My Baby Sister

My mother has a story she likes to relate about a peculiar interaction I had as a young boy. Another kid approached me (at church of all places) and informed me that his big brother could beat me up. I am told that I responded unfazed, I responded: "well, I can take care of my little sister all by myself". How do you respond to that?

 
 

It was not at all obvious to my young Catholic friend that caring for family was an impressive feat, and that's telling. Although it's a silly story it reflects pretty well our modern model for masculinity, which seems to vacillate somewhere between caricature and near non-existence. The standard is either an exaggerated gun-toting action hero or else the bar is set so low that its definition is someone who can appropriately appreciate football and beer. In other words, our model for masculinity is that of an adolescent. And yet at some point we expect men to grow up and become "domesticated" and are somehow surprised when they fail to meet our expectations.

 
 

For someone stepping into the workplace and economic independence without my dad as a model, this void is particularly disappointing. There has been an attempt on the part of some to create a kind of alternative model. The Art of Manliness a blog I follow is an attempt to get back to a different conception of masculinity, relating more to personal strength and responsibility than swagger and bravado. The internet can be helpful in helping me find out what I have to learn on my own, from teaching myself to cook, jump a car and invest my money, to the bigger question of how to negotiate my own way towards manhood.

 
 

I differ from the standard American 22 year old pretty substantially to begin with. I live in my widowed mother's house with my two siblings, one in college and the other in high school. I have a job and pay my mom a little bit of money to help pay for utilities and I cook dinner most days. We have a "family meeting" every week to discuss who is responsible for various tasks that need doing, like putting out clothes for Easter Seals or removing that fallen tree from our backyard.

 
 

In the United States it isn't a widely accepted practice for an adult to live with his family during the period after graduating high school and before getting married. But in the developing world, like my father's side of the family in Guatemala, expectations are very different. Children very rarely move out of their parents' house before they are married and since universities tend to be clustered in the same urban centers as the demographics lucky enough to attend them, college kids tend to commute from home; my dad and I commuting to Case together was an oddity in the US, but is identical to how my cousins got to college in Guatemala City.

 
 

So while my family doesn't quite fit with the norm, we try to carve out some kind of system that functions and I try my best to be useful. With my dad gone, I have tried to take on some of the responsibilities associated with being, as the cliché goes, the "man of the house"…with mixed results. It can be difficult at times to straddle the lines between being a mature older brother and a support to my mother. There are challenges and I don't always know whether I am doing the right thing. But I try. Maybe I can't quite take care of my baby sister (who can almost drink legally) "all by myself" but I feel proud of pitching in how I can to support the people I love. Taking care of your own family is way manlier than beating up someone else's.

    

A Daily Spoonful of Strong Kicking Medicine

Sitting around in the studios WRUW, I stumbled across this message from jazz drummer Peeter Uuskyla. It comes from the liner notes of the album medicina by the swedish trio of Peter Brotzmann, Friis Nielsen and Uuskyla. Even if you don't like free jazz (and not many people do) I think a lot of people can relate to what he says about music, the act of creation and life. I've produced it here in its entirety:

At work, the everyday job to make the living, ones daily bread. Thinking of breaking the chain of doing this samething. How bored do you have to be? How much money will you get for all these hours, days and years you are selling off from your lifetime? Will be there enough for your kids and the ones you love? Will there ever be enough and who will not get enough? Why must it be boring to earn ones bread? Must it always be boring? So if it's not going to be boring all the time, you have to shorten the boring time and use it as a reference point when defining the good time. To make the good times happen at least once a day, you have to get in touch daily with your dreams and visions. [bold mine]


Music comes first. The sound, the noise, shaped into form while letting it pass your body. It's difficult to keep and own the music, it's not like a piece of art. Maybe you can borrow it for a short while. You can anyway never just buy it and keep it for yourself. It's abstract and untouchable and therefore difficult to dissect. This music is never perfect or complete. It is always in progress. You can change it's direction, like your path in life. It's give and take. You must put in some of whatever you have, leave your fingerprints ringing, loud and clear. You are able to change the over-all sound by the way you are adding your own sound. Like painting and writing, but on the run, you never go backwards for correction. A living music is more ritualistic than a package of rehearsals and concerts. It continues day after day, changing slowly or fast, like life. It sounds now, in this moment, every day, living only once you have to act in every now situation. There is not too much time to talk about it while you better play it, guts out, music as life security, as a daily spoonful of strong kicking medicine.

And you may maybe be able to handle reality.

I'm Gonna be Rich

Well, not for a while...

While I'm spending the year as an AmeriCorps volunteer, I'm being paid just enough to cover, bare expenses.The Corporation for National Community Service, which pays my salary, bases our pay on the federal poverty level for the state in which we serve...which is not much.

Clearly I'm not in this for the money.

A friend and I were once having a discussion about our careers and I mentioned that I'd be interested in doing something different and interesting, even if I didn't make a lot of money doing it, arguing that being young is the best time in my life to not be making very much money. In econ-speak (because I'm a big dork) the "opportunity cost" of doing something like joining the peace corps is much lower when the amount of money you'd be making in anything else is less.

My friend replied by saying that "this is the main difference between you and me. I don't think about things in those terms". Asking what she meant, she explained that she didn't equate things in life in terms of money. Other things are more important.

Now I feel that the distinction is really a suckers choice: at its core money is just one abstract measure of the choices you have available, both how many and what kind. Trying to make the most of your resources does not need to be about some heartless pursuit of wealth for its own sake, but can rather be about getting what you want out of life. It's not money I care about. I care about my family, food, music, a good education. All of these require resources to sustain them somewhere along the line

That's also the philosophy of blogger Ramit Sethi, whose book I will Teach you to be Rich I discovered through a friend and who maintains a blog of the same name. He writes about personal finance and one of his core philosophies is one that makes a lot of intuitive sense to me; that money isn't an end in and of itself. Personal finance should not be about bragging about the hot stocks in your portfolio, but about helping you get the things you want out of life, whether it's saving up for an education or being able to retire someday and travel the world. For most people, money isn't really something that they want to spend energy caring about--as Sethi puts it, getting your personal finances under control allows you to worry about more important things in your life.

I bought Ramit's book and started on the six-week plan for managing my finances (such as they are), which isn't nearly as corny as it sounds like it is. As I figure out what I'm doing I'm learning some stuff and some of it I'm finding kind of interesting.

Ok. So maybe I am treating financial knowledge as an end unto itself. Maybe though, if I share useful things I find and my own experiences my friends and neighbors can benefit in some way. That would be rich (now that is corny).

No garlic, no regrets

Thursday is John Coltrane’s birthday, so this week’s show featured some of his music; both some mainstream appearances as well as some of his more experimental stuff, including a tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King. In addition there was some South African jazz and Nigerian Afro-beat coming from the station’s new shelf, and music from Latin America, from Colombia to Argentina. As always you can listen to this week’s show streaming online here until the next show goes up, or you can download it here by right clicking the 56k link.

Last week in addition to Electronica and Jewish Jazz, the show featured local musicians Carlos Jones and Blue Lunch, off of a set of recordings from the Crooked River Groove record label, a label run out of Cleveland’s own Tri-C. The two I played on the show are longtime favorites of mine, groups I’ve gone out to see more than once.

Carlos Jones along with a number of other area musicians played the garlic festival at Shaker Square a couple weeks ago. Although the event sounded great, and was really close to where I live I hadn’t intended to go to the show, because I was busy that day. Along with my siblings I’d planned to help my mom clean out the basement with the ultimate goal of making the house marketable in case she ever wants to sell it. I was taking a break to make dinner and had to stop at Dave’s Market to pick up some ground beef and I heard the festival music on the way there. I’m not sure which of the groups it was, but I really liked it. I called back home, while I was shopping to see if anyone wanted to go see the show, but there wasn’t any great interest, so I just went home and made dinner.

I should say, by way of explanation that it’s a rather unique living arrangement I currently find myself in. I live with my siblings and my mother in the same house I grew up in. I’m doing a service year through AmeriCorps and I use part of my salary to defray some household expenses. I also cook most of the meals and organize weekly meetings so that our little clan can get together to discuss ways we can contribute to the success of the household.

So basically, the reason I couldn’t go to the concert at the square was my own doing. I couldn’t very well be resentful about it because it was my own idea. It’s a very different position than I was able to have during the summer when I was filling my days looking for work, and trying to be productive. At that time I felt lousy about not going out and being social the way I had in college. Not being able to go to the concert at the square though was entirely the result of deliberate choices I had made to try to help my family and my widowed mother get through a hard time.

It’s incredible what a difference it can make in your outlook if you view the things you do as the result of your choices and the things you don’t do as sacrifices that you choose to make for a worthy cause. For me, it’s the difference between feeling resentful at being “stuck” with my family and appreciating them while being grateful that I can make a difference.

world electronic and jewish jazz

(This is my first attempt to blog about music as a companion to the show. Bear with me and let me know what you think)

This week's show (audio available here with the complete playlist here) featured a lot of new music. We have a shelf in the on-air studio with all of the music the station has acquired in the past month or so--it's fun to check out new music and it's great to have stuff to play within arm's reach. On the online playlist you can tell which songs came from that shelf because they have a little asterisk next to the artist's name. The entire first half hour I played from a single CD, an album put out periodically by Fabric, a london nightclub that also has their own record label where they release live mixes by the guest DJs. The rest of the hour was taken up by other electronica ranging from Thievery Corporation to a compilation of South African house music. Some interesting stuff.

This week I also played a number of artists from the Tzadik record label, in particular the "Radical Jewish Culture" recordings. The label, started by experimental musician and jazz saxophonist John Zorn, seeks to advance experimental and avant garde music, and with "Radical Jewish Culture" to advance a kind of new Jewish music. You can read more about what he means by that on his website, but the results are definitely some interesting stuff.

Last week I played music by Balkan Beat Box, a group recommended to me by my brother's girlfriend during a long drive home from a renaissance festival (other, long story). I checked them out and found out that the group, formed by New Yorkers with pretty extensive ties to Israel, now has their own record label: JDub, where they put out records by Jewish artists spanning a whole range of genres, from reggae to indie-rock. In that same conversation I'd mentioned John Zorn so I decided I'd look more into all the new Jewish music he was putting out on Tzadik. I wasn't dissapointed.

If you're interested in hearing the show you can listen in live from 5 to 7am Wednesdays and can catch anything you've missed online here for one week after the show airs (or save the mp3 and listen whenever you want).

I'm a hypocrite

Every time I start writing again (which seems to happen with embarrassing frequency for me) I feel this strange compulsion to write first about writing itself, something I both enjoy and philosophically oppose. Writing written about writing, always seems to present the danger of becoming just naval gazing form of expression possible. Writing, I believe, ought to be a way of getting out of yourself and connecting with others

And yet here I am.

Part of it is an act of justification. I feel I must justify that writing a post is more than just satisfying a strange kind of vanity. Ultimately wanting to speak has to be matched with people receptive to being spoken to. Like the poet Billy Collins, I don't believe in writing "just for yourself" being sufficiently worthwhile, though it can be therapeutic. Like doing a radio show, if there's no listeners, there's no point. The problem is that, as with radio, you don't always know who your listeners are and you just have to hope that the stuff you dig might matter to other people too.

Presumably it's the possibility for connection that propels writing in the first place and helps take it from being self-indulgent to being useful in some way. Just as no one starts a band in their basement expecting it will stay there I don't go to the radio station each week with the expectation that I'm the only one listening. If I'm gonna bother writing something I want real people to read it, not just imaginary future publishers.

That's why blogs are great. You can do it without the pretension that can come with harboring dreams of literary fame that I might have had taking creative writing classes in school.

Several months ago, a friend wrote me about how she had been touched by something I had written about my late dad. I sometimes question the merit of writing about deeply personal subjects, this blog having started as a travel journal, it wasn't something I was prepared for. When I started writing about it, I wasn't sure if anyone would care. But the way I figure it, if even one person is touched by something I write, then that is sufficient justification to sit down every week to do something I love.

The radio show that shares this blogs' name Late Night Hobo Blues (which doesn't really make sense for either one at this point...) started as a jazz and blues show and ended up somewhere very different. I've finally abandoned sticking to a theme or direction to dictate its content. And that's what I plan to do here as well.

Normally that sort of lack of direction bothers me, but I think for now it's good. I'll just keep looking around and seeing what I can find and then on Wednesdays I'll show you what I've found.

Walking Around "Barefoot"

Blogger is increasingly coming up with new ways to "monetize" the blogging experience, allowing you to make money by putting up ads or amazon.com links. I'm a little leery of the idea, perhaps because I'm still wedded to the idea of artistic expression for its own sake, uncorrupted by commercialism--or something like that. It's hard not too, typing this post as I do in a non-commercial radio station.

But I have to say something about a recent purchase of mine: the Vibram Five Fingers.

I'm not going to use this space to wax poetic about the merits of barefoot shoes and how they let you feel connected with the earth man. Anyway the company's website already does that pretty well. I am going to tell a little story.

Since I got the shoes, I've tried to regularly go on short jogs around my neighborhood in order to get my feet used to running in a different way, and get used to the "shoes". On one such occasion I went out to the small park near my house in an effort to find more grass to run on. This park was apparently one of the reasons my parents decided to live where we live. "We'll be right next to a park! We can go running there whenever we want!" This didn't turn out happening very much...

I myself had not been back to this park in quite a while. One particularly memorable occasion sticks out though, as it did when I was finishing up my jog. A long time ago my girlfriend at the time and I picknicked, by the bank of the stream that runs through this park, and thinking of this I stopped there to sit for a while after my jog. My memory of that day is undoubtedly effected to the events that followed it, in the way that so many memories are changed by future events. Still, I remember it as one of my happiest experiences. We'd ridden bikes from where she lived down to the park and brought along some wine and cheese. It was the sense of peace and freedom that I remember most. I had the sort of feeling that makes one feel like this could go on forever, like there could be many other days like this one.

She had at one time told me about walking up and down streams out in the metroparks, barefoot, in the summer when it's really hot. She suggested we do this together when the summer came, and it was something I looked forward to as the spring went on.

Due to an added benefit of my "shoes" allowing me to go sockless, I decided to wade into the stream, which came up to my ankles. I walked upstream, with a sort of childlike sense of wonder at having gained access to a part of my home that had always been here, but just slightly out of reach. It's so easy and yet it's often the easy things that get put off indefinitely. It's a shame, because you don't always get another shot at it.