My Time as a Human

Ever since I was a geeky kid who didn’t fit in anywhere, I’ve found the positive flip side in my place as the token outsider in every social group. When I was with my punk or metal friends I was moshing in nice sweaters and loafers. When I was with the straight A students their parents would talk about having seen me out with my “weird friends” as we sipped juice in their living rooms. No matter how different I was from any given social sphere, there was always a slot for someone like me who could be a representative from the outside.

This last week up in Ottawa I had a wonderful time being part of my friend’s Sikh wedding. At one point someone asked me if it made me feel uncomfortable when everyone around me was speaking Punjabi. That’s when I realized not only how comfortable I was as the only foreigner, but how often I’d been there. When I dated a Chinese girl for four years I used to hang out at parties where English would flow in and out of conversation based on my proximity, although often with some considerable lag time. In Germany or spending time with lots of Germans in college the same thing happened. Once when bowling with my African American friends, they had cut a deal with the guy behind the counter to get free shoes. When I went up by myself the dialog went something like, “you’re with who?” “Those guys.” “Those guys over there?” “Yeah.” “The guys right there? Those guys?” The game became ever more silly and embarrassing as he continued to point but neither of us were going to say “the black kids”. He couldn’t believe that the long haired white kid in front of him was with the large group of rowdy black students. (I guess I should note that the guy behind the counter was black as well.)

I’ve rarely consciously sought out these situations. I was excited about soul, hip hop, and working in video and so I plugged myself into a black music video show. I met a girl on the tennis courts who was from Beijing. I think what makes these things evolve more often for me is that I don’t resist the discomfort that may come with meeting new and different people and, perhaps sensing this, people find it easier to invite me into their subcultures.

At a more subtle level, I think it’s my spongelike absorbing of minutia of movement and body language that makes people comfortable with me. When I can’t understand the spoken language, I’ve learned to read body language, context and intent as a means of understanding. I think I’ve also learned to enjoy an environment without completely understanding it, and become comfortable just being present and taking in the essence of a world.

Certainly all of this has lead to one of the most primal drives in my life: to help people of completely different backgrounds understand each other. For whatever reason I’ve learned to see that genetic core that we all share, those commonalities like the capacity and desire for love. It breaks me up when groups of people I care about can’t see that in each other and so I want to capture the essence of one through film or writing or music and share it with the other in a safe way that allows them see what I see. It’s my hope that as more of this work is being done the world over, there will be a steady migration towards understanding and a greater openness to difference in general.

There is an aesthetic to European cities that arrises from an ethos very different than that found in America. At it’s core this belief system includes the ideas that people have value, the community of people has value, and quality is more important than quantity or size. I definitely found this in Montreal.

Buildings in European style cities are things of beauty on the outside. They are designed to be appealing to people walking around outside of the structures, who may not even be involved in the commerce taking place inside and yet somehow deserve respect. Kunstler talks a lot about this, actually.

There were huge parts of the city designated as walking zones, as though people were as important as cars. There were also generous bike lanes throughout the city and at night, a collection of bikes lined the fronts of every house we passed. Public parks were plentiful and seemed to regularly host music and art events, including drag races where men dressed in drag competed in drink carrying and torch song events.

I felt like people’s health had value too. Not only did everyone have healthcare, but there were massive open markets of vegetables and fruits, as though people still ate them instead of fast food. The majority of humans I saw around me were striking in that they were their original shapes and sizes, as though they got exercise and ate reasonable portions of something other than corn syrup and fat.

When I later traveled west to Ottawa, the situation quickly reversed itself again. While I didn’t immerse myself quite as much in the city there, I was amazed to watch everyone grow several sizes. The stores followed suit, becoming gigantic box chains like Home Depot and Circuit City as though I had suddenly warped back to any suburb in the U.S.

Montreal was wonderful and the Montreal Jazz Fest was teasing me with great acts and flirting with me through beautiful posters. Fortunately, I came prepared and I was hip to this city’s game. I knew full well that if I stayed any longer the tiny window of livable weather would vanish in a white cloud of snow. Once it had trapped me the winds would tear me apart and even though I can’t read Celsius, thirty degrees below zero is thirty degrees below zero! (In fact, at that temperature it’s actually true that -30F = -34C!)

So in my short visit I danced around with my friend Heather Kelley, munching on a delicious loaf of Spelt bread from a shop that only made bread. We stopped to eat samples of peaches, apricots, berries and tomatoes at the market. We sat at an outdoor cafe while a group of musicians spontaneously formed to sing with guitars, passerby of all ages stopping to join in on familiar songs. We met a man selling bags made of recycled materials, his new business after meeting a lovely French woman while world traveling who dragged him up to Canada to be married. I found Go stones in Chinatown. I saw French hipsters packed into a cafe to watch an old black man sing the blues. I wondered at one way streets that suddenly changed direction throughout the day.

I might not be able to afford the snow boots to live there, but I may very well make the trip up again to sample the summer buffet, all the more rich and full for it’s brevity!

The washing machine is full of turbans, and their predecessors are draped about my room like long colorful flags drying for my journey to Canada. I’ve been hired to film an Indian (Sikh) wedding and I’ll even be performing some of the Indian wedding music alongside my friend who plays Sarod. This is both thrilling and terrifying, as I’ve just learned the rags and one of the pieces is in 14/4.

I’ve decided to go old school and pack my grandfather’s little monogramed American Tourister suitcase. It should keep the nicer clothes a little less rumpled than my typical backpack and it’s stylin’ besides. Somehow he managed to travel for years with just this, and I can’t seem to leave my house without several massive army duffles. Of course, I never seem to travel without being on some kind of project, and so I’ll be fighting the airlines as usual for a place to put my precious guitar and to keep them from tossing my laptop or camera under the plane.

As this is a post 9/11 world I also have to live in constant terror of being targeted and incarcerated, so sadly I had to remove my “ISH” necklace, which looks a little too Arabic, and swap it out for my bone penguin. The border guards don’t know to fear penguins just yet. With only the beard and hair I should be able to keep it limited to the pat down and luggage search I usually receive. If I don’t crack a smile they won’t have to bring out the rubber gloves.

All in all it makes me long for the beauty and simplicity of the road trip, an American form of adventure soon to become obsolete with ever increasing gas prices. I may try to get one more in this summer before they go away forever, but it’s already going to cost me quite a bit. Maybe I can make the last American road trip film at the same time!

Until then, Viva Canadia!

Saturday night I took a break from hacking together my next demo reel to hang out in an old horse barn downtown. While a small jazz group sounding like a chainsaw fighting a swarm of bees turned up to twelve and spun the hot night air, I climbed between rotting wooden tables over dirt floors to stacks of paintings. The canvases were everywhere, heaped and discarded like old windows pulled out of an abandoned building. A selection of these had been hung around two walls and provided a variety of views into the same moments as a nude model moved through poses. The aged glass of these particular windows was rippled and cracked by each artists’ life experience such that their hopes, lost loves and living dreams made the same model, in the same moment, appear in one view bitter and hopeless and in another sweet, innocent and full of hope.

Outside bicycles spun back and forth between old houses and warehouses that shook with metal or blues bands. In one an older woman hammered passionately at a huge old electronic keyboard as three hipsters lurked near the bar, nursing cans of Lone Star. Only blocks away sat the house my ex-fiance’ and I built several years before.

I think the walls are still wonderfully “classy Alice in Wonderland” stripes and the spiral staircase that took up most of the 800 square foot house still climbs to a tiny loft space. At the time the neighborhood was entirely Hispanic. I remember talking to an older guy who had grown up there who explained that the whole place was entirely Swedish before that.

I was increasingly troubled by my accidental role as the flag bearer of gentrification, the sign that it was “ok” for white people to start moving in. This reached its peak when a white guy bought a house down the street and installed two aggressive dogs and a huge metal fence. Despite having assistants, he himself took on the task of snarling aggressively at anyone who walked past and treated the place as if it were a bunker in hostile territory.

I miss the old place where my neighbors would ring me up and say, “hey, I got an order for drywall, is that you? I’ll just swing by with the truck after work!” We bought a dented stove and the guy who brought it by lived in the house right across the street, where at night his father and friends used to practice with their mariachi band.

I also dig the crumbling horse barns and warehouses full of enthusiastic artists chopping at stone or slashing up scrap metal with oxy-acetylene torches. Without the income to afford cars, a lot of these people are reviving the joy of zipping through the streets on bicycles. There’s nothing like feeling the wind tossle my hair while gliding among the people out walking. Being on a bike makes stopping to babble with random passerby simple and frequent. I love that there are more people sharing this experience.

But all of this is but a brief spot on a continuum. The cycle continues and the briefest moment is this one, a time when the old neighborhood still has some of its character and artists can afford to perform and create before all of it is swept away by condo builders intent on capitalizing on the momentum. There have been attempts to stop or slow this progression, but most have met with little success. Fundamentally, the world over, we are humans and collectively motivated by the same things, be it money or a passion to create art. In Germany artists poured into east Berlin when it opened cheap spaces and squats, and when developers rushed in to capitalize I understand that now west Berlin has emptied out enough to become the new affordable place to be.

This leaves me realizing that my favorite place to be will forever be a moving target. If I want to stay in the sweet spot I’ll have to be willing to migrate every few years, or at least stay within cycling distance of the purple spotlight as it sweeps across a city. The mechanized guard dogs in Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash heated up so much from their internal power sources that they had to stay in constant motion to stay cool and alive. I feel you my brothers.