So for the last year, I’ve been working on a series of tests to determine how well some popular and some less well-known web browsers perform in supporting the technology for displaying Hebrew text. In particular, I’m interested to see which browsers are failing to use a web standard called CSS @font-face to properly display Unicode Hebrew fonts that support the full range of Hebrew diacritics and which contain excellent font logic for diacritical positioning. I’m also keen on seeing which browsers might even be failing at recognizing bidirectional (BIDI) and right-to-left (RTL) text, given that Hebrew is read RTL and it’s not uncommon to find עִבְרִית and other left-to-right (LTR) languages written together with one another.

With these tests I also hoped to find some simple way by which an individual browsing the web could troubleshoot whether the problem is in their browser, their browser’s settings, or in a web page, when they find a web page that is poorly displaying Hebrew. I learned a great deal in the process and so I also made a page for web designer/coders to learn the correct way to craft a web page that will correctly display Hebrew.

Cross-posted to the Open Siddur Project.

Even before New Year’s a year past, this blog had begun a mostly uninterrupted slumber beginning in 2009, what with most of my activity focused on directing the Open Siddur Project (2009-present), studying at Yeshivat Hadar (2009-2010), teaching with the Teva Learning Alliance (2010-2011), studying Hebrew and pedagogy in the Experiential Education program in the Davidson School of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (2011-present), and currently, studying the complexity of modern Israel along with more Hebrew in the Kesher Ḥadash program of the Davidson School.

Most of these activities were documented publicly semi-privately via my twitter, Facebook,‎ and Google+ accounts, with all the caveats that proprietary social networks provide for archiving and redistributing creativity. Over the next few months, I hope to look back over the last few years and share publicly whatever output I’ve produced privately that might be worthwhile to share.

Through this effort I hope to document and construct a somewhat coherent narrative of my work since I left post-hurricane Louisiana after working there as an urban/environmental/GIS planner 2006-2008. Privately, I tell variations of this story to friends without the benefit of illustrations, but with the benefit of long walks and digressions. I think it’s time I explain myself, in the manner of Italo Calvino’s Marco Polo in Invisible Cities — with pantomime, gesticulation, unexplicated esotericism, and a translation that relies entirely on your patience and interest. Before my Kublai Khan, I have to present endless yarns spun from ever accumulating navel lint, an assemblage of obtuse details the connection of one to the other might otherwise seem ponderous, but I hope not pretentious. So bare with me, please.

I still hope to work and contribute as an urban/environmental planner, public historian and educator. I still harbor sage-like aspirations. I’m still hopelessly entangled in a great vein of string spun by others to document their own progress through the vast labyrinth of psychedelic and gnostic insight. Freedom, compassion, creativity, and awareness remain the touchstones of my intention, the grounding for my empathy and the foundation of my commitment in my work. Twelve years ago I learned some wonderful things while bicycling along the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia and the consequence of this gnosis is that I now can’t help but see prisons and cages everywhere. Facilitating creative activities, constructing open spaces, helping to recover lost wisdom — these express my intentions. And I’m still searching for that loose alliance of friends who share these objectives in bringing more people into the next age.

Varady's Fabulous Flying Keyboard (Level 1)

Behold my Flying Keyboard!

Ever want a keyboard configuration you could switch to for odd characters‽ You know, so you could add an Ḥ in Ḥanukah without copying and pasting from this page (or your favorite “Character Viewer” program).

Well I made such a keyboard configuration that you can download and install on your very own computer. (Only works for Windows OS, alas.) Download, unzip and install.

The keyboard layout includes glyphs mapped onto the universal and international standard Unicode character encoding schema. You’ll have to use the layout along with a font (e.g. DejaVu Sans) that supports all of these glyphs. Such fonts are installed with the popular, cross-platform, free/libre and open source LibreOffice application.

Varady's Fabulous Flying Keyboard (Level 2)

I was tired of using the Windows Character Viewer to access a number of useful character glyphs including the Ḥ. So I made my own keyboard layout using the proprietary but free-without-fee program called “Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator v1.4.” (Windows only, although it’s also possible to do something similar for Macs and Linux.) If you want to hack the keyboard layout I made, I’ve included the layout in a directory named “source” in the zip which also includes the images above.

Mac keyboard layouts are directly modifiable using a 3rd party free-without-fee tool called Ukelele. Re: Linux, like much of the rest of the configuration on *nix type systems, keyboard layouts for the X Window System are defined in easily editable text files. See this page for more info.)

UPDATE: For Windows users, Steg adds this useful information,

Go to your System Setttings and find the Language/Keyboard settings and add the input method “U.S. Extended”. Then start using it. To type a Ḥ type option-x and then H.

UPDATE: I managed to convince the army of volunteer editors to approve an article I wrote on the GPL+FE (General Public License with font exception clause). This after my initial disastrous foray into wikipedia article posting. For those counting, this is my third approved article on Wikipedia.

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Lately, for the Open Siddur Project, I’ve been putting together a font package for more easily distributing extant free/libre licensed Unicode Hebrew fonts. These fonts tend to be licensed with SIL’s Open Font License (e.g., EzraSIL and Cardo), or the GNU General Public License (GPL, e.g., Maxim Iorsh’s Culmus Project fonts). Because of the differences between fonts and other software code in their usage, there arose some conflicts which necessitated an exception to the GPL specifically for fonts. Unfortunately, the GPL font exception statement is somewhat buried in the Free Software Foundations GPL FAQ. Because important information on the GPL+FE is nowhere on the Internet included in one single post, I’ve reformatted it and shared it below.

From the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License FAQ, “How does the GPL apply to fonts?“:

Font licensing is a complex issue which needs serious consideration. The following license exception is experimental but approved for general use. We welcome suggestions on this subject—please see this this explanatory essay and write to licensing@gnu.org.

To use this exception, add this text to the license notice of each file in the package (to the extent possible), at the end of the text that says the file is distributed under the GNU GPL:

As a special exception, if you create a document which uses this font, and embed this font or unaltered portions of this font into the document, this font does not by itself cause the resulting document to be covered by the GNU General Public License. This exception does not however invalidate any other reasons why the document might be covered by the GNU General Public License. If you modify this font, you may extend this exception to your version of the font, but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version.

The drafter of the GPL+FE statement above, explained the need for the GPL+FE in the following post, “Font Licensing” (FSF 2005).

Font Licensing

by novalis Contributions — last modified May 17, 2010 16:43

By David “Novalis” Turner

There has been some recent confusion about font licensing. Since I wrote the font exception, let me tell you a bit about where we are, and how we got there, and what this all means to you.

First, in the US, the copyright status of fonts is somewhat confused. A font face — that is, the look of a font, is not copyrightable (see Eltra Corp. v. Ringer, 579 F.2d 294 (4th Cir. 1978)). But font “programs” (truetype fonts, for example) are. Another ruling has extended the definition of “programs” to include certain outline data. Why this outline data is not equivalent to a font face, nobody knows. Helpfully, the copyright office has also issued contradictory statements on this. I don’t know how font copyright works in other countries.

What this means is that no font is going to affect the distributability of a printed document in the US. Further, merely referencing the font (as in the CSS font-face: caslon;) does not create a derivative work of that font. So why did we worry about font licensing at all?

The situation we were considering was one where a font was embedded in a document (rather than merely referenced). Embedding allows a document to be viewed as the author intended it even on machines that don’t have that font installed. So, the document (a copyrighted work) would be derived from the font program (another work). The text of the document, of course, would be unrestricted when distributed without the font.

This isn’t an artifact of the GPL; it’s just the way fonts work. Proprietary fonts often explicitly forbid embedding. So, if you want to send your document off to a printing service, the printing service needs to buy another copy of the font.

I was unhappy with even this amount of influence for fonts, because (a) it’s rarely what font authors intend and (b) it’s possible that some applications do embedding behind the user’s back. The situation seemed to me to be similar to the case of the runtime libraries which GCC automatically includes in its output (and which are licensed to permit inclusion in proprietary software). So, I wrote the font exception you see on our web site.

The reason the exception is so limited is that we’re worried about someone extracting a font from a document, and redistributing it. Extraction is, in my view, the major issue that a font license must confront. Because I haven’t been able to come up with a license which correctly handles embedding and extraction in all cases, I’ve restricted this exception to unaltered fonts. This means that someone can’t use embedding as a way to distribute a modified version of a font under restrictive terms. If you have suggestions for how to write a license which better handles extraction, please let us know. We haven’t had time to give this as much thought as we’ve given some of the other issues involved in free licensing. We’re especially interested in hearing from font creators at licensing@gnu.org.

I’m here for a few reasons, the first of which is to have a dedicated space and time to invest serious energy and intention in religious practice in general, and Judaism in particular. I want to be able to think about, research, and write about Jewish folklore and cosmology. It’s been impossible for me to feel passionate about this without entertaining how to sustain this interest past the present year, and so naturally I’m thinking of rabbinical school or a graduate program in Judaic Studies, or even a general program in religious or folkloric studies where I can find a specialization. Hopefully by the end of this year I’ll have significantly improved my capability with available sources in Hebrew and Aramaic. If I do this, then I think I’ll have the confidence to continue further and also be a more attractive candidate for a graduate or rabbinic program.

The latter still attracts my imagination since I’m interested in bridging the distance between academic and applied Judaic Studies. If my passion can endure even half a year of this work and lifestyle, then I think I’ll be able to pursue rabbinical school applications with a more clear and grounded intention.

In addition, like PresenTense was, Yeshivat Hadar will be something of a nest for the nascent Open Siddur Project, that is still hard at work developing a web application. Hadar is providing a modest if substantial living stipend for fellows, and besides helping me live within public transit distance of the yeshiva, I’m using this stipend to fund my work on the Open Siddur. (Hadar also provides a $2000 grant specifically for funding a community project, like the Open Siddur.)

By Providence, comrade in code, realazthat, lives only three blocks away from me in Brooklyn. Also nearby is my colleague from PresenTense, Russel Neiss (see MediaMidrash), who along with the Open Siddur, shares my passion for book ripping and scanning (public domain material only). We hope to build a working book scanner by the end of the year!

After a year away from Louisiana and urban planning, this may very well be the turning point in a career shift for me. Or not. Considering the investment in a career in planning it seems almost insane to me to give this up. But there is a freedom that comes from being unsettled, from being suspended rather than grounded. I cannot be sustained too long off of the ground, but I cannot remain either where I’ve been standing. And so this will become my sabbatical year.

I would be remiss if I didn’t finish by plugging a party that everyone who cares about egalitarianism in traditional Judaism might want to turn out for. It’s Wednesday night on October 21, 2009. Hope to see you there. Details below.

“Any Torah study without work will ultimate be lost and lead to sin.” (Pirkei Avot 2:2)

“I am abandoning all practical training for my children and I will only teach my children Torah.” (Mishnah Kiddushin 4:14)

Is life about Torah, or is Torah about life? And what’s at stake in the question, anyway?

Please join me in celebrating the opening of Yeshivat Hadar’s full-year program, come join us as we explore the relationship between our commitment to Torah and our work in the world.

Yeshivat Hadar’s Full-Year Celebration:
Wednesday, October 21
7:30 pm — 9:30 pm
The Schafler Forum at Congregation Rodeph Sholom
7 West 83rd Street
New York, NY 10024

RSVP by email: frank@mechonhadar.org or by phone 212.284.6549

Mechon Hadar is an institute that empowers young Jews to build vibrant Jewish communities through:

• Yeshivat Hadar: the first full-time egalitarian yeshiva in North America
• The Minyan Project: resources, networking, and consulting for more than 50 independent minyanim nationwide

Mechon Hadar is grateful to multiple individual supporters and national foundations. For a complete list of foundation supporters, visit www.mechonhadar.org supporters

To learn more about Mechon Hadar visit our website: www.mechonhadar.org

Happenstance the first: a creative project I proposed to the summer bootcamp/workshop for social entrepreneurs known as the PresenTense Institute was accepted for a fellowship. Now I am in Jerusalem working on this project. More information is available regarding the Open Siddur is available at my developer blog for the project, opensiddur.varady.net.

Happenstance, the second: acceptance of a fellowhsip that will allow me to study at Yeshivat Hadar in Manahattan beginning early September. Concerned friends and relatives are all wondering what this is all leading to. A career in Jewish education? Rabinnical school? Urban and community planning of unbuilt or coalescing intentional communities? I don’t know the answer. But I’m pretty certain the answer isn’t located in Craigslist job listings or the many job posting listserves I’m subscribed to. But maybe it is, (so I’m still checking). I’m still working on that book on magic, art carved furnuture, and obscure Jewish lore, so perhaps this is all an involved research project for what I can only imagine will be my life’s work.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a post for the Omphalos based on a shiur I gave during a Tikkun Leil Shavuot retreat at an exurban development in the wilderness outside East Doylestown, Pa. Stay tuned for it: Azazel, the relationship between Shavuot and Yom Kippur, and why we eat cheese (and not blood) on the Hag Habikkurim.

In October 2008, my friend Will posted on his blog, A Journey Around My Skull, his discovery of a Japanese illustrator, Rokuro Taniuchi. The image of a looming figure on the horizon by Taniuchi reminded me very much of the cover art for a book I read in 5th grade titled Creatures from UFO’s (1978) by Daniel Cohen. On my recent trip back to Cincinnati I fetched the paperback from my old bedroom bookshelf and scanned the cover. Unfortunately, Archway, the publisher, didn’t see fit to credit the cover art illustrator for this book in its young adult series of non-fiction publications. Please comment if you can identify the artist.

The cover artist drew inspiration from chapter 5 of the book, “The Mississippi Fisherman,” that recounts the fascinating tale of two men in Pascagoula, Mississippi on the night of October 11, 1973. Before I continue I should say that I think hypnogogic or hypnopompic states help explain the vast number of encounters with frightening extraterrestrials, angels, demons, ghosts, or molemen depending on the century and culture framing the disturbing experience. Like dreams, these visions tells us more about ourselves and the world of our imagination than the world of nature. Cohen writes,

A door suddenly appeared in the side of the craft. Three strange-looking creatures came out. They didn’t walk. They floated about three feet off the ground.

The two men said the creatures were about five feet tall. They were covered with grayish, wrinkled skin. It was like “the skin of an elephant,” Hickson [one of the two witnesses] said. The creatures didn’t have real faces. Where the nose should have been there was a carrot-like growth. Two similar growths were where ears should have been. The mouth was just a hole. They didn’t have any eyes.

The creatures had two arms, but no fingers. The arms ended in claw-like pincers, like the claws of a lobster. They had what looked like two legs, but the legs seemed to be stuck together. This is why they didn’t seem able to walk. But since they could float they didn’t need to walk…

The story continues to describe how the men were abducted, examined by a machine that resembled a giant eye, and released. I read plenty of books like this when I was in 5th grade, but of all of them, the cover art of this book stuck with me, and so did the story. It reminded me of the tale of the three angels that visited Avraham after his circumcision in Genesis Chapter 18. The fused legs of the UFO creatures reminded me of the idea in Jewish angelology, following Ezekiel’s description of the Ḥayot in Ezekiel 1:5-7,

וּמִתּוֹכָהּ דְּמוּת אַרְבַּע חַיּוֹת וְזֶה מַרְאֵיהֶן דְּמוּת אָדָם לָהֵנָּה. וְאַרְבָּעָה פָנִים לְאֶחָת וְאַרְבַּע כְּנָפַיִם לְאַחַת לָהֶם. וְרַגְלֵיהֶם רֶגֶל יְשָׁרָה וְכַף רַגְלֵיהֶם כְּכַף רֶגֶל עֵגֶל וְנֹצְצִים כְּעֵין נְחֹשֶׁת קָלָל.‏

And out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the likeness of a man. 6 And every one had four faces, and every one of them had four wings. 7 And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf’s foot; and they sparkled like the colour of burnished brass.

In imitation of angels, the Talmud in Berachot 10a explains the Jewish practice of standing with one’s feet together during the standing meditation prayer called the Amidah. The idea of a single leg is also related to that of a pedestal (literally, foot stand), the base of a pillar and the foundations of a philosophy.  Note the challenge spoken by a Roman soldier to the sages Shammai and Hillel the Elder, recorded in Tractate Shabbath 31a: “Accept me as a proselyte on the condition that you teach me the whole Torah while I stand al regal achat (on one foot).” (See below in the illustration by Arthur Szyk.)

In antiquity, to ‘stand on one’s foot,’ was a figure of speech.  Horace in his Satires (1.4.9-10) wrote concerning Lucilius, “ in hora saepe ducentos, ut magnum, versus dictabat stans pede in uno.” (In an hour he used to dictate two hundred verses, as a great feat [while] standing on one foot.) But the Hebrew word regal (foot) also sounds similar to the Classic Latin word regula meaning “basic principle.” (Regula is the root of the modern word “regulation”). Hillel’s clever answer reveals the basic principle of the Torah that can be learned by anyone standing on one foot for a short length of time: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah — the rest is commentary. Now go and learn.”

In some way, I think this notion of a single premise provides an added ethical meaning to the mythic idea of an Even ha-Shettiyah, the Foundation Stone — that a geological foundation of the world is synonymous with or perhaps even signifies a basic code of ethical behavior.  What then is the stone that was cast away that shall become the foundation stone? The considerate and sensitive treatment of each other that is lost and forgotten in times of war and selfish struggle.

As a side note, those actually born with fused legs suffer from Sirenomelia, or Mermaid Syndrome, a rare congenital deformity manifesting in 1 out of 100,000 births. It is usually fatal within one or two days of birth due to related abnormal kidney and bladder development and function.

LATE BREAKING UPDATE: Am I channeling some sort of zeitgeist? Less than a month after this post, this lovely new resource, On1Foot :  Jewish Texts for Social Justice was established. Check it out this amazing user-contributable archive of relevant source texts.

Wonka’s oblique answer references the first stanza of a poem by Arthur O’Shaughnessy, the “Ode” featured in his collection of poems from 1874, Music and Moonlight. I didn’t understand Wonka’s response to Veruca Salt until I read the entire poem. The meaning provided me a key to understanding the story, who the mysterious character Wonka represents, what his motivations are in finding a child to give his factory to, and what Charlie Bucket really means for him. Read the poem below, and I think you might understand too.

ODE.

WE are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;–
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world’s great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire’s glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song’s measure
Can trample a kingdom down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself in our mirth;
And o’erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world’s worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.

A breath of our inspiration
Is the life of each generation;
A wondrous thing of our dreaming
Unearthly, impossible seeming–
The soldier, the king, and the peasant
Are working together in one,
Till our dream shall become their present,
And their work in the world be done.

They had no vision amazing
Of the goodly house they are raising;
They had no divine foreshowing
Of the land to which they are going:
But on one man’s soul it hath broken,
A light that doth not depart;
And his look, or a word he hath spoken,
Wrought flame in another man’s heart.

And therefore to-day is thrilling
With a past day’s late fulfilling;
And the multitudes are enlisted
In the faith that their fathers resisted,
And, scorning the dream of to-morrow,
Are bringing to pass, as they may,
In the world, for its joy or its sorrow,
The dream that was scorned yesterday.

But we, with our dreaming and singing,
Ceaseless and sorrowless we !
The glory about us clinging
Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing:
O men! it must ever be
That we dwell, in our dreaming and singing,
A little apart from ye.

For we are afar with the dawning
And the suns that are not yet high,
And out of the infinite morning
Intrepid you hear us cry–
How, spite of your human scorning,
Once more God’s future draws nigh,
And already goes forth the warning
That ye of the past must die.

Great hail! we cry to the comers
From the dazzling unknown shore;
Bring us hither your sun and your summers,
And renew our world as of yore;
You shall teach us your song’s new numbers,
And things that we dreamed not before:
Yea, in spite of a dreamer who slumbers,
And a singer who sings no more.

The premise of Roald Dahl’s novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) asks: what would an industrial factory engaged in mass production look like if it was built by a fantasist, dreamer, and romantic in a world dominated by pragmatists, realists, and materialists. In this lonely island, Wonka wonders who will inherit his life’s work and hopes that in the next generation of children there might still be romantics. His sampling of youth via the lottery tickets provides a referendum on Charlie’s generation. The selected tourists to Wonka’s candyland are a fools gallery of technocrats, capitalists, hedonists… and opportunists. The latter is what Wonka makes of Charlie Bucket.

Poverty does not make Charlie a finer candidate than any of the others or even more sympathetic to Wonka. But the moral challenge that Charlie meets in the face of his family’s dire poverty does affect Wonka. For Charlie to give back the stolen everlasting gobstopper means returning to Wonka’s competitor Oscar Slugworth empty handed and to his family with only tales of Oompa-Loompas. Wonka is so resigned to the absence of new romantics in the world that he is willing to give up everything to Slugworth by letting Charlie walk out with the gobstopper. By returning the gobstopper Wonka is enlightened to Charlie’s enduring romantic virtue. Charlie’s elevation of an abstract moral good over an immediate material good justifies his embrace of the young lad as the rightful recipient of his vast empire of imagination.

If these insights were intriguing, note that they don’t apply to either Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) nor the screenplay he wrote for the film. Rather, credit is due to David Seltzer, an uncredited Jewish screenwriter who wrote at least 30% of the final script. Seltzer was responsible for all of Wonka’s literary references throughout the film including Wonka’s quotation from O’Shaughnessy’s “Ode” and his quote of Portia from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice at the end of the film, “So shines a good deed in a naughty world.” ( Seltzer later directed another film representing the tribulations of an alienated romantic youth, Lucas (1986).)

Dahl, furious with the casting of Gene Wilder over Spike Milligan and Seltzer’s focus on Wonka rather than Charlie Bucket, later forbid a film adaptation of his Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator (1972). Focus on Dahl’s anti-Semitism often focuses on his 1983 outburst: “There’s a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity … I mean there is always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.” It’s intriguing to speculate that a decade earlier Dahl’s animus might have been expressed in his frustration with Gene Wilder and David Seltzer’s reinvention of Wonka, the romantic industrialist, as a Magical Jew.

Title 1970 John Cale & Terry Riley Church Of Anthrax 1 Church of Anthrax 1970 John Cale & Terry Riley Church Of Anthrax 2 The Hall of Mirrors in the Palace at Versailles 1990 Robert Rich Geometry 1 Primes Part 1 1990 Robert Rich Geometry 2 Primes Part 2 1999 Tranquility Bass Steve Reich Remixed 4 Megamix 1974 Laurie Spiegel New Music For Electronic and Recorded Media: Women in Electronic Music 4 Appalachian Grove I 2003 Aphex Twin 26 Mixes for Cash (Disc 1) 5 Heroes (remixed Philip Glass and David Bowie) 1991 Harold Budd By the Dawn’s Early Light 1 Poem Aztec Hotel 2005 dj BC Glassbreaks 1 Einstein on the Beast 2006 Boards Of Canada Trans Canada Highway 1 Dayvan Cowboy 1972 Bill Withers Still Bill 4 Use Me unknown year Ghost Exits Sun EP 3 [unknown title] 1967 Jorge Luis Borges Por él Mismo 6 el gólem 1959 Raymond Scott OHM (Disc 2) 1 Cindy Electronium 1975 Lard Free I’m Around About Midnight 1 Violez L’espace De Son Réfrigérant 1975 Lard Free I’m Around About Midnight 2 In A Desert Alambic 1975 Lard Free I’m Around About Midnight 3 Does East Bakestan Belong To Itself? 1975 Lard Free I’m Around About Midnight 4 Tatkooz A Roulette 1975 Lard Free I’m Around About Midnight 5 Pale Violence Under A Reverbere 1975 Lard Free I’m Around About Midnight 6 Even Silence Stops When Trains Come 1980 Robert Fripp with David Byrne God Save the Queen/Under Heavy Manners 4 Under Heavy Manners 1988 Spacemen 3 Playing With Fire 1 Honey 1982 Brainticket Voyage 1 Voyage (Part 1)

(Also available via streamin’ Internet audio, the programme “Amplified Harmonic Resonance,” is brought to you by Heavenly Music Corporation brand cigarettes and Ubik brand reality cleansers.)

On hiatus for the last six years, dj spaceling has been on academic retreat, whiling away his years in hermitages and think tanks, and more recently, battling leviathans off the coast of Louisiana. His heart as broken as a thrift store fiddle and mind as sharp as a kite racer’s glass string, you can expect morning musiks that aim to temper and wrastle the caffeinated raging  mania that fuels our modern Empire.

In other words, yours truly shall be on the radio and live on the Internet Monday mornings for the next semester on Philadelphia radio via WKDU, Drexel University’s student run radio station, 91.7FM 7am-10am. (Noon-3PM London, 2pm-5pm Haifa)

Last week I received a press release from Physicians for Human Rights-Israel about a sharp increase in child burn victims in the Gaza Strip. This was before the Israeli air campaign began. After what’s happened in the last couple of days, PHR’s email now seems like a message from another historical era, a time so calm that it was a major concern that

“In December alone, 16 Palestinians were hospitalized who were burned while trying to heat their homes. Most of the cases reported to the NGO were of children playing with fire, following attempts to light bonfires for heating and cooking and lighting candles in order to illuminate homes.”

The fires, that is, were the result of the siege of Gaza, which included fuel shortages and power outages. The head of the burn unit at Shifa Hospital in Gaza reported that his unit was collapsing under the strain. I can only guess that Dr. Nafed Abu Shaaban is having a much harder time this week. [read the full post]

This news hits home for me. This weekend I learned that my youngest nephew, a resident of the occupied West Bank, received first and second degree burns after his clothes caught on fire, the result of his grasping for a Chanukiah (chanukah menorah) candle. Everyone is in shock, exhausted, and thanking God that at least he wasn’t wearing a polyester shirt, oy, he was wearing polyester Tzizit. Thank G!d  he wasn’t hurt even worse than he was.

For all the negative attention given over to the Cult of Molokh in the Torah, one would think that any fire ritual in Judaism be undertaken with many precautions to preclude even the possibility of fire related injury, especially of children. According to M’lachim Bet (2 Kings 23:10) and Sefer Yirmiyahu (Jeremiah 32:35) the fire ritual of Molokh seems to involve the passage of the first born male child through fire. The Jewish tradition finds it obscene to create situations in which children, any children, are subjected to such danger.

Hatzalah, an international volunteer emergency response organization serving mostly Orthodox Jewish communities provided a safety guide this year  to help prevent Chanukah related accidents. It reads

• Remove curtains or any other flammable objects from the area around the menorah.
• Keep the menorahs away from the reach of small children and make sure the menorah is on something solid and leveled.
• Children bring home beautiful projects on Chanukah. If they are flammable, either paste them on the wall or place them away from menorahs.
• When making latkes, keep ALL children away from the hot oil.
• Turn frying pan handles away from the edge of the stove and try to use the back burners.
• House fires tend to occur more often during the winter months. Prepare an escape plan and frequently rehearse it with your family.

It adds this helpful information in small print:

First Aid for Burns – this is for immediate care only.

• Skin continues to burn for a while after the heat source has been removed. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to begin cooling the burn as soon as possible. A first-degree burn that is left untreated can quickly become a second or third degree burn.
• Cool a burn by running cold (not freezing) water on the affected area, or by covering the area with a wet towel. When using the towel method, it is important to occasionally re-immerse the towel in cold water as the burn warms the cloth.
• Burns, regardless of the cause, have to be cooled for a minimum of twenty minutes. The hotter the skin, the longer the cooling process.
• It is advisable that any burn to an infant, child or the elderly that affects the face, chest, abdomen, or back should be considered an emergency.

This information needs to be more widely disseminated. And if we consider the safety of our children to be a priority and a religious obligation, then we should also find obscene what has been happening to the children of Gaza under Hamas and the past year’s siege.

It’s amazing to me that its easier to find information on fire related injuries to Gazan children than statistics on how often Jewish children are injured due to Chanukah related accidents. I can’t find anything online. I’ll post them on my blog as soon as I can find some.

In the meantime, I pray that we all become mindful of each other’s health and safety, and act accordingly to increase light in all of our communities, to preserve each other against callous disregard and aggression, and find shelter under a common awning of peace. This is my humble and sad wish on the last day of Chanukah.

We come to chase the dark away
In our hands are light and fire
Each individual light is small
But together the light is mighty.
Flee, darkness and night
Flee, before the light.

Perhaps you don’t have a significant other or know-it-all child or lucky friend to ask you for your computer help when troubles arise. If so, please feel free to give me call. My parents tell me that while I’m busy looking for work I should also make myself useful by helping people with their computer problems. That, after all, is what I do for them when I return home, so, you know, obviously.

But beyond the esteem my parents beam on their tech-savvy son, I also have some street cred. To note, before I became a planner I was a computer dude in Philadelphia, first working with Windows and Macs at the University of Pennsylvania, and then afterward as an open source programmer on linux servers at a small web hosting company in Center City. I gave up that career when I moved away from Philly to go to grad school six years ago. I never really looked back but my talents were always of use, whether it was repurposing an antique Sun server into a low cost web server for my school’s planning program, or configuring a CMS out of Movable Type or WordPress, or simply teaching my coworkers how to use Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, and Illustrator. I also found myself doing a lot of work using ESRI’s ArcView GIS software in addition to the other familiar research and writing tasks of planners.

But now I’m living in the West Washington Square Park neighborhood of Center City Philadelphia and hunting down job leads (that hopefully won’t take me away from Philly again). And while I’m doing so, I’m taking my parents advice to make my IT consulting services available to everyone. It’s a pretty competitive market from what I can see from Craigslist, but I imagine that plenty of folks looking for computer help in Center City might still find this post and give me a call (513.405.3603) for my competitive rates.

It being the Winter holiday season, I thought it might also be pertinent to advertise that I can also be of service ripping compact discs to mp3 players, and providing all the nice cover art and metadata that modern audio players use to organize the music they contain. Give me a call if you’d like to pay someone else to take over the mind-numbing task of ripping CDs and/or correcting your music’s metadata. I was just reminded to add that I also do freelance editing. Need a second (or third) pair of eyes on your paper? Need someone to help polish your text? References available upon request.

And hey, if you’d like some help preparing your charette, researching your plan, or illustrating your reports with maps and charts, don’t hesitate to nab me before someone else does.

Kitteh Yoga: Exhale arch, Inhale stretch

Last night was my second night in two weeks of yoga with K. Clair and friends at her West Philly loft. I’m even starting to remember some poses for practicing during the rest of the week. But the hardest part, for me anyways, seems to be associating correctly each pose with either inhaling or exhaling — and then keeping aware of where my breathing is as I exercise each position. As a teaching and memory aid, I created the above image macro with the help of icanhascheesburger.

Much appreciation to Kristina and my other fellow Philly yoga friends for making this a fun and instructive part of my week.

UPDATE: Hilariously, I got my (in/ex)hales mixed up in my first attempt at this lolcat. See comments below. Thanks again to Kristina

Behold, my Omphalos as digested arithmetically (with some aesthetic treatments) by Jonathan Feinberg’s text cloud application over at wordle.net. Makes for a rather elegant visual poem, no? The wordle engine accepts site URLs, RSS feeds, or giant gobs of text. The latter is what I fed it after copying the source of my ATOM feed and removing all the links, html, and other xml cruft using NoteTab. Hat tip to Jamais Cascio over at Open the Future for sharing the coolness.

The application provides some control over the appearance of the cloud. You can configure how many words appear (I chose 200). There are also settings for the orientation of the words (vertical/horizontal), palette, and font choice.

Some comments. It doesn’t appear as if the wordle engine is context sensitive to words that appear in close proximity to each other; place names like Bond Hill and Baton Rouge are thus not recognized as such. It would also be nice if common words such as “like” and “also” could be filtered out or relegated to the background as glue for more significant nouns like “heierophant” and “cosmogonic”.

Still, looking into the world cloud as a mirror of my writing over the last three years or so is interesting. All those music related terms are surely the result of importing all the posts I made over at mog.com in 2006 and 2007. Should I be as surprised as I am that this blog is so “Jewish”? Probably not.

Joe Lamantia has written more about text clouds here. (A tag cloud with all the tags and catgories of articles posted at the Omphalos appears on the right sidebar.)

I rode my bicycle over to Ault Park today to hear Barack Obama speak. Navigating the hills and valleys of Cincinnati on a beautiful day, as it was today, is so much more preferable to huffing it to the park from a car parked a mile away. As it happened I was pretty exhausted by the time I made it up that last hill up ot the pavillion and then I had to scout around for a suitable pole for locking up my bicycle. Many folks were still arriving for the 3pm rally and to get in Obama campaign volunteers were passing out white “tickets” for attendees to fill out with their neighborhood so they could be co-opted for possible volunteer work in the next few weeks. But really, no tickets were required for attendance. At the pavillion, police had me go through a scanner and checked me for weapons.

The podium was set up in the lower yard of the park, which was pretty well filled by the time I arrived. In any case, I was on the lookout for some shade, the park goers best friend on a sunny day. I found a little nearby where the event organizers had set up a refreshments table serving water courtesy of a nearby fire hydrant and the Cincinnati Water Works. First Mayor Mallory spoke and he introduced many of the other local and state Democratic party politicians vying for office. Then Governor Strickland spoke and word of mouth spread that Obama was running late. Strickland then introduced a woman from Sharonville named Rockel Haussman (sp?). She spoke of her family’s difficulty finding work and enduring long commutes after her husband lost his job security with Ford Motor Company. A smattering of applause interrupted her story as Obama’s entourage arrived at the park. A few minutes later she introduced Obama.

I’ve heard Obama speak on television numerous times now. But here in Cincinnati I couldn’t help but be struck by his populist message. The speech was definitely oriented towards working hard on reviving the economy and he didn’t shy away from saying that we will all need to make sacrifices and take conservation seriously in order to be more frugal. I cheered when he called for promoting a public educatuion system that funded art and music classes. I remembered that critics have been calling for Obama to make an emotional connection with voters and I feel he did so when speaking about his mother arguing with insurance companies a few months before her death from ovarian cancer at the age of 53. The fight for health care against its obscene corruption by health insurance companies animated Obama.

It’s hard to estimate how many thousands of people were in attendance at the rally. At least 5,000. Possibly twice that. Later on in the day I went to Kroger’s to buy some goodies for my Yom Kippur break fast and saw an employee I had seen earlier at the rally. I said hi and asked him what he thought. He said that he missed hearing Obama speak. Because Obama was running late he said he had to leave the rally early to make sure he got to work in time. Then he told me he’s one of those undecided voters who’ll probably choose who to vote for the day of the election. I suspect that he also thought that Obama would be speaking at 3pm rather than having to endure a half hour of introductions by local pols. In any case, this rally today was a missed opportunity for him. For the rest of those assembled, most of whom were wearing some Obama merch, the rally was already preaching to the converted.

During Golden Week, Vote Today Ohio banked ~3,300 Obama votes, plus 621 voter registrations. Did we hit our ambitious 10,000 goal? No. Did we make a critical contribution in America’s #1 battleground state? Absolutely.

Our 3,300 votes were far more than just a drop in the bucket. Consider this: In Franklin County (home to Columbus), 9,264 people voted early during Golden Week. Vote Today Ohio vans (and cars and marches) moved 1,369 of them to the polls. Yes, we directly moved 14.8 percent of the early vote in Franklin County. It’s safe to assume that thousands more heard about Golden Week directly from our work. That’s powerful. We were THE game in town.

These numbers are significant since Stephen Majors of the Associated Press wrote on October 6th that first indications indicated that turnout during Golden Week was light. Majors writes, “Early returns showed about 3,000 voters in Ohio’s four largest counties took advantage of the disputed policy, a surprisingly low turnout to some elections officials.”

Considering that Monday was our busiest day by far and that Vote Today Ohio was one of only a number of groups in the state helping to turn out the vote last week, I’m pretty confident that the early returns cited by Majors presents a misleading picture of the turnout last week. Moveon and ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) were two other groups working in Hamilton County. Jennifer Brunner, Secretary of State for Ohio, reported yesterday that roughly 660,000 voters were newly registered in Ohio. Obviously, only a small fraction of these banked their vote last week but from what I could tell on October 6th, the Board of Elections was busy enough to make the Republican Party here quite nervous. I’m cautiously optimistic for November 4th.

Erik Crew added up the numbers for our efforts in Cincinnati on Monday, by far our busiest day. (Erik is interviewed in this ireport video). We moved 220 votes to the Hamilton County Board of Elections on the final day of registration. Our Golden Week is over but early voting continues. One of our volunteers, Becky from the UK, is staying on and helping make daily shuttle runs from campuses to the Board of Elections. So long as I’m in town I’ll also volunteer to drive and I’m also working on cleaning up GIS data for the Obama GIS working group. Should be a busy three weeks.

Finally, I want to give a shout out to Cathy from the Washingtonrox blog who has a great summary of our effort this last week, and excellent photos of my volunteer colleagues in Cincinnati. Take a look.

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This is the last day of Golden Week, the week in Ohio when the periods for voter registration and early voting overlap allowing new voters to register and vote on the same day. Our teams are working hard to make one final push to get out the vote. I made posters like the one above for Xavier University. (If you like it and want to use it feel free. Here’s the download: Election Day Is Now (poster art)).

Friday night our volunteer groups met up at Baba Budan’s Cafe near campus. There I made the acquaintance of Erik Crew, another local Cincinnatian working on this effort. He’s been writing at rubyhornet about Golden Week (“Golden What?“), his experience registering the homeless, and the issue of ex-felon disenfranchisement. Erik and I are an exception. Most of the volunteers have come in from other states (California, Michigan, Kentucky, etc.) and two are international; one traveled from Canada and another flew all the way from the UK. Their efforts are testament to the global concern for the future of this nation’s leadership.

The party at Baba Budan’s was co-sponsored by the Hip Hop Congress. Spoken word artists delivered poetry, some with dj backing. The emcee was the Divine Prince Hakeem. My ears perked up when he mentioned his connection to the Artistic Order of 144,000. The latter was the collective of my friend Obalaye Makaria. (Obalaye helped direct some funding for my research into Bond Hill’s history four years ago.) Hakeem informed me that Obalaye’s since moved to Seattle but calls in weekly to Cincinnati’s black radio station, The Buzz. I’ll be tuning in to hopefully hear from him.

Sunday morning I went with Erik to the A.M.E. Church in Bond Hill. (This is the church built at the corner of Reading Road and Seymour Ave. on the parking lot of what is now Jordan’s Crossing and formerly Swifton Commons.) Our mission: to respectfully offer our shuttle services to any congregants come later today. We stayed for the 11am service. Rarely have I known a warmer and more welcoming community. After introducing ourselves, the congregants were invited to greet us personally. I really felt their love. I also enjoyed the relaxed yet uplifting spirit created by the church choir and its excellent band. The band leader and piano player informed us that the bassist, a young fellow, would be playing with Wynton Marsalis pretty soon and everyone gave him a nice applause. The band leader also announced a group of black youth called the Ritz Chamber Players who will be performing with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra on October 9th. He invited everyone to attend the concert and udged everyone to develop an eclectic taste in all sorts of musical styles including classical and hip hop in addition to gospel and rock and roll.

Reverend Alphonse Allen preached about the necessity of striving to improve even when you feel comfortable where you’re at. In developing this idea he used the story in Deuteronomy of God commanding the Israelites to prepare to take possession of the land of Canaan while they camped on the east side of the Jordan after their 40 years of travel in the wilderness. In Jewish circles I think I’ve heard the same idea developed but from the command of God to Abram to lech l’cha l’artzecha, go out to a land that he will show you. Thinking about it, there’s a good parallel between the two stories in Genesis and Deuteronomy. Below is an image I gleaned of their lovely sanctuary.

9/30: 380 votes
10/1: 429 votes, plus 121 new registrations
10/2: 449 votes, plus 306 new registrations
10/3: 776 votes, plus 391 new registrations

That’s 2,034 total votes cast statewide since Tuesday. If we assume that each field team has a shuttle van that leaves every hour from 9am-3pm, and that every van has 7 seats, then 2,034 voters have cast out of a possible 5,880. In other words we’re getting close to 35% of our capacity. The stats aren’t broken down by peak hours but I’d hazard a guess that we’re hitting nearly 60% of our capacity from 11am-2pm.

I’m OK with these figures and buoyed by the upward slope of the stats. I’ll tell you why. Early voting doesn’t commence Monday with the end of voter registration in Ohio (when “Golden Week” is over). Ohioans can continue to vote at Early Voting Centers until Monday, November 3rd. More than directly increasing voter turnout, this week probably did more for simply generating a good vibe among college students (and their friends and families by word of mouth) that they’ve already helped make a difference in this Election.

ELECTION DAY IS NOW. From my own experience talking to folk on campuses, plenty of voters simply wanted to know the address of the Early Voting Center in Hamilton County (it’s the Board of Elections office at 824 Broadway Street in Downtown Cincinnati, 2nd Floor) so that they could get down there on their own at their convenience. I also heard the best reason for voting early when a voter (pictured above) convinced a friend to vote at our table, “Vote today ’cause November 4th might be cold!” Word.

In these stats, we may also be seeing the outcome of the intense new voter registration efforts by groups like moveon.org. From the stats above, it looks like a little over half of the voters we’ve shuttled had already registered. There is plenty to be enthusiastic about in this race but from the level of enthusiasm I saw among our college students at Cincinnati State University this week, I’d wager that many of these were newly registered voters.

Yesterday, I finished the t-shirts I promised the Cincinnati early voting teams. This is the first stencil I’ve made and below is the result. What do you think? We didn’t have enough teams or volunteers to justify a silk screen, thus these lo-fi spray painted shirts.

For those wondering how to do this

I didn’t have a frame to reduce splatter around the stencil, so I wrapped the t-shirt over a slightly smaller cardboard sheet I cut from a box. By laying the t-shirts flat over the backing I was able to adjust the shirt for where I wanted the image and then wrapped the sides and back of the shirt around and underneath the cardboard. By the way, if you’d like to download this stencil and make your own shirts, I have it available for download. Link: VOTE TODAY OHIO T-SHIRT STENCIL ART.

Vote Today Ohio at Cincinnati State University

Today I met with my field team at Cincinnati State University where I was put to work politely asking passing students, custodial workers, faculty, and staff whether they’d like to “Vote Today” and explaining the advantages of early voting and submitting an absentee ballot in person (rather than by mail). Quite a few signed up for our shuttle service to the local Early Voting Center at Hamilton County’s Board of Elections Office (824 Broadway St., google map link). When our 11am van filled to capacity I was thrilled.

For sure there’s no way to know how folks will vote once they are given their absentee ballot to fill out, but Vote Today Ohio is hoping that they’ll vote for Obama. Thus the focus on frequently under-represented voting blocks: college students, the homeless, and ex-felons (who are forbidden to vote in Florida, among other states), to help swell Obama’s numbers in this key swing state. (See here, for more on Ohio’s voting rights and regulations.

Can you tell how pleased I am to be working on this project? I was hoping to do something for this campaign. This summer I was hoping someone would respond to my invitation to do GIS work for Obama gratis. Some of my proudest work in Louisiana involved the canvassing maps I drew up for David Brown, a Baton Rouge lawyer and progressive candidate for the State Legislature’s District 67. But even before I learned GIS, I’ve tried to help wherever I could. Back in 2004, when I moved to DC and began working at the Trust for Public Land, I was happy to find a little volunteer niche at the DNC party HQ regularly sorting giant binders of scanned and copied checks for their donation vetting department.

(A digression. Amazing the friends you make working shoulder to shoulder for these races. At the DNC I met Chris Kinsei, a Zen Buddhist monk who had recently left the Mt. Shasta monastery that had been his home for the previous 25 years. Twenty five years of contemplating peace gave him a hunger for pursuing peace in our world. In the last four years since Bush won, Chris has gone on to build a life teaching folk, getting married, and studying to become a nurse. A great guy if ever you should meet him.)

In 2000, I worked as a citizen reporter for the IMC covering the (unfortunately now typical) police abuses of political demonstrations at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia and nearly got arrested while talking on my cell phone and delivering this story from Market Street. My work on national political campaigns began by canvassing to elect former California governor Jerry Brown President in 1992.

Besides watching the VP debate, tonight I get to make some snappy t-shirts for my fellow volunteers to wear. My hope is that they’ll be good enough to become a budget conscious hipster’s proud thrift store discovery.

I’m excited to be going and especially to see some of my old colleagues from the Trust for Public Land that will be attending. But in a deeper sense, working at this conference and networking with other folk passionate about parks will be a return for me to an intention that motivated me to change my career six years ago.

Rewind the cosmic clock and half a decade ago you’ll find me riding a bicycle along the Schuylkill River Park greenway in Philadelphia and wondering how I could possibly reciprocate for the wonderful space that anonymous civic philanthopists, city planners, and landscape architects had provided for me to re-create myself on that beautiful day. The answer I came up with was studying to become a city planner myself, and two years later after writing a thesis and finishing a ton of work, I was awarded a degree in city planning. Still focused on parks I found a job with Peter Harnik at the Center for City Park Excellence at the Trust for Public Land, a research internship that last a year.

But for the past two and a half years I haven’t been focused on parks. Following the hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, I moved down to Louisiana to cut my teeth as a planning practitioner, first for a FEMA contractor in rural southwestern Louisiana, and afterwords for an engineering firm in Baton Rouge. During that time I gained enough experience to apply to take the AICP exam and passed. And now that I’ve returned from Louisiana, I’m once again looking to get back into working for city parks, as a city planner in a parks department, or in some other capacity as an open space or trails planner.

I’ve also been looking into programs that focus on green building and construction. What I discovered in Louisiana is that experience matters. However exciting green technology or environmental best practices sounds to a young planner, the tried and conventional modes ossified in regional expectations are a nearly impossible barrier if you can’t speak with firsthand experience to how practical a different approach might be.

A moment of transition and opportunity. This next year should be interesting. I’ll keep you informed.

Then I noticed that the ipods had album shuffle. The new players from Cowon and Archos did not, nor any others that fancied themselves as ipod competitors. But I still wasn’t convinced to buy an ipod yet. My trusty if heavy and slow Archos had a (then enormous) 100gb hard drive that I had installed myself and the largest ipod then available was 60gb. Ahh, but just before my birthday Apple announced their release of a new 160gb ipod. I was won over. Soon I gifted myself with a new Ipod Classic 160gb.

iPod Management

When it arrived, the ipod’s hard drive came formatted with Apple’s native file system, HFS Plus (HFS+). As the Windows operating systems cannot natively read HFS+ drives and my Thinkpad runs Windows XP, iTunes reformatted the ipod with FAT32, a file system engineered by Microsoft. At the time I didn’t think too much of HFS+ vs. FAT32, I was just happy that the ipod was working. And so, I put all concerns about file fragmentation and the need to periodically defrag FAT32 volumes to the side, and got to work filling the ipod up with good music and videos.

Over the last year I’ve learned how to corrupt my ipod’s database (and how to fix it painlessly) by avoiding iTunes as much as possible. iTunes had the advantage of supporting Album shuffle, but I preferred to use Winamp with the Album List plug-in for listening to albums on my computer. I had some success using Floola (which does not support Album shuffle) and Floola is my choice ipod manager on my Linux boxen. But on my Thinkpad running Windows XP, I was more interested in whether there were any plug-ins for Winamp that could suffice as a fully featured alternative to iTunes.

Looking at Winamp I discovered that it supported iPods through a plug-in bundled with the Winamp installer called pmp_ipod. Trying it out I was underwhelmed by its poor support of album cover art on the ipod, a feature I had really come to love. Then I discovered ml_ipod — an open source winamp plugin written by independent developers that could do (almost) everything pmp_ipod could do but better. The only thing I would need iTunes for would be for occasional firmware updates. ml_ipod support was fairly well documented on an online wiki and any further questions could be pursued on an active support forum hosted at Winamp. I’ve been using ml_ipod since January and have donated money to the further development of the plug-in.

File Fragmentation in FAT32 vs. HFS+

A few weeks ago I began to wonder again what my ipod’s FAT32 volume file fragmentation looked like. Unsurprisingly, after tens of thousands of file transfers, the ipod’s music, video, database and artwork files were critically fragmented according to Diskeeper, a windows defrag tool. A fragmented file system meant that my ipod needed to work harder and slower than it should have to. The answer to a fragmented ipod file system isn’t defragging it though. Ever wonder whether you should defrag your ipod? Don’t waste your time. Defragmenting an ipod over USB takes a LONG time. It is much much faster to simply do a full restore from your computer’s existing archive of music. (Before doing so, make sure you have an archive of all your iPod’s music.)

Even after I initialized and reloaded my FAT32 ipod, I found that the the iTunes database of music files as well as the artwork database of cover art were still fragmented — just less so. I began to explore what benefits there might be to manage the ipod with its original HFS+ over FAT32. I was impressed to find that HFS+ drives do not suffer from the same fragmentation problems as FAT32 drives. As this comparison of file systems shows, the main reason for the lack of fragmentation in HFS+ is because unlike FAT32, HFS+ supports Extents. Wikipedia explains:

An extent is a contiguous area of storage in a computer file system, reserved for a file. When starting to write to a file, a whole extent is allocated. When writing to the file again, possibly after doing other write operations, the data continues where the previous write left off. This reduces or eliminates file fragmentation.

Additionally, because HFS+ was specifically engineered to minimize disk access and quickly access individual files, its specific utility for the iPod seems obvious. This specific advantage of HFS+ over FAT32 was summarized well by the user, “Millenium,” over on the macnn web forum in a 2006 thread on HFS+ vs. FAT32:

You may hear that HFS+ is slower than FAT32. That’s true in some cases, but not in others. In particular, HFS+ does not do very well in tasks where you need to access many small files at once…

For looking up individual files, however, HFS+ is actually one of the fastest filesystems out there, and has been for a long time. This all comes from the way that HFS+ stores its data: when you’re working with relatively few files it’s better, but when you’re working with many files at once it isn’t as good. It’s a design tradeoff, and whether it will be better or worse for you in this regard really depends on how you use your computer.

The original Macintosh File System (MFS, from which HFS and then HFS+ directly descend) was created in an era when most people used floppies to store all of their data. The same is true of FAT16, which is where FAT32 comes from. Apple’s engineers decided that since floppies were so slow, people and applications would try to minimize disk access in general, and so they optimized their filesystem to work best under those conditions. It worked extraordinarily well for the time, and even today there aren’t many better filesystems for people who work under those conditions.

In other words, one of the best file systems available for the iPod is HFS+ (especially compared with FAT32). Unfortunately, FAT32 is not a comparable alternative to HFS+. FAT32′s presence as an alternative file system for the ipod simply reflects the lack of support in Windows OSes for the more advanced HFS+ file system.

Perils of FAT32 to HFS+ Conversion

As a result of learning this, I became increasingly interested in converting my FAT32 ipod to HFS+. Besides fragmentation and reliability, I also wondered if a change in ipod file systems might affect the file transfer speed over USB 2.0. File transfer speeds over USB 2.0 with my FAT32 formatted ipod averaged around 6000 kB/s. Would HFS+ perform worse or better?

General information on converting the iPod from FAT32 to HFS+ was plainly lacking and specific recommendations advised iPod users to accept FAT32. I was on my own. To access HFS+ formatted drive volumes on Windows I’d need to install special software like MacDrive by Mediafour. So to begin, I downloaded the MacDrive software and formatted my ipod to HFS+. So far so good. I wanted to make certain that my firmware was installed correctly so I proceeded to initialize my ipod with iTunes, and then re-transfer my mp3s and mp4s to the newly formatted ipod with winamp + ml_ipod. This seemed to work fine (although I didn’t see any discernible change in file transfer speeds). But afterward, I was surprised to find that my ipod was still formatted with FAT32! I soon learned that as part of its restore sequence, iTunes for PC will automatically format HFS+ formatted ipods with a FAT32 file system. It also copies ipod for PC firmware that seems tailored specifically for FAT32.

In my next attempt, I reformatted the ipod to HFS+ with Macdrive, ignored iTunes altogether, and did a full restore with ml_ipod in winamp onto the Ipod. ml_ipod recognized the drive and transferred the files. This time the file transfer speed was much higher: 9500 kB/s vs. 6000 kB/s. I was impressed but once the transfer completed, I found the ipod would not recognize any of the files that had been transferred. The itunesDB database was not corrupt and the actual data files were all present so what could be the problem? Was it a problem with the iPod’s firmware not being able to read HFS+?

I found the answer on a wiki page written for Gentoo Linux users on how to update ipod firmware. Simply formatting the ipod’s drive to HFS+ would not work because HFS+ formatted ipods have three partitions: the first partition contains the partition table, the second partition the ipod for mac firmware, and the third partition the media files and databases. (FAT32 formatted ipods have two partitions: a hidden one for the ipod for pc firmware, and the other for the media.) The ability to create these HFS+ partitions on the iPod aren’t available on Windows, even with MacDrive. MacDrive can format a disk to HFS+ but does not provide the ability to create three separate partitions on the disk. And to make the ipod work, I would also need the correct ipod firmware installed in its respective partition. Could iTunes solve the problem? iTunes for PC will neither create the three HFS+ partitions nor copy anything but ipod for PC firmware to a FAT32 partition. The only solution I could imagine for copying the correct firmware and creating the correct partitions would be by connecting my ipod to a computer running OS X and restoring my iPod using iTunes for Macintosh.

So iPod USB cable in hand, I visited my friend Isaac S. and his Macbook, and soon afterward I had a functioning ipod with the correct HFS+ partitions and firmware. (Thanks Isaac!) Back home, I found that with MacDrive installed on my Thinkpad, ml_ipod and winamp had no difficulty recognizing the HFS+ volume. Transfer speeds hovered mid 8000 kB/s. Success!

The conversion did not come without any caveats. After the full transfer was completed I did notice that there was less free space available on the ipod. The ipod with HFS+ used approximately 5% more storage for the same files than when it was formatted with FAT32. (116gb/FAT32 vs. 122gb/HFS+ out of 148gb total.) I don’t know why, but perhaps it has something to do with the extents allocated for each file in HFS+ (described above). (See update below on this weird problem.)

Because ml_ipod was designed to restore fat32 formatted ipods, I don’t think I’ll be able to use ml_ipod’s “restore or initialize ipod” feature anymore, nor will I be able to rely on iTunes for PC for the occasional firmware update. Rather than buy a whole new Apple computer for this task, I’m looking at vmware workstation, an emulation environment that I can run OS X on within Windows. Another option is to use another piece of software by Mediafour called Xplay.

Conclusion

I hope this story helps anyone else out there wondering whether to get their FAT32 ipods converted back to HFS+ (and how exactly to go about doing that). I think it’s a worthwhile project because of the advantages that HFS+ provides in speed and reliability over FAT32, the lack of file fragmentation in HFS+, and some moderate file transfer speed advantages. The disadvantages  are the need to purchase HFS+ software for Windows like MacDrive and no longer being able to depend on iTunes for firmware updates or ml_ipod for occasional full restore and ipod initialization. (You can probably get around the latter problems by installing Mac OS X in a vmware emulation, but then you’d need to buy a copy of vmware workstation and OS X as well. Or you can buy a mac mini, macbook, or other Apple computer.) If this doesn’t faze you, then you should also expect that due to differences between the two file systems, that HFS+ will utilize more storage space on your ipod than FAT32. On my ipod, HFS+ used 5% more drive space with the same files loaded onto it.

If you want to run an HFS+ formatted ipod on a PC running Windows, follow these steps:

1. If your ipod is formatted FAT32, restore it using iTunes for Mac on a friend’s Macintosh computer. (iTunes for PC will only format your ipod to FAT32.)
2. Install HFS+ reading/writing software for Windows like MacDrive by Mediafour.
3. Optional but recommended: Install ml_ipod for winamp and transfer your files to your HFS+ formatted ipod.

In the comments please let me know if you’ve found other ways to partition ipods correctly for HFS+ without using iTunes for Mac. Besides file transfer speed changes and degrees of fragmentation, I’m also interested in documenting any other reported benefits of using HFS+.

UPDATE: A week later and I’ve reloaded my ipod once more under slightly different conditions. The important difference is that this time, the strange 5% storage space loss from my earlier adventure didn’t manifest. Instead of restoring the iPod using ml_ipod, I used XPlay (ver. 3.0.2), another piece of software by Mediafour. I’m not exactly certain what made a difference… but my iPod certainly seems happier having been reformated with MacDrive and restored with XPlay. XPlay has a trial period of 30 days or 20 times running, and I’ll be curious to know whether the software makes any difference to managing an HFS+ formatted iPod besides using its restore feature. I’ll provide another update to this post when I do.

Upon moving to Philadelphia in 2007 I bought a copy of Commercial Entertainment Product at the Digital Underground, a music store at 5th and South where I was making friends with local scenesters, and it was there that I probably learned the following year of the Spooky tour with EBN coming to the TLA. I had a mixed experience at the show. I think I got there late but was quickly impressed by EBN’s visuals. They had set up a double screen with a mirror image of the left on the right side, so there was some very cool if simple effects of action in the videos blending towards the center of the two screens. The visuals they provided for Spooky’s set were again very aggressive and I thought kind of childishly masculine, with lots of quick cut edits of men in race cars, spies, guns, and things getting blown up. EBN had made their name for videos that parodied the manipulation and dissemination of propaganda for the first Gulf War through mainstream media. For example, in their video “Syncopated Ordinance Demonstration #1″ (see below) they contrast the war footage of tanks getting bombed, with GI Joe’s cartoon battles, and scantily clad women shooting uzis in gun manufacturer advertisements, and so present the different ways violence on TV is presented in one single grotesque.

EBN’s viduals for dj Spooky’s sets were much more superficial. Without depth, EBN’s art was merely being used to complement the aggressive and masculine tone of Spooky’s presentation of illbient in relation to hip hop.

But I wasn’t dissapointed during EBN’s solo set. I saw videos that were works of art in and of themselves, and not being used to complement some other message. One of them featured a manipulation of Frank Sinatra from a short TV clip that would phase in and out of itself in audio and video. Seeing it made the entire evening worthwhile. Following the show, I searched in vain for anyone who had recorded the show. I wrote to dj Spooky asking for more information. I asked friends who new folks that regularly bootlegged shows at the TLA. Nada. And to make matters worse, I soon learned that EBN disbanded.

Fast forward to 2006. EBN videos were all over the place on youtube, and I did some exploring and found that the EBN project has been revived somewhat. All the members had gone onto other things, mostly in media production work, and EBN frontman Joshua L. Pearson had become a family man. But he had also created an official web page for EBN and posted a few videos, mostly quicktime files from Commercial Entertainment Product, for download. I still couldn’t find the Sinatra video but I was excited that it probably wasn’t lost. Hopefully it would be posted on youtube or somewhere else. At the time, looking for it would have to wait since I was terribly busy in Louisiana doing urban planning following the hurricanes of 2005. I would follow up on this later.

And so when I had some spare time earlier this year I sent out emails to all the EBN project members on whether the group had any plans to make an official release of the old videos on DVD. Greg Deocampo (currently of Mediatronica) was the only one who responded, but wow, what a response. He pointed me to his pesonal project Eclectic Method (EMN) and his portfolio of EMN videos. On a separate page of the EMN project, Greg had all the videos that had been made for the CD album Telecommunication Breakdown in 1995 but hadn’t been released due to there not being enough space on the CD for all those videos. (Only “Electronic Behavior Control System,” “3:7:8,” and “Homicidal Schizophrenic (A Lad Insane)” were released on the data side of the CD.) Mediatronica was also hosting a mirror of the videos on their video distribution site televis.es. Among the flash videos was a copy of the Sinatra video entitled “Frank”; I was overjoyed! (See “Frank” below.) A great interview of Deocampo is available in the episode archive of the public radio program, Some Assembly Required.

Having become a collector of EBN videos, I was dismayed to find that quite a few were no longer accessible on youtube or anywhere else. For years, a site called GNN (Guerilla News Network) had hosted a series of seven EBN videos it called “The Lost Tapes.” A few had surfaced on youtube, and one or two on file sharing networks, but the others had since 2004 when GNN stopped hosting them, become truly lost. Another video, “Banjo Lesson,” was made inaccessible when a youtube user named Nomeus had his account suspended. And so last week, I went looking for Nomeus, and finally caught up with him on his urban exploration site flurbex.com. I’ve since been able to get copies of all the missing files and repost them on youtube. Here’s “Banjo Lesson”:

In the context of Jewish mysticism, this sentiment might already tag me as a neophyte (correctly) since the majority of my ancestors and the most famous kabbalistic works not only unapologetically gender their god — the use of the dual male/female Gender system is made an essential allegory for describing the Godhead and the relationship between it and the created world. I have bunches more to read here including Elliot R. Wolfson’s Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination, but I’ve read Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess. I am convinced by his thesis that a perceived feminine aspect of god can be traced back from our current neo-hasidic revival of interest in the Shekhina (the Divine Presence) to the medieval kabbalistic Matronit to imaginary depictions of the shekhina in exile in late antiquity following the destruction of the second temple, to biblical depictions of the shekhina and association with cherubim and clouds… and yes, to the Asherah. Patai having made his point, I was left struggling with its relevance for my religious imagination, even entertaining the thought of breaking with this ancient well formulated tradition that uses gender allegories to describe aspects of our god.

Influenced as much by the synthesis of Greek Philosophy and Jewish mysticism (inherent in movement like Sethianism), I’ve been more eager to describe God by what my god is not. The description Ein Sof, or god “without end,” is so much more useful to me than the distraction of gender. If I must think of the philosophical meaning of a cleft in the Godhead in the cosmogonic myth (as I often do), I will think of an illusory division between an unknowable transcendence and an intimately knowable immanence — and refuse to describe transcendence as male aloofness and immanence as female sexuality. I refuse!

I mention this all in passing to Jay Michaelson during a break at the recent New Voices conference in NYC. (I’ve been a fan of Michaelson’s writing since Paul Serici first introduced them to me, so meeting him was a thrill.) Michaelson is thinking about the gender of God taking into account the different gender identities we are only now coming to terms with in Gender and Queer Studies. In reacting to my points, Michaelson was more accepting of a gendered God in mystical experiences. He differentiated between (at least) two different kinds of mystical experiences, one of which, catalyzed by use of an entheogenic plant, would inspire a much more intimate and sexualized experience of divinity. Then he invited me to Nehirim, the shabbat retreat of LGBTQ Jews and their allies, to learn and talk some more. (Despite the suggestion of cosmic serendipity, first meeting Eli K-W also on his way to Nehirim and then to be invited by the organizer himself, I chose not to spend the full registration out of pocket to attend, and instead spent much needed time in reunion with my cousin Una.)

This brings me to introduce Rima Turner, now interning for Nehirim (congrats!). I first met zir* at Jews in the Woods: a bespectacled, diminutive, giant of a spirit whose haftorah reading one Shabbat morning managed to draw down tears from eyes that had for too long been dry. We’ve been in communicating for the past three years, sharing what we’ve learned in our respective wanderings. Rima also invited me to Nehirim, but whatever I missed there I’ll make up in responding to the interesting and personal d’var torah, “Sacred Spaces: The Tabernacle, Women’s Work, and the Body as Sanctuary.” Ze just recently shared zir essay over at Jewish Mosaic, the national (Jewish) center for seuxal and gender diversity.

On Parshat Naso (Numbers 4:21 – 7:89), Rima writes:

In Numbers 7, we read about the sanctification of the tabernacle (the Mishkan). Moses anoints the tabernacle and its components, and then the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel each bring offerings: silver, gold, incense, oxen, sheep, and goats. The offerings function as a dedication, after which the tabernacle is anointed again. Moses goes into the tabernacle, and the Divine speaks to him.

What does it mean to create a holy space? The Divine is not your dinner date—Ze won’t come over to your apartment just because that’s where you live. You can invite Zir in, but that doesn’t mean Ze is going to come. Those of us who pray or meditate regularly are familiar with this reality. Some days we enter into prayer and prayer enters into us—but sometimes prayer takes a day off, no matter how hard we try (or try not to try, or try not to try not to try—well, you get the picture).

I love what Rima’s done with gender-neutral pronouns. I had heard these neologisms used in referring to people (at Jews in the Woods, where else?) but never before had I seen them in discussions about divinity. So useful!

The use and innovation of gender-neutral pronouns in English has a long history summarized in a FAQ here. Gender-neutral pronouns currently in use have roots extending back at least into the early days of USENET in the 1980s, where they found popularity in nascent gender queer usegroups. The earliest use I could find of the pronouns zie and zir on USENET are in this post by a Lynn Dobbs in the soc.bi newsgroup from December 1993. (Fair warning, the subject matter is erotic.)

Richard Creel, a philosophy professor at Ithaca College, may have been the first to specifically use  gender-neutral neologisms in discussing divinity in his philosophy of religion classes. This is what Creel wrote in “Ze, zer, mer,” in the Fall 1997 issue of the American Philosophical Association Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy:

“Ze,” “zer,” and “mer” may seem awkward now, but if we use them regularly and the usage becomes widespread, they will soon seem quite natural. Meanwhile we will have enriched the categories of our language and improved our ability to communicate clearly, precisely, and grammatically. “She,” “her,” “he,” “his,” and “him” should, of course, continue to be used when appropriate. “Ze,” “zer,” and “mer” will supplement them, not supplant them.

To close on a personal note, in my philosophy of religion courses I explain these terms to my students, then I use them when I speak of God, which, of course, I do a lot. My students are not required to use these terms yet many of them are intrigued, attracted, and choose to do so, at first with self-conscious good-humor. My women students seem especially appreciative of an opportunity to speak of God without being forced to use a gendered pronoun or an awkward strategy designed to evade the use of pronouns altogether. Similar benefits accrue for general discussions of the nature of a person, whether in philosophy of religion or not. Hence, even if “ze,” “zer,” and “mer” do not enter into common usage (obviously the odds are greatly against that), nonetheless they can be very useful in philosophical discussions.

* As evidinced by her bio at Jewish Mosaic, Rima is exploring the use of the neologisms ze and zir to refer to zirself. I can hardly imagine what it must be like to be at war even with language in determining for society what your gender identity is. But I do know a hint of a shade of this struggle from thinking about gender and god, and so I’m hopeful that in using the language that my friend Rima chooses for zirself, I will also be that much more mature in wrestling with a god that defies easy gender delineations.

UPDATE 6/15: Rima posts more at her blog.

I was having a conversation with a mathematician, Yaakov, at the University of Maryland recently, and he was struggling with aesthetic questions on what is good or bad art, so I suggested an alternative more useful question as rather, “what is this art good for?” recalling Marcel Duchamp’s 1957 essay, The Creative Act:

What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

The verdict of the spectator is separate from the activity of the artist. The spectator might very well take umbrage if the art object, the object of fascination (or boredom) had been or had not been toiled over, had or had not been the expression of a theory or movement, had or had not been the work of an artist at all. As a spectator, my verdict is not whether art is or is not art, but whether the art is useful — and useful only in the sense of whether it has opened my eyes and expanded my conscious awareness as to the existence of wonder in the world of relationships and things outside of frames and pedestals, galleries and museums — whether appreciation of the art object has brought me to appreciate everything else in the Everything Else room in the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum.

In a related sense, as much as I ponder myth in Judaism specifically, and religion in general, I return to this concern, that these ideas, while interesting to me, while stimulating and enriching an emerging creative expressive innerverse within me, that these ideas should also hopefully be useful for others. That if they are not, that they are trivial, and that this whole project is a delusion of self-indulgence. I will be honest with you, that I am not wholly convinced that this is not, but I am writing — with the intention that these labyrinth of ideas I’m exploring and sometimes getting lost in — that I will bring back along my wayfinding thread/trail of breadcrumbs/umbilical chord, something useful.

I’m hopeful that just as art becomes useful by revealing to an observer the greater wondrous reality outside the frame of (framed) Art, that my insights into myth and religion might also be useful for helping to reveal a greater wondrous imaginary world only hinted at within the source text of religious doctrine and dogma. Myth and storytelling thus convey the promise and potential of enduring creative liberty and the subversion of religious control to generations of eager children and aging heresiarchs.

Having said this, let me share with you something totally weird that I just found (on wikipedia, where else) that blew my mind. An Arabian myth of a creature called Bahamut (بهموت-Ž) which unlike the Behemot is not terrestrial, but like Leviatan, inhabits the endless depths of the ocean. This is mind blowing to me because the tradition in Sefer Chanoch, that the Leviatan is the mate of the Behemot seems much more plausible (in a sort-of mythic taxonomy) if we imagine both of them as sea dwellers rather than as opposites on a terrestrial/aquatic scale.

Just for review, I’ve written about the Behemot in Jewish myth, how it seems to relate to Apsu, the ancient ur-deity in Babylonian mythology, the personification of heavenly fresh water. I’ve written how the Behemot is imagined as a cosmically large hippopatamus dripping with condensation, and referred to in midrash as the “Ox of the Pit.” I’ve wondered whether the Pit was a reference to the t’hom, the primordial abyss, the abstraction of the other Babylonian ur-deity and personification of saltwater, Tiamat. How Leviatan seems to be synonymous with Tiamat in biblical writings. How Behemot/Leviatan are mated to one another in Sefer Chanoch. The Talmud also prefers the notion that Leviathan and Behemot were each created like all other creatures, male and female. So the existence of a myth where Behemot takes the form of a non-terrestrial sea creature like the leviathan seems significant.

From the wikipedia article on Bahamut:

Bahamut (Arabic: بهموت, Bahamūt) is a vast fish that supports the earth in Arabian mythology. In some sources, Bahamut is described as having a head resembling a hippopotamus or elephant.

If that’s not enough of a teaser, here is the entire fantastic entry on Bahamut written by Jorge Luis Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings (translated by Margarita Guerrero, Norman Thomas di Giovanni). I want to point out that I find it significant that similar to the Behemot tradition, the Bahamut myth describes the creatures with hippopotamus features.

Behemoth’s fame reached the wastes of Arabia, where men altered and magnified its image.

From a hippopotamus or elephant they turned it into a fish afloat in a fathomless sea; on the fish they placed a bull, and on the bull a ruby mountain, and on the mountain an angel, and over the angel six hells, and over these hells the earth, and over the earth seven heavens. A Moslem tradition runs: God made the earth, but the earth had no base and so under the earth he made an angel. But the angel had no base and so under the angel’s feet he made a crag of ruby. But the crag had no base and so under the crag he made a bull endowed with four thousand eyes, ears, nostrils, mouths, tongues, and feet. But the bull had no base and so under the bull he made a fish named Bahamut, and under the fish he put water, and under the water he put darkness, and beyond this men’s knowledge does not reach.

Others have it that the earth has its foundation on the water; the water, on the crag; the crag, on the bull’s forehead; the bull, on a bed of sand; the sand, on Bahamut; Bahamut, on a stifling wind; the stifling wind on a mist. What lies under the mist is unknown. So immense and dazzling is Bahamut that the eyes of man cannot bear its sight. All the seas of the world, placed in one of the fish’s nostrils, would be like a mustard seed laid in the desert. In the 496th night of the Arabian Nights we are told that it was given to Isa ( Jesus) to behold Bahamut and that, this mercy granted, Isa fell to the ground in a faint, and three days and their nights passed before he recovered his senses.

The tale goes on that beneath the measureless fish is a sea; and beneath the sea, a chasm of air; and beneath the air, fire; and beneath the fire, a serpent named Falak in whose mouth are the six hells.

The idea of the crag resting on the bull, and the bull on Bahamut, and Bahamut on anything else, seems to be an illustration of the cosmological proof of the existence of God. This proof argues that every cause requires a prior cause, and so, in order to avoid proceeding into infinity, a first cause is necessary.

The story of Bahamut is thus a variation in a wide tradition of cosmic creatures said to be supporting the world. In Hinduism, the creature is Akupara, a ginormous tortoise. Or elsewhere in the Vedas, as the turtle being Kurma, second incarnation of Vishnu. In Greek myth, it is the titan, Atlas. If you’ve read any Terry Pratchett, you might also be reminded of the turtle that supports his fictional Discworld.

In modern Western philosophical debate, an anecdote relating the myth of Bahamut or Akupara is sometimes referred to as “Turtles all the way down” (explanation below). The anecdote has been used by enlightened moderns lampooning the logical fallacies of irrational belief systems since the 17th century. Or as the wikipedia describes it, the anecdote is used “to humorously illustrate both infinite regress, in cosmological imagery, and the perils of religious/mythic myopia.” This is how Stephen Hawking relates the anecdote in his A Brief History of Time (1988):

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”

Russell probably wasn’t the scientist to have been the recipient of this retort. Most identify the scientist in this popular anecdote as the 19th century psychologist and philosopher William James. But Hawking can be forgiven for thinking so since Bertrand Russell, said the following in his lecture Why I Am Not a Christian (1927):

If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”

William James’ godfather, Ralph Waldo Emerson, may very well have been acquainted with the story from his peer, Henry David Thoreau who wrote in his journal in 1852,

Men are making speeches-¦ all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stands on truth. They are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and had nothing to put under the tortoise.

So whether the Turtles anecdote originated with Russell or James, it is clear that myths representing cosmological proofs were useful arguments of ridicule for enlightenment rationalists and other freethinkers. In 1690 John Locke may have been the first western philosopher to refer to this myth in a philosophical argument on what the substance is of an object being empirically investigated. From book 2, chapter 23 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding Locke writes,

If anyone be asked what is the subject wherein colour or weight inheres, he would have nothing to say but, the solid extended parts; and if he were demanded what is it that solidity and extension adhere in, he would not be in a much better case than the Indian before-mentioned who, saying that the world was supported by a great elephant, was asked what the elephant rested on, to which his answer was, a great tortoise; but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad backed tortoise, replied, something, he knew not what.

Perhaps the Indian said, “Bahamut.” Bahamut, the imaginary foundation of the world of myth.

Above: illustration of Bahamut for The Book of Imaginary Beings by the graduate students in the Department of Illustration and Art of the Book at the Vakalo School of Art and Design in Athens, Greece.

UPDATE 6/5: It is something of a testament to my interest (obsession?) over the Leviatan myths that I realized only today that I had provided something a fuller treatment in a post I wrote already over two years ago, “Rejoining Tetragrammaton.” You can read on below for a good enough summation of my thoughts but it lacks source references and quotes. So please go to the earlier post first if you’re interested in these myths. What appears below is a rewritten article I wrote originally as the about page for this blog when it was called — guess — “The Leviathan and the Behemoth.” In the post below I write with some more detail on what I find relevant in the Enuma Elish and I do mention Hermann Gunkel as the source for the idea that Tiamat is a cognate for the biblical hebrew Tohu/T’hom, and I should have mentioned this in that earlier post. So besides being topical, these posts will help me in a later synthesis I need to write. I think what’s important to note in any case is that all of this has been written about with greater academic rigor, sophistication and nuance in scholarly literature — what I’m trying to do is articulate how this myth may still be relevant (read: useful) in a Judaism that is both mythically and environmentally conscious. The Leviatan/Behemot myths ARE interesting specifically because they are so well linked to an ancient natural cosmology that seems to have identified and personified aspects of what we now call the Water Cycle.

——

The Leviathan is one of the oldest and most obscure creation myths in the Torah. For me, the myth must be understood in the context of other midrashim concerning the Behemot (Behemoth). Together, I believe the Leviatan and Behemot represent two aspects of the ancient Israelite cosmology: the snowy pure waters above shamayim (the heavens) and the sweet waters below the aretz (the earth). The origins of the Leviathan myth are old and can be traced even into Sumerian mythology thousands of years before the birth of ancient Israel.

Being so old, the meaning of the myth has morphed over time. In perhaps its oldest known incarnation, the Leviatan (Kur and Tiamat in Sumerian mythology, Tiamat and Rakhab elsewhere in the TaNaKH) is a primordial chaotic force which must be defeated or tamed by wisdom in order to allow for creation to proceed. According to Hermann Gunkel, the primordial mother deity Tiamat (representing chaos in Sumerian myth) is abstracted in the Torah’s Genesis as T‘hom (the abyss). Following from Raphael Patai’s reading in his Hebrew Myths (with Robert Graves) the body of the Leviathan forms the earthly depths and is alternately represented as a tremendous underwater mountain, as a dragon, as a cosmic serpent (sustained by fresh waters flowing underground from terrestrial streams), as the abyss of the cosmos (the blank slate before creation), or as purely abstract chaos.

Meanwhile, midrashim represent the Behemot as an impossibly ginormous hippopotamus or water buffalo, supported on earth by the four pillars of its gigantic legs, dripping with condensation from the fresh waters above the earth, or simply as the primordial Void. The esoteric Sefer Chanoch preserves the ancient tradition that the Behemot and the Leviatan are each others mates. If we accept Patai’s reading, then Behemot, in his earlier Sumerian incarnation, was the ur-deity, lover of Tiamat, the fresh water god, Apsu.

In the Enuma Elish, Apsu, is killed by the newborn God of Wisdom, Ea (an early cognate of the YHVH) in order for creation to proceed. After this, Tiamat, and Kinghu (her new lover) and their children (representing the chaotic unstructured waterworld) battle with Ea to return the world to its chaotic state. The two lovers must be separated (violently in the myth) in order to be defeated (this time by the hero of Ea, Marduk) and a new age to begin.

Besides the explicit tradition preserved in Sefer Chanoch, the relationship between Apsu/Kingu and Tiamat, Leviatan and Behemot was all but lost. Whispers of it, however, remained in the two creatures relationship to fresh water, their below and above relation to the world as giants, and the Leviatan’s enduring association with the chaotic Ocean and saltwater despite her reliance on fresh water.

The Talmud alternately presents the notion that to preserve space in the world, God slaughtered the male counterparts of the created Leviatan and Behemot and pickled them for later feasting by the righteous when the sukah of peace is spread out across the world at the dawn of the messianic age. The idea that the primordial deities needed to be slaughtered for creation not to be filed with cosmic monsters also recalls the motivation of Ea’s fratricide in the Enuma Elish.

Much much later, Hobbes invoked the image of Leviathan to represent the gigantic nature of state bureaucracy. The Behemot and his relationship to Leviatan was forgotten. This past century, fundamentalist Christians have revived the Behemot as textual proof for the existence of dinosaurs during the age of Man.

Putting aside Hobbes and the creationist ideas, when I think of the leviathan and the behemoth, I can’t help but join the ancient mythic ideas in my mind with Andy Goldsworthy’s observation of serpentine forms in the movement of water on the surface of land, as well as the ancient Jewish mystical belief that all forces must be reconciled and unified for their to be a cosmic healing, a Tikkun Olam.

In contrast to the midrashim describing a final battle at the end of days when God slaughters the surviving Leviatan, Behemot, and Ziz (another ginormous birdlike creature), I imagine Behemot and Leviatan as once close, inseparable friends whose love for one another was so profound it excluded the possibility of any other relationships forming. While the midrashim imagine the Leviatan slaughtered and skinned with the tzakkim (righteous) feasting on her flesh of the Leviatan and sheltered under her luminous skin, I imagine a peaceful unification after a tragic separation spanning the history of all creation. In this way as well, I can reconcile the aspiration to be righteous with my practice of not eating the flesh of other creatures

This binary relationship expressed in verticality (above/below), or terrestrial vs. marine, or inner vs. outer expansiveness (depth/void), also helps me imagine two other invisible reactives, thought of at odds: the invisible hand of the market, and the complicated ecology of nature. As a planner, my power derives from my position as an expert to provide intelligence for people making market decisions, decisions that will have wide repurcussions on an environment (that in turn impacts the market). I am a mediator between two invisible forces, surrogates for the hand of God: the Market and Nature.

Robyn and I purchased our tickets and waited patiently in the long exhibit queue where we had an opportunity to look at Diego Rivera’s Liberation of the Peon (1931). Once through the entrance, we accepted the audio guides and commenced our study of the work of Frida Kahlo. Narration on the tour was provided by a device contained a small LCD screen, a keypad, and pause, stop, and play audio buttons, as well as attached earphones.  To play the commentary for a particular image, one would simply press in the keypad the number listed next to the painting on the wall of the gallery. In addition to the audio commentary, informative text was also silk screened onto the walls of the gallery adjoining the paintings and photographs displayed.

This exhibit originally began its tour with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The fancy Antenna Audio gadget that had been used in these earlier Kahlo exhibits was for some reason not used for this show at the PMA. I’m not certain why. Also, the audio provided was not that of the exhibit curator Hayden Herrera, or her assistant Elizabeth Carpenter, but from some other British man. I’m still trying to find out who this is. I’d like to ask them a question:

Namely, why did the curator introduce Kahlo as having been born of mixed German and Mexican Indian heritage and not mention her Jewish heritage? This is what the narrator said:

Frida Kahlo was born on July 6, 1907 in Coyoacán, a southern suburb of Mexico City, the third daughter of a German father and a mother of Spanish and Native American descent.

So I want to know: was Kahlo’s father Guillermo (née Wilhelm) Kahlo’s Hungarian-Jewish ancestry so irrelevant and besides the point to exclude it? Kahlo’s Indian heritage and Mexican socialist nationalism is well known because they are so much a part of her art work. But Kahlo herself claimed to be the granddaughter of Hungarian Jews that emigrated to Germany in the 19th century. Isn’t that significant? In an article on a 2007 Kahlo exhibit, Gannit Ankori, an art historian specializing in Frida Kahlo provides the details,

Kahlo testified “many times- about her Jewish identity, “stressing that her paternal grandparents, Henriette Kaufmann and Jakob Kahlo, were Jews from the city of Arad.” Further, many people who knew Frida and Wilhelm, such as Frida’s biographer, Hayden Herrera, and Frida’s husband Diego Rivera’s biographer, Bertram Wolfe, personally repeated this fact.

It seems a mistake to omit the fact that expatriate Eurpoean Jews made up an important core of the radical progressive political and art scene that Kahlo and her husband Diego inhabited, the most famous of whom was Leon Trotsky. This is an important point because socialism, communism, and anarchism, and the arts were secular programs that accepted the contribution of Jews at a time when anti-Jewish sentiment was profound and ubiquitous. Although antisemitism persisted (and still persists) in the Left, Guillermo Kahlo and his daughter, could find sanctuary among more enlightened contemporaries. And they did.

Perhaps the lack of attention or unwillingness of the art historian narrating the exhibit to be fully forthcoming about Kahlo’s Jewish heritage stems from ambivalence and ignorance of what Judaism is in general, let alone specifically how Kahlo and her father understood it as relevant to their self-identity. Judaism is correctly understood as not only a religion, but also as a civilization with an enduring culture the re religious aspect of which is not easily (or honestly) excised, as well as the inspiration of a modern nationalist and socialist movement of liberation and self-determination (Zionism). If Kahlo’s Jewish ancestry was only understood to be a religious identity then commenting on her Jewish parentage would correctly be considered irrelevant and misleading. So, what did Kahlo think of her Jewish heritage? How did she self-identify?

The answer to these questions was dealt with in 2003 at a Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Jewish Museum, “‘Frida Kahlo’s Intimate Family Picture.” In that exhibit, Israeli curator Gannit Ankori recognized an extremely important point revealed in Kahlo’s painting, “My Grandparents, My Parents and I.” Grace Glueck for the NY Times Art Review explains,

”My Grandparents” shows Frida as a small child, standing naked in the courtyard of the Casa Azul, the comfortable home built by her father in Coyoacán, then a village south of Mexico City, where Frida spent most of her life. (She died there, and it is now the Frida Kahlo Museum.) In her right hand she holds a ribbon that flows upward on either side of the picture to support floating portraits of each set of grandparents; the Mexican couple on the left, the Hungarian-Jewish pair on the right. (From her Kahlo grandmother, Frida apparently inherited those awesome black eyebrows that almost met in the middle of her forehead.) [emphasis mine]

The subject of Kahlo’s Jewish identity was returned to again in a 2005 book on Guillermo Kahlo’s photographic work, Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo, by Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle. The historians reveal that contrary to Frida Kahlo’s own claim, her father was the scion of a long line of German Lutheran Protestants. If this was indeed the case, then the curiosity remains why Kahlo claimed herself to be of Jewish ancestry. Was it a family legend encouraged by her father? Was it in vogue to have Jewish ancestry in artsy socialist circles in Mexico City? Or was Kahlo, in identifying her genealogy with Jews during the 1930s, declaring solidarity with another ethnic minority oppressed by fascists at the onset of Hitler’s campaign of extermination?

The complex construction of Kahlo’s identity and its relationship to anti-Nazi Jewish sympathies is the subject of 2007 article in the Jewish Press by Menachem Wecker on Kahlo exhibit in Washington, DC’s National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA). Wecker writes,

[Ankori] cited the position that Kahlo sought to distance herself from the Nazis based upon the fact that testimony about Wilhelm Kahlo’s Jewish background surfaced most frequently between 1936 and the 1940s. But she said over email, “I think in light of the new findings , these issues require further investigation. What is of great interest to me is not Wilhelm Kahlo’s -˜real’ religion, but Frida Kahlo’s construction of her self-image- insofar as it “impacted Kahlo’s self-image as manifested in her art.”

But later in Wecker’s article, Ankori does consider Wilhelm Kahlo’s “real religion” to be of interest, since besides Kahlo’s penchant for and mastery of her self-constructed image, she may very well have building a family tree to satisfy any doubts of her father’s identity in terms of both halakha (Jewish ritual law) and the Nazi’s ancestry laws. In short, what is relevant for Kahlo herself is whether her genealogy is Jewish enough to be murdered with her adopted semitic compatriots.

To Ankori, the question is whether Henriette Kaufmann was Jewish, since her Jewishness would make Wilhelm Jewish “according to both Jewish Halakha and Nazi laws.” If instead Wilhelm was a German Lutheran (Ankori says Lutheran, while Ronnen wrote Protestant), “why would Frida Kahlo -˜create’ a Hungarian Jewish genealogy for him and for herself?- Ankori wondered.

Even after Franger and Huhle’s book, for Jason Steiber, archivist at the NMWA, Kahlo remains a Jewish artist.

“I believe, without a doubt, that Frida Kahlo was a Jewish artist,” said Jason Stieber, archivist at the NMWA, through e-mail. But Stieber said other aspects of Kahlo’s identity played much greater roles in her life and work. “Frida was many things … and she embraced wholeheartedly everything that she was,” he said, noting that Frida “was proud of this lineage- and greatly delighted in “wheedling anti-Semites in America,” such as her famous inquiry put forth to Henry Ford of whether he was Jewish. Although she was an atheist, “she abhorred the Catholic religiosity of her mother,” and she “did embrace her Jewish ethnicity, if not the tenets of Judaic faith.”

“So yes, Frida was a Jewish artist,” Strieber continued, “however, I think she would have been more likely to refer to herself as a Mexican artist. Mexico held a very special place in heart and in her art.”

So I’ve been thinking about all of this and I’m left with an important quote that Wecker brings from an email in conversation with, Robin Cembalest, executive editor of ARTNews magazine, reveals the other side to the fascination with the question of Kahlo’s heritage.

“In my world the process of defining Jewish art, or what is Jewish in art, is both parlor game and intellectual exercise,” Cembalest wrote. “Either way, clearly it reveals as much about who is doing the assessing as it does about the figures we are claiming for our team.”

I think this is a remarkable statement as it rings both true and hollow — true in the sense that, yeah, ethnic pride is commonly expressed in appropriating the achievements of individuals as evidence of community capabilities. Hollow in the sense, that if art historians can not see beyond chauvinist ethnic boosterism to understand the importance of identity politics in the lives and art of artists then they are willingly blinding themselves to significant contextual meaning.

Kahlo’s creative philo-semitism is just one example of her passion for the liberation of all peoples. I, for one, am proud of Frida Kahlo’s defiant solidarity with Jews in the face of fascism, her storytelling in the face of a geneology and ritual law that would deny her a more rigorous and truthful connection with my people.

I held off from writing about Philly while present there, but now that I’m away, my need to share dictates that I must, and I’m hopeful that in doing so, I might smooth some of the edge off of my missing the city already. To this end, you’ll soon be able to read a series of posts of some personal thoughts worthwhile of your review.

I’ve taken some pictures but lacking a memory stick card reader at the moment, it will be a while before I’ll be able to illustrate these thoughts with images. And I’m writing this from DC of which I’ll write about still later, perhaps while I’m visiting NYC next week.

One year later and I’m still in Baton Rouge and working with my planning team, now an order of magnitude larger. Plans out the door include the City of Port Allen Annexation Plan and the Comprehensive Coastal Protection and Restoration Master Plan for Louisiana. To reprise, I came down here a year and a half ago at the blind invitation of URS Corporation who I soon learned upon arriving was needing planners, civil engineers, economic development specialists, and the like to fill Parish Recovery Teams in a FEMA division called ESF-14 Long Term Community Recovery. Most of those parish teams were disbanded at the end of April, our reports and projects destined to live on as part of the massive Louisiana Speaks initiative. Andres Duany, Peter Calthorpe, and John Fregonese were all part of this effort too, as was the Coastal Protection and Restoration Master Plan for Louisiana. What once seemed to me to be a disparate collection of independent planning efforts loosely guided along parallel planning paths, has now come together in a somewhat elegant convergence under the direction of important civic groups like the Center for Planning Excellence and the Baton Rouge Area Foundation. Situated as I’ve been in the corporate planning world consulting on various aspect of these massive plans — and now looking back — I’m relieved that there has been so much collaboration where there could have been more fiasco.

What else is new? Rabbi Geoffrey Dennis from Flower Mound, Texas, came last weekend to Baton Rouge and spoke at length introducing a number of now obscure aspects of Judaism (angelology, animism, fantastic/cosmic beings such as the leviathan, behemoth, and ziz, etc.). Right up my darkened alley, I found these talks enlightening and inspirational. Enlightening because I don’t get to hear other scholars talk about these things ever so it helped me make all sorts of connections that I hadn’t before. Inspirational sinceit once again made me dream all romantic like that I could be a rabbi someday too and help resurrect animism as part of a wider environmental worldview within Jewish practice. Who knows when I’ll get to that… but I’m looking.

Molly F. introduced me to a reading circle and we’ve since read Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Hemingway’s Movable Feast. Hemingway urges writers hovering above their blank pages to just “write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” A very cool person I met over Passover in Cincinnati urged me to do so, so I did. And this is what I wrote:

when i write i
dodge words, not knowing
whether i’m
channeling truth or
arranging pawns

when i speak i
walk over cliffs,
over water,
into fire, then
remember and wish
telepathy could permeate
all our hearts

when i act i can’t see
except through mirrors
representing the image of
the likeness of myself,
my eyes imagining
possessing the eyes of others

so i write without walking
and speak with my eyes closed
and act with my heart
prepared for battle

and when a miracle occurs
and i am blinded by truth
and my heart is pierced
and my tongue is splintered like babel,
i am suspended (between worlds)
and take solace in simple presence,
in silence, and in wonder…

but if I’ve learned anything these years:
miracles only blossom
from preparation
and preparation develops
from a choreography
where the dancers
are a multitude of desires
who in patient discipline,
with love and with
humble recognition
of the limits of language and symbol
discover and express the ubiquity of hidden things
pointing the way.

Each of us an intervention
of the Other
each of us a miracle
of presence defying
recognition, pointing the way
improvising without choreography
in fearless moments.

———-

Next we’ll be reading Young Werther by Goethe. I was hoping for Gogol’s Dead Souls but the reading is admittefly very lazy and likes short books!

I’ve been Netflixing more lately and I found a film that really surprised me. My queue is so long and I move through it so slowly so I am clueless where I got this recommendation from to see it. The film is My Son, The Fanatic and it offers a very nuanced vision of assimilation and the politics of ethnic and religious identity for Pakistani Muslims in England. Of course, the story will also resonate with anyone familiar with the embrace and dissonance of cultural influence, personal choices, conformity, and hypcorisy. I loved it.
Molly F. and I saw the entire Firefly series and Serenity. Now I know why so many people were in love with this. I join my voice with theirs in mourning the stupidity in cutting down this young series just as it was hitting its prime.

Speaking of good stories, I finally received my DVD of the complete Nowhere Man series. The dvd box surprised me with some trivia: the producers of this deeply wierd conspiracy serial, are the same producers of the very successful 24 series. 24 is a fun story but I’m a bit afraid that Cheney and his Bushies, look to the 24 scripts to nourish their own destructive agendas. The last pronoic story I’ve ever seen was the brilliant, They Might be Giants film from 1974. Julia S. saw tht with me and we both enjoyed it immensely.
Speaking of my friend Julia S., we took a trip to the Festival Internationale in Lafayette a few weeks ago. There I saw one of the best live shows in my life — that of a group from Guinea called Ba Cissoko. I pray someone recorded it and that I can hear it again since I missed the first 30 minutes. I made some 30 second recording with my cell phone I hope to have on youtube eventually.

This brings me to the musical subject of this essay: Conemelt — or more specifically, the music of Ashley Marlowe. As with my previous post on Squarepusher’s remix of “psultan” and “bedroom glow” by Kiyoshi Izumi’s , “Under The Hood” by Conemelt has that break in rhythm and shift to new melody where everything becomes even more intense and delicious sounding. The track appeared on a 12″, Rocker’s Ruin E.P. (1997) I discovered at the 611 record store after much much browsing. And similar to “psultan” I needed to find my own pitch for the track to sound right. On the version you’ll hear on the MOG player, it’s been shifted down from 45 to about 42. (vinyl rip by yours truly.)

Ashley is an amazing drummer and listen for yourself below:

Moineşti (pronounced MOI-nesht) is a small city in north-eastern Romania, in the Moldavian region, and in the county of Bacău. According to Wikipedia,

The name is derived from the Romanian word moină, which means fallow or light rain. Moineşti once had a large Jewish community; in Jewish contexts the name is often given as Mojnescht.

Moinesti is situated on the TrotuÅŸ River on the eastern slopes of the Carpathian Mountains. A little further to the west is the region of Transylvania. Bordering the Moldavian region to the east and across the Romanian border is the Republic of Moldova, part of Moldavia in the Middle Ages and later known as Bessarabia.

Mentioned as early as 1467, the small village of MoineÅŸti, grew steadily through the 19th century as a regional market town. In 1832, MoineÅŸti had 188 houses and 588 inhabitants (wikipedia). According to another source, the 1831 Census registered 49 Jewish resident families (source). (Reconciling these two sources apparently indicates there were on average 12 individuals living in each family home.)

In 1836, in Moinesti, there were 193 Jews, three teachers, and three Hahams. In 1844, in “The Charter of Moinesti town” (Prince Mihail Grigore Sturdza) there are some mentions about “the Jews, the Rabbi, and the Haham”. In the same year, Neculai Neculce sells a piece of ground to Rabbi Manascu from Moinesti…

The 1885 -1893 statistics mention approximately 500 families. There are also mentioned five prayer houses; a ritual bath (mentioned also by M. Sadoveanu: “the only public bath was owned by the Jews-¦”); a primary school for boys, founded in 1893, with 125 students; a cemetery. 1896 -1899. J.C.A. (Jewish Colonization Association) founded by Baron Rothschild, offers support for erecting a new school. In 1896, there were 183 students. In 1899, there were 2,398 Jews [or] some 50.6% [of] the entire population. (source)

Of the two Jewish cemeteries in the town, somewhere between 1000 and 5000 tombstones (most of which are toppled) attest to a Jewish population that persisted from the early 18th Century until the Holocaust. The earliest tombstone was dated by a visitor to 1740 (fourty years before the town was first chartered, source). Even older stones may be undateable due to erosion by vegetation and the elements.

For such a small place, MoineÅŸti has something of a proud if obscure history as the birthplace of some wonderful Jewish artists, poets, and writers. Here’s a short list of Jewish artists and writers born in Moinesti:

• Tristan Tzara, aka Samy Rosenstock, Yiddish and Hebrew poet. He was born in Moinesti, Romania. In 1912, he began to publish poems in a symbolist style, which were to be highly influential in Romanian poetry. In 1916 he moved to Zurich, Switzerland, where he was among the founders of Dadaism, the name of which was derived from Tzara opening a dictionary and choosing the first irrelevant word. Dada was a nihilistic revolutionary movement, aimed at demolishing the values of modern civilization. Tzara was considered the movement’s most articulate exponent, expressed in his Romanian and French poems (he lived in Paris from 1919). As the avant-garde turned to Surrealism, he joined forces with that group and his work became more contained and sober. In 1935 he joined the Communists and during World War II was active in the underground in France.
• Binyamin Zeev Ehrenkranz (aka Velvel Zbarazher, 1819-1883), a colourful Yiddish singer/comedian originally from Galicia, settled in Moinesti for a while.
• Samuel Grinberg (1879-1959) – the first Rabbi confirmed by F.C.I. Bucharest and by the Ministry of Cults.
• Pic G. Adrian (Pincu Grinberg), poet, plastic artist and art critic, settled in Barcelona.
• Samuel Grimberg, poet and writer, precursor of the Poalei Tzion movement.
• Charles Davison (b. 1891, in Moinesti): neuropsychiatrist, neuropathologist, and educator; worked for several hospitals in Pittsburgh and taught at Columbia University; contributed more than 100 articles to medical journals.

More Jews from Moinesti can be found on the Moinesti page at the Romania’s Jewish heritage web site. This page includes some brief and casually organized details of the Jews of Moinesti from what looks to be oral histories.

MoineÅŸti was also the birthplace of an important proto-Zionist enterprise. In the late 19th century, Jews from MoineÅŸti and soon after, Bacău, founded the first two Chovevei Zion colonies in Palestine in 1882: Rosh Pinah and Samarin. Overlooking the Mediterranean, today, Samarin is known as Zikhron Ya’aqov (זִכְרוֹן יַעֲקֹב), the home of Carmel Winery. Here is a panorama view of the lands near Rosh Pina taken by resident Itamar Aratiya at the website trekearth.

Zionist enterprises paralleled the influence of the Haskala. In 1910, MoineÅŸti opened it’s first school for both boys and girls learning together. The building also housed the offices and meeting room of the B’nai Brith.

There were also some Hassidim in MoineÅŸti. My great-great grandfathers were quite bearded but there’s no way I can know whether they were Hassidim, but then again maybe they were. It gives me so much pleasure to know that a niggun survives from the daughter of a Breslover Hassid born in Moinesti. The tune appears on the album, A Mazeldiker Yid, by the Klezmer roots band, Di Naye Kapelye.

Tracks 17:  Cili Svarts – The Bosnian Nign
This melody was learned from the singing of Cili Svarts, the wife of Itsik Svarts, the Yiddish writer, teacher, and former director of the Yiddish theater of Iasi, Romania. A schoolteacher, avid singer, and formidable baker of kosher soda cookies, Cili was born the daughter of a Breslover Hasid in Moinesti, Romania, in 1915. This was her favorite melody. She learned it from her uncle Alter Baris who worked as a forester in the Bosnian town of Zavidovich before the First World War. Whether Sephardic or Ashkenazic in origin, we play it as a slow hora. Sadly, Zavidovich was largely destroyed during the Bosnian War, as was my maternal grandmother’s birthplace, the nearby town of Travnik. We hope this melody serves to honor the memory of Bosnia’s Jewish culture, and as a loving tribute to the memory of Itsik and Cili Svarts.

My great-grandfather, with his parents and children left Mojnescht around 1911 (+/-2 years) for Montreal, Canada. The only thing recalled by one of my grand-uncles was that the town had constant and loud sounds of pounding. What an incredible detail! At the time they left, MoineÅŸti had just begun to be a center for oil exploration in the Carpathian Mountains. Below is an undated photo I found of the oil wells in MoineÅŸti at a Romanian website.

According to one source, the Jews from Moinesti were the owners of some of the first oil distilleries in Moldavia.

Virgil Madgerau: “-¦the small oil distilleries belonging to the Jews are part of the history of the Romanian oil”…

1860, Wolf Lazarovici built “the first distillery [in] MoineÅŸti”. Iosif Theiller “was the first in the country to obtain a license for exploitation of a oil well with modern equipment” (Solomon Sapira), with “American-style pumps”. He published the study “Idei economice”. “Mister Theiller, who became a Romanian citizen, is the first founder of the gas and paraffin factory in Moinesti-¦” (“Fraternitatea”, 1882). Moses Frischoff was exporter of oil, automobile oil, etc. (source)

Steaua Romana, a Romanian oil company had “access to extensive oil deposits in the Eastern and Southern Carpathian Mountains” (source). These deposits were acquired in 1903 when Deutsche Bank purchased Steaua Romana. By the onset of WWI in 1914. Steaua Romana had become “the largest and most important production plant in Romania” (ibid). To the right, is an undated drawing of the Steaua Romana’s oil field at MoineÅŸti (probably circa 1910).

Moinesti’s history in oil extraction is preserved iconographically in the City of Moinesti’s seal.

Monesti Jews were also active in the local timber industry.

No details are remembered why my family left but perhaps they simply became terribly saddened as the small town atmosphere of MoineÅŸti in the midst of the Carpathian Mountain forests was transformed into a hellish and polluted industrial extraction point for oil. That, combined with the precarious position of Jews in Moldavia, probably convinced them to leave, as many, many other Romanian Jews had in the preceding years. (40,000 Romanian Jews left for America between 1880 and 1910). Social conditions in the region had been deteriorating on the national level. For my family, the critical event preceding their departure may well have been the Kishinev Pogrom in 1905, the first state-inspired action against Jews in the 20th century (source).

Widespread impoverishment and pogroms during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to large-scale emigration. The most notorious pogrom occurred in 1903, apparently with the support of the Russian Ministry of the Interior, led by Vyacheslav von Plehve. The attack occurred on Easter, April 6 and 7, spurred by a blood libel campaign in a prominent newspaper. According to official statistics, 49 Jews were killed and another 500 were injured. Material losses from property destruction and looting were enormous. About 2,000 Jews were left homeless. Another pogrom occurred on August 19, 1905, in which 19 Jews were killed and 56 were injured.

Of course, other parts of my family remained, most of whom were lost in the Holocaust. According to a cousin, a few survived and their descendants are living in Israel. Below is a memorial at Yad Vashem in Isreal inscribed in Hebrew and English with the names of Bacau and Moinesti.

An exhibit on the Jews of Romania, with a section on Moldavia, can be found here.

Pointed to, as in, go in this direction and you will find. This applies to an individual as well as to a society. The idea, the iqar, is that if you participate in certain actions, the consequence of them will be a Truth. So what do I mena by Truth?

Truth is something that cannot be revealed explicitly, because it must emerge on its own. To reveal it is thus a lie. It must be a consequence and is entirely hidden by the curtain, the parochet, of time and preparation.

So what then, can be taught? Actions and ideas that add up to a revelation, the catalyst of which is kindness and intelligence.

Actions must not stand on their own. They must be beautiful by themselves and as reflections of a beautiful worldview that treasures kindness and intelligence. Actions are preparations.

Jennifer Wickboldt wrote the poem above, one of many available sprawled over old tripod user pages. Friday evening I had a long conversation with her. Later today she is being cremated. I can still see her sitting in my apartment, the apartment she used to live in before I came here to Baton Rouge. She was asking me about passover and mezuzahs. And she liked the band Red House Painters. She was very cute and had a boyfriend who loved her very much, many friends, and a dog named Latte. She was a magic person, so of course, she was constantly assaulted by demons who feast on vivacious creative people. Sunday morning they got their wish, convincing her to do herself in. She traded her future away for salvation from a troubled past. I am so sorry.

As my father says, tragedies like these remind us to hold each other tight and never take for granted the time we have with each other.

There is only one L in Vermilion 
There is only one L in Chevrolet
There is only one L in Louisiana 
And that is why people say: 

You only need one L 
            To say “I Love You-
And one L to say 
            I won’t ever leave
But if you won’t be mine forever, 
            Then I’ll just sit here and grieve.

If you won’t be mine forever,
Then you can just go to -˜L.

UPDATE: James Hebert, KRVS Operations Manager writes me, “Regarding the Mardi-Gras special we aired Tuesday, it’s Dance for a Chicken, a video documentary produced by Pat Mire Films. It’s available at 1-800-256-8471, or 337-232-0700, or 625 Garfield Street Lafayette, LA 70115.”

From the Pat Mire Films website:

Dance for a Chicken: The Cajun Mardi Gras (1993, 60 mins. Color). This award-winning film brims over with stunning images of carnival play and a rich soundtrack of hot Cajun music. Cajun filmmaker Pat Mire gives us an inside look at the colorful, rural Cajun Mardi Gras. Every year before Lent begins, processions of masked and costumed revelers, often on horseback, go from house to house gathering ingredients for communal gumbos in communities across rural southwest Louisiana. The often-unruly participants in this ancient tradition play as beggars, fools, and thieves as they raid farmsteads and perform in exchange for charity or, in other words, “dance for a chicken.”

“Dance for a Chicken is an articulate, intelligent, and compelling film portraying the richness of indigenous Louisiana Cajun culture. Without question the best Mardi Gras film to date. A true gem.” — Tom Rankin, Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

“Dance for a Chicken” was the winner of the “Award of Excellence” at the 1993 American Anthropological Association Film Festival.

http://vermilionanimalaid.blogspot.com/

1. Attending the Vermilion Parish Police Jury (sort of like a county commissioners meeting but rowdier and with exciting community input amidst reports of mosquito spraying and garbage pickup hassles; the things I heard at this meeting made front page news the day after, first impression: this place feels small enough that you can comprehend all the actors, motives, and agendas impacting the community, second impression: most serious business takes place behind the scenes through alliances that are difficult to fathom from the perspective of an outsider) 
2. Traveling to Avery Island and the Tobasco Sauce Factory (considering just how deeply eccentric the Mclhenney family actually is, purchasing rubber crawfish at the Tobasco gift shop, considering how southeast asia, exoticism and romanticism inspired the landscaping of the Mclhenney’s “Jungle Garden” complete with pagoda and buddha purched on top of an artificial hill and lagoon) 2/5
3. Visiting the Chitimacha Casino (delicious cacaphony, every depressing thing you ever imagined about casino life, and excellent omelettes) 2/5
4. Hearing the DPZ presentation in Lake Charles (excellent Planning History of San Diego presentation by Howard Blackson; bumping into Andres; other presentations very interesting; nothing is dumbed down it seems; my thinkpad t30′s video card dies from ati2dvig.dll woes) 2/6
5. Meeting the DPZ team and Duany when their focus shifts to my parish, Vermilion (exciting! and they’re using my Community Basline draft; all these designers and planners are slim, wearing black turtlenecks, and expensive watches) 2/13
6. Listening to the best public radio station I’ve ever heard, KRVS (Not only local programming by excellent local djs playing their favorite new and old Zydeco and Cajun Music, but also incredible progrmaming for avante-garde electronic, harp, swing, and everything else; hearing syndicated PRI programs here that I never knew existed)
7. The Abbeville Meridional has a new writer, a young woman who I met at the City Bar and sang Summertime Rolls by Jane’s Addiction with. She just wrote a fine article, her third first page lead story since she was hired as a reporter and editor a week ago. She’s also a waitress in Abbeville’s Riverfront restaurant. It’s really exciting to see someone in the process of moving ahead in their life!
8. Attending Duany’s presentations for Vermilion Parish (brilliant ideas for a New Erath, biofuel, mixed use development and creation of a sense of place at the port in Delcambre, reorienting the entrance to Main Street Abbeville from the LA 14 bypass that has been economically strangling the city for the last 20 years, good stuff but wondering how any of this will be accepted by a community which seems resigned to incremental dumb growth developments and a political body unfamiliar with planning, zoning, or code enforcement) 2/13-17
9. Writing. Lots of writing. (16 hour days)
10. Representing my team in Baton Rouge (getting props from the Magic Kingdom) 2/15
11. Getting fired. Getting rehired. (along with my team, along with all of the Long Term Community Recovery Teams in all the affected parishes of Louisiana; probably appeared to stem from FEMA seeking to cut costs and looking for programs to “put on hold”) 2/9-11
12. Making the pilgrimage to Jews in the Woods north of Stroudsburg, PA. Taking my first “rotation”, a three day vactaion granted by my parent contractor to its TACs  every 28 days. (I am a TAC).
13. Writing and thinking about crawfish, cute little freshwater lobsters. Folks here eat these delightful crustaceans.
14. Writing about my team, our morale, those who’ve stayed, those who’ve left, and those who went snarking never to be found again.
15. Davening with the Jews of Lafayette, Louisiana. (I will never get used to the call and respond liturgy familiar to American Reform Jews.)

Slacker (1991) is a film by Richard Linklater.

One observation from yesterday’s work. In writing this I’m tasked with getting some hard numbers and figuring them into an articulate and concise narrative. I spend less time actually writing than I do actually nailing down these hard numbers. The numbers come from somewhere, or maybe they don’t exist yet, or are hard to find, or perhaps are taken for granted when they ultimately are sourced from anecdotes. I’m remembering a lesson from planning grad school that planner’s have to make decisions and recommendations on incomplete data.

Apologies to friends and relatives who are hoping to find new postings every day. I want to and I think I will even have multiple postings a day like some of my favorite blogs. But maybe not. Blogging aspirations are choked by mundane and practical concerns. But I’m working through them, so I think I’ll be posting more often.

The night before, I visited Beth Shalom Synagogue in Baton Rouge, for meeting Rougey Jews and to maybe even sing L’cha Dodi and other nice songs. The synagogue is one of two in Baton Rouge, (the other being Bnei Israel). Formerly Beth Shalom was known as the Liberal Synagogue. Founded in 1945, the synagogue differentiated itself from the other Baton Rouge congregation by being openly Zionist and, over the years, less afraid to represent Judaism by meeting on Saturday (instead of on Sunday).
Alas, I missed L’cha Dodi but I did meet a few of the locals. There was a large attendance but I was later informed by a regular that many of the people there came for a special occasion, a going away kiddush for an older couple, the Karlins, who had long been active members and an anchor of the community. So I shouldn’t have been surprised that the davening was really weak or that almost no one approached me to introduce themselves to a newcomer. As far as most of them knew, I was a regular. The synagogue president wryly observed (while roasting the couple, the Karlins) that the shul should have a going away party every shabbes!

The congregation was led by the shul’s rabbi, Rabbi Zamek, whose pulpit skills are accented by a sense of humour. For a silent reading, he prepared quotes from the Karliner Rebbe (inspired by the departure of the Karlins). The shul uses the older reform prayerbooks which are about as dry and boring as the old Birnbaum prayerbooks still found in orthodox synagogues.They also declare aloud “Baruch Shem Kavod Malchuto Le’Olam Va’Ed” (gender-neutral translation: blessed is the Name, may the Kingdom’s Glory extend for ever and ever). Until recently this verse has only been recited quietly except on Yom Kippur. (The verse is a response of Yaakov to his sons, according to a midrash cited in Tractate P’sachim 56a, when they tell him on his death bed, in unity with each other, “Sh’ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Echad”. Another midrash holds that Moshe overheard the verse sung by angels and thus it cannot be said by mortal except on days like Yom Kippur when we think we can get away with it). Of all the oddities in the classic reform service, this practice remains the most alien for me. The reason the verse has long not been proclaimed out loud by Jews can be found in all of its wonderful and colorful talmudic reasoning here.

Reasons I’ve heard from reform Jews on the significance of saying it out loud year long, range from historical arguments (saying it quietly reflects ancient fears of persecution which are now unfounded), to liturgical ones (if it is not said out loud the congregation will ignore it), to theological ones (malkhut, lit. kingship, is an outdated archaism by which to describe our understanding and relationship with God). The historical argument is really interesting to me. Here’s an explanation I found on the internet, and reflects what I was told personally by a rabbi at Temple Emmanuel in Bethesda, Maryland.

From: Jerry Blaz
Date: Sun, 12 Oct 1997 01:27:26 -0700
Subject: Reform PrayerbookTara Cazaubon asked why the second line of the sh'ma,
"Baruch shem kavod," is said aloud in the Reform
congregation, while she noted that is said silently
except for Yom Kippur in the Conservative and Orthodox
synagogues.  The explanation that I was given many years
ago has to do with the "problem" of malchut or kingship.
The statement was interpreted by our enemies to state
that the kingship of the Jewish God was over the entire
world, which intimated to our enemies that we did not
recognize the sovereignty of Christian kings. So the
source of the silence is coercion.  The Reform state
this "Baruch Shem Kavod" out loud as a sign of their
liberation from this oppression.

Ok, so that’s quite a digression from what I meant to write up but I’m a completist. Rabbi Zamek has also introduced a meditational practice. Unfortunately I wasn’t present the next day to experience the form of meditation practiced personally. Instead, I was in New Orleans. I had been interested in taking a trip down to New Orleans since I arrived in Louisiana. I had a rental car. I wasn’t doing any work for FEMA yet… but I didn’t want to get too far away from Baton Rouge if I was to get a call for deployment. I probably could have gotten away with it, and I guess I did that last Shabbes. A fellow in the Beth Shalom congregation, Sam Breen, came up to me at the kiddush and asked me if I’d like to drive down with him to the Chabad House in Metairie to help make the shabbes minyan the next morning. The man spoke in the slow droll of a native Nyorlinean. He had observed my davening during the silent amidah and thought I might be Orthodox. So Sam and I met in the Beth Shalom parking lot the next day and he drove me down to Nyorlean. And after shul (where I did in fact make the minyan), he gave me a tour of a number of devastated neighborhoods of New Orleans, and some of the affected suburbs like Metairie.

What makes something look creepy or seem haunted? Maybe it’s when it looks completely normal except for one or two things easily glanced over but once recognized compel you to stare and look harder until your eyes feel bloated and engorged. We drove into a typical subdivision in Matairie with ugly McMansion tear-downs and older 70s era two story homes. Looked rather normal, except for the fact that it was empty. And then the sense of emptiness began to creep over everything, from the street, to the lawns, across the driveways and into the houses. The doors were open, and dark inside. Each house had an embellishment, some graffitti indicating how many people or animals were found inside dead. This was indicated by an X painted on the door, or the outside wall next to the entrance, or above the entrance next to an open second floor window. This looked to me like a subdivision which had once seen the conquest of zombie hordes, which after a night of mayhem, had left the place dead and empty. (Yes, it is to zombie flicks that I owe my perceptions of urban decay and understanding of the failure of civilization).

We traveled wetward across the city to a neighborhood which seemed like it had a lot of promise, being pedestrian oriented and within walking distance of a commercial district. But it was also close to the interstate and the commerical district was oriented, not to the neighborhood but to an exit ramp and strip. Like Metairie, the neighborhood was mostly empty except for a few people who seemed to be doing work, some dresses in hazmat suits. There was plenty of automobile traffic in New Orleans though. And more people on the street the closer we came to Tulane and Loyola. The streets were cracked and bumpy but perhaps they were that way before the Hurricane. I saw signs of damage and some closed businesses when we reached canal street but Sam told me this wasn’t due as much from the flood as it was from the ensuing chaos, looting and sniping. Of the latter, I thought it was a myth, but Sam said otherwise. The lines for the trolley are only true on Canal Street (this was ensured so that tourists could somehow benefit from them and the city could recapture some of its former sense of place), but the line outside the central business district is not functioning. Leaving New Orleans we hit traffic — the mass of evacuated New Orleaneans who travel from Baton Rouge to New Orleans on the weekends to look after their property and dlo what they can to fix what they can.

Early this morning I left La Quinta Inn for Abbeville. The hour an a half drive brought me to work by 7:30am where I met many of my fellow workers and my supervisors. After getting set up I began what turned out to be a day long orientation in the field meeting a number of the farmers here and seeing the destruction wrought my Hurricane Rita on their homes and fields. I observed that the marsh environment here has been extensively modified by intense human activity. The most common land use appears to be growing rice/crawfish (each grown seasonally in the same field in rotation). I was pleased to see so many species of birds wading in these crawfish ponds. The rice/crawfish crop is threatened by saltwater intrusion deposited by the hurricane’s storm surge (the largest ever seen in cajun memory here), the lack of enough rain this winter to flush the saltwater from their pond’s many irrigation canals, the accumulated and sometimes dangerously explosive debris in their fields such as propane tanks tht make machanical harvesting difficult. Sugarcane takes three growing seasons to mature and the saltwater intrusion killed off all the sugarcane growing. Cattle and aligators are also raised here.
That’s all for now since I should be asleep already.

There seems to be some confusion as to the correct spelling of the parish. The Vermilion Parish Tourist Commission spells the parish with one L. But historically, it appears to have been spelled with two Ls. Here is a map I found online of the parish from 1895 with the older spelling:

And here is an aerial image of some of the rice fields in Vermilion. Rice farming is an economic base of the parish.

I hope to have more information to post soon, but I must take care of some chores and get on the road to Abbeville.

I am in Baton Rouge, an hours distance from New Orleans. This city and its suburbs are where tens of thousands of New Orleanian residents came to live after fleeing their flooded homes. Many were housed in local motels and hotels, their accomodations paid for by FEMA. At Motel 6 I noticed the following:

When I first came to register at the front desk, I found the door locked from the inside. The manager, a young woman, explained it was for her security. When I asked her to elaborate she simply repeated herself. She locked the door after I entered the motel lobby. I asked her if many hurricane evacuees were staying there. She said, “A few.” I think there were many more than a few. She was obviously not comfortable with the situation both personally and professionally. I found the motel to be noisy if not lively. During the days especially, I often heard residents hollering to roomates or other guests across the open courtyard and pool, sometimes playing music from their rooms, every minute or so another cellphone ring or walkie-talkie bleep would broadcast to every resident of the motel courtyard that one peson or another had received a call or had been texted. I noticed no one ever used the outdoor pool even though it was warm. Other residents left their doors open to let the music they were playing drift outside. Many residents had notes taped to their windows saying “no room service” or “do not disturb.” When the friendly and patient room service woman came to my door she would politely ask me to initial that I had requested no full room service, just the emptying of trash and a change of towels. At night I noticed the presence of a police car in the parking lot. I saw the scampering of stray cats and kittens in the bushes next to the pool and through the fences separating one sprawling roadside parking lot from its neighboring asphalt expanse.

A note in the motel lobby advertises complimentary coffee before 9am. I also noticed a single letter posted next to the coffee machine, a comunique from FEMA to evacuees explaining that rooms would no longer be paid for after February 7, 2006. On the local news, I could not find any stories of what was like to live as an evacuee in a motel room, however, other stories featuring a crime angle helped to frame these motels as sources of criminal activity and danger. A motel across the street from me, Microtel, was often featured because they had turned off phone service to motel rooms after 10pm, ostensibly as a means of curbing apparent prostitution. The allegation of prostitution was not investigated by the local news. A poor old black woman was interviewed as relying on the phone service after 10pm in order to communicate with a close relative on the west coast suffering from breast cancer. Another motel, where a white woman and her mother was featured prominently as they complained about the lack of safety and their willingness to kill anyone who knocked at their door. They made this point as the news cameraperson videoed them brandishing and cocking a very large gun. Black and hispanic room service employees sustaining the motel accomodations for these evacuee resident were not interviewed.

At the La Quinta Inn, I found less evacuees. The Inn is about twice as expensive as Motel 6. I am treated cordially and with respect by the concierge. The lobby of the Inn is not locked and people actually sit down and talk to one another. A TV set featuring Fox News plays constantly. The friendly and polite room service does not ask me to initial any papers. A stack of FEMA notices are available on the lobby counter. Last Friday (1/27/2006), while waiting once again for deployment, I met a group of FEMA employees in the lobby. Their task was to inform evacuee residents of the February 7 deadline and the opportunities for assistance if they should need any after that date. The FEMA employees are young and black. one woman and two men. the men speak to me and are very curious about the details of the Long Term Recovery Project I’ll be working on. (That makes three of us!) We chat for a while and they invite me later to join them after work some day for beer and billiards. An evacuee approaces them in the lobby about making a FEMA claim and even though that is not their mission at the Inn, they sit down with the man and help him.

My last evening at Motel 6 capped a week exploring Baton Rouge’s vegetarian possibilites. Thinking I could find something at a Chinese restaurant I stopped down the road at the Chinese Inn, an example of classic American roadside architecture. The szechuan tofu was spicy but seemed hastily prepared, and a glass of water, when it eventually was provided, tasted funny just like Baton Rouge tap water.

Good eats were found the next day at Taste of China, which had an all I could eat buffet, so I left stuffed. Plenty of veggie grub to be had there. Cheap and recommended if you have to eat off of the highway.

Ideally, there would be an inexpensive veggie restaurant downtown. Haven’t found one yet, but I did locate Coffee Star, a nice cafe on Florida Blvd just east of Third Street. Free wi-fi, decent and relatively inexpensive chai, and comfortable digs. Nothing vegetarian though — even the tomato soup had meat stock. A fewblocks over is the levee, and I’ll be visiting it after this post and cup of chai to take a few pics. Also, taking a cue from Richard Layman, I’ll be taking pictures of so-called “street furniture”: way finding signs and other unique streetscape characteristics of Baton Rouge, and whatever else strikes my planner’s eye. My father’s been taking pictures of urban streets for many years. Now that I’ve caught a bit of the bug I’ve realized that to take good urban pictures takes a good eye, some talent, and experience. So the ones you’re seeing next to these posts are also documenting the development of my planner’s eye.

My first meeting since I arrived this morning gave me a glimpse of the 25 or so other contractors working on the Long Term Recovery Project. I noticed I was one of the few to have actually have been cleared and FEMA badged. I was also one of the youngest. In my unscientific survey I observed the median age was close to 50. Schmoozing with a few of the other contractors was interrupted by the meeting — a wonderful, if all to brief, presentation on Louisana’s colorful history by documentarian and local historian Jeff Duhe. It was a real pleasure meeting another historian so soon. There will be plenty of opportunities I think to network with some bright and interesting people here.

I was expecting some details of my deployment, but so far: not yet… sometime this afternoon I’m told. I hope to know soon because for all practical purposes I’m living out of my rental car today and need to make lodging accomodation for this evening wherever I’ll be staying, in Baton Rouge, Lafayette, New Orleans, or wherever.

One more thing, I learned yesterday listeining to local public radio, WRKF 89.3FM, that Baton Rouge/Louisiana State University is the home of the writer and essayist Andrei Codrescu! (This is almost as cool as being in the town as Daniel Pinkwater). Maybe I’ll run into Mr. Codrescu (or write to him).

But I have been able to explore a bit of Baton Rouge. The downtown is lovely, if not lively. Beautiful streetscapes with the occasional parking lot where a building must once have stood. The area around North and 3rd Street is particularly excellent.

There’s some new development by the Mississippi River, the kind of extravagant if contrived development designed to convince the people living out by Airline Highway to come back to the city for some sports, fun, and culture. A museum of natural history neighbors an arts museum, a small gallery district, a sports arena, and a bit futher south, a casino. Except for this section however, the river’s levee has an industrial feel with a nice view of southern urban decay. There is a levee walk that extends to the Lousiana State University campus however — an excellent recreational asset, though I’d like to see more of a natural riparian buffer along the Mississippi, maybe a restoration of the great Weeping Willow trees that historically abutted the river, controlled erosion, and calmed and cooled its banks.

While wandering around the city Friday night I came across this weird gutted building. Checking the door I discovered to my surprise that this was the regional FEMA office!

I wish I could describe more interesting adventures while I’ve been waiting for my background check to come through. I did discover a few free wif-fi hotspots near LSU’s campus, and will be spending more time there just to get away from my motel room. And I’ll be taking some pictures of the levee and riverfront here too.

I mention this because Shabbat is arriving here in Baton Rouge in a few hours and through my fruity Jewish contacts, I’ve already found some Jews in the Bayou here, vegetarians who know as much about the local Jewish scene as the local Bollywood scene in New Orleans (thanks Yonah and Bev). So in a few hours I’ll be in downtown Baton Rouge where the energy of this place is, and exploring it in earnest. Have a peaceful and restful shabbes everyone!

But arriving in Baton Rouge, whatever angst I felt was superseded by practical considerations. First, acquiring the rental car. Second, determing directions to my destination. Third, meeting my TAC coordinator. Fourth, driving to FEMA HQ for fingerprinting and background checking. Fifth, finding accomodations at the Motel 6. Sixth, scouting for food on this Baton Rouge strip. Seventh, connecting to the Internet via GPRS enabled cell phone.

A little hacking on this blog and I also managed to get gallery2 working with wordpress. I’m so proud of myself. I’ve still got an eye for understanding and tweaking code after, what has it been, two years since I last programmed, and four since I wrote any serious code? OK, so this wasn’t a huge project but I’m still happy to know I can support my own web projects.

Anderson Cooper is reporting live from the Gulf. NPR has a story about Louisiana Governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, inviting Andres Duany, co-founder of the architectural firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., to plan the new New Orleans. I feel like I’ve arrived in the midst of something, but I won’t know exactly what until my background check clears. Until then I have a few days to explore Baton Rouge and Louisiana on my own. Please post in the comments any suggestions of where you think I should visit.

Today was a study in contrasts. The past few days have seen me increasingly frazzled as I struggled to prepare everything I needed for living out of a suitcase in Louisiana motels for the next three months. A minor fiasco with my credit card meant that I didn’t arrive in Baton Rouge as expected and will instead arrive tomorrow (Thursday). (Note to self: make sure to tell the credit company that your company will be making travel arrangements for you with your credit so they won’t shut down your card under the impression that it had been stolen.) Couldn’t have gotten anything done these past few days without the help of friends and zipcar. Just to catch you up to speed, Sunday I put this blog together, Monday I met with the FEMA contractor I’ll be working for to officially be hired and given a worker’s orientation; Tuesday, my friend Allan helped me go shopping for clothes and luggage, after which I needed to move my apartment into storage by 6pm. I just managed to do that when I came home and realized that I had forgotten to put my bike into storage and my kitchen items, and my computer. All of this was done in haste under the impression that I’d be leaving Wednesday morning. Such a good start for a planner! The good news is that the company that hired me couldn’t purchase the ticket for Wednesday because the credit was frozen by all of these odd purchases, completely out of profile with my regular frugal behaviour. Wires were tripped, flags were a-wavin’, many cellular minutes were expended waiting for available attendants. Thankfully, my point-of-contact at the company was forgiving, patient, and relieved that it was all getting sorted out.

So now I am at Paul’s, having been walked out of my home down the block by my landlord after giving him the keys and breaking my lease. With my extra day I was able to put almost everything into storage (forgot the kettle) and to clean my room. I believe it was the clean room that impressed Mr. D—- into forgiving my broken lease and even offering to give back my deposit if only he could find a new tenant by February. (Fingers crossed). Minutes ago, Nikki stopped by and handed me a note with all the blessings I could ever want for what I’m about to do. (Nikki is a miracle and a holy person and I struggle to keep this in mind when she is talking to me because she looks like any other normal human.) I was beginning to feel anxious… about what I had gotten myself into, especially after experiencing the graciousness of friends helping throught these last few days — I won’t have their company so very soon.

Other things to report as well but they were too painful to go over in any detail. Let it just be said that friendship is something to cultivate, and romantic love with all of its magic, is no surrogate for it, if often an impostor. I leave for Louisiana tomorrow with blessings from Jon, and Paul, and Nikki, and Jackie, people who I didn’t know a year ago, and some of them even a few months ago — but people who I give my love to and share with the solidarity of my being.

• clear out of my room
• move my stuff into storage
• determine what to bring with me to Louisiana
• book a flight
• show my room to prospective tenants
• buy some luggage, say goodbye to friends
• sign paperwork
• and maybe buy an ev-do cellular data card, and a big 2.5″ 100gb hd for the lappy.

It’s hard for me to imagine that in only a few short days I’ll be saying goodbye to DC for something completely different and a way of living I’ve never experienced.

And here’s a pic of me pasty white sitting in my now empty room (except for this computer) in a beaming white wifebeater shirt. Nothing better for sweating in and getting dirty thana wifebeater, or “A-shirt”, when you’re moving. How did I get on without one all these years of changing apartments?

The process for publishing with Arcadia has been fairly straightforward. I emailed the publisher with a description of my work and in the publisher’s reply I was asked some questions such as where I was from and whether I was niterested in attending book signings and had a relationship with any local historical societies. Passing the questionnaire back over email, my answers were reviewed by the publisher and after a little back and forth (there was some concern that since I was currently working post-graduation in Washington, DC that I wouldn’t be able to help promote the book effectively in Cincinnati) I was sent by mail an official Arcadia Publishing Book Proposal to complete and mail back to them with 20 sample images and illustrations. Arcadia moves very quickly! Just about a week after receiving my book proposal they callled me that they were interested in publishing and were wondering how quickly I could get all the materials ready for publishing. Thanks to my work with lulu, my answer was that all of my materials are ready. The book may be published as early as July 2005! I’ll probably add a few more things to my text about suburban history, building associations, 19th century commuters and the aspirations of country living, and cooperatives before submitting the draft to them.

Much else to report: I’m nearing the end of my internship at TPL in DC and am looking at the doctoral program in urban studies at the University of Maryland. There are also other job leads I’m pursuing.

Regarding the presentation itself, this was the first time I had given a public talk before strangers and I was a bit anxious beforehand. This anxiety motivated me to prepare many slides to elucidate my story and to challenge the imagination of my audience. Admittedly, and hour and twenty minutes is a bit long for most people and I didn’t even cover everything. In future presentations I will cover less material, and harp on the absolutely relevant details I want my audience to remember.

Dr. Tanaka is now in Matsue, Japan at the Lafcadio Hearn Memorial Conference so perhaps already a new audience is aware of my research into Hearn’s mentor, Henry Watkin, and the neighborhood Watkin helped to found, Bond Hill.

Please forgive me as I raise the price for purchasing Bond Hill: Origin and Transformation as I need all the help I can get surviving being a bohemian for the upcoming few weeks.

The latest version of this book has more material relating to Henry Watkin and Watkin’s family, Laura Ann Fry Watkin, daughter of the master woodcarver Henry L. Fry, and their daughter, Effie Watkin. With Dr. Tanaka’s help I was able to discover new material on Henry Watkin at Iowa State Univeristy’s Archives including a beautiful photo of Watkin, their home in Pleasant Ridge, Ohio, and an interior photo of one of the rooms in their home showing what appear to be Henry and Laura’s wedding portraits. This should be very exciting new information for fans of Lafcadio Hearn.

Over the next few weeks I will be on the East Coast interviewing and networking for jobs. Wish me luck.