Many more weeks in Pittsburgh to follow!
My friend’s backyard
One of many bridges that I don’t yet know the name of, and a tolerable pumpkin beer on the bar at Silky’s Pub in Bloomfield.
One flight of old abandoned stairs amongst hundreds.
(I’ll do more research on the stairs of Pittsburgh and report back soon!)
Posted in Adventure, Beer, Hiking/Walking, Local/Community, Non-sense, Photography, Pittsburgh | Tags: abandoned stairs, autumn, backyard, bridge, Post Road Pumpkin Ale
Happy October! We are in the midst of my favorite season, and I have the pleasure of experiencing autumn in a new place. The spectacular fall foliage of the east coast was calling my name so loudly this year that I actually left Oregon, rode a train for 62 hours, and moved to Pittsburgh, PA. (There may have been other reasons for the move, but the timing of it was very premeditated…) The word on the leaf peepers channel is that foliage is peaking in northern parts, but here in western PA the leaves are just starting to turn. I will get to enjoy the full glory of a proper autumn once again – and there is a wicked nice cemetery just down the street that is in desperate need of exploration, while red and orange leaves drift gently down around me. Yup!
I very cleverly picked an east coast city that is full of trees, perhaps the most of any US city according to the taxi driver who delivered my groggy boyfriend and myself to my friends’ house in the neighborhood of Lawrenceville at 5:45 in the morning after that 62 hour train ride… While I wait for them to turn from green to gold, I’ll enjoy 70-80 degree weather and, so far, quite a lot of sunshine. Those rays really lend themselves to beautifying the row houses (an architectural feature I’ve not seen before) and other interestingly run-down buildings that abound here. A lot of the neighborhoods are revitalizing and coming together as communities to better their streets, so there’s plenty of spick and span mixed in with the shabby. It’s an exciting time to dig in here, and I’m eager to get my feet muddy.
I think I counted 21 bridges that I could see from this viewpoint on Grandview Ave. the other day – you can see 15 of them in this picture. That’s another thing I loved in advance about Pittsburgh, and I can’t wait to get to know the bridges – and there are tunnels too! This place is going to keep my camera busy for a long time.
My recent explorations have been driven by the search for work and a neighborhood to call home. I have some good leads in both those areas, and have also run to earth some local permaculture groups and urban farmers and natural builders. In a city where the world’s first movie theater opened in 1905, there are plenty of movie watching and movie making opportunities – and of course Andrew Carnegie was kind enough to scatter about 19 libraries across Pittsburgh. I do believe this place will keep not just my camera, but my whole self busy for a good while to come!
Therefore, let me bid farewell to OR and all the good times I had there with a few pictures from my last days and the journey that followed, and then turn my heart and mind entirely to the adventure of making Pittsburgh my new home.
Tumalo Falls, outside Bend, OR
The Oregon coast at Bandon
Spring Creek, near Klamath Falls, OR
Glimpse of Glacier Nat’l Park, MT, through the train window
Crossing the Mississippi River, and Chicago at sunset
Yours truly, on Grandview Ave. in the Mt. Washington area, overlooking Pittsburgh’s downtown and the convergence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and the Ohio rivers
Don’t forget to drink some autumnal beers folks (I’ve been treating myself to Southern Tier’s Imperial Pumking ON DRAFT! with cinnamon/sugar or brown sugar on the rim…dangerously delicious!) and have a spooktacular October. Cheers!
—
What’s the deal with the giant rubber duckie floating in the river? I will report back on that!
Posted in Adventure, Beer, Local/Community, Non-sense, Photography, Pittsburgh, Traveling | Tags: autumn, fall foliage, moving, OR, train ride
It seems like a summer wrap-up post is always required round here. Last summer I was so busy playing in the mud and building things that I didn’t have time to blog. This summer I was busy making pizza and drinking in the sun and plotting social uprisings and falling in love. Fortunately, my camera is always on hand to document my escapades, so the 2013 edition of this annual post can now be presented to you.
Let’s see…
In May I hiked a portion of the Pacific Crest Trail, tromping through 4 feet of snow while enjoying 80 degree weather.
In June I completed my first independent timber framing project – I cut the frame for a solarium. Then I went to Klamath Falls, kidnapped my boyfriend, and carried him off to Bend.
In July I enjoyed many long sunny days spent at the Riverside Market, watching dogs pant (Oreo is seen above), talking to people, trying new beers, and plotting my next big adventure.
I also explored the Maury Mountains during a camping trip with Jonah.
In August my summer work gig with the Pizza Cart became a full time affair, with late nights spent rolling thousands of pizza skins, and days spent working things like BrewFest and Kaleidoscope Music Festival.
And on my birthday, in early September, I made it up onto McKenzie Pass where I checked out big mountains and big lava flows and a strange little tower.
There are still a few days of summer left, but in my mind it ends with the start of school and my birthday. Autumn is my favorite season, and this year it is shaping up to be pretty interesting. I am leaving Bend, OR in a few days for a brief roadtrip around this state and then Jonah and I are hopping a train and heading to Pittsburgh to try our hands at city and east coast life – and I’ll have my camera there to capture the details, and a couple hundred pictures of the fall foliage too.
Until then, cheers!
My friend Jonah is getting up to mischief again – following lines of thought in unusual directions, challenging your thought rut, gesturing wildly, and saying a whole lot of important things. Watch if you dare. Or if you care.
Posted in Adventure, History, Local/Community, Non-sense, State of the World, Work | Tags: anarchism, Cascadia, creativity, economy, ideas, Jonah Hakanson, middle-class, revolution, thoughts
– Ponderosas standing ponderously before an indifferent pink sunrise sky.
– A stray Coors can beside crushed grass where the tent was.
– Dust billowing behind the blue rental car.
– A hawk in the top of a pine tree, a rabbit romping down the roadside, a single antelope in a field watching me watching it.
– My friend, partner, lover asleep in the passenger seat.
– Camping gear crash landed on my bedroom floor.
– Gin over ice with a hint of tonic and a withered lime slice precariously pinching the pint glass rim.
– 104 bees tangled in the flowering viney plant that covers one whole wall of the Riverside Market.
– My fingers, pouring sauce scattering cheese counting out 5 pepperoni crushing garlic tearing basil making pizzas HOT FRESH TO ORDER!
– A little flying insect flattened against page 30 of Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg.
– This page, lit by headlight, because my friend, partner, lover is asleep on my bed.
July 30th 2013 – Bend, OR
Posted in Non-sense, Poetry, Writing | Tags: camping, gin & tonic, my work, poem, The Pizza Cart
Let’s sing a song!
My friend Jonah and I are working on an internet sing-along collaboration. The idea is to get as many people singing If I Had A Hammer together as possible. Singing together is such a powerful and fun experience, and whenever I can do it in person I’m blown away by the sense of community that is generated. Some of my favorite memories are of groups of friends, or strangers who quickly became friends, gathered together and making music. The internet allows me to keep in touch with my friends who are scattered all around the world, and I would now like to use the internet to go on singing with them – and with you, a stranger perhaps, who will soon be a friend.
Here I am, all by my lonesome, singing the song. Please listen and sing along with me, and record yourself doing so (this is super easy to do on an iPhone, and most phones have a voice memo feature which you can then share). Email your part to tuulenhaiven@gmail.com, and we will mix it in and update the song with the new voice. Hopefully there will soon be layers and layers of voices, and all around the world we will be singing together.
Here are the lyrics, in case you don’t already know this song by heart. 🙂
If I had a hammer,
I’d hammer in the morning
I’d hammer in the evening,
All over this land
I’d hammer out danger,
I’d hammer out a warning,
I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.
If I had a bell,
I’d ring it in the morning,
I’d ring it in the evening,
All over this land
I’d ring out danger,
I’d ring out a warning
I’d ring out love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.
If I had a song,
I’d sing it in the morning,
I’d sing it in the evening,
All over this land
I’d sing out danger,
I’d sing out a warning
I’d sing out love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.
Well I got a hammer,
And I got a bell,
And I got a song to sing, all over this land.
It’s the hammer of Justice,
It’s the bell of Freedom,
It’s the song about Love between my brothers and my sisters,
All over this land.
Posted in Adventure, Local/Community, Music, Non-sense | Tags: collaboration, If I Had A Hammer, pete seeger, sing-along, singing
“A good, simple expression of this scenario comes when someone says something like “think outside the box”, or that they need to “broaden their horizons”. These are ultimately true, but all you can do inside of a realm of authority is think inside another box. Or, better yet, broaden the number of boxes you are involved in.“
– Jonah Hakanson
For more on the realms of authority and permission, check out this post at Brutally Naked. I should probably point out that the “me” in this comic is not actually ME. My little boxes look a bit different…
Click on the picture for a larger view!
I recently read Kurt Vonnegut’s collection of essays titled A Man Without a Country, and as usual his commentary on life and the condition of America today (the book was published in 2005) was one of the more hilarious ways to get slapped in the face. Vonnegut wields humor like a battle ax, and in this book he is clearly very annoyed. Occasionally he sets the ax down for a moment and talks about jazz, and storytelling, and remembering to be happy, and the importance of jokes when faced with potentially overwhelming despair – but he can’t stray far from the topics that weigh so heavily on his mind. The book ends on an amazing and horrible note, with the poem Requiem –
The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
‘…we know what we are doing.‘ That needs to be repeated. We are not innocent bystanders, watching the world parade into ruin. We are all actively participating in the disintegration of our society, the disembowelment of our democracy in this country, and the destruction of the only life-supporting planet that we know of. Even as we try to live ‘green’ and shop local and support civil rights in various forms, thinking ourselves to be perfectly liberal and enlightened, our tax dollars are funding wars and murder, theft and starvation on a worldwide scale. This video, made by my friend Jonah Hakanson, states clearly the role each of us plays in activities that none of us agree with or support. And he offers a solution – a little seed that needs to be planted and watered by all of us so that it can grow big and strong and beautiful.
I cannot un-see what I have seen, and you can’t either. It’s time to do something about it.
We need to be wise humans, as Vonnegut states at the end of a chapter about the ‘guessers’ in power –
‘Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long, for all of human experience so far…’ – p. 82
‘Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today.’ – p. 83
‘The boisterous guessers are still in charge – the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations… If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on. Please, don’t you do that.’ – p. 86
Why would we allow such ignorant guessers to control our lives? – folks who guess that ‘billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down‘, or that ‘the more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment’s notice, the safer humanity is and the better off the world will be that our grandchildren will inherit,’ or that ‘industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them,’ or that ‘the poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn’t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences,’ or that ‘the United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.’
You guys! We are not fools. We are not cruel, evil people. And yet we have allowed the guessers in Washington to ‘present ourselves to the rest of the world as proud, grinning, jut-jawed, pitiless war-lovers with appallingly powerful weaponry – who stand unopposed. In case you haven’t noticed, we are now as feared and hated all over the world as the Nazis once were. And with good reason. In case you haven’t noticed, our unelected leaders (referring to the rigged election in Florida in 2000) have dehumanized millions and millions of human beings simply because of their religion and race. We wound ’em and kill ’em and torture ’em and imprison ’em all we want. Piece of cake. In case you haven’t noticed, we also dehumanize our own soldiers, not because of their religion or race, but because of their low social class. Send ’em anywhere. Make ’em do anything. Piece of cake. ‘ p. 87
This should make you angry. This should shatter you. This ought to make you want to stop cooperating with the guessers, with the PPs (psychopathic personalities, as Vonnegut later calls them- ‘congenitally defective human beings…people born without a consciences...’) – because you are smarter, and more thoughtful, and more caring and generous than they are. Because you DO have a conscience. Because you’re a wise human. They hate those. ‘So be one anyway. Save our lives and your lives, too. Be honorable.’ p. 93
The idea that Jonah suggests at the end of his video presentation is simple. It’s the action of the modern day hero that Vonnegut asks for. Stop participating in a system that believes it can get away with murder (literally) in your name, using your money. Stop selling your labor to employers whose taxes go to support wars and theft, racism and ignorance. Stop living in isolation, stop waiting for someone else to tip it all over. Stop battling zombies and staking vampires in a virtual reality. Just stop. Let’s come to a screeching halt, join hands, and start walking forward again together.
In a statement on FB Jonah said, “Don’t help your employer give his money and debt to a system that is patently murderous and insane. That is the “strike” part of the General Strike. The other part, is helping each other with the abundance, courage, and skills we all have together. THAT is called democracy. THAT is the revolution. We’ll figure it out.”
And on his blog Jonah wrote, “It is hard to wrap our head around the idea of a General Strike. It is not a day off of work, it is a thoughtful withdrawal of yourself from a system doing things you do not agree with. It is non-violent, non-cooperation on a massive scale (Gandhi, MLK). It is civil disobedience, although not exclusively. The small details do not matter. Although, in practice, in history, a General Strike means that wage workers cease their work. Start there.”
I am going to strike on July 8th. I have two jobs, and while I myself don’t directly contribute to the system, due to the fine print of my employment agreements, my employers still do. They are decent, honest folks who care deeply about the people around them. They’re doing their best to put their hands to good work. They do not want to cause the deaths of children in middle eastern countries. And yet they, and I, are contributing to a system that does just that. Therefore, on July 8th I won’t go to work.
I’m not going to march around and wave a sign. I’m simply going to wear something yellow, take a walk, talk to friends, hopefully talk to strangers. It will be a very small thing – but it could be a very large thing if you joined me. If you and I, and every other wise human in this country stopped participating for a single day, the guessers and the PPs in power would have to take notice. They would have to remember that there aren’t very many of them, while there are millions of us. And boy, would they get scared. They might even start listening to us. Wouldn’t that be something?
So won’t you take my hand? Won’t you set aside your video games and TV shows and fantasy football and yes, even your books, (!) and any other means you have of escaping the real world, and do something amazing and powerful with me? You long for adventure and heroes and for life to be different. Let’s go on an adventure and become heroes and make that difference!
—
For more information on the General Strike click on the flyer above. Also, check out Jonah’s blog, Brutally Naked.
by Catherynne M. Valente
“If the world is divided into seeing and not seeing,” Marya thought, “I shall always choose to see.”
Mmm, this book! – this is proper storytelling. Valente tangles and then unwinds the threads of Russian folklore and actual history, eventually cutting a vibrant, painfully beautiful tale about love and death and marriage off of her loom.
Marya Morevna sits in a second floor window that overlooks a street that used to be known as Gorokhovaya (just as Petrograd was once called St. Petersburg) and watches a rook, and then a plover, and then a shrike fall out of a tree and turn into handsome young men. These young men marry her three older sisters, and Marya is left with a complex secret, having ‘seen the world naked, caught out‘. As she waits for her own bird to fall out of a tree and come to claim her, Marya reads Pushkin, meets the Stalinist house elves that live behind the stove, and brushes her long dark hair with a silver comb.
When her bird finally comes, Marya is caught off guard, but is immensely relieved to be ‘finally inside the magic instead of looking at it through a window.’ Comrade Koschei is handsome and he wants her, and he takes her away in a long black car, far away to his own country where he rules as the Tsar of Life – or Koschei the Deathless.
Here Valente really snarls things. Marya begins a long dance with Koschei – who is a villain of Russian folklore – as each tries to determine ‘who will rule?‘ Meanwhile there are strange and wonderful leshiyi to befriend, firebirds to shoot, quests to go on at the command of Baba Yaga, and an endless war with the Tsar of Death. And inevitably, there is Ivan – a thoroughly human man whose destiny it is to take Marya back to Leningrad (as it is now called), where she is faced with another war and the undoing of many things – both magical and real.
This is not a particularly pleasant book, but it is a pleasure to read. It’s dark twists and turns are lit by excellent writing – probably the best I’ve encountered so far this year. While it spins heavily into fairy tale styling at times, and follows recognizable forms (many things happen in threes), Valente’s prose is lovely, and also like banging your funny bone – sharp and surprising and kind of deliciously painful. The characters are deftly embroidered but not perfect, and Marya is especially complex. I disliked her and yet loved her. The entire thing is almost like a fever dream – it left me dizzy and restless, and I was relieved when it was over. But I LIKE that about a book – I want stories that I need to kick off like a blanket on a hot night, and yet draw up to my chin a few hours later. This was such a one, for which I am grateful.
what we have here is a failure to communicate 