Basic Human Needs

(Reuters) - Remains of the earliest known feast in a cave in Israel show that humans have been bringing food to funerals for millennia and suggest that burial feasts may have helped shape modern society, researchers said on Monday.

I'm a traditionalist; I love vernacular culture. I'm into reciprocity and community: sharing foodways, music, and stories in a context that seems to be as old as human social relationships. We live in a world where we alienate ourselves further and further choosing "stuff" over people. In Buddhist words, we'd say that we feed our attachments over and over again in an effort to end our suffering.

I'm writing a paper for this conference that discusses the myth of the "Ancient Celtic Past" in Irish traditional music. Basically the paper argues that rooting contemporary Irish traditional music in a nebulous "Ancient Celtic Past" serves two purposes; 1) marketing and 2) a popular reclamation of traditional community values.

I'd argue that many people who buy into the "Ancient Celtic Past," complete with misguided New Age overtones, are identifying the very ancient ways of fulfilling basic human needs that vernacular Irish culture provides. Things like reciprocity, friendship, community beyond familial ties, and the music, dance, storytelling, and foodways that tend to create situations that nurture these expressions of human interconnectedness; these things feel viscerally ancient. And subsequently, people otherwise disconnected with community feel as though this interconnectedness is somehow undermined if it isn't historically linked to a timeless, picturesque past.

It's a bit of an oversimplification of my paper, because ultimately the ACP is also tied into the marketing of music and movies as well as popular misconceptions of history/the historical past.

But suffice it to say, that basic human needs are the same. People still need interconnectedness, and vernacular culture tends to nurture community as a vital expression of cultural unity.

On Counterculture and Politics

I don't generally consider myself part of mainstream popular culture. For the most part, I don't listen to top 40 on the Billboard charts (with Country music being the exception). I don't really watch a lot of TV, and most of the movies I watch are slowly becoming documentaries/indie films/foreign films that you can only rent on Netflix. The books I read are an amalgamation of musicology, history/historiography, philosophy, feminist/queer theory, and popcorn historical mystery/thrillers (or some not-so-popcorn versions like Name of the Rose). I'm trying to learn more "apocalypse skills;" skills like knitting, baking, cooking, woodworking, and gardening (i.e. skills that would be useful in an apocalypse). I bike to school or take the bus. I'm an unapologetic geek about what I do, and I'm openly gay. I am, for the most part, counterculture.

Now about a year ago, I moved to Oregon, to a city that seems to embody counterculture. Meaning that counterculture here IS mainstream pop culture. I am surrounded by people who are far more radical and "out there" politically and socially, and that's fine with me. I can't, however, stand the pot-shots people here take from the "counterculture" sidelines.

Here's the deal: If there's something in the world you believe is wrong, you don't get to complain and take pot-shots at the activists trying to fix it unless you are actively trying to make the change you wish to see. Period.

This means that joining a "cause" on facebook isn't enough. It means that if you're fed up with politics, or social policy, or the lack of care people tend to show towards their fellow human beings then you've got to try and fix it.

I've learned, living way out on the west coast away from most of the communities I've belonged to, that community building and political activism are two human imperatives for which everyone is responsible.

However, as Emma Goldman said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."

Appropriation Fridays: New Orleans Five Years Out

Sunday the 29th will be the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall on the Gulf Coast.

Five years ago, I had just moved from the Gulf Coast, my home for 21 years, to Lubbock, TX. During the first week of classes the hurricane hit. I knew my family was safe, but I had friends who couldn't find family members until days afterward. And they were the lucky ones.

If you've never been through a hurricane (and Katrina made landfall as a Category 3 out of 5), different areas have to worry about different things. My family lives on high ground but amidst lots of trees, so we worry more about wind. New Orleans on the other hand, being below sea level always has to worry about floods. Some places along the Mississippi Gulf Coast had to worry about both. When you worry about wind, it doesn't really matter how long the storm sits in one place, but with flooding you want a storm to pass fast. Katrina sat there.....and sat there.....and sat there. And the levies broke.

1,836 people lost their lives in Katrina along the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf Coast. But the bigger tragedy isn't the devastation that Katrina itself caused; the bigger tragedy is our lack of prolonged attention, our lack of compassion, and our inertia towards protecting, defending, and rebuilding the Gulf Coast. Not just for Katrina, but for the BP oil disaster as well.

Lake Ponchartrain overlooks the City of New Orleans. Appropriated below, the incomparable Paul Brady performing Lakes of the Ponchartrain.

Gay Rights

I am a multifaceted human being and there are a lot of parts of my identity, some of which I'm more comfortable with than others. I consider being gay to be a smaller part of my identity than say, being a musician, or being a scholar, but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a big part of who I am and who I am becoming.

Tonight I canvassed for the first time. It happened to be for a group called Basic Rights Oregon (BRO) which was getting voter opinions on a possible ballot initiative that would propose giving gays and lesbians in Oregon the right to marry. For two hours I talked to mostly supportive people about something that a lot of people in the gay rights movement feel very passionately about. Oddly enough, I'm not one of them.

That's not to say that I feel we shouldn't fight for the right to marry. It's just that when I look at the list of things that make me feel like a second class citizen, the issue of marriage isn't high up there. I'm worried about being employed, because in 29 states I could be fired because I'm gay. Transgender Americans have to worry about possible termination in 38 states for gender expression/identity. I'm worried about adoption rights, and hate crimes, and an entire demographic being told that they're not worth enough to serve their country. And yes, I'm worried about marriage, mostly because if I ever find someone I do want to marry, I want the ability to visit her in the hospital. I'm worried for transgender/genderqueer people and the idea that the LGBT movement seems to leave the "T" behind. I'm worried that in re-framing the movement to exclude the words "gay," "lesbian," and "transgender" from our organizational names, that we're perceived as being ashamed of our identity.

I want to own that rhetoric. I want to own this fight.

But I've always believed, specifically in politics, that it's easy to make potshots from the cheap seats and to second guess the policy directions taken by others. You don't get to complain about the movement unless you're involved in it. So tonight I canvassed for a right I and my other gay friends should have.

But I want the gay rights movement to be about more than just marriage. We just have to figure out a way to make that happen.