Revolution on Canvas, Volume 2

by Rich Balling

  While the realm of popular thought usually labels tools that have come into existence only through modern scientific research and innovation as technology, I believe it is almost certain, beyond any doubt, that early humans used experimental trial-and-error methods to discover, improve, and eventually utilize music as an extremely powerful psychotropic, technological tool. As such, the discovery of music, similar to the invention of language, was so instinctual and ancient that it has not been popularly recognized as having fundamental scientific origins and technological implementations.

  Organizations that constitute the modern music business have made the transition from technological supply entities to profit-acquiring entities efficiently and covertly by employing a variety of circular, self-sustaining marketing and manipulation methods. They know, as all good business people do, that the largest demographic with the largest disposable income will be the most desirable group to market any nonessential product to. It just so happens that in America and most of the world, young children and teenagers living with their parents constitute most of this demographic. It also turns out that this group’s opinions and, correspondingly, their purchasing choices are easily manipulated. Music businesses prey on the universally image-conscious, status-seeking teenagers of the world by employing psychologically coercive advertising tools that convince them that to gain status with their peers they must purchase and use certain products. Once a specific musical trend is established by corporate advertising, it is easily exploited and maintained as specific products saturate the market. The need for further aggressive advertising is radically reduced at this point and the growing word-of-mouth persuasion will most likely sustain the trend until another kills and replaces it. The use of social pressure to sell products effectively removes most freedom that consumers may have had regarding what music to listen to and correspondingly limits the ability of the consumer to maximize the positive impact of music on their lives.

  Profit mongering in the music business is accompanied by several destructive processes, maybe the most dangerous of which is the manufacturing and rewarding of unoriginality. Substantial creative progress will never be made in today’s mainstream music environment because it is a business and businesses are not sustained by creative innovation but by the manufacturing of shallow gimmickry. It is not so much that popular music lacks complete creative merit, but it has been so overspecialized and filtered to fit current market trends that diversity has been almost completely eradicated.

  Art has been and always will be an action of instinct and will. When individualism is abandoned for popular opinion we are robbed not only of our sincerity but our power, style, and soul.

  KENNY VASOLI

  The Starting Line

  My Flaws Get Along

  I don’t love the way I feel all of the time, but I don’t feel the need for a billboard bullet or a bursting wallet with green coming out at the seams. I don’t have care in a world that is fair, but that world is one I have never seen. My perfect skin is never coming in, but my scars all seem grown like a newborn son who just turned one at twenty-two years old. My love is strong when it gets along with the target that it’s focused on, but my temper is short like when I was four when nothing was actually wrong. I take to heart things I should not, when thrown around in a casual talk. I put myself in an awkward place with a porcupine with a pretty face that I do try to kiss until it hurts my lips or one of us remains. I take in stride the flaws I hide from my blind side and camera eyes, but they reside with a smile so wide … they’re live hermits that party all night.

  ELGIN JAMES

  Dream Weaver

  I was eight years old when the Ku Klux Klan came to my town, and I couldn’t help but take it personally. Being the only brown person within a seventy-mile radius, I had to ask myself who else could be responsible for the “black scourge” their pamphlets railed against. The Lawson twins? Asian sisters whose white father had adopted and brought them home after his tour in Vietnam, the girls still clutching each other and crying every time a low flying plane buzzed over recess? Or maybe the Giovanni family, Italians who owned Morris Town Pizza and only looked dark in the summer months? No, I knew I was to blame, and the “mongrels attacking the core of white society” were my hippie parents with their rainbow of adopted children.

  Ironically, my parents came from bloodlines any racist would have been proud of. My father’s family had grown fat on the Louisiana slave trade until the Southern defeat in the Civil War threw them into a poverty that persists to this day. As recently as World War II, my father’s uncle (a member of the American Nazi Party) proudly flew a bloodred flag with a centered black swastika above his small neighborhood grocery store. The flag only flew for a few hours, though, before that same neighborhood burned the store to the ground.

  On my mother’s side, the family tree traces back to Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the purported Godfather of Eugenics, a ramshackle theory that some believe proves the Aryan race superior over all others. On the same branch of that tree is world famous Richard Wagner, whom Adolf Hitler himself declared the national composer of Nazi Germany.

  Unfortunately, my unruly Afro and complexion betrayed my racial pedigree, because unlike the Giovanni family, I was cocoacolored year round.

  Family history may have played a part in launching my parents so aggressively into the civil rights movement. A shame that spurred them to march through the South, arms linked tight with blacks while dogs and high-powered hoses were set upon them. Why they continued in the struggle even after my father’s friend James Chaney was murdered along with two whites by the Klan on a Southern dirt road (dramatized in the movie Mississippi Burning). And why my father chose to become a white pastor in an all black parish.

  He’d tell us the story of a Sunday morning when members of the KKK surrounded the church, trapping the parishioners inside. The husband of the organist was late and pulled up to see thirty or so cloaked Klansmen armed with torches and shotguns. Worried for his wife he jumped out of his car and sprinted for the church. He almost made it. They got him about fifteen feet from the door. They dragged him to the back of a pickup truck and spread his limbs apart. A young man with a mouthful of tobacco cocked a Louisville slugger back on his shoulder like Mickey Mantle and then swung it down between the man’s outstretched legs. The parish hugged and held back his hysterical wife while the Klan beat her husband. The cops (who my father assumed were under those white sheets) never showed.

  I was raised on stories like this, so you can imagine why, after racist pamphlets found their way littered about our small town and the six o’clock news showed men in terrifying white hoods marching just twelve miles away in the city of Torrington, I spent the summer of my eighth year sleeping at the foot of my mother’s bed.

  We couldn’t afford day care, and my older sisters were spending the summer at camp so my mom would bring me with her to the factory in Torrington. She’d let me stay in the car to listen to the radio while she worked her shift. I’d flip through the stations hoping for a gem like “Sometimes When We Touch” by Dan Hill or “Dream Weaver” by Gary Wright. I loved the anticipation as I searched through the static never knowing what I would find. I could spend hours like that and did, the eight hours of my mom’s workday.

  All that summer, though, I had been plagued by nightmares. I would be in the factory parking lot in the front seat of our station wagon when I would hear footsteps marching. I’d look in the rearview mirror and see a thousand Klansmen draped in white, their eyes black behind cut-out holes. I would start shaking, my small hands fumbling to open the car door. I’d want to run to the safety of the factory but I could never work the handle and the Klansmen would set upon the car, rocking it back and forth, breaking the windows, their hands reaching in to drag me out.

  I would jolt awake in my bed choking on a scream stuck in the pit of my stomach. When my mother’s alarm would buzz she’d find me curled up in my sleeping bag on her floor, because the soft sound of her bre
athing was the only thing that could lull me back to sleep.

  I never told her about the dreams. She was spending more and more time crying when she thought I couldn’t hear. Sobs hidden behind the bathroom door, eyes wet while she stood over the stove, her bedroom locked and dark in the afternoon ignoring my tentative knocks. That’s why I never told her how hard third grade had been that year. How the kids at school called me nigger. How every time I got off the school bus the same rusted blue pickup truck was parked with its engine running. From the driver’s seat eighteen-year-old Keith Kelly would spit a spray of tobacco juice on me, followed by whatever garbage happened to be in his truck. The veins in his neck and forehead bulging, he’d scream, “You fucking nigger, go the fuck home!” Which is exactly what I was trying to do except I figured he probably meant Africa.

  Keith had bragged all over town about how he had joined the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan on his eighteenth birthday and the sudden appearance of “White Pride” pamphlets and “nigers (sic) out!” spray painted behind the town hall were widely assumed to be his handiwork.

  I would walk as quickly as I could waiting for a half full can of Dr Pepper or a crumpled McDonald’s bag to ricochet off the back of my head. I’d keep my eyes leveled on Bubba, my Chester White pig, waiting across the street. Smarter than any dog and just as loyal, he’d meet me at the end of our property every day after school. I’d crouch down, giving him a kiss on his pink snout and wait for the truck to pull off with a final “I’ll burn your fucking nigger house down” and then walk back across the street to pick up the trash I had just been bombarded with.

  In the passenger seat of the truck every day was Keith’s sister Kristen. A sixth-grader with perfect freckles, offset by deep brown eyes. She would look down, allowing me some dignity by pretending it wasn’t happening. At school she would smile a soft apology in the halls. I would daydream of ripping her brother out of his truck and then kissing her on the lips. I wanted to touch her milk white skin. But each day would end with her glumly studying her shoes while her big brother spat on me.

  I started hiding out in the school bathroom so I would miss my bus home. After the last yellow coach would pull off I would sneak out past the janitors and walk the two miles to my house. That worked for about a week until Keith got wise to my strategy and waited, driving slowly next to me spitting and screaming the entire way.

  I figured my only choice now was not to go to school at all. I was sick with a fever for days after I learned to hold the thermometer near my bedside lamp to raise the mercury. Eating an entire package of Ex-Lax chocolate kept me out of school for half a week. One early spring afternoon I plucked poison ivy out by its roots and rubbed it all over my face, chest and back. That night as my body caught fire and the rash spread from my hairline to my waistband I was positive I had bought myself a solid week’s vacation. I was wrong. My mother shook me awake the next morning holding a big tube of salve. By the time I got to school I looked like a voodoo priest covered head to toe in the white paste of calamine lotion.

  Eventually the sicknesses became real. I woke up in the middle of the night, doubled over in pain, screaming. My mother came running and within minutes had me packed into the station wagon on our way to the hospital. The doctors gave me a chalky liquid to drink and a loud clacking machine took X-rays of my stomach. They spoke quietly to my mother about things as benign as an ulcer and as serious as stomach cancer. They decided to keep me for further observation.

  That week in the hospital was an oasis. I was fed a steady diet of red Jell-O and the nurses called me “Nate the great,” running their soft, clean fingers through my hair. I never wanted to leave.

  After the tests came back inconclusive I was discharged. The doctors simply said I had a “nervous stomach” and asked my mom if I was under any stress. My mother said “Of course not, he’s only eight years old.”

  The nurses threw me a going away party and gave me a red Corvette Matchbox car with its silver engine sticking out through the hood. They couldn’t understand why I wasn’t happier to be going home.

  The principal had called my mother and was concerned that it was only May and I had already missed twenty-four days of school. She promised him I would be there Monday.

  Sunday night I was curled up on the couch while my dad sat in his chair with his scotch and water watching CBS’s 60 Minutes. Dozing off, I was startled awake by a familiar sound. Footsteps marching, voices full of rage screaming in unison. I opened my eyes to see white robes carrying placards declaring “death to race mixing” and “white is right.” The footage was of a Klan rally in Chicago and my stomach instantly twisted into knots. But then the TV showed something amazing. Unlike the passive faces of Torrington, in Chicago people black, brown, and white lined the sidewalk pelting the now fleeing Klansmen with rocks and bottles. Riot police moved in to protect the Klan and the crowd started fighting with the officers. The camera fixed in on one white man with a bandanna covering the lower half of his face, his eyes watery and bloodshot from tear gas, repeatedly kicking a fallen Klansmen on the ground.

  My father shook his head in disgust saying that was no way to solve the problem, but I was transfixed. That seemed to me to be a very effective way. If there had been even one person to stand up for me, to take to Keith Kelly’s pickup with a crowbar you better believe he wouldn’t have been there the next day. As far as I was concerned that was the definition of a problem solved.

  I felt energized the next morning. I had been gone from school for over a week and looked forward to seeing my friends. Even class wasn’t so bad; Mrs. Pierson decided since I had just come out of the hospital I could skip the math quiz and read quietly to catch up on English.

  At the end of the day I stood wrestling and laughing with my friend Brian in the line for our bus. We got on and took our normal seats in the back. As we pulled away from school my stomach tightened as the rusted blue pickup fell in behind us. I looked out the back window and Keith Kelly’s pockmarked face smiled back at me.

  The bus stopped at Candlebirch farm and Mrs. Finch the driver pulled back the big lever opening the door for me. I said goodbye to Brian and slowly walked off. As the bus pulled away and the truck drove up I caught a spray of phlegm on my cheek. “You fucking nigger, hope your whole Jew family dies!”

  Torrington, Connecticut, was a far way from Chicago, and there was no one to throw rocks or bottles. Just a fat white pig, waiting.

  AARON BEDARD

  Bane

  One Summer Knight

  There they went again.

  Neighborhood maniacs going buck wild, throwing fists and feet from every angle. At first it seemed to be a three-on-one situation, which was ugly enough, but soon a second wave of friends rushed into the frame, sucking all the challenge and drama from the scene, as it went from being a street fight to a brutal beating. It was hard to imagine what the poor guy must have done to bring such chaos into his world, but it only took seconds for him to stop trying to stand up for himself and, through obvious experience, fold into a ball on the sidewalk while an avalanche of sneakers and boots rained down upon him.

  Nick literally had a front-row seat for the whole mess, in a window booth of a restaurant, where he sat alone, trying to enjoy a salad. He could see every blow, could see into their eyes. Some were actually shining, enjoying every frantic second, while others looked so focused and furious that he started to worry that they may not stop until this guy was dead.

  People out on the busy street, which the locals referred to as the Avenue, were starting to turn their attention to the ruckus, stopping in their tracks, watching from the doors and windows of storefronts. Though no one seemed to be doing anything. Even when someone inside the restaurant cried out, “Jesus, someone call the cops!” nothing really happened.

  The Veg Edge was a small, quiet health food restaurant, only a few blocks from Nick’s apartment. He found himself there several times a week. He didn’t usually like the lone booth by the window, however; all of
the activity out on the strip was generally too distracting, even when the locals weren’t beating the daylights out of each other right in broad daylight. He preferred the quiet booths in the back where he could spread his textbooks out and get some work done. But there was no homework due tonight, he had actually finished his second semester of medical school that very day and had come to the Veg Edge to unwind over a light meal and a Batman graphic novel. But instead, he was forced to sit and note the difference between a fight in a comic book and a fight out in the streets.

  An old woman in an apron burst out from the pizza place next door, screaming and waving a finger at the blur of oversized, white T-shirts, baggy denim, and silver chains. This didn’t stop them from stomping their victim into the pavement. No one missed a blow. One of the boys simply turned and swore defiantly back into her face, sending her storming right back through the door from which she came.

  Nick looked down at Batman, dancing across the pages of his comic book, kicking ass, saving the day. He longed for that type of fearlessness and resolution, to be able to just dive headfirst into messes like this one. To put a stop to what was begging to be stopped … as long as he could remember there had been that pull to do something heroic, to be the one to save the earth from a meteor. But instead he had grown into a tall, awkward, medical student. Who, at twenty-two, still found inspiration, as well as his idea of right and wrong, good and evil, inside the pages of the comic books he never managed to outgrow.

  It wasn’t the first time he’d been forced to watch some minor injustice unfold, filled with fear and hesitation, knowing exactly what needed to be done but being frozen solid, faced with the most disappointing part of himself.

  The Avenue wasn’t even in a bad neighborhood, not an easy claim in the city of Baltimore, where the ghettos stretched to every corner of the city limits and beyond. Where any street you found yourself on seemed to lead, eventually, to an area where you would rather not be. But outside Nick’s window was supposedly one of the city’s safer places. Tucked away between a sprawling park and Johns Hopkins University, it was home to a delicate mix of college kids, local hipsters, and the white working-class types who had lived among its row houses for generations. It was the kind of place you were supposed to be able to walk around at night. People grew gardens in their yards, kids and dogs played freely, safe from stray bullets and used needles. The Avenue was its centerpiece, the main drag, where restaurants and boutiques stood side by side with dive bars, convenience stores, and pawnshops. Though every once in a while things did get crazy out there and it was almost always at the hands of young men with bad tattoos and huge T-shirts.