APORIA

It was a fascinating fall to be in the Bay Area, probably second in the experience of the Occupy Movement only to New York.  During this entire past fall, I have wanted to share the insanity of Occupy Oakland and Occupy Cal through more than just daily Facebook updates.  But my involvement, which didn’t include much sleeping out or even too much action planning occupied my time in the extreme.  Things exploded here before the break; and the tensions are still here with further actions being planned.  The big unknown of this semester is how much more Occupy will eat up my time.

There are many precursors to the movement.  But one protest on September 24 illuminated some of the tensions, especially access to education, that would animate Occupy Cal.   The College Republicans held a bake sale where they sold baked good at different prices based on the customer’s race and gender to protest the possibility of affirmative action in the UC system.  It sparked outrage and condemnation. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/24/uc-berkeley-racist-bake-sale_n_979184.html.

and a counter protest lie-in.

My involvement with Occupy Oakland didn’t start until the first raid.  It had been in my awareness as I had been to events in SF and Berkeley. When I heard reports of a violent raid on the morning of October 25, I biked over to join the reoccupation.

The police surrounding what Occupy Oakland renamed Oscar Grant Plaza (Oscar Grant was a black man who was shot unarmed by BART police in 2010 and has become a symbol of racial violence in the system).

The barricades to OGP come down.

Violence ensued that night.  This was the night that cities’ response to the Occupy movement became violent.  Police teargassed us multiple times to keep us out, but people came back again and again.  An Iraq War veteran was gravely injured with brain damage.  This video kinda sums it up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx036_m6HUA

Right before the reoccupation the next day.

Stacia and I went to the GA the night after.  The City of Oakland had embarrassed itself internationally after the violence of the night before, as Mayor Quan had not even been in town.  They seemed politically powerless to prevent reoccupation, as 4000 people gathered and called for a general strike on November 2, the next week.

November 2 Oakland General Strike

Broken glass: a sign of the impending violence to come.

On the way to shut down the port of Oakland.

The night of Nov 2 dissolved into chaos, and the coverage of Oakland was of a city out of control.  The narrative shifted that day and made Occupy seem like a dangerous movement that would have to be eventually eliminated.  That night the police also shot Scott Campbell a non-violent protestor videotaping the police line: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0pX9LeE-g8&feature=player_embedded

Occupy Cal started a week later on Nov 9.  Occupy Cal was modeled on the Occupy Movement in many ways, but we have very specific demands.  We succeeded in stopping any increases in tuition hikes (the regents were going to vote on an 81% hike!) and we made them declare support for reversing Prop 13, the regressive tax code that has caused California’s budget woes. In many ways, Occupy Cal started as a replay of the events of Oakland 2 weeks before.  We were met with police violence and striked the week later (Davis would replay the same violence strike the week later scenario–we couldn’t understand how these administrations wouldn’t learn from one another).

As soon as the tents were up, the cops were out.

They raided the camp, smashing batons in students stomachs.  The famous footage is here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=buovLQ9qyWQ

But we soon chased them off and reestablished an encampment.

The administration told us we could protest without occupying, to which we shouted “Bullshit.”  The night ended with another raid and a declaration for a university-wide strike the following week.

The American Musicological Society  held its annual meeting in San Francisco (in a hotel being sued for its treatment of labor no less) right next to Occupy SF.  The AMS seemed pretty irrelevant at the time and a number of us wandered over to Occupy SF to see Derrick Jenson speak (author of Endgame and other anti-civilization books).

November 16: the University Strike

Another parallel between Oakland and Cal was that the chancellor was also out of town the night of the violence.  His office immediately sent a message to the campus community praising the police and calling the linking of arms “not-non violent.”  He was criticized all over the country.  Colbert did a good number on it: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/402024/november-10-2011/occupy-u-c–berkeley?

Regentasaurus Rex

That night we held the largest GA in Occupy history with 5000 attendees.  Robert Reich, former Clinton Secretary of Labor, Berkeley professor, and prominent liberal advocate told us “the age of apathy is over.”  The Atlantic captured the event well: http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/11/occupy-cal-makes-occupy-history-at-berkeley/248555/

The days following

Berkeley reoccupied.

They raided the camp soon after and killed Regentasaurus!

Occupy Oakland was raided the next weekend along with several other important occupations that week including New York and Portland.

Oakland attempted another reoccupation that was cut down the same night.

The Department of Public Works destroyed this the next day.  Protestors claimed they wished the DPW could fix the potholes so quickly.

The Brass Liberation Orchestra, an awesome presence throughout the events.

Hip-hop vans

Occupy spotlighted the closing of 5 Oakland schools, which would cost 2 million to keep open, less than the city had already spent on harassing Occupy.

Meanwhile at Occupy Cal.  Right before Thanksgiving we held a pyjama party where we all slept out and reestablished an encampment.  The UCs had thoroughly embarrassed themselves at Cal and especially Davis.  They were powerless to stop it.

One of many manifestations of the free speech circle where it is written ”This soil and the air space extending above it shall not be a part of any nation and shall not be subject to any entity’s jurisdiction.”

On December 12, Occupy Oakland led the West Coast Port shut down.

Angela Davis, former Black Panther and Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at UC Santa Cruz (right!), hugs my friend Beezer.

My professor leading the beat in the march to port.

Occupy Cal handiwork at the port.  We raised “An improvising movement with the best of intentions always becoming new brand new brand new.”

Bike repair at the port!

In Santa Barbara, wall art.

This truck is parked outside of our house.  I’m not sure who it belongs to!

I hope to have another album up at the end of this coming semester with more actions and more successes.  My faith in the power of a small minority of people, the minority who care, has been kindled.  We are powerful and they are afraid of us.

This summer has been amazing so far!  After school ended, I booked it up to Portland to meet up with Jordan Kohn, fellow Reedie, former bandmate, and good friend.  We were planning on biking down the coast from Portland to as far as we could get.  Before that adventure, however, we trained by climbing Mt. St. Helen’s with another former Reedie and good friend Jess Thompson.  At 2:30 in the morning, we began the ascent (click on pix to enlarge):

We didn’t make it all the way to the top, much to Jess’s chagrin, due to a whiteout on the mountain.  We probably made it to 1000 feet of the 8000 foot goal.

We slid down on sheets of padded aluminum (glissading) and felt triumphant.

A few days later, Jordan and I set off to bike down the coast from People’s Coop in Portland:

We cut to the coast and headed towards Astoria, staying in Vernonia and bypassing the Zen Monastery of Oregon.  Hitting the 101, our main drag until the 1:

The first few days down the Oregon coast were blissful and beautiful; we thought sunny days would last.

We took our first rest day in Manzanita, a sweet town full of hippies.  Our knees were having growing pains from the shock of biking so much and we had heard of a festivity known as Trash Bash.  We went, and it was amazing, an Oregonian attempt to make environmentalism cool.  Attendees created amazing artworks from trash reciting recycling mantras.  Some examples:

A contestant of the Trashion show:

We had found this amazing bicycle powered orchestra earlier and thought it was something straight out of Renn Fayre, Reed’s yearly non-Renaissance Festival.

As we soon found out, it was designed and constructed by Reedie John Feder!  We met several other Reedies there, friends of us both.  We went to the farm for a post trash-bash bash and played through the night.

The dancing girl on the left worked at the local food coop, and, by giving us damaged organic produce, she began our tradition of asking the coast coops if they had damaged produce that would otherwise be composted. 9 times out of 10, we’d live with an armload of free produce!

Further down the coast in Pacific City, live rock walls breathing muscles:

We visited our good friend, Reedie Emidio Cantalupo, who has found himself through natural building.  He is doing an internship at the famous Cob Cottage Company, where they build amazingly beatiful buildings out of cob (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cob_(material).

The place was beautiful, well hidden off the coast in a luscious rain forest.  It seemed we had entered Middle Earth:

Upon leaving Cob Cottage Company, we had been admiring our luck with the amazing weather in what is usually a precarious time for weather in Oregon.  That’s when the storm hit.  We biked through one of the worse storms I’ve been in.  Sleeting rain and a 30 mile an hour headwind into Port Orford (Port Awful) created the sensation of navigating a boat at sea.  The rain plagued us for the next few days.  I tried to console the rain-averse Jordan that things would be better in California.  They actually did clear up as soon as we passed the state line.

We were soon amongst amazing Redwood trees looming above us.  Only 5% of the original population of redwoods still exists.  Think about that the next time you admire a San Francisco Victorian.

Stacia joined us in Arcata to bike for a week back down to her farm in Bolinas.  We stayed at Jordan’s friends’ parents, who have an amazing place overlooking the ocean:

Eureka was an amazingly beautiful city, full of murals and Victorians.  The following is the origin of the Lost Coast Brewery design.

We named our trip the Tour de Brew, as we probably hit up almost every coastal microbrewery from Astoria to Santa Barbara.  We decided Eureka’s Lost Coast was the best.

In Eureka, we were hosted by a man who truly manifested the Dude.  He lived in a large Victorian house by himself with his hot tub and his many many concert posters from the Fillmore and San Francisco in the 60 and 70s.

Mendocino and Sonoma:

Amidst these photos, another wrath of weather came down upon us, slowing us down significantly.  Stacia decided to take the bus back to her farm, and Jordan and I saw her that night in Bolinas after biking 100 miles, my first century!

Stacia’s farm is well documented on her website: http://glow.whyiamnotdying.net.  This photo is awesome

We were pretty discouraged by the wet weather, but it looked from the weather reports that clear skies were ahead further south.  We biked through the city, said hi to Berkeley and took back off.

Santa Cruz was sweet.  We were hosted by a cycling couple who participate in the Dharma Wheelers, Buddhists going bike touring together and visiting monasteries in California.  We also spotted the famous veggie van.

In Monterey, we were hosted by an awesome 20 something who wanted to make documentaries in the US and India.  He hadn’t yet finished college–we told him he’d be perfect Reed material.  Also Monterey has the best bike paths of any city I’ve ever seen (and Carmel sucks a lot).

The true reward for wading through the rain was Big Sur, 80 miles of stunning and uninterrupted coast line from Carmel to San Simeon:

A colony of Elephant Seals:

In San Luis Obispo, we were hosted by a couple that truly went to town to host us.  I could have sworn we were at a B & B.  Sweet town.  We had been contemplating how far our adventure would take us.  Our first goal, to the Mexican border, began to seem unrealistic as there was no train from the border.  Then San Diego began to seem far.  We sure as hell weren’t going to end our trip in Orange County!  Then person and person told us how much it sucks to bike in the LA area.  We settled for Santa Barbara as our final destination.

Biking through farm land, one is often exposed to monoculture farming, and lots and lots of pesticides:

Our last day of biking was by far the most intense–over a 2000 foot pass in 90 degree heat into Santa Barbara.  The arrival at the top was the last triumph of the trip.  It was all downhill from there.  The top of San Marcos pass:

Santa Barbara in the distance:

For the first time ever, my life feels like it’s falling into place.  Almost deceptively.  I have a clear and defined career path, and my almost 3-year relationship seems to be moving into new, firmer, territory, against all odds.  Stacia is moving to the Bay Area in a few weeks; she is beginning an internship at the Regenerative Design Institute, a permaculture farm/education center (http://www.regenerativedesign.org/), in Bolinas, Marin County.  In August, we plan to find a place in Berkeley or the Temescal area of Oakland (hipster central).

After a semester at Berkeley, grad school seems thoroughly doable.  Reed was great training—at no point in this semester, though it’s only the first, did I experience the stress I did at Reed.  Partly, my goal is to be a person who is not stressed or ambitious, just focused.  But finally being in a field I have wanted to contribute to since I was sixteen is anything but stressful—it’s awesome.  Spending my days familiarizing myself with sonic obscurity is fairly rewarding.

I don’t think I expected for things to fall in place so early or to break through the early/mid-twenties malaise that seems to typify this recessed generation.  And yet objective signifiers of direction and success make me even more aware of pitfalls: burning out on grad school, successlessness in the academic job market, potential collapse of my relationship, and collapse of the economic and political system that supports such useless activity haunt me.  And so stability seems deceptive.

I am, however, very glad to be in grad school at Berkeley.  There was truly no other place that would have made sense for me to go.  The Bay Area is beautiful and awesome—perhaps less radical than Portland per capita, but it makes up for it in sheer diversity.  Had I wound up in Pittsburg, I doubt I would have lasted beyond a Masters.  In the vast majority of programs I applied to, the transition from living in Portland, I think, would not have been worth it.  Being a student is not worth all costs.  But being a student does have its privileges: a life of leisure—endless days waking up at 10 and taking baths; my current six weeks of vacation certainly seems to justify my lack of monetary prowess.

I ended my job as an assistant teacher in a preschool class at the Portland French School in May.  I am extremely grateful for that experience, which was completely unplanned.  I am now far more fluent in French, more comfortable with children, more reflective about pedagogy, and, most importantly, more aware of what it will mean to be a parent.

After finishing that job, Stacia and I left our apartment in the Hawthorne area to depart on an epic bike adventure.  We biked from Portland to Boulder, CO through the Cascades, the Oregon desert, the Rockies, the Montana forest, Yellowstone, the Wyoming plains, and Colorado’s stunning Rocky Mountain National Park in less than seven weeks.  I had to depart from Denver to begin grad school while Stacia set off to accomplish her dream of biking across the country—she made it from Portland to Chesapeake Bay in exactly 100 days.  Stacia did amazing documentation of the trip.  Her blog, beginning in Oregon, can be found here: http://glow.whyiamnotdying.net/category/big-bike-adventure/.

Since August, I have had my head in books, sheet music, and headphones.  Though it took me a while to realize that I needed to focus on music above all else during college, I always told people that I wanted to go into ethnomusicology.  Only at the end of college did I realize how much work I would need to do to get into a program.  I am eternally grateful to the Reed College music department for allowing me to catch up on the coursework for free.

Ethnomusicology is the study of music in culture or, alternatively, the study of non-Western music.  It, like anthropology and so many other fields, exists as an outgrowth of colonialism, when anthropologists arrived in safari outfits to complete the documentation of an entire culture in the snapshot of a monograph.  The dichotomy between the West and the Rest is fading, thankfully, as is the notion that ethnomusicologists study music as cultural phenomena while musicologists study the form and aesthetics of classical music.  These untenable distinctions continue, however, to animate department politics and create false distinctions of value for naïve undergrads. The ethnomusicologist is still the runt of music programs, teaching classes on the “world” while his/her colleagues have distinct specializations in a repertoire of ever decreasing relevance to the contemporary world.  Thankfully, Berkeley is fairly egalitarian and the department works as a strong community though the same dichotomies are still in place.  I hope that these barriers and distinctions are erased within my lifetime, and I want to be, in this small and symbolic way, part of the push back against the legacy of colonialism and ethnocentrism in our culture.  For me, the only real distinction between musicology and ethnomusicology should be between research methods: musicologists generally work from historical documents while ethnomusicologists work from ethnography.  The potential of doing ethnography, going out into “the field” and working with musicians and their experiences throughout the world, was one of the strongest motivators for me to go into ethnomusicology.

I applied with interests in French colonialism and Indian music, but my interests have quickly cohered around Indian music, due to my passion for the music and the country as well as the overwhelming and vast amount of work I will have to do to be taken seriously in that topic.  Taking up the study of a non-Western language, an entirely different civilization, and a subtle and vast musical tradition feels daunting. My first foray into this topic is through the lens of fusion music, between Indian and Western forms of music, which I feel expresses my own subjectivity as a Westerner trying to grapple with the magnitude and influence of India.  Fusion also seems to be a metaphor for the current time in our world civilization, and I am fascinated in the conversations that take place between diverse cultures.  I am also trying to keep my eye on the subjects I can fall back on—the Caribbean feels enormously appealing.

My musical integration into the Bay Area is certainly developing, though I find it difficult not to feel dissatisfied after losing the amazing community and projects I had in Portland.  When I look back upon these past four months objectively, however, I feel that I am moving in the right direction.  I play a weekly gig with an Irish band in a revolutionary Irish bar next to my house, and I have fallen in with a community of traditional musicians.  I have improved immensely on jazz guitar through lessons with an amazing teacher who has played with many jazz luminaries (I’m lucky to have my department spending money on such endeavors).  Jazz combos are awesome and gigs are becoming more frequent.  The chance to study at the legendary Ali Akbar Khan School of Music makes the Bay Area probably the best place in the country to study Indian music.

I am launching this website, in part, to aid my musical integration into the Bay Area.  When asked what I am up to musically, I want something accessible to which to direct people.  Click on the music tab above to see what’s up.   Another intention is to share writing through this website.  I believe academia has to go beyond the traditional publishing system if we want to reach anyone but ourselves.  Failure to engage with new media will only exacerbate the irrelevance of academic writing to mainstream society.  Under articles, I have posted a few papers I think are worth sharing, and I hope that the incentive of wanting to share my writing on the internet will help me take my papers more seriously.  In this blog, I want to have a means to articulate thoughts (personal, academic, social, musical) not fully formed, extraneous, and perhaps, sometimes, insightful.

Back in Portland for the holidays, I feel like I never left.  I’m sad not to live here anymore, though, if I continued to live here, I would continue to dream of other vistas.  Distance helps me appreciate why Portland is a uniquely awesome community.  But with my mom and plenty of friends here, I expect Portland to be my second home for many years to come.  I have, however, loved my introduction to the Bay Area, an area full of radicalism, art, natural and architectural beauty.  I am excited to explore Marin County while Stacia is there, the Sierras, the neighborhood clubs I don’t yet know, and the huge variety of music that exists there.  This summer, I hope to bike up the coast from San Francisco to Portland.  Despite the transition, the suspicion that my path is not so clear and unencumbered, and the enormous amount of work to do, I feel blessed with this life.