criminalization of baggy pants

So I ran across this blog entry in the Criminal Justice section of change.org and thought the issue related well to how we were talking about the absorbtion or criminalization of percieved threats. I don't know that these blog entries (the one I am posting and the two that it links to at the beginning) articluate exactly what the issue is. It seems that the notion is that the "clothing style" is being criminalized because people just don't like it. I think that a more accurate way to describe it would be to say that the actual pants styles aren't what people have a problem with, the individuals wearing them are. They are the threat that the system is having a hard time controlling. I don't think the pants styles being targeted because of taste. I think this goes beyond grown-ups "just not understanding" kids. The individuals who are part of that group that are being targeted because their social and cultural mores and behaviors are considered threatening. This isn't fashion police, it's what happens when the system can't control something so it has to criminalize it. Even though the music industry has capitalized on this group, it doesn't seem like they've been able to sterilize it and repackage the ideas coming from them...but they are still selling them, and now it's a bohemeth that scares the shit out of people in power.

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The Racial Undertones of Baggy Pants Laws

BY MATT KELLEY

PUBLISHED APRIL 14, 2009 @ 04:43PM PST

Two thoughtful posts yesterday - at Flawless Hustle and RaceWire - examine one of the newer additions to the criminalized-for-no-good-reason list: baggy pants.

Towns across the country have passed laws banning baggy pants, imposing fines and prison time on the offenders. In Pine Lawn, Missouri, the parents of young offenders could spend 90 days in jail. A proposed bill in Kentucky would fine offenders $1,000 for wearing pants below the waistline. These laws are misguided because they criminalize expression - anyone arguing that exposure of underwear is indecent exposure should work on amending indecent exposure laws rather than criminalizing a specific clothing style.

They're also wrong because they target an urban population and one that includes a large number of African-Americans. We tend to criminalize that which we don't understand, and we tend to make laws that increase contact between police and inner-city youth. Laws like this start the cycle that sucks too many people into a criminal justice system they don't need. A court date for baggy pants leads to a missed day at work and a continuance. Another court date, another missed day of work - or school. The case is finally wrapped up, with a fine and a brand new criminal record. A missed test or a lost job have serious consequences, and so does a record. Another infraction - maybe trespassing for hanging out a friend's public housing complex - and we have a repeat offender. It's no mystery how good people can get wrapped up in this system when we make laws like this.

Is it going to take a Supreme Court decision to end the baggy pants laws? Here's Michelle Chen at RaceWire:

"Grown-ups have been fretting about what kids are wearing for generations. In the 1960s, black armbands worn in protest of the Vietnam War were banned, ultimately leading to a landmark Supreme Court ruling. During the 1990s, courts ruled that some bans on provocatively worded T-shirts and other controversial fashion flunked the constitutional test because they didn’t serve a valid safety or disciplinary purpose."

And vadim at Flawless Hustle:

"I’ve been living in this country for a long time and this logic - X is distasteful to me, so let's throw people who use/show/wear X in jail - is intuitive to too many people. Lucky or us, we have the Constitution, and we have the first amendment, which clearly allows for Americans to exercise their Freedom of Expression to, for example, wear clothes others might find distasteful. And we have the eighth amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment,” i.e. jailing/fining citizens for wearing clothes others might find objectionable."

The more litigants challenge these laws on Constitutional grounds, and the more activist judges overrule narrow-minded legislators, the better.

Well said.

beat vs. nik

Today we takled about the major difference between the Beats and the Beatniks. The two terms are contermporarily used synonymously, however we learned that they are two completely seperate worlds. Here are a few snippets from my notes:

When Capitalism percieves a threat, it absorbs it, processes it, codifies it, repackages it and sells it for profit to the mainstream. This is what the Beatnik was. 

If a threat cannot be co-opted, it is criminalized (i.e. obscenity trials of the actual Beats). Both of these are ways to control the threat.

The Beatnik was an an abstraction of the perceived mentality of the Beats. Negative stereotype of the Beat: Lazy, drug addicts, sex crazed, etc.

Pre-meditated (inauthentic, unoriginal, copies) Beatnik products. Commercialized, bastardized versions of Beat cultural aspects. The EFFECTS were being appropriated and sold, not the ROOTS. The image, the delusion of that freedom were being sold. Beatnik kits, movies, books, clothes...cookbooks? Literally anything that could be sold for profit was processed and regurgitated. Not only did this make money, but it granted the companies control over the 'beat' image. Which is why today when someone says 'Beat' or 'Beatnik' they not only think they mean the same thing, they think that thing is the cheap abstraction that was put into the mainstream in the 60's.

More from Wikipedia about Beatniks:

These are just a few parts of the Wiki articlce that I thought hit on what we talked about:

Stereotyping

In her memoir, Minor Characters, Joyce Johnson described how the beat stereotype was absorbed into American culture:

"Beat Generation" sold books, sold black turtleneck sweaters and bongos, berets and dark glasses, sold a way of life that seemed like dangerous fun—thus to be either condemned or imitated. Suburban couples could have beatnik parties on Saturday nights and drink too much and fondle each other’s wives.

Ann Charters observed how the term "beat" was appropriated to become a marketing tool:

The term caught on because it could mean anything. It could even be exploited in the affluent wake of the decade’s extraordinary technological inventions. Almost immediately, for example, advertisements by "hip" record companies in New York used the idea of the Beat Generation to sell their new long-playing vinyl records.

Prefacing The Beat Vortex, Thornton Lee Streiff found a false image resulting from an amalgam of earlier stereotypes:

Reporters are not generally well versed in artistic movements, or the history of literature or art. And most are certain that their readers, or viewers, are of limited intellectual ability and must have things explained simply, in any case. Thus, the reporters in the media tried to relate something that was new to already pre-existing frameworks and images that were only vaguely appropriate in their efforts to explain and simplify. With a variety of oversimplified and conventional formulas at their disposal, they fell back on the nearest stereotypical approximation of what the phenomenon resembled, as they saw it. And even worse, they did not see it clearly and completely at that. They got a quotation here and a photograph there — and it was their job to wrap it up in a comprehensible package — and if it seemed to violate the prevailing mandatory conformist doctrine, they would also be obliged to give it a negative spin as well. And in this, they were aided and abetted by the Poetic Establishment of the day. Thus, what came out in the media: from newspapers, magazines, TV, and the movies, was a product of the stereotypes of the 30s and 40s — though garbled — of a cross between a 1920s Greenwich Village bohemian artist and a Bop musician, whose visual image was completed by mixing in Daliesque paintings, a beret, a van dyke beard, a turtle-neck sweater, a pair of sandals, and set of bongo drums. A few authentic elements were added to the collective image: poets reading their poems, for example, but even this was made unintelligible by making all of the poets speak in some kind of phony Bop idiom. The consequence is, that even though we may know now that these images do not accurately reflect the reality of the Beat movement, we still subconsciously look for them when we look back to the 50s. We have not even yet completely escaped the visual imagery that has been so insistently forced upon us.

Etymology of the term beatnik

The word "beatnik" was coined by Herb Caen in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle on April 2,1958. Caen coined the term by adding the Russian suffix -nik after Sputnik I to the Beat Generation. Caen's column with the word came six months after the launch of Sputnik. It may have been Caen's intent to portray the members of the Beat Generation as un-American. Objecting to Caen's twist on the term, Allen Ginsberg wrote to the New York Times to deplore "the foul word beatnik," commenting, "If beatniks and not illuminated Beat poets overrun this country, they will have been created not by Kerouac but by industries of mass communication which continue to brainwash man."

Some other snippets from the article:

At the time that the terms Beat Generation and beat were coined, there was a trend amongst young college students to adopt the stereotype, with men wearing goatees and berets, rolling their own cigarettes and playing bongos. Fashions for women included black leotards and wearing their hair long, straight and unadorned in a rebellion against the middle-class culture of beauty salons. Marijuana use was associated with the subculture, and during the 1950s, Aldous Huxley's The Doors of Perception further influenced views on drugs.

The character Maynard G. Krebs, played on TV by Bob Denver in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959-63), solidified the beatnik stereotype, in contrast to the rebellious, beat-related images presented by popular film actors of the early and mid-1950s, notably Marlon Brando and James Dean.

The Krebs character, portrayed by actor Bob Denver, began as a stereotypical beatnik, with a goatee, "hip" (slang) usage, and a generally unkempt, bohemian appearance, studiously avoiding anything resembling work, which he seemed to regard as the ultimate four-letter word. Whenever the word was mentioned, even in a line like "That would work," he would jump with fear, yelping, "Work?!" He served as a foil to the well-groomed, well-dressed, straitlaced Dobie, and the contrast between the two friends provided much of the humor of the series.

Here's a video clip of the Maynard Character (let it load, then skip to 4:24):

bongo notes

Bongo Lecture: The American Landscape & Ecology

-There is a distinction between the romantic, hippy view of nature and the Beat sensibility which was unromantic, more realist. 

-The romantic view is that of perfection and spirituality in nature, a transcendental view (i.e. Wordsworth)

-The Beat view is that nature is as scary as it is beautiful, that "Nature is unnatural" and the grime is a part of it, too. -The ugliness, darkness and scariness is essential in nature.

-The relationship between nature & the city - where do we fit? How is it possible?

Michael McClure - "For the Death of 100 Whales"

D.H. Lawrence - "Whales Weep Not"

-Anything that is able to make love is worth saving, is holy.

Gary Snyder - "Smokey the Bear Sutra"

-Smokey the bear as theultimate buhddah incarnation

-New awareness of responsibility for the environment

-Understanding it on its own terms
-Outgrowth of the human spirit

-Cycles of knowledge - Ezra Pound - make it new

Gary Snyder - "Axe Handles"
-If we're seeking far, we're not looking in the right place. Self contained method of growing and evolving. Learning & teaching at the same time. "He dies of thirst beside the fountain". God is closer to you than your jugular. 

for the death of 100 whales

I'm going to post a couple of things in response to the bongo lecture on the American landscape & ecology later, but one of the first things I did when I was thinking about the lecture was to look up the Michael McClure poem Alex read.

I found an anthology of his poems put together by Michael McClure himself. You can find it here. I picked a couple of my favorite ones and wanted to put them here. I think they seem like they would go well with bongos.

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FOR THE DEATH OF 100 WHALES

In April, 1954, TIME magazine described seventy-nine bored American G.I.s stationed at a NATO base in Iceland murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers, armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales to death.

I read this poem at my first reading, in 1955.

Hung midsea
Like a boat mid-air
The liners boiled their pastures:
The liners of flesh,
The Arctic steamers

Brains the size of a teacup
Mouths the size of a door

The sleek wolves
Mowers and reapers of sea kine.
THE GIANT TADPOLES
(Meat their algae)
Lept
Like sheep or children.
Shot from the sea's bore.

Turned and twisted
(Goya!!)
Flung blood and sperm.
Incense.
Gnashed at their tails and brothers
Cursed Christ of mammals,
Snapped at the sun,
Ran for the Sea's floor.

Goya! Goya!
Oh Lawrence
No angels dance those bridges.
OH GUN! OH BOW!
There are no churches in the waves,
No holiness,
No passages or crossings
From the beasts' wet shore.

* * *

DISTURBED BY FREEDOM

MY HAND IS A GUN AND EACH FINGER
IS A BARREL
and my arm is growing searching reaching
like a DREAM and I don't know
what to shoot, surely not the robins who have flown
ALL
the way
BACK
from the mountains of Sonora over the desert
where I have driven amazed at the craggy
strangeness of raw beauty.
((THAT'S WHAT I AM ABOUT: BEAUTY.
--BEAUTY AND SENSE))
and these robins have alighted here
in these green meadows where sprinkled water
turning warm runs over the masses of pink blooms.
I CANNOT SHOOT THE SOUND OF THE TRAFFIC.
A hundred bullets
would not stop that bus and I
would not hurt the children
or the adolescents at the moving windows
with their pink mohawk haircuts
and their sexual cries
LIKE HUMAN MACAWS.
It is another day and another dollar.
I
WONDER
WHERE
I
AM
((ROAMING SO SWEETLY FROM FIELD
TO FIELD DIS-
TURBED BY MY FREEDOM!))
--AND LOOK AT THE DEEP SCRATCHES THAT MADMEN
make with their keys on the sleek red
lacquer of my car.
I taste coffee in my mouth.
MY MOUTH IS WHERE I AM LIVING TODAY
but I am lonely as a skinny
old white cat with blue eyes
and irregular jagged spots of gray and black
showing a tiger pattern.
I am a tyger, I am an owl. I am some ancient wisdom
taking its own pulse and listening:
BANG!
BANG!, goes my finger.
BANG! Lover, I wish
we had bought
the purplish polish for your
toe
nails!

* * *

NIRVANA ALSO DEPENDS ON THE TREASURES OF THE TATHAGATA.
YET DEATH IS NEVER A WHOLLY WELCOME GUEST.
SWIM MUSIC DARK GLOAMING THUNDER.
LISTENING SMOKE SHEET WRINKLE MORNING.
A blackened face with clouds of blue smoke from the forehead.
Russian wolfhound crunching the ribs of sheep.
An envelope filled with orchid seeds.
Bright green creatures.
Appearance of the Ghost of Love.
Chairs covered with moss.
Palm trees the size of bacteria.
The sexual thrill of darkened autos.
Ammonia.
Ammonites.
Pineapple.
Silver dollars in the stocking.
Pineapple.
Ammonites.
Ammonia.
The sexual thrill of darkened autos.
Palm trees the size of bacteria.
Chairs covered with moss.
Appearance of the Ghost of Love.
Bright green creatures.
An envelope filled with orchid seeds.
Russian wolfhound crunching the ribs of sheep.
A blackened face with clouds of blue smoke from the forehead.
LISTENING SMOKE SHEET WRINKLE MORNING.
SWIM MUSIC BARK GLOAMING THUNDER.
YET DEATH IS NEVER A WHOLLY WELCOME GUEST.
NIRVANA ALSO DEPENDS ON THE TREASURES OF THE TATHAGATA.

* * *

EACH BON MOT HAS COST ME A PURSE OF GOLD.
ERASE THE LINES OF THE NIGHT FROM THE COUCH OF THE DAY.
COOL TURQUOISE CRYSTAL FEATHER -- WOLF PROTON GYRE.
SCROLLED FERN SHADOW SPORE -- BREAST SALT MOON.
Wheel of the galaxy turning in tumbleweed.
Faces of antelope staring from ice cream.
Watches ticking on the backs of turtles.
Tambourines tinkling in apple trees.
Flames full of creatures arising from the mouths of worms
Bearded men pondering in dreams.
Bees and moths darting on the fields of purple asters.
Odor of hummingbird mint crunched under boot heel.
Maya.
Spirit.
Matter.
River.
Creek.
River.
Matter.
Spirit.
Maya.
Odor of hummingbird mint crunched under boot heel.
Bees and moths darting on the fields of purple asters.
Bearded men pondering in dreams.
Flames full of creatures arising from the mouths of worms.
Tambourines tinkling in apple trees.
Watches ticking on the backs of turtles.
Faces of antelope staring from ice cream.
Wheel of the galaxy turning in tumbleweed.
SCROLLED FERN SHADOW SPORE -- BREAST SALT MOON.
COOL TURQUOISE CRYSTAL FEATHER -- WOLF PROTON GYRE.
ERASE THE LINES OF THE NIGHT FROM THE COUCH OF THE DAY.
EACH BON MOT HAS COST ME A PURSE OF GOLD.

* * *

LISTEN LAWRENCE

LISTEN, LAWRENCE, THERE ARE CERTAIN OF US
INTENSELY COMMITTED
TO
a
real
A REAL,
REVOLT! A REVOLT
that we only begin to
conceptualize as we
achieve it!
THE CONCEPTION
BEGINS SLOW
-- as we do it -- as we really do
it -- as we make the revolution
with our bodies -- our real BODIES!
OUR REAL BONES ARE NOT DIVISIBLE
from the bulks of our
brother and sister beings!
We're alarmed by the simultaneous extinction
and overcrowding of creatures:
WE
BELIEVE
that the universe of discourse
(of talk and habbit-patterned actions)
and the universe of politics
are equivalent!
THAT POLITICS IS DEAD
and
BIOLOGY
IS HERE!
We live near the shadow
AT THE NEAR EDGE OF THE SHADOW
((TOO NEAR!!))
of the extermination
of the diversity
of living beings. No need
to list their names
(Mountain Gorilla, Grizzly, Dune Tansy)
for it
is a too terrible
elegy to do so!

COMMUNISM,
CAPITALISM,
SOCIALISM,
will do
NOTHING,
NOTHING
to save the surge
of life -- the ten thousand
to the ten thousandth, vast,
Da Vincian molecule of which
ALL LIFE,
ALL LIFE
is a particle

*

LISTEN, BELIEVE
ME,
none of us can afford to luxuriate,
if we care about the presence of life.
The
whole scene
IS ALL ONE DIMENSIONAL!
MARCUSE was right!
because he saw there is
only one, one-dimensional, planet-wide civilization
and realpolitik.
Unfortunately
it is modeled on one of the most
perfect aspects of our nature: THE DESIRE
TO GROW, TO WASTE, TO BREED, TO BURN UP,
TO EAT, TO TOSS DOWN, TO TEAR UP, TO FINGER
AND TWIST, AND TEASE, AND MAKE ALL
THINGS TERRIBLE AND DIVINE,
AND GLORIOUS! And we have
succeeded TOO WELL,
TOO WELL!
We are the most complete successes
the world has ever known!
POLITICS
is
part
and particle
of this horrific success, success
which is -- in fact -- an explosion that has
ALREADY OCCURRED. We have charred
the surface of the earth leaving behind
buildings which are cinders from the blasts
of oceans of petrochemicals!
Look, books and papers are
the fossil fuel explosion of trees!
LISTEN, LAWRENCE, this
is the same old politics! ANY, ANY, ANY
POLITICS
is the POLITICS OF EXTINCTION!

*

IT IS TIME FOR PEOPLE TO COME OUT OF THE CLOSET
ALL RIGHT!
ALL RIGHT!
IT IS TIME FOR THEM
to come out of the closet --
OUT OF THE CLOSET OF POLITICS
and into the light of their flesh and bodies!
NOW
is
THE TIME
to learn to see
with the systemless system
--with the systemless system
like a Negative Capability --
of anarchist-mammal perception!
THAT'S BIOLOGY! Now is the time
to see that
it is our nature to be beautiful
and the destruction wrought by politics
is part of our beauty. Now we can learn
to see why it is our nature to go on with
this destructive politics. NOW WE CAN SAY:
LET'S STOP! LET'S STOP
THIS ENDLESS MURDER BY POLITICS!
LET
US
DO WHAT
WE CAN TO STOP
so very much useless pain!

It is our nature to overbreed and kill!
but our nature has endless dimensions! We
can choose among them -- we can reject,
we can reject the flowers of politics!