting against the clock just to finish one before the next shows up. This week it struck a few personal cords.
During an interview with Naomi Klein (the lady working on moving the center of politics and understanding generation branding iron), she touched upon the energy of the pre-9/11 globalization movement. She talks about Quebec City during the Summit of the Americas in 2001. April 19, 20, and 21 as I recall. We missed Extravaganja, and thats hard for the young and outraged.
" ...when the officials surrounded themselves with a tall protective fence, a group of activists built a medieval-style wood catapult and lobbed Teddy bears over the top."
We presumed it was Ya Basta, the Italian yippies that also wore full body armor made of stuffed animals. I have a picture up close of that catapult. It was glorious.
" 'Quebec City was just madness,' she says, 'It was one of those times when nobody knows what's going to happen, and there are these breakthrough moments, these liberated moments, of euphoria. It was mostly young people, and they were getting gassed, but they were still enjoying themselves tremendously, playing cat and mouse with the police. What I loved about it was that the whole city joined in - people working in cafes on the main streets, and neighbors got buckets of water to wash out people's eyes. It was like an alternative reality.' "
When we left the country, we expected the border police to hassle us.
"Did you get wet kids?"
"What? The rain? It wasn't that bad."
"We meant the hoses. Have a good day."
The next editorial was about Derrick Parker, he just released a book "Notorious C.O.P.: The Inside Story of the Tupac, Biggie, and Jam Master Jay Investigations from the NYPD's First "Hip-Hop Cop". Starts explaining the politics of urban nightlife, he's got a security service now. He still recognizes people he's arrested and investigated from his detective days, but he's been retired since 2002.
"Guys I arrested back in the day are surprised I still remember their real names, their priors, what they did time for, the names of their baby mamas.....A couple of years ago, at this club called Avalon, this dude tried to slip by with his hat down over his face, and I looked and I recognized him. It was a guy who'd been an enforcer for some Brooklyn drug dealers called the Ortiz brothers, Dominican guys. While he was working for them, this guy had a guy handcuffed in a bathroom and he was beatin' him tryin' to find out what he'd done with some moneyhe owed the Ortiz brothers, and this guy gets carried away and he kills him. So now he doesn't know what to do, so he cuts the guy up into parts, and later the victim's bones were found in trash bags beside the highway. The guy eventually got arrested for something else, and he turned state's evidence for the Feds...he was out in eleven years.
"Anyway, as he was goin' by me at Avalon, I said to him, 'So you still like to use cutting tools?' and he said, 'Aww, Parker, man, don't be bringin' that old stuff up, all that's in my past, I did eleven years, I got my life back now.' Later I told the promoter, I said 'What can I do, man? He was dressed properly, according to the U.S. government, he's paid his dues.' "
That's the guy that I narrowly averted having to serve on jury duty for, to determine if he was gonna be looking at the chair. He must have not finished paying his debt.
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