These are the days of the garden of good eating. Every night: fresh Asian greens, Hakurei turnips, and Easter egg radishes along with salads. I've concocted a new kind of salad mix lately, drawing basically on an array of available lettuce greens, herbs, and baby spinach, which actually isn't young at all but is the result of a plant that survived last winter's snow and this spring's mud as well as a transplant from one bed to the other. I wasn't sure whether the plant that had survived the winter could survive a transplant and by the time the plant proved itself worthy, it had begun to flower and bolt. So I've been clipping off the top and selecting a handful of small tender dark green leaves in hopes that the plant will experience yet another renewal and start to bush out into a full spinach plant once again.
In the meantime, the leaves pair well with the remnants of another soon-to-bolt lettuce green. This one is a kind of hybrid romaine plant that came from a set of seedlings that one of the Saratoga Farmers Market vendors gifted us with back in March. Like the spinach, the romaine survived the winter but faced an uncertain future when its leaves began to wilt in the container in which I was growing it around mid-April. I moved it into sun-warmed soil alongside a series of baby bok choy and tatsoi seedlings that seemed to be outgrowing their starter pots faster than I'd envisioned. Then, the spring warmth returned to a glum damp grey chill, and I thought I'd lost the whole lot. Hoping to salvage at least some of the plants, I clipped baby leaves off the bok choy and tatsoi in early May, then experienced the delight of watching the plants bounce to life. We ate from that garden nearly every other night for about a month, until the plants produced their final leaves and found relief in going to seed. By then, there was a healthy crop of arugula, basil, and mint growing in other beds, all of which combined with the struggling spinach and lettuce to produce salads that are a myriad shades of green and super-crisp.
As I've been scavenging and salvaging salad leaves from the gardens, I've also been trying to clear my refrigerator of various condiments that have found a home in the shelves over the past couple of years. Happily, the refrigerated shelf life for foods like miso paste, Worchestershire sauce, mustard, and Bragg's amino acids are fairly long. A little bit of label reading, common sense and creativity have led to some new salad dressings.
I never was very good at creating salad dressings from the basic balsamic vinegar and olive oil base. The vinegar always seemed too sharp and softening its edge with the smooth flavor of the oil seemed to blunt the fresh crispness of the salad greens I craved. My understandings of dressings improved, however, after I consulted with a coffee vendor at the Saratoga Farmers Market who encouraged me to go light on the oil and soften the balsamic vinegar's sharpness with honey, maple syrup, and a bit of fresh lemon. Another farmer was selling greenhouse-grown lemons at the time so I gave it a try and enjoyed it. Over the past few months, I've broken the dressing down into a formula that consists roughly of 1) an oil; 2) an acidic ingredient; and 3) some flavoring. With that formula in mind, I've created one dressing that blends miso paste, water, lemon juice, and sesame oil; another that mixes the olive oil with Worchestershire sauce; and a third that retains the basic olive oil and balsamic combo alongside the juices that spill out of freshly cut tomato slices and a few crushed leaves of dried stevia.
The challenge with these combinations is that they are un-measurable. This means that the quantities of each ingredient vary as do the combinations of items that get tossed into the salad spinner for a cold water cleansing and fast dry. I think, however, that the uncertainty works as long as the leaves stay small and green.
In the meantime, a new crop of lettuce has started to flourish, in the spaces where the first round of baby bok choi and tatsoi initially reigned.
Thursday, June 26, 2014
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
The Alleged Simplicity of Food
Tonight I made a white-bean hummus, using dried European Soldier beans (a large variety), garlic scapes, cumin, lemon juice, and olive oil. Once the beans were softened through a one-hour soak and low boil, the entire preparation took about five minutes. My husband and I sampled the mixture as it was whirring in the food processor, and after I had scooped about 95 percent of it into a storage dish for refrigeration, we enjoyed what was left in the mixing bowl. So flavorful. So easy. Just a few minutes, and it's done.
Only it's not quite as simple as that.
The beans came from our backyard garden, as did the garlic scapes. Although I can't claim credit for producing the cumin, lemon juice, or oil, working the land as we have for the past three years makes me acutely conscious of the fact that these items, too, were produced by someone somewhere on this planet initially. In many ways, the flavor of the hummus was enhanced by the fact that we grew its main ingredient ourselves. But as I was marveling at how quickly the preparation came together I started to remember the labor that went into producing that main ingredient: the beans.
From that perspective, the main ingredient for the hummus took about a year to migrate from farm field to fork. We planted our dried bean crop in late June of 2013, and spent a summer watering the plants, weeding the spaces in and around them, beating back a small bug infestation, and building a solar-powered electric fence around all of our fields to deter the area deer. When we harvested our dried beans in October, we were ecstatic. Our harvest filled two empty chicken feed sacks, each of which had held 100 pounds of grain.
A mistake in planning meant we spent the winter, spring, and now the early summer slowly husking all of those beans. To this date, a four-foot-tall garden bin still remains half-full of unhusked beans. With husking came sorting, and as spring advanced toward summer, we found ourselves in the midst of the next garden season. Quickly, we chose about 100 black turtle beans, 100 Vermont cranberry beans, and 100 European Soldiers to plant for this year, along with some pinto beans we'd acquired from a local farmer and some garbanzo beans from an Indian grocery store that we decided to try planting on a whim.
This year's beans have sprouted and are growing fast. Still, there's more work to be done: more weeding, more fertilizing, more harvesting, and husking.
I raise these points because growing one's own food increasingly calls attention to the value of food itself. Knowing what it takes to grow a meal -- or even a simple snack like hummus -- has made me increasingly conscious of how, when, why, and how much I actually eat. I find myself treasuring every bite, and feel compelled not to let anything we cook -- or others cook for us -- go to waste. This consciousness of food seems better than the best diet because you're always eating just enough to satisfy you and you're always appreciating every bite.
It surprises me increasingly that this simple level of awareness disappears in a society of gluttony, eating that is so fast-paced that it seems to be more like scarfing, and over-indulgence. That, of course, applies to the "haves" side of the spectrum, and does not include the tens of millions who suffer chronic hunger because the means to produce what one needs simply does not exist for them. These conditions cause me to wonder how we grew so alienated from the means of production of food in the first place, and what it is about modernity that enables us so gleefully to accept those circumstances.
The garden that grows in our backyard has expanded over three years. It provides nearly all of the vegetables we eat year-round, eggs, and, as of this year, strawberries and chicken. We are hoping to grow other berries, revitalize the apple trees, raise bees for honey, and over time other animals for meat. While we are far from poor, we live with a small bank account: We stretch the bi-weekly paycheck hard to pay our bills and count many things that friends and colleagues take for granted as rare luxuries. Still, in our home, there's always enough to eat and usually some to share. While we try to eat mindfully, we do not go hungry. That equation of low cash and high yields seems so simple.
Yet, it's one that is based in a ever-evolving understanding of value. I thought of that as I scraped the mixing bowl in which I'd made the hummus striving to not let any of it go to waste. A lot of hours of planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, and husking went into that hummus. The least we could do was slowly savor every bite.
Sunday, June 15, 2014
A New Normal
I ended the month of May with a short piece about being "on call" as my mother entered the hospital near the first of the month and remained there for much of the time. As she was treated for a stomach infection via intravenous tubes, antibiotics, an emergency surgery, drainage tubes, and CT scans, I was in a position of waiting: Waiting for phone calls that would give me updates on her health, checking in with my father on how well he was coping, trading e-mails and texts and phone calls with my sisters as we grappled with an unfamiliar situation, trying to figure out what next to do. Amid that all, I tried to rise up to the challenge of trying to go on with life as usual -- going to the office, checking up on students, reading and commenting on assignments, preparing to attend conferences, just generally trying to keep up with meetings, projects, and other commitments, and continuing to try and write and do workouts at the same time.
As May spilled into June, I found myself in Muncie, staying for ten days with my parents in their new retirement community townhouse and adjusting to a life that saw my mother using a walker to move around the house, relying upon others to provide her with food instead of insisting on preparing elaborate meals for others, asking for help with an array of tasks, and generally trying to do as much as she could on her own.
The move to the townhouse had occurred the previous fall. It was a smart move on the part of my parents -- providing them with living quarters that were still quite spacious and suited for independent life but smaller and more manageable than the homes in which they had lived for the prior four decades. I remember my father telling me as I helped them sort through their possessions and make decisions about what to keep and what to pass on to others that he felt as if he and my mother would be quite happy there. He particularly liked the backyard, which featured a pleasant patio, a wooden pergola, and a small gurgling fountain amid a series of small, manageable gardens.
In June, the pleasant air of the townhouse seemed to have been put into disarray: four-foot tall dandelions had taken over the gardens, along with a series of other weeds. The fountain was shut down, and the patio and pergola sat alone in the pleasant sun receiving very little use.
I decided that bringing order back to the backyard might be one way to re-establish a sense of normalcy, for my father particularly, as my mother recovered. Over their mild protests, I went out and uprooted the overgrown dandelions, and filled a thirty-gallon garbage bag with weeds. I re-located some solar lamps, and my sister brought several potted tomatoes, summer squash, peppers and herbs that she and I proceeded to plant in the backyard. As life returned to the yard, it seemed to perk up my father's spirits, as well. On the day before I left, he went to the grocery store purportedly to pick up some daily staples. After he returned, I spotted something bright hanging from the pergola: a basket of hanging flowers. He had purchased two of the baskets to enliven the space.
Two days after I left, my mother returned to the hospital for a follow-up CT scan. All of us -- my father, my sisters, close friends and other relatives, and even her doctors -- hoped and expected the image to reveal a clean bill of health because, it seemed, that she was recovering so well. She had been gaining strength and weight with each passing day, and just before I left, had been able not only to cut a few vegetables on a chopping board but also to check on a meal-in-progress, stirring the pot and offering an assessment with her expert eyes of what more needed to be done to complete the preparations.
Instead the scan reveal a recurrence of infection. She was re-admitted to the hospital. New tubes were inserted, and more antibiotics were given. A series of new tests were administered, as well.
I received this news while on a work trip, via the same technologies that had dominated May: text messages, e-mails, and phone calls between myself and my sisters. Once again, I found myself watching my phone, waiting, and wondering what was the best thing to do.
I am not a weepy emotional person. I do love and care for my parents and my sisters, but I do not demonstrate these sentiments very often in the warm-and-fuzzy Hallmark-esque kinds of ways that celebrations of such things as Father's Day and Mother's Day seem to demand. I also realize that life needs to continue, that the ailments of one individual will only grow worse if those around her fall ill, as well. And so I enter the week before the Summer Solstice with a sense that any aspect of daily life is now subject to change. I can make plans, set goals, and establish deadlines as I have always done. But I cannot guarantee that those plans, goals, and deadlines will be met. Perhaps this is the new normal that all of us with aging parents and/or ailing relatives must ultimately confront.
As May spilled into June, I found myself in Muncie, staying for ten days with my parents in their new retirement community townhouse and adjusting to a life that saw my mother using a walker to move around the house, relying upon others to provide her with food instead of insisting on preparing elaborate meals for others, asking for help with an array of tasks, and generally trying to do as much as she could on her own.
The move to the townhouse had occurred the previous fall. It was a smart move on the part of my parents -- providing them with living quarters that were still quite spacious and suited for independent life but smaller and more manageable than the homes in which they had lived for the prior four decades. I remember my father telling me as I helped them sort through their possessions and make decisions about what to keep and what to pass on to others that he felt as if he and my mother would be quite happy there. He particularly liked the backyard, which featured a pleasant patio, a wooden pergola, and a small gurgling fountain amid a series of small, manageable gardens.
In June, the pleasant air of the townhouse seemed to have been put into disarray: four-foot tall dandelions had taken over the gardens, along with a series of other weeds. The fountain was shut down, and the patio and pergola sat alone in the pleasant sun receiving very little use.
I decided that bringing order back to the backyard might be one way to re-establish a sense of normalcy, for my father particularly, as my mother recovered. Over their mild protests, I went out and uprooted the overgrown dandelions, and filled a thirty-gallon garbage bag with weeds. I re-located some solar lamps, and my sister brought several potted tomatoes, summer squash, peppers and herbs that she and I proceeded to plant in the backyard. As life returned to the yard, it seemed to perk up my father's spirits, as well. On the day before I left, he went to the grocery store purportedly to pick up some daily staples. After he returned, I spotted something bright hanging from the pergola: a basket of hanging flowers. He had purchased two of the baskets to enliven the space.
Two days after I left, my mother returned to the hospital for a follow-up CT scan. All of us -- my father, my sisters, close friends and other relatives, and even her doctors -- hoped and expected the image to reveal a clean bill of health because, it seemed, that she was recovering so well. She had been gaining strength and weight with each passing day, and just before I left, had been able not only to cut a few vegetables on a chopping board but also to check on a meal-in-progress, stirring the pot and offering an assessment with her expert eyes of what more needed to be done to complete the preparations.
Instead the scan reveal a recurrence of infection. She was re-admitted to the hospital. New tubes were inserted, and more antibiotics were given. A series of new tests were administered, as well.
I received this news while on a work trip, via the same technologies that had dominated May: text messages, e-mails, and phone calls between myself and my sisters. Once again, I found myself watching my phone, waiting, and wondering what was the best thing to do.
I am not a weepy emotional person. I do love and care for my parents and my sisters, but I do not demonstrate these sentiments very often in the warm-and-fuzzy Hallmark-esque kinds of ways that celebrations of such things as Father's Day and Mother's Day seem to demand. I also realize that life needs to continue, that the ailments of one individual will only grow worse if those around her fall ill, as well. And so I enter the week before the Summer Solstice with a sense that any aspect of daily life is now subject to change. I can make plans, set goals, and establish deadlines as I have always done. But I cannot guarantee that those plans, goals, and deadlines will be met. Perhaps this is the new normal that all of us with aging parents and/or ailing relatives must ultimately confront.
Saturday, May 31, 2014
On Call
The month of May ends in a similar state of mind with which it began: being on call, on call, waiting for phone messages, e-mails, texts.
On call started May 2 when my phone rang during a union delegate assembly meeting. It was my sister.
I silenced the phone, and sent her a text: "In a meeting. Is this urgent?"
My sisters and I don't usually just call each other out of the blue. We talk via e-mail and Facebook, and usually if we're going to talk, arrange for a convenient time to call.
"Nothing real urgent," my sister texted back. "Mom's in the hospital. Doctor sent her in."
That felt urgent. Our mother had had a planned surgery a couple of months earlier, which she was healing well from. But she had been suffering flu-like symptoms for the past week or so. Still, the flu is the flu. A hospital check-in seemed to create a state of high alert.
Of the three of us, this particular sister lived the closest to my parents. She could drive up in two and a half hours.
"Are you going up?"
"No, and I don't really know what to do," she replied. "I can drop everything and go with a moment's notice. But when do I do that? When do I make that choice?"
"I think when you're asked," I replied. "At their age, it seems to make sense of all of us to be on call."
And so the waiting began. The three of us called our parents repeatedly on Saturday and Sunday, and text-messaged each other, as well.
Things seemed stable but uncertain.
Early Monday morning, my sister called again. "I just spoke to mom. There's an infection that's spread to her stomach. She asked me to come. I'm leaving now."
My husband and I quickly made plans to go, as soon as we were asked. We did some hasty texting and made arrangements for someone to take care of our farm animals and house chickens, if necessary.
An emergency surgery took place, followed by a few days in intensive care. My sister and my father were there, as were several close friends of the family.
The phone calls, e-mails, and text-messages continued. "Would you like me to come?" "For how long?" "When?"
The answers were always affirmative and non-committal. "Yes, when she gets home." "She will need help." But when and what kind of help were unknown.
I canceled commitments, and then rescheduled them. I tried to continue with life, as normal. But I was "on call" now, and prepared to drop everything.
Friends and colleagues were solicitous, supportive, and kind. A whole universe of people -- some who were very close to my mother as well as some who had never met her because they barely knew me -- began sending her prayers, healing energies, and other well wishes for a speedy recovery.
Other friends set up cooking and visit schedules to ensure that both she and my father were cared for. They helped reassure my sisters and me that my father was holding up okay and was being taken care of, and that there wasn't much anyone outside of the medical team could do for my mother until she left the hospital. Their logic made sense, and as the days stretched into first one and then two and then nearly three weeks, the sense of alert eased. We were still on call, but with less urgency than before.
With the end of May looming and summer plans and decisions to make facing us, my sisters and I compared schedules and notes and made a plan. One of us would go around the time she was expected to be released from the hospital. I would go for eleven days in early June, in between a conference and a work commitment, and the third one -- the one who lived closest -- would fill in the gaps, as needed. Our plans ended up coinciding with my mother's recovery fairly well. She left the hospital on the second to last Thursday in May and the first sister arrived the next day.
Now, it is the last day of May, and I am on my way. I have come to realize that I am not traveling alone. I am traveling with the stress and tension of being on call, and I am realizing that that stress has been cutting into my energy reserves. While my sister was with my parents last week, I did not call home quite as often. I did not call on the day she left or the day after.
Last night, as I was preparing for bed, I saw that I had received a voice mail. From my father. He sounded tired. He wanted to know how I was doing.
I sent back a text saying I was find, had come home from the conference and would call in the morning.
On call started May 2 when my phone rang during a union delegate assembly meeting. It was my sister.
I silenced the phone, and sent her a text: "In a meeting. Is this urgent?"
My sisters and I don't usually just call each other out of the blue. We talk via e-mail and Facebook, and usually if we're going to talk, arrange for a convenient time to call.
"Nothing real urgent," my sister texted back. "Mom's in the hospital. Doctor sent her in."
That felt urgent. Our mother had had a planned surgery a couple of months earlier, which she was healing well from. But she had been suffering flu-like symptoms for the past week or so. Still, the flu is the flu. A hospital check-in seemed to create a state of high alert.
Of the three of us, this particular sister lived the closest to my parents. She could drive up in two and a half hours.
"Are you going up?"
"No, and I don't really know what to do," she replied. "I can drop everything and go with a moment's notice. But when do I do that? When do I make that choice?"
"I think when you're asked," I replied. "At their age, it seems to make sense of all of us to be on call."
And so the waiting began. The three of us called our parents repeatedly on Saturday and Sunday, and text-messaged each other, as well.
Things seemed stable but uncertain.
Early Monday morning, my sister called again. "I just spoke to mom. There's an infection that's spread to her stomach. She asked me to come. I'm leaving now."
My husband and I quickly made plans to go, as soon as we were asked. We did some hasty texting and made arrangements for someone to take care of our farm animals and house chickens, if necessary.
An emergency surgery took place, followed by a few days in intensive care. My sister and my father were there, as were several close friends of the family.
The phone calls, e-mails, and text-messages continued. "Would you like me to come?" "For how long?" "When?"
The answers were always affirmative and non-committal. "Yes, when she gets home." "She will need help." But when and what kind of help were unknown.
I canceled commitments, and then rescheduled them. I tried to continue with life, as normal. But I was "on call" now, and prepared to drop everything.
Friends and colleagues were solicitous, supportive, and kind. A whole universe of people -- some who were very close to my mother as well as some who had never met her because they barely knew me -- began sending her prayers, healing energies, and other well wishes for a speedy recovery.
Other friends set up cooking and visit schedules to ensure that both she and my father were cared for. They helped reassure my sisters and me that my father was holding up okay and was being taken care of, and that there wasn't much anyone outside of the medical team could do for my mother until she left the hospital. Their logic made sense, and as the days stretched into first one and then two and then nearly three weeks, the sense of alert eased. We were still on call, but with less urgency than before.
With the end of May looming and summer plans and decisions to make facing us, my sisters and I compared schedules and notes and made a plan. One of us would go around the time she was expected to be released from the hospital. I would go for eleven days in early June, in between a conference and a work commitment, and the third one -- the one who lived closest -- would fill in the gaps, as needed. Our plans ended up coinciding with my mother's recovery fairly well. She left the hospital on the second to last Thursday in May and the first sister arrived the next day.
Now, it is the last day of May, and I am on my way. I have come to realize that I am not traveling alone. I am traveling with the stress and tension of being on call, and I am realizing that that stress has been cutting into my energy reserves. While my sister was with my parents last week, I did not call home quite as often. I did not call on the day she left or the day after.
Last night, as I was preparing for bed, I saw that I had received a voice mail. From my father. He sounded tired. He wanted to know how I was doing.
I sent back a text saying I was find, had come home from the conference and would call in the morning.
Friday, May 30, 2014
2:15 p.m.
After two days of gray glum, the sun broke through the clouds. I was both elated and frustrated. Elated to finally feel warmth. Frustrated because this was the one day that I could not ride my bike. I was wearing a skirt, carrying my computer and phone with their attendant chargers in a shoulder bag, and after my 8:30 a.m. presentation, had a full morning of other talks to attend and a three and a half hour drive Ithaca to Saratoga.
In addition to these travails was the fact that my bike and I would be parting company the next day for a full 20 days. After a night at home, I was scheduled to fly out the next day for an 11-day trip to Indiana. I would fly back and leave again the morning after returning for Salt Lake City. I like traveling and I was looking forward to the trips, but I also was anxious about the toll that the travel would take on my training.
And, then, I devised a plan: I could leave Ithaca as early in the afternoon as possible and sneak back into Saratoga quietly. Quietly means arriving a couple of hours earlier than the official arrival time I would give my husband. I could sneak in a bike ride in Saratoga and a swim at the local Y, and then conveniently have him meet me at the laundromat with dirty clothes. He had to pick me up anyway because I had rented a car and after returning the vehicle I would need a ride home.
Now, don't get me wrong. I don't lie to my husband as a matter of practice. I just get a little frustrated at times when he throws up barriers to things like my training, usually with the entirely logical and truthful argument that there isn't enough time. The problem is, he and I tend to view time differently. He gets perplexed if there's more than one or two things on the day's agenda. I prefer it when the days are fairly loose and relaxed, but I also thrive on sandwiching seven or eight or even more tasks or errands into a compressed space. So, in my mind, it made perfect sense for me to wake up at 6 a.m., pack up my car and check out of the dorm room where I was staying, give my talk, support my peers, have lunch, drive three and a half hours home, sneak in a bike ride and swim, and then have him meet me at the laundromat. I envisioned the day even more elaborately, thinking that I could use the time that the clothes were in the wash to pick up a couple of prescription refills at the Rite-Aid and do my expense report. And I further believed that we could just bring the wet clothes home and put them in our dryer to save a few quarters since our dryer -- contrary to our worthless washer -- was working fine.
And, so at 2:15 p.m., I got in the car and began the drive home.
Quickly, fate conspired to foil my plans. First, the voice guidance for the GPS on my smart phone didn't work, which forced me to keep looking at the Google Maps app while driving in order to know where I was going. Trying to do this and not create an accident caused me to miss a key turn and, as a result, I ended up on a 15-minute detour on tight, windy country roads. Next, as I neared the Albany urban area, I missed another turn. Rebounding from this error put me into heavy rush-hour traffic that culminated with gridlock on yet another country road. As traffic slowed to a crawl, the skies opened and rain pelted down. I decided to call my husband. "I'm stuck in traffic and a thunderstorm," I said. "Do you still want to meet me at the laundromat?"
I still had hopes that I might be able to sneak in a bike ride, a short one, if it stopped raining. I figured that I could drop my bags at my office, drive to the rental car office, get my bike out, and after returning the car, bike to the laundromat, which is just around the corner from my office. Only, by this point, my wise husband had caught on apparently to my tricks.
"It's too late to do laundry," he said. "At some point we have to eat tonight."
I shrugged my shoulders and assented. He was right.
Traffic finally eased, and I managed to get to my office -- where we agreed that we would meet -- at about 6:45 p.m. I was worn out from the drive, the traffic, and the various mishaps, and he was frustrated because he was waiting for me before putting gas in the car. But the rain had ceased and the evening sun was once again warming things up. We returned the car, decided to go home and grill burgers and enjoy the evening on our deck.
We made it home a little before 8. I emptied out the car as he lit the grill.
And then the skies opened up once again.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
Archives of the Ordinary
I have had the opportunity to return this week to the Hip Hop Special Collection at Cornell University. After spending time at the archive last fall and experiencing the collection of materials on hip-hop stored in the Rare Manuscripts Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, I was much better prepared for what I might encounter on this visit. I am in Ithaca this week for a few days attending a conference, and am using free spaces in between the various conference offerings to spend time in the archives.
Knowing that I would have a little more luxury of time, I decided that I would request access to materials donated to Cornell by Charlie Ahearn.
What I have found in my first day with the two big boxes of materials that Ahearn donated is mind-boggling, puzzling in some ways, and very touching. Even though I have never met the man and until my first encounter with his materials in the Hip Hop Special Collection knew very little about him and his contributions to hip hop's history and evolution as a global culture, my experience with his materials makes me feel as if I would like to get to know him. I am intrigued by what he took the time to save and chose to donate to Cornell, and I am eager to find out more.
Who is Charlie Ahearn? Most people in hip hop circles know him as the director of Wild Style, a 1983 documentary style film that is regarded as one of the classic films of the early beginnings of hip hop. What I learned from a quick Google search after poring through a series of images, media articles, photographs, handwritten notes, and postcards is that he has been a longtime film director, freelance writer, and radio host. He was born in 1951 in Binghamton, New York, and moved to New York City in 1973 to attend a studio arts program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. With his twin brother John, he became involved with an artists group known as Colab -- or Collaborative Artists.
His interest in hip hop was seeded when he began filming kids in the Smith projects neighborhood where he lived in the late 1970s who were dancing in the streets. "There was a gym at the Smith projects and kids would come there and dance," Ahearn said in an interview with JayQuan, available at http://www.thafoundation.com/charliea.htm." I distinctly remember hearing the DJ cutting up James Brown , and the kids would drop to one leg , and stick the other leg out in synchronous fashion like a line of guys at once. To this honky from upstate New York it looked like tribal dancing , I had never seen anything like it , and I didn’t know what Breakdancing was at the time. But I did have my camera and I would tape this even though I didn’t know what it was. I was very excited by this." Adding to the mix were giant-sized murals that renowned graffiti artist Lee Quinones was making at the time.
Intrigue with the arts escalated into professional practice as Ahearn began creating films to show in the area projects, interviewing the artists themselves, and then in 1980 meeting Fred Braithwaite ("Fab Five Freddy") who told Ahearn he wanted to talk to him about making movies. From there, he was in the middle of hip hop and his work on "Wild Style" began.
Some of Ahearn's Wild Style contributions were part of the "Now Scream" exhibit that the Cornell Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection (of which the Hip Hop Special Collection is a part) organized in 2013. What I went through at the Hip Hop Special Collection today, however, differed from what I remembered viewing in that exhibit last fall. While I still have several more folders and another big box to go through, what I saw today offered a variety of different perspectives on what hip-hop meant in its beginning years. Ahearn, for instance, saved flyers for a kung-fu school and a range of images featuring martial arts performances, often in publications in Asian languages. He himself described kung-fu movies as "the common bond for '70s street culture as kids from all boros poured into the 42nd Street theaters" in a pitch for a "Wild Style prequel" that he included in the collection. The multi-racial and multi-lingual dimensions of these works interested me as they seemed to speak to the hybridity of forces that cohered into the artistic and cultural practices that are associated today with hip hop. With this poly-cultural focus also came a sense that preparation for war and performance of dance were interdependent. This aspect of Ahearn's collections resonated with understandings of the practice of martial arts that I had picked up in my studies of tai chi in the 1990s as being simultaneously about promoting personal health and preparing one's self for battle and self-defense should the need arise.
Also built into Ahearn's contributions to the archive was a sense through his journalistic writings of living conditions in the New York City boroughs where hip hop thrived. They weren't pretty. Even after the early hip hop artists (Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and DJ Kool Herc, among others) began promoting their messages of self-discipline, knowledge, unity, enjoyment, and peace, life was violent. Ahearn's articles document a shooting at a jam where Grandmaster Flash was spinning as well as violence in the South Bronx neighborhood where his brother John was making plaster casts of individuals for an upcoming gallery show. These "tell it like it is, not how you'd like to imagine it to be" slices of hip hop life are instructive as I continue to try and build my knowledge of a past in which I was alive but did not (could not?) live as those who created hip hop did.
These insights were underscored by a review of "Wild Style" in the collection that described the film as follows: “Shot in the sturdy, no-frills manner of a 1950s industrial documentary, Wild Style rises above the cartoon cooning of feel-good bullshit like Breakin’ (1984) and Beat Street (1984) and Rappin’ (1985). Ahearn mixes into the narrative performances from true schoolers like the Cold Crush Brothers and the Rock Steady Crew, and reveals the roots of hardcore hip hop." The reviewer goes on to note that Wild Style also "takes a political view of the Downtown art scene, celebrating its racial diversity but also exposing its ‘voyeuristic fascination with the other.’ "
I left the collection when it closed at 4:30. Reflecting on the experience later, I thought about what it meant to save and what it meant to discard. One could make an argument that library archives house nothing that is outside the realm of the ordinary. What Charlie Ahearn offered were boxes of pictures, images, newspaper clippings, typewritten pages of manuscripts, posters, flyers, brochures, and materials of a similar nature. They were pieces of his life, and because he became a documentarian of hip hop, they have become valuable to those of us who seek to explore hip hop more. Within this ordinary past emerged something quite extraordinary that is likely to persist for generations to come.
Knowing that I would have a little more luxury of time, I decided that I would request access to materials donated to Cornell by Charlie Ahearn.
What I have found in my first day with the two big boxes of materials that Ahearn donated is mind-boggling, puzzling in some ways, and very touching. Even though I have never met the man and until my first encounter with his materials in the Hip Hop Special Collection knew very little about him and his contributions to hip hop's history and evolution as a global culture, my experience with his materials makes me feel as if I would like to get to know him. I am intrigued by what he took the time to save and chose to donate to Cornell, and I am eager to find out more.
Who is Charlie Ahearn? Most people in hip hop circles know him as the director of Wild Style, a 1983 documentary style film that is regarded as one of the classic films of the early beginnings of hip hop. What I learned from a quick Google search after poring through a series of images, media articles, photographs, handwritten notes, and postcards is that he has been a longtime film director, freelance writer, and radio host. He was born in 1951 in Binghamton, New York, and moved to New York City in 1973 to attend a studio arts program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. With his twin brother John, he became involved with an artists group known as Colab -- or Collaborative Artists.
His interest in hip hop was seeded when he began filming kids in the Smith projects neighborhood where he lived in the late 1970s who were dancing in the streets. "There was a gym at the Smith projects and kids would come there and dance," Ahearn said in an interview with JayQuan, available at http://www.thafoundation.com/charliea.htm." I distinctly remember hearing the DJ cutting up James Brown , and the kids would drop to one leg , and stick the other leg out in synchronous fashion like a line of guys at once. To this honky from upstate New York it looked like tribal dancing , I had never seen anything like it , and I didn’t know what Breakdancing was at the time. But I did have my camera and I would tape this even though I didn’t know what it was. I was very excited by this." Adding to the mix were giant-sized murals that renowned graffiti artist Lee Quinones was making at the time.
Intrigue with the arts escalated into professional practice as Ahearn began creating films to show in the area projects, interviewing the artists themselves, and then in 1980 meeting Fred Braithwaite ("Fab Five Freddy") who told Ahearn he wanted to talk to him about making movies. From there, he was in the middle of hip hop and his work on "Wild Style" began.
Some of Ahearn's Wild Style contributions were part of the "Now Scream" exhibit that the Cornell Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection (of which the Hip Hop Special Collection is a part) organized in 2013. What I went through at the Hip Hop Special Collection today, however, differed from what I remembered viewing in that exhibit last fall. While I still have several more folders and another big box to go through, what I saw today offered a variety of different perspectives on what hip-hop meant in its beginning years. Ahearn, for instance, saved flyers for a kung-fu school and a range of images featuring martial arts performances, often in publications in Asian languages. He himself described kung-fu movies as "the common bond for '70s street culture as kids from all boros poured into the 42nd Street theaters" in a pitch for a "Wild Style prequel" that he included in the collection. The multi-racial and multi-lingual dimensions of these works interested me as they seemed to speak to the hybridity of forces that cohered into the artistic and cultural practices that are associated today with hip hop. With this poly-cultural focus also came a sense that preparation for war and performance of dance were interdependent. This aspect of Ahearn's collections resonated with understandings of the practice of martial arts that I had picked up in my studies of tai chi in the 1990s as being simultaneously about promoting personal health and preparing one's self for battle and self-defense should the need arise.
Also built into Ahearn's contributions to the archive was a sense through his journalistic writings of living conditions in the New York City boroughs where hip hop thrived. They weren't pretty. Even after the early hip hop artists (Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and DJ Kool Herc, among others) began promoting their messages of self-discipline, knowledge, unity, enjoyment, and peace, life was violent. Ahearn's articles document a shooting at a jam where Grandmaster Flash was spinning as well as violence in the South Bronx neighborhood where his brother John was making plaster casts of individuals for an upcoming gallery show. These "tell it like it is, not how you'd like to imagine it to be" slices of hip hop life are instructive as I continue to try and build my knowledge of a past in which I was alive but did not (could not?) live as those who created hip hop did.
These insights were underscored by a review of "Wild Style" in the collection that described the film as follows: “Shot in the sturdy, no-frills manner of a 1950s industrial documentary, Wild Style rises above the cartoon cooning of feel-good bullshit like Breakin’ (1984) and Beat Street (1984) and Rappin’ (1985). Ahearn mixes into the narrative performances from true schoolers like the Cold Crush Brothers and the Rock Steady Crew, and reveals the roots of hardcore hip hop." The reviewer goes on to note that Wild Style also "takes a political view of the Downtown art scene, celebrating its racial diversity but also exposing its ‘voyeuristic fascination with the other.’ "
I left the collection when it closed at 4:30. Reflecting on the experience later, I thought about what it meant to save and what it meant to discard. One could make an argument that library archives house nothing that is outside the realm of the ordinary. What Charlie Ahearn offered were boxes of pictures, images, newspaper clippings, typewritten pages of manuscripts, posters, flyers, brochures, and materials of a similar nature. They were pieces of his life, and because he became a documentarian of hip hop, they have become valuable to those of us who seek to explore hip hop more. Within this ordinary past emerged something quite extraordinary that is likely to persist for generations to come.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Sleeping through time
A writer-friend posted on Facebook that a barking dog woke her up at 5 a.m. Unable to get back to sleep, she wrote a modern-day story of a Rip Van Winkle type who wakes up after sleeping for twenty-five years. The post led me to ponder what it might be like to have woken up this morning after having been asleep for twenty-five years. What follows is a reflection on what one would have missed.
So, twenty-five years ago would have been May 27, 1989. To fall asleep on May 26, 1989, and to awaken today, one would not know about:
* Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf War that resulted from it.
* The crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the symbolic Iron Curtain.
* The creation of perhaps two dozen new nation-states, and untold violence that resulted from these changes.
* The complete revolution in how we communicate with each other via technology, whether we're talking about individuals sharing space in a single room or individuals living separately from each other on opposite ends of the globe.
* The election of the first African American president of the United States, and a new surge in democratic participation.
* The massive popularity of hip-hop and its evolution into a worldwide political and cultural movement.
* Electric cars.
* Rises in ocean water as a result of increasing heating of the planet.
* The Tea Party backlash to the election of the first African American president.
* Untold numbers of shootings in elementary, middle, and high schools and on college campuses.
* The increasing -- and logical -- decriminalization of marijuana.
* The validation -- and again logical -- of same sex marriages.
* The fact that people are living longer with such terminal illnesses as HIV/AIDS and cancer, and that treatments are creating conditions where their lives are healthier and fuller.
* The fact that income disparities in this country and across the world put the increasingly sophisticated technologies of health care out of reach for many.
* A revival of personal sustainability in the form of backyard farming, along with the revival of a local farms economy.
* The elevated prestige of cats in the middle class American householder's life.
* Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, and other tools grouped into that category we call social media.
* The rebirth of the newspaper.
* The demise of the pay phone booth.
* ATM fees.
* Dot.coms, bubble economies, and reverse mortgages.
* The creation of the Rock Hall of Fame.
* Self-publishing.
* Cell phones, smart phones, and text messaging.
* Digital photos.
* Cameras embedded into cell phones.
* Fish nibbling treatments to rid the feet of dried skin.
* Compost.
* The efforts by the Bush family to forge a political dynasty.
* Hillary Clinton.
* Amazon.com
* Netflix
* Pay per view, rent on demand.
* September 11, 2001.
* "You're either with us or against us."
* Learning management software systems.
* Online learning.
* Adjunct professors.
* Contractual employment.
* Downsizing.
* Restructuring.
* Junk bonds.
* The global distribution of Starbucks.
* The demise of Frederick & Nelson in Seattle, and the loss of the local Woolworth all over the United States.
* laptop computers.
* Microsoft Word.
* The disappearance of the land line.
* And with it the loss of the dial phone.
* The disappearance of the local telephone book.
* The end of the factory town.
* The demise of job security.
* The gutting of social security.
* The passage of the first significantly progressive federal health care program for all peoples in the United States.
* The idea that one could write 750 words every day on a computer and earn "badges" of merit.
* Massive-open-online courses (or MOOCs).
* Flash mobs.
* Flash drives.
That's a partial list. I'm sure there's quite a bit more.
On a personal level, if I had slept through the past twenty-five years, I would not have bought a house in Seattle, moved to Hawai'i, earned a master's and doctoral degree, moved back to Seattle, and moved to New York. I would not have gotten married, and I would not have had the joy of the numerous cats who brought fur, purrs, and peace to my household post-1989. I would not have run ten marathons, and I would not have tried a triathlon. I would not have leapt out of one career as a journalist into another one as an academic. I often feel as if I do sleep walk through certain aspects of popular culture -- what's hot on TV or what's playing in the cinema, for instance -- but that is because life is busy and full. I do my best to sleep eight hours a night, in order to enjoy that busy-ness to its utmost.
So, twenty-five years ago would have been May 27, 1989. To fall asleep on May 26, 1989, and to awaken today, one would not know about:
* Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and the Persian Gulf War that resulted from it.
* The crumbling of the Berlin Wall and the fall of the symbolic Iron Curtain.
* The creation of perhaps two dozen new nation-states, and untold violence that resulted from these changes.
* The complete revolution in how we communicate with each other via technology, whether we're talking about individuals sharing space in a single room or individuals living separately from each other on opposite ends of the globe.
* The election of the first African American president of the United States, and a new surge in democratic participation.
* The massive popularity of hip-hop and its evolution into a worldwide political and cultural movement.
* Electric cars.
* Rises in ocean water as a result of increasing heating of the planet.
* The Tea Party backlash to the election of the first African American president.
* Untold numbers of shootings in elementary, middle, and high schools and on college campuses.
* The increasing -- and logical -- decriminalization of marijuana.
* The validation -- and again logical -- of same sex marriages.
* The fact that people are living longer with such terminal illnesses as HIV/AIDS and cancer, and that treatments are creating conditions where their lives are healthier and fuller.
* The fact that income disparities in this country and across the world put the increasingly sophisticated technologies of health care out of reach for many.
* A revival of personal sustainability in the form of backyard farming, along with the revival of a local farms economy.
* The elevated prestige of cats in the middle class American householder's life.
* Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis, and other tools grouped into that category we call social media.
* The rebirth of the newspaper.
* The demise of the pay phone booth.
* ATM fees.
* Dot.coms, bubble economies, and reverse mortgages.
* The creation of the Rock Hall of Fame.
* Self-publishing.
* Cell phones, smart phones, and text messaging.
* Digital photos.
* Cameras embedded into cell phones.
* Fish nibbling treatments to rid the feet of dried skin.
* Compost.
* The efforts by the Bush family to forge a political dynasty.
* Hillary Clinton.
* Amazon.com
* Netflix
* Pay per view, rent on demand.
* September 11, 2001.
* "You're either with us or against us."
* Learning management software systems.
* Online learning.
* Adjunct professors.
* Contractual employment.
* Downsizing.
* Restructuring.
* Junk bonds.
* The global distribution of Starbucks.
* The demise of Frederick & Nelson in Seattle, and the loss of the local Woolworth all over the United States.
* laptop computers.
* Microsoft Word.
* The disappearance of the land line.
* And with it the loss of the dial phone.
* The disappearance of the local telephone book.
* The end of the factory town.
* The demise of job security.
* The gutting of social security.
* The passage of the first significantly progressive federal health care program for all peoples in the United States.
* The idea that one could write 750 words every day on a computer and earn "badges" of merit.
* Massive-open-online courses (or MOOCs).
* Flash mobs.
* Flash drives.
That's a partial list. I'm sure there's quite a bit more.
On a personal level, if I had slept through the past twenty-five years, I would not have bought a house in Seattle, moved to Hawai'i, earned a master's and doctoral degree, moved back to Seattle, and moved to New York. I would not have gotten married, and I would not have had the joy of the numerous cats who brought fur, purrs, and peace to my household post-1989. I would not have run ten marathons, and I would not have tried a triathlon. I would not have leapt out of one career as a journalist into another one as an academic. I often feel as if I do sleep walk through certain aspects of popular culture -- what's hot on TV or what's playing in the cinema, for instance -- but that is because life is busy and full. I do my best to sleep eight hours a night, in order to enjoy that busy-ness to its utmost.
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