Andrei Codrescu
A Little Ode to Kansas City
The next to last thing that Jeffrey Ruckman, musician extraordinaire, said to me was: "Don't tell anybody about it!" The "it" he was referring to was Kansas City, which is a pretty hip hangout if you are a bohemian refugee looking for a still-cheap haven for your artistic frustrations. In KC there are big brick warehouses habited by a variety of hardworking misfits --yes, Dorothy, this being the Midwest, even the misfits are hardworking! They stand side by side with still-chugging light industrial concerns and offices of the old old economy. Freight trains pass right through the heart of the Bottoms warehouse zone, producing clank and rattle that Jeffrey thinks will keep away yuppie developers. Sure! From what I've seen in urban postmodern America, things like rattling trains are marketed as charm. True enough, this particular freight we were waiting for to pass, took about an hour, which is long for charm. But once the train passed, we were right in the thick of a hipster fest called "Culture Under Fire," which consisted of night-long expressions of reasoned disgust at Censorship.
Censorship, like Globalism, has undergone many mutations since the simple days when the National Endowment for the Arts unfunded Piss Christs and such. Censorship is not the sole the province of bureaucrats any longer. The entire mega-machine of the entertainment industry is out to level the wild woods of independent expression. Publishing is in the hands of less than a dozen corporations. Media is owned by less than a dozen, too. Trying to get out complex, critical work is like swimming against the raging torrent of a river of shlock. In the Midwest, protest is a serious thing. When midwesterners finally get together to take on the shlock and its tributaries, they mass. They are ominous. They mean business. Of course, they are also provincial, which is a good thing. On the first night of "Culture Under Fire" activities, a jammed hall responded with wild cheering at expressions as diverse as an invocation to the Goddess, a stoned rap about taking a bath in a dysfunctional household, and a striptease by a man muscled by years of such exercise.
The good part was that the publisher of the monthly art newspaper, "Review," Mr. Mike Miller, his young Anais-Nin-in-her-doelike-period lookalike assistant Hallie Smith, Jeffrey himself, his musician wife Leah, and yours truly, were able to board an ancient hand-operated freight elevator to the top of the warehouse and consume a bottle of Glen Fyditch, while studying the lights of the two cities below us: Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas. The differences were obvious to my friends, but quite invisible to me. All I knew is that from hereabouts there had been spewed forth a scary Attorney General named Ashcroft. Which made "Culture Under a Fire" a most salutary event. Jeffrey swore that in his childhood he had heard Ashcroft babble in tongues at his church, and now regretted not having had the foresight to make a tape. Ah, yes, if only our childhoods had been post-Watergate! I mean that. I am often wishing that the tape was rolling in my early life. I would now have evidence of censorship like you wouldn't believe.
Many other remarkable things happened to me in Kansas City, not the least of which was the shelter a Henry Moore sculpture gave me during an unexpected thunderstorm. At one point, Jeffrey referred to the Bible as a "bronze-age anthology," which became, in some way, the sound of Kansas City itself, with her bronze Moore and the gong-like sound of protest.
I won't tell a soul about it, I promise.
Home Editorial Feature Credits Eco-Watch Essays Fiction/Nonfiction Poetry Politics Renaissance Reviews Road Tea Party The Path Links Archives Submissions Contact Store