Why Hipsterville is Paradise

Ben and Millie drink coffee in perhaps the world's perfect room: with five windows looking over the confluence of Soda and Gun Creeks. Kelly showed me what it is like to sit with a hot mug and meditate on the day, spider plants making generations of ladies in silent company. So I've got this concept of coffee being this drink of solitude, a drink of morning calm and quiet comfort. Making espresso on the HMS Weed Warrior last summer was the logical extreme of that idea, and was, for those Steely Dan fans out there, "the best."

But today I am wearing black and white, with my silver-and-black laptop matching my silver-and-black phone and silver-and-black travel mug, and I'm on Bogart Street at "Archive," an espresso-slanging video rental cafe with exposed vent ducts, a clientele wearing nothing but black coats, and a projector screen playing this:



...in a pulsating stream of absolutely addicting Beastie Boys' jams. A video hasn't gotten me like this one since "It's Gonna be Me." Forget Gun Creek, Bennie. Let the spider plants wilt, Kel. Leydies and Hipstermen, welcome to paradise!

Extra! Extra! Nickelbee does something great!!

I'd like to begin this second installment about N.C.L.B (apparently called "Nickelbee" by insiders) with some corrections. This act was indeed submitted by G.W. Bush, but it was authored and supported by a bipartisan group including George Miller and Ted Kennedy. It follows in a long line of standards-based education reform bills, but there are some nuances to this one. Schools that receive "Title 1" funding, meaning they get extra money from the Fed because half the kids come from "low income" families, have to improve their test scores each year in order to receive that extra cash. If they don't improve each year compared to the last, they are labeled "failing" and three things happen:
1) The Title 1 funding is cut
2) Parents have the option of moving their kids to a different school
3) The school must offer special tutoring for the students

This seems like an awful situation. The school's funding is cut, it must allocate its dwindling funds to additional programing, and students with more resources or more active parents will flee the school, leaving a more apathetic student body and a general feeling of failure.

HOWEVER, specifically because of this whole rigmarole, I have the awesome opportunity to go to East New York five days a week and hang out with kids. In a 1-on-1 context, I work with five kids on their homework, or work through math or English worksheets that I bring, or we Google things and look at maps. Earlier in the fall, we did some nature activities outside, and of course I often end up talking about ecology or earth systems.

Miguel told his mom that "le encanta el tutor." (that means me!)

Antonio cried the first day of class, but now he gives me sweet high-fives.

Liz is a brilliant kindergartner, and when I leave on Tuesday she waves saying, "Hasta el Friday!"

I'm involved in a powerful thing. I'm a white kid going every day into a world that is seldom seen by white eyes. And it's not only racial. These are immigrant families, now undeniably American, who find themselves in the Babelian Library of Brooklyn, an endless honeycomb of hexagonal parlors and tight corridors. These schools fail to meet standards and probably don't prepare many kids for college. But perhaps I get to touch a few kids, and make an impact. Maybe I can get them to think about college, and beyond.

They have certainly touched me, impacted me, and helped me to see another reality of mi patria. There must be a way to bring a community like East New York together with Steamboat and Minneapolis and Vernal. And Avellaneda and Shanghai and Lyon, for that matter.

The Need Foray Solution

“No Child Left Behind” was a Bush brainchild which was passed by a Republican congress in 2002. It created a new system for grading schools based on standardized tests, for rewarding good and improving schools, and for addressing the inadequacies of failing schools.

Steamboat has really great schools. We had passionate teachers, a supportive community, and with a half-cent sales tax and several bond issues supported by voters, top-notch facilities. In 10th grade we did a Leadership exchange with Manual High School in Denver, and I was 100% culture-shocked by the run-down urban brick school with its black and Spanish student body. It seemed so loud and chaotic, and it seemed like the students weren’t trying to learn, and the teachers no longer were trying to teach. The moment that impacted me most was in the showers after gym class, when my “buddy” handed me a bottle of Herbal Essences conditioner to wash with. “I can’t wash with this,” I said, “this is conditioner!” He looked a bit amused and said, “Maaan, soap is soap!”

A few months later, it was such a crazy sight to see the Manual leadership class walking like silent ghosts through SSHS. Perhaps the only group of black kids that have ever been in that building, they huddled together and gasped wide-eyed at our gym and weight room, which looked so bright and shiny around their cluster of baggy jeans, hoodies, and jerseys.

The first I heard of actual implementation of “No Child Left Behind” policies was the next year, when Manual was deemed failing for a third straight year, and federal consultants intervened, dividing the school into several separate schools, each operating independently on different floors. Based on my day there, I concurred that Manual had not been functioning well, so I welcomed the concept of experimenting with administrative changes. When things are going poorly, changing things up is a better option than continuing with the same failing policies.

Over the years, however, I have joined the ranks of N.C.L.B. critics, as I have thought more about the mechanics and practice of teaching. Standardized tests, with their hollow passages and banal questions, don’t teach anything. They aren’t fun or interesting. So they end up feeling like a broken record asking incessantly, “Are you awake? Are you awake? Are you awake? Are you awake?...” until you inevitably fall asleep.

At Steamboat, the CSAP tests wasted two days of our lives, and caused a fair amount of bitching, but that was the end of it. The school consistently scored well, and therefore didn’t have to worry too much about preparing the students. We were able to focus on Tension and Cleaving forces, the invasion of 1066, and what happens when limit goes to 0.

For schools that score poorly, however, the tests have become an obsession. The curriculum has become hollow passages and banal questions, so that the students can be “good” at getting these questions right. The school’s scores are tied to its funding and its administrative independence. And these kids, who so desperately need education to improve their lives and get out of the deadening rut of their socioeconomic conditions, are dropped into another deadening rut: a curriculum based on little circles with A, B, C, and D.

“Would you like fries with that?”

Show me all the Rules, Girl!

She was pacing on the platform, tap tap tapping, swishing a long coat, boots trimmed in fur. She kept pulling her hair down between two scissoring fingers, like she probably had ironed her hair at home and was worried the humidity would bring the kinks back. She couldn't believe the L wasn't running properly, that there was no train between 8th Ave and Union Square, and now some other announcement was being made. She worriedly asked the MTA official about getting to the Morgan stop, saying that she never took the train and therefore didn't know anything about the train system, and the MTA official gave an answer like, "Tonight there's a shuttle to Bedford, where a true L will be Canarsie-bound," which makes perfect sense to anyone familiar with the L, but of course did not help this girl at all.

I've seen that kind of interaction many times, usually in the context of a language barrier. A person with limited knowledge of the language asks a native speaker a question, and the native answers with contractions and slang and a few "you know"s thrown in, and absolutely baffles the foreigner. It's like some sort of autism, where you are unable to empathize with a person enough to see from their point of view. ...unable to break things down into digestible parts...

I was sitting against the wall, on my Sector 9, wearing my new sweatsuit, reading the cover of Charlotte's Web, thinking about contact improv, bar mitzvahs, NOLS courses, and the nature of jealously. I wonder if The Temptations really made a good Christmas album. I wonder if Julia is really happy in Seattle. I wish I wouldn't have said that he smoked crack. I wonder if she could like me, even though I look nothing like Gael Garcia Bernal, or really anybody else.

The Samaipata Effect

Totora, Bolivia used to be a nice, quaint colonial village. It is tucked in a high valley, up in the dry mountains, and if you plunge directly downhill you can arrive in the lush, humid tropical lowlands in a day or so. It's down in those lowlands that crops can be grown (fruits, veggies, and coca for chewing) but the bugs are bad down there and it rains all the time. So in the late 1800's the big landowning terratenientes built their wrought-iron balcony/ stone patio townhouses in Totora, and it was there that they sipped Cappuccino and read the Times.

But seasons have turned cien veces, and a hundred presidents have fled to Spain with the Bolivian Treasury in a suitcase, and the Times are no longer printed in Totora. In fact, few people there are interested in reading. It's dusty, the roads are often impassibly eroded, and there is barbed-wire fencing in the Plaza. Even for Ben Beall IV, the consummate optimist, Totora is "tough."

If you strike out on the well-worn cobblestone highway heading eastward out of Totora, you contour around treeless peaks, then drop into orange river valleys, past mud brick houses and goats. There are potatoes growing over there. That river obviously floods really big sometimes. Where is that person possibly walking to?

And then you cross an incredible expanse of cactus-country. It looks like Grandma moved to a retirement community in Arizona and went TOTALLY overboard with the Southwestern decor. There are dozens of varieties of cactuses, and dry arroyos, and layers of reds and tans and oranges. And after another day of driving, you smell water, palpable in your sinuses, and of a sudden you crest a hill and base-jump into a cloud forest with booming trees, spreading ferns, draped in bromeliads and orchids. Waterfalls stream down Yosemite-like cliffs. Here, the Inca had a spa carved into the granite. There you can see bespectacled bears and resplendent quetzales.

There, in Samaipata, something happens to your heart. It lifts; it opens. There is a sense that you have just begun to breathe, just hoped for the first time. That now, if you sleep, you will dream of endless possibilities.

The Samaipata Effect is something that has stayed with me ever since that day. It's quite simple, and perhaps boringly obvious: we have a very real relationship with the environment in which we live. A beautiful place can inspire us, lift us up, make us strive for more. And similarly, we can feel stifled or oppressed by our context. It can bind your feet, limiting your dreams. Someone might find Echo Park absolutely inspiring. Someone else might feel that lift in Midtown of Manhattan, or at the Louvre, or maybe at Vasey's Paradise, or looking out into the waves rolling into Ho'okipa.

The relationship is real, and it's effect on us is real. I live on a futon in Bushsick, Brooklyn, across the street from the Boarshead Meat packing facility. I'm inspired to paint the room black.

"Boulder" goes "Platinum"

So basically I'm from Brooklyn, New York, and basically I know how the world works a lot and I know that New York is per-person the greenest city in America and I know where the best cold cuts in Chelsea are and I know that Meet the Johnsons has $2 PBR's and that is the coolest beer ever.

And I saw the shoe commercials that Will posted and I bought some pastel-colored Reebok high-tops and I've been long boarding (street surfing) ever since. And Kanye WAS the voice of our generation until he just SOLD OUT recently, but whatever.

And my friend Molly sent me this video which is way too long:



And since I've traveled extensively all over, including Latin America and West Africa, and because I've lived on an organic farm/music and performing arts camp in Colorado, I have this to say:

Whoa, whoa, whoa Everybody...

Slow down with this excitement, didn't anyone ever tell you NOT to believe what you see on TV?

This video is obviously a fake, I mean, there is NO possible way that there is a city so clean and colorful as this "Boulder" place looks... Ryan Van Duzer makes videos, and he could tell you that this one was made in a Hollywood theater. I mean, the obvious giveaway is that all the actors and extras that they hired were white... and all those little smiling white kids with Colgate-commercial dentition.... obviously a lack of Equal Opportunity hiring at THAT Hollywood studio...

And all those people talking with eyebrow-raising passion about "Boulder"...obviously actors... no one could possibly be so excited and articulate about biking and bike paths! Pssh! And that "Cris Jones" character at 2min 30sec... what an overactor!!

Not to mention those huge impossibly vertical rock backdrops... SOMEBODY didn't pay attention in Physics 1001!

Peace and love "Boulder"ites... or "Martians"...

Everything!

So it's the city.

It's THE CITY. And "if you can't find it here, it doesn't exist."

("Unless," I think, "it's mountains, pine trees, solitude, silence, peace, calm, elk, deer, viable ecology, fresh powder, lightning storms, corn fields, socialism, communism, cheap beer, bonfires, roaring rapids, high altitude, whistle pigs, people who know what a gaper is, people who know what forest succession is, people who like country music, people who don't think taxidermy is horrifying, people who don't associate Hunter Orange with ignorance, people who don't associate the South with ignorance, country music, taxidermy, forest succession, sandstone that's not a counter top, limestone that's not a shower sill, quartz that's not a necklace, shale that's not in a conversation about oil extraction, livestock, wildlife, evidence of the Pre-Columbian era, or Palisade Peaches....")

So, if you can't find it here, it doesn't exist. So sit back, get comfortable, and order in. There's great Chinese on Flushing that delivers.

In my veins

November 19, 2008
Today, I am in Maryland, going to the Eastern Shore to visit Nana and Pops. I am 24 years old, 2 years out of college, living in New York City, working as a coffee shop barista and an after-school tutor. I have two Bachelor’s degrees, some neat stories from some great international trips, and I speak two languages.
My grandparents are 91 and 93 years old. They are from Mississippi, met when they were my age, and started a family soon thereafter. Pops was good student and a diligent worker, and a soft-spoken, caring, and thoughtful man. He began as a surveyor, and worked his way up in Bell Laboratories, innovating the technology of conductors, helping to bring electricity to America, and gaining at least one patent to his name, until as an executive he was able to create his own spin-off company, Lindburg. They raised four children, affording a suburban lifestyle and private schools. Their children fought wars, traveled and lived internationally, created businesses of their own, and raised their own families. Nana and Pops owned a home on the Gulf Coast, a condo in Steamboat, and an island cottage in the Bahamas. Now, at the sunset of life, their condo sold, the Bahamas getaway given to the next generations, the Mississippi home destroyed by Katrina, they live in a retirement community in Maryland, playing bridge, visiting with other retirees, reading books and watching Fox News.
Who they were and are is a product of place and time. They were the children of a proud and cultured Southern class, Pops in line to a drugstore legacy, and Nana the second daughter of a town mayor. They came to maturity in the Great Depression, and have remained frugal and opportunistic ever since. As testament to the liberal progression of our nation, they were more racially open-minded than their parents, Nana attended the first women’s university in Mississippi, and they considered moving out of the state, northward.
My life has been quite different from theirs. I was born to free-market Clinton hippies, who had left their places of origin and upbringing, trotted the globe, and landed in the mountains of Colorado to ski, hike, raft, chop wood. We dragged a pine tree into the living room each Christmas, but did not whisper prayers to the baby Jesus. We grilled elk that we had hunted instead of carving a roast beef. We decorated eggs and ate Grammy Rolls in the April sunshine, but never had to hold the fork with our right hand, shine our shoes, or eat the host. I learned to whip Brookie-laden streams with a 4-foot leader, scout rapids, and field dress an elk.
And all this time, my grandparents remain role models to me. They have built such a beautiful life around them, a sort of kingdom, which they reign over as matriarch and patriarch. My grandmother’s piercing blue eyes inspire fear, bitterness, and respect. My grandfather’s patience and deliberation was unparalleled and I remember watching him maintain his tidy workshop or pot plants in his immaculate garden. At dinner, Nana would tell stories or dole out advice, and Pops would silently pull flakes of crab meat out of the tiniest legs. At the right moment, Nana would pause from her story, and Pops would serve his poke onto her plate. She would thank him silently, invisibly, lovingly.

Rightist Rant Continued

One question that I'm trying to answer is "Why on earth did 100% of New York City vote for Obama?" Everyone? Really? In the rest of the country, half of everyone I know and love voted for McCain, but something else occurred in NYC. Unquestioned unanimity. And it wasn't just New York; urban centers everywhere were the same story.

In this human context, everything is provided. Every service is an arm's length away. And people like it that way. It becomes normal. The concept of the Great American Man, the Rugged Individual, seems weird and confusing. I ask if anyone has clippers to buzz my hair, and people crinkle their brows. "Why don't you go to a barber?" they ask, dumbfounded. I invite people over for homemade pizza, and people push it around their plates, not sure if they can trust it. "I just didn't know it was possible to make pizza at home..." says Phil, deliberating over some cheese and green pepper.

"There's no way you can walk from here to there," warns Doug. "It'll take like thirty minutes! AND it might rain!"

Joe gets up in the morning. He gets his news. He gets a bacon-egg-n-cheese-on-a-roll. He takes the L-train to work. He comes home and drinks with friends and goes back to sleep. He's that cog. Somebody gets him his food. Somebody drives the transport. Somebody sweeps the streets. Somebody signs the check. Somebody brews the beer. He doesn't even think about those people, even think about the commute or the job. He just dreams about his artwork, which he's hoping to get into a gallery show someday.

This is the city. These people are energetic, talkative, opinionated. They eat chips and salsa, rhyme, talk about books, movies, music. They have cool shoes. But "killing my own deer so that I feel connected to the land" sounds like a joke from a West Village stand-up comic.

To be continued...

My First Rightist Rant

There are certainly many differences between the Dems and GOPs in terms of platform, and I will never condone the ignorant and outright mean social dogma of "moral Republicans." That said, tonight I begin my first rightist commentary.

I don't know what "the best" is, or how to ultimately find happiness, but here in the post-modern, post-industrial hip-strip between Williamsburg and Bushwick, kids are really doing something strange. These kids are really skinny. Skinny like "skeletons with a condom stretched over," according to Patrick. These kids are from Ann Arbor and Nashville and Colombus and New Haven, but now they're here and like the wonderfully adaptive creatures they are, they are morphing into a brand new thing here in Brooklyn. They are energetic, talkative, and opinionated. They work hard and have interests in art, music, and politics. They pay extra for organic potato chips. Inter-drainage water diversion, Beetlekilled pines, or invasive cedars are nowhere near interesting. International development, Fair Trade coffee, and Eating Local are like brand names, to be printed in cool font next to a Dolce & Gabanna model.

The thing is, this is an entirely human environment. It's just people and people and more people, and turn the corner and it's more people, and go to the next block and it's more people, and get off at the next stop and it will be bodegas and barbershops and groceries and restaurants and people, people, people. Littering is ok because you are employing street-sweepers. The rain is just a reason to buy an umbrella. Rivers are just reasons for bridges.

And in such a place, wonderfully adaptive creatures come to see themselves as part of the human matrix, a cog in the great machine of the city, buying coffee from the Cafe, bagel from the bakery, gyro from the deli, juice from the Bodega, beer at a bar. Ten blocks is an unnecessarily long walk since the Subway is right here. Cabs are just so damn convenient. I am like this, and those folks live over there, and those people are like that. Everything is bought and sold; everything comes from somebody, and I pick it up every Wednesday when it's fresh, and I don't know what I'd do without that restaurant!

To Be Continued...

Good Money

I'm making good money.
No, it's a lot of bad money
it comes in little bits
doesn't look like fun
doesn't feel like a payoff
In fact, I haven't gotten paid yet.

No days off.
A couple slow mornings a week
Tutoring is now my rest time
I fell asleep tonight while teaching
while eating a taco
while reading multiple choices.

I'm building a life
filling a schedule.
It's not wandering
It's not debting.
I am putting in work, putting in days
showing my dad that I can do it
learning about America

Overwhelmed

What is fear? What does it feel like when it wells, and pushes at the seams and into bones and corners and is so thick, like heat, like bananas, like couches with wooden feet...
Anthony didn't want to come out of this room when the tutor came. His mom tried to reassure the tutor: "oh, he'll be just a second..." she said, "...oh, just a minute... I can't imagine what could be the issue." And the tutor sat in the tile living room by the bouquet of dried flowers, by a bright turquoise wall, watching on Telemundo as a Florida family cried, begged a brother to quit shooting up. The addict cried, silently, not looking up. In perfect fashion of the immigrant community, the younger siblings didn't speak spanish, and the show's host had to translate for the sobbing audience.
I sat there and watched with my student's grandma, drinking water, thinking about how clean and new everything always seems to be in latino houses. Wall-to-wall cream tiles that smell like Tilex, dangerously slippery. Floral print high-backed couches. Polished glass-inlaid dining table. Finally Anthony came out of his room, puffy-faced from yelling, crying- holding it all back and not knowing- shoulders at his ears, telling me his name through closed lips.
I had gotten off the train a few stops early and walked twenty minutes to get to the house. It's 40 minutes outside Manhattan, a world away. I walked by parking lots, down sidewalks squeezed by five-foot-tall weeds, past paint cans dumped on a corner. There were as many police as civilians on the street. It's so airy, spacious after weeks in Manhattan... industrial and bodegas and graffiti. I turned right at the McDonalds into a residential area, passed a Catholic school, two Green Thumb gardens, an outreach center, lots of halloween decorations. From the piles of pink plastic shit leaned against buildings, it seems that Wall Mart was having a sale.
I had been nervous outside the Capellan house, pausing at the gleaming silver and gold gate, feeling out of breath. I ate a fun-size Butterfinger and that was delicious. Then I went in, ready to scare tears into Anthony's bones.

Dance

Onye:

So NYC, seems like you could be dancing alot....with the big dogs if you wanted to....there's everything up there.
1:21am

Roddy:

yeah, sometimes I go online and check out where and when classes are. Even today I almost went to a class. But i get held back. I'm shy about going.
1:25am

Onye:

you should go. its New York.

its the big city

its the world's city

reality is being redefined every moment

you are a dancer...dance

Roddy:

thank you. Good night Onye. be well.

Onye:

yeah. peace.

This Important Moment

Hi friends and family,

This is a very important moment. Next week we'll elect a new
president to lead our country, and to a large extent our world. I
don't pretend to know everything about national or international
politics, but I do feel like I'm on solid footing when I ask you to
vote for Barack Obama.

Our world is beautiful, and diverse, and very complicated. Racial,
ethnic, and religious conflicts are constantly flaring up on every
continent. In the past month we have seen that our international
economic systems are precarious and fragile. The next president will
have to address these issues with intelligence, compassion, and
patience.

We cannot afford to keep making enemies in the world. We have to
re-create the meaningful alliances that the Bush Administration lost
through arrogance and violence. We must show the world that we are
thoughtful, caring, and fair. This is the road to peace and safety.

And at home, we need intelligent solutions to our complex problems.
We need a professor, not a fighter pilot. We need calm, not anxiety.
We need hope and positivity, not fear and entrenchment.

If you feel like dismissing my thoughts as naive or partisan, that's
your prerogative. But I hope that you consider how wonderful this
world can be, and yet how easily we can make enemies through arrogant
politics, and thus make the world hostile and dangerous. I have many
years to live on this planet, and we need to make the best choices for
it.

We need Barack Obama.

Thank You,
Roddy Beall

Carter Doctrine: Cheese!

Sometime, I want you to tell me about Jimmy Carter. This is what I know:

-He was president one term, not reelected, therefore thought of as a failure, politically
-From the South, maybe was governor of Georgia (?)
-Told Americans to put on a sweater, as he brought forth environmental issues that folks weren't ready for, and that we now could see as visionary. With the sweater comment, it seems as if he is trying to "bring the solution home", as in "making people take responsibility for the issue," something that by-and-large people didn't- and don't- want to do.
-I recently heard a neat piece on NPR which looked at church and state separation and had Bill Mahr on, since his movie "Religulous" comes out this week. They said that Jimmy Carter was the first president to conceptualize the USA as a Christian State, and the office of the Presidency as a Christian position. He started the legacy of "God Bless America's" that all subsequent presidents have been required to spout.
-Your man Bacevich talked about the "Carter Doctrine," stating the strategic importance of the Middle East and declaring that the USA would not allow any other country to take control of the region, as a starting point for our imperialistic posture in the region.

All of that just doesn't seem to fit into the cartoon picture that I visualize of him, which is just an enormous Colgate smile on a dweeby sweater-clad body. So I would like you maybe to fill in some gaps for me. Who the heck was this guy?

9th Street Night-Op

Hi bro,

I hope you are doing well today, with your crazy schedule, whatever hours you worked, whenever you slept. In my mind, from this distance, it seems like a cool adventure. I imagine having to go with my ZZZ Carpentry crew and do a night-op on a Manhattan jobsite. I can see Big-D, 6'5" and fresh from prison, waiting on the sidewalk with his trashbag backpack. Then Niggs and Jose come around the corner with their do-rags on, as if they just came from rumble, but they are carrying tape measures and drill bits. Billy zooms in on his bike, tapered pants and machine-gun laugh, and we all wait for James, late again, with his headphones playing death metal into his long dreds. When we've amassed the squadron, we open the service door, and with headlamps navigate the basement maze to the freight elevator, and as we press into the car, we are thankful for each other's body heat, although no one would dare mention it.
Up to the 33rd floor, medical booties across the marble and brass floor, silently into the Penthouse, and before Billy flicks on the lights, we all sigh as the galaxy of Manhattan lights glitters into the parlor from the broad windows. The city is silent, like the night sky, and planets and moons and taxis and planes orbit us. We are home, and we are all out of place.

That's what it would be like if we had to work the middle of the night. I bet

Body Premeire, Penthouse

Quiero preguntarte algo.
But I don't want anyone to know that I asked you.
Have you ever hooked up with a boy?

"...if it weren't for you, for our connection, our love, our meeting, our experience together- I would have never been able to accomplish this... Our relationship gave me the validation that love exists in this world, that connection is real and does happen, that two people can fall asleep folded up in each other and wake up in the same position, that honesty and communication create more love and a deeper connection, that men do care, are sensitive and do notice- even small things."

She wears a bra 24 hours a day,
and those things are so incredible! Straight up!
She won't kiss during sex,
She saw Pretty Woman in 4th grade and decided kissing was too intimate.
I'm dancing with a TV screen of a girl dancing.

"Our relationship- you gave me- the experience of dancing with someone open and willing to embody and express himself, the willingness and ability to trust this world, to travel at large and to feed off chaotic and foreign experience while remaining circumspective."

Three times the national average incidence of HIV
Three times the fun
Three guys hanging out in the West Village
Three FIT girls, and us with our shirts off.

Uno, dos, tres, it's on.

I want to be met. I want to be known. I want to be loved.
There must be girls in this city
that want to be met, that want to be known, that want to be loved.

What kind of computer is that?
Cool, do you like it?
I'm Roddy.

Sine Waves of Emotion

This life is a roller coaster. It's nuts. I longboard through Manhattan every day, and with Radiohead blasting in my earbuds, the whole world is just a screenplay. I see many people in perfect emotional stasis on their routine commute, but every once in a while I see a real gem, a diamond in the rough: a tear-streaked face screaming into a cell phone, kicking a wall, falling in despair onto a bench, throwing up their hopeless hands, squaring off to punch a complete stranger.

It's not an ideal moment, for those people. I'm sure they wish I wasn't seeing them. But I'm so grateful I am. They represent a peak in human existence: the pinnacles of emotion. They are overwhelmed with their own humanity. They can't escape their fate as real, sentient, capable beings. They can't hide in clothes or products or ego. They are splayed open, and I'm lucky enough to see inside.

Everyone loves graphs right? Well, I do, and emotions in life similar to a sine wave, which fluctuates constantly between extremes, and returns again and again to 0, but never stops. At either extreme, it does for a moment stop changing (slope=0) so it could be said that that moment of extreme emotion is more real and lasting and tangible than the moment of calm, represented by 0, when in fact the rate of change is at its maximum velocity. Said another way, you have actually arrived at a real destination if you are ecstatic or in despair, but if you are "just fine," you are simply heading toward ecstasy or despair.

Here's the thing though. For all it's moving and shaking, the sine wave has an average of 0. For every moment of rage there is an equal and opposite moment of bliss, and these things can (at least mathematically) cancel each other out. If a person takes a long-term view of his life, he may come to trust this average, and take comfort in the guaranteed return to 0. So even at an emotional peak, he can take a deep breath and say, "I'm gonna be fine; I AM fine," and in that way nullify the peak.

How uncommunicative for his girlfriend! How unfulfilling for the longboarding spectator! How discouraging for neurotransmitters, just waiting to deliver bursts of emotion!

As a side note, I do the breathe and average technique. It's been disastrous for more than one relationship. But I'm working on it. At least I'm blogging about it.

Taking the Hard Road: Concrete

I believe everything I read. And everything I see and hear. I wish I had a better sense of smell, so I could believe more things.

Freddy is Puertorican, so of course he was raised Catholic, but his daughters recently chimed back to him from their bunkbed: "Daddy, we don't believe in God. We believe in science!"

Some people I know try to be honest and authentic, and therefore convey their thoughts and feelings respectfully. Other people spout pure lies. An interesting third category declares things that they believe to be true or that they hope to be true, therefore they're not really "lying" and should not be hated.

As for things I've read, James Redfield wrote in "The Celestine Prophecy," (a must-read for third category non-Christians) that our true path in life is marked by beauty, that a sort of light will emanate from proper life decisions, and if we just pay attention to that light, we will be guided. Paulo Coehlo shared in "The Alchemist" that when we are on the path of our Personal Legend, the whole universe conspires in our favor, making that path easier.

I've felt that kind of phenomena a few times. When I first heard Ghanaian drumming, and let my bare feet touch the dancefloor, I felt a light and beauty that led me to one of the most rewarding chapters of my life. When a sudden wind and hail tormenta in Southern Argentina was literally lifting us off the ground and dashing us against the rocks, I bee-lined for a crack under a boulder, and dove headlong into it, landing on a bed of dry leaves in an tranquil cave. Mike asked me how I knew about the cave, and I replied that I "just knew."

But how does that theory apply when sometimes "pushing your comfort-zone" is necessary for growth? It's not easy to live in New York City! It's not beauty and joy and God that shines from the streets; those are florescent bulbs! Are Redfield and Coehlo really espousing that we take the "easy way out" all the time, and that will ultimately lead us to the "best" life?

Man, there are too many words to put in quotes here, which means that nothing means anything. Daddy, I believe in science!

Zanganos y Obreras

All worker bees have tools to work: wings and senses, legs and language, and thus the ability to create. Creating wax or nectar or honey or propolis is an absolute miracle on an individual level: that one bee is capable of so much... but on a broader scale, the creation of these products is normal, routine. Millions of bees the world over can do the same thing. So there.

Sam opined tonight that the internet and the 21st Century has really changed art. We can write, take digital photos, think and create, and subsequently we can post our work on this incredible international medium, and potentially diffuse our work to a wide audience. Unfortunately, "it's all been done before."

Perhaps this sentiment has been felt since the very first attempt at originality, because the pursuit itself is afraid of being wrong. What if someone has done this already? If so, it will mean nothing.

But it's true that with blogs and YouTube and all the user-content platforms of today, there is a mammoth of content JUST LIKE THIS BLOG, and it's growing all the time.

So where can it all lead? No one is reading my blog (except you Will) just like no one is reading anyone's blog. Except that some blogs have millions of views. Somehow, there is movement in this world, some sort of flow. YouTube or TubetheVote.com are trying to find interesting ways to organize user-content into some digestible serving. There are so many carpenters, building on this internet frontier, Sam believes it would be interesting to be involved with organizing these carpenters into some structure, akin to social and political long-term planning.

Where can we go with all this? I could have blogged about the ridiculous McCain/Palin campaign, but I'm sure that plenty of people already have.

Bailout!

In elementary school, the thing that we learned about Australia was that it was established as a huge prison for the British "thieves and debtors." To my little kid mind that sounded just fine, and perhaps I regurgitated that on some sort of quiz. As I grew up a bit, I vaguely reflected on that concept, and was a bit confused with it.
"Debtors"? What the heck are those? I mean, they obviously owe money, but everybody owes money. In my world, everybody had credit cards, morgages, car loans, student loans. My cousin Teddy had three houses and put four of his brothers and sisters through college and liked to brag that he was 4 million in debt. So what did the "-ors" mean after "debt"? (And if they owe you money, why would you want to send them away to an island, shouldn't you keep them around and try to squeeze some money out of them?)

Then I met Tom, and I learned a few things. With flashing blue eyes and his grey hair neatly trimmed, he would lean over the table and smile at you, and make you feel like a million bucks. His button-ups were always clean and tucked in, and he seemed to have answers to any question, an idea for any slow moment. He invited me on a kayaking trip, to run a river in eastern Bolivia that had never been run, and I said sure, I had a few weeks to burn. And before we even left the house, he asked me to loan him a hundred bucks. I went with it, and we drove for three days, way down into Amazonia, and at some point I started to stratch my head. He knew people in every town and we always ate for free. He would pull the owner aside, and then we just wouldn't pay. Sometimes we'd stay free at hotels. When I'd ask, he'd just smile. At first the smile inspired trust and admiration, but soon the candy melted. I wondered what the catch was.

We got deep in the forest, had terrifyingly close encounters with snakes and bees and a puma, and as we looked toward the river trip, I asked about my money. "There's no money here!" he cried indignantly. "How much more money do you have? What? How are we supposed to go on this trip with only that much?"

What the fuck, I thought. We had agreed to this trip, saying that we'd split everything down the middle, but this guy had NO money. He intended to schmooze, borrow, and skate the whole way. And at the end of the tunnel, there was no money. I put my foot down, and effectively stymied the river trip plans, and eventually Tom borrowed money from his estranged wife to pay me back.

This week our government plans to bail out Wall Street with a Trillion dollars from our Treasury. The super-wealthy made years of big loans and bad deals, and like Tom, at the end of the tunnel, there was no money. No substance. I'm not a finance expert, unfortunately, so I'm not sure if saving these companies is somehow "necessary" for avoiding undue pain and hardship for the global populace. If it's not necessary, then let those debtors fall, or send them to Australia!

Jumping Ship

Billy Karesh travels the world as a wildlife veterinarian, and he hesitates to call his New York City apartment "home," and he says that anything that reminds him of the swamps of Charleston Bay where he grew up make him feel that warm "homey" feeling. He figures that humans, like fish, are imprinted with their spawning ground.

There is a place where the morning sun slants through the leaves while the wind plays with the light and blows on my coffee for me. This morning that was the patio of 40 Bank Street in the West Village.

There is a place where I can get off work, ride my bike into the autumn sun and find four guys waiting for me at the basketball courts. I can airball jumpshots and still get high-fives. Yesterday that was in Riverside Park, in Zoo York City.

But there is just one place where I can be, and feel like I'm a king of the dirt beneath my feet. A place where I can walk in any door, shake any hand, or talk to any girl. It's a place that makes me proud, defensive, and makes me cry when I'm too far away for too long. Everything compares to Steamboat, and Steamboat compares to nothing.

Call me a salmon.

A very long walk

At one of the lowest moments of my life, when I felt like crying nearly all the time, I happened to be in one of Earth's most beautiful places. Sitting in the moonlight on the bank of a high alpine lake, with craggy peaks soaring into the stars, I felt lost and alone, and then I looked down behind a rock and found a box of Marlboro Reds with one cigarette and a lighter inside. I smoked it, and I didn't like it. That day I had walked 12 miles, and I felt like that was a very long walk.
My friend Patrick has the outline of all the continents tatooed across his hip, and it looks great. He is a wonderful person, a global citizen, and he's lived in Europe and South America and speaks four or five languages. He remained curious at why his parents loved Colorado so much, so this summer he walked for forty days across the state, along mountain trails, climbing fourteeners eating only cactus spines and wearing just his grasshopper-pelt loincloth. Even for a galactic champion triathlete, that was a very long walk.
My friend Will is a wordsmith, and as such he can create entire realities by mixing christmas lights and a re-renovated Dell with Hot Tamales and a Birth Scream. He also does 100 pushups sometimes, and walks 7 to 10 miles a day in great-fitting jeans. He bought a pedometer, and started tallying exactly how far he walked each day, and through the magic of wordsmithsmanship, he walked across the United States, from California to New York. That is objectively a long walk, and it was recorded subjectively at averylongwalk.blogspot.com.

So, apparently my friends and I are accomplished walkers. When we are sad or curious or stylish, we can really strut. But today I met Pedro, and when I asked him how he got to the US from his native Honduras, he told me, "It was a very long walk."

"What???" I said. "You really came in walking? How?"

"We came in through Arizona. We couldn't walk during the day, because they patrol with helicopters. So we had to walk at night. And we had to keep out eyes down, because they said that if you look up, even though it's night, they can see you from the whites of your eyes. It was such a long trip. So much walking... My dad left Honduras when I was five, left my whole family. But now I am here, and so are my two brothers. My mom though, she's alone back home. They won't give her a visa, and there is no way she could survive the walk... But I can't go back home. There is nothing there: no work, no life. People just sit around and wait for dollars to arrive. I will stay here, and try to get my mom here."

We are in desperate need of a change in our immigration policy. This kind of arduous and dangerous journey is inhumane, but the current system, which demands workers but doesn't provide legal pathways for immigration, forces people to make the march. Our immigration policy must provide safe and fair avenues for immigration, and more importantly work with places such as Honduras, to foster more productivity and positivity in those places. We share so many people with Mexico and Central America, people who are from there, work here, and will likely maintain social and financial ties to their homeland, so we should view these countries as our partners.

Smarty Hooves Part II

The search for intelligence in other species leads us to watch animals closely, to determine what they do under different circumstances. Because we can't ask them, "what are you thinking about?" we have to watch their reactions to different circumstances, and try to infer what they were thinking. A chimp in a mirror will see food in his beard and pick it out, thus showing that he knows that the hairy face in the glass is actually him. Inference: clear sense of self. A chimp confronted with a piece of food hanging from a string and pulley in the middle of the room will find where the string is tied to the wall, and untie the string, dropping the food. Inference: understanding of space, and logic with mechanical systems.
But comparative behavior studies can also raise questions about our own actions. When a chimp feels threatened or uncomfortable, it will show all it's teeth, and give an exhaling yell, chopped up by an almost rhythmic detention of breath. In short, they laugh. Smile and laugh.
We share over 99% of our genetic code with chimps, so it's safe to say that they're pretty similar to us. And in this case, it's possible to see the connection between our laugh and theirs. When do we laugh? What pushes our buttons? Jokes find social pressure points that make us feel vulnerable or uncomfortable. Stand-up comedians shine a light on our weaknesses, prejudices, social problems. And we laugh. Tickling is effective because it makes us feel nervous, self-conscious, or vulnerable. And getting tickled, we laugh uncontrollably.
If it is true that human laughing is the same as a chimp's, and is a defensive response, then why do we like it? Why do we seek it out?

Smarty Hooves Part I

We assume ourselves to be the smartest creatures on earth. People also commonly list elephants, dolphins, pigs, or small-toothed whales as other "intelligent" non-primates. It's interesting to examine what exactly we view as intelligence.
A sense of "self" and "other," social hierarchies, language, and learning are factors considered in the search for cognitive ability. Interestingly, these skill sets all have to do with group life- social life- and so they necessarily favor socially adapted animals. The ability to share an everyday idea with a friend is imperative for a human or a dolphin, but it's not a necessary activity for a puma. Solitary animals are thus disadvantaged in this system.
The search for language as a sign of intelligence is particularly bothersome, because it seems like a pure extension of the "man is master" concept. We humans build our entire life around language, and when we see an animal clearly communicate, we are seeing a reflection of ourselves. To conclude that that is "intelligent" involves the built-in assumption that we are wondrous.

Great Apes

One of the greatest humans that I know on this earth lives in Western Colorado, works as a botanist, and upholds such firm beliefs about lessening her impact on the earth that she chose not to have children. She sees that it is PEOPLE that are the issue, and nearly every problem comes back to the fact that we are too many.
On the other side of the world, wrapped in the noise and movement and rhythm of New York life, Freddy has worked construction for 12 years, is married and has two girls, and he doesn't know anything about overpopulation. Maybe he's heard something, but "ecosystem health" or "global environmental health" are absolutely foreign concepts in his world of subways, jobsites, calzones and paychecks. "If I win the lotto, pop, my wife better look out! She'll be pregnant every nine months, until I've got ten kids!...Big families are the love, pop, cause even though you're poor, you've got family there, so it's happy."
The idea that Tamara has no kids and Freddy could have ten makes my head reel.

go, keep, close the windows, wear it, run away from her, carve, live.

breathe, stretch, be yourself.

I was feeling pretty high on myself, because he's this big tatooed Boriqua and I hang out with him for eight hours a day. Words come smoothly for him, his steps are sure, the kind of ease that comes with knowing you are the big man on the block. I jitter around the room, unsure if I've ever done anything right in my life. Should I sweep again.

But after two weeks, I could surely stoop sit in Bushwick and dance with a Nutcracker. I can surely way, "tu sabes" at the end of my sentences. I may be me, but I can be many things.

And as if in cue, he came to work and showed me why I can't ever be him. He'd been at a funeral the night before. A lady with three kids, and breast cancer took her. She was a COP, so there were 75 COPS there. But her brother and partner were "from the hood," so all sorts of neighborhood guys were there. Henry came, and Henry used to be a "big, strong dude, like, beautiful, shiny black, and strong." But he showed up, skinny and ashen, with "like, full-blown AIDS." AIDS has "hit the community hard, will all the dudes who used to shoot up dope."
The funeral was nice, but a lot of the guys didn't want to be inside with the mourners, so they went out on the street to drink and smoke weed. The funeral had attracted "a lot of different dudes, too many motherfuckers," and he could feel that there was a weird vibe. He went home, and got a call that one of his friends was got shot there on the street. "Ignorance, man. I knew somebody would do something. It's stupid shit."

He and I worked together on some trim and molding pieces, and helped some subs pour the shower concrete. But I didn't feel like I could just say "tu sabes" and be a new-recruit Boricua. No, I'm not from Bushwick. I'm from Steamboat.

Coffee break in the E.R.

Perhaps it is the fragility of the thing that makes us love it. We ride atop it, within, bleeding and feeling and breaking and dying, and all the time we convince ourselves of immortality. Divine, perfect, created in the image of. As if it's a right of man, we forget that anatomy and medicine was unknown to Western Europeans until the Crusades. Now we expect to never be sick, to never hurt, to never die. We want to look like this, move like that, perform just so. It's just balance, just gravity, just orbit. It's electron sharing, it's magnetism, it's water. And it's an incredible coincidence that it's happening at all. So we ride on, turning those pedals and pounding peanut butter pretzels. Coffee is the stay-up late and the get up early. Obligation is the make-it-through-the-day. Wind it up tight, keep it going, expect more. C'mon. With 10 billion dollars we will find a cure for cancer. Cells divide all the time in the body, and regulatory mechanisms turn that division on and off. With three changes- caused by mutation or damage or insertion- the cells can begin to divide without stopping, creating a tumor. Coffee and obligation keep me going, cranking the pedals, beyond the limits. But 10 billion dollars will find the cure so that the regulatory limits stay in place.

Wisdom

A city so big, it has everything. In any instant, you choose what you want, and it's there. If you're not doing just what you want, it's not the city's fault. It's yours.
-Liar

You create every opportunity, every moment, for yourself. You choose your state of mind, and by embodying that choice, you project outward, and your inner decision will manifest outwardly.
-Dreamer

Five people, together, bonded by friendship, can create joy and beauty and productivity. The Rule of Five.
-Bennie Beall a.k.a. The Truth

Check Minus for Everyone!

Ben Beall IV is the only person I know who can ask, "John McCain is a hero for being a POW? He crashed his plane, and then got caught. How does that make him a hero?"
If anyone else said that, they'd be shunned. Thanks for being here Dad.

vanguard express

mitkin provono pa
interes mayombe ba
sino con otro imaya
valasa conprede ta

cubana mulata pero see
if only intrecana me
hills and rafters confundo
and hillis mister intruso

calama mama
carlos santana
pintorama
if you wanna

cmon papa
cry for mama
cry for Sana
feel for fama

hear it, por favor
seal it, drag a door
fore eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
for meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

salamalecu ye
salamalecu ye
salamalecu ye
sal-a-ma-le-cu one two three for five!

Transparency...Vamos Windex!

On the pick-up soccer field at Stanton and Forsythe, Mexicans and Colombians, and one white kid, played a 6v6 match. The field is caged in by thirty-foot-tall fence, the turf is wonderfully green and soft, and as the grundgy grey Chinatown bustling rails on around the field, inside the cage is an oasis. The latinos llamaban al gringo algo que no era "gringo," y yo pense que era su nombre. Pero cuando empece a jugar yo, me llamaron lo mismo. They were calling us Windex. Why man? Because you're so clean and clear. Ok. !Vamos Windex!
Funny thing is that transparency is actually something that I genuinely struggle with, something that perhaps a lot of people struggle with. Many a sit-com script has included the girlfriend character yelling to her man, "I just don't know what you're thinking! You need to talk to me!" And often the boyfriend character doesn't understand where he's been unclear. He WAS clear, wasn't he?
I've often felt that way, because my natural reaction to conflict is to walk away. Isn't that what Sesame Street taught me to do? Don't fight, walk away. So when someone says something that I perceive to be wrong, or hurtful, or arrogant, or insensitive, the last thing I'm going to do is say something to them about it! Then I'd be the one starting the fight, Big Bird. No, I'll walk away before it even becomes a fight.

...
[edited out for personal reasons]
...

But she never knew she had insulted me! I had never said anything about any of her comments, and therefore she had no way of knowing that I even heard her! And my tiptoeing was both awkward and confusing, because it had no logical basis. And like we always do, she filled my silence with her worst fears. If the sitcom boyfriend is silent in response to an issue with the GF, she'll naturally fill that silence with an assumption that he no longer loves her, obviously has met someone else, and is about to break up with her.
It's awful. We need to communicate honestly in order to safeguard our relationships, in order to value our frienships. We need transparency. Vamos Big Bird!

Iconography and the Loss of Fact

Paula is a college student at Rosario University in Bogota, Colombia. She works as a clerk at a law firm, and in the following years, as she completes her studies and gains more experience, she'll be a lawyer. In Bogota, like in New York or perhaps anywhere, getting that career "in" is all about connections, and the Rodriguez family is well-connected. They are NOT related to the famosos Hermanos Rodriguez of the Cali Cartel, but Paula has her own story about being hurt by Colombia's conflicto armado.
In 2003 Paula was beginning at the University, and she commuted to school by walking and on public transportation. Then her father received threats that Paula and her brother Alberto would be killed if he did not pay the FARC (a "leftist" guerrilla group) an preemptive ransom. The FARC makes it's money off the cocaine trade, and Paula's father stubbornly refused to pay, declaring his pride and strength at standing up to the criminals. For the next six months, says Paula, the family lived in terror. They received many threats. She had to be escorted by bodyguards and a driver anytime she left the house. One night, two cars filled with men with machine guns surrounded them on a narrow street, and they narrowly escaped when the driver sped down a side alley. Finally the FARC gave up and left them alone, but the fear and pain was inextricably imprinted in Paula's mind. Her country, Colombia, in spite of its natural beauty and smiling people, is shackled by the horror of the cocaine-funded war.
Last week on Mulberry Street in New York's "Little Italy," Paula looked into a t-shirt shop and saw, next to a "Godfather" T, a black and gold XXL with the name Pablo Escobar emblazoned on it. She called me in a frenzy, demanding an explanation. Why is this here? What does it mean? This is a man who brought pain and terror to her country for decades, who slaughtered entire families, who assassinated hundreds of policemen, who was finally killed in 1993 to the collective sigh of her homeland, and here on a street lined with red-and-white-checkered tablecloths is his silkscreened face with the label "#1 Gangster."
Me, I heard shout-outs to Escobar in rap songs long before I heard his true story. If I saw that shirt I would likely think that he was a character from a movie, perhaps from Godfather III or Scarface. In high school, I just thought he was a rapper, maybe from L.A.
The thing is that once a person gains a level of notoriety in this media-driven world, and then the headlines fade and leave only vague memories of who they really were, they become symbols, not people. As symbols, they can easily be used and misused and can organically come to represent many things, likely disparate from their "factual" reality. When a tourist or a rapper dons an Escobar t-shirt, to him the hills of Antioquia mean nothing. When a college student puts on the one-starred mug of Che Guevara, he is not thinking of the capture of the Santa Clara train, or the social system under Batista. Symbols are not meant to remind us of history, they are meant to serve the present. The power of a symbol is its ability to conjure a feeling or emotion that applies to the current situation. A good symbol can become timeless. A good symbol can be used by different people for different reasons, each of which draws back to, not the history, but the emotion or feeling.
That is both the beauty of a symbol and the danger. As the symbol comes to mean different things to different people, it becomes more powerful, because it can effect people in different ways. But putting on a Che shirt does not require taking on the responsibility of that symbol and all its myriad meanings. You may be wearing a powerful thing- an inspiring, complicit, or even hurtful thing- but to you it's just a shirt. "This shirt's cool. Everyone has this. Whatever."

The Biology of a Work Out

Kanye's workout tape tells us to work it, get those sit ups right in, to do pilates to take care of all those mocha-lattes. I don't know why, but I believe him...
On Rivington Street on the L.E.S. in the N.Y.C., there is a never-ending parade of frilly skirtsies, low-back shirtsies, and shiny bootsies. Girls are planched down, push-upped, sucked in and worked out. Guys are tight shirted, loose mouthed, straight laced and cock hatted. The music is too loud, the spaces too tight. And it's the best there is. It's the hot barrio in the hottest city on the continent. These are the lucky ones.
Pablo has two daughters and works construction, and at lunchtime he asks about the number of calories in his bodega burger. Sean says that Beckham on the cover of Men's Health "isn't that big, he actually kindof a tweeter." John turns every head when he skateboards shirtless through Union Square, and he checks every reflection, wondering if he's losing it.
In fact, our bodies are wonderful adaptive systems that are capable of changing in order to best repond to the imput we give them. If we need to work hard, the body will allocate resources for muscle growth. If we eat a lot, the body allocates more resources to the gut.
The body also needs to sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeppppppppppppppppppppppp...........................................

We are ready.

Before the 1959 revolution, they say that Cuba resembled very much the American South. It was hot and humid, with small town centers, cafes and diners, white-washed homes. Protestant churches were big, many coming directly from mission groups from the US, like the Baptists. Baseball was the national game, and sandlots were filled with kids who idolized Joe Dimaggio. And there were big sugar plantations and mansions with ornate moulding, shading white families from the sun, while black workers set fire to the cane, cleaning it for harvest, stomping through the smoke with rags over their faces.
Slaves had still arrived in Cuba until the 1880's. In 1898 the island came under US control, and with investment came US culture, language, and Jim Crow values. In the half-century under US rule, Cuba was funneled toward the rigid US conceptions of race, and communities became increasingly segregated. As merchandizing and mass media became cultural drivers, it became "bad" to be black, and in the spirit of Social Darwinism, white Cuban pundits declared that Cuba's hope for a positive future would be in an overall "whitening" of the population.
But Nicolas Guillen wrote "Motivos de son," and his words came into the people like the beat of a drum. In just eight short poems, the entire publication not seeming more than a brochure, he brought the idea of being black together with the idea of being good, and together with the idea of being Cuban. It was a sensation. He idealized the full lips and corse hair of a mulatto girl, brought forth with song and color the thick speech of afro-cubans, and struck out at the petty quaffs of the dominant culture.
Guillen became the literary voice of the revolution before Che became its gun and Fidel became its pumping fist. In this poems he created a concept that Cuba could be a mixed-race culture, that the essence and power of Cuba could in fact be its mix of races, instead of race serving as a criteria for division, fear, and hate. People had hope, and they took to the streets just as the Civil Rights Movement took to the streets in the US. They called for change. They called for hope. The change was already coming, through music and art and literature.
Then Castro's guerrillas showed up in the Sierra Maestra, Batista fled the country, and suddenly there was a chance to implement a drastic political, economic, and cultural change that took the search for equality to the extreme. Guillen's work became required reading in schools, his poems became mantra, and this poet who tried to find his voice as a mixed-race Cuban became the voice of a revolution.
It's hard to say if the Cuban Revolution was "good" or not. Many people were killed, oppressed, and misplaced. The island became a cage, as politicians turned the waves into walls. Fifty years later, Cuban people are equal: everyone is just as poor as everyone else. One can't say if it was "good" or not, but one can say without doubt that something wonderfully unique occurred in Cuba. Instead of marching on with the US along a path of racial division, they forcefully created a different reality.
Maybe it doesn't need to be so forceful in the US. Maybe we can rally around Barack Obama for President, and feel that this man is American, truly, and for the first time see Americans of color as Americans, as true Americans, and look around and see that we are surrounded by people of color, that we are ourselves people of color. Many different colors. And all American! We are fifty years late, but maybe Cuba was fifty years early. Maybe we're just ready now. We don't need guerillas or to overthrow a government. We have our words, we have our Constitution, and we are ready. We are ready.

To whom it may concern,

My name is Rodney Beall, and I am a recent graduate from the University of Colorado at Boulder. I want to be involved immediately in the national and international discussion of creating sustainability in the human-environment relationship, and I believe that I can become a valuable voice in that discussion.

In my third year at Boulder, I changed from Pre-Medicine to Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, realizing that the best way to strive toward human health is to seek a broader systemic health: that of our planet. I began travelling internationally at that same time, because as a global citizen I feel that our solutions must come from an international effort. I’ve travelled to Ghana, West Africa and to Latin America five times, working to learn many different cultures, and develop full Spanish fluency.

After college I worked for Botanist Tamara Naumann at Dinosaur National Monument, leading efforts to educate volunteer groups and restore riparian habitat for native plant and animal species. Under Ms. Naumann, I was able to learn about the role of government in research and policy-making regarding our precious natural resources.

I moved to New York City looking for the next step, and I hope that I can find it with Ecology and Environment, Inc. With my energy, solid education, and international experience, I believe I can be a positive member of the team.

Thank you for your time and consideration. Please call me at 303-829-3670 or email rodneybeall@gmail.com to arrange a convenient time when we can meet to further discuss my background and your organization. I look forward to talking to you soon.

Sincerely,
Rodney Beall

It's all about charter schools....

When something is "public," we always seem to think that it will be taken care of. We don't tread lightly on the NYC Public Parks bball courts. We figure we can jump in dirty at the public pool. Whereas we'd probably tiptoe around the country club, and take showers before swimming, because somehow we feel that we are having a personal impact on someone. At the public facility, we figure that there will be someone to clean up after us, someone to repaint or repair. Maybe it's the Tragedy of the Commons.
My parents both knew better. My mom saw that the public schools system only can function and thrive if individual people pour their heart and energy into making it great. Passionate teachers, dedicated volunteers, and loving parents have to join the administration and lead for success in the schools. She was absolutely right. Why are so many public schools failing? Because we assume that like the courts and the pools, there is always money and people that will come after us, so we can just kindof shit on the place.
The hardest thing to change is culture, and perhaps this issue is indicative of a deep-seated cultural phenomena that will not be changed. Perhaps the best course of action is to accept the cultural truth, that people will only care about something when it feels personal, individual, exclusive to some sort of community or group. Therefore, we should support charter schools, and support the shift to making all schools in the nation charters, so that people can feel this sense of inclusion, community, and pertinence.
There are some huge problems with this. One, charter schools can be selective in admissions, so immediately the public schools are left with a disproportionate educational burden, as it takes more time and resources to teach the "difficult" students. Two, not everyone can afford to commute to a different part of town, so the richer kids or more organized families will end up at the charter schools, leaving the public schools with a more challenging demographic. Basically, we are taking the smart, rich, and privileged out of the public schools and along with them taking away the per-pupil funding, and leaving the public schools to rot with the already nationally marginalized demographic.
Yes, our public schools are having trouble all over. But ditching them, and running away to the suburbs with the lunch money is not a good solution. We must support our public schools, in fact all of our public institutions, and think of them as ours, as personal, and as something that we have to work for and fight for.

Workplace Safety

"The most important thing is to show up," they offer as advice for the timid. Ok, says me, I can do that at least. I can get there. Great! I made it, now what, advice man? “Safety first, safety last, and work hard in between,” they say. Ok, says me, I can do that. But what exactly do I do to be safe?
This is New York City. This is a jungle-gym of speeding cars and narrow misses, of high rises and dive bars. It’s a city of dangerous men and even more dangerous girls. It’s a place where 10 bucks will get you two slices of pizza and a coke, so you better have a hustle. Fouls on the court are called by whoever can cuss cooler, whoever can throw the ball and yell, “You don’t know me son!” The subways screech, the horns honk, the subwoofers set off car alarms, and I sleep on a plastic air mattress. What did you say about being safe?
On the job site, there are sharp things like saws and knives and nails and screws and metal edges. There are hot things like any metal that experiences friction. There are a lot of things that are moving, like tools, and people. Some things are heavy, like sheetrock or bags of trash.
Outside, thirteen floors below, the street teems. The jobsite is quiet and cool and feels like a haven. However, with a moment’s distraction, suddenly you have a utility knife blade embedded in your thigh. And it hurts. And it’s expensive. And you can’t work.
“What’s your hustle?” Freddy asks. He wants to know what my interests are, what my passion is, how I can see myself working, and thus making a dollar, in this beehive. In Cuba, life seems healthier, happier, because even though everyone is poor, no one feels wronged because there is no one waving wealth in their face. They don’t feel the inequality. But here, Rafael, Jorge, y Freddy commute in from Brooklyn or down from Washington Heights to lay marble and mahogany on Madison Ave. These guys better wear safety glasses, lift with their knees, and mind their fingers around those saws, because their hustle depends on that body functioning every day.
Hustle on. Wear safety glasses and gloves. Cut away from your body. Be circumspect. Play on playa.

Succession in a Northeastern deciduous forest

Charles Mann wrote a wonderful book that every American should read, from Alaska to Ushuia, called 1491. The book asks the question, “What was going on in the Americas before Columbus came?” Mann is not an anthropologist- he’s a journalist- and he does a great job of bringing many different voices in from the scientific community, many of which disagree with each other, in order to create an intelligent conversation about the extent of Pre-Columbian civilization. In the end, the take-away message is that there were many more people here than commonly thought, and they had extensive impact on the land. They were not the harmonious nomads that they are painted as. They were farmers, fishermen, hunters, city-dwellers, and across the continent they employed novel techniques to manipulate the land for their benefit. They made vast fruit and nut woodlands in the eastern US, geometrical earthworks for capturing fish in Bolivia, and engineered new, fertile dirt in the Amazon (to name a few).
Elizabeth Dworkin owns a house in upstate New York, about four hours north of the city, and I’m lucky enough to be her guest this weekend. As I hung my head out of the Toyota Corolla window, highway breeze on my teeth, my thoughts quickly shifted from funk grooves and low-cost housing to biodiversity and historic land use.
In 1491, Mann created a great section on the misperceptions surrounding the Native American tribes of the Northeast. The misperception stems from a simple disappearing act: one moment the Indians were there, and the next moment they were gone. Between Columbus’ landing in 1492 and the settlement of the Chesapeake in the early 1600’s, there were ships cruising the coast, trading with towns. According to the journal entries of the first of these traders, towns lined the whole coast, one after another. The towns were big, had fortification walls, fields of corn and squash and veggies, and complex culture and tradable goods. However, a hundred years later, when the pilgrims settled, journal entries described a “virgin forest” all along the coast, a foreboding dark tangle of trees… Where there had recently been cities similar to those on the Mediterranean coast, now there was just wildness, wilderness, and a few nomads.
This was not a magic trick. According to Mann’s sources, there were in fact millions of Indians in the Northeast, with cities and governments and culture. And those first trade ships brought epidemics that swept through and killed up to 95 percent of the population. The “harmonious nomads” that we found in the forests and on the plains were in fact refugees fleeing from the plague.

The Groove

Some people talk about psychic connections, or energetic fields, or fate or destiny... I don't know about all that. But I do know that there is a very real, visceral way that people can connect with one another. Whether it's by a glance, or through conversation, or on a dance floor, we can "feel the vibe" and it's something real. It's hard to put words to, because there are questions to be answered like: why do you feel a vibe from some person, and not another? Where does the vibe come from? Who or what power decides who you will "connect" with and who you won't? Trying to answer these questions leads to conversations about God or about energetic realms, because they're unanswerable questions without going way out there.
The fact is though, that with some people you "feel it" and with others you don't. And that's that. You have to keep looking, keep meeting people, and be OK with duds and hopeful that you'll find somebody that you click with. And with that, perhaps I'm advocating for a liberal modern society, in which we are allowed to meet lots of people, and be free to try our hand at several relationships before we settle into marriage. Sure I am.

Growth, Part III

So, we are faced now with a reality that we are many. We are many upon this earth, and we are productive. We make big homes for ourselves, and we make many things for ourselves, and we sell things around the world. With the level of sophistication we have reached, we support a huge global population and impact the earth’s natural equilibrium to an unprecedented level.
Secondly, we realize that we have thoroughly affected every corner of the planet. The ecosystems of our “wild places” have been infiltrated by invasive species. A recent study showed that even deep corners of the ocean far from cities are contaminated by our desechos. In 2008, we are no longer frontiersmen charged to tame the dark unknown, but rather we’ve taken our biblical place as shepherd and caretaker of our kingdom.
I have said a million times that we must see ourselves as part of the natural system, instead of seeing ourselves as separate and isolated from it. I was fortunate to grow up where I did, with the mountains wrapped around me, river flowing under me, fishing for breakfast, hunting for dinner, raking leaves and shoveling snow. I know what it means to chop wood and run from an angry bear. Because of my visceral connection with the earth’s seasons, weather and animals, I feel part of the greater picture. Recycling makes sense because I know places with no trash. Reducing air pollution makes sense because I know the feeling of crisp clean air.
But not everyone can live how I lived. We are too many. There is not enough land. In an attempt to give each person the “sense of space” of the frontier, we created the suburbs, which are an awful ecological wasteland of non-native grasses and uninhabitable landscaping. Ecologically rich forests and plains are erased by concrete and landscaping, and any insect or rodent that tries to stay around is quickly “solved” with a red spray-bottle from the Home and Garden aisle.
The sad thing about the suburbs is that they cover so much land surface, and thereby destroy the exact terrain that could potentially inspire the next generation of children. Let’s consider two options. One, a suburban housing development clears 40 acres of land and paves in 60 homes. Or two, six apartment buildings are built on sides of the property, or perhaps on the four corners, with ten apartment in each, and 30 acres is not only “saved,” but also becomes space for children to lose and find themselves, get dirty, learn to use a compass and a tent and matches, and how to spot deer and birds.
If we extend the example to a larger scale, we would discuss the vertical growth of our cities, focusing on creating positive livable urban environments, and thus preserving easily accessible natural places outside the cities. Thoreau lived in Concord and went to Harvard, but Walden was close enough, and wild enough, that he was able to get his greatest inspiration. We need to create livable urban environments so we can house our growing population without covering the earth’s entire surface, but everyone needs their Copper Ridge or their Walden.

Growth, Part II

What is a weed?
-It's a bad plant.
-An ugly plant.
-Something that shouldn't be there
-It's non-native.
...
Not quite. If a Serviceberry bush crops up in a farmer's wheat field, it's the native shrub that's the weed, even though wheat is native to Mesopotamia. The concept of a "weed" is entirely determined by a human context, by our own placement of value on some species over others. So even though I'll warn the kid who said "bad plant" to not be so subjective, in essence the scientists base their work on a similar subjectivity.
In order to answer the question of "What is a weed?" we have to take a big step back, and consider the world in which we live, and how we want this world to be. We have developed much of the earth's surface for urban centers, suburban developments, and farming. We run cattle on many lands. We exploit vast areas by drilling and mining. We love our cities, our suburbs, our farms, and the products we get from natural resource exploitation. And we also love our "wild places," the Yellowstones and Yosemites and Grand Canyons, which we've set aside, protected from "the hand of man" so that we can enjoy the "unspoiled and timeless earthscapes" for many generations to come.
This is all fiction of course. All this land is touched by the hand of man. Many places were farmed or settled centuries ago. The act of preservation has often meant wildfire suppression, and this indirectly effects change on the land. And perhaps the largest way that we passively touch our earth- the second largest cause of species endangerment to date- we introduce exotic species.
With the ever-increasing rate of global travel and commerce, we carry around seeds and eggs and plants and animals, and constantly release species upon the land that don't belong. Since Pangea separated 250 MYA, isolation has allowed certain plants and animals to coevolve and develop balanced relationships. When an exotic species suddenly shows up off a Boeing 747, the danger stems from the fact that this newby did not coevolve within the ecosystem. So maybe there is nothing here capable of eating it. Even though back home it is just part of the mosaic of plants, maybe in its new context it is capable of pushing out native species, spreading quickly, and creating homogenous stands. If it can do that, we call it "invasive."
Now, what's a weed? As I've said, it starts with our intentions. In our protected, "wild" places, our intention is that the landscape represent a native, natural, "untouched" state. If a weed is a plant that we don't want, then in a National Park the exotic plants are weeds. So if we want to maintain the "natural" character of these places, we actually have to go in and proactively remove the exotic species. Some have the ability to become invasive and therefore take over huge areas of land, so they must be prioritized for removal.
It sounds counterintuitive, that we have to stomp around upon this land in order to leave it "untouched," but we have to realize that we've already touched the whole globe. Now it's ours, and if we want to keep some parts of it beautiful, inspirational, and powerful, we're going to have to work for it.

Growth, Part I

In the late 60's, Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb caused quite a stir in the pop-science community, because up until that point, we hadn't really thought much about our overall population on this earth, and how that might bring global consequences. Maybe people in the 60's didn't have the same concept of the unity and smallness of this orb. Nowadays, Beijing is practically next door, and the idea that China has 1.4 billion people has little to do with competition or war, and more to do with how early spring will come next year in Steamboat.
In 1968 Ehrlich calculted the earth's carrying capacity to be 3.8 billion. We've "proved him wrong" in the sense that the massive famines and wars that he predicted have not yet come to pass, but recently on the Brian Laer show, Ehrlich reiterated that global stability requires that we reduce our population to 5, or 4, or 3 billion.
Population reduction??? Are you f'ing kidding?? The definition of an economic recession, the concept that has caused so much constipation in the US over the past half year, is when "growth is negative for two or more consecutive quarters." In other words, if we are not growing and expanding, we are in trouble. In the context of this national Ponzi Scheme, how could we function if the world halved in population? Is there a possibility to create a new economic model under which we can reduce our population, contract sales and consumption, and at the same time maintain our political and social systems and our quality of life?

aech to oh!

Water is so smooth, so soft, elemental and pure, cool, calming, and yet it patiently moves mountains.
Mist and flakes settle on leaves and pine needles with such delicate poise, whispers are hushed as snow piles in drifts, blows into canyons and buries the world. It is the slowest, most comfortable death, sinking into white softness, the world slowing down. The only proper light is a burning flame, a candle, or the distant stars. A moon is the perfect beam of white to reflect the world of white, and the world is simple, and binary, and cold. The stinging air is perfect, it's like birth.
And then it all gets ruined.
And at first slowly and then with greater speed, the snow shrugs and bows and mumbles and commiserates. It's stark whiteness disappears and of a sudden it is clear droplets of water, too heavy for their comfort, and eager to go downhill.
Little trickles hide in scree piles, but nourish alcove lilies and columbines. Shale slides apart and lets the water nibble a bit of a cut. Faucets are turned on, all over the mountain, and the jets shout with joy. They grab hands and three-legged race down the hillsides, falling and laughing into box canyons, beaver ponds, trout lakes and fern-laden bogs. And pausing, sprinting, tossing rocks, all together they roar in the night.
And Sandstone doesn't stand a chance. Limestone can't cope. Schist, twisted and horrified in Mordor, flexes its shiny face but crumbles and falls. And Crystals fall. And Harps Fall. And Lava Falls. As if it were a schemer, it waits in calm pools before it slacks into a rock-toothed chasm. As if it were joking, it twirls against traffic at rush hour, giggling behind a big rock. For fun, the adrenaline junkie base jumps off any submerged rock, and trampolining off the bottom comes back to recirculate and whitewater cartwheel.
And as the river plays this game, it calls all its friends, and they all come running from all sides, and high-fives and handshakes make unbreakable bonds, and alliances are forged, and pretty soon.... "!El Pueblo, Unido, Jamas Sera Vencido!"... the march turns from the rollicking festival into a million-man-manifesto, a slow parade that mocks time, leans the weight of elephants into the wind, and fills the banks. And slowly, slowly, fatalistically, the march leans. Leans.

That Girl on the Fabric

Last Friday's Olympic opening ceremony was full of images, icons of deeper meaning. One that stands out in my mind, which the commentators so unabashedly "called out" during its display, was that of the young dancer with teal streamers, carried on a giant fabric, that was supported from underneath my a legion of men. The idea of many faceless grunts striving to support and elevate one beautiful individual is something wonderful, and perhaps specifically Chinese, and sadly un-American.
Barak Obama has again and again been criticized for being aloof, elitist, effete, intellectual, exotic, international, and thus "out of touch" with white, middle, common America. I am reminded of (and nauseated by) the fact that many people voted for George W. Bush over Al Gore in 2000 because they'd rather "sit at the bar and have a beer" with the Texan. Why do we want "one of the guys" to be our head of state? Why don't we want the "best of the best" to take that charge?
The reason is that this is America, not China. This is a place where we are all equal, and we don't want to be one of the hundred faceless grunts holding up that dancer. We each want to be, and feel like we are, the one chosen one. We are Neo, John Wayne, Maverick, John McLane. The Hollywood heroes are engineered to be great while being normal, so that we feel like we too could, at any moment, be great. In fact, we tell ourselves, we already are. This is the reason for our culture of entitlement, consumerism, and waste. "I am the King," we feel, "so I'll live like such."
So instead of hearing Obama's elevated intellectual rhetoric and saying, "This man deserves to be President," we see that he is smarter than us and therefore mistrust him. I'm the greatest, therefore he must be "out of touch." I deserve to be President, yes me, well at least someone just like me, who drinks Pabst.
That girl on the fabric doesn't drink Pabst.

Be destructive, Create!

We create, and in that creation we feel productive, valuable, meaningful. We search for success in accomplishment, specifically in building something. We build sandcastles, businesses, nations. My dad talked about why construction was something he liked doing. He would say, "In carpentry, I can step back at the end of the day and see what I've done."
Tamara Naumann, the Botanist at Dinosaur National Monument, feels quite differently. As someone who is chiefly concerned with the well being of natural systems, she sees humans and human creation as the primary evil. It is the construction of dams that strangles aquatic systems, suburban subdivisions that pave over prairie ecosystems, and industry that pollutes our land, seas, and air. She even chose to minimize her own personal ability to create, choosing not to have children.
My dad and Tamara are both wonderful, honorable people. They are friends, and agree on most things. But there is a difference of opinion in the value of construction.
Eustace Conway is a personal hero of mine. His biography is called The Last American Man, and it was written by Elizabeth Gilbert and it is a fabulous read. Conway embodies many of the traits that I value: individualism, rational thought, genuine concern for nature, and a personal involvement in the natural world, as a hunter, gatherer, farmer. Yet as Gilbert told the story of his life, she did a great job of showing Conway as an example of all of us. He started out as a 20-year-old who hiked the Appalachian Trail with just a knife, eating roadkill or dumpster-diving. He became a master of "living off the land," and acquired 1000 acres of land. And on that land he became teaching. And building buildings. First it was a shed, then a cabin, then some fences, then a barn, then a house, then a bigger house, then a garage, then... and this man who preached against development, calling for all Americans to return to nature, took virgin forest and turned it into fields and buildings.
So how can destruction and creation be so interconnected? And would it be possible for us to find a sense of purpose, happiness, and production without continuing to build? It is absolutly necessary that we STOP building new things. We need the humility to see that each acre that we turn into "human environment" we are stealing from other species. As long as we continue to build, we will keep loosing species on this earth, and we will also loose beautiful places that are wonderful to visit. Is tai chi the answer? Can we become strong and flexible, and inward-looking, and thusly feel productive? I hope so.

El imperio

Strike down the monster,
Cheer on your team,
Build a nation,
advocate.

Abajo imperio,
El pueblo unido,
Bush diablo,
!Fuera ya!

Love rules supreme,
Family and friends,
I have a dream,
Yes we can!

Hasta la victoria siempre,
El amor eterno,
Abajo arriba,
Si se puede.

Pero mira, ?que pasa si mi nacion es el imperio, si mi pueblo son los de arriba? ?Que puedo decir, en que puedo tener orgullo? ?En que debo trabajar? Yo vivo en el "Empire State," vivo el la ciudad monopoli. Aqui el dinero es rey, todo sale caro, y se paga sueldos altos. Aqui las calles estan plateadas. "Yes we can!" dice Obama, y esta hablando a nosotros, a los de Nueva York, a los hombres de negocio y a los financieros, a los blancos y a mi, y esta hablando de la construccion de nuestro pais. No esta hablando de imperio, no quiere explotacion, no pide la continuacion de la pobreza global. No, el, y yo, y somos muchos que quiere que los Estados Unidos sea un gran pais, un buen lugar en donde vivir y crecer una familia, y un miembro responsable de la comunidad global. Trabajar por parte de "The Man" tiene que ser positivo, si "The Man" soy yo.

The End of Ideology

It's probably plagiarism even to entitle this blog "The End of Ideology," because Daniel Bell wrote a terrific work by that name that my dad read during his graduate studies, and remained relevant for forty years so that it was assigned to Knute at CU. I own it, and like to talk about its content, but I won't say I've read it.
What I will say is that in many other countries in the world, there are representative and senators who belong to the "socialist" party, or even the "communist" party. These people draw from Marx, or Lenin, or Trotsky, or from libraries of literature of theory and thought on how government could be run, who then go to work each day and represent "socialism" or "communism."
I don't know what that means in 2008, in a world that has such established and interconnected global networks of capitalist trade. Advocating for communism seems to be akin to "jumping off the bandwagon." But then I think of ways that certain programs in the US, or even specific politicians, are called "socially conscious," or "progressive." I am thinking of things such as welfare, affirmative action, or universal health care. Honestly, these things go against the grain of fundamentalist capitalism, yet no politician is comfortable labeling it "socialist" or declaring themselves members of a "Socialist Party."
One might say that there is no Socialist Party because our system encourages a two-party system and that has played itself out in order to whittle us down to the Dems and Reps, but Daniel Bell says differently (I bet). The fact is that after WWII and the creation of the USSR, we had to define ourselves as something else. It is the classic example of using an "other" to create "self." They were the Reds, the Commies, the Socialists. So we, by default, became not these things. McCarthy worked on this in an ostentacious way, but at the same time the American people worked on it in a slower and more subtle way. They must have. For now we have no room even in our vocabulary for these words. Even at "liberal" universities, there is no Association of Socialist Students. No one says, "We should change our economic system." Within the debates that we do have, one thing is accepted by all: the capitalist system is working and generating everything. From that foundation, we debate on social programming or the exclusion of such.
My dad explains very well how it is a myth that we live in a free market. With subsidies and other government deals, the economy the free market that we think it is. And I don't think it is working perfectly. Our economy functions on the need for constant growth. I see growth as more use of natural resources and the generation of more waste. I want a system based on no growth. I want us to look at possibilities of different systems, and not to be scared of names or labels. We cleansed ourselves of "the Reds" in the 50's, but that only succeeds in limiting our possibilities.

Tanning an Elk Hide

I have thus far worked three elk hides and one goat hide, with varied results. The only true conclusion that I have reached is that it is a really difficult thing to do well. Additionally, I have learned a lot about leather, patience, and about the history and technique of a beautiful craft. There are some great how-to books out there, but this is a basic overview.
Once the animal is dead, you need to skin it. The skin on the shanks gets thinner and thinner toward the hoof, so there is really no reason to try to keep much of that on. You'll end up cutting it off later. Then, if you are going to do a hair-on hide, you should scrape off all the meat and fat and then tie the hide on a frame to dry, and dry-scrape the membrane. If you are doing a hair-off buckskin, you should put the hide in a big tub with water and ash from a pot belly stove, and let it sit for a few days. At some point, the hair will be falling off (or easily pulled out) and at that point it's time to wetscrape. Throw the hide over a smooth beam or huge PVC pipe leaning at 45degrees against a tree, and scrape the hair side with a drawknife. The hair should scrape right out. Flip it over, and you'll see that the membrane side is impregnated with dark ashen water. As you scrape, that whole membrane will peel off. Now let the grained and membraned hide dry out.
Now you have a dried out hide that's as stiff as a board. Maybe you should let it dry for 6months to let the fibers "open up." Or maybe before drying you were supposed to soak it in a vinegar solution or something else. I'm not sure. But when you're ready, it's time to cure the hide.
This can be done by soaking it in a solution of water and blended up brains of the animal, or water with 10 whipped eggs, or water and olive oil and grated ivory soap, or a solution with soaked tree bark. You need to work the hide into the solution, getting it wet and soft and pushing it into the bucket. Let it sit in the bucket for a day. The idea here is that instead of water filling all the cavities inside the leather, proteins from the eggs or oil are going to fill those space, so when it dries, it will be soft and full instead of drying out thin and hard again. After the day in the eggs, you take it out, and here come the hard work!
You have to "work over" the hide, stretching it and moving it and ruffing it up, transitioning it from wet to dry. It is particularily important to be working the leather rigorously when it is finally transitioning to completely dry. This process will take 4 to 8 hours for an elk hide, cuz those suckers are thick and hold a lot of moisture. Plus they're heavy, so it's an incredible workout for your shoulders and forearms. You can do it by sitting and stretching the hide over your knees, then turning it and stretching it the other way, and moving around like that. Or you can do it by tying the hide up in a frame and pushing into it with your fists, or an axe handle, and massaging/stretching it like that.
As the hide dries, hopefully it becomes soft, pliable, full-bodied, and elastic. If it's not soft to your liking, you can return to the eggs/olive oil/brains soak, and then work it over again, so hopefully you saved that solution.
Then you are ready to smoke it. Smoking the hide permenently changes its character, so if it gets wet again, it wont become mushy and slimy. Build up a bed of hot embers in the middle of a circle of rocks or in a big ceramic pot. Use three 12' trees to build a tripod over the fire. Fold the hide in half and safety pin or Elmer's glue it into a tight bag. Attach a denim skirt to the bottom that flares wide so as to go around the rocks or the pot, and funnel the smoke from the fire up into the hide bag. Throw leaves or punk onto the coals, and it will pump off enough smoke to inflate the bag. Watch out for flare-ups. At some point flip the hide inside-out and smoke the other side.
The leather will smell so strongly like smoke, so you can throw it in the washing machine and then in the dryer to get the smell out. Now you're ready to cut patterns, and make the backpack, moccossins, or jacket that you want!