I spend a week training to co-teach a summer school class for
a program that combines ESL with vocational training. The class is an intro to Medical Technology,
but some wires get crossed at my school and, although I’ve had 40 hours of preparation,
the class is cancelled. I’ve signed a
contract however so at the last minute, a schedule of three ESL classes in a
row is cobbled together for me. My first
two classes are the same beginning level of ESL that I’ve been teaching. As it’s only a four-week class, we’re not
using a textbook, so I have to prepare my own teaching materials for each session. My third class, also created on the fly, is a
conversation class for higher level English Language students. My evening
classes are usually primarily comprised of Hispanic students, so once in a
while, I can take a Spanish shortcut. These daytime classes are a mixed bag
with students from Eritrea, Angola, Korea and Ethiopia so there’s a lot of
pantomime and running over to the computer to project a Google image. I am on my feet for five hours straight and
return home to attend to my business and plan lessons for the following day. I survive the first week. Three left to go.
Usually my evening classes have about 50 students
enrolled. As these morning classes are
so last minute, I have only about twelve students per class. Every session I
get a chance to talk and practice one to one with each individual student. I rearranged
the desks in a circle and have them work in small groups or with partners and
move around the room, impossible in my usual ginormous classes.
The 3rd period advanced conversation class is
scheduled after the regular ESL classes have ended and a hard sell for students
who have already been studying for four hours straight. The single counselor on duty is spread
ridiculously thin so it takes a while to for him to advertise the class and
enroll students. The first day, only one
student attends. Neta is from Iran and about
my age. She’s practicing for her citizenship
test. I go through the hundred suggested
study questions with her. She can name
all of the framers of the Constitution and every war from Revolutionary through
Afghanistan. She names all of the Supreme
Court justices and knows that her local Representative to the House is Jimmy Gomez,
a Democrat.
The following day, Kristy, from South Korea arrives. She’s an evangelical Christian and very involved
in teaching bible studies to children. When
we steer her off Jesus and talk about hobbies, she explains that she is
enchanted by Amtrak. Her husband, she
says, works all the time, and she travels frequently by herself and knows all
of the schedules out of Union Station.
She reports that she loves being independent and meeting other
people. I assume that her fellow
travelers all get a bit of Jesus, but Kristy is so bubbly that I imagine that
she charms many of the folks that she meets.
She’s planning a three-week trip from Los Angeles to New York and is
writing a book about using Amtrak for Korean tourists.
By the third day, we’ve added some Ethiopians, Koreans and a
half a dozen Central Americans to the conversation hour. The first enrollees are all women, so we talk
about the roles of women in their respective countries. All of the countries that my students
represent, have seen opportunities for women expand in the last few
decades. For example, all report that
there are women police officers in their homelands. Neta explains however that females on the
force in Iran are tasked only to police women to insure their modest dress and behavior. It is a hot day and Neta recalls how
miserable it is to suffer a hijab in the stifling heat. Then she asks me to
turn on the air conditioner.
Sula reports that she worked as a photographer in Ethiopia
but as a rigid caste system remains in place, her status as a Barya poses a
limit on her opportunities. Kristy pipes
up that she wants to learn more about Ethiopia because King Solomon loved the
Ethiopians. Everyone is polite but the
class is obviously more engaged when Kristy talks about traveling via Amtrak to
Arizona to visit the Grand Canyon.
Miriam has been here for twenty years. She works as a housekeeper. Like most of the other students, she sends
money home. It is miraculous to me that
undocumented folks, speaking limited English, are able to survive in one of the
most expensive cities in the world and still manage to support their families
at home. Miriam sends money every week
to her twenty-five-year-old daughter who works as a secretary in Guatemala
City. The girl, Miriam explains, only earns
about five dollars a week. Miriam is
rebuffed when she asks her daughter to immigrate to the U.S. “At least I work in a clean office, I don’t
want to clean toilets,” is the girl’s response.
Expecting a taxing schedule, we spend our pre-teaching week
in the Redwoods of Felton. Our friends’
garden, beneath towering redwoods, is an explosion of color after a wet spring
and remarkable planting efforts. While I’ve
toned it down a bit, since 2016, most of my free time is spent flipping from CNN
and MSNBC, numb to outrage, but unable to quit it. For most of my life, prior to the election, I
play music, all day. I guess it feels frivolous,
when democracy teeters on the verge of collapse, but for our holiday in Felton,
we enjoy an orgy of rock ‘n roll documentaries.
We watch Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue about Dylan’s
weird 1975 impromptu national tour, inspired by 19th century
traveling medicine shows. Musicians, and
special guests like Alan Ginsberg and Sam Shephard played concerts, usually
announced on the day they were performed, in small town halls and even a prison. Talent came and went. Dylan is his usual uncommunicative self but
always drives the big bus himself. Joni
Mitchell liaises with Sam Shephard on this tour and writes the song “Coyote”
about this dalliance. She plays the song for the very first time, accompanied
by Bob Dylan, for me the best moment in the film.
“Sympathy for the Devil” is a bizarre 1968 film by Godard. Half of the film is folks spouting Black
Panther rhetoric and spray-painting Maoist symbols all over Paris. Without a connecting element that I can
surmise, the other half of the film is of the Rolling Stones in the studio,
working out the arrangement for the recording of the eponymous song. It is fascinating to see the craftsmanship
and attention to detail that results a recording that sounds to spontaneous and
anarchic.
“The Quiet One” is about Stones bassist Bill Wyman, who is what,
if he didn’t have money to pay folks to categorize and store his treasures, would
be certainly called a hoarder. In
addition to items that tickle his fancy, Wyman has filmed extensively and cataloged
every article, photograph and film element related to the band’s history. There’s a lot of pretty extraordinary footage
of the venerable band.
Another Scorsese project is the chronicle of George Harrison,
“Living in the Material World.” As I was
in elementary school for most of the Beatles’ prime, the Beatles have never
meant much more than Paul McCartney being the cutest and scads of a.m. radio
hits that I’ve been sick of hearing for decades. The finely sketched portrait of Harrison and
particularly his experience of going from growing up in a cold water flat to,
at age twenty, entering perhaps the most intense spotlight in the history of
celebrity is harrowing. While the whole film held my interest, for
some reason, the footage of the day, in 1969, when the paperwork for the break-up
of the Beatles was signed on Abbey Road is the most powerful.
A recent film, Echoes of the Canyon, ostensibly about the
1960s music scene in Laurel Canyon has some good studio footage and particularly
revealing interviews with David Crosby and Stephen Stills but it is mostly the
chronicle of a tribute concert organized by Jakob Dylan, who has about the same
amount of personal warmth as his old man does. The likes of Fiona Apple, Beck
and Regina Spektor opine callowly about the significance of the Laurel Canyon
scene and there is disappointingly little archival footage. Still, some of the interviews with survivors
are illuminating so the doc is probably worthwhile on free cable, finger on
fast forward.
This rock ‘n roll extravaganza leaves me wistful. I guess we all carry weight from fraught
childhood and adolescence. My home on
Fulton Avenue had no air conditioning.
During summer I’d sleep most of the day and open the windows at
night. I’d stack records and Joni
Mitchell, Jackson Brown and Van Morrison, and so many others from my orange
crates crammed with albums, transported me from the sweltering San Fernando
Valley to a better place.
The adult angst about my children’s future world becoming irredeemably
fucked up is different than teenage loneliness.
Now, I do have friends and relationships that I can count on and really
don’t suffer from a sense of isolation or love-lessness. I admire my teenage self for aggressively
seeking out new music and allowing myself to take comfort in it. Now my family, friends and students provide a
lot of comfort and hope. Many of the
happy memories from a rough childhood, are rooted in music. I love my teenage self for nurturing this
survival instinct. And after a marathon
of music films, I realize that this indulgence will make the current rough time
a bit easier to survive. Maybe even those
early Beatle’s songs will feed my soul. “I
Wanna Hold Your Hand?” Well, that might
be stretching it.
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