On The Sunny Side of the Street
On one side of the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville, Virginia is a left-wing radical bookshop called The Beautiful Idea. On the other side of the street at a slantwise angle — just out of view — is an apparent campaign office for the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, RFK Jr.
I loathe the fact that this geographical pairing sits like a hanging curveball of a story waiting to happen. I’d rather the story weren’t there. It isn’t just that Naomi Klein has already written Doppelganger, a book we’ve already referenced that directly addresses a pairing such at this. It’s that walking by a campaign office for RFK Jr. is a little like walking by a house still celebrating Halloween well after Halloween has come and gone — the pumpkins are rotting on the lawn; the candy has curdled itself in unknown directions; and we find ourselves imagining a rational actor ironically singing a Hallmark-quality rendition of Louis Armstrong’s “On The Sunny Side of The Street,” the sugary sense of that emotion dissolving away into a of state of perpetually elevated mild amusement, and what is the use of that? You can’t build a house out of that.
Particularly if we extend the metaphor like a piece of chewing gum and look at all the other figurative homebuilders in the area — not only those who’ve operated in a certain tradition of political writing (Didion, Mailer, et. al.), but also those who walk around with live streams and certain social media accounts like they’re a one-person TMZ; like they’re a one-person helicopter on the highway ready to give chase to things that don’t necessarily need to be chased; as if a piece of media and its audience and the subsequent critical thinking required to connect the two are nothing more than a bridge-sized piece of chewing gum stretched across a chasm.
The latter is on my mind because of the way in which far-right protestors came out to ‘defend’ the Cenotaph on Remembrance Day in the UK. When asked as to why they were there, folks directly pointed to the now-fired Home Secretary, Suella Braverman.
Many stated explicitly that they had travelled to Whitehall because of comments made by the home secretary, Suella Braverman, who, days earlier, had claimed that police treated football supporters – such as Neale – unfavourably compared to “politically connected minority groups.” “She’s the only one making any sense at the minute. We’re sleepwalking into a race war,” said a middle-aged man who said he was a Sunderland fan but did not want to be named. “Armistice is our day!” he added.
“It’s getting ridiculous, them taking our streets, attacking the Cenotaph,” said another man, a black scarf covering the lower part of his face.
It felt like a distant but unmistakable echo of what happened between the former President and his followers on January 6th. It was a one-to-one ratio.
Again, from Klein’s book: “In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt described the process of thinking as a form of doubling, because it is ‘a dialogue between me and myself,’” which I cite here to semi-rhetorically ask where that kind of internal dialogue goes when people — all Nazi Literature in the Americas-like — inadvertently begin to self-report their own fascism like the woman who called 911 on a library.
That particular moment — that act of slippage, of the internal dialogue disappearing — isn’t Bodysnatchers, neither the film nor the Radiohead song. It’s not “House Taken Over.” It’s something else. What is it?
It makes me think there’s something quietly political I can do in refusing to let the ‘I’ of this piece follow the path of an otherwise traditional ‘I,’ to aggressively interrupt this piece before it even has a chance to properly ‘begin.’ You don’t need the ‘I’ adventuring its way between these two locations on this particular street here in Charlottesville in November of 2023 for this story to be the story that it is, if we can even call this piece a story at all. (It’s not.) And, of course, if you’re ready to argue otherwise, if you’re ready to prove me wrong — which, please do! This is a democratic space, and those two words are the entire point — I can simply hand the computer off to someone else, ask them take over, and then sit back and watch as the first words they type are “Um, okay.”
In other words: “Frank Sinatra has a Cold” — and Evan doesn’t want to write about either side of the street. Evan would rather sing, ‘On The Sunny Side of The Street’ as knowingly as he possibly can (at least for the purposes of this piece.) He wants to think about how easily he can hear the melody for “Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?” in Armstrong’s opening statement of theme in the track linked to here. He’d rather watch We’re Here or Dungeons & Drag Queens. Evan does not believe in false equivalencies in a narrative culture that looks at the time required to differentiate one thing from another and decides it doesn’t actually have the time after all. He does not believe in false choices. Evan would rather think about poems by the Italian writer Cesare Pavese, where the narrator speaks on how —
The morning
will suddenly open wide on a spacious silence,
muffling every voice. Even the tramp,
who has no home, no city, drinks in that air, inhaling it
like a glass of grappa on an empty stomach.
Whether you're hungry or have been betrayed by the sweetest
mouth, it's worth your while just to go walking in that air,
feeling your faintest memories quicken as you breathe.
— and then see how those kind of lines might enter into dialogue with films like Frederick Wiseman’s Monrovia, Indiana, Juan Palacios’s Meseta, or Il Buco by Michelangelo Frammartino, all of which seem interested themselves in exploring the dimensional depths of something as simple as the idea of ‘quiet,’ ‘silence,’ or ‘space.’
Yes, a data point only often recognizes fellow data points — look at how this campaign office and this bookstore are to one another! — but that’s not the only language that exists. These figurative oranges aren’t the only fruit. The language bound up with our identities isn’t just born to live inside figurative rocket silos that are then sent in the direction of the moon, never to be seen, heard of, or thought of again, some distant cacophony of fireworks hanging over a dystopian version of Le Corbusier’s ‘Radiant City.’
Language is less than that. It’s also more.