connecting, connecting 1,2,3

i sit here after the umpteenth attempt at leaving the house today. there's something too easy about living in los angeles in the 80 degree weather, surrounded by food, and social media..

makes you wonder why there's so many hardships.. must be the haze.. 

i've been sifting through piles of memories and melodies. trying not to let the haze get me down. filling my head with recipes and sounds. listening to what others have to say and thinking about what that means to me.

for some reason i can't get out of the house today. it seems it's sucked me in. my head feels thick. it feels this way when i sit in front of a computer too long..

for some reason i can't get out of the house today. a tile saw whirs outside the window. the sound of the I-5 whirs outside the window. 

and i can't seam to get out of the house today because i realized that bashu hasn't posted any recipes yet. just peaches and cream. heavy on the peaches.

so i guess i'll have to get out through the cyber window.. into the haze for my first post on this blog.

i realize today, as i have in the past, that this is hard for me to do and makes me feel unhealthy. i prefer to connect to things directly rather than read what someone else has said about them.. because if i don't have that connection i don't know what the consequences are, and i don't know what the truth is. it makes it hard for me to trust anything via social media. therefore it makes it hard for me to express anything through social media.. i rely more on feeling, and direct connection to people, places, and things. it also scares me that people often only see one message, and sometimes never see the other side of the truth, and make a choice they're not directly connected to ,or conscious of, and therefore can cause indirect harm to so many things, often including themselves.

my friend bashu and i once talked about the accuracy of language: meaning when you aren't sure of something you should talk about it in the frame of reference that you are sure of.

for example:

prop 37 (labeling of gmo foods in california) yes or no?

what are gmo's? i've been  TOLD (told being the frame of reference) they are genetically modified organisms. for example: corn with insecticide genes so that when insects bite the corn their stomachs burst from the insecticide gene. 

where do gmos come from? i've been told monsanto, and other Genetic engineering corporations.

what are the effects? i probably used to eat a lot of gmo foods ( almost anything containing any form of corn, soy, sugar beets, etc.), and i used to feel pretty ill, and still sometimes when i eat things with these things in them, i feel ill. other people say they have other negative affects on people and the environment: cause animals to get sick from eating them, infertility, pest and plant mutations, and other extreme effects from being exposed to them. others say they don't, but they do kill bugs, and weeds, but nothing else that's exposed to them. 

where can you find gmo's? i've been told they are in many foods, especially in processed foods at the grocery store, and in animal feeds. 

why would people be concerned about gmo foods, if there really was no reason to be concerned?  they design labels.. and would make good profit? organic food producers may have an increase in business since people might stop buying gmo foods? 

why would people discredit the concern? I've been told, to protect their business. their money, and their control over food production, and farmers.

what would help with all the things you don't know, but have been told, or think? labeling gmo foods, so i don't eat them unknowingly if i would like not to. 

Why does this matter to you? i hope someday people will only eat things that they have direct connection to (they KNOW what's in it, and they know where it comes from, and what practices the farmers use) and hopefully without any foreign pollutants filtering in. i know many caring, connected, conscious farms and farmers who grow food in harmony with nature and don't use pesticides or any gmos and if we all ate their food, or grew our own, we wouldn't have gmo's. eliminating the questions and the risk. and the labels for petes sake. boy am i tired of labels.

labels like:

hey hippie!

hey hipster!

hey hippopotamus!

someone should leave those hippos alone! pay attention to the elephants in the room! 

labels like being trapped in a box surrounded by labels like depressed! corporate! greedy! gmo! infertile! sick! unhealthy! sad! oppressed! ignorant! disconnected! 

let me out in the world so i can just be without all the haze!

so, as promised, some recipes from the van life (sans haze):

staples:

peasant pie

1 bashu 

1 bryce

1 all the other people on earth

1 love

1 heart

-lets get together and feel alright! 

-mix well

-serve locally

ouef a la bet

eggs

beets

carrots, potatoes, sweet potatoes (optional)

whatever herbs and spices you like

we like garlic, ginger, onions, various curry spices, local herbs

salt to preference

-grate ingredients

-find kindling for pocket rocket stove, light pocket rocket stove

-steam or fry beets and other ingredients in pan (cast iron is nice from what i've experienced) with a little bit of water (enough to cover bottom of pan) or local fat source (in california- olive and coconut oil mostly, in bc- organic and/or local butter typically) 

-once cooked and most of the water evaporates crack eggs into other ingredients, cover, and let sit until eggs are cooked

-serve on rocket stove on the side of the road with friends, and local grains

treats:

snackies

local fruit (apples in washington, avocados in california, etc.)

local organic nuts (or nut butter) 

local raw honey

-cut fruit in half

-scoop out innards

-replace innards with nuts and honey

-make more because they're going quick! 

dates

dates

-awghhhhhhh

-go to the coachella valley in late fall early winter

-stop at flying disc ranch (call first or find them at the farmers market) 

-feel free to lend a hand on whatever they're doing

-eat tthe dates as they drip off the trees!

-pit them and stuff them with nuts, make em into balls, bars, smoothies, raw pies, anything, everything, mmmm dates.

- also, mmmm persimmons, mmm figs, mmmm artichokes, mmmm blackberries, mmmm cactus fruit, mmm pears, mmmm zapotes, mmmm bananas, mmmm oranges, mmmm grapefruit, mmmm pomegranates, mmmm raw milk, mmmmm raw blue cheese, mmmm raw blue cheese truffles, mmmm salal berries, salmon berries, raspberries, blueberries, melons, kiwis, nectarines, peaches, pistachios, almonds, pecans, walnuts, hazlenuts and many many many many more wonderful local (depending where you are) wonders

Bon apetit! 

Bon Voyage!

Gracias para todo! 

See you in the village enjoying local wonders! But thank goodness we have a way to communicate so the larger world hears what we're saying.

Love,

be

and a shout out to leslee... wherever she may be

a different country, March 5, 2012

So this is it. I was going to say it's the ending chapter, but life doesn't come in episodes, not really- it never fades to black and credits roll. You just get to tackle a new set of lessons, maybe with a new cast of people, and the older stuff you didn't deal with comes back, and the newer stuff gets dealt with better, and etc, ad mortem.

What to say? maybe a list of people who are learning cob with us.

Taiga and Masa-aki are two Japanese dudes who have been re-teaching me the Japanese that I learnt as a young boy and never spoke. Masa comes from a small (10 person) community in Japan. He says he started cobbing a house with his friends, got to the windows, and didn't know what to do, so he took this workshop. Taiga plays didge. we met him before on the beach on Mayne Island, BC.

Mark is a reMarkable man who quit his environmental job with Esso and started walking the walk. He tells me that Calgary is becoming remarkable progressive. Did you know they have more than 100 community gardens, most of which are very recent?

Ali and Sandra are two very artful girls from Vancouver. They have turned their house into a haunted walk-through play at least once. Sandra can handle a machete and knows massage. Ali has a labyrinth tattooed into the side of her head.

Daniel is a Mexican dude from Veracruz, which he pronounces Beracruz. He tells me all sorts of good things about Spanish and Mexican food, and he swears to me that there's a really good dirt called Chojoste that you can eat in Veracruz.

Cabell is from West Virginia. She only rarely says Yall. I tell her about once or twice a week to not take the last avocado, or the wall will fall down. She still believes me for at least a second.

Kelly, Bryce, and Annabelle are all here with me. We are sticking together as a family, but we're also been absorbed into the midst of all these people.

I thought I would write about everybody but I realise now that since you don't know them, there's not a lot of point. The real point is, 14 people are here learning how to build a house that doesn't require fiberglass, concrete, putting shit into the earth or taking too much shit out. This is a powerful fact- and I recall now that I never thought activism would ever be an easy or enjoyable thing, but we make it so.

I am reading Chocolat, the book that the movie was based on, and reminding myself that a gypsy can settle down. Glory be!

It also occurs to me that I learnt French in California and now I'm learning Japanese and Spanish in Mexico. Mi cabeza is a little soupy tokidoki.

on the bright side with all this lifting watashi wa cho tsuyoii desu yo!
(I am frickin' strong!)

Bashu out!

P.s. this is where we're staying (it ain't all peaches and cream... but it's pretty peachy):

being a peasant, Mexico City, February 18th, 2012

First off..

it's 2012! how long have you been waiting for that, eh? Crazy.

secondly, me and Bryce were talking and we realised that one reason we set out on this trip was to learn how to become better Peasants.

This is a crazy mouthful of a word. You may be thinking of poor bastards, slogging away in mud.. ("what about free speech?!"), returning to their hovel, collapsing into their bed, too tired even to strike their dogs. That would be fine.

What me and Bryce think of, however, is people who know how to live simple.

And this is not an act of laziness- otherwise we wouldn't have to go on a trip through small communities, mountains, forests, valleys and metropolises to find out what the secrets are. To know what your needs are and to know the simplest way to fulfill them- this is a knowledge that could take millennia to evolve. Could you live in a 100 square foot house? Do you know how much space you really need? Would you know how to build a bigger one- without relying on trucks and stores?

Anyways.

We set out to learn to be peasants, and sitting on the plane from Los Angeles to Mexico City as it took off into the air, we looked at each other and said

"Man, this is the weirdest thing we've done on this trip."

And we agreed that it was because in fact,
we had learnt quite well the secret joy of being a peasant.

So, success!

I reflected that the reason it was so weird is because it was such a normal thing to do. Taking a plane is a totally normal thing for a traveller to do. Just about every day on this trip, I have been doing weird things.

More in the next post, which will include recipes. Good day.

Aimee and Whiskey Kelly's House, LA, January 31st, 2012

Hi Guys.

Last Monday our stuff got stolen.

Everything else is a complication of that main idea, but the main theme on that Monday night was, somebody saw what belonged to us, and had a reason to take it, and took it.

So, that's an interesting idea to deal with.

There's also grief at the loss of something cared for, well used, etc. The things in this case were Amelie's camera, that she used to document her trip, and my accordion, well appreciated every day.

There's also the addition of more work and more days to the quest, when something is stolen and must be replaced. In this case it's Amelie's passport, her ID, etc, and the rest of her purse.

That about sums it up.

As for feelings, on my part they are not crushing. I put work into recovering the objects. I don't know if they will come back automatically, but I have faith. And that work I put in is therapeutic in helping settle my relationship to the accordion. It's something that I had, and now I lost, I may not see it again. I will try to, and the trying may not come to anything, and I'm satisfied with that. I could not think of a better relationship to have with something stolen.

--

the curve of our trip, in any case, took us from Ojai to, as you can see plainly, Whiskey Kelly and Aimee's house, in the hills of Silver Lake, Los Angeles. It's good coming back to the city when I have in my head the intention of carrying onwards from these days into the splendour and long-work of nature and farming. I can walk around Sunset Boulevard and hold that image in my head for contrast when I am leaning on a pitchfork in the garlic patch, the garlic patch that I love so well. I have some fantasies stemming from this. Taking a goat on a leash around the city. Selling my fruits from a basket on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Perhaps they're just stemming from that idea that I wish the two- farm patch and city sidewalk - were not so far apart. It's like living in BC and never eating an orange because Those Come From Far Away.

I hope you liked reading that cause I can't elaborate it any more.

Next post will include some recipes from the van life. Our staples - what we eat every day- and our treats, -what we eat for special times-.

At times I do feel like our van is the beginning of a homestead.

I will leave you with a "yo hippie" joke, which is kind of like a "yo mamma" joke, except you say "yo hippie sooo dirty that" instead of "yo mamma so fat."

It goes,

Yo hippie so dirty,

when he wash his hands he jam da sink!

I hope you enjoyed.

Santa Barbara, Central Coast, January 21st, 2012

Hey everybody! I can't think of many useful things to say, though a lot of mostly wonderful things have been happening to us, so instead I'll just read off a bunch of quotations, add some factoids, and put in some observations.

"you really have to be grateful no matter what is happening. I was once bringing my daughter to her boyfriend's house in New York. I dropped her off and she asked if I was coming in, I said no, I'll sleep in the van. About 3 am, a big truck drove past in the snow and rocked the van with its passage. I woke up, and pulled my woolen hat a little lower on my head, and rolled over and ate a bite of a raw onion. Then I looked to the heavens and said,

"Thank you god, that was quite nice."

and rolled back over to sleep some more."

- Geoff, an old and lovely artist, in Ventura.

"California is like Quicksand. Warm and wonderful quicksand. I have set myself a limit of leaving in eight months. You can learn a lot in California, but California doesn't need me like Wisconsin needs me."

- Alex, a permaculture acolyte in Ojai.

"I think, we are all learning, through travelling, how to make our heart our true home."

-Amelie, a member of the travelling Leslee family.

"You dirty dog, you pulled a couple of chicks and are leading them down the muddy path? I love this. You really make a former teacher proud."

-Gordon, my cob and natural building teacher

"With your height.. and you sing... you could come to Manila and make a lot of money modelling formal clothes for me."

-Armhand Remojo, a designer on the Santa Monica boardwalk.

"Everybody in Los Angeles has a hidden agenda. People look at you playing accordion on the sidewalk and they ask you for a business card because of course you've got business cards, cause you want to become THE Los Angeles Accordionist. Everybody assumes you want to make it big."

-Aimee and Whisky Kelly, THE wonderful ladies of Los Angeles

observations:

People are generally good, but they are often surrounded by clouds of habits.

Security guards mostly just want to keep their jobs, but sometimes they also want to get high by intimidating you.

Really, really, don't ask people for directions in Los Angeles. Get a map.

Good Events:

Ojai took such good care of us, we are going back for a week. The hotsprings smell like hard boiled eggs and the streets gather the good people together.

Because we are busking so frequently now, we are going to record a few songs, because two (!) recording engineers like us and want to record us for free. We will slap it up on a Bandcamp page and sell people little cards with Download codes written on them, because this saves the plastic of new CDs. We will also, because people can be old-fashioned, record them onto used cassettes that we buy in thrift stores. In this way we avoid getting into the whirlpool of irresponsible waste of resources that professional music can be. Call this holistic promotion.

Farmers' markets are feeding us regularly with fresh, local and organic foods, all of which treat our bodies very well.

We are going to work at a Cob Workshop in Mexico on Feburary 20th, for a month, after which I am considering coming back, because neither California nor Mexico needs me like BC needs me, or like I need BC, one of those.

Ye are lovely! Never discount it!

Accordion Travelling, Los Angeles, January 9th, 2012

With an accordion or any instrument, travelling is different. Busking becomes possible.

Anybody can fly a sign- this is bum slang for sitting on the pavement and holding up a sign that says "Travellin folk, hungry and broke", etc. I have not done this. Nate told me bout it. I got worried the first time Bryce even proposed we make a sign for me busking; all it said was "Tips not Required, will support a young man's travels", which was a happy enough statement. I stood and looked at it and this anxiety came over me.

I explored the anxiety and realised that for the first time in my life I was out and out asking people for money, because I needed the world's help. True, I was giving them something in return, but to me it was something that I would gladly give away for free. What I was really doing, is telling the world "I ask you for any help you can give me". It is a humbling thing that requires an openness I am still learning.

Another thing I'm learning is that I am a musician, and that this means something special. Don't quite know how to explain this except through stories: I've been playing with Annabel, Amelie, Nate, and Bryce, who are all good learners on ukelele and banjo, but who haven't played music as much as I have. Thus, picking up a song and playing doesn't come as easy to them. So I acknowledged I was at a certain skill level.

Then yesterday in the street we met a band of musicians playing Romanian and Gypsy music called the Petrovjic Blasting Company, who invited us to a literally inexplicable institute called the Museum of Jurassic Technology, with a Russian teahouse on top serving endless cups of strong tea with lemon in a rooftop garden. We sat and watched them play strange and beautiful music late into the night.

Concepts such as 4-hour a day practice minimum, ability to switch between many instruments, 13 years of constant playing, etc, came up as I asked them numerous questions. I acknowledged again that I was at a certain skill level.

I gave up music for a time in my life, feeling that I was not making any difference to the world by playing. Perhaps this was true when I was playing at home on my piano to my family only. I am reconsidering now.

The main question that socks me in the gut is: Can I spend 4 hours a day practicing accordion and still say that I am devoted to helping the world get better? What about natural building and permaculture? Is there room to balance them with playing shows, recording albums? Festival season is natural building season.

This post has a lot of uncertainty in it.

But one thing I'm certain of! I was leaning against a post in West Hollywood and a man gave me 3 dollars to play a Balkan song and say "Bonjour Justin!" in a video to his friend. A little later another man came by and asked to hear a song. I played a Gillian Welch tune to him. He said:

"This is California! You got something special! You could make it big! Get on youtube!"

I told him thank you, and ran to catch my bus. What a world.

Los Angeles, January 3rd 2012

slab city, and slab city. The one I met when I first came there and the one I said goodbye to. In Slab City,

there is always someone yelling somewhere. after a while you disregard it. The same with the dogs- there is always one barking, and another barking back at it, somewhere out of sight. There is always someone walking past. Call them over to your camp, where you are sitting on a folding chair. Do they have a cigarette? I don't smoke. Nate asks the question. In Slab City,

it's always either too cold or too hot. This is just a function of being in the low low desert. There are two hours, just after sunrise and just after sunset, when you'll be fine no matter what you wear. how tired does this heat and cold make you? In Slab City,

someone is always burning plastic in a barrel somewhere. Don't breathe in. The inhabitants of Slab City are not allowed to use the Niland landfill. They don't pay property taxes. You have to care a lot to drag your trash such a long way off that it will go to a place that can deal with it. far easier to dump it into a barrel and light that shite up. Oh, yeah, the same with shite, incidentally. In Slab City,

there's always somebody to talk to. Keep walking til you find them. Hi Allie, how's the family, Hi Ian, how's the business, Hi Karen, Hi Vince, Hi Rudy, Hi Lynn, if I do dishes at the Oasis Club can I get free pancakes? Hi Moccasin people, Hi Raven, Hi Hack, Hi Jimmy and Hi Jeff, Hi Pyro, that's a lot of beers you got there. In Slab City,

I hear meth is a big problem but I don't see it. I don't hear drinking and eating crap food is a big problem, but I do see it. Hell I join in. When someone says "pudding!" I don't ask "Is it sweetened with fruit juice, organic ingredients?" I say "Hell yeah!" In Slab City,

somebody's always giving away food. I can't figure this one out. There just always seems to be a good reason. In Slab City,

people are constantly rolling in to taste that American freedom, and the only ones who stay are the ones who have comfortable RVs or are fine with freedom being uncomfortable. This second group is constituting a whole lot of traveller bums who previously were annoying dirty people to me and who are now the most indispensably beautifully spirited people who I want to learn from. That their hair is unwashed and pants crusted and casual addictions unconcealed is nothing but something that makes it shine brighter. This is a cliche, but that's OK, I'm on the level. In Slab City,

let's get drunk tonight. In Slab City,
let's go to the hot springs, it's dirty but it's free. In Slab City,
I could sit here all day and so I do. In Slab City,
Folks are just folks. In Slab City,
your stuff will get ripped off. Look out. In Slab City,
everybody's got a certain regard for everybody. They may not like each other or they may love each other, but dammit they look at each other in the eye. They'll talk to you. They won't walk past if you call out unless they've got a damn good reason. In Slab City,
be ridiculous, there's no reason not to. In Slab City,
what are we going to do with all this garbage? We are faced with the fact of our own taking up space. In Slab City,
I never watched that movie "into the wild." in Slab City,
let's get out of Slab City. In Slab City,
wait. Now I want to stay here,
In Slab City.

-


But of course now I'm in Los Angeles. And that's totally fine. The first Slab City scared me away. The one I left, I wasn't scared of. I'm at Whiskey Kelly's house, she has some photos of us here: http://bangbangclick.wordpress.com/