Today, I was writing my talk for Focus the Nation, a nationwide teach-in about global warming. I know what to say, how to say it. I am in control, and I can see in my mind’s eye the audience’s response. I refer to global warming, not as a problem, but as a crisis. It is monumental, overpowering, without precedent. The language is dire: will the earth survive? Will we survive? If we act, we can beat extinction. I controlled it all, until Aleta called me and whispered those words that settle everything, that take everything out of our hands and levels us all. She said: Tony has passed.
Nothing matches the finality of death; but then again nothing should. Nothing touches death’s knack for settling issues, for turning all the heavy, insurmountable crises into, well, into nothing. I have no way of talking about Tony’s passing, except to talk about his presence then, rather than his absence now. And maybe the two are exactly the same. For I see him now, the Tony that moved at double time, the Tony that talked at bullet speed, the Tony that darted here and there with nine cameras, asking this person to stand here, no there, to hold this thing and that—to turn to the left and talk to that one.
Style Wars—that’s how I know him best. He came to my class and talked about the film and about the kids years after he had made the film. He spoke with such affection about the misbegotten—Cap and Daze and Dondi—he loved their craziness, their wildness, their sense that they could do anything, anytime, anywhere. Brooklyn kids threw up their names two stories high on the sides of trains, on the sides of buildings, on the sides of the world itself. Listen to me, you friggin’ world, pay me some mighty attention. For I am somebody, goddamn it! Their spirit rubbed off on him—my god, they were invincible, they would live forever. They would beat the game and the system and show the man for what he was—a damned fool.
That was Tony, that was the man who could, I swear, climb the trains or hang on the overpass and spray his name all over town. I think he would have loved that. He had that look in his eye, that spring in his step, that little ‘screw you’ in his get up and go. I’M WALKIN’ HERE!
Oh Tony, Oh my man, if there are blank walls where you are, give it a go. Write your name all over the damned place. Let them know Tony Silver was here. HI HO SILVER!
Barry Sanders was professor of History of Ideas and English at Pitzer College in Claremont, California and a prolific author. Sanders was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize by Harper’s magazine for his book Alienable Rights: The Exclusion of African Americans in a White Man’s Land, 1619-2000.[1] In 1994 Sanders received his first Pulitzer nomination from Random House for his book A is for Ox: Violence, Electronic Media, and the Silencing of the Written Word. He is also the author of Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History. Sanders is a member of the board of (Out)Laws & Justice.
Posted by Mare 139 on March 02, 2008 at 11:47 PM
