But each year, my 85-year-old grandmother is the biggest target. On one hand, this could be perceived as cruelty to my elders. On the other hand, you should see the grin on her face when she retells the stories. Which she does, constantly, to strangers. She clearly enjoys being part of the annual revelry, even if her role is to be duped. One year I told her I was getting married. Another year I told her I was climbing Mount Everest — without a jacket. Then I dragged her to Grand Central Terminal, where my friend Ben pretended to be a StoryCorps employee.

Eventually, she wised up and stopped picking up the phone. She now marks the April 1 box on her calendar with the most counterintuitive instructions a Jewish grandmother can imagine: Don’t talk to your grandson today.

I had to find another way to reach her. My aforementioned friend Ben suggested snail mail.

This is what I sent her:

Quickly, a couple things about my grandmother. She was raised by socialist union organizers in New York, which makes her a) virulently atheist, and b) very liberal. She think religious people are idiots and doesn’t understand why we didn’t have universal health care fifty years ago. She also happens to be a snob about grammar and punctuation.

At this point in the prank, I knew I either had her or I didn’t. Either she would believe that a stranger from a farcically repugnant religious group with a suspicious street address was donating money on her behalf, or she would see through it. But she never does.

So I decided to keep going.

I’m guessing she found the your/you’re confusion harder to countenance than the threats of violence.

And then, on the off-chance she was still reading, the pièce de résistance:

So far, JesusLovesFetuses@hotmail.com has received no emails. Let’s see what happens…

—

UPDATE:

She was fooled. She called the number of the church group to complain, and when that number forwarded to my cell and she heard my voice on the answering machine, she figured out it was all a hoax. This was the voicemail she left me (sorry, I have no idea why it’s so large):

According to the slang I just made up, that would be called figureheading. Which would make me, metaphorically, a wood carving. Or, one-metaphor-removedly, a celebrity taking credit for words I did not write. But I am not a celebrity, and I never asked anyone to be my ghostwriter. So why are two pieces I didn’t write masquerading under my name?

Every year, Heeb magazine compiles a list of 100 influential young Jews, with a photo and  a blurb about each honoree. It’s probably not “good for the Jews” to propagate the “Jews own the media” meme, but that’s not for me to say. They asked me to write a couple of the blurbs, and though there was no money in it (what else is new?) it seemed fun and not too time-consuming, so I accepted. I asked the editor if there was a strict word limit. She said blurbs were “usually 75-100 words,” and sent me a model from last year, which was 96 words long.

As usual, I spent way more time on the assignment than I should have. I even interviewed both of my subjects–supererogatory, but again, hey, why not? Also as usual, and to my discredit, I then submitted drafts that were over the suggested word limit (by an average of 22 words). The editor said, “Thanks so much Andrew!” and “I’ll be in touch if we need any edits. Thanks again!” That was two and a half months ago. I never heard from Heeb again.

Today, Heeb posted, under my name, two blurbs I didn’t write. The bastards figureheaded me. Below, in case anyone is still reading, I’ll post both versions: what I wrote and what Heeb ran. They bear no resemblance to each other. Literally, apart from “is” and “the” and “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” I wrote not a word of what was published.

Now, on one hand, who gives a shit? Editors rewrite stuff all the time. It wasn’t like my original 100 words were so spectacular, or even necessarily better than what was published. Besides, this was a throwaway gig. Not many people read Heeb, and those who do probably don’t look at the bylines. No one is going to read those three sentences I didn’t write and say, “I thought Andrew Marantz was a good writer, but apparently not. Maybe we shouldn’t give him that MacArthur fellowship.”

Still, I have to care about my name, because it is my name, and because a name is all a writer has. Call it egotistical–it is–but I am careful about the words I use to represent myself. It’s not business; it’s personal. And I’d rather not get credit for a good piece than get erroneous credit for a bad one.

Here are the two versions of each blurb:

EZRA KLEIN (My version)

Stereotypical Jewish moms want their daughters to marry doctors, not bloggers. But have those moms met Ezra Klein? At 25, he is already one of the most respected journalists in the business. (The Economist called him “terrifyingly young and bright.”) A self-confessed policy nerd, he started blogging while he was in college; these days, the Washington Post pays him to opine. And opine he does, at the rate of thousands of words per day. In fact, I could have sworn he published a blog post while I was interviewing him over the phone. Klein also writes about food, which means that he could probably bring a tasty charoset to the next seder. Hear that, Jewish moms?

EZRA KLEIN (Figureheaded version)

Ezra Klein is a former print journalist who found his niche as a blogger for The Washington Post, where he writes about everything from political policy and health care to food. Klein has used this platform to launch a career as one of the most hotly hunted talking heads on the political news circuit. Not bad for a guy who can work in his underwear.

ORAN CANFIELD (My version)

“People have always told me I should write a book [about my life],” said Oran Canfield, author of the recent memoir Long Past Stopping. One problem: Canfield was not a writer. He was a bike messenger by trade and a musician by calling, performing with the grindcore act Child Abuse. Moreover, he was cynical about the publishing industry; his father, with whom he had a difficult relationship, was the editor of the commercially successful but artistically dubious Chicken Soup for the Soul series. A friend offered to ghostwrite Canfield’s memoir for him, but “she couldn’t get my voice,” he says, “so I wrote a few paragraphs to help her get the idea.” A few cathartic months later, Canfield had written the whole book. Now he is a writer.

ORAN CANFIELD (Figureheaded version)

Oran Canfield is the author of recent memoir Long Past Stopping, a story of drug addiction and a tumultuous upbringing as the son of the editor of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Canfield’s book may not nurture your spirit in the same way as his pop’s enterprise, but it will make you feel a hell of a lot better about your own messed-up family.

Still, at a minimum, we knew that President Obama would be able to do at least a few real, consequential things. He would order the closure of Guantanamo. (Check.) He would bring the troops home. (Um…impending check?) And he would push through a bipartisan bill that would grant free education in exchange for national service. Sure, this one would require congressional approval — but who would oppose an expansion of voluntary public service? Who could possibly launch a PR campaign against AmeriCorps?

I should have known the answer, of course. Who else but the wackiest conservative around, the lady who makes Glenn Beck look like Charlie Rose, Michele Bachmann:

Where is this paranoia coming from? By “philosophical agenda,” does she mean, perhaps, the agenda put forward during the Sermon on the Mount? I am going to stop writing about this before I start getting angry. The point is: this is not a question of competing political ideologies, but of incommensurate versions of reality. When Michele Bachmann looks out the window, or reads the (liberal) news, she simply does not see the world I see.

“You heading to the second line?” the stranger asks. He is standing in the middle of the street, where the dividing line would be if there was one, picking catfish from a Styrofoam box. “Just up there a few blocks. You can hear the music almost.”

I am on my way to the second line, but I don’t answer right away. I have just left New York, and am still following that city’s unspoken code—that any stranger who wants to chat is crazy, or soliciting money, or both.

I have to remind myself: this is New Orleans, where strangers make small talk and eye contact; where “All right” is a greeting; where “How are you?” is more than a greeting; where people are nice to each other for no reason.

“I am going to the second line, actually,” I say. “Are you?”

He spits out a bone. “I’ll walk with you a bit. Can’t go too far, though. Have to watch the museum.” I guess he means the Backstreet Cultural Museum, half a block behind us. As I passed by it I considered going in; but I couldn’t tell if it was a hidden treasure or a scam, some guy trying to charge me $8 to fondle his tchotchkes. (Later, when a New Orleanian suggests I visit that very museum, I ask her which she thinks it is. “Both,” she says, without a pause.)

He walks with me a bit. Asks me if I knew the woman.

He must mean the lady who died. “No. Did you?”

“Oh, sure. Everyone in the Treme knew her. You must not be from around here.”

I am not. I am visiting for a weekend. The wrong weekend, most people would say: the first weekend of Lent, four days after Mardi Gras. The streets are quiet. The French Quarter looks like a living room the morning after a house party: sticky sidewalks instead of sticky floorboards; plastic beads instead of plastic cups. The city feels diffident, not sure what it did last night and afraid to find out.

New Orleans is a deeply Catholic city. Before the storm, 40 percent of the city’s children went to Catholic schools; the city is still split into parishes. Even Ignatius Reilly, main character of A Confederacy of Dunces and the great literary anti-hero of New Orleans, was a grudging Catholic. Reilly disdained all modern institutions—capitalism, democracy, courtship, kinship, even New Orleans itself—but he never renounced the Church.

In a bona fide Sin City like Las Vegas, the hedonism buffet is open year-round. In New Orleans, though, the revelry runs in cycles of indulgence and guilt, delineated by the liturgical calendar. After all, Mardi Gras, that bacchanal of bacchanals, is a Catholic festival, and it ends with a hell of a whimper: forty days of fasting and repentance. This is New Orleans—the country’s biggest party followed by the universe’s biggest buzzkill.

The catfish docent and I part ways, and suddenly here comes the second line, and suddenly I’m swept up in it. Two white horses draw an ornate gharry carriage with the casket inside. The band marches in front, playing those sweet sad dirges everyone knows—”When the Saints Go Marching In,” “This Little Light of Mine”—and we go along with them, in equal scale weighing delight and dole.

Is a jazz funeral really a funeral or a party? Both, I say.

A lady near me wears a torn tank top and no shoes, a cigarette burning in each hand. The first time I look over she’s gyrating wildly, grinding her hips and shouting with primal, aggressive joy; the next moment she’s bent over a parked car, racked with sobs. She might be the sister of the deceased, blind with grief, or she might just be out of her mind.

*

“The second line is a bunch of guys who follow the parade. They’re not the members of the Lodge or the club. Anybody can be a second liner, whether they are raggedy or dressed up. They seemed to have more fun than anybody.” – Louis Armstrong

“Down here motherfuckers have the biggest fun of anybody. Motherfucker have a parade, start dancing at the drop of a hat. I understand you dance at funerals and shit? ‘Motherfucker dead, let’s dance his ass off.’” – Richard Pryor, to a crowd in New Orleans

“In this place, there is a custom for the funerals of jazz musicians. The funeral procession parades slowly through the streets, followed by a band playing a mournful dirge as it moves to the cemetery. Once the casket has been laid in place, the band breaks into a joyful ’second line’—symbolizing the triumph of the spirit over death. Tonight the Gulf Coast is still coming through the dirge, yet we will live to see the second line.” – George W. Bush in New Orleans, September 15, 2005

“Yet, the popular view…that the second line is ‘nothing but a party’…a harmless pastime or a diversion for the poorest communities in a city that ‘loves a parade,’ is, says Helen Regis, one of the operations of black-face minstrelsy that hides the social and political significance of the parades…. In these circumstances then, Bush’s invoking of the second line parade as a strategy of forgetting does damage to an institution that is associated with remembering…. In this, perhaps, the President’s speech was simply part of a much broader strategy of forgetting about race in America, one too broad to be fully explored here.” - Simon Stow

*

The next day I wind through the French Quarter on a rented bike. It is Sunday, cold and overcast, and most of the shops are closed. Beads and trinkets litter the ground like bird droppings. They are everywhere: crammed between bricks in the walls, crushed to bits on top of manhole covers, strung up on trees and balconies. Rebecca, my friend and ad hoc bicycle tour guide, tells me most of the beads will hang from the trees all year.

Rebecca leads me through Jackson Square. Nobody is out but the buskers and caricaturists, chatting among themselves. At the far end of the square a church bell chimes an unsteady rhythm, twenty times, twenty-five times, thirty times—not announcing the time, just announcing its presence.

Is Jackson Square a bastion of a proud American subculture, or a sterile tourist attraction? Both, I say.

We leave the French Quarter and, within blocks, New Orleans is a post-industrial wasteland. Elevated train tracks; a narrow, potholed road; a levee—the levee; a long gray sky. And a horizon of huge, empty warehouses—profoundly empty, the way warehouses look in a grim recession in the aftermath of a crippling storm.

Rebecca knows that at least one of these warehouses is not empty. She knows someone who lives and works in one of them, a kind of piano whisperer. He finds pianos that were abandoned in the storm and tries to bring them back to life.

We ring the bell and he gives us a quick tour: the docking bay strewn with drumsticks and hammers and cables; the plywood partition behind which he eats and sleeps; the mural on the wall, a sort of Technicolor pyramid of the muses with twin portraits of Bach and Satchmo at the pinnacle.

“I’m working towards what I really want to do with the space,” he says, “which is have bands come in whenever they want, just word of mouth, and just get people in here drinking and dancing all night. This place is great for it—train tracks on one side, a few vacant lots on the other. No one to complain about the noise. Only problem with this place is this corrugated tin roof. In the summer? In the summer this place is hell. Just baking. I had a free jazz camp in here two summers ago for the kids, and I was like, ‘Am I doing a service here or torturing these poor kids?’ ”

“Both,” I say.

He mostly sells pianos for cheap, but during Lent he’s hoping to fix up at least five and give them away for free.

Everyone I meet in New Orleans is making a sacrifice for Lent. Rebecca is going vegan. Her friend Ronny is only eating out once a week. His friend is spending no more than five dollars a day. Another friend is not using disposable cups or containers. Another is on a cleanse, drinking nothing but hot water, lemon, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper.

Lent is more cultural than religious in this city. It’s just something everyone does, even though most of my friends here are Jewish, or atheists, or both. New Orleans is a Catholic city, not necessarily a God-fearing one.

As we leave the piano hangar for the street, we see a freight train rumble over the tracks: a caravan of Humvees and Jeeps and tanks, camo green and sand-beige.

“Oh, I think I heard about this,” Rebecca says. “I heard all those military police that came in after the storm, apparently they were staying until this Mardi Gras and they’re just leaving now. So that must be them. Or their equipment, anyway.”

“So there have been troops here the whole time?”

“I guess so.”

“You mean contractors? Blackwater and all those?”

“I think so, yeah. All I know is, don’t get pulled over around here.”

*

We bike out of the post-industrial wasteland and back into town. We pass a homeless man, sitting in front of his shopping cart and muttering to himself. When he looks up and sees me, he stops talking for a minute, raises and hand in greeting, and says, “All right.”

Rebecca stops at a corner store—BEER ICE LOTTO PO BOYS—and I watch the bikes while she buys a bottle of water. Two men stand against the side of the building smoking thin cigars. They are in their forties. They gossip about Lil Wayne’s latest antics—his new mixtape, his Katie Couric interview—as if he were a rambunctious young cousin or a neighborhood scamp.

“I’m gonna get me a beer from inside,” one of them says to the other. “You want one?”

“No, man, I’m not trying to drink right now.”

“Why not? What else do you have going on?”

“Man, it’s Sunday, man. I’ma go home and put my ass to bed.”

Went to see the elephants last night. They were walking across Manhattan in the cold, starting at the Midtown Tunnel at midnight and ending at Madison Square Garden. (They had to get to the Garden to perform in the circus and, as my friend put it, “How else are they gonna get there?”)

It all sounded like a great idea around 9:00 pm. When someone asks you if you want to go see the elephants, it seems that yes is the only right answer. But by the time it was 11:30 and time to go, I was having doubts. Then after an hour underground, the Q train lurching, then stopping, the whole time wondering whether I was missing the parade, I picked a mental fight with Del Close: You can’t always say yes!

Off the train and above ground: We had not missed the elephants. We were just in time. The crowd was pressed up against the barricades, brimming with a kind of self-conscious, self-fulfilling enthusiasm. (The logic seemed to be: “This is a childish thing to do, so I will do it with a childlike sense of wonder.”) We were shivering, but every few minutes someone would yell “Whooo! Elephants!” and we would all break into a cheer. The elephants were not here just yet, but they were coming, goddammit.

This is the amazing thing about New York: whatever crazy, self-destructive thing you decide to do, you can take comfort in the fact that hundreds of people will be stupid enough to do it with you.

When the elephants did walk by, they were indeed very huge and very cute. They really do link up, trunks grasping tails, and that is pretty great. 

But all the excitement wasn’t about them, per se. One can imagine living in a very different part of the world, where elephants would be old news and people would instead line up to see a car whizz by. What’s exciting is what’s anomalous.

We returned to the Herald Square subway, only to find another surprise: a sound installation on the southbound track. A green pipe mounted above eye-level, reticulated with little holes, and the holes produce music when you place your hand over them. Like a flute made out of an air duct, except the sound is not produced by air rushing through the tube; the sounds are pre-recorded, and triggered when a light beam is interrupted.

Again, this installation, taken on its own, was not the best I’ve ever seen. You couldn’t shape the music in any way (duration, timbre, volume). At Burning Man, it would have been fair at best. But again, it’s about context: on the subway platform, it made my night. 

All of which made me think about some pretty dry and lofty things, because I am a big dork.

One: We have to do away with eternal, context-independent judgments about art (or about anything, really). In the university, we stopped searching for capital-T Truth long ago. Everything is historically contingent. God is dead. Yet within even the most pomo art critic’s soul lurks the vestigial assumption that a piece of art is either Good or Bad, essentially, platonically. Perhaps art critics cling to this idea, though they claim to disagree with it, because art criticism is still structured as a priesthood. Without her singular power to sling labels (Brilliant, Tacky, Genius, Poseur) like thunderbolts, the art critic would be out of a job.

Two: What do we lose in a recession? We all have to make sacrifices, and the first thing to go, one would think, would be luxuries. What, then, is a luxury? What is superfluous? Some examples are obvious: AIG executives should not get a handout, but veterans should. It gets trickier when we talk about things like public sound installations and circus elephants. I won’t go too deeply into it here, but I think the dilemma is clear. I am sincerely glad that a bunch of corporations decided to fund an air-duct-flute in the subway. My night was better because of it, and, arguably, the polis at large is better because of it. (That is, if you believe that public art serves a deeply important function, which I do.) But I would be hard-pressed to make that case to a homeless person, who might say, with good reason, “I’m glad you had fun making those sounds, but I could have used that money to keep warm.”

Contast Maslow’s pyramid with Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach. There are many differences between them — for one, the former claimed to be descriptive and the latter prescriptive. But here’s what I want to point out: Maslow’s is a hierarchy, while Nussbaum’s is a web. According to Nussbaum, each human right is equally, crucially important. Some are more basic, of course — without life, you can’t have any of the other ones — but that doesn’t mean that life is more important than, say, play. A life without play, Nussbaum is saying, is an incomplete life. A strict utilitarian might say, “No one gets an air-duct-flute until everyone has a place to sleep,” and there is certainly merit to that argument. But Nussbaum would disagree.

Waiting for a Coney Island-bound Q train at 12:15 on a Saturday Sunday is no one’s idea of a good time. (If you were to stage Beckett in Brooklyn, you could do worse than the DeKalb B/Q station for a set.) Luckily, last night a pair of couples pierced the midnight melancholy. They were on a rollicking Valentine’s double-date and were not ready for the fun to end.

The taller man — debonair, pointy shoes, old enough that he would have been embarrassed if not for the alcohol — was being prodded, by the other three, to dance. “No music!” was his excuse. The shorter man brandished a cellphone, and “Hips Don’t Lie” chattered from the mouthpiece. The tall man’s bluff had been called. He had to dance. Imagine your father, slightly buzzed, performing an enthusiastic and terrible Shakira impression. That’s how entertaining it was.

Suddenly, though, the man was stopped by the police. “Dancing is legal,” Officer Dadura (shield number 4784) explained. “Playing music such that it is audible to other people, however, is illegal.”

I don’t usually do this, but I intervened, since I was the only person to whom the cellphone music was “audible.”

“I didn’t mind,” I said. “I kind of liked it.” This had no effect, of course. The man with the cell phone was in store for a $50 ticket. But that was not all.

“Do you have any identification, sir?”

He did not.

“No driver’s license, nothing witchyur picture on it? No passport? If you can’t produce anything, sir, I’m afraid I’m going to have to arrest you.”

Did I mention that the men were Latino?

Now, I’m not going to get started about racial profiling and “quality of life” policing and fascism; I won’t even elaborate on how unfortunate it is that in this, the Age of Obama, the NYPD is still stuck in its Giuliani-era mentality. The point I want to make, for now, is much simpler: the cell phone guy didn’t do anything wrong. He certainly brightened my night. I do not doubt that Officer Dadura is correct, that New York City has a law against playing audible music in the subway. Every city has its share of dumb and/or oppressive laws. Laws are human constructions. They are no more or less stupid than the legislators who make them up. “Illegal,” therefore, is hardly the same as “bad” or “wrong” or even “inconsiderate.”

We have pursued such ridiculous crime policies for so long that we no longer expect our laws to be reasonable. In theory, though, shouldn’t they be? I am not going to argue that commonsense utilitarianism will solve all our problems. But before we bother someone and cart him off to jail (which didn’t happen in this case, thankfully), shouldn’t  we at least consider whether he did anything wrong — anything, that is, other than break some law?

The more salient point is even simpler: if the NYPD is trying to stop looking racist — and if they aren’t, they should — then Officer Dadura is doing them a disservice. Maybe he had a quota to fill, or maybe he is just a dick, but his actions certainly looked like ethnic profiling to me. You can file a complaint against him here.

Much, much more can be and has been said about this. Several books, and at least one mediocre undergraduate thesis (mine), have argued that how a society chooses to define and respond to crime says more about the society than about the disinterested pursuit of Justice. In other words: the function of laws and cops and prisons — at least, sociologically speaking — is not to improve our lives and keep us safe. If you think it is, you have been watching [too much] TV. Sociologically speaking, says Durkheim, the primary function of “law and order” is to define deviance, and, in the process, to define normality — who We, as opposed to They, are.

French sociology aside, something has got to give. The financial crisis could be a great excuse to make reforms that are long overdue. Lucky for us, Giuliani did not win the election. Let’s hope that Obama has the courage to try to overhaul the system.

The bill’s sponsor, Republican Rep. Beverly Pyle, said she introduced the measure after a series of church shootings across the country. She said it would be up to each individual church whether to allow the concealed guns….

Pyle had an unexpected ally in liberal Democratic Rep. Lindsley Smith, who said she supported the bill because it was an issue of separation of church and state. Smith urged lawmakers to pass the bill because churches shouldn’t be treated differently from other private entities under state law, she said.

Apparently some pastors dissented, claiming that guns don’t make people safe. Goddamn hippies.

How does it feel to be a patriot for the first time? A few young New Yorkers tell all. (Disclaimer: I’m linking to this because I’m one of them.)