Radio ahead

Posted: May. 8th, 2010

Sometimes, you never know what’s gonna happen.

In mid-April, I got a call from a man named Stephen Hoffman, who said he was a producer with Marketplace, a national radio program. Frankly, I’d never heard of it, but I played it cool and acted like I had. (When I looked it up, I learned that Marketplace, a program of American Public Media, gets 8 million listeners a week, which, well, is a lot of peeps.) Stephen said the program was coming to Seattle to do a special show on housing and he wanted to know if I’d be interested in doing a radio commentary. I was interested, but told him I’d never done one. He said he’d help me out, but to think it over and get back to him. So I thought, I got back and I said yes.

After a few suggestions from the production team, I decided to do a commentary on the people who, amidst the foreclosure crisis, have never had a house to lose in the first place. I planned to focus on this by telling the story of Isaac Chapiro, a man experiencing homelessness here in Seattle. I wrote up a script and after a few editing suggestions, I tightened it up and printed it out.

Usually, commentaries are recorded in a studio, but Stephen suggested, since I’d written about places outdoors, we record it outside. So, I met Stephen and the audio/tech producer, Josh Rogosin, on a cold, drizzly Seattle morning. I read from the printed script while the rain splattered the pages, with a microphone placed closed to my lip. And while I was nursing a back injury. Somehow, we pulled it off in a few takes.

So here it is, a link to my 2-plus minutes of incandescent, radio-centered fame. There are also some pix of me, looking like I just stepped out of a used clothing store in the woods. Just click under the first pic of me to give a listen to my commentary.

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/04/23/mm-never-had-home-to-lose/

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Buggin out

Posted: Mar. 31st, 2010

As a kid, I detested bugs. Really. They freaked me out. Any crawly, multiple-legged critter, one with wings that send it flying into my face: They all led to me shrieking like some banshee as I ran out the room or, if I was outside, running into the house to get away. But my most despised: the cricket. I loved the chirrup it made. But when I walked near one, it would always jump at me instead of away. It scared the hell out of me.

Then something happened. When I was almost 17, a brood of 17-year cicadas came to visit. I lived in Maryland and, over the course of three weeks, millions upon millions of them dug themselves out of the ground, crawled up trees, poles, legs — anything — and issued a piercing, ear-splitting call that drowned out any other sound around. Honestly. You couldn’t even hear planes fly overhead.

M. septendecim calling by Joe Green from Cicada Mania on Vimeo.

The cicadas (called magicicada septendecim) live a 17-year lifecycle. Once they mate, the females lay eggs in little slits they make in tree limbs with an ovipositor. The adults die away. The eggs, shortly after, hatch and the grubs fall to the ground. They burrow in the earth where they molt for 17 years, crawling back out of the ground to start the process anew.

These days, I’ve become a bug lover. Show me an insect — wolf spider, unicorn beetle, honeybee — and I’m likely to stop and talk to it. I find insects incredibly beautiful. Like these insects. Photographed with their bodies covered in dew, they’re a sight to behold. Enough so, it can turn “Ewww” into “Wow.”

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A Snowball’s chance in heaven

Posted: Feb. 15th, 2010

As a kid, I got a pet rabbit, a fluffy, white little critter named, not surprisingly, Snowball. I was 7 and oh, did I love that rabbit. I used to take him out of his cage and place him on the rug, watching his little wrinkling, twitching nose, transfixed for hours. I mean, it was ridiculous.

Of course, Snowball being a rabbit and me being a kid with little thought about mortality, I gave little thought to what lay in our future. On day, after an enormous thunderstorm, I wandered down to his big outdoor cage in the backyard. There, inside the still dripping chain-link cage, lay Snowball, soggy, limp and undeniably deceased. I wailed and sobbed, overwhelmed by grief for a creature I loved.

My poor mother, seeing me distraught, said she’d buy me another rabbit. And she did. But I got two, instead of one. Soon enough, there were little bunnies and, as their famed propensity for producing offspring foretold, those rabbits did it like rabbits, till we had so many they were squeezing out between the chain links. That was in the mid-70s and to this day, my mother’s yard still has rabbits hopping here and there.

My mind only turned momentarily to those little hoppers about a month ago, when I went out with a friend, Simone Lupson-Cook. Simone is a general falconer and keeps two hawks — a red-tailed and a goshawk — and I’d contacted her a short while before about heading out with her and the red-tailed, named Chase, to film her hunting with him. She agreed and not only brought Chase, but Cricket, a young goshawk. The day was gorgeous and for a couple of hours, they soared from her glove to tree limbs, dove to the ground and caught a rabbit (or at least, Chase did). It was a stupendous day, truly.

I took a good amount of video of the morning. I’m planning to turn it into a short film, but here’s a trailer, to whet the appetite. When it’s done, I’ll make sure I’ll post it, with apologies to Snowball.

 

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Thar she blows!

Posted: Feb. 9th, 2010

Every year, if things work according to plan, you get older. And, many moons ago, for my 25th birthday, I got a great gift: a whale-watching excursion.

I lived in Provincetown, MA, at the time, on Cape Cod, an area known for centuries for its whaling fleet (“Moby Dick,” which is such a fantastic book it doesn’t make sense, begins in New Bedford, MA, not too far away). But by the 90s, the tide had turned on whaling, as all manner of cetaceans found themselves on endangered and threatened lists. By the last decade of last century, whale watching was the way to go.

We set out on a beautiful day in late May and, in a word, the experience was astounding. Actually, make that humbling. North American right whales — so named because they were considered the “right” whale to hunt because, once killed, their bodies would float — came up to the boat. One swam alongside our non-motoring vessel for a good two minutes, on its side, an enormous eye checking us out as we all bent over to get a look. Another whale breeched in the near distance. Whales circled us for a good 15 minutes. I was in a state of awe: How could a creature so massive, so beautiful, so obviously intelligent actually exist? I felt so tiny, so inconsequential. On the ride back to land, I realized what a fortunate life I lived, to be able to experience a live whale, in a way most people haven’t. And I couldn’t believe that an intelligent animal killed in such great numbers by humans would still interact with us, and decide not to steer clear.

Since then, whales have been a big love of mine. That’s why when I hear, or see, anything about whales, I stop and listen or watch. And just the other day, I found this: Down in the Antarctic, Japanese whaling vessels have been battling it out with Bob Barker.  No, not the former “The Price is Right” host, but a ship named after him, that’s part of a fleet of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, which exists to protect marine life. Bob Barker has been rammed; water cannons have been fired from ship to ship. And, while most of us live our lives up here, down in the cold oceans near the South Pole, a battle wages for the lives of whales.

Say what you will about the society’s leader, Paul Watson, and his tactics, his organization makes it hard to ignore the reality of whales, the giants that exist in the watery sphere of our planet. And it’s hard for me to fault him too aggressively when I remember gazing into that whale’s eye and witnessing the worlds I saw contained within.

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Ms Smith goes to Washington (State, that is)

Posted: Jan. 27th, 2010

Years ago, I used to live on Cape Cod — Wellfleet, to be specific — on Long Pond Road. Stuck back in the woods, a mile from the highway, Route 6, the house overlooked Long Pond, a gorgeous body of water. A man named Philip owned the house and I lived upstairs.

Philip, who had worked for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, seemed to know everyone. And if he didn’t, he’d probably been around him or her. As proof, he had, in his study, a photo of him at a concert somewhere, standing off to the side, while in the foreground the rocker Patti Smith was in the process of smashing a chair to smithereens by hurling it to the ground. Watching the whole thing go down, Philip had a little smile on his face.

I loved that picture. Oh, did I love it. Looking at it, I always thought, Wow, she’s awesome. And, Damn, I want to meet Patti Smith.

I thought that in 97-98. Now, it’s 2010 and, somehow, that thought came true.

Just this past week, on Jan. 25, Patti Smith came to Seattle, to give a reading from her new book, “Just Kids,” about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. (Yep, him, the photog who took some unapologetically S&M-themed queer pix that drove Sen. Jesse Helms batty.) I’d contacted Seattle Arts and Lectures, to see if I could interview her. Unfortunately, she was too busy. But, I was asked, what about attending a champagne toast with Patti? I would have been a fool to say no. So I didn’t.

And let me tell you: Patti is just about the sweetest person you’d ever wanna meet. She walked right up to me, all nonchalant, and said, “Hi, my name’s Patti.” Like she needed an introduction. Then she posed for pix with me — and everyone else there — and, when she found out I worked for Real Change, she said, “The homeless, they’re our people.”

She went on stage a short while later, read from “Just Kids” (which, I gotta say, sounds great), did a Q-n-A with rock journalist Charles R. Cross, then sang. And since she can only play six chords on the gee-tar (?!?!), she led the audience in a rousing a cappella version of “Because the Night.”

And seeing her, listening to her, it was hard not to feel that the does indeed belong to us. All of us.

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