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Bob Dorn: Requiem for a Renaissance Man

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There’s a funeral toast, “Here’s to a man whose like won’t come this way again.” That’s Bob Dorn. Writer, jazz man, stone mason, gardener, cook, and maker of carnival masks; he was also a warm, witty, and constant friend. About that last semi-colon, Bob and I had two caffeine-fueled discussions on the semi-colon, which he put to bed with these words,

“I think the notion that language usage should (or could) be proper is
‘… a hobgoblin of small minds’ (Emerson). Communication is the proper aim of writing.”

When I met Bob early in 2013 he had been playing the trumpet for many years, and for me jazz informed his writing in ways wonderful and a little mysterious. After asking him about the process in a couple of different ways, Bob emailed on his 74th birthday,

“Music’s even more mysterious to me than
language but the comparison isn’t fair because language …. ? I was
gonna say it’s more like rocks fitted together and music has structure,
but that’s not good enough because there are musicians who can
can explain the system but they often can’t play as well as others who
nevertheless can’t explain the system. There’s a so-what in there,
someplace. One thing that comes to mind is
that there are alternative phrases in jazz and writing. A phrase like,
“dawn came a little slowly…” might be jazzy, but “he waited for a dawn
that never seemed to arrive” is more like writing.”

Updated Jan. 5, 2019: to include memorial service info   [Read more…]

1968 in Black, White, and Gray – Part Two

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For starters the old joke ain’t true. If you remember the ‘60s you actually mighta been there. As far as 1968 by itself goes (as opposed to being short hand for the ‘60s’) except for Tigers fans of a certain age the revolutionary significance of the year has left deeper marks in France than the U.S. While the immediate inspiration for the French students may have been their American counterparts in Berkeley, by the spring of ’68 it really did look like a coalition of students and workers might take down the Fifth Republic. On this side of the pond all the radical movements put together were never even close.
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1968 in Black, White, and Gray – Part One

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Like a kid who pauses halfway up a tree and is surprised to see how far away the ground has gone it’s disconcerting, and 50 years later a little comical, to see childhood memories as bit players in the broader dramas of receding History. Though I’ve never been 61 years old before, I’m assuming these feelings of vertigo and bemusement are perennial and widespread among kids who survive long enough to feel them.   [Read more…]

Flames of Ignorance and the Wisdom of the Snail | Seeds of Rebellion, Part 3

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After wandering through the Schools for Chiapas Mayan Food Forest incubator in Part I, and witnessing the resistance by the First Peoples of southern Mexico to powerful corporate and governmental forces intent on destroying their autonomy and culture in Part II, we conclude with a look back to a past marvelous and shameful and towards a future carved on the shell of a snail.

“The diet of the people here before the Spanish conquest was so much more than corn and beans,” explains Paco Vazquez, a coordinator with Prodmedios, a media company based in San Cristóbal that empowers local communities all over Mexico to tell their own stories using a wide variety of media. Raised on the outskirts of what was once the Aztec capital, Paco is a direct descendant of the Nahuatl water architects who constructed the floating gardens and aquaculture the Spanish marveled at, and then destroyed. Five centuries have transformed a city once laced by clear running canals into a diesel-choked metropolis; so Paco knows something about lost knowledge.   [Read more…]

The Invasion of North American GMO Corn and the Price of Resistance | Seeds of Rebellion, Part II

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In Part 1, we met Armando, the Schools for Chiapas coordinator of the effort to restore the ancient Mayan system of sustainable food forests in the regions of Chiapas, Mexico, in consultation with Zapatista educators. In Part Two we explore the mortal threat posed by NAFTA and the heroic resistance to the attempts to culturally, and at times physically, exterminate the First Peoples of southern Mexico.

The mortal threat posed by U.S. corn to the people who first domesticated it is not the cheapness of Midwestern maize but its bio-engineered genetic uniformity. According to a 2017 study by scientists from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), GMO corn from north of the border has infiltrated up to 90 percent of corn tortillas and 82 percent of all corn based products throughout Mexico.

Wind riding GMO corn pollen contaminates non GMO fields with ease leading to a loss of genetic diversity that makes any living system less resilient and at greater risk for catastrophic plagues. And the myriad creatures who live in the rivers and streams that absorb run off from nearby GMO fields when the rains come? Collateral damage, whose numbers and health can only be guessed at.

Super weeds are already appearing in GMO fields in the U.S., descendants of hardy survivors who passed their immunity to Roundup weed killer onto future generations. Loathe to listen to any messages coming from lifeforms not   [Read more…]

Zapatista Food Forests | Seeds of Rebellion, Part I

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“If the Malanga is split at the top, or tears easily, it’s poisonous.” Seizing the tip in his hands, Armando tried to rip the leaf along its central axis. Three feet long and nearly two feet across the translucent green leaf lives up to the plant’s alternate name, elephant ear. “This is a good one. If you cut the root into thin strips you can boil or fry them. Malanga is rich in potassium and provides three times the nourishment of the potato; and it tastes better.”

We’re inside the Schools for Chiapas building in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Mexico, walking through the experimental heart of a project that’s recreating the Mayan perennial food forests destroyed by enslavement in Spanish encomiendas (roughly equivalent to plantations in the U.S. South) and “development”. Jointly sponsored by Schools for Chiapas and educators from Morelia, one of five autonomous zones, or caracoles, run by the Zapatistas, the food forest project seeks out ancient earth-based wisdom by using the latest technology to connect with farmers, herbalists and healers all over the world.

[Updated 2108-07-18]   [Read more…]

On the Road in Oaxaca

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“Etla Crucero, Etla Crucero!” From the organized chaos of Oaxaca’s El Central transportation hub men and boys shout out the various destinations of collective taxis and city buses. They always sound so persuasive that the traveler has to fight back the urge to blurt, “You know what? The heck with that doctor’s appointment, I’m going to Etla!”

El Central is just one node in a hybrid web of long distance and city buses, collective taxis, and mototaxis–enclosed motor scooters with space for two or three in back–that connects the towns and cities of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca with an efficiency, frequency, and economy that leaves states like California in the dust.   [Read more…]

Where Have All The Postcards Gone?

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In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo explains, “In Maurilia, the traveler is invited to visit the city and, at the same time, to examine some old postcards that show it as it used to be … If the traveler does not wish to disappoint the inhabitants, he must praise the postcard city and prefer it to the present one, though he must be careful to contain his regret at the changes within definite limits.”

For the traveler visiting Oaxaca, the southern Mexican city differs from Maurilia in at least two respects. First, the historic center of Oaxaca appears not to have changed at all, for at least a century. The narrow streets packed with buildings built to a human scale hold businesses that open onto the sidewalk. If the traveler could find a postcard from 1918 and compare it to a postcard from today all that would be different is the clothing styles of the pedestrians.

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Mexican Post Card: Goin’ to the Dogs

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“No question, the life of the Mexican free dog—we prefer the term ‘free’ to ‘street’—has never been an easy one.”

One look at the goateed philosopher who growled these words revealed their truth. Max looks like a small mop that hasn’t seen water in a while. Where the fur ends and actual flesh or even bone begins could itself be a philosophical question. Max is the leader of a pack—a not particularly ferocious, self-selected group of three, sometimes four canines of uncertain and utterly unrelated blood lines.

They roam the streets of Santa Isabel Etla, a smallish town in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. The pack’s foundational compact proclaims their geographic range as running from the Collectivo stand to the Municipal Market. However, like much of the Mexican Constitution and Greek claims to the name of Macedonia, the compact is more aspirational than real as business owners, waiters, and various other two leggeds are constantly challenging the pack’s right to patrol or even exist in their own land.   [Read more…]

Chiapas Post Card: Dignity

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Editor’s Note: SDFP Contributor Nat Krieger is currently traveling in Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico.

What is human dignity, and where can it be found? There seem to be as many answers as there are questions. Bob Dylan had a “fat man lookin’ in a blade of steal, thin man lookin’ at his last meal…for dignity.” In a 1998 communique the Zapatistas asserted that:

“Dignity is that nation without nationality, that rainbow that is also a bridge, that murmur of the heart no matter what blood lives in it, that rebel irreverence that mocks borders, customs, and wars.”

Wandering with a Zapatista guide around the rain lashed EZLN caracole of Oventic you see almost immediately that you’re in a place dedicated to building human dignity, a zone of soft spoken autonomy and rebellion unlike anywhere this reporter has ever been.   [Read more…]

Chiapas Post Card: Crossing Borders

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By Nat Krieger

Editor’s Note:  SDFP Contributor Nat Krieger is traveling in Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico. 

No matter where you travel in the world, the people who stand guard at borders nearly all share the look. Their uniforms vary, dark blue or green are especially popular, but they usually have the look. Maybe they learn the look in border guard training, or maybe they get the job because they already have it. Along with the look — hard, distant, with generous or soupçon annoyance — comes the voice, hard, distant, with generous or….

You get the idea. If you use our local border crossings you probably already know about the look, and the voice.   [Read more…]

Oaxaca Post Card: Chocolate and Chapulines

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While Mexico is world famous for its cuisine, many Mexicans look to the state of Oaxaca as having the best food in the republic. Oaxacans do it all, from tejate “the drink of the gods” to mole, and from toasted chapulines (grasshoppers) a very BC (Before Conquest) dish, to amazing hot chocolate. All these specialties have Amerindian culinary and linguistic roots, but Oaxacans also have a way of adding cinnamon, among other ingredients, to make their chocolate drink second to none.   [Read more…]

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