Being new to New York

feels exactly like this, in case you were wondering:

Just kidding. Kind of. What it really feels like is a total reinvention of the self under an unfamiliar network of very bright constellations. It's an adrenaline rush and filled with potential and utterly disorienting. This morning on the subway I was set upon by a goofy-looking semi-crazy fellow whose breakfast hobby, it appears, is to eloquently bitch and insult other subway riders, breaking that 4th wall of collective public indifference that we all know so well. I appreciated his spirit, but his choice of target (me) was obnoxious. My current situation of slightly heartsick joblessness was done no favors by the fact that I was late, on a train during rush hour, with a bike (oh the inconvenience, my fellow riders collectively asserted), headed to a sterile office environment where I was expected to masturbate into a cup and otherwise cement my position in society as a desperate creative type. So within all that psychic malaise Richard (for he introduced himself in soliloquy) struck me as a dick, and I told him so (in different words, rising to the occasion of his eloquence). The look with which he then regarded me told me, quite plainly, that I didn't belong. "As a native New Yorker I have long since learned..." he began his next diatribe, and with that phrase I knew I'd been bested. See, I have been on a bit of a winning streak when it comes to being out of place.

In Palestine it was fairly easy, given that people regard foreigners as you would a rock star and treat them with shocking deference, interest, celebrity, and hospitality. But any good post-colonialist gets tired of that positon after a while, and at the end of the day getting stared at wears you out regardless. In Haiti it was more of the same, but now whiteness was a synonym for exploitation and bad history, which made breaking the ice with a videocamera a bit of a challenge. Then there was not speaking Spanish in the DR, or, for that matter, speaking Polish in Poland, Mayorg in Hungary, etc. All's this to say that after 10 months of travelling in as many countries this puppy is worn out. And the last thing I wanted, in the US of A, the goddamn melting pot, and furthermore the only place I can ever be from, was to be an outsider. But an outsider I feel. Up on 181st I feel like a visitor in a sea of black and brown faces whom have made this place theirs, over the generations, and down in Greenepoint I am disgusted by what I see as the fruits of the young bright things' invasion into such places. With the punks of Zuccotti park I feel like a square (who needs an apartment! Who needs a job! Who needs upward mobility to be effective! That world's tired, and broken, and no fun anyway.), on my bike I feel like a stereotype that's been co-opted, and in a tie and a button-down shirt I feel like I'm playing dress-up and being earmarked as an impostor with my self-inflicted haircut.

Ahem. So it's funny, despite all that, that I'm having an incredible time. Building the beast that other folks know as 'the network' and I simply know as making friends, one hears glimmers of things again and again that start to materialize in front of you, names of organizations and initiatives and projects and places. Already, 10 days in, I've popped inside some of those places and felt the potential there. The roofless ability to, if one plays one's cards right, be effective. That's where the intoxication of New York comes from, the fact that behind the glibness and the hipness and the self-involved posturing and the bustle and the grime and the ego and the challenges there's actually potential, real potential. The ability to take what you do and kick ass with it. That's already been worth it. Furthermore, there are 8 million people of every stripe out there, and while you can't get to know them all, you can meet a ton of them, even in your first week, and they'll let you into their worlds. I'm tremendously grateful to the people that have so far done things for me, large and small, considered me for piecework, introduced me to friends, hosted me on their couches, gave me places to connect and volunteer, initiated projects with me, hung out in the park, invited me to meditation, found me jobs, searched for apartments with me, made me feel at home, and are beginning (or returning) to call me friend. So much so soon, and so worth it. Even if there's a moment or two where I feel like I'm getting run over by a Camero Camaro. Read More......

Refusing to Leave, or Leaving all the time.

An excellent episode of Radiolab talked about cities, their behaviors as organisms (growing, breathing, many units making up a whole, product in, product out) but their weirdly unique characteristic of never dying. Around here, where occupiers and cultures come and go to the tune of 7000, 10000 year histories (Jericho, anyone?), it's clear that where people dig in there heels it takes quite the circumstance to get them to leave. Radiolab gives the amazing example of Centraila, a little podunk town in Pennsylvania that was home to an underground coal fire for years, people factionalizing and bickering and never wanting to leave, the ground under their feet literally burning. People fought tooth and nail to stay there. When asked to explain why they held on so long, experts simply chalk it up to human nature. The primal desire to hold onto what you know, to what's yours.

So of course, when you're Palestinian, and someone says, "hey, leave!" you say "hell no!" And everyone knows what happened from there. A century long push-pull, mostly pushing, of new neighbors greeted with hospitality and co-existence to a tenuous balance under a mutual occupier to armed struggle and aggression and mutual conflict to the ever diminishing tracts of crowded, occupied, and strangled land under a militant, victorious, zealous foreign government. Und so weiter.


The very core of the tragedy, from a sustained humanitarian suffering perspective, is that Palestine was not destroyed quickly. It's currently halfway through an era-long strangulation, which, as the imagery suggests, isn't pretty. Couple that with the spiky, unnatural settlement compounds multiplying all over like torturous barbs, and the land starts to appear as some kind of BDSM victim. Sure, some might find that sort of thing quite cool, but I must remind everyone that a key difference between serial rape and an adventurous relationship are the issues of violence and consent.

Wow. So now kink is a metaphor for Palestine. I'm SO going to hell. Moving beyond that...

In short, the people are primally and inextricably obligated to resist the destruction of their homeland. But like the Radiolab guys mention, cities don't die, they just change hands. I think also of Istanbul, that many-named city, where buildings like the Aya Sophia were once sites of pagan rituals, then roman temples, then churches, then mosques, now 'theological monuments.' We're watching that kind of spatial-cultural takeover happen in real time. Ask an Israeli about their cultural food. Shakshouka? Felafel? Hummus (Hummus wars?)? as Arab as the hijab. Or, my favorite example, the Mid-East floor squeegee/mop:


This humble device is an ingenious method of cleaning floors, and both my Israeli and Palestinian friends have championed it as an invention of their culture, going so far as to suggest we open a business selling them, usually at the same time as deriding this:

as a unilaterally inferior way of cleaning the crap off the floor. As the American in Palestine I'm resigned to a healthy dose of anti-American cultural ribbing, but hey, if you're going to criticize, at least do it with things you don't share with your sworn enemy. But that's just it. These two cultures are and have been more similar than dissimilar, from their food to their hygiene to their religious customs. Remember that throw-away comment on hijabs? It's not like Muslims have a corner on the obscured hair market. Sometimes there's room for cultural mixing, where the two peoples create a hybrid existence that is rich and varied, but when the two are kept in constant inequality, one a militarized occupier and the other a powerless, voiceless prisoner, such possibilities are no more than a nice idea. Until the power balance is shifted Palestinians are just an oppressed people who

will.
not.
leave.
their.
homeland.

Now, as I'm in a retrospective vein, it's with a slightly heavy heart that I turn to where I grew up. I'm from, factually, not arguably, one of the most beautiful places on earth. It's boggling how amazing Sundance is.

This picturesque landscape raised me, trained me, gave me my desires, opinions, prejudices. I had no fear of the forest night, and knew I could walk with friends in the streets unmolested and sleep wherever we wished once night adventures wore down at 3 in the morning. We skied every day. Salt Lake, as well, is an escape from rural Sundance, and also my home. It too has never mistreated me. Yet if you told me I had to live there for the next 10 years I would probably mutiny. I have been traveling all my life and constantly running away from Utah. When I return to the states it is imperative to my plans that I move to Chicago or the Bay Area as soon as possible.

Clearly I'm from a radically different environment. Through the comfort and security afforded me by my privilege I have only the slightest qualms about abandoning my land, primarily because I know I will probably always be able to return. Palestinians, obliteratingly obviously, do not have that privilege. Their land has been threatened for close to a hundred years, and resistance is their existence. Some days I see what's happening in Palestine and I want it to die, everyone packing up and moving to the margins or wherever fate takes them, so that the suffering ends, people can have closure, and have lives concerned with something beyond the conflict.

But in reality I want to see more justice than that.
Read More......

To Jenin: April 16th, 7 years and one day after a revision of my history.

Liberated by the knowledge that I was finished volunteering, adventures and unknowns ahead, I set off to be the trip mechanic on a week long bike tour from Jenin to Hebron, stem to stern of the West Bank and beyond. It started out from a place called Hamdad Tourism Resort, outside of Jenin, a hard-hit city with a conservative reputation that was rocked by the assassination of Juilano Mer Khamis a few weeks earlier. I biked down into a winding valley called Wadi Badan, one of the best stretches of road in Palestine, a beautiful decent with the option to pop into a swimming hole at the end of it. After that a series of rolling hills wore me out, as underestimating distances seems to be my forte here. I left at about 1 pm to make it to Jenin, which conveniently dropped me in the midst of the first decently hot day of the season. It still felt great to be free, all my things with me in my saddlebags, cruising through cute villages like Aqaba and Zebabida, berms and green fields.



Coincidentally running into some young kids from the village who recognized me from Nablus put me in a great mood. We were so happy to see each other, like old friends. I became giddy and lightfooted, reflecting on my life, a wander. I wrote on the roadside:

"Remember the eyes and soft faces of the girls you've fallen in love with, their work, their power. Remember the draw of attraction and the bittersweet, youthful knowledge that there's more love in the world, always more love."

There was a current of immaturity running through that moment, and a simultaneous acknowledgment of it.

What I didn't write is:
Each moment eclipses the last unless you're careful to record it. Contrast that with the audacious knowledge that we all settle down, someday, and that there's always an end.

Because here, in this exceptionally conservative place and moment in the ever-conservative Middle East, love is not a wander, ever. It's a permanence. An awesomely limiting proposition. If I were from here, paradoxically, there's no way I would have ever left my family, my home. Terrifying, but there's incredible strength in that.

I'd been in Palestine three months, and extrapolated forward another three to imagine the cumulative effect. I'd lived a lot in that time, parts had seemed rough, and challenging. But in that same stretch of time many mundane challenges have taxed others in my family in ways more subtle and more impossible to bear. My grandmother and father were dying slowly, and others taking care of them, their lives on hold as they watched the minutes slip away on sickbed duty. My adventures are easy to sustain compared to the chores of my mother, spending 80 of the first 160 days of 2011 at my grandmother's bedside, and she went about those tasks pragmatically enough. It consumes her. I wonder what her life, free, would be. And me, her clever son, has not the strength to be consumed.

A tractor just drove by, all red and green and yellow, the driver a sharp and kind-looking old man with one of those old-fashioned headscarves that I never learned the name of, simpler than a keffeyah and white. Face like an old apple. He looked so cheerful and kind, a version of my father in the Palestinian countryside. This is his land, and as it died, he lived, and did not abandon it.

I condemn myself, but I take the burden of my decision: My life is my own, and for now, I want to be free. I'll make use of that.




Read More......

Web revolutionaries

The world's all wrapped up in deathbed cloth, cancerous bumps of misconceptions about issues bigger than us, hating and hunting viciously people we can't see but know are wrong, know their rights as humans are somehow flawed or illegitimate, more venom then necessary, as if the problems of the world came spouting from these far-away faces we don't understand and if we crush them everything'll be ok. But it won't be ok. We won't solve hate with hate, we won't solve sadness with sadness. And largely, mostly, we'll never be so right as to be righteous. Zealotry is a luxury we cannot afford.

The best we can hope for is to cultivate love. Love for strangers, love for our closest family, love for the oddities we see on the street, love for the things we taste and build and find in the trash. Love of routine, and love of the unknown. Cultivate creativity. The dignity to find value in small things, in subtle things, and cast around you for sources of inspiration. What can I make today that solves a problem? What can I do today that strengthens my life without costing another?

My role as a human is to live creatively, efficiently, as brightly and constructively as possible.

After spending the afternoon reading this, and this , unfortunately deviating towards the comments section too often on various Youtube videos. Read More......

Self-Taught

A year ago I met a fellow on my travels in Paris. He was American, working a fairly stable but uninspiring job on Berkeley campus, but was taking an extended holiday (or internship) in Paris. On one of his last days there we were out running around until late in the evening, he was jubilant, snapping pictures, buying things for people, and lamenting that he had to leave.

"Come back, Zach" I said. "You could live here. You speak the language, you've got everything it takes!"
He shrugged. "I can't just up and move. I have too many people relying on me at home, and nothing really set up here."
The night was fresh around us. People walking to and fro over ancient bridges, kebabs and snacks in their hands. "Seriously, my friend" I said, tossing a chip into my mouth, "It's as simple as wanting it."

He works here, now:





I need to learn to take my own damn advice. Read More......

Egypt

He realized how long he’d lived, in his short time on the planet, how much was forgotten, and how he’d changed. He’d grown up, simplified, knew less about the world than he did when he was young. Looking back on the pictures of the suntanned young man with the huge grin and tired eyes, in a country far away, he missed his old life like he missed a part of his soul.









See other egypt faves here. Read More......

Hiding.

Lui Bolin is blowing my mind right now, and he happens to provide a fitting image for my internet auspiciousness recently. But I've been good, if under-the-radar.

Shooting The Tale of Don Giovanni: That Indomitable Hipster soon, my first narrative. It's shaping up to be great. More news on that in a minute. Shooting a first scene earlier than scheduled, on the 18th of October at the SLC Bike Collective in the evening, starting at 6:00. Let me know if you want to help out.




Here's Dallin, in character (as always) as Leoprello, taking his first crack at the script.


Chris is playing the heartless lead, here he is being uncharacteristically nice :).



Went to Interbike in Vegas and learned about the World Bicycle Relief. They're a fantastic non-profit that I'd like to work for someday.

Been moving my Dad out of his place, and working on some stuff for the Leonardo. Biked to 33rd and 33rd on a cruiser last night. Fun, cold, introduced the seriousness with which winter's approaching.

Getting really good at delivering lots of food without a cart, which makes me faster. Read More......

Love of Bikes.

Saturday we raced through the rain in the Pastry Alleycat, hustling up the huge hills of Salt Lake gathering ingredients to chocolate chip cookies and taking shots along the way. The downhill was terrifying, sliding in front of busses with no intention to stop, finishing the race at Johnny's and puking in the gutter for all to see (what, that part was just me?! weird...)

Next day, to celebrate my thesis completion, Chris suggests we wake up at 7, drive to Moab, bike the 36 mile Porcupine Rim trail, and drive back home. I say OK. 15 miles of climbing on a singlespeed followed by some of the most intensely technical trails I've ever seen, bone-jarring downhills for adrenaline madness. I'm smiling the whole way, thinking of touring this summer, the day before, and what's to come. Loving the aches and the bruises and increasing skill and stamina. Slept soundly, settling like dust.

Monday is work, biking sandwich orders at double speed, saving late orders that the cars can't get to, not feeling tired after the weekend of intense riding, netting $96 dollars in tips.

I'll never stop. Read More......

Luke Williams EP, new music on the scene.

I have a soft spot for local music. When someone close to me makes a song it usually resonates more, so I'm not usually a very reliable music guru. I get all emotionally invested. But when Luke Williams told me he was releasing his debut E.P Ancient Eyes I got disproportionately excited, because not only is Luke a local guy but he's a freakin' musical genius as well. He breathes the stuff, has since he was about 12.

None of that matters when you throw on some headphones and start up his album. Kid's got talent, and speaks in crafty tounges. I believe he recorded just about every instrument on the mix himself, and they're all completely pro. For example: The accordion track on We Were Wrong? Luke, frustrated at the lack of a concert organ in the vicinity of his house, dug his dad's old accordian out of the basement and taught himself how to play it for the track in about a day. What a jerk!

I really like what he's done, the moods of the tracks he puts back to back. Songs like Mary Alice, We Were Wrong and Topaz have just enough jive plus sincerity to really last, and the vocal harmonies he throws in here and there really take it up a notch. I feel hints of everything from Jethro Tull to Skybox to Ben Harper. But the song for the ages, the one 5 years before its time in his musical repertoire, for me, is Don't Leave Me Alone...

The lilting progression on the track.... hurts in a really powerful way. Someone as young as Luke (or me, for that matter) shouldn't know this loneliness, to me it's astonishing to hear this kind of reflection in someone else's art. The emotions in this song make me sublimely sad, and his treatment of them makes me smile. Good on ya, Mr. Williams.

Some criticisms: Don't Leave Me Alone gets my personal gold star, but I'm holding out a request for an acoustic, more lo-fi version without the initial blast of blues guitar. I liked the version where you could hear the empty apartment, you know? But it's still a crushingly good song.

Also, Luke's more sunshiney stuff (Sunflower) leaves me a bit empty; I tend to dig his darker, smokier tunes. If this is his debut, though, we can expect some seriously impressive music from him once he's gone on a couple cross-country adventures and suffered a few bumps. Everything along the way promises to be really, really good.

The 7 Song EP Ancient Eyes is available to download free right here. Read More......

Dada Robotnik Turns 1!

That's right, one year old! Time for reflection...

Reading my first-ever post, it appears I've gotten a lot less eloquent. Or maybe just learned to shut up more, I'm not sure. I was still thinking a lot about my place in the world, but more from a writerly perspective. These days I envy my former self, in that he had time to reflect, to crystallize his readings into coherent thoughts. Now I'm reduced to full-throttle babbling, but I'm more multi-media in my efforts!

I'm passionately and exquisitely looking forward to the end of the semester, when I'll graduate, and get to play with all of my ideas in the real world a bit more. I have only the most quiet and private of grand aspirations, in the meantime I'll learn a lot more and hopefully have time to fit in a book or two. And a date. A date'll be nice...

Big ups to ya'll for being paid by my mother to be my friend, and I'll leave you with a song.

Read More......

Blown outta the water.

In summary, I went to New York, Got really amped and returned home to make a bike movie, got some positive response, screened it before Macaframa here in Salt Lake. The video got picked up by some large blogs, and I was feeling pretty good about it.

Then this video came along and knocked everything back in perspective. It's so... flawless. I consider it New York's response to my piddling efforts, and I stand humbled. It was made on the exact corners where I was inspired, in front of Affinity Cycles and elsewhere. Everything about it is more big-city than me, the quality of the video, the number of views it has received in one day, its immediate commercialization of the talent that made it. It's an apt e-portrait of hubris. I'm stunned, but I won't stop trying. Read More......

The Deep is online!

Alex Haworth's beautiful and steampunkian short film, "The Deep," is finally available for viewing on Vimeo!

The Deep from Dada Factory on Vimeo.

Al's film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008.There's some beautiful stuff here, I love the spinning cogs of the press and the elevator.

This film really typifies my perception of Al as a filmmaker. Seemingly out of nowhere, in a rush of a few weeks, he says "I want to make a film this month." Suddenly he's securing locations and spending money on the sets, and next thing I know he's made something entirely his, entirely beautiful. He spent much longer preparing it privately, of course, but it was still quite amazing to see how quickly Al can materialize his visions.

Incidentally, Al has just written another spotlight over at the Dada Press,this time on the diverse verbal world of Makena Walsh. Check it out: The Illusion of Geometry. Read More......

This time last year

The spirits of the dead miss each other.

We know they do, because occasionally their whispered, lost communications go astray and drift across our mind. The human mind sympathizes with the loss, the grief and creates its own story, without really knowing why. That discontentment breeds and broods in the souls of poets and on the minds of thinkers and in the hands of artists until it metamorphoses into something beautiful. Until it does so it is excruciating.

The pain of butterflies is in their fragility, knowing that the slightest push results in a tear, the loss of a crystal so delicate and beautiful that it has no material value. This is our legacy, the production of the crystal, regardless of the pain and the cost, regardless of the value. Read More......