Sun King

We spent half of last week on the northern part of Isla del Sol, which sits in the the majestic Lake Titicaca (haha, caca).

There are no cars on the island and only about 800 families live there. To get there, we took a 2-hour ferry from Copacabana. We slept in a cute, little clay cabin, perched on the side of a small mountain, overlooking the lake. We paid 30 bolivianos (about $4.50) per night, and ate fresh caught trucha (trout) for lunch everyday.

At dinner everynight, we wathed sheep, cows, goats and donkeys pass by our restaurants´ window, being escorted home by their sheperds, after a plentiful day of grazing.

After Isla, we headed back to La Paz to board a 17-hour bus to Santa Cruz. Shira packed PB and J sandwiches, clementines, oreos, chips and water. Two ridiculously violent movies were shown overnight (Bloodsport and Desperado), and before we knew it, we pulled into Santa Cruz at around 11 am yesterday. From there, believe it or not, Shira and I stuffed ourselves into the front-seat of a tiny white cab, and rode another 3.5 uncomfortable hours to the small and charming village, Samaipata. All in all, we spent about 24-hours in transit.

El Choro

The night before heading off on the 3-day, El Choro trek, Shira felt kinda funny. And by funny, I mean sick and disoriented. It must´ve been the altitude in La Paz. We had just finished up some saag paneer and chapati (you´re welcome, dad), at an Indian restaurant, when Shira felt like she was gonna throw up. I helped her up from the table and began to lead her to the bathroom. ¨Everything started going in circles,¨ recounts Shira. And then, in the middle of the restaurant, she didn´t throw-up...she fainted. I began yelling her name, lightly slapping her face, while the waiters around us scrambled to help. After 10ish seconds, she woke up and said she was having a dream.

Later that night, on our way back from the ATM, Shira began to feel faint again. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, and proceeded to yack...a lot...on the street, on her crocs and on her pants. Fortunately, she began to feel better after unloading.

The next morning we got up early and Shira said she was up for the trek. We met our guide, Ronaldo, in La Paz, and drove an hour in a van to the beginning of El Choro, at about 4900 meters (16,000 feet). It was cold and windy up there, but we were dressed in layers and felt energized, breathing in the clean, mountain air.

The El Choro trek is unique in that the majority of the trail is a descent. In the first day alone, we moved from 4900 meters to 2800. Walking downhill, hour after hour, having to step on and around jagged stones and rocks, was brutal on our knees. In the higher altitudes, we saw tons of sheep and llamas and stone pueblos and yellow mountains (not our photo). But by the end of the first day, we had decended low enough to find ourselves in warmer weather, in the forest (not our photo), where we remained for the next two days of trekking. We camped in tents each night along the forests' ridge lines at these little rest-stops, ran by locals, who sold water, coke ad beer to the trekkers. Ronaldo prepared our meals each day, mostly consisting of rice, eggs, salty cheese, carrots, green peppers and hearty vegetable soup.

Though we completed a 10-day trek in Nepal, El Choro felt much harder on us. If you saw Shira trying to walk down the flight of stairs at our hostel this morning, you might laugh out loud, but also cry a little too. We are VERY soar, but so proud to be done!

We're now in the small and charming town of Coroico, resting for the next day or so, until we head back to La Paz, and from there, bus to Isla del Sol. We´re never walking again.

Amazon (not the e-commerce website)

Well, the food is definitely better in India, but Bolivia has still got it goin´ on in its own unique, South American way.

Shira and I have just returned from the Amazon Basin region of Bolivia, where we spent a few days with the indigenous-run, Mashaquipe Eco-http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifTourism project, which, according to their website,

¨should help to conserve their culture and environment and give them a earning to improve the situation of their life and enable the education and apprenticeship of their children. They have the only tourism office in Rurrenabaque which is organized by the indígenas themselves and that's profits are exclusively used to improve their situation.¨

To get there, we flew on a tiny 18-seat plane from La Paz to Rurrenbaque. From there, we boarded a wooden motorboat and cruised 3-hours in a river to our camp in the jungle. Our gorgeous little cabin was made entirely from native trees and built entirely and masterfully by the people running the program, all of whom were born and raised nearby.

Our guides taught us how to make rings out of coconut seeds and how to treat both basic and serious ailments with infusions and tonics made from native plants and barks. We were humbled and energized by their ingenuity.

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Now we´re back in La Paz. Tomorrow, we leave for a 3-day trekking adventure.

Boliva Bound

Shira and I have been married for one-full week, and I've got to tell you, it's been pretty pretty good. To celebrate our 7-day anniversary, we're on our way to Bolivia for a month. Bolivia is here.

Over the next 30 days, we'll trek through these mountains, take night hikes with this communutity-based eco-tourism project, swim in this lake, and explore this city, among others.

I'm not sure how frequently I'll be updating the blog, but I'm shooting for one post/week.

Hasta Pronto!

48222

Detroit's Floating Post Office from WBEZ on Vimeo.

Speaking of Finding Resonace!

On Language
‘Resonate’

Hauschka Prepares the Piano

PP

One Hello World

DG just turned me on to One Hello World, wherein you can call (316) 247-0421 and leave a message, and a composer will write music behind your narrative. "Call it a soundtrack to your thoughts."

Strange Fruit

Hava Nagilah, What is it?

'Hava Nagilah, What Is It?' - Fundraising Trailer from Katahdin Productions on Vimeo.

Nowtopia

"We need to stop doing all the stupid work we do, and start doing the work that matters." - Chris Carlsson

This Program is about Music

You're the Winner!

(thanks ea)

Music for 100 Carpenters

On Sunday night, a small warehouse full of people showed up to hear a "theatrical surround-sound music performance, enlisting 100 skilled and unskilled tradespeople." The performance was written by Douglas Henderson, a celebrated sound artist and composer. In his words, here's what he was going for.

Prying at Stockhausen’s convolution of rhythm and timbre, 100 hammers, 100 blocks of wood and some 10,000 nails of varying sizes are brought to bear in a real-time, real-world articulation of complex computer synthesis. Under the guidance of job supervisors, thousands of hammer blows become waves of tonal murmur, threaded with rustlings of nails and occasional snarls of righteous indignation. The performers are organized into work crews with lists of tasks and closely timed schedules, and arranged in a circle around the audience. Toolbelts, sweat and lunchboxes are part of the score.

(photo courtesy of David Scher)

My favorite part of the 30-minute performance came after the first round of synchronized nailing into 2x4s, when all the carpenters took a granny smith apple from their metal lunch boxes, and bit into them.

From Nov. 13 - Dec. 20, a video and 6-channel surround sound audio recording of last night's performance will be projected at the site of the performance, where you can see "debris from the show left in place."

Go Listen. It's worth it.

The Recess Ends

Thanks to my friends at DCOH for bringing this project to my attention.

The Recess Ends: Extended Trailer from B-Rilla on Vimeo.

Close Your Eyes in Your Ears

The Books ~ Group Autogenics from Ciao Music on Vimeo.

Talking Bikes

In his new book Bicycle Diaries, David Byrne shares the thoughts, adventures and observations he's experienced while cycling through some of the world's major cities. Here he is on Weekend Edition Sunday



Read an excerpt from the book here.

Cachoo

I Met The Walrus

In Verse

In Verse is a collaboration between poets, photographers and radio producers to create a new model of storytelling in journalism.

In Verse: Congregation, Witness from InVerse on Vimeo.

This installment of features Pulitzer Prize winning poet Natasha Trethewey, photographer Joshua Cogan and producer Lu Olkowski as they cover the ongoing recovery on the Mississippi Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.

This amazing project was created through Public Radio Makers Quest 2.0, an initiative of AIR, the Association of Independents in Radio, Incorporated. Check out two more pieces here.

What's Happening in the Mind's of Little Babies

Since this has been the year of the baby for my family, I offer up a recent Radiolab podcast about how babies might experience the world.

Creative Coincidences

After Merce Cunningman's recent passing, Fresh Air re-aired an enlightening interview with Cunningham's partner, the experimental composer, John Cage. It's not only really interesting to hear Cage's ideas in 1982, but also so cool to hear a much younger, and more wordy Terry Gross navigate the discussion.

Check it.

While My Guitar Gently Bleeps

Skeptical about the "Beatles: Rock Band" video game? Have a look at this past Sunday's feature about the game, and the making of it, and that skepticism will likely turn into sheer excitement.

McCartney said he believed this larger- and neater-than-life portrayal is the appropriate one. “I think it reflects where the Beatles are at,” he said. “We are halfway between reality and mythology.”

"Lazy Journalists Love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff"

Here's a piece from Vice Magazine about the cavalcade of journalists descending upon Detroit, looking for things falling, or fallen apart.

"If you live on a block near one of the city’s tens of thousands of abandoned buildings, you can’t toss a chunk of Fordite without hitting some schmuck with a camera worth more than your house."

"not a huge, tragic collapse, but a transition"

Detroit Wildlife from florent tillon on Vimeo.

On Georgia St.

Drive down a random street in a Detroit neighborhood, and you might see just as many abandoned houses and vacant lots than lived in homes. With that said though, many Detroiters are finding hope and potential in what others might see as despair. And in a neighborhood on the eastside of Detroit, Mark Covington is trying to figure out a way to bring his neighbors together, despite all the factors working against him.

I produced this story as part of WDET's Facing the Mortgage Crisis series.




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To learn more about Mark Covington and the Georgia Street Community Collective's efforts, check out their website or their blog.

http://www.georgiastreetcc.com/

or

http://georgiastreetgarden.blogspot.com/

Single Barrel Detroit

Single Barrel Detroit is basically a Detroit-version of la blogotheque, in which musicians perform their songs live for a handheld camera, and in-front of something beautiful. For example, you can see the great Rodriguez performing solo in-front of the Diego Rivera mural at the DIA, or Daniel Zott walking around Woodbridge, or Charlene Kaye in the empty Lee Plaza Hotel. Metro Times Arts and Culture editor (and fellow former Groves alum), wrote about the project last month.

"Fame, Death, Fear, and Money"

An insightful and fascinating look at Andy Kaufman's genius and influence airs this week on Studio 360. Erik Molinsky put the piece together. My favorite part unfolds 1-minute and 52-seconds in.

Bike Among the Ruins

Despite the press, survival here isn’t so hard. Businesses like the Wheelhouse and the Hub have already shown how well Detroit can work as a new business hothouse. With the legendarily affordable real estate and without needing to pay for car payments, gas or insurance, bicyclists could rebuild Detroit into a model of a two-wheeled economy. They could pass laws promoting bikes over cars and designate entire avenues motor-free zones, which, given the state of many of them now, wouldn’t be so much of a stretch.

Maybe it sounds far-fetched, but then again maybe it’s just destiny. Look at a map and you’ll see that Detroit is designed in the shape of a wheel, with streets emanating like spokes from the downtown hub. It looks like a premonition, a city uniquely designed to alter transportation forever.

The Entire Op-Ed by Detroit's Toby Barlow

G.M., Detroit and the Fall of the Black Middle Class

"They were among some six and a half million African-Americans who left the South from 1910 to 1970 in what became known as the Great Migration. They were drawn to the North by the promise of equal treatment but also by the hope of finding work: the mechanization of agriculture, in particular the advent of the cotton picker, decimated black employment in the South. As Nicholas Lemann wrote in his 1991 book, “The Promised Land,” what in fact awaited most blacks was a more subtle form of discrimination. But in Detroit at least, there were the auto plants. Ford started hiring African-Americans in 1914, offering them the same $5-a-day wage it paid its white employees, even as it limited them to sweeping the floors and pouring hot steel in sweltering foundries. To discourage African-American employees from improving their lot by unionizing, the company offered free coal to ministers of black churches who preached the Ford gospel."

Read the entire article here.

Don't Stop Till You Get Enough

The first person I thought of after I heard about MJ yesterday was the guy who you'll often find dancing to classic Jackson tunes off Liberty St. in Ann Arbor, in that graffiti filled alley across from Borders. This man, who will always smile or wave when you stop to watch him strut, devotes the majority of daylight hours to dancing to Jackson in public. I wonder what he'll do now. Will he hang up his moonwalking shoes, or continue to Dance The Night (day) Away?



As of yesterday evening, after the news, he wasn't on stage.

Stochasticity

"You have to be careful not to find meaning...when it's just coincidence."

Abandoned Places

Detroit Lives, a new design team/website is up and running. I met the founder, Phil, last month when he was spending his day off digging a trench in an eastside community garden. The site offers some really cool t-shirts, and a heartfelt mission.

In their news section, there's a post about places around the world that are far more "abandoned" than the D. Check out this picture below from Bodie State Park in California. Pretty stunning.

Distillation

Ze Frank on Iran

The North End

Detroit’s North End might be best known as the birthplace of Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, and Diana Ross. The Gold Coast running along Oakland Avenue used to be a bastion of successful black owned businesses. But, as is the case in many places around Detroit, things aren’t like they used to be. The area has been blighted, disinvested from, and in many ways, ignored for decades. And now, the foreclosure crisis has compounded a lot of these issues. But maybe because of the hard times we’ve fallen upon, Detroiters are now be banding together more than ever. Really.

North End Vacant Lot Program by WDET

Full Power

I'll be concentrating my blogging for the next two months here, at WDET's Facing The Mortgage Crisis series page. My first of what will eventually be eightish stories aired this afternoon on DT.

Mitch and Gina For Web by WDET

More context here.

A Primer

A Primer, by Bob Hicok

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

SBTB!

Video Recaps | Full Episodes | Webisodes

Whatever Works

You know how all of Woody Allen's movies start with the credits, always in the same font? Well that font is actually called "Windsor Light Condensed." That trivia was revealed in a great feature from New York Magazine that unravels the evolution of jewish humor, then asks whether or not it still really exists. It's also about Woody Allen's new film, Whatever Works, in which Larry David stars.



(go here to see some vintage Woody photos from Life Magazine.)

"Pioneers"

I realize that I'm two years late in acknowleding a really wonderful and cool project, brought to us by Jon Brumit. You might recognize Jon from ABC news. He's the guy, who, with his wife, recently bought the 100 dollar house in Hamtramck. Now he and the Mrs. are getting ready to move here permantly, from Chicago. He's also one of the people directing NPR, Neighborhood Public Radio!

So, about the project. For the Shrinking Cities exhbit in Detroit in 2007, he made a "radio-based driving tour of Detroit featuring 12 mini-programs continually broadcast at 107.9 FM from short-range transmitters in 12 different locations." Learn more here.

La Petit Zinc

I ate lunch yesterday, and the day before, at Le Petit Zinc in Corktown. If you haven't yet been (I hadn't), you've gotta go. Amazing coffee. For my first lunch I had ratatouille served on a fresh baguette, and yesterday I tried their house special, the crepe, mine with chocolate and banana. Here's the menu, and you can read the owner's interesting story here.

The place seems to be a really refreshing symbol for what Detroit is right now. It was teeming with hipsters, elders, professionals on their lunch break, and a Eastern European guy looking for the police department. There's a really charming outdoor eating area, and behind that are two raised soil beds, which I'm assuming (hoping?) will be used to grow fresh herbs for their menu.

More pictures and context here.

I find it really encouraging that in the last year or so, two CREPE restaurants have opened in the city!

There is No Alternative to Building Alternatives