Astral Impressions

This was a lot of fun, giving astrology the playfulness it deserves.

Last Friday, my band Chemystry Set performed Dancing on the Brink of the World at the Hotel Utah in San Francisco. Accompanied by a multimedia presentation, slides of Evelyn Terranova’s paintings and evolutionary astrologer Steven Forrest’s audio interludes, here are some photos to visualize the evening. View the whole series here.

Ready to rock The Year of the Ram

A Gemini is showing balance

The show is heating up.

Dancing on the Brink of the World

yup, and that’s me…

Astro Ball

I don’t like tooting my own horn, but this is going to be a great show tomorrow night. If you’re in the Bay Area you should consider stopping by, there’ll be rockin’ music, multimedia interludes, great people, awesome venue, costumes, and you’ll learn about astrology in ways you never imagined.

Here’s the skinny:

Chemystry Set’s Astro Ball
CD & Book Release Party of
Dancing on the Brink of the World
a song cycle through the signs of the zodiac
Friday, November 13, 9pm
Hotel Utah
500 4th St @ Bryant, San Francisco
with Luke Thomas Trio & Love, Isabel
Raffle & Visuals
Come dressed as your sun sign!

Come celebrate the completion of a cosmic song cycle and join Chemystry Set in a long overdue live performance of Dancing on the Brink of the World, a multimedia extravaganza that paints the ancient wisdom of astrology onto a creative contemporary canvas. This is going to be more than just a baker’s dozen of tunes: Dress up as your astrological sign or have fun guessing others’ costumes. Win a reading and other goodies in our astro raffle. Learn the ways of the zodiac from evolutionary astrology master Steven Forrest’s creative interludes. Our good friends Love, Isabel (Cat Galimidi, David Penner, & ex-Chemystry Set percussionist Avi Rose) will open the show and Luke Thomas Trio (featuring Chemystry Set’s Dickie Ogden on drums and Uriah Duffy on bass) will bring it home for the night owls with their rump-shaking grooves and infectious feel-good vibes.

More info at www.chemystryset.com

Here’s the trailer:

We’re going to Berlin!

On this 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall I thought I’d re-post an essay I wrote about the extraordinary cultural transformation that took place in Germany during World Cup 2006. It’s a look at the social, political, and spiritual dimensions of soccer, the almost mythical role this sport plays across the globe, and how it ultimately led me, a native German turned U.S. citizen, back to Berlin. It’s a diary about healing the ghosts of the past and the realization that any wall can crumble, no matter how tall or wide, once it has lost its power over our hearts.

I’m what people would call a product of twenty-two years of San Francisco schooling: a gay-friendly musician who shops at farmers markets and prays at the altar of composting. I read Vonnegut, Chomsky, Pollan and Berry, play in a rock band, practice astrology and work for organizations with names like Ecocity Builders. In short, I am the last person my friends call when they have extra tickets to a baseball game.

However, behind the granola curtain lurks an undeniable reality: I am German. Yes, born and raised, 100 percent beer and pretzels. What this means, of course, is that I love soccer. Soccer, or — let’s call it by its name — football, is in my bones. Always has been. From childhood memories of retrieving stray balls from the neighbor’s flower bed to my one-way ticket to the U.S. on a soccer scholarship, the chase after this little patchwork of leather has been so much more than a past-time; it has guided me through life like an invisible friend who not only offers a looking glass into a common past but whose evolution continues to provide inspiration as well as self-reflection. To quote myself as a nine-year-old who had just completed his first full season with a soccer club, “Mom, without football I just couldn’t live.”

In 2000, as soon as it became clear that World Cup ‘06 would be held in Germany, I booked the trip. That is, in my head I did. In January of 2006, when the time had finally come to hunt for game tickets and cheap airfare, I confessed the clandestine plan to Deb, my partner of one and a half years. Swayed by my visions of a better world through soccer, and, being a trooper, she immediately warmed to the idea of joining me in Europe with the primary objective of catching as many games in as many locations as possible.

Summer arrived quickly and it was time to tune out the depressing news from Iraq and focus on positive human activities. And since both the American and Iranian teams had qualified there was hope that their countries’ leaders would perhaps just tone it down for a month. We had decided to spend the first week of World Cup in San Francisco to take in the Latino football fever in our Mission District neighborhood before joining the action in Alemania.

June 9
Our living room, Mission District, SF
Germany – Costa Rica, opening match

Needless to say, I could not bear to watch this game outside the sanctity of my own home. Too much doubt had been sown in the media about this German team and its capacity to make it to the second round, not to mention winning the Cup. Since I would be the only one in my neighborhood rooting for Germany I wanted to be alone in case the unthinkable happened. But thank heavens for Telemundo TV and Mexican sports commentators. Before the first whistle of the game was blown, their unbridled joy and excitement had already eased the tension. Who cares about winning when the whole world is poised for a party? Of course, this didn’t keep me from jumping off the couch and dancing like a 6-year-old when German defender Phillip Lahm scored the first goal four minutes into the game in what would end up a rousing 4:2 win. Deb looked at me in utter amazement. My cover as intellectual non-jock had been blown.

June 11
El Farolito Sports Bar, Mission District, SF
Mexico – Iran

When the proprietor opened the door at 8.30am, a flock of loyal fans filed into the bar. Before the game even started I was chatting with Manuel from Guatemala and his friend José from El Salvador. Neither of their teams had qualified for the tournament, but I could sense a Latino pride that made their hearts beat for the big brother to the north. When Omar Bravo scored the go-ahead goal for heavily favored Mexico we had just changed the subject from Hugo Chavez’ chances of reforming South America to Nestor Kirchner’s accomplishments with the ever so fragile Argentinean economy.

After Yahya Golmohammadi tied it for Iran, Manuel poured forth with his doubts about the land reforms in Guatemala. His parents, sixth-generation corn farmers, could hardly keep themselves afloat. Having to compete with subsidized corn from the U.S., the only reason they could afford to retire on their small plot of land was because of the monthly envelope containing their son’s dollars. Manuel, who held a pretty steady gig as a house painter, felt it his duty to spare his parents the fate of so many of their friends and neighbors who had to abandon their land to look for work in overcrowded Guatemala City or Antigua.

As the game went into the second half with the score still tied, the mood got quieter, though never desperate. Then, seventy-six minutes into the game, it was once again Omar Bravo who brought relief to us all. Another three minutes later Antonio Zinha topped it off with another goal, kicking off a day of honking and flag waving in the streets of San Francisco.

June 17
Downtown Kaiserslautern, Germany
Italy – USA

My parents picked me up from the Frankfurt airport in the afternoon. (Deb wouldn’t arrive in Germany for another two weeks). Without tickets, but giddy and unwilling to heed my jet-lag, we drove to the smallest World Cup city of Kaiserslautern where the U.S. team was to take on Italy that night. There are several large U.S. Army barracks in what they call K-Town, and it showed the minute we drove into town. Hanging from windows and balconies everywhere were the Stars and Stripes, often intertwined with Italian and German flags, giving this medieval town of 100,000 inhabitants the appearance of a United Nations convention.

We parked the car and walked to Stiftsplatz, the main town square, where giant screens had been set up as a public service to thousands of ticketless soccer fans. To foster cross-cultural understanding and invite fans to share their excitement, these viewing areas had sprung up in cities and towns across Germany. That night, however, not even Stiftsplatz could contain the onslaught of people. By the time we got there, it was filled to capacity.

Getting around the narrow alleys to find alternate screens was like swimming in molasses. We longingly peeked through open apartment windows and shuffled past crowded pub entries to catch snippets of the game on obstructed television sets. Italy’s go-ahead goal sent a surge through the wandering mass, erupting into climactic shock waves only moments later when Cristian Zaccardo put the ball in his own goal to tie it for the U.S.

We finally found a standing-room only wine garden (K-Town and surroundings in the Rhineland Palatinate region are known for their wines) to watch the dramatic second half. Three red card ejections and 45 minutes later, the referee finally blew the whistle to end the game. As if all the frustration of constantly having to answer for your government’s policies had suddenly been popped like a balloon, the American fans began to sing, scream and dance. Drunken with national pride and German beer, they celebrated their small victory into the wee hours. That night, after the most captivating game of the tournament until that point, none of the Italians and Germans held it against them — if only their country’s leaders could find such beauty in a draw.

June 20
FIFA World Cup Stadium (aka Fritz Walter Stadium), Kaiserslautern
Paraguay – Trinidad & Tobago

When I was a kid, stadiums were named after rivers, geographic regions, or people who had made social contributions to the respective team’s hometown. It was a time when the meaning of World Cup was simple: The best football teams from around the world were invited by a host nation to kick a ball into the opponent’s net until the last remaining team got to hoist a little cylindrical trophy. In short, football was just football, and FIFA ranked in significance right up there with the National Wood Flooring Association.

When my mom, stepfather, brother and I arrived at Fritz Walter…I mean…FIFA World Cup Stadium to attend the only game we had been able to score tickets for, it quickly became clear that we were being ushered into a brave new FIFA world. Upon entry into the fortified gates of FIFAland we were funneled through licensed merchandise stands and Budweiser-only beer booths. The only thing reminding us that we were actually in the same town that had served us Bischoff Bier and Leberknoedel mit Weinsauerkraut only three days earlier was the stadium announcer’s repeated and obviously choreographed Welcome to FIFA World Cup host city KAISERSLAUTERN!!

From the moment we took our seats we were barraged with mega decibel jingles. Multiple video screens were giving us detailed instructions as to who and what to pay attention to, and when and where. Like a frozen dinner, this experience had been neatly packaged for easy and frequent consumption. And yet, thriving in the compost heaps of McFIFA were the connections and friendships between the Soca Warriors, the singing and dancing fans of Trinidad & Tobago, the smallest nation to ever have qualified for the tournament, and the Germans. To have 30,000 Germans dress up in Caribbean red shirts and chant “Trinidad, Trinidad,” points to a deeper cultural connection. Despite the Soca Warriors’ eventual 2:0 loss that night, the Germans and Trinis made a lasting impact on each other.

June 22
Downtown Stuttgart
Croatia – Australia

The tournament had advanced to the last group games and most match-ups were now do or die. As my hometown Stuttgart was playing host to Australia and Croatia in the evening game, I knew there were going to be a lot of Croats downtown. Having grown up with many children of guest workers who came to Germany after World War II, I had a feeling that there would be a disproportionate number of Croats, but little did I know that thousands of Aussies had left winter behind to cheer on their underdog squad.

When I got off the tram around 2pm the mayhem was in full swing. Grown men were singing folk songs out of tune and in languages I couldn’t decipher. Pregnant women were flaunting bellies painted with soccer ball checkers. On Schlossplatz, the old castle square, a group of Aussies dressed as kangaroos were bouncing across the cobblestone. The beer was showing its effects; by the time I had worked my way to the gigantic screen right in front of the castle to watch the afternoon game between Italy and Czech Republic, the honking, hollering and whistling had crescendoed to symphonic levels.

The Squadra Azzurra beat the Czechs to qualify for the second round, which sent thousands of Italians into frenzy. Not to be outdone, Croats and Australians cranked their party into high gear while heading for the stadium. I journeyed back for a mellow evening at my friend’s garden in the suburbs. That night we heard the Aussies singing into the wee hours from ten kilometers away, celebrating the Socceroo’s last minute goal that advanced them into the second round for the first time in the nation’s history.

June 30
Frankfurt airport
Germany – Argentina

When Germany beat Sweden 2:0 in the second round, two fates were sealed. One, a previously skeptical national psyche was catapulted into a new and unknown sphere of levity, and two, Deb and I were destined to watch the quarterfinal between Germany and Argentina, the most important event in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the Frankfurt airport, due to her flight’s scheduled arrival thirty minutes before kick-off.

If the German flags hanging from every balcony, car window, and store front weren’t enough of an indication that the country was undergoing a historical transformation, the young team’s refreshing playing style and ensuing four-game winning streak launched the nation into a new orbit. The very same black, red, and gold stripes, whose mere presence had left a vile taste in my mouth as a teenager, were now triggering a new, more refined set of responses. Here I was, standing before my people who in the course of sixty years had evolved from tank makers to solar energy consultants, feeling at ease. The nation that had been hell-bent on starting wars was now using their god-given gift to organize the planet’s biggest multicultural party. Riding this wave of brotherly love, we were jazzed to beat Argentina.

A short train ride from Stuttgart, I arrived at the Frankfurt airport in time to meet Deb at the gate. We hurried through the terminal, and, as I had suspected we would, found a viewing area equipped with big screens and a beer booth. We got there right after kick-off, to standing room only. Safe for the commentator’s voice, the airport was as quiet as a church, as if the whole country had ground to a halt.

After a scoreless first half, we were in for a rude awakening when Ayala scored for Argentina only four minutes into the second half. It was the first time the German team had fallen behind in the tournament, and the moans and groans in the airport crowd hinted at a dwindling faith in the team’s good fortunes. In the 80th minute, Polish born striker Miroslav Klose’s header into the top left corner of the Argentine goal lifted us all off the ground. In a matter of a split second, eerie silence erupted into a thunderous wave of screams, outstretched arms, and flying objects that quickly rippled into the international terminal.

Regardless of the outcome of the game and the tournament, this goal opened a door through which there was no return ticket. In one final push, a nation incarcerated in the dark and dank vaults of incurable angst, chronic pessimism, and irredeemable guilt was now riding this team’s carefree spirit for good. If eleven football players could dispel the image of the boring, mechanical German and defy all odds to come back against a seemingly invincible opponent, then certainly we the people, the descendants of Mozart, Rilke, and Goethe, could trust in our own creative powers to recover our generation’s most oppressed treasure: our heart.

The eventual win in penalty kicks was all icing. Deb got to see my stoic compatriots jump in the air four more times, showing displays of affection that had been unheard of in such latitudes up until then. Back in Stuttgart, we were greeted by face-painted, flag-clad mobs, arm in arm, dancing on a sea of broken beer bottles, chanting their irreverent new anthem: “Berlin, Berlin, wir fahren nach Berlin,” meaning “We’re going to Berlin.”

July 9
Berlin
Italy vs. France, final

When Deb and I decided to go to Berlin for the final we had no idea that the game itself would be all but an afterthought. In a way, the Germans’ last minute overtime defeat in the semifinals at the hands of a relentless yet uninspiring Italian squad felt like divine interference, a final exam administered to my people, testing us on whether the displays of universal goodwill had been authentic or just emotional gravy spilling over from a winning train. If any city was going to be the barometer of a new “Germanness,” it would have to be Berlin. Divided and walled-in after the war, Berlin had not only been the symbol of Germany’s image to the world, but also a mirror of its internal state of mind throughout its illustrious past and into the present. Once again, Berlin, one of the cultural hubs of Europe, had been chosen to host the world. However, unlike the 1936 Summer Olympics, the 2006 World Cup final promised to be a healing force in an otherwise divided world. And there I was, with my Jewish girlfriend, right in the middle of it.

The day of the final, after Germany had beaten Portugal to take third place the previous night, Deb and I took a stroll near the Brandenburg Gate. Swallowed by a stream of football fans headed to the infamous fan mile, Germany’s largest public viewing area, we got swept up in the euphoria of seeing our national heroes at their victory, or rather third place parade. The skeptical look on Deb’s face signaled that she had seen enough big crowds, a sentiment I tacitly shared after a month of non-stop football mania. We veered into an empty side street that let out to a vast landscape of charcoal colored slabs. Rising before us like a labyrinth, the Holocaust Memorial’s undulating field of rectangular blocks beckoned like a civilization within a civilization.

At the far side of the memorial, where a row of shorter steles gave the appearance of a ramped entryway, two young men were sitting on one of the blocks. Wearing black, red, and gold hats and scarves, they were enjoying a leisurely morning smoke when approached by a balding gentleman.

“This is an insult to history,” he said with a heavy French accent. “You call this affront to the senses a memorial? How would you like it if I sit on your grave?”

Caught off-guard, the two Germans glanced at each other. After a brief moment, one of them looked up and said, “Maybe the dead like the close contact with the living. We are very comfortable here, so why shouldn’t they be?”

“Ah non, monsieur, this is not the way to honor the victims of genocide,” the Frenchman said. “Children are climbing on the ashes of injustice like a playground or something.”

“But why is it so bad to play? We can’t change what happened, but we can change how we want to behave today. If we can play today, then everybody will play tomorrow.”

The three of them went on to discuss the matter while Deb and I wandered through the memorial. This was the game we had come to Berlin for.

=======

photos by Debra Baida & Sven Eberlein

To Pollanate a Berry

Last night I had the great privilege to see and hear two of the most influential and inspiring figures in the sustainable food movement in conversation. While Michael Pollan has become a household name through books like Omnivore’s Dilemma, and most recently, films like Food Inc. and The Botany of Desire, he took the interviewer’s seat and gave the stage to a man who has touched so many of us who care about living in harmony with nature and whose prose about Americans’ relationship to their land has been as profound as it’s been prophetic.

This was Wendell Berry’s night, the 75-year old agrarian, author and voice of stewardship who had traveled all the way from his Kentucky farm to share his eloquence, humor, and wisdom with an appreciative audience at the Herbst Theater in San Francisco. It’s impossible to list all the books, essays and poems Mr. Berry has written or to do justice in words to the impact he has had on the current renaissance of agrarian awakenings from budding farmers markets to a White House garden, so I will just relay some choice quotes that I hastily scribbled in the dark theater.

Wendell Berry is one of those rare souls whose mere presence brings you into a deeper place within yourself, a meditative zone that enables greater reflection and larger context, away from the constant soundbites we expose ourselves to in our daily lives. In an interview with Michael Krasny a day earlier, I was taken in by this simple thing he had to say:

Politics is the art of the practical.

Poetry is about enlarging the context.

While you have to fight the day to day battles of politics, he seems to say, you’ve got to take time to delve into the broader landscape of how these battles relate to the greater underlying themes and why you’re fighting them in the first place. When Michael Pollan introduced Mr. Berry, he asked us to take note of the pauses that would occur before each answer. “Here’s a man who thinks before he speaks,” he pointed out, “something most of us aren’t used to.”

The first question was about the new administration and its accomplishments after the first year. His answer I thought was very profound, a reminder to those of us losing patience with President Obama and forgetting that despite the power bestowed upon him he is a human being maneuvering through the morass of a deeply entrenched system built upon short-sightedness.

Imagine a mere person in that huge enterprise, so much of which is fraudulent.

He told us about his visit to the White House a couple of months ago, accompanying Wes Jackson to present and promote their 50 year farm bill to the President’s agricultural team. It seems pretty obvious that much of the trouble we’ve gotten ourselves into in regard to the food we grow and eat is based on the fact our farm bills only look 5 years into the future. Great for a corporate bottom line, but completely out of touch with the way mother earth functions. He pointed out that they were very well versed in the subject and receptive to the ideas presented, but as mentioned above, the realities of a political system that is so deeply rooted in instant gratification are hard to overcome in just a few months, years, or even a presidential term.

He did remind us of the tremendous impact of leadership that talks about the need for healthy fresh food, setting examples like having a garden on the White House lawn:

It’s an acknowledgement from the top that food exists before it gets on the plate.

And while a lot can be done working from the top down, Mr. Berry kept emphasizing that much of the needed work to restore our relationship with the land will have to and is already happening from the bottom up.

I’m not putting all my eggs in the political basket.

We’ll have real multiculturalism when we have local economies.

And speaking of economy, he had this to say:

I don’t believe in the bailing out of the paper economy.

This of course goes way beyond bailouts and stimuli or what the administration did or didn’t do in this recent crash, but it cuts right to a much bigger, systemic problem we have. The fact that very little of our economy has anything to do anymore with what we do with our hands and how we treat the land we live and depend on is testament how utterly disconnected we are from reality. Mr. Berry mentioned cities like Dallas, in the middle of vast ranch land, where people sit in big high rises pushing papers and looking at computer screens, feeding an imaginary economy that has nothing to do with the land they live on. He pointed out that our most revered expert economists like Paul Krugman don’t ever account for the impact we have on the land in their brainy, elaborate models, as if the food we eat and that keeps us nourished and alive is just a little leaf on the economy tree.

Nature’s wisdom as opposed to our cleverness.

It’s not just economists, but our society’s collective worship of brainy technology at the expense of listening to nature’s boundless wisdom. That sort of linear thinking that has brought us food-like substances concocted in scientific labs has drowned out our ability to listen to the rhythms of the land and be in sync with the nuances and complexities of the fragile yet incredibly resilient web of life. Mr. Berry used the example of how we say “this is not rocket science” as if to say that rocket science is the most complex thing on earth. It isn’t. The most complex and mysterious thing on earth is mother earth herself and her vast system of interconnectedness, and yet we’ve come to worship specialists who connect two dots and present it as a philosophy.

Farming doesn’t run on a universal solution. Farming runs on the best possible local solution.

The question about food grown in balance with the land as being too expensive and possibly elitist came up. The problem of course is that the industrially grown food is only so cheap because decades of subsidies for agribusiness and mono-crops have artificially cheapened our food, and we’ve become used to it, thinking it’s normal to only spend a fraction of our income on food. Mr. Berry said it pretty clearly:

Food is too cheap for everybody – that’s where the problem is.

And going a bit further into our fixation on short-term yield and profits, he said:

We’ve only given farmers a proxy to produce, but we haven’t given them a proxy to maintain the land.

Of course, many say that this doesn’t help the people who are too poor to afford good fresh food, and in some cases that’s true. But I also think that this has become a bit of a reflexive cop-out line, too. My partner and I buy a huge box of fresh vegetables directly from our local farmer for 25 bucks, and we munch on it for almost two weeks. I don’t think I could get as good a deal from Safeway, and that’s not even factoring the nutritional value of the food. Sure, a lot of people don’t have access to a local farmer, which is something that is rapidly changing though, with an explosion of farmer’s markets around the country. I guess my point is that real food doesn’t have to be more expensive than mass produced mono-crops and food-like substances. And don’t even get me started on the long term health costs. We need much more education, and we need to have a farm policy that supports small farmers and their land, not big profits.

Michael Pollan added a very important point about how we’ve been in this backwards cycle in the race for cheap and instant gratification, and how everyone has been forced to spiral down along with this economic model:

You pay people Walmart wages, and they can only afford Walmart food.

Amen, Michael.

The end of the conversation was truly magical, Wendell Berry at his very best. Asked about whether we have shifted too much of our environmental endeavors into preserving wilderness and not put enough of our thought and resources into preserving our farm land, he showed us the meaning of enlarging the context. You see, it’s only in our conditioned minds that we think of wilderness as only what’s inside a national park. If you ever dig your hands in the ground you’ll find an amazingly wild ecosystem right there underneath our feet.

There’s so much life in our soil. We have to maintain the wilderness beneath our feet in order to keep eating

He took it a step further, pointing out that only to us humans the wilderness is a wilderness. To all the creatures living in what we call wilderness it is their home, a living place, complexly domestic.

All the creatures in the wild are leading their domestic lives. The only wild things are humans, who are out of control.

And with that, a deeply moving and inspiring hour ended, leaving us all wonderfully nourished, our mental horizons opened and broadened.

As a special treat I got to snap a photo of these two soul brothers.

Village Bottoms, Vol. 3: Getting a taste of what it means to be Black

Why not come to West Oakland to get a taste of what it means to be black?

These were the words of poet, artist, and community builder Marcel Diallo as he led us, a group of planners, developers, city representatives and curious bystanders, on a tour through the Village Bottoms, a West Oakland working class neighborhood with deep African American roots and spirited determination to grow these very roots through the concrete and redlined walls of urban blight into a vibrant and verdant cultural canopy and future eco-city.

Given the history of race relations in this country, a question like this might easily be construed as a threat, and just that thought — however fleeting — should alert us to the continued need for addressing and processing our wounded past. But this is not a threat. This is an invitation. . .an invitation to listen, to remember, to reflect, and perhaps, to heal.

There are some injustices that are so visible and egregious — genocide, slavery, apartheid — that eventually they garner enough attention and outrage to be deemed unacceptable in the public eye, and action is taken to right the wrong. However, while blood, shackles and barbed wire fences are recognizable symbols of oppression and have become unacceptable markers in our collective moral compass, it is much easier to ignore or be oblivious to the more subtle yet pervasive injustices and mental walls that still exist all around us.

The fact that we’re still here is testament to our spiritual resilience.

- Marcel Diallo

Often, the mental barriers persist long after the shackles have been removed. As I described in Ecocities: From the Bottoms Up, in West Oakland they persist through a history of urban planning that builds a highway right through the poorest part of a city and cuts off an entire community from vital services like grocery stores and hospitals. They persist in the form of an economic system that rewards those who already have money and withholds loans from those who don’t (unless they’re sub-prime). They persist in the form of industries that would never be allowed to build a plant in a white middle class neighborhood with political clout but can buy up cheap land (cheap for them, not for the residents) in a struggling minority neighborhood.

This recycling center was built on Pine Street, the Bottoms’ main drag, at the height of West Oakland’s decline in the early 1980s, introducing garbage odors and rodents to the neighborhood:

In most places, having the odds stacked against you for so long would eventually mean the end of a community and its deep roots. After the last of the better heeled black residents have moved away to escape the urban blight and property prices drop far below market rates in the area, the land becomes lucrative to developers who will invest in remaking the neighborhood to attract young, upwardly mobile, predominantly white folks looking to fulfill their dream of owning a home that will gain in value as the new community takes hold and flourishes. It’s also called gentrification.

You see, nobody gets harassed, shackled, or killed, so nobody is directly responsible for the uprooting. It’s like death by a thousand cuts. We’re all just fish in a big pond, swimming in the free market waters where some of us eat and others get eaten. End of story. Right?

Wrong.

This is where the story of the Village Bottoms takes a sharp turn from the usual dead end of racial polarization, from the traps of dualistic us-versus-them thinking, where ignorance begets resentment and accusation begets guilt. And who better to break the vicious cycle, to invite us to heal and to overcome, to process without pretense, to remember without getting stuck, than the creative spirits of this world, the artists, musicians and storytellers? Come on in, and tap into your soul truth…

We have to protect the neighborhood with our artistic endeavors.

- Marcel Diallo

Marcel has a way of drawing you into his world, weaving together a web of personal stories and historic events punctuated by razor-sharp, well-placed epiphanies. One moment he will stand on a fire hydrant in front of the former Phoenix Ironworks, pointing toward the Port of Oakland that blows over all its pollution but none of the unfathomable amounts of money that are changing hands while his community is scraping together the resources to build a Center of Black Folk Life on the huge empty lot…

The next moment we’re inside the Black New World Social Aid & Pleasure Club where Marcel proudly recalls how the Bottoms community built this performance space from scratch before he launches into an obituary for black Oakland Blues and Dance Clubs that have been shut down over the years, replaced by white urban lounges.

When I sat for this portrait in 1951, West Oakland was one of the few places we as Black folks were allowed to live. Today I wouldn’t leave the Bottoms if they paid me.

- Marcel Diallo’s grandmother

The Bottoms community knows they have a long way to go, especially with the economic cards stacked against them. It is not without irony that the same sub-prime loans by predatory lenders that enabled many of them to be home owners in their own neighborhood for the first time just a few years ago took away their ancestors’ homes once again during the housing crash. Home values are way down now, but nobody is lending to low income residents.

It’s a mixed bag. On the one hand, some of the restoration projects of some of the beautiful original houses have been stalled…

But the seeds that were sown before the housing market crashed are also beginning to sprout now, both figuratively and literally. The old Pacific Cannery is now a state of the art building, offering affordable residential and retail units. Built by developer Rick Holliday who has worked very closely with Marcel and the community in making sure that locals would have first dibs at the spaces, about 20 percent of the residential and most of the retail spaces are currently occupied by African Americans.

There’s the above-mentioned Black Dot Cafe, and there’s the Juju Shop, a place to immerse yourself into the sights and scents of the African Diaspora, offering everything from books to incense and artifacts…

The night of our tour was also the grand opening of the Soul Foods Coop…

The awesome Soul Foods staff was welcoming their first customers with whole foods, healing elixirs, and a profound knowledge of nutrition and its effects on the body’s immune system. Here are Yasser and Ian serving up mushroom tea and marrow soup…

We’re trying to change people’s perception.

- Marcel Diallo

And yes, food. Up until recently there wasn’t a single grocery store in all of West Oakland, but 53 liquor stores! Talk about being at a disadvantage! How can you expect a community to survive, much less thrive, without access to real food? And this went on unnoticed and was tolerated for decades until this group of young visionaries and entrepreneurs got together and decided that in order for the existing dynamics and conditions to change they had to become the change they wished to see. There needed to be a farm in the Village Bottoms.

They spent a year cleaning up an old junk lot that Marcel had bought for a song. Then they took a trip to Wisconsin to meet with basketball player turned urban farm guru turned MacArthur Fellowship recipient Will Allen, to learn worm composting, aquaponics construction and other farm skills. Back home, they built their own aquaponics system, a method of growing crops and fish together on re-circulating raised beds. By the time we got the tour, the operation was up and running…

You get the idea. This is not a community asking for a free handout, a stereotype that often rears its head when a minority group suggests it should get more proportionate access to resources, reversing the cumulative and systemic injustices of the past and creating the semblance of a level playing field. This is also not some sort of a fad, a flaky artist commune that’s going to fade away at the first signs of hardship. It’s also not a revenge conspiracy to sabotage the hipster dream of owning an affordable home in an up and coming hood. No, this is the call of native people with a deep spiritual connection to the land and a long proud lineage and cultural history to be treated with respect, to have a say in what gets built on their sacred ground, to negotiate on equal terms.

All we want is a little Black Cultural District, like the Chinese have Chinatown, Italians have North Beach, Latinos have the Mission.

- Marcel Diallo

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Valerie Fahey just yesterday about the new Pacific Cannery lofts that are now for sale right behind the Central Station demonstrates the mental disconnect and ignorance that still shapes our public discourse:

So far, there are 163 units in the former Pacific Cannery building – about half have been sold – and Zephyr Gate’s 130-unit townhouse project. Ninety-nine below-market-rate apartments are in the works for what is known as the Prescott Oakland-Point neighborhood. The area has long been a sort of no-man’s-land. West Oakland was cut off from the rest of the city on four sides by the Oakland Army Base, West Oakland BART, the West Grand Avenue freeway entrance to the Bay Bridge and a lumbering double-decker portion of Interstate 880 called the Cypress Structure.

[bold-face mine.]

Not a single mention of Village Bottoms in the entire article. Or I guess it is mentioned once, if you count a sort of no-man’s-land as a rough translation. I guess since Ms. Fahey didn’t see any men (or women) on her way to the loft opening they must not exist.

A sampling from the comments section gives you a taste of what the Village Bottoms neighborhood is up against: (and remember, this is the “liberal” Bay Area)

- What they really need is a shooting range for the people living there. That way they might have a chance to defend themselves.

- I am sure everyone with no money will be lining up to purchase (and default) on these lovely “homes”. Assault rifle included?

- yikes.. west oakland…too close to the scum and druggies that live there.. cant imagine you will get real people there.

It is comments like these that give Marcel Diallo’s invitation to come to West Oakland and get a taste of what it means to be black a deeper layer of texture and meaning. It is as if he understands that in order to heal we have to feel both the pain and the joy, in order to evolve we have to remember, and in order to be human we have to experience someone else’s humanity. Sometimes the strongest remedies have a bitter taste, but they boost our immune system so that we may once again taste the sweetness.

We are the black dot, but we need that concentric circle of allies surrounding us.

- Marcel Diallo

I, for one, feel extremely fortunate to have been connected with and touched by the fighting and healing spirit of the Village Bottoms. I see their deep love for and connection with their ancestral land as a great benefit to all of us, and by supporting and nurturing their stewardship of roots both physical and cultural we are helping to strengthen and realign one small strand in the fragile web of life we all depend on.

As Marcel says, “We all need an African American Cultural District, just as we all need a Chinatown.” We also all need urban communities based on human needs and “access by proximity” rather than cities built in the current pattern of automobile driven excess, wasteful consumption and the destruction of the biosphere. The Village Bottoms represents a great opportunity to use a boundless well of human passion, energy and creativity not only to overcome a history of injustices and the mental barriers associated with it, but to be a model city of the future in which walking, bicycling and gardening are the natural result of a healthy, caring and interconnected community.

As you have read and seen, this is not a Utopian fantasy or a drawing in a sketchbook. With the help of Ecocity Builders, the vision has been laid out and a plan been drafted. Now it is up to the powers that be, both developers and the City of Oakland, to come through with the political and economic will to invest from the bottoms up to lay the foundation for the city of the future. In the meantime, it is up to us to keep breaking down stereotypes and healing old wounds. So come on down to the Bottoms for a cup of tea and a chat — you might end up learning about fish ponds and worm bins!

========

photos by Debra Baida & Sven Eberlein

Resources:

More photos from the Village Bottoms Tour

Part I & II of my Village Bottoms series:
From the Bottoms Up
Village Bottoms, Vol. 2: Don’t save us, work with us!

Book: Village Bottoms Cultural District
By Ecocity Builders and Village Bottoms Neighborhood

Marcel Diallo to speak at the 2009 Ecocity World Summit in Istanbul

Please consider supporting projects like the Village Bottoms Farm and the Soul Food Coop by becoming a Friend of the Black New World

November thought

The shortest route isn’t always the best one.

350: The Mind Searches for what the Heart Knows

Now that the big activities and festivities surrounding climate action day are over and everyone is back to their daily routines, I want to take a moment to reflect on the 350 theme. I’ve had a somewhat mixed relationship with the whole idea, because I wasn’t sure whether a mere number could really inspire the kind of shift in consciousness that is needed for humans to voluntarily “ramp down” our massively fossil fueled lifestyles.

Looking at the photos from all over the world I must say I was positively surprised by the creative outpouring these three little digits unleashed. It is a true testament to our human spirit and imagination that so many people from all over the world were able to perform magic tricks armed with nothing more than a dry mathematical calculation. However, it’s one thing to imagine a general, almost ethereal 350ness, the place we’d all like to be in a global collective sort of way, but the question now becomes: Can you and I imagine a different kind of life?

Climbers display a 350 flag atop Antarctica’s highest peak.

I know that a big part of the 350 campaign is to raise awareness about the severity of the climate crisis and pressure global leaders to adopt sweeping agreements with tough mandates to reduce carbon levels at the climate conference in Copenhagen. I know it’s not so much about specific action but more of a collective understanding that something needs to be done. I understand that we live in a world of short attention spans where a witty and sexy youtube video can reach and affect more people than any investigative journalism or deep think piece ever could.

But does it really change US? Does it make us more amenable to changing the way we relate to one another and to the fragile ecosystem within which we live? Does it make each of us scale down on our consumption or is it just a Disneyesque projection of a collective feelgood story and hope for better days while individually we go about in our business as usual?

While I positively believe in the power of a collective shift in consciousness, I am concerned that by making a very ethereal, almost intangible number the actual object of our intended shift we may be leading ourselves into a false sense of identity, an archetype of sorts that represents us all and yet speaks to nobody directly. In my mind, the 350 concept feels like the attractive Supermodel herself, who we all love to watch, adore, celebrate, and project all our hopes and dreams onto, but it’s the image of her we’re attracted to rather than the actual person. Likewise, I worry that by putting so much of our hopes and dreams and buzz into this Supernumber 350, we may be tempted to diminish or overlook the fact that to actually get to that number we are all going to have to make drastic changes in our everyday lives.

There are those who believe that we can transition into a low carbon/fossil fuel economy by the sheer brilliance of yet unknown technological advances, that we can all drive cars, have new gadgets every year and live our lives in the fast lane, but do it all on renewable energy and recycled materials. The hope is that if only we can get our governments and industries to invest in the right kind of energy models, then We the People can go about our business as usual. But I just don’t think it’s possible for us to continue to live so high on the hog: Moving, feeding and supercharging ourselves on millions of years of borrowed energy stored in fossil fuels has not only depleted 50% of those fuels in just 100 years, but has wound us humans up like energizer bunnies, plowing over a very fragile and life-sustaining ecosystem in our thirst for ever more. So even if we were able to replace fossil fuels with solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, or whatever else to keep ourselves supercharged we would still be consuming the planet and ourselves to oblivion.

It’s certainly understandable that we would think we could keep our current growth pattern or imagine it to last indefinitely, simply because it’s never been any different during any of our lifetimes. The power of our imagination is unlimited, but the underlying root cause of this and where I think the movement needs to put much more work and thought into is the inherent fear of change, of slowing down. We are all so indoctrinated in the capitalistic myth of perpetual growth and instant gratification, that the idea of slowing down or living a more simple life has become this most horrifying thought in our head. We’ve become so accustomed to ever more comfort and convenience that we’re psychologically conditioned to see anything that could be construed as primitive as a threat to our well being and happiness.

Some say that the unsustainable system of capitalism must change in order for us and the world to change. In my view, this can only happen when a growing number of individuals is willing to look deeper into our own relationship with perpetual growth and our real and imagined fear of scarcity. Capitalism and its preachers have been very adept at planting this seed of fear in our collective consciousness, equating anything that’s not growth or consumption-oriented with scarcity and unhappiness. This is where I think the biggest challenge as well as the biggest opportunity lies in the struggle not only to reduce greenhouse gases, but to create the foundation for humanity to live in balance within the web of life on Planet Earth. Talking about individual sacrifice has in many ways been the third rail of the climate change debate, but it doesn’t need to be, and I’ll tell you why.

By not talking openly and enough about the need for a change in our lifestyle we’re tacitly playing into the capitalistic storyline that if we’re not constantly consuming and pampered by convenience we’re sacrificing something, falling short. For example, we’ve totally conceded the conventional wisdom that faster is always better, based on utilitarian measurement only. Thus it feels like a sacrifice to trade in a five minute car ride to the grocery store for a half hour walk. After all, time is money, and we’ve gotten ourselves into a mental space where we’ve come to believe that that’s all it is. We don’t take into account that we get a nice workout, might run into a friend or smell the spring blossoms of a neighbor’s tree on our walk. It’s almost as if these more sublime benefits to our physical and spiritual well being are being stored away in capitalism’s deep chamber of externalities, along with things like pollution, dwindling biodiversity, or resource depletion.

The myth of material happiness and its implied fear of perceived scarcity is one of the biggest hurdles we’re facing in our quest to get to 350ppm, or that which it stands for, life in balance with the earth’s ecosystem. So to me, the most meaningful way to get past that hurdle is to change the storyline that we can’t live happy and fulfilling lives without constant growth and acceleration. I think it’s time to speak to people directly about simplifying their lives, about slowing down and making more with less. But rather than talking about it in terms of sacrifice and shortage, or of replacing the fear of scarcity with the fear of doom, we need to shoot straight for the soul truth of the matter that living a simple life can be full of happiness, fulfillment, and dare I say, wealth.

Let me give you some examples: You can talk all day about industrialized agriculture and its role in producing unprecedented amounts of CO2, but it’s not until someone has sunk their teeth into a juicy organic heirloom apple or dug their hands into the soil that they are personally connected to changing that dynamic. You can bring attention to automobile emissions, but it’s not until someone has worked up a sweat and lost a few pounds while riding their bike to work that they understand the fun of low carbon living. You can bemoan the wastefulness of buying plastic chotchkies from China, but it’s not until someone receives a gift handmade from an old pallet that they see the beauty of reusing what’s already there. You may say that this won’t matter in the grand scheme, but these are the acts that pull intellectual exercises and theoretical models and propositions right down into our core where we can feel it. Because in the grandest of all schemes, the mind searches for what the heart knows.

I know these are all things that many folks in the 350 campaign are aware of and support, it’s all part of a whole range of things that need to go hand in hand in this epic shift we’re all envisioning. If Supermodels taking their clothes off and mountain climbers holding up signs is going to pique the curiosity of a few new folks to find out more about the issue, I’m all for it. But we’ve got to be careful not to let the message itself take up so much space that it obscures that which it is trying to call attention to: We’ve got to scale down! (and it’ll feel good, like relief from a big headache, or a breath of fresh air) This will only be a successful campaign if the discussion can evolve from a generalized We must get to 350! to This is what you can do to live a happier and healthier life in balance with the planet. After all, Mother Earth doesn’t care what label we put on the bottle, only what we put in it.

Interview with visionary bassist Kai Eckhardt

If people have a sense of responsibility for the outcome of a situation, it will lift up the human race to deal with everything, even global warming. – Kai Eckhardt

Last weekend visionary musician Kai Eckhardt presented/performed at the 2009 Bioneers Conference. Perfect time to dig up excerpts from an interview I did with him in 2005, during a period of great darkness. In it, he speaks of the power within each of us to use creative expression and our imagination to change the social and psychological dynamics that have put our planet in such peril. Looking back at that time it’s astonishing how far we have come in four short years and it gives me hope that with our reawakened collective energy for peace, collaboration, and justice, we will continue to transform toward a more sustainable world, both physically and spiritually.

From the Bioneers program:

Kai Eckhardt is a renowned musical figure. A Liberian/German bassist, his illustrious three-decade career has seen him collaborate with many of our era’s greatest musicians. Currently a professor at the Jazz School Institute in Berkeley, California, Kai teaches workshops worldwide, and is also very active in social justice and environmental issues. He has helped put together benefits for the homeless, rallies for green collar jobs, poetry projects featuring socially conscious messages and is a proud member of Greenforall.org.

If the blues comes I tell myself: Pain is also energy. Use it! – Kai Eckhardt

Sven Eberlein: In your biography it is mentioned that the last few years you’ve been more and more interested in art as transformation, as a vehicle that can overcome all the divisions between humans. Do you feel like we are all in this together, on a level that’s beyond our physical realities?

Kai Eckhardt: Yes, I really believe so. John McLaughlin, for instance, believes if there is a trio on stage, this trio has to connect first as a unit, and then draw people and their intentions in. Then people will connect to that and have a positive experience to a degree where they can walk home from a concert and have an added sense of problem-solving skills and feeling at ease with who they are. The purpose of art is to provide a healing environment for humanity in which people can breathe and feel save.

SE: Does music have the power to bring about political change and do you think musicians should speak out against injustices or just let their instruments speak?

KE: This goes back to art and social change, the responsibility of the artist to be at the center of the paradigm shift. How can we have a good time as people, despite the fact that some of us are black or white, some of us are Indian, some are poor, some of us healthy, some have a disease, some have money, some don’t, and how do we get over these negative emotions that we project onto each other. I believe that if we could harmonize our energy as human beings, being a collective force, you would see an amazing and beautiful transformation, the alleviation of a lot of pain that would lift people up. What is happening is that we’re directing negativity against each other, we’re blaming each other for our own misery. It happens on a family level, on a community level, and on a national and international level. It’s energy directed toward its own center, unable to flow. I always look at the human race as being an individual organism. One creative and powerful approach to solving these problems is to initiate dialogue between people of different backgrounds through the use of images. This is an anonymous way of people relating their experiences to each other. For example, for our upcoming Garaj Mahal shows a screen will be set up so the band as well as the audience can see the it. We sent an email to our fans: “We want to know your feelings about the new year, and can you represent your feelings in one image.”  Within one week 200 jpgs came in…

SE: Like art, collages and photos…?

KE: Yes. This is a simple initial step for people to relate their emotions without any censorship. Because it’s anonymous it goes right back to that collective ritual of purging yourself from the things you struggle with on the inside by putting them on the outside. So while you’re trancing out in the audience you’re actually looking at yourself and you also get the chance to see what’s going on in other people’s heads. If you consider this as Step One, the second step would be for people to draw themselves using these images. For instance, you could take a group of people coming together to solve a community problem and say “let’s set up an almost constitutional set of topics related to the pictures shown”. One of them could be “What is my worst problem right now.” Now that would be a very intimate picture, right? Since it’s anonymous you can represent your picture without revealing your identity. You can have that series followed by “What are our blessings, what are the things we can be proud of?” Then the next image could be “What is the first step toward a solution?” Again, can you see the collective subconscious at work here?

SE: It’s like working with archetypes.

KE: Yes, exactly! You call up the archetypes through the event. You can say “Represent yourself in three pictures – where you came from, where you are now, and where you are going.” That would be a way people could get to know each other, and I have the feeling that even though people in the room don’t know who put up what image, the emotions they emanate while they see their pictures are still the same as if they were talking to somebody. That’s the value of it, this release. If somebody could create an event and do it really specifically, intelligently and sensitive to the human condition, one could take that event as a type of precursor to a serious debate where people come together to really solve problems. This is something I learned from the Africans. When the Africans have a serious problem they call all the spirits that know about the problem. In rituals they have shamans dress up as the problem who act out the problem in this wild way, and everybody goes “yeah, and this husband did this to that woman, and here comes this entity.” They all get emotionally worked up, and then finally they sit down and talk. Western culture did away with that. It said “let’s just elect a few people and have them be the representatives of our problems. Once we elect them they can do whatever they want.”

SE: And we approach music in the same way, we create this spectacle where we put musicians up on a big stage and say: “Entertain us!”

KE: Yes, and I don’t want that. I want to do everything I can to dissolve that. I want people to come to a show thinking “I am making this show happen tonight, I am coming with my own energy and I am going to make it happen.” If people have that kind of confidence and that kind of sense of responsibility for the outcome of the situation, it will lift up the human race to deal with everything, even global warming. Even if there is such a thing as the apocalypse, you know the end times, if we reach that threshold with integrity there will be that sense of “wow, we are all together now.”

SE: Seems like there is a big wave of people who don’t believe in that dogma anymore and realize that we’re just accumulating karma, all the stuff that’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan, it’ll just keep coming. Our leaders always speak of power as in who has the biggest weapon, but what about the power of wisdom?

KE: I feel like not everyone is ready for it, nor can I tell a mother or father what to do or think if their child is killed, because I know that’s my worst nightmare. In a way you have to be careful to not be a snob either, as in “oh, you don’t have the power to forgive.” No, I have to say “this is real injury”, and so the harder the situation that we’re in as people, the greater the opportunity to show greatness. It’s easy for me to be cool and balanced if I have more money than I need and all my bills are paid every month. But if I’m struggling to survive, incurring debt, and my family is sick and I’m burned out from the road, in that state of mind my world shrinks and I am overpowered by a strong life-negating emotional undercurrent. I react instead of responding carefully. This is universal and every human will feel this undertow in a stressful situation. There is a pull toward entropy coming from the day to day experience of what seems hopeless. To overcome the chronic effect of long-term struggle is the top challenge. Well to do people with a cushioned lifestyle for the most part don’t understand that.  This is one of the reasons people in challenged positions feel humiliated and insulted by the condescending attitudes of the rich, the privileged, the often careless, and the mostly clueless. Nevertheless we all have the power to move away from the downward spiral and to use the power of our consciously directed will in order to defeat misery. And before we can do that we have to assume responsibility and admit to mistakes of the past. After that we have to go through the labor of actually defining what we really want. Then we have to create a sensible plan to pre-empt chronic problems, eventually overcoming them. No plan — no escape from Negativeland. I have been there more than once and I have learned my lesson. Thankfully I am blessed with an amazing wife and wonderful children. Nowadays despair is not an option. I owe it to them. If the blues comes I tell myself: Pain is also energy. Use it! I now use that energy to create something productive. A new piece of music, a poem, an action plan, an act of courage. A meaningful gesture, an ordeal, a sacrifice. I have tried it. It works.

SE: If you had to describe your role in this world in just a few words, what would it be?

KE: To be a decent person, a decent father, a decent husband, a decent musician in the eyes of eternity. To be a refined mirror that reflects the boundless infinity of the universe in which I live and die. To never stop evolving in life, to be a great provider, to be at peace with myself regardless of the circumstances, to have fun. To be loving and to inspire faith in humanity beyond the call of duty.

It was 20 years ago today: 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake

This is my “where were you” story I had fun with a few years ago…

Something warm and viscous was dripping down the back of my pants. I was on my hands and knees, facing a pair of alert Japanese eyes and the frantic stares of a Moroccan, an Argentinean and a Texan, all hunched under the table like cats under a couch after narrowly escaping the neighbor’s dog. The floor seemed to be breathing, and I felt like I was swimming in one of the artificial wave spas back in my native Germany. After another moment of bathing in this illusion the shaking got more violent and my body retreated into its fetal position. Looking at various kinds of hairballs glued to chunks of Russet potatoes scattered around the floor, the source of the substance trickling down my rear-end suddenly became agonizingly clear: The bowl of chicken gravy on the table!

Just about two years earlier, in September of 1987, I had stepped off the plane for the biggest adventure of my life: One-way ticket from Germany to the San Francisco Bay Area, ready for a life of peace, sunshine and academic advancement at Cal State Hayward. It hadn’t taken long to figure out that it wasn’t Harvard, but this place was much better, anyway. Here at Carlos Bee Hall, the college dormitory, everything was just a bit too quirky to make you long for ivy-league credentials. There was Kenichi, my Japanese roommate who didn’t speak a word of English, Caco, a gay Moroccan who could recite Shakespeare backwards, Mauritio, an Argentinean bodybuilder who dropped the soda machine on his leg while trying to scam a free Coke, and Fish, a Texan Dead Head and master of the Defender video game.

The five of us, fresh off our respective boats and planes, had become the most unlikely of friends in just a short time. Before long, we had established our little ritual of meeting at the Cafeteria round-table for early dinner. October 17th, 1989 was a special day for me because it was Tuesday and that meant we would be indulging in all-you-can-eat fried chicken and mashed potatoes. We had just sat down to discuss the thickness of American gravy in our even thicker foreign accents, when the rumbling began. Somebody screamed “Uuthquake,” and within seconds the whole motley crew of college freshmen and international vagabonds was ducking for cover.

Hunkered under our table, we all looked at Kenichi, whose Japanese origin emanated the confidence of an experienced earthquake veteran. “No wurry, no wurry!” he stuttered, elegantly sewing together two samples of his ten word vocabulary. The rest of us were staring at each other on the floor, not sure whether to be worried or amused. The closest one will come to experiencing an earthquake in Morocco, Argentina or Germany is the shock-wave that stomping soccer fans release to celebrate their team’s winning goal, but this was an entirely different ballpark. After a few more seconds of unrelenting tremors, my whole life flashed by me like a highlight reel, with the closing credits drenched in mashed potatoes and chicken gravy.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” I heard myself whisper, as I was backing my saucy behind from underneath the cafeteria table. Then my survival instinct took over and I started hurdling over fallen chairs and salad-bar wasteland toward the door. On my way through the hallway I stumbled by a Namibian exchange student on the verge of breaking Fish’s Defender record. He had battled himself into such ecstasy that he probably thought this was all part of the game. When I finally reached the front door, the shaking had stopped and Carlos Bee Hall stood proud and peaceful against the setting sun of a mild October evening.

Sex and the Eco-City

That’s the title of an article in this week’s Time Magazine. Being a great aficionado of all things simple and eco as it relates to cities (walking, bicycling, urban gardens, farms, public transit, etc), I was instantly aroused by such a promising title. Alas, the story is “only” about green sex toys.

As the green movement makes its way into the bedroom, low lighting is a must–to conserve electricity–but so are vegan condoms, organic lubricants and hand-cranked vibrators.

Not to take anything away from vegan condoms, but my sexual appetite is so much larger than that: I lust for visionary urban design that creates greater intimacy, attractive architecture in sync with natural rhythms, and low carbon ejaculation.

Sure, I want organic lubricant, but the thought of living in this building gets my juices flowing naturally:

Hundertwasserhaus, Vienna, Austria

I mean, I’m all about natural family-planning (NFP), but the thought of natural city-planning is simply irresistible:

Freiburg has built its economy and reputation on being “Germany’s greenest city.” The 900 year old city decided in the 1970’s to reject nuclear power, and instead developed its own solar industry. In 1996, the city passed a resolution to reduce CO2 emissions to 25% below 1992 levels by 2010. In 1997, Solar-Fabrik decided to build a nonpolluting solar manufacturing plant in the city. Today the city draws tourists from around the world, who come to check out its super progressive architecture, city planning, educational institutions and industry and R&D. From Treehugger

I don’t know about you but I love getting intimate right in the street…

And I’m just full of love when my body is moving and I’m surrounded by joyful masses in the middle of a city park…

I think birth control is great, and if biodegradable lambskin condoms find new takers and stabilize world population, I’m all for it. But if we seriously want to reduce our carbon footprint, we have to re-envision our cities…

Drawing by Richard Register

Cuz you know, that organic massage oil and those whips made of recycled inner tubes don’t quite get me as excited as the thought of doing it in a place like this:

So, if sex in the eco-city sounds like something worth working toward, check out groups like Ecocity Builders, Livable Cities, or Walkscore.

PS: And just to show that this is not only a male fantasy, this one came in from Kirstin Miller, Director of Ecocity Builders:

Ur, NOT sexy

…i’m not feeling anything (except completely bored)…

better!

OMG!