THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT :: Installment 5

SEPTEMBER 28, 2009 :: WIGGLE YOUR TOES

FORECAST: partly sunny, with a chance of natural disaster

TOPICS: iTunes Genius, Algorithms, Natural Disasters, Clichés like ‘No Man Is An Island,’ Interconnectedness, I Heart Huckabees, Hip Bones Becoming Elbows, The Burnham Plan Centennial, Openlands’ 500 Miles of Water Trails, Blair Kamin, ‘Green Infrastructure,’ Chicago’s Olympic Bid

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1. BIRD + YAMAGATA

B comes before Y, alphabetically. And Bird came before Yamagata, chronologically (Music of Hair was released in 1996, Yamagata’s EP in 2003). So that explains the order. But B is a long way from Y spatially, and ’96 precedes ’03 by a good long while.

But there they were, one following the other, and logically so since neither alphabet nor discography determines placement with iTunes Genius, Apple’s playlist generator that created quite a stir when it came out in 2008, though it wasn’t particularly revolutionary.

I use it on occasion, neither besotted nor disappointed with its taste. But the other day it did something odd.

It put Andrew Bird’s “Imitosis” just before Rachael Yamagata’s “Reason Why.” Not a big deal until you listen carefully to Bird’s words. The focus lyric—repeated with poignant emphasis—is, “Tell me doctor, can you quantify, the reason why?” And then a song whose title asks the exact same question? It was creepy. Just what information did Genius aggregate to form a playlist? Was Apple’s technology so advanced that it took into account lyrical themes? Was Bird and Yamagata a coincidence, or was the “brain” of this music database aware of existential conundrums?

I did some research. A 16-year-old Canadian kid sums up Genius pretty accurately.

“You send information about your music library to iTunes, where this ‘brain’ analyzes it, runs it through the algorithm, and spits it back out to you. …The more information this mega-brain of information feeds on, the smarter it becomes.”

Another user mentioned that the algorithm probably relies on “user-created playlists: if two songs appear together in the same playlists of many different iTunes users, then those songs become linked in the ‘mind’ of Genius.”

I felt a bit relieved and a bit disappointed. Genius wasn’t interpreting emotive sentiment. But could it? In addition to genre tags and beats per minute, could lyrical themes, emotional output, or social messages be tracked with enough precision to link similar songs?

Would a song like “The Honey, the Power, the Light” bring up “When the President Talks to God,” “Megalomaniac,” “I Hear Them All,” and “I’m Standing in the Light”?

No. It wouldn’t. I just tried.

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2. QUESTION + ANSWER

Bird + Yamagata put me in a contemplative mood. Searching for the reason why these two songs had ended up together, I’d joined the musical artists in their search.

The REASON WHY.

It’s as frustratingly complex a question as you can ask, yet to not ask it would be to live a comatose life. Existence demands a WHY, and those who’ve exercised their existence have asked it since the dawn of abstract thought.

They are spiritual and corporeal questions, born out of painfully tangible events (natural disasters (see Bird again) tend to illicit the question en masse), but wandering further.

“WHY didn’t he save himself?” “WHY did he get in the car?” “WHY are you rich, and I am poor?” “WHY me?” “WHY not me?” “WHY did God allow this to happen?” “WHY do I believe what I believe?”

The answers to WHY questions are therefore also both spiritual and corporeal, their roots planted in the physical soil of our lives but reaching deeper, more mystical truths—some of which we understand, some of which we come to understand through those answers, and some of which we remain forever ignorant.

This metaphysical thread, from which the WHY of things is born, is interconnectedness. We don’t often see it until later, but events in our lives are interconnected with other events—those in the past and those in the future—and also with events in other people’s lives. Once we see this, we often see the WHY, the reason for the unexplainable.

The WHY question, as cliché: “WHY do bad things happen to good people?”

An answer, as cliché: “No man is an island.”

That latter cliché was referenced a few months ago, for one reason or another, and I was struck by the analogy’s scientific inaccuracy: even islands are connected—just not at first glance. This realization spawned a piece of writing that’s become very meaningful to me, a poetic manifesto reminding me of WHY and its answers:

We see a vast expanse of midnight between our shores
and think so much separates us

But islands are merely the
mountains that peak above the sea

Our roots find their home in the same
igneous pasture as those
thousands of miles across the waters

It’s called “Don’t Light a Signal Fire, Wiggle Your Toes.”

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3. BERNARD + BURNHAM

There are certain movies that pack a double (or triple, or quintuple) punch. Gigantic is, for me, the most recent addition to this genre. It’s a multi-layered comedy so darkly funny and intricately personal it could be the collaborative project of The Directors Anderson (Paul Thomas and Wes, though the two aren’t related and have not been so named, until now). John Goodman moves a malignant tumor with his mind, Paul Dano is attacked by an omnipresent homeless man, and Zooey Deschanel is a quirky, tragically helpless rich girl who may or may not be a hooker. I’ll give it two thumbs up, even if no one else did.

Perhaps one of the punchiest films, because it comes across originally as a bizarre but innocuous study in perverse antic (but is so much more), is I Heart Huckabees. Early in the film Dustin Hoffman, as Bernard Jaffe, holds up a blanket and explains his theory of the universe: everything is the blanket—an orgasm, the Eiffel Tower, a hamburger.

JASON SCHWARTZMAN: “Everything is the same, even if it’s different.”

HOFFMAN: “Exactly. But our everyday mind forgets this. We think everything is separate, limited: ‘I’m over here, you’re over there,’ which is true…but it’s not the whole truth. Because we’re all connected.”

In the past 70 years interconnectedness has gained scientific validity and mainstream popularity. Psychology is based on the very idea of interconnection. My wife studied psychology, so I asked her about this.

ME: “It’s kinda like that ‘hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone’ song.”

HER: “Not really. Because things are connected to everything else; it’s not really ever a progression. Like behavior is tied to neural pathways, but those neural pathways can be altered by an environment, after a long enough time. So it’s more like everything’s jumbled up, connected to everything else.”

So it’s as if the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone, but it’s also connected to the vertebrae and could become an elbow if somebody put a gun to its head.

And we’re just scratching the surface.

The way we live can emphasize or minimize the truth of interconnection, and little is more important to the way we live than where we live and how that affects movement and interaction. In 1909, Chicagoans found themselves the recipients of a visionary book that had at its core the truth of this interconnectedness and in its pages already-rendered ideas for how they might embrace and improve it.

The book was The Plan of Chicago, by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett.

Burnham, who enjoyed tremendous success as the chief designer of the Columbian Exposition’s White City sixteen years before, was the primary author and has since received most of the credit for the book.

His name gets thrown around a lot here in the windy city, and deservedly so. What became known as The Burnham Plan inspired a movement for better cities throughout the entire country, and he is still revered for his holistic approach to civic design. [In honor of the plan’s centennial, the One Book, One Chicago program chose The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City, by Carl Smith, who gives a lecture on the topic late next month.]

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4. WHITE + GREEN

Burnham focused on interconnectedness especially as he designed the city’s system of parks and boulevards—miles of extra-wide, tree-lined streets connecting acres upon acres of green space. A few blocks from our apartment, Sacramento Avenue morphs into Humboldt Boulevard and cuts a wide, curvy swath through Humboldt Park (neither of which would exist without Burnham’s influence).

This man’s vision affects my life everyday. I walk through the park to get to the library, my wife and I have attended dance performances at the historic boathouse, and wherever we’re going, the boulevards are easily the choicest paths—winding and broad, natural, letting us forget we’re in Chicago.

From an aerial view, these boulevards, I imagine, resemble rivers.

On June 14, Openlands, a leading organization in conservation efforts, celebrated 500 miles of water trails in northeastern Illinois as part of the Burnham Plan Centennial. Its vision was to find ways to unify the region’s waterways—creeks, rivers, and Lake Michigan—into “a rich and vast resource for people of all ages, interests, and abilities.” Though more iconic landmarks—Navy Pier, the Magnificent Mile—come to mind as Burnham’s primary achievements, he was passionate about projects like that of Openlands, the interdependence of man-made and natural beauty, envisioning “an interconnected network of open spaces and natural areas, or ‘green infrastructure,’ consisting of greenways, biking and hiking trails, waterways, wetlands, parks, forest preserves, and native plant vegetation.”

In 1909 green was just a color, not a business model or a building technique. Yet, Burnham saw the world through the lenses most of us now wear.

Blair Kamin, the writer behind the Tribune’s Cityscapes column, thinks this year’s centennial is the perfect opportunity to re-envision Chicago, hard as it may be.

“In 1909, the booming Chicago region could be compared to an adolescent — gangly, full of energy, still taking shape. Today, by comparison, Chicago is mature…And yet, it would be foolish to say that Chicago has stopped growing or that we lack opportunities to shape its growth.”

What we need, Kamin says, is organic, sustainable growth. Wise developers have said this for decades, but finally, few planners oppose the notion that “compact, walkable communities” are the answer to the problems sprawl has created: more roads, streets, and sewers; greater traffic congestion, which “fouls the air and costs each Chicago-area commuter hundreds of dollars each year in wasted gas and time;” and the loss of fertile, Midwestern farmland.

Kamin says the aim of today’s visionary “is not a White City, but a Green Region.”

I have my doubts about some of the more radical ideas for the next century, but the city’s Olympic bid, the results of which are announced in 12 days, could spur tremendous change in just a few years. On top of that, Kamin’s closing words reminded me that interconnectedness is complex, that working toward its preservation and invigoration has never been easy or immediate.

“A plan isn’t a blueprint. It’s a vision, an aspiration. You measure its impact over decades or a century…The real power of the Burnham Plan is the power of an idea: that we are forever engaged in the process of making better cities and suburbs, and that we still have the capacity to do that—in a new century, confronting new realities and imagining a new and greener future.”

READ: The Plan for Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City, Carl Smith.
RESEARCH: Burnham 2.0: A Composite Plan for the High-Speed Rail City

A Young Man

a young man loves a song that reminds him of his brother’s girlfriend, who reminds him of things untold, the telling is an old wives’ tale with a gruesome twist, psychotherapy and cabbage rolls, boarding school days—the young man is of that crowd, he wears a white scarf and lets no one in his private thoughts, which turn, often, to the unsightly affairs of the world, drug-induced comas of single mothers with too many disabilities, the psalmist a charlatan, the proverbs a collection of poetry loosely based on the thoughts of a drunk, his hair in his drink, black keys to iron gates, a Denver man setting foot in a dry river bed, breeding whores to cure his son, here, they come, damming the waters, their bodies spread open like balloons, catching the wind and unfurling until even the sun gives up trying to reach the young man, who is now shuffling, as a blind man shuffles, down a hall that smells of feces and forgottenness, a sweater around his waist and a letter in his pocket from a long-lost love who married his brother, grateful for the larva in his intestine, for the company and the romance of again sharing a bed

WINEOCEROS

the bush tears up one’s feet
in bicycle-tire swaths, a grater
to an orange
similar to the way one’s father
cannot be known, not
like a first love
Vanauken’s shining, pagan barrier

photos help, from there
it’s imaginative, speculative
like an anthropologist studying
the cultures of children’s lit

Sendak’s and Seuss’
alternative societies, beauty standards
your wineoceros, a study
in aggressive sexual revolution
stoned out of his German-
East African mind, stamping
bloodprints, sloshed, across the continent

5,000 pounds per print
by today’s standards,
if well preserved, or petrified

Say What You Will

the hollow place of a foot
soul searching
night under lamp-lit arches
bookcase for a window

gin on our tongues, warm and
wormy in each other’s
mouths, put the umbrella
in the corner, it’s falling apart
a bulimic stem in glass vases

paint, oozing through a
still life—bleeding hats
into beards into collars

we run on schizophrenic
streets, alone under
the voyeurs at their windows
dark spots between legs
from shadow or neglect

they leak onto the sills

hanging on my every word
she can hang her hat
on the coat rack I bought this
afternoon; she can pile
boxes in the kitchen,
on my desk, unused all summer
she can force me
into quietness
all those things people say
I’ll let them say them about me

our shoes mingling
in the closet, like our fingers
when we aren’t asleep,
blanketed in
the welcome chill

THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT :: Installment 4

SEPTEMBER 15, 2009 :: BOBBING FOR APPLES: A SPIRITUAL ACT

FORECAST: heavy precipitation

TOPICS: new columns by Jack Pendarvis, rain’s bleating, Jonathan Harris, starting my own religion, the pros and cons of TOMS, cleaning pots the way you clean wounds, the iconic language of song titles, Kevin Drew, Ho No Hana, broken necks at Sandy’s, 12 red badges of courage, symptoms of pneumonia as a sign you aren’t paralyzed, water bars in Waikiki, Icelandic life spans, little Hindu deities

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1. “WAY TO GO, CLOUDS!”

It’s nice to find universal things. We’re constantly searching for them, but it’s still energizing to realize an experience is felt across the globe and throughout time. In Jack Pendarvis’ new column in The Believer, he discusses clouds. “Clouds are just about the same now as they were in the time of the dinosaurs. Think about it. A dinosaur could look up and see the same clouds you are looking at right now. For this reason scientists agree that clouds will one day help us in our studies of dinosaurs. Way to go, clouds!”

Rain is the same. It hasn’t rained here recently, but that isn’t necessary to remember what it feels like. Smells like. The way it patterns a window. The way it hammers the car roof, bleats as it drips past our ears, hums on the shingles. It’s the same in Tibet as it is in Kansas. Every child knows what it is to stand under a roof, a gray-blue screen obscuring whatever usually greets him from his window. Whether the roof is leaky thatch or well-insulated tile, the rain outside is the same.

Like our reactions to all external stimuli, our emotions and memories are triggered by a particular day’s weather. I noticed the connection in the social experiment We Feel Fine [wefeelfine.org], orchestrated by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar. A web interface that “collects feelings,” it searches blogs for the phrase “I feel…” grabs the sentence up to the period, and retrieves as much information about the author as it can. Interestingly, you can explore the collected emotions in a view option called “Weather,” where the feelings are categorized according to the weather when it was written.

“I am writing you this letter to let you know that I love the way you made me feel in your last letter” — from someone in Worcester, Massachusetts, United States when it was sunny.

The clouds roll in.

“I really am confused as to why this person feels it necessary to make everyone involved absolutely miserable” — from someone in Everett, Washington, United States when it was cloudy.

And unleash.

“I feel that the people I already applied to are probably looking at me like I am a joke just because of my email address and they don’t even know me.” — from someone in Portland, Oregon, United States, when it was rainy.

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2. LOTS OF SWIMMING, AND ICE SCULPTURES

For weather, the common denominator is precipitation. Among its definitions—a headlong fall or rush, abrupt or impulsive haste—is “any form of water that falls to the earth.” Thinking of weather’s effect on humans and water’s great role in weather, it wouldn’t surprise you that if I ever started my own religion—decided to throw in the towel and just wing it—I would put as my central deity: water.

Most of us have probably pondered its power—it gives life, and it taketh away. We gulp it down, but are terrified of drowning. It makes things grow, but a waves can destroy entire villages in seconds. We bathe in it, we use it to cook, clean, and put out fires.

I was thinking of this as I finally tossed a particularly decrepit pair of TOMS.

If you don’t know what TOMS are [tomsshoes.com], they’re brilliant but have their drawbacks:

Pro: For every pair you buy, TOMS donates a pair to a child who doesn’t have shoes.

Con: They disintegrate rather quickly.

Pro: They’re relatively cheap.

Con: Wear them without socks and they smell like rotten cantaloupe rind after a while.

Pro: They’re very stylish, mainly because social consciousness is stylish.

Con: Later in life you will have back problems.

The right shoe of this pair of TOMS developed a quarter-sized hole in its sole last spring. I continued to wear them for months. Finally, four weeks ago a piece of glass hit a bulls-eye in that skin-colored target. Later, as I stood in our shower washing the wound, black with dirt and tangible smog, I was in awe of water. I was cleansing a wound with the same thing I would use to clean a skillet. The same thing I could boil to kill nasty bacteria. The same thing we run out of when it’s cold and run in to when it’s hot. One might conclude that water is the source of life (something agreed upon by NASA scientists).

When I want to research a topic, I go to my iTunes library. You can deduce a lot about cultural values through the iconic language of song titles. In my library alone, which is probably representative of 0.23% of all the music written in the last century (but certainly has no bias toward water-related songs), there is 3.8 hours worth of music whose titles refer to water in some form. It exists in every potential fashion. Jack Johnson says drink it, Dave Matthews says don’t. Rachael Yamagata says meet her by it. The Henry Clay People warn there’s something in it. Feist wrote a song called “The Water,” which inspired Kevin Drew to make a film called The Water, which was shot almost completely in silence.

From Counting Crows (“Rain King”) to Justice (“Waters of Nazareth”), Anathallo (“The River”) to Tom Waits (“Rainbirds”), everybody’s crooning about it.

My religion wouldn’t be the next Raëlism, purporting we’re the genetic engineering of advanced humanoid extraterrestrials, or Ho No Hana, pretending to diagnose illnesses through “reading feet” while pocketing $900 per session. I’d keep it simple. Lots of swimming and ice sculptures. We’d be the most hydrated congregation on Sundays. We might even bob for apples, enjoying, literally, our god’s bounty, floating right on top of his vast, ethereal being. In a bucket.

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3. SALT WATER

I first experienced water’s enormous power in Hawaii. There were six of us crammed into a two-bedroom for a summer. One day we went to Sandy’s, a locals-only place famous for bodysurfing. Even though we technically lived there, we stuck out. Not only were we vibrant specimens of the Caucasian race, we were visibly in awe of the gigantic doomsday devices that were masquerading as waves a hundred feet before us. These were bulldozer blades, every few seconds crashing into the shore and plowing the sand up toward the sunbathers.

The lifeguards approached us. “Are you planning on getting in?” We looked at each other. Finally someone said, noncommittally, “Uh, I don’t know. Maybe.” The lifeguard seemed to take this as bad sign, like he knew the waves would smell the fear on us, like dogs can. “Well, just so you know. Yesterday somebody broke their neck here. So be careful. It’s really dangerous.” We shrugged him off and staked out a plot of sand, unfurling our towels and kicking off our flip-flops lazily to prove how not terrified we were. Maybe I was the only one terrified. But I doubt it. How often do you do something that recently caused a person’s neck to snap in half?

I wasn’t the first one in. Derek led the way. You got thrashed a few times just trying to get past the break; if you planted your feet and resisted the oncoming surge—imagine a skinny kid with his hands outstretched as a bulldozer barrels toward him—you were swept off your feet, flipped upside down, and dragged up the beach where you were eventually deposited, choking, looking as Haole as they come. Instead, you had to dive straight into the wave and push hard until you reached air.

Once you did that, all you had to do was bodysurf. Piece of cake.

Already slightly paralyzed after a few run-ins with the bulldozer, I was scared to put myself at the precipice of any of the larger waves, but it’s the only way to really get it. So once we’d mustered up enough courage (we deserve about 12 red badges a piece), we positioned ourselves so the next one almost came down on top of us—you feel like your top-half is sticking straight out of a vertical wall of water—and swam like crazy. When we caught it and torpedoed through the wave’s tunnel into the plumage of white water and sand, it was amazing. Still terrifying. But amazing. And we got up and ran back in.

However. When we caught it wrong, it hurt. If you were too slow, you were fine. It was like missing the bus. You just wait for the next one. But when you overshot, when you got ahead of that rushing blade, you looked down as you rose higher and higher, the ground sinking away below you, seemingly being swallowed by a beast, and you knew it was about to swallow you too. The bus was coming, and you were in the middle of the street.

At the breaking point you’re about as high above ground as if you were lying on the roof of a one-story house, peeking over the side. You can see straight down because of the arc, and there’s suddenly nothing between you and the sloping sand. Gravity gives a sharp tug, and, using our heavy machinery metaphor, it is extremely like being a little kid and falling off the front end of a moving bulldozer. Hitting the ground hurts enough, but a split second later the blade pushes two tons of soil and brick and fractured rebar into your face and pummels you up a hill. No matter how determined you are to keep yourself right side up, you’re thrown every which way and you wind up with salt water gushing down your throat and out your nose and your head feels instantaneously pneumonic. But the pain in your head is each time a relief. As is motion in your limbs, because these are signs you aren’t paralyzed. Your vertebrae are still intact, your spine has not splintered, and you feel up for just one more.

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4. FINAL NOTES

A final few notes on water. First, it is thought to be the cause of Icelanders’ lengthy life spans—something about volcanic purification.

Secondly, water bars exist. In Waikiki, they exist in bright white lights and curved, slick architecture, futuristic like Hollywood does the future. I remember thinking, “If desalinization of ocean water is possible (for this is what they were selling), why all the water scarcity stuff? Just scare tactics?” Then I read that it’s simply too expensive to be a viable option for creating drinking water for 6 billion people.

And thirdly, if I ever decide water deserves my undivided spiritual attention, I want to write two books: 1) The Little Book of Water Deities, based off Pixar animator Sanjay Patel’s The Little Book of Hindu Deities, without doubt the cutest religious tome ever published; and 2) Divining the Divine, because what a witty and perfect metaphor for searching for God: you hold out a forked stick and wander aimlessly. Sounds about right.

READ: Tapped Out, by Paul Simon; The Little Book of Hindu Deities, by Sanjay Patel.
RESEARCH: The Eastern Garbage Patch.
WATCH: The Water, directed by Kevin Drew, starring Leslie Feist, David Fox, and Cillian Murphy.

THE BICKERDIKE APTS #1

discreet vantage, French-sounding taunts
and black dogs, brown-skinned
kids at the corner, hiding three stories below
my gray stairwell leading

nowhere, the neighbors’ yard—how can
she hang from the chainlink fence?
I’m scared to even climb it
it’s like me, to sit three stories, three miles

above—who’s flying over? watching me
watch them. teenagers

a ½ story below and to my right,
explosive and crude, a model for the
ground-floor hide-and-seekers
a car-load of “fuck no’s” and Spanish

and in half a moment, it’s empty
adult voices sidling along the brick
from the front, cackling dominoes, more dogs,
yells from down the street

we raise our voices to
the shingles, well-tanned from the summer sun
I’ve been screaming all afternoon
from a chair, from
the bathroom
my throat tight and absorbent, 3rd floor

you’re invisible, a color not quite blue not
quite white the only thing up

THE BICKERDIKE APTS #2

feet on prison bars
the chaise-lounge staircase

the case-lounge stairplace
I toy with it to keep
from noticing my age

nothing’s funny anymore; everything’s
a sign—the locust tree, how the
mortar’s spackled brushstroke

guides each brick, fans in the windows

patches of brown below the X
as if marking a miniature city,
death just a part
of the landscape

sprinklers reserved for the
green and growing,

those streets you feel safe on

THE BICKERDIKE APTS #3

silhouettes of houses
on houses

like painting over a painting

marrying a mirage
burying catalpa pods as if
they weren’t human

THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT :: Installment 3

SEPTEMBER 7, 2009 :: THE MEANING OF EPHEMERAL

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FORECAST: hot, with a 0% chance of precipitation

TOPICS: Rosebushes like Jacks-in-the-Box for Christmas, becoming an environmentalist at age 3, watering 50 Taxodium distichum and reading an unfinished fantasy series, the war between Greek and Turkish Cypriots, Andrew Bird, 33-hour work days, picking the writer to finish your dead husband’s book, ACME GIFT, delivering flowers on bikes, Asteroid B-612, endangered ways to love, old friends like dead butterflies

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1. MY PARENTS, PLANTING

When there’s no one living in a house—it’s all boarded up, waiting to be rehabbed or sold or demolished—and there’s a sea of daylilies pushing their sharp, orange petals through the fence, it’s proper protocol to pick a few stems on your way home from work.

And if I hadn’t followed protocol, our neighbor, Diane, wouldn’t have known I liked flowers and wouldn’t have given me a rosebush a few days later. It was a yellow rosebush, still wrapped up tight in its plastic, like a Jack-in-the-Box under the Christmas tree that had accidentally popped open. As I planted it later, I thought about how my parents had yellow roses at their wedding.

It’s impossible to be around flowers without thinking of my parents. My dad is a soil conservationist, which with a switch of two letters would be a soil conversationist and an entirely different profession altogether, and my mom is a landscape designer.

I often say I became an environmentalist at age 3, which is only half true. I didn’t have the respect for nature my parents had until later, but it is true that the acres my parents reseeded to native grasses to provide habitat for quail and other Kansas fauna have had a profound effect on the way I continue to view farming, hunting, development, and the sanctity of life.

When I was little, every spring, my mother and I would plant pansies underneath my tree. “My tree” was a redbud by the sidewalk to our back door. It was a picturesque thing—perfectly round and covered in fuchsia blossoms in that time between winter and summer. Beneath the tree, my favorite pansies were the purple ones with yellow or white centers, like starburst-pattern guitars.

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2. THE APPLE TREE

The most pivotal memory of our small Kansas farm/nature preserve is the summer my parents decided to plant 50 Taxodium distichum, or bald cypresses, the official state tree of Louisiana and known for its love of wet, swampy areas. To an 11-year-old, planting 50 trees is not the ideal summer. However, I was more into it than most soon-to-be 6th graders, and I remember not minding the planting process—watching the foot-tall, feathery gnomes form a single-file line in front of the cedars, which were dying on account of the wetness—hence the “swamp cypresses.”

[A quick note before moving on: I was very lucky in finding out pre-installment that cypress the tree is spelled differently than Cyprus the country. I did a study on the war between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots in the 1960s (the war was in the 60s, not the study; I’m not over 40), and assumed the two were spelled alike. My dad informed me of the difference. Speaking of Greek Cypriots, the ethnic group appears at random in Andrew Bird’s “Tenuousness,” along with a lot of other words and references (proto-Sanskrit, coprophagia, etc.) that caused some bitterness for music reviewers.]

Back to cypress the tree, I thought it was over once all 50 were in the ground. Oh, I was wrong. My work had just begun.

It was a particularly hot summer that year—not nearly swampy enough—so I was recruited to help water the newly planted conifers. I don’t remember the specific details, but it was something like five minutes on each side (N, S, E, W), two times per tree. So I’d put the hose on one side, climb up the apple tree, read for 3½ minutes, climb down the apple tree, and move the hose to the next spot. Eight spots per tree. 50 trees. That’s 400 hose-positions total. Five minutes per position makes the job a 2,000-minute (or 33.3-hour) workday.

By the time I got to the end of the row, the first ones were drying up again, their soft needles yellow, threatening to turn brown if I didn’t do something. It was an all-summer task.

Luckily, I had the apple tree.

The apple tree isn’t there anymore, but that summer I must have rubbed the bark raw with how often I made my way up (starting at the middle where the three largest limbs arched upward), and made my way down (usually swinging down like a little Tarzan of the jungle). I was reading Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series that summer, making my way through books 1-4, a total of 3,280 pages. The fantasy series dulled the drudgery of the watering, transporting me instead to places like the Three Fold Land, a hot, dry desert like the one in which we’d decided to plant our swamp trees.

Like the apple tree, Robert Jordan is no longer around. He died just before he finished the twelfth and final book of the series, A Memory of Light. Using notes Jordan had prepared, his widowed wife chose fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson to complete the last installment in three volumes, the first of which will hit stores this October, 25 years after the inception of the series.

That summer, reading The Wheel of Time and watering bald cypress trees, is one I will never forget. My parents’ love for nature is instilled in me, and it shows. In college I worked at a small gift store called ACME GIFT. We didn’t sell backfiring contraptions to wily coyotes. We sold flowers, among other things. My favorite part of the job was going on deliveries. They weren’t from me, but I got to witness the exuberant joy of someone who’d just gotten an unexpected gift.

In Chicago, though there are hundreds of community gardens, dozens of enormous parks, and a massive amount green space (the EarthLab Foundation named it the greenest city in the country), somehow I still feel dwarfed by the concrete, steel, and asphalt. So, some friends and I thought maybe we should start randomly delivering flowers to the smattering of friends we have in the city.

::

3. ALL FLOWERS ARE EPHEMERAL

Getting older, in huge, one-year leaps and yet also rather seamlessly, flowers have become a metaphor for my life. In The Little Prince (1943) by Antoine de Saint Exupery, a rose lives on the Prince’s island moon, Asteroid B-612. The petulant but loving flower becomes the reason for the Prince’s journey to other planets. On one of the planets he finds a geographer who tells him roses—and indeed all flowers—are ephemeral. The Little Prince asks what that means. The geographer answers, “that which is in danger of speedy disappearance.”

I find my life to be quite ephemeral.

We are all in danger of speedy disappearance in the most literal sense. But our friendships, relationships, plans for graduate school, plans for travel—these things are even more precariously balanced on the edge of the future. And dreams, ideas, ways to change the world, ways to love—they are the most endangered of all. It doesn’t take a magician to make them disappear; they often just go, whisked away by unforeseen challenges or stepped over out of duty. Sometimes they just crumble before us, and we can’t stop it.

There are days I believe certain actions are eternal, or at least have a longevity that will outlast my lifetime. But other days even the oldest buildings in Chicago seem in danger of disappearing to make way for something else. There’s no preserving every meaningful thing in life; you can’t store old friends in shadowboxes, pinned like dead butterflies, under your bed.

Flowers know this: the lucky ones bloom, wither, and half-die, hibernating underground, keeping only their earthy souls warm, and then they grow again when snow turns to rain. But others last only one season. And the gardener doesn’t mourn the loss of the annuals, doesn’t make up a headstone for the patch of pansies he planted last year. He just goes about replanting.

Replanting.

Seeding a life with friends and dreams and things that you know will perish in a short time. But seeding them anyway, for a single season. Participating fully in the ephemera of life.

::

READ: The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint Exupery.
RESEARCH: The Climate Group + Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid.
LISTEN: “Tenuousness,” Andrew Bird.

THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT :: Installment 2, Part II

AUGUST 31, 2009 :: PART II :: GAY TEL AVIV

Forecast: slight chance of rain

Topics: Homophobes on your track team, being asked if you’re gay because you’re “vibrant,” Johanna Sigurdardottir, Chicago’s gay pride parade and why it’s held on a Sunday morning, red strap-ons, sardonic irreverence, 1950s-era cookouts, Love is an Orientation, Boy’s Town, evangelical seminary, recognizing your friend Nathan in a YouTube video

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When you grow up in a Kansas town of 1,500, if you’re a part of the theatre program (no matter how prestigious it is), people think you’re gay. Everyone knows you’re not actually a homosexual (ok, not everyone; some guys probably avoided showering next to me after track practice or something), but they simply equate acting/singing/dancing/performing monologues in which your character is gay with you being gay. So I got pretty used to my sexual orientation being called into question.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t surprised when a few months ago a woman in the park yelled over to me, “Excuse me!” (I look over.) “Are you gay!?” (I stumble to a halt. Hesitate. Turn around and walk over to her; she’s on a bench, sitting alone.) “Umm, no ma’am.” (She’s a black woman probably in her 40’s, hence the “ma’am.”) “I don’t mean any offense or anything. I was just wondering.” (She doesn’t seem to mean any disrespect, but it’s a pretty ballsy question in a neighborhood where white guys like me aren’t usually talked to.) “Can I ask why?” (This from me, to attain ways I might avoid coming across as something I’m not.) “You’re just so…” (She pauses. It all rests on the next word.) “…vibrant.” (I can take that.) “And feminine.” (There it is. (I decide to stop wearing scarves. It doesn’t stick; I wore one Friday.))

Homosexuality is ubiquitous these days, if not mainstream in the same way yoga is mainstream, than at least a topic of discussion in political circles, religious groups and just in everyday life. Politically it used to be suicide to be openly gay, but this year (a month after Obama’s inauguration) Iceland joined America in doing something the world had never seen. It elected Johanna Sigurdardottir as prime minister, the first openly gay world leader.

Closer to home, this summer Allison’s dance group—some of the Najwa ladies who are also part of SGI (see Installment 2, Part I)—was invited to perform at the Chicago Pride Parade, which has to be the only major parade on a Sunday (for reasons that are obvious, ironic, and frustrating). When we arrived, Allison navigated the jungle of Speedo-clad men to find the dancers, and I met up with some friends.

As float after float (my favorite was Gay Tel Aviv’s, a group of Israelis with the slogan “Keeping It Kosher,” effectively banning any “sausage” jokes) of mostly naked, oiled men and women passed us, I couldn’t stop my feelings from becoming mixed—like batter made from incongruous ingredients, whisked into a frothy, rancid mixture that I tried to name. It didn’t stem from feelings about homosexuality, or from the pressure of trying to figure out which dancers were women and which ones were wannabes. I finally realized it was a response to the overt emphasis on sex. The near-middle three letters of “homosexuality” were overshadowing the others.

My gay friends reject (and contradict) the stereotypical notion that they’re all deviants who want total sexual freedom and are disgusted by the concept of monogamy. Yet most floats promoted that very stereotype. Girls who weren’t gay were put up on trailers dressed like naughty Egyptians just to draw a crowd, please the eye, and say, “Hey, let people do what they want. If that’s doing the homosexual thing, cool! If it’s wearing a mesh top and bright red strap-on like me, cool!”

And the crowd was drawn. The eyes were pleased. And people said, “Fuck it. Cool!”

Except that I was there to be a part of a movement that said, “Hey, don’t treat people like they’re less. We’re all human, and no matter what, that comes before sexual orientation.” I was there as one of a million who are tired of hate-crimes stemming from a hyped-up pseudo-morality. It wasn’t about being free to bang whatever type of person, animal or object one might feel like. It was about ending a legacy of shame, discrimination, and judgment. This march was about civil rights as much as MLK’s in the 60s.

But it didn’t feel the same. It was as if the crowd was made up of kids from my hometown and they’d stumbled onto a stash of cheap beer, obeying their hormonally confused, sexually amped bodies for the next five hours. The whole thing was filled with this sardonic irreverence, a vibe that belonged more to Coachella than a civil rights movement. This was flippant. A joke. A dirty joke that shocked the moral majority, but still a joke.

There were a few inspiring moments. The religious groups carrying picket signs of acceptance, for example. And the float depicting a 1950s-era cookout: on one side, a cardboard cutout of the typical American family (husband, wife, son, and daughter) grilling in front of a white picket fence. On the other side: the same scene played with real people, and instead: husband, wife, son with boyfriend, and daughter. They were still grilling, still smiling. Still a family. It carried a poignancy that countered the weight in the pit of my stomach when I think of the legacy of conditional love practiced by so many families. I’ve had friends get kicked out, beaten, excommunicated. So I liked this float.

For Christians, the stance toward homosexuality has been ruthless at worst, inconsistent at best. Which is why I was excited when I heard about a new book called Love is an Orientation (2009), written by a Christian and self-proclaimed recovering homophobe. Three of the author’s close friends came out to him in three consecutive months, and suddenly he was face to face with an aspect of sexuality he’d always avoided. So he moved to Boy’s Town (one of Chicago’s most prominent gay communities) and decided that it was time to figure out if love and homosexuality were compatible.

The author, Andrew Marin, still lives with his wife in Boy’s Town and was at the pride parade this year. He took tons of video, and as I was researching him for this column, scrolling down through his video posts, I noticed one in particular: “2009 Gay Pride Parade Video 7 of 11.” Before I clicked on the video, I read what Marin had written below it. “In this clip I interview Nathan, a straight man who is walking in the Parade. And funny enough, he goes to an evangelical seminary in Chicago as well!”

Interested to see what this seminary student had to say, I played the video. As soon as the camera panned to the interviewee, Nathan, I realized, “I know this guy.”

It was Nathan, one of my best friend’s best friends. We were introduced at the Langhorne Slim show at Schuba’s last year (which had enough hip thrusting it could’ve been billed as a precursor to the pride parade). Thrilled at this realization, I watched on to see how he answered the question (an eloquently stated, “What are you doing here, man?”). He looks at the crowd lining Halsted Street, and repeats, “What am I doing here?” Then he launches into one of the greatest 45-second speeches of all time:

“I’m here for a lot of reasons. To sum it up, I think this is what the church and Christians should be doing. They should be walking and supporting and affirming a group of people that have been oppressed and hated by the church for decades and decades, and too much wrong has been done. So I’m here apologizing as a Christian, I’m here making amends, and I’m here to say, ‘God loves you, period. I love you, period.’ And to be honest, this gay community has been more welcoming to me than my seminary community. And for that, I’m here walking.”

Beautiful, Nathan. Next time I see you, I’m gonna give you a huge, straight-man hug to thank you for your brilliance. I’ll also tell you how awesome you looked in your Aviators and gold Mardi Gras beads.

Read: Love is an Orientation, Andrew Marin; “The Gossip Takes Paris,” from the July/August issue of The Believer, Michelle Tea [http://believermag.com/issues/200907/?read=article_tea]. Watch: Eddie Izzard, “Weirdo or Executive Transvestite?” [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6npfjWoBCRM].

To watch Marin’s video interviewing Nathan, go to http://love-is-an-orientation.blogspot.com/2009/07/2009-gay-pride-parade-video-7-of-11.html. Read Andrew Marin’s blog at http://www.loveisanorientation.com/, and to see the organization he’s created as part of his efforts to bridge the relationship between the Christian and GLBT community, check out http://www.themarinfoundation.org/.