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Madison 1973
Oct. 25th, 2006 10:27 pmSo. I think that this might be the first in a series of posts based around photos. This scanner is just so fun to play with. I knew I'd like it.
I'm also accompanying this particular memory and image with music.
I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and lived there until I was eight. I was born as the antiwar movement started picking up steam: my first demonstration was at eight days old, being rolled along in a huge old black baby buggy outside the local Dow Chemical plant, which produced napalm for the war. My father tells me that this was also the day that my Red Squad/FBI file was started, as there were obvious agents there, taking photographs of everybody in order to intimidate them. In particular, that this not be seen as a flight of paranoiac fancy, there were men in dark suits with narrow lapels and dark glasses perched in cherry pickers, those weird trucks with extensible ladder-and-bucket arrangements for lopping off tree limbs, or whatever. And the men in the cherry picker maneuvered it directly over my buggy and down so that they could take a picture of me, my parents furiously yelling at them the whole time.
This picture is from six or so years later. It's our dining room. My father is the man with the overlong hair (I LOVE long hair, don't get me wrong, but... my dad had a hard time keeping it from getting greasy at that length. It wasn't a good look for him. There are other photos of him in this journal various places, and he's a handsome dude, in my biased eyes) smoking a pipe. The other guy is some friend and chess buddy of his. I am the solemn looking child with brown hair, wearing the red Wisconsin Badgers tee-shirt. My sister is the younger blond girl. She reminds me very much of my older niece in this photo. The cat is named Inessa, after Lenin's lover, Inessa Armand.
On the wall behind us -- well, first, there is the ubiquitous presence of endless books, which overflowed bookcases all over our one-bedroom apartment. Then, there are the images. In order, there is an antiwar poster of a woman being napalmed, drawn by a local artist and friend of my dad's, Paul Hass. Then, there are Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebnecht, and Karl Marx in quick succession. Then there's a poster of Bill Monroe, and one of a worker of some kind -- it's an OSHA poster. When I was six, though, I didn't know that. I assumed that all of those people were revolutionary heroes. I thought Bill Monroe was a revolutionary. Maybe a Wobbly. Maybe in the SP, with Debs. I think the display continues on the rest of the wall, after the large poster (which I don't remember) with Trotsky and Debs. Rosa Luxemburg was the only woman. Her image was as iconic for me as Che Guevara (who was probably also up there, along with a Black Panthers poster -- for years, the black panther was my automatic answer for "what's your favorite animal?").
I loved my early childhood. I was a kid who was pretty intensely focused on the adults around me. I recall getting out of my crib (I slept in an iron barred crib until I was four, and my sister was in a wicker bassinet, both of these in the same bedroom as our parents) late at night, when I was four years old and sneaking into the living room where my parents and their comrades would be up late, arguing passionately and drinking and smoking. I'd try to sit inconspicuously behind one of the many hanging india print curtains, picking up what I could and trying to understand what imperialism was, and genocide, and reformism. My niece Ruby does the exact same thing, although the politics she ear hustles often have more to do with teachers' strikes and No Child Left Behind and the war in Iraq and immigrants' rights. This photograph brings back those memories. My parents weren't hippies exactly (despite my dad's short-lived long hair) but socialists and revolutionaries. They've remained that, thirty-three years later. It's funny -- this iTunes set started with "American Pie" by Don McLean, which is a song I loved when I was five years old. And now it's on something from Hair. The other song I loved when I was five was the lushly sentimental "On Top of the World" by the Carpenters.
I'm also accompanying this particular memory and image with music.
I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and lived there until I was eight. I was born as the antiwar movement started picking up steam: my first demonstration was at eight days old, being rolled along in a huge old black baby buggy outside the local Dow Chemical plant, which produced napalm for the war. My father tells me that this was also the day that my Red Squad/FBI file was started, as there were obvious agents there, taking photographs of everybody in order to intimidate them. In particular, that this not be seen as a flight of paranoiac fancy, there were men in dark suits with narrow lapels and dark glasses perched in cherry pickers, those weird trucks with extensible ladder-and-bucket arrangements for lopping off tree limbs, or whatever. And the men in the cherry picker maneuvered it directly over my buggy and down so that they could take a picture of me, my parents furiously yelling at them the whole time.
This picture is from six or so years later. It's our dining room. My father is the man with the overlong hair (I LOVE long hair, don't get me wrong, but... my dad had a hard time keeping it from getting greasy at that length. It wasn't a good look for him. There are other photos of him in this journal various places, and he's a handsome dude, in my biased eyes) smoking a pipe. The other guy is some friend and chess buddy of his. I am the solemn looking child with brown hair, wearing the red Wisconsin Badgers tee-shirt. My sister is the younger blond girl. She reminds me very much of my older niece in this photo. The cat is named Inessa, after Lenin's lover, Inessa Armand.
On the wall behind us -- well, first, there is the ubiquitous presence of endless books, which overflowed bookcases all over our one-bedroom apartment. Then, there are the images. In order, there is an antiwar poster of a woman being napalmed, drawn by a local artist and friend of my dad's, Paul Hass. Then, there are Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebnecht, and Karl Marx in quick succession. Then there's a poster of Bill Monroe, and one of a worker of some kind -- it's an OSHA poster. When I was six, though, I didn't know that. I assumed that all of those people were revolutionary heroes. I thought Bill Monroe was a revolutionary. Maybe a Wobbly. Maybe in the SP, with Debs. I think the display continues on the rest of the wall, after the large poster (which I don't remember) with Trotsky and Debs. Rosa Luxemburg was the only woman. Her image was as iconic for me as Che Guevara (who was probably also up there, along with a Black Panthers poster -- for years, the black panther was my automatic answer for "what's your favorite animal?").
I loved my early childhood. I was a kid who was pretty intensely focused on the adults around me. I recall getting out of my crib (I slept in an iron barred crib until I was four, and my sister was in a wicker bassinet, both of these in the same bedroom as our parents) late at night, when I was four years old and sneaking into the living room where my parents and their comrades would be up late, arguing passionately and drinking and smoking. I'd try to sit inconspicuously behind one of the many hanging india print curtains, picking up what I could and trying to understand what imperialism was, and genocide, and reformism. My niece Ruby does the exact same thing, although the politics she ear hustles often have more to do with teachers' strikes and No Child Left Behind and the war in Iraq and immigrants' rights. This photograph brings back those memories. My parents weren't hippies exactly (despite my dad's short-lived long hair) but socialists and revolutionaries. They've remained that, thirty-three years later. It's funny -- this iTunes set started with "American Pie" by Don McLean, which is a song I loved when I was five years old. And now it's on something from Hair. The other song I loved when I was five was the lushly sentimental "On Top of the World" by the Carpenters.