SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: ANTONIO MACHADO

Posted on April 24, 2010 by asitoughttobemagazine

LAST NIGHT, AS I WAS SLEEPING, I DREAMT MARVELOUS ERROR!

by Antonio Machado

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error! –
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error! –
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error! –
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night, as I slept,
I dreamt — marvelous error! –
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

Antonio Machado (1875-1939) was one of Spain’s most esteemed modern poets. He has been referred to as “a poet of time and memory.” Machado was prominent in the Spanish literary movement known as The Generation of ’98. He published a number of works during his lifetime, beginning with Soledades in 1903 and ending with Juan de Mairena in 1936. Machado’s death was related to the Spanish Civil War. When he died, in his pocket was found his last poem, “Estos días azules y este sol de infancia.”

Editor’s Note: This poem was a request. If you have a request of your own please feel free to post it as a comment. Of course, I will not post a poem that I do not stand behind. But how can one not stand behind a poem by one of Spain’s greatest modern poets, especially one with such a line as: “And the golden bees were making white combs and sweet honey from my old failures.” I have yet to find poets that blow me away in quite the way that Spanish poets do.

Want to read more by and about Antonio Machado?
Poetry Chaikhana
Famous Poets and Poems
Green Integer

FRIDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: Max Beckmann

Posted on April 23, 2010 by asitoughttobemagazine

Excerpt from “Letters to a Woman Painter”

by Max Beckmann

It is necessary for you, you who now draw near to the motley and tempting realm of art, it is very necessary that you also comprehend how close to danger you are. If you devote yourself to the ascetic life, if you renounce all worldly pleasures, all human things, you may, I suppose, attain a certain concentration; but for the same reason you may also dry up. Now, on the other hand, if you plunge headlong into the arms of passion, you may just as easily burn yourself up! Art, love, and passion are very closely related because everything revolves more or less around knowledge and the enjoyment of beauty in one form or another. And intoxication is beautiful, is it not, my friend?

Have you not sometimes been with me in the deep hollow of the champagne glass where red lobsters crawl around and black waiters serve red rumbas which make the blood course through your veins as if to a wild dance? Where white dresses and black silk stockings nestle themselves close to the forms of young gods amidst orchid blossoms and the clatter of tambourines? Have you never thought that in the hellish heat of intoxication amongst princes, harlots, and gangsters there is the glamour of life? Or have not the wide seas on hot nights let you dream that we were glowing sparks on flying fish far above the sea and the stars? Splendid was your mask of black fire in which your long hair was burning – and you believed, at last, at last, that you held the young god in your arms who would deliver you from poverty and ardent desire!

Then came the other thing – the cold fire, the glory. Never again, you said, never again shall my will be a slave to another. Now I want to be alone, alone with myself and my will to power and to glory…And uneasy you walk alone through your palace of ice. Because you still do not want to give up the world of delusion, that little “point” still burns within you – the other one! And for that reason you are an artist, my poor child! And on you go, walking in dreams like myself…You dream of my own self in you, you mirror of my soul…

Max Beckmann (1884 – 1950) was a German painter, sculptor, printmaker, and writer. Although often described as an Expressionist, Beckmann disagreed with Expressionist aims, finding their tendency to abstraction frustrating. Hundreds of his works were confiscated by Hitler in 1937, and several were featured in the Degenerate Art exhibition produced by the Nazis in an attempt to denigrate Modern art. Driven into exile, Beckmann eventually found himself in the U.S. The above passage is excerpted from a speech he gave at Stephens College in 1948 explaining his approach to art.

Want to read more by and about Max Beckmann?
Wikipedia
Artchive

THE YES MEN

Posted on April 22, 2010 by asitoughttobemagazine

Photograph of a child pumping water in Bhopal, India from a contaminated Union Carbide source.

DOW HIJACKS LIVE EARTH RUN

OR

DO THE YES MEN?

April 19, 2010
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

DOW THROWS A DISMAL PARTY, FEW ATTEND
Underattended “Run for Water” plagued by death scenes, zombies, and dozens of “Dow spokesmen”; truth seems to run free

Video: Yes Men video here; other video here, here, and here
Stills: Yes Men pictures here; numerous others here
Contact: Whitney Black (803)466-3786; press@theyesmen.org

Brooklyn, NY — Bucolic Prospect park in Brooklyn, NY played host to a bizarre spectacle on Sunday, as a dramatically under-attended Dow-sponsored “Run for Water” was infiltrated and turned upside down by hundreds of furious activists, including a hundred dressed as Dow spokespeople.

New Yorkers who came to the park expecting a light run followed by a free concert found themselves unwitting extras in a macabre and chaotic scene as runners keeled over dead, Dow-branded grim reapers chased participants, and a hundred fake Dow representatives harangued other protesters and and handed out literature that explained Dow’s greenwashing program in frank detail.

The actions called attention to Dow’s toxic legacy in places like India (the Bhopal Catastrophe), Vietnam (Agent Orange) and Midland Michigan (Dioxin Contamination), and to the absurdity of a company with serious water issues all over the world sponsoring the Live Earth Run For Water.

After race cancellations in London, Milan, Berlin, and Sweden, on-site Dow brand managers were in damage-control mode. But their job was made harder by the hundred fake “Dow” spokespeople who loudly but clumsily proclaimed Dow’s position (“Our race! Our earth!” and “Run for water! Run for your life!”), spoke with many runners, screamed at the other protesters, passed out beautifully-produced literature, and all in all looked a whole lot better than the real Dow reps, who seemed eager to make themselves scarce.

“I don’t know what’s going on here,” said Tracey Von Sloop, a Queens woman who attended the race. “All I know is these people are both crazy, and Dow is f*ing sick. I’m outta here.”

The event was the latest blow to Dow’s greenwashing efforts, the most visible element of which is the “Human Element” multi-media advertising campaign, one of the most expensive, and successful, marketing efforts in recent history. It even won an “Effie Award” for the most effective corporate advertising campaign in North America.

“Effective,” perhaps — but also completely misleading. To name just a few examples of Dow’s water-related issues: Dow refuses to clean up the groundwater in Bhopal, India, site of the largest industrial disaster in human history, committed by Dow’s fully-owned subsidiary, Union Carbide. As a result, children continue to be born there with debilitating birth defects. Dow has also dumped hundreds of millions of pounds of toxic chemical byproducts into wetlands of Louisiana, and has even poisoned its own backyard, leaving record levels of dioxins downriver from its global headquarters in Midland, Michigan.

“We thought it must be a joke when we first heard that Dow Chemical Company was sponsoring a run for clean water,” said Yes Woman Whitney Black. “Sadly, it was not. One of the world’s worst polluters trying to greenwash its image instead of taking responsibility for drinking water and ecosystems it has poisoned around the world? What an awfully unfunny way to start off Earth Week. We decided the event needed a little comic relief.”

Irony was piled on irony throughout the race, which Dow absurdly claimed was going to be “the largest solutions-based initiative aimed at solving the global water crisis in history.” At one point, organizers were caught on tape dramatically throwing out excess water left over because of an embarrassingly low turnout.

Groups organizing the action included the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, New York Whale and Dolphin Action League, the Vietnam Agent Orange Relief and Responsibility Campaign, the Wetlands Activism Collective, Global Justice for Animals and the Environment, Kids For A Better Future, The Yes Men, and hundreds of assorted volunteers, activists and mischief makers.

This press release was originally posted on The Yes Men website on 4/19/2010.

For more photographs see Indybay.org.

Against Medical Advice

Posted on April 21, 2010 by asitoughttobemagazine

Against Medical Advice
By John Unger Zussman

A woman I’ll call Bonnie sat in the exam room with her husband, waiting for her oncologist. They held hands without speaking, wearing thin, brave smiles.

(I’ve given Bonnie a pseudonym, and refrained from identifying my relationship to her, out of respect for her privacy. Suffice it to say we are close.)

Three months earlier, after a suspicious mammogram, a biopsy came back positive. Bonnie had a malignant breast tumor.

The diagnosis was a shock to Bonnie, who had no history of cancer in her family. She had to learn to cope with her brand-new reality. But watching someone I love face cancer set off land mines in my brain. My father died from rhabdomyosarcoma at age 35, when I was ten; my sister died of breast cancer at 45. My mother survived breast cancer in her 30s and spindle-cell sarcoma in her 70s, just after my adoptive father (her second husband) was treated for prostate cancer.

So I lived with a sword hanging above my head, expecting that someday I’d have to face that diagnosis myself. Once, my doctor’s office left a message on a Friday asking me to repeat a Hemoccult test. I spent an angst-filled, sleepless weekend convinced I was dying of colon cancer. It turned out that only one of the three samples had read positive—a fairly common occurrence—and the retest came out normal. Still, cancer is my demon, and Bonnie’s cancer let it loose.

The doctors put Bonnie through an exhausting battery of X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans to find out how much it might have spread. Meanwhile Bonnie worked her way through denial, anger, and depression, the first three stages of grief. She scoured the Internet medical sites and joined her local breast cancer support center.

After all the test results were in, her surgeon arranged for her to appear before the tumor board at his hospital, a celebrated university cancer center. First, a group of surgeons and oncologists came in to examine her. “It was strange, sitting there,” Bonnie’s husband said later, “as that parade of medical people took turns feeling her up.” Then she waited while the doctors reviewed her case.

Finally, they met with the hospital’s top breast cancer expert. He presided over the tumor board and was to be her oncologist.

“We’ve reviewed your case,” he told Bonnie, “and we all agree. If your surgery goes as we expect, you’re going to go through six months of hell. But then you’ll be fine.” Although the tumor was small, he explained, it was an aggressive type and might have spread to her lymph nodes. She would probably need radiation followed by chemotherapy.

Bonnie looked at her husband uneasily. She dreaded the thought of radiation and chemo, which had taken a physical and emotional toll on every breast cancer patient she knew.

As Bonnie’s lumpectomy date approached, she moved on to bargaining. Her research said that if her lymph nodes were not affected—that is, if she had stage 1 cancer— she would probably need no chemo, maybe not even radiation. And the less stress she subjected her body to, the better.

Bonnie’s hopes were fulfilled when the surgeon brought good news. She had caught it early. The tumor was small, the surgical margins were clear, and no lymph nodes were affected. Her cancer was only stage 1, and the surgeon was confident he had gotten it all.

Relieved, she settled into acceptance. And now, a few weeks later, she and her husband looked up as her oncologist entered her exam room and sat down. He congratulated her on her successful surgery and her positive test results.

And then he dictated a full course of radiation followed by aggressive chemotherapy.

This wasn’t what Bonnie had bargained for. She questioned him, but he was relentless. He couldn’t be sure that some cancer cells hadn’t escaped or that they wouldn’t metastasize. And that’s what you really want to avoid, he said. When she continued to resist, especially the chemo, he became defensive. “Why are we having this conversation if you’ve already made up your mind?” he demanded. He wasn’t used to mere patients questioning his authority.

Finally, Bonnie asked directly, “What if I go without chemo?”

“It’s risky,” he replied, “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“What if I skip radiation?”

“I’ll strap you to the table.”

Bonnie doesn’t cotton to being told what to do. “I don’t believe in hell,” she said later. She quickly regressed back to anger—and stayed there.

The first thing she did was fire her oncologist. She couldn’t believe the good results had not altered his treatment plan even a millimeter. “I want a doc who’ll treat me, not my cancer,” she said.

I tried to be supportive, but challenging medical authority is not my nature. I didn’t even know you could fire your oncologist. I wanted her to explore every avenue, use every medical weapon to beat this disease. Foregoing further treatment seemed a great risk, tempting fate, taking a chance with her life. Of all my fears, this was the oldest and most devastating. Bonnie’s cancer unleashed my demons and awakened my nightmares.

Bonnie stepped up her research and sought a second opinion. She also got access to a website, widely used by medical professionals, that estimates the risk of breast cancer relapse and mortality based on characteristics of the patient, her tumor, and potential chemotherapy.

And when she described that research, to my surprise, it was my mind that began to change. Bonnie’s prognosis was good no matter what she did. Radiation would cut the chance of recurrence, but it would have no effect on her survival and might cause long-term heart damage. Chemo would increase her chance of survival by a few percent, but she would be flooding her system with poisons that would cause nausea, hair loss, and the possibility of long-term cognitive and systemic impairment. That made her decision easy: no radiation, no chemo.

Her surgeon, whom she liked and trusted, tried to dissuade her. “What will happen,” he asked, “if the worst happens and you get a recurrence or even a metastasis? How will you feel then? Won’t you regret this?”

“Not for a minute,” she said without hesitation.

We often talk about patients waging a “courageous battle with cancer.” This usually means they try every means available, suffer every side effect, in the attempt to conquer their disease. But it also takes courage to forego treatment—to understand the odds and trust them, to know your own body and what’s best for it, to realize that, for you, the treatment might be worse than the disease.

Most cancer professionals are courageous too, and dedicated. They take their best shot and watch their patients die and then have to come back the next day and do it all again. It’s no wonder that they want to use every possible tool to beat this damn disease.

So they develop a standard treatment and apply it across the board. No doubt this is partly dictated by insurance and liability concerns. “Radiation? Of course you want radiation. It reduces the risk of recurrence by 40% or more.” But when that risk is low to begin with, when it doesn’t increase your chance of survival, and when you add the risks of radiation itself—the choice is far from obvious. Women need the option to make their own decision.

In the end, ironically, it’s not the oncologists’ job to cure cancer. Their job is to treat their patients—and it’s not the same thing.

Twenty-one months later, Bonnie is both healthy and steadfast, without a moment of doubt or regret. The odds are in her favor. I try not to second-guess her, even if I know that disaster might lurk in every screening exam and mammogram, even if just writing these words seems like tempting the gods. It’s her body and her decision, not her doctor’s.

The health care establishment and the breathless media sometimes tout new treatments as medical miracles. But they have risks and cause damage, which have to be weighed against their benefits. I hope to explore this calculus in future posts, and explore what it’s taught me about medicine and the state of our culture. I’ll also describe the ways Bonnie has chosen to manage her risk of recurrence and metastasis. She is not going gentle unto that good night.

Please note that I am not a medical doctor (nor do I play one on TV), so my reflections are meant to be descriptive and not prescriptive. I wouldn’t pretend to tell anyone else what to do. I invite your comments and, especially, your own stories.

Shortly after Bonnie made her decision, she learned that her original oncologist was running a clinical trial with, coincidentally, the same chemo medications he prescribed for Bonnie.

By that time, Bonnie had found a new oncologist. He gives her options, not orders.

Against Medical Advice By John Unger Zussman A woman I’ll call Bonnie sat in the exam room with her husband, waiting for her oncologist. They held hands without speaking, wearing thin, brave smiles. (I’ve given Bonnie a pseudonym, and refrained from identifying my relationship to her, out of respect for her privacy. Suffice it to say we are close.) Three months earlier, after a suspicious mammogram, a biopsy came back positive. Bonnie had a malignant breast tumor. The diagnosis was a shock to Bonnie, who had no history of cancer in her family. She had to learn to cope with her brand-new reality. But watching someone I love face cancer set off land mines in my brain. My father died from rhabdomyosarcoma at age 35, when I was ten; my sister died of breast cancer at 45. My mother survived breast cancer in her 30s and spindle-cell sarcoma in her 70s, just after my adoptive father (her second husband) was treated for prostate cancer. So I lived with a sword hanging above my head, expecting that someday I’d have to face that diagnosis myself. Once, my doctor’s office left a message on a Friday asking me to repeat a Hemoccult test. I spent an angst-filled, sleepless weekend convinced I was dying of colon cancer. It turned out that only one of the three samples had read positive—a fairly common occurrence—and the retest came out normal. Still, cancer is my demon, and Bonnie’s cancer empowered it. The doctors put Bonnie through an exhausting battery of X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans to find out how much it might have spread. Meanwhile Bonnie worked her way through denial, anger, and depression, the first three stages of grief. She scoured the Internet medical sites and joined her local breast cancer support center. After all the test results were in, her surgeon arranged for her to appear before the tumor board at his hospital, a celebrated university cancer center. First, a group of surgeons and oncologists came in to examine her. “It was strange, sitting there,” Bonnie’s husband said later, “as that parade of medical people took turns feeling her up.” Then she waited while the doctors reviewed her case. Finally, they met with the hospital’s top breast cancer expert. He presided over the tumor board, and was to be her oncologist. “We’ve reviewed your case,” he told Bonnie, “and we all agree. If your surgery goes as we expect, you’re going to go through six months of hell. But then you’ll be fine.” Although the tumor was small, he explained, it was an aggressive type and might have spread to her lymph nodes. She would probably need radiation followed by chemotherapy. Bonnie and looked at her husband uneasily. She dreaded the thought of radiation and chemo, which had taken a physical and emotional toll on every breast cancer patient she knew. As Bonnie’s lumpectomy date approached, she moved on to bargaining. Her research said that if her lymph nodes were not affected—that is, if she had stage 1 cancer— she would probably need no chemo, maybe not even radiation. And the less stress she subjected her body to, the better. Bonnie’s hopes were fulfilled when the surgeon brought good news. She had caught it early. The tumor was small, the surgical margins were clear, and no lymph nodes were affected. Her cancer was only stage 1, and the surgeon was confident he had gotten it all. Relieved, she settled into acceptance. And now, a few weeks later, she and her husband looked up as her oncologist entered her exam room and sat down. He congratulated her on her successful surgery and her positive test results. And then he dictated a full course of radiation followed by aggressive chemotherapy. This wasn’t what Bonnie had bargained for. She questioned him, but he was relentless. He couldn’t be sure that some cancer cells hadn’t escaped or that they wouldn’t metastasize. And that’s what you really want to avoid, he said. When she continued to resist, especially the chemo, he became curt. “Why are we having this conversation if you’ve already made up your mind?” he demanded. He wasn’t used to mere patients questioning his authority. Finally, Bonnie asked directly, “What if I go without chemo?” “It’s risky,” he replied, “I wouldn’t recommend it.” “What if I skip radiation?” “I’ll strap you to the table.” Bonnie doesn’t cotton to being told what to do. “I don’t believe in hell,” she said later. She quickly regressed back to anger—and stayed there. The first thing she did was fire her oncologist. She couldn’t believe the good results had not altered his treatment plan even a millimeter. “I want a doc who’ll treat me, not my cancer,” she said. I tried to be supportive, but challenging medical authority is not my nature. I didn’t even know you could fire your oncologist. I wanted her to explore every avenue, use every medical weapon to beat this disease. Foregoing further treatment seemed a great risk, tempting fate, taking a chance with her life. Of all my fears, this was the oldest and most devastating. Bonnie’s cancer unleashed my demons and awakened my nightmares. Bonnie stepped up her research and sought a second opinion. She also got access to a website, widely used by medical professionals, that estimates the risk of breast cancer relapse and mortality based on characteristics of the patient, her tumor, and potential chemotherapy. And when she described that research, to my surprise, it was my mind that began to change. Bonnie’s prognosis was good no matter what she did. Radiation would cut the chance of recurrence, but it would have no effect on her survival and might cause long-term heart damage. Chemo would increase her chance of survival by a few percent, but she would be flooding her system with poisons that would cause nausea, hair loss, and the possibility of long-term cognitive and systemic impairment. That made her decision easy: no radiation, no chemo. Her surgeon, whom she liked and trusted, tried to dissuade her. “What will happen,” he asked, “if the worst happens and you get a recurrence or even a metastasis? How will you feel then? Won’t you regret this?” “Not for a minute,” she said without hesitation. We often talk about patients waging a “courageous battle with cancer.” This usually means they try every means available, suffer every side effect, in the attempt to conquer their disease. But it also takes courage to forego treatment—to understand the odds and trust them, to know your own body and what’s best for it, to realize that, for you, the treatment might be worse than the disease. Most cancer professionals are courageous too, and dedicated. They take their best shot and watch their patients die and then have to come back the next day and do it all again. It’s no wonder that they want to use every possible tool to beat this damn disease. So they develop a standard treatment and apply it across the board. No doubt this is partly dictated by insurance and liability concerns. “Radiation? Of course you want radiation. It reduces the risk of recurrence by 40%.” But do the math. When that risk starts at 5%, when radiation reduces that risk (by 40% of 5%) to 3%, when it doesn’t increase your chance of survival, and when you add the risks of radiation itself—the choice is far from obvious. Women need the option to make their own decision. In the end, ironically, it’s not the oncologists’ job to cure cancer. Their job is to treat their patients—and it’s not the same thing. Twenty-one months later, Bonnie is both healthy and steadfast, without a moment of doubt or regret. The odds are in her favor. I try not to second-guess her, even if I know that disaster might lurk in every screening exam and mammogram, even if just writing these words seems like tempting fate. It’s her body and her decision, not her doctor’s. The health care establishment and the breathless media sometimes tout new treatments as medical miracles. But they have risks and they cause damage, which have to be weighed against their benefits. I hope to explore this calculus in future posts, and explore what it’s taught me about medicine and the state of our culture. I’ll also describe the ways Bonnie has chosen to manage her risk of recurrence and metastasis. She is not going gentle unto that good night. Please note that I am not a medical doctor (nor do I play one on TV), so my reflections are meant to be descriptive and not prescriptive. I wouldn’t pretend to tell anyone else what to do. I invite your comments and, especially, your own stories. Shortly after Bonnie made her decision, she learned that her original oncologist was running a clinical trial with, coincidentally, the same chemo medications he prescribed for Bonnie. By that time, Bonnie had found a new oncologist. He gives her options, not orders.

ANDREAS ECONOMAKIS

Posted on April 19, 2010 by asitoughttobemagazine

Harlem Street scene, 1988. Photography by Andreas Economakis.

GRACELAND

by Andreas Economakis

1988. A summer of cut-off shorts, cocaine, drinking, bicycling around Manhattan, dreadlocks and fun. My girlfriend Marisa and I are hanging out with friends every single night, jumping around bars, ending up in dorm rooms, strange rooms, bathrooms, hunched over mirrors, bankcards and razors clicking the glass, tinfoil and rolled dollar bills powdered white, tongues stinging, noses numb.

Marisa’s pad is up on 139^th and Broadway, in a Dominican neighborhood where the music never stops and cars are always triple-parked on the street. The futile horns of the trapped cars sound in sync with the Latin rhythms blaring out of every window and door, out of every orifice. Everything seems to fit. Our bodies are strong and we have no fear. We’re on top of the world.

Friday night we decide to drop acid and head out to Broadway’s lights. Broadway is like magic. It’s the wondrous threshold that pushes us into the high, the avenue that turns it all on like an electrical switch. I feel great. Why shouldn’t I? After all, I finally have a job! No more Reagan-era scrounging for handouts from friends. And screw UPS, come to think of it. Maybe once upon a time I wanted to be a United Parcel Service driver, driving around Manhattan in that big shit-brown truck, in my nappy shit-brown outfit, but no longer. I even got to drive that shit-brown truck as part of the test. The examiner told me I was a natural. Then he handed me a small plastic cup and asked for my piss. My piss! They didn’t even have the decency to call and tell me I failed. But that’s all history.

Starting Monday I’m answering phones in a large law office midtown. And for $10 an hour! Easy money, boy, and I don’t even have to wear a tie! So what if all my co-workers are women in their mid 50’s? Who cares? $10 an hour! And to top it all off, I’ve got a whole weekend to party, lots of weed, a sweet eight-ball, a small sheet of acid and more 24-hour liquor stores than the eye can count. Marisa’s down to party. So is Lou. Tina joins us too.

We burst out of Marisa’s apartment on our bicycles, riding everywhere, the party never ending. Harlem’s a blur of brownstone, white garlic-covered yucca, colorful crack-vile caps, gutted cars and Run DMC. The Jersey breeze in our hair, the twinkling lights of Weehawken across black water and then the Village, a neon vinyl wonderland of coin operated candy dispensers and blonde hair over tight, bulging jeans. Lines and beers and whippets on the old elevated West Side Highway (before they so shamelessly tore it down), buzzing our way cross-town for joints in the warm, dark, narcotic park. Early morning motor-oil sized eggs at the Hudson View Diner under the bridge up on 125^th,the old meat market next door an orgy of slaughtered meat and early morning 25-cent hookers in candy-colored spandex over Latin brown skin.

The early Monday sun finds us heading for Marisa’s bed, the Dominicans red-eyed and smiling as we skirt by musical windows and cars, fugitives from a weekend we will never forget but need to leave behind. The growing twilight is cut by white lines and sucked up through hand-twirled $1 tubes, as Paul Simon sings Graceland on the stereo. We finally drift off to sleep, horny as fuck but too fucked up to do anything about it.

At some point the alarm goes off and someone slaps it shut. At ten in the morning Marisa shakes me awake. I beg her to call the law office for me. I bury my head under the pillow, a modern day dreadlocked ostrich. “Uh, he can’t come in,” she says. I can hear them scream on the other end, through the feathers. “Um, yeah, he got a job with UPS,” she says. That was my idea. We fall back asleep.

When I finally wake up, Marisa is playing Graceland again. We wander into the kitchen and pour two piping hot Bustelo coffees as speedy little cockroaches run for cover under the humming fridge. I get dressed and bicycle downtown and get a job as a bike messenger, humming Graceland all the way:

For reasons I cannot explain

There’s some part of me wants to see Graceland,

And I may be obliged to defend

Every love every ending

Or maybe there’s no obligations now,

Maybe I’ve a reason to believe

We all will be received

In Graceland…

I guess I’m just not cut out for offices.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece is part of a collection of stories on blindness entitled: The Blindness of Life.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

“My Father’s Potato Death” by Sean Karns

Posted on April 18, 2010April 28, 2019 by asitoughttobemagazine

bedrohlich__05-03c.jpg_595 — “Bedrohlich” by Anke Merzbach

MY FATHER’S POTATO DEATH

The Irish weather demands
a black umbrella, but I prefer green
over black. I see green in ways
the morning light comes up over
the green tree divide that separates
the city from green-plastic-
covered potato mounds.

Being a crop inspector is serious
business. There’s been a few cropped
heads because men with hatchets
remember days of potato scares. My father
was on duty protecting the crops,
when I found him headless holding
an umbrella. His death reminds
me of the economics of a potato.
Potato vodka for Russians
or competing with them Idahoans.
Those fancy red rich people potatoes;
all fortified by hatchet men.

I took up the post in honor
of my father, and I will bleed out
the men who steal my potatoes.
I’ll use their blood to fertilize crops.
I will tuck them in a makeshift plastic
greenhouse and plant their heads,
call them head mounds.

I eat fried potatoes in memoriam
of the headless. I fire a twenty-one
potato gun salute into the green
haze released from the potato factory.

Sean Karns‘s work appears in several journals, including Folio, Ninth Letter, and Mayday, where the above poem originally appeared.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

Posted on April 17, 2010 by asitoughttobemagazine

SONG OF THE BARREN ORANGE TREE

by Federico Garcia Lorca

Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit.

Why was I born among mirrors?
The day walks in circles around me,
and the night copies me
in all its stars.

I want to live without seeing myself.
And I will dream that ants
and thistleburrs are my
leaves and my birds.

Woodcutter.
Cut my shadow from me.
Free me from the torment
of seeing myself without fruit.

Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of ’27. He is thought to be one of the many thousands who were ‘disappeared’ and executed by Nationalists at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.
(Annotated biography of Federico Garcia Lorca courtesy of Wikipedia.org.)

Editor’s Note: I think few poems have achieved what this poem does. This poem both inspires me to want to be a better poet and intimidates me with its greatness.

Want to read more by and about Federico Garcia Lorca?
Poets.org
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A Hidden Wholeness: Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Posted on April 14, 2010 by asitoughttobemagazine

A Hidden Wholeness: Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King, Jr.

by Albert J. Raboteau

At the time of his assassination, plans were underway for Martin Luther King, Jr., to make a retreat with Thomas Merton at Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey. We shall never know what might have resulted from a dialogue between this Roman Catholic monk and this black Baptist preacher whose lives still fascinate and inspire us twenty years after their deaths. But the act of recalling their common struggle against the evils of racism, materialism, and militarism, may enable us to recover what they would have brought to such an encounter and to imagine the joint “word” they might have left those who strive to live out their legacy.(1)

They came, of course, from two very different backgrounds. A quick comparison of their biographies would seem to demonstrate that the only thing that Fr. Louis Merton, O.C.S.O. and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., held in common was the year of their deaths — 1968. Merton was born in Prades, France in 1915, the son of Owen Merton, an artist from New Zealand and Ruth Jenkins Merton, an artist from the U.S. His mother died when Merton was only six and his father when he was fifteen. His childhood and adolescence were unsettled. Shuttling between France, England, Bermuda, and Long Island, N.Y., Merton experienced the homelessness of the expatriate, the rootlessness of the transient adrift in an uncaring world, and the longing of the orphan for family stability. Educated at European boarding schools, at Cambridge, and at Columbia, between the two World Wars, Merton experienced the disillusionment with the modern world that many of the intellectuals of his generation felt. His conversion to Roman Catholicism incorporated him into a firmly established system of values and doctrines that countered the anomie and hedonism he deplored in modern society. “Leaving the world,” he would find both a home and a family in the monastic enclosure and the community life of a Cistercian monastery in Kentucky.(2)

From his parents, Merton absorbed the temperament of the artist, though his talent expressed itself in writing, not painting. This artistic perspective tended to nurture in him a critical distance from the world. Fortunately, Merton’s superiors recognized and encouraged his vocation as a writer and throughout his years in the monastery he remained an amazingly prolific one, publishing over forty-eight books of poetry, essays, biography, autobiography, journals, fiction, meditations, and social criticism. Writing requires discipline and solitude. The strictly regulated life of a contemplative monk offered the disciplined structure he needed. And Merton himself helped persuade his order to recover the value of solitude in its own tradition by reinstituting the practice of allowing some monks to retire to the more complete solitude of the hermit life. His own request for greater solitude granted, he lived the last years of his life in a hermitage.

Illustrating the old theological adage, “grace builds on nature,” Merton’s distanced perspective upon the world and his need for disciplined solitude derived from his “expatriate” past and from his sensibilities as a literary artist, were deepened, fulfilled, and — as we shall see – transformed by the contemplative tradition in which he immersed himself.

Martin Luther King, Jr., was born in Atlanta, in 1929, the son of Alberta Williams King and M. L. King, Sr., pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church. King’s middle-class childhood was emotionally as well as economically secure, though, like most black children, his awareness of racism came early: a white friend who suddenly refused to play with him, a white shoe salesman who insisted that black customers wait in the rear of the store, a policeman who insulted his father by calling him “boy,” a bus driver who forced him and his teacher to stand in the aisles for a ninety-mile trip in order to seat whites. King was shocked and hurt by these incidents, and he never forgot them.(3)

As the son, grandson, and great grandson of Baptist ministers, King was deeply rooted in the Afro-American religious tradition. Though he briefly considered careers in medicine and law, he decided as a teenager to accept what must have seemed inevitable: he too would enter the ministry. Already, it was apparent that he was, as his father proudly remarked, “a magnificent preacher.” Throughout the years of his leadership in the civil rights Movement, King would remain a preacher, who drew instinctively upon the black church tradition in which he was formed for both the style and content of his message. Courses in philosophy, ethics, and theology at Morehouse College, Crozier Semi nary, and Boston University provided King with the opportunity to develop an intellectual framework for systematic analysis of the relationship between Christianity and society, but the existential base for King’s commitment to social action was already established in the tradition of black religious protest. Certainly the intellectual sources commonly credited with influencing King’s development — Thoreau’s doctrine of non-cooperation with evil, Rauschenbusch’s social gospel, Gandhi’s non-violence, and the philosophical school of personalism at Boston University — were important, but so was the example of his father and maternal grandfather. In 1935, Martin Luther King, Sr. had led several thousand black demonstrators on a march from Ebenezer Baptist Church to Atlanta’s city hall in support of voting rights for black citizens. A decade earlier, Reverend Adam Daniel Williams, King’s maternal grandfather, organized rallies at Ebenezer to protest a munici pal bond issue that contained no provisions for high-school education for black youth.(4)

Strongly attracted to the intellectual life, King might very well have followed the example of Benjamin Mays or Howard Thurman by combining ministerial and academic careers. He could have taught in a seminary in the North and we might today be reading his texts in social ethics, but he decided instead that the place for his was a pastorate in the South. And so he accepted that fateful call to pastor the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in the shadow of the capitol of the old Confederacy in Montgomery Alabama.

Our Lady of Gethsemani Abbey and Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Catholic monasticism and Black Protestantism, two very different locations and two very different traditions and yet, they did share a common trait — marginality. Monks were marginal by profession; they had rejected the “world.” Blacks were marginalized by discrimination; they were rejected by the dominant white society. Both monasticism and the black church were profoundly extraneous to the priorities and to the values of America in the 1950s. Marginality provided Martin and King with the critical consciousness necessary for radical dissent from the religious and political status quo. Moreover, the contemplative tradition within monasticism, and the prophetic tradition within Afro-American religion, furnished Merton, the contemplative, and King, the prophet, with the spiritual insight necessary to articulate convincing critical analyses of society and the religious experience necessary to ground their prescriptions for social change in personal authenticity.

And yet, it was not the traditions, per se, but what King and Merton took from them, or better, the ways in which King and Merton were transformed by them which made all the difference. Initially, neither Merton or King set out to “save the soul of the nation,” as King’s SCLC would later put it. There was in the young Merton, the enthusiasm of the convert, which led him to espouse in his earlier works, like The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), a world-rejecting attitude that he later came to recant:

The contemplative life is not [he wrote in 1964], and cannot be, a mere withdrawal, a pure negation, a turning of one’s back on the world with its suffering, its crises, its confusions and its errors. First of all, the attempt itself would be illusory. No man can withdraw completely from the society of his fellow men; and the monastic community is deeply implicated, for better or for worse, in the economic, political, and social structures of the contemporary world.(5)

We are all, according to Merton, in the fine phrase he used to entitle one of his published journals, “Guilty Bystanders.” The Merton who had written a series of widely read “modern spiritual classics,” Seeds of Contemplation (1949), The Ascent to Truth (1951), Bread in the Wilderness (1953), The Living BreadThoughts in Solitude (1958) was suddenly turning out volumes of essays on civil rights, nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, and expressing radical views on social and political issues. No doubt the change in Merton came about due to maturity, the deromantization of monastic life, the recovery of earlier concern about race and peace, but also due to a deepening understanding of the vocation of the monk and the meaning of contemplation. The change was probably gradual, but, Merton interpreted it in his journals as a revelatory experience. ‘One of the most famous passages in Merton’s writing, it is worth quoting extensively: (1956),

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of “separation from the world” that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion …. [W]e are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest …. This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud …. To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking …. I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.(6)

Merton went on to assert that it was precisely the task of the monk to speak out of his silence and solitude with an independent voice in order to clarify for those who were “completely immersed in other cares” the true value of the human person, amidst the illusions with which mass society surrounds modern man at every turn. The contemplative then has a responsibility to dissent lest by his forgetfulness, ignorance, and silence he actually complies with what he thinks he has left behind in the world. And then in a profoundly paradoxical statement Merton claims: “My solitude, however, is not my own, for I see now how much it belongs to them — and that I have a responsibility for it in their regard, not just in my own. It is because I am one with them that I owe it to them to be alone, and when I am alone they are not ‘they’ but my own self. There are no strangers!(7)

King’s life, like Merton’s, was turned from its expected trajectory by an unexpected event. That event was the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott which King had neither started nor suggested, but which irrevocably changed him from the successful pastor of a moderately comfortable church to the leader of a national movement for racial justice. He later recalled, “When I went to Montgomery as a pastor, I had not the slightest idea that I would later become involved in a crisis …. I simply responded to the call of the people for a spokesman.”(8) As spokesman for the boycott, King was overwhelmed with a load of back-breaking responsibilities and frightened by serious threats against his life and his family’s safety. Reaching the end of his endurance, King sat at his kitchen table one night over a cup of coffee, trying to figure out how to get out of the movement without appearing a coward.

And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it …. I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage they will begin to get weak. And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And to I will be with you, even until the end of the world.” …I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared.(9)

King’s kitchen table experience and Merton’s Fourth and Walnut vision were breakthrough events in the lives of each man. King committed himself to the movement completely despite his growing realization more certain as the years went by — that it would cost him his life. Merton grasped with his heart a truth that he had only known with his head, the monk left the world for the sake of the world. These events confirmed each in the path he had already started.

Both paths converged on the issue of civil rights. Merton, as well as King, perceived civil rights as a moral and religious struggle, indeed as the religious cause of the day, a view disputed by many Christians who saw it as basically a political struggle with extremists on both sides. Merton and King had a profound sense that they and the nation were living through a kairos, a “time of urgent and providential election.” …

The conclusion of this essay can be found at SPIRITUALITY TODAY For the Trumpet Shall Sound: Protest, Prayer, and Prophecy — Conference Proceedings Aquinas Center of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, October 26-30, 1988 Winter 1988 Supplement, Vol.40, pp. 80-95.

Dr. Albert J. Raboteau is Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., and the author of Slave Religion: “The Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South.

“Professor Raboteau is a source of inspiration for all who wish to build the kind of society that Dr. King envisioned, a society in which the life of the mind and spirit propel us toward each other rather than apart, where suffering, if it must occur, is redemptive rather than destructive,” Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman, MLK Day Journey Award for Lifetime Service, January 16, 2006.

King Mob

Posted on April 13, 2010 by asitoughttobemagazine

“For me Malc was always entertaining, and I hope you remember that. Above all else he was an entertainer and I will miss him, and so should you.”

Johnny Rotten, April 2010

I was sad to hear that Malcolm Maclaren had died last week but I wasn’t surprised that some people weren’t. Villified for his mis-management and perceived exploitation of the Sex Pistols, McLaren was one of those tolerated eccentric celebs that the media keeps giving us hoping we’ll scorn them. McLaren had, in recent years, been reduced to good incidental copy, scams like standing for Mayor of London because “Ken wouldn’t stand” (Ken Livingstone, former Miners’ Union leader & Mayor of London) had McLaren back on the front pages.

His mayoral campaign was funded by Alan McGee of Creation Records –McGee got twenty thousand pounds from Sony Music by telling them the campaign was an ‘art statement’. Maclaren appeared on British TV and had 6% of the vote with a manifesto proposing legalizing brothels and allowing alcohol in libraries. This is classic McLaren, a self-confessed Situationist, he lived well beyond the despised ‘artistic specialization’ noted at the Situationist International inaugural conference in 1957 and succeeded in creating art out of ‘instances of a transformed everyday life’, which, in a nutshell, was the movement’s intention. McLaren also adhered to the First Pop Law of Andrew Loog Oldham,

“I believe that if you lie enough it becomes a reality.”

He also changed the nature of the English music industry as Jon Savage tells so well in his excellent book about the Sex Pistols and punk rock, “England’s Dreaming”.

Clearly McLaren is one of those celebs that I profess to “like” by virtue of his singular achievements, though all accounts of his personality leads me to believe he would have been a problematic friend. Nevertheless, it was the idea of McLaren as a living breathing creature, not a huge cultural icon or pariah that started me on this piece.

After all celebrities are real life people too, sometimes people will tell you stuff; in West Marin there are waitresses that gossip that George Lucas is a bad tipper, if you read the pulp mags they’ll tell you umpteen starlets are bitches to their staff and aloof with their kids. Somewhere in the desire to create entertainment, celebrities themselves and their real lives have become the preferred main course. Many many people are concerned about Lindsey Lohan’s drug taking and many others would like to see Brad back with Jen.

I care less about the Desperate Housewives actors but I will read People, InStyle! or any other dross that’s on the stand when I’m in line at Safers and form my opinions: Britney needs medical marijuana, Oprah is a man. The dis/information is designed to color your perceptions. I had a patch when I really hated McLaren: it was after I first saw The Filth and the Fury, where John Lydon compellingly blames Malc for abandoning Sid in the States, which, as we know, didn’t end well. Interesting that a decade after the Filth, Lydon is eulogizing his old manager, even re-assuming his Johnny Rotten identity for his press release. I liked that, because it was a major nod, and I do agree, McLaren was a huge entertainer, he changed things in the way that only true daredevils and artists can. The idea that actually meeting somebody of this stature can intelligently inform an opinion is moot. Take for example the night I met Iggy Pop: backstage at a gig in New York that my husband was playing, I’d just read Please Kill Me and recognized the icon hovering by the complimentary buffet, I introduced myself and gushed about how I enjoyed the book ( hes in it & given lots of love) Igs didn’t even acknowledge me, his fish eyes never made contact, it was brutal celeb behavior. Consequently this is the arsehole story I tell about him, though sometimes I mention how I met Blake Baxter moments after & told him the whole embarrassing story: he responded like a dude and a gentleman by doing one of those hissing and head-shaking protracted laughs while pouring me a v & t for my pains.

In 1990 McLaren came to the opening of Gambler, an art show that I co-curated at Building One, a warehouse gallery we’d opened in South London. Gambler, was a group show of those as-yet-unidentified-as-YBAs and a couple of Americans imported extravagantly from New York. Malcolm turned up wearing a flamboyant pink argyle golfing sweater which clashed with his overwhelmingly big and red hair. Somewhere there are black and white photos of me with ten thousand pounds worth of borrowed diamond earrings and the most incredible British impresario of our times. He was a charmer, he said that he’d just arrived in London from New York and he’d been sitting in a pub in Soho and everybody had been talking about Gambler, so naturally he’d come down to see what was going on. He was a chancer, he’d just met Dom Denis, one of the artists in the show and now he was very excited to meet me.

Of course he was, I was one of the upstarts who had finageled this gallery space into existence, it had more square footage than the Royal Academy and was hosting huge sculptures featuring charred cow skulls and maggot farms. McLaren was clearly titillated by our initiative, he knew that Damien’s drugs cabinets were named after tracks on ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ and his approval was intoxicating. We’ve got to talk he said, clocking those borrowed diamonds.

My partners were less than enthusiastic, McLaren was voracious by reputation and despite the punk stance we were offering up to the art world it wasn’t part of our plan to be discovered by the dastardly likes of the great rock n’ roll swindler. I didn’t demur, he was as overwhelming as his hair and we were all about our own thing, which presented pretty situationist but wasn’t really. Still, I was massively encouraged and felt his attention was a sign that in some cool way we’d arrived. Funnily enough, those twenty minutes, twenty years ago, live on in my clutch of treasured memories.

Later, one of the boys from Leeds drunkenly hurled a wine glass at one of the walls. The wall was free-standing – basically a timber frame clad with plasterboard, the wine glass sliced through the white-painted surface and lodged, it looked surreal, wine dripped down and the glass stem stuck out awkwardly intact. Purple red splatters from the impact had landed dangerously close to a pair of Dom’s diptych series ( all of which I’d sold that night.)

I was furious and followed the culprit to the pub over the road where the uptown art crowd and the whole uproar had migrated. The landlord, thrilled to have a full house of thirsty nobs, got wind of my upset, and offered to have the offending lad taken outside for a good beating. This I declined and found rather sobering, I certainly didn’t want anybody’s head kicked in for a perceived slight to art. And that wasn’t the real deal either, the insult was directly to us; Carl, Damien & I and what we were doing, the glass-thrower knew us and he was a hater.

I remember going back to the gallery later, unlocking the yard gate, unlocking the double doors, switching the industrial fluorescent lights on and standing, swaying, smoking in the space. It was an old biscuit factory with an ornate iron-framed glass roof, the show looked amazing, the faint smell of rotting cow flesh and sour wine was not upsetting. I remember feeling this weird restlessness, I was thinking; I know this is good but I know there is something more. I didn’t know what — more art or more satisfaction?

‘Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing.’

College Notes, Winter 1967/68 Malcolm McLaren

ANDREAS ECONOMAKIS

Posted on April 12, 2010 by asitoughttobemagazine

INTERNATIONAL PARTY TURTLES

by Andreas Economakis

September 3^rd, 2005. A small mosquito bite hotel near Kalamaki Beach, Zakynthos.

I am awakened by beer-soaked karaoke screams and the sound of flip-flops flip-flopping somewhere outside my room. The lyrics “I want to know, houh-hah, won’t you be my girl?” bounce off-key around my Navajo-white walls and explode in my tired brain. One of the singing Brits burps loudly and then crash-slams into my door with a hysterical laugh. I sit bolt upright in my bed, disoriented. Where am I? I turn on the light. Oh yeah. I look at my cell phone clock. 5:15 AM. The mini van will be here in 45 minutes to pick me up. I wonder if I should try to sleep for another 10 minutes. Nah. What’s another few minutes of restless mock-sleep anyway?

I slide across the beady polyester sheets and fish the toilet paper ear plugs out of my ears. Not that they worked any. Groggy-eyed, I crack open the brown aluminum and plastic shutters to the balcony and peak outside. The repetitive subwoofer beat of house music that drove me nuts all night becomes even louder. Over and across the dark green cow pasture that fronts my small cement hotel, a noisy electric orgy of laser and neon and Tungsten light dominates the skyline. It’s coming from the throbbing strip mall road that is the village of Kalamaki. Well, I guess you can call it a village. One must certainly not confuse this place with any kind of typical, dozy-cat white Greek village. In fact, there’s nothing Greek about Kalamaki at all, except maybe the name, which means “little straw.” And that’s not the hay straw, but the kind you put in a cocktail drink. It’s a weirdly appropriate name, considering how booze is what Kalamaki is all about.

Though the first mango-orange signs of sunrise can be seen on the deep blue horizon, the party in Kalamaki is still in full swing. I guess the nightly festivities only end when the sun screams “it’s high noon people, go to bed now so the delivery people can get through.” I recall how the night before, as I walked down the strip mall road in search of a simple gyro, I had a psychedelic flash that I was in Las Vegas. I had to fight for elbow space on sidewalks teaming with red-faced teenagers prowling the three-block village for the next bar to hop. Many of these kids seemed to have their heads cocked upwards, almost as if an enormous Absolut Vodka bottle had suddenly arisen in front of their dialated eyes like a neon-lit Tower of Babel. Were the teenagers taking in the Babylonian explosion of flashing light or were they simply too drunk to balance their heads while walking? I wonder. I never ended up finding a gyro or even a simple Greek taverna. However, I did find plenty of Tequila Slammer bars, 10-euro booze-bonanza discos, Red Bull liquor stores, English fish and pubs, Singh Beer Indian restaurants and drink-until-you-scream karaoke joints. I ended up buying a pre-made ham and cheese sandwich and an Amstel beer (well, if you can’t fight them…) from a liquor store run by a young Polish couple who don’t speak a word of Greek. They don’t need to. I was probably the first Greek they’d seen all week. Was I in Greece or Vegas’ new International Liquorland Junkfood Amusement Park?

As I shiver in the ice-cold shower (it’s solar heated and so brutally cold at night) I have a revelation. How different the world would be if there were nice beaches and sun in Birmingham or Tokyo or Duluth. Perhaps only then would pristine areas like Zakynthos be spared from the homogenized amusement park sprawl that seems to have taken over most of the beautiful, sunny areas in the world. I don’t know if it’s funny or sad that it’s easier to find a gin-fizz in Kalamaki than an ouzo. I wonder why tourists even come to Greece? To eat the same food and swill the same booze as back home? I guess so. In the end, if you cut through all the neon and noise and booze and fast food grease in Kalamaki you will soon realize what this place really is: an international mass tourist destination that could be anywhere on planet earth but just happens to be in one of Greece’s most beautiful and verdant islands.

Zakynthos. The birthplace of Dionysios Solomos. He’s Greece’s poet-laureate and the writer of our national anthem, a true fighting ode to freedom. Zakynthos. The home of the Caretta caretta sea turtle. These last few years these tranquil Loggerhead turtles have been fighting an uneven battle of their own. Unlike Dionysios Solomos, the turtles aren’t battling Attila but rather a far more versatile enemy that has many faces and is custom designed to devour first and explain later. This enemy loves the coastline and quickly blankets everything in cement and noise and lights and garbage and smoke and plastic. A true propaganda beast of the modern age, this enemy calls itself “development” in order to stave off its critics. The engine that drives this beast, at least in most of Greece, is consumerism through mass tourism. It fights tooth and nail to import the mass tourism economic model by first attacking the local population, decimating it’s traditional economy and culture and replacing it with what it has to offer, which is basically multinational corporation junk food in a shinny wrapper. When it has done its almost irreparable damage to the local environment, culture and economy, its cement and booze and fast-food trucks move on to the next tranquil spot to carry on the sprawl, quickly creating the infrastructure needed to meet the insatiable demand of the invading mass tourists for cheap lodging, ample booze, loud music, easy beach entertainment and fast food. It’s a wonder a single sea turtle has managed to survive this new, take-no-prisoners-styled invasion of their ancient nesting grounds. That’s why I’m in Zakynthos. To help the sea turtles in this highly uneven, one-sided battle.

I was recently commissioned by ARCHELON, the Sea Turtle Protection Society of Greece to make a promotional film about the volunteers who come to the Society’s program from all over the world to help conserve the beleaguered Loggerheads and their dwindling environment. My first destination is Zakynthos, where the Society’s volunteer program is particularly important and big, thus so in order to handle the large Caretta caretta population that returns each year to nest on this lush, emerald-green Ionian island.

A car honks in the hotel driveway and I gather my video equipment. As I exit my sparsely decorated hotel room, I notice that the room next door is wide open and the lights are on. Inside the room an extremely fat fellow with a beet-red face snores up a storm in his baggy cartoon orange boxers. Wrinkled yet enormous white ants march about on his boxers ominously but fat fellow is too busy sawing wood to care. Next to him, an incredibly thin chap in loose Calvin Klein briefs is splayed across the bed the wrong way, wheezing and gurgling as if in a belly-dance dream. A lone flip-flop dangles from one of his big toes. A dozen or so radiant green Heineken tall-boy cans are strewn about their hotel room floor, fighting for space on the faux Italian tile floor next to greasy McDonald’s wrappers, salt crusted Billabong surfer-dude trunks and damp Summer in Hawaii beach towels. I wonder if this oddly contemporary Laurel and Hardy duo are the burp and sing karaoke twins I heard earlier.

The van doors slide open. Right away, long-haired Yonni, ARCHELON’s designated volunteer driver for the day, calls out “Shalom! Kalimera!” with a heavy Israeli accent and a sunny smile. I squeeze myself into the van next to Angela, who is an ARCHELON supervisor and the only other Greek in the van (well, she’s half Rumanian too), Aude, a long-haired French woman with a nice smile, another Yonni from Israel (luckily this one has a shaved head) and finally tiny Joe, whose real name is John. John opted for Joe when he heard that there were 2 other volunteers named John at the Zakynthos program. In fact there are three Yonni’s at the program too, but none of them opted for another name. “Was’up, mate” Joe-John says to me in a sing-song New Zealand accent once I’ve settled in. “Hi everyone,” I say, a bit overwhelmed by all this early morning talk before I’ve even had a single sip of java. “Did you sleep well?” Angela asks me in Greek. “I didn’t sleep at all,” I reply in English. “Way too much party noise all night,” I add. “English,” skinhead-Yonni says, smiling. “Karaoke and beer!” Joe-John yells out with a smile. “Welcome to Kalamaki,” Aude adds with an ironic French accent.

We start speeding to Kalamaki Beach for morning patrol. A warm moist wind gently caresses my red-eyed face, helping me wake up. I stare out the smudged front window at the almost tropical explosion of jungle greens and browns and blues and oranges developing in the road up ahead. We drive by a field overflowing with plum trees, all dripping wet with glistening dark purple fruit. We turn left and head down a wet pot-hole road that leads directly to the beach. The sun is just coming up. A mandarin-colored sky with intense dark gray-white clouds caps a frothy blue and menacing sea, which is particularly agitated today. Curly-haired Yonni pulls up to the beach entrance and everyone piles out. “See ya Scorcese!’ he shouts out with a smile and a wink, flooring the mini-van and disappearing up the pot-hole road. When I turn around, Angela, Joe-John, skinhead-Yonni and Aude are already on the beach, looking at their clip-boards. I pull out my camera, slide on my headphones and hustle down to film them.

Every summer hundreds of Loggerhead sea turtles return to Zakynthos from all over the Mediterranean to lay their eggs on the exact same beach where they were born. Other Caretta caretta do this at a handful of other beaches in Greece as well: in Kyparissia, Koroni, a few beaches in the Lakonikos Bay in the Peloponesse and finally on Crete. No knows why this is, why the turtles are hard-wired to return year after year to the land of their birth in order to lay their eggs. Perhaps this system worked well for them over the millennia. Unfortunately, this internal compass system is now proving to be the very Achilles Heel that is decimating their numbers. Returning to the beaches where they were born, most of the Caretta caretta are finding them overrun by humans and all their egg-destroying detritus: beach chairs, umbrellas, bright lights, cement, pollution, garbage, noise and sometimes, outright human destruction and predation. The number of sea turtles that actually manage to lay their eggs on these hard-hit beaches has been in a steady freefall for years. This of course is in direct contrast to the steady increase of regulated and unregulated “development” in these areas. Were it not for the efforts of ARCHELON, the WWF and a small handful of other conservation groups, the Caretta caretta wouldn’t have a fighting chance against the all-consuming human invasion of these ancient turtle nesting grounds.

Photograph courtesy of ARCHELON, the Sea Turtle Protection Society of Greece.

As soon as I step on Kalamaki Beach I realize that the wind and surf are so loud that I can barely hear Angela scream-explain to Joe-John, Yonni and Aude what the tasks of the morning are. Through the whistling wind and crashing waves I am however able make out some of her instructions in English, the default language of ARCHELON’s volunteers. Angela explains that because of the previous night’s rainfall, the hatchlings’ traces to the sea are probably not going to be visible and thus cannot be counted. Instead, Joe-John, Yonni and Aude are to look for signs that the baby turtles have hatched in the marked (and sometimes unmarked) nests by the indentations and bulging in the sand. They are also to count the number of tourists on the beach and inform them to move closer to the waterfront if they’ve laid their towels or beach chairs too close to the hatching nests. These tasks, in a nutshell, comprise what is known as “Morning Patrol,” one of ARCHELON’s most effective tools in its coterie of efforts to help conserve the sea turtles and their environment.

Aside from the all-important public awareness aspect of the Society’s efforts in Zakynthos (and elsewhere in Greece), a large percentage of the volunteers’ time goes into cataloguing and classifying the numbers of returning Loggerheads, the nests they create, the number of eggs they lay and finally the actual hatchlings born on the known nesting beaches. By doing this over the last few years, ARCHELON has been able to provide statistical evidence of the effects of human encroachment on the Loggerheads in Greece and thus help change both the government’s and general public’s attitudes regarding the conservation of their environment. But it is ARCHELON’s consistent mano-a-mano effort to increase public awareness on the actual beaches that has provided the most tangible results with regards to Loggerhead conservation. Because of the work of the volunteers and ARCHELON’s consistent approach, the steady decline in Loggerhead numbers has been somewhat reduced recently, at least compared to a few years back, when ignorance of the problem reigned supreme and nest encroachment and destruction was rampant.

Armed with their clip-boards, National Marine Water Park tags and ARCHELON volunteer t-shirts, Angela, Joe-John, Yonni and Aude start walking down the beach, their eyes scanning the light brown sand. Not yet desensitized to the immense amount of garbage on most Greek beaches, Joe-John starts picking up countless beer-cans, plastic bottles and assorted garbage that has washed up on the beach, stuffing it all in his backpack as there are no waste bins anywhere to be seen. He seems shocked at the amount of waste laying about. Aude tells him that she too collected the garbage at first but soon gave up as it got too heavy to carry around every day. The group’s first stop is a nest that started hatching a few days back and whose protective bamboo cage has been knocked askew by the wind. After Angela shows the group how to restore the cage to it’s original position, I ask Joe-John how he learned of the program and ended up here. He tells me that he heard about ARCHELON from a previous volunteer while he was traveling in Borneo. Before I can ask another question, Joe-John strokes his thin goatee and adds “Yeah, turtles fascinate me too. I had this favorite turtle pet when I was young, but it ran away, thank god! So yeah, turtles interest me and the whole helping out, conserving their habitat and letting them live, I guess.”

Further down the beach, Yonni and Aude spot a ghostly-white couple who are sitting too far up on the beach, near a couple of nests. Yonni gently pushes Aude forward and she hurries over to inform them that they need to move closer to the waterfront and away from the nests. “Eastern Europeans for sure, or Russian” Yonni tells me as Aude approaches the couple. “You can tell by their flip-flops,” he adds, smiling. At first the ghost-white couple seem annoyed by the early-morning French invasion. They appear to not speak a word of English or French and Aude resorts to asking the couple to read a paragraph on her clipboard that explains what she needs them to do in a variety of languages. After some hesitation, the couple get the message and they start to move closer to the water.

“Sometimes they don’t speak English, and they don’t speak French and they only speak very little German and even when they read the thing they don’t understand and so I have to find a way to explain that they need to move. Some times it’s very hard because of the tongues,” Aude tells me with her heavy French accent when she returns. “Where were they from?” Yonni asks. “The Czech Republic,” Aude says, rolling her R’s. Yonni smiles at me. We continue down the beach and round some rocks. An immense beach appears before us, with big hotels and lots of commercial action all along it. “This is Laganas Beach, the main nesting beach on Zakynthos,” Angela tells me. “And also the most abused,” Yonni says. We continue walking and soon link up with Irini, the only other Greek ARCHELON volunteer in Zakynthos. A happy-go-lucky college student from Athens. Irini started her morning patrol on the other side of Laganas. She is wearing a bright pink ARCHELON volunteer shirt with baby turtles crawling on it. As we all walk on together, Yonni spots a pretty blonde sunbather lying near a nest. He quickly hustles off to give her the drill. Aude looks at me with a frowning smile. “You’ll soon learn that he only talks to pretty young ladies,” she tells me. “He’ll be a while,” she adds and we continue on.

Further up the beach, the group spots a good-looking young couple skewering a large umbrella into the sand right next to a nest. They seem to have brought an intense amount of beach junk with them and have spread it over a sizeable radius, partially covering another hatching nest. The coup de grace is when the guy stamps his cigarette out on the sand next to the nest and covers it up with sand. “Jeez!” Joe-John says. “Should I go tell them?” he asks Angela. “They look Greek, better let Irini talk to them,” Angela replies. Irini lights up. “I’ll set them straight, the thoughtless cretins,” Irini calls out in Greek and heads over to the beach-junk couple.

Just as Irini enters a long conversation with the couple, Yonni walks up with a smile and phone number. Aude rolls her eyes. Looking towards Irini, Angela tells me that there is a shortage of Greek volunteers at ARCHELON, something which is felt on morning patrols, particularly when the volunteers have to approach Greek sunbathers. “Sometimes the Greeks don’t want to listen to foreigners because they feel like they’re local and who is this foreigner who is coming to tell them what to do in their land. But generally, they are compliant,” she says. A nodding Yonni adds that he doesn’t seem to have too many problems, even though he doesn’t speak Greek. He attributes his luck with Greeks to the fact that he’s Israeli and thus more in tune with the Mediterranean mentality. For Yonni it isn’t so much the language barrier that he sees as the main problem with the locals, but rather the economic issues. “Most Greeks speak English anyway. The tourists are usually very concerned and very cooperative. Yeah, and they really like the efforts that we’re doing. But with the locals it’s a different story, because they feel like we’re taking their income away and it makes them pretty upset. What they don’t know is that in the long run it might increase their income.” I lower my camera for a second. “It’s the age old battle between mass tourism and ecological tourism,” I say.

The sky starts thundering ominously and we all look up at the suddenly dark, steel-grey sky. Irini, who appears to be having problems with the argumentative beach-junk couple, seems relieved that at least the weather will clear the beach of all ill-behaving people. The first fat drops of rain start to fall and the couple hastily starts to collect their gear to leave. Irini rushes over to join us. “Well?” Angela asks her. “Italians,” Irini says and rolls her eyes. “They barely speak any English and could not understand me.” The sky thunders again and a Biblical deluge begins. Everyone on the beach, volunteers included, starts running for cover. I quickly shield my camera and follow suit. I catch up with the volunteers and we all take cover under the roof of a small open-air tourist kiosk by the beach, near a road with lots of bars on it. “That’s it for morning patrol,” Angela says. “What now?” I ask. “Well, it’s kind of a standby situation now until the afternoon. If the sun comes back out, we’ll continue with the beach patrol, and in the afternoon we’ll do some nest excavations to count eggs.” The sky thunders again. “I know a bar up the street,” Yonni says. Before anyone can answer, he slides the hood of his poncho over his shaved head and bolts up the road. Before I can say a thing, the rest of the volunteers take off after Yonni. “Why not go to this bar?” I ask Angela and Irini, pointing to a bar that’s right next to the beach. “We would never go there. See that laser light? They represent everything we’re against,” Irini answers through the rain.

A few hundred meters up the road, Yonni cuts into a shanty-styled bar called The Captain’s Hook. Fishnets and swords and black pirate hats and empty rum bottles decorate the wood-paneled walls. I’m not sure if the sawdust on the floor is damp with rain water or beer. I catch a whiff. Definitely beer. A bored looking English bartender perks up when she see us. Dripping wet, we all sit at the bar and before long a variety of beers appear before us. “This is the best part of volunteering,” Yonni says, smiling. We all clink glasses and drink. Aude goes to the jukebox and punches up a few songs. Surprisingly, the “I want to know, oouh-hah, won’t you be my girl?’ song comes on. “Ya mas! Cheers!” Joe-John toasts and we all clink glasses again. A couple of stumbling Brits enter the bar, dripping wet and with wide grins on their faces. On the first refrain, everyone in the bar sings out at top volume, the volunteers included. A cacophonous, multinational karaoke version of the song starts up spontaneously. “I want to know, oouh-hah, won’t you be my girl?!!” Infected with the good energy, I join in.

When the song ends, one of the Brits, who has been hitting on Irini and seems fascinated with her crawling baby turtle t-shirt, yells out “International Party Turtles! Yeah!” We all toast again. Buena Vista Social Club’s ‘La Bayamesa” comes on the jukebox. I imagine a bunch of baby turtles samba-ing their way down to the water. I am awakened from my reverie by the loud karaoke voices of my friends. They bounce around the wood-paneled walls and explode off-key in my brain. “Tristes recuerdos de tradiciones, cuando contempla sus verdes llanos lagrimas vierte spor sur pasiones, ay! Ella es sencilla le brinda qal hombre birtudes todas y el corazon.” “Sad memories of the past, memories of green pastures make her passionate tears overflow. She is so true, she brings only goodness and love to mankind.” As if to highlight the last verse, the sun breaks through the clouds and a beam of bright light enters The Captain’s Hook. “Lets get back to work!” Angela calls out and all the volunteers get up and exit the bar, all dripping wet and with smiles on their faces.

–Andreas Economakis

This piece first appeared in the Spring 2006 issue of Johnny Seagull.

For more stories by Andreas Economakis click on the author’s name below.

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