MSA

MSA is short for “moving stuff around.” MSA goes way back in my family. I’ve been MSA-ing for 50 years because my annual income has never hit $30,000. An MSA-er moves stuff him or herself with a friend or a relative and a friend’s or a relative’s pick-up. To rise from the MSA class to the next rung up, the U-Haul class, you’ve got to make at least $30 thou a year. I’ve never made it U-Haul class.

I’ve been MSA-ing for almost 50 years now. I’d say it was fate if MSA were karmically grander, but maneuvering unwieldy, old household furnishings up and down stairs now and then lacks the cosmic resonances fate requires.

My most gratifying MSA experience occurred one hot afternoon about 40 years ago when my MSA partner and I decided to heave his 8-foot wreck of a couch off an apartment deck rather than hump it down three flights of stairs. The couch, which also served as the guy’s bed, was none the worse for the flight, although the building manager said he’d call the police if he saw us air-freight any more stuff past his window.

Four decades later — and still MSA-ing — it goes like this:

“Bruce, you’ve got a pick-up truck, right?” 

No denying it. (I did at the time.)

“And a handcart?”

Yup. Bungees too. 

In other words, the basic MSA equipment and a social circle pretty much confined to the MSA income level. I’m reconciled to permanent, on-call MSA. About all I can look forward to is MSA-ing on the Senior Bus — the one with the hydraulic lift.

MSA-ing in San Francisco has its compensations. One Saturday years ago, on an MSA mission in The City, and in between major MSA events, I went to a movie. Hadn’t been to one in a year or so, but I was intrigued by an idiot review in the Chronicle that warned against “Amores Perros,” or “Love’s a Bitch,” because the reviewer warned that the film contained “extremely violent” scenes involving dog fights.

The reviewer was more apprehensive about viewer reactions to the film’s bloody dog scenes than he was about viewer reactions to on-screen depictions of the ultra-vi befalling humans.

In San Francisco, dog people rule, hence canine cultural hegemony.

Judge for yourself, fellow aesthetes, but I thought “Amores Perros” was as intelligent a movie as I’ve seen, offering us a vividly honest artistic rendering of the true state of late capitalism. 

Not to go too Andrew Sarris on you here, but “Amores Perros” is a meditation on the effects of unchecked industrial capitalism on human relations, dramatically presented in class-conscious, anthropomorphic metaphors — dog fights. But the big-screen violence is never gratuitous, and living dogs were obviously not sacrificed to art, not that this viewer would be disturbed if they had been, such was the power of the film. Hell, art is so scarce these days the genius who made this movie could have sacrificed every mutt in town, and the SPCA’s board of directors with them, and it would be cool with me. 

As the lights dimmed and the film rolled, a magnified English language disclaimer appeared. It looked like it had been hastily typed on an old manual by management to appease Frisco’s dog people, whom, the disclaimers must have assumed, could not be trusted to distinguish the Mexican movie dogs they were about to meet from the mass indulgence of canine-centered decadence prevalent in San Francisco. The disclaimer reassured the dog people that the beasts in “Amores Perres” had been scrupulously cared for. If the dog people were skeptical that the movie blood spilled during the make-believe dog fights wasn’t catsup, they could double-check the dubious on-screen visuals with the Humane Society.

Arf! Arf!

The dog people have captured all The City’s public spaces, including the parks, children’s playpens and sand boxes, the sidewalks, and Hippie Hill, where every other sunning derelict maintains an unleashed pit bull. It’s time for a counter-offensive.

Later that evening, after the movie and another round of MSA, I walked down to Valencia Street to check a couple of my favorite book stores, Modern Times and, just up the street, Dog Eared Books. At Modern Times an enthusiastic man with an East European accent was speaking to an attentive audience of 200 people or so. I spotted Jeff Blankfort up front with a tape recorder, which I mention because at the time he hosted the only listenable local public affairs show on Free Speech Radio-Philo and I hoped he’d play a recording of the man on his show.

The speaker was a man named Zizek whose name rang a faint bell with me, so faint I wasn’t sure if I knew it as an imported soft drink or from my wife’s Scrabble dictionary. Like most of my ethno-centric fellow citizens, about all I know of East Europe is Kafka and some of the pre-Revolution Russian writers. Other than these hazy, lit-derived impressions, everything east of New York is pretty much unknown territory. 

But I’ve since learned that Zizek is a Slovene professor famous among post-modern thinkers and the few people capable of grasping their abstractions. Slovenia? Beats me. Over there somewhere east of the Rhine. In heavily accented but perfect English, Zizek immediately reeled me in with a series of opinions that he rightly identified as not having been said aloud among America’s demoralized left “for 30 or 40 years.” 

At the risk of summing up his complicated views, Professor Zizek said that the identity politics with which the American left has been hijacked is essentially a reductionist dead-end; that the kind of phony multiculturalism and weepy, “fetishization of the victim” that preoccupies what passes for left politics in this country diverts attention, energy and the very will to take on the true enemy of mankind — unfettered capitalism.

“When my son asks me what communism was like, I tell him, ‘California’,” Zizek said, and everyone in the crowded room laughed, although I don’t think they’d laugh if an American said out loud that “fetishistic distractions” like gay marriage and hairy-legged women, to name two prevalent PC No-Go Zones the professor specifically cited, represented absurd diversions from the True Prob — lethal free enterprise. If one of us said it, the “As a.....” people who typically dominate audiences at places like Modern Times would be rushing the podium. “As a recovering alcoholic gay single parent with a leukemia cat, I resent.... As a bi-polar renter with a one-eyed son, I resent.... As a self-pitying, solipsistic purple nut case, I resent anybody who won’t sit down and have a good long cry with me....”

But Zizek had the “As a.....” people on task and silently attentive. It was gratifying to hear a smart left presentation unmarred by the professional whiners, but it was also mildly depressing that it took a foreigner to tell an crowd of American lefties things that we’re too cowed by the narcissists and the neurotics to tell ourselves.

“Something vast is happening,” Zizek said near the end of his stimulating and encouraging remarks, but his voice trailed off after he’d limned with his outstretched limbs the ominous recent careenings of global capitalism and the blood-soaked events arising from its inherent instability.

Outside on the street, it was peaceful enough, but not what you’d call reassuringly congenial. The contradictions adding up to looming bad times were everywhere. One out of three people walked fat dogs, small armies of the destitute and the doomed shuffled up and down the street, and oblivious consumers crowded the expensive stores and restaurants.