Entirely Too Many Art History Majors in this Agroforestry Program

One drunken night in beautiful Limbe, a friend and I spent the evening playing the Super Mario Brothers pinball machine (You gotta get a Yoshi!). The bartender there, a young wiry Cameroonian with the ropy muscles of a parkboy, looked sullen and angry, slinging Mutzigs and Castels. By the end of the night we were the only ones in the off-license and we struck up a conversation with the guy. He was in his early twenties and had graduated from the University of Yaounde two years earlier, with a B.S. in Chemistry. And he was serving bottles at his father's off-license. He was angry about this, fuming about the state of Cameroon. Here he was with a very marketable degree, and he couldn't get a job. Kevin and I were both science teachers, sent to this equatorial African country to fill a gaping hole in it's academic structure. We knew this, of course, but the irony was not lost on our educated bartending friend, either. It was the first time in my two years as a volunteer that someone had laid it out quite like that. Could they truly not find anyone to teach middle school biology and physics in Mamfe? Was a washed-up, thirty year old hospital orderly from Virginia the best they could do? Did they really need to recruit a twenty-two year old fine arts major to help with developing fish ponds? Did any of it make any sense?

Apparently, I spearheaded the construction of a health center in a small village towards Nigeria. I use "spearheaded" in it's utilitarian sense: the sharpened edge enters the flesh, the prey breathes its last, and all is done. All I did was sign a paper. That was my first and last involvement with it. The rest of my days I spent riding my bike back and forth to school, teaching for a couple of hours and then coming home and napping. If I could have changed Mamfe through early afternoon naps, everyone would have had a TV and extra children to plow the fields. (Under the supervision of a twenty-three year old pottery major from a small private school in the mountains of Vermont, of course.)

I read Robert L. Strauss's op-ed piece for The New York Times in the midst of finishing Oracle Bones by Thomas Heller and at the cusp of beginning The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa by Josh Swiller. Strauss, a former Country Director for Peace Corps Cameroon; Heller, a RPCV from China who now works as a freelance writer out of Beijing; and Swiller, a RPCV from Zambia, whose book is the closest to being an out-and-out Peace Corps memoir, all have something interesting to say about the United States foray into international development, some of it enlightening, disturbing, amusing, but all of it, ultimately, familiar to any who have taken that plunge.

With that being said, I have chosen a rather juicy bit from Strauss's article to work things up a bit. In the immortal words of Homer Simpson- and far be it from me to start inserting Simpson's analogies into my writing- "it's funny 'cuz it's true":

I wrote to our headquarters in Washington to ask if anyone had considered how an American farmer would feel if a fresh-out-of-college Cameroonian with a liberal arts degree who had occasionally visited Grandma's cassava plot were sent to Iowa to consult on pig-raising techniques learned in a three-month crash course. I'm pretty sure the American farmer would see it as a publicity stunt and a bunch of hooey, but I never heard back from headquarters.

For the Peace Corps, the number of volunteers has always trumped the quality of their work, perhaps because the agency fears that an objective assessment of its impact would reveal that while volunteers generate goodwill for the United States, they do little or nothing to actually aid development in poor countries.

Whether you agree with him or not- and his argument is full of holes readily available for the filling- he does have a point. I had a job in Cameroon as a teacher, but just as I am today, I was a lazy teacher. I showed up late and left early. I did what I had to do and got back to busying myself with Piskops two other goals: drinking and dancing. I have never danced more in my entire life than I did in those two years. It seemed like I danced everywhere. "I say mammi," I would yell as I entered the chophouse down the street. "Gimme rice for one hundred and beans for fitty! And put on that Petit Pays. I want fo dance!". And then we would shuffle slowly to the sounds of makossa. Dancing everywhere. I was sick like that.

In The Unheard, Josh Swiller has a Peace Corps experience much like those of volunteers in Cameroon. For two years, he made a valiant effort, but in the end, had nothing to show for it. He was sent to a small town in Zambia to dig wells, but he was unsuccessful. Instead, he spent his days weighing babies and bandaging up sores at the local health clinic. He tried to construct a new health clinic, even to the point of obtaining the funds through USAIDs, but the project ran into typically African stalemating. Oh, and he was deaf. Without his hearing aids, he was profoundly deaf. He could hear with the aids, but they still had their limitations. He needed to see the speaker's lips and the speaker needed to speak clear. This he found in Mununga, the village he lived in, from the locals- that stilted, purposeful special English that seems to roll off the lips of Afircans. In loud situations, bars, parties, get-togethers, the background noise would prove too much.

The interesting thing about The Unheard is the book never becomes about his deafness. While this was an integral part of his experience there- in an NPR interview, Josh Swiller mentions that his deafness may have been the cause of a lot of the problems he ended up having- he never seems to dwell on it much. And this is good. The story by itself- even to a person who can hear perfectlly well- is a Peace Corps experience that seems to dwarf those of other volunteers. He has a lot of stories to tell. But, again, just as Louis L. Strauss said, Josh doesn't have much to show for his two years in Zambia.

His PC service was unique. They were the first group back to Zambia in many, many years. He saw a lot of incredibly violent, ugly stuff and was at the dangerous end of quite a few scuffles. I read the book in three days. The only issue I have with the novel- and I have this with a lot of memoirs that I read- is that it is rather flippantly written. The actions in the book sometime veer toward quirky drama, a la Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris. I realize that this is popular writing now. It sells books and it's easy to read. Sometimes, though, I think the story deserves more integrity in the writing style. But what do I know. When I looked up the book on Amazon, 37 people had given the book 5 stars, none lower. So I could just be a curmudgeon. (NOTE: This is exactly why I am looking forward to going back to Cameroon. I spend entirely too much time seeing how people rank things. I'm at the point now where I could, literally, write a two-star book and know exactly what I need to make it a three-star book. Likewise for food. I will search out the four-star burger for under ten bucks. Not the three star one. Sigh. Where would we be without our ability to quantify things.)

As for Oracle Bones, there is something to be said for total immersion. Peace Corps is one thing: at it's basest level it's simply an alternative to grad school. It's another thing to go to your country of posting and never leave, which is what Peter Hessler did. He was in Peace Corps as an English teacher in a remote village in China, but parlayed his stay into copy filing for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, where he began writing about China. In much the same way the Aidian Hartley's Zanzibar Chest was a harrowing story about Africa that revolved around a simple chest that his father had left him, Hesseler's novel spins around the ancient oracle bones, inscripted turtle shells that were used by priests to predict the future. The inscriptions were simple and telling: There will be no disasters for the next ten days. Hesseler's book follows the story of some of his former students, as well as a Uighur trader who immigrates to America. In addition, he exhaustively studies not just the history of the oracle bones, but the lives of the scholars and archaeologists who study them. The book is dense and compelling, the writing complex and incisive. The novel is a trenchant work, perhaps one of the best books I've ever read within this genre.

Where Robert L. Strauss was wrong, however, is that an experience in Peace Corps can somehow be quantified by what the volunteers have tangibly given the host countries. Both Hessler and Swiller are both great examples of this. While neither may have built a health-clinic or delivered pre-term babies on the floor of dirty huts, they have used their experience for much, much more. Swiller has brought international recognition to the disability of deafness. Hesseler has dedicated his life and career to looking into the multi-faceted cultures of China, and has continually kept in touch with the students he taught as a volunteer. Whether any of us, as ex-volunteers, left a working farm or a pond full of tilapia, isn't the be all, end all of the experience. What is important is that it hasn't escaped us, that we've channeled that incredible journey into something positive and something that helps others "develop". I wouldn't have become a teacher had I not joined Peace Corps. Does that mean my experience was ineffective there? Doesn't the fact that I- like many RPCVs-have dedicated my life to working in some of the worse schools of New York City (a level of education, quite literally, on par with a government high school in Cameroon) count for something? Of course it does.

In the end Peace Corps will continue sending fresh new faces to foreign countries. And many of them will flounder around doing nothing, filled with good intentions that will never get beyond the letters home. But the experience, for most people I know, doesn't end when you get on that plane for the last time. In fact, it's just beginning.


Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler My Grade: A

The Unheard: A Memoir of Deafness and Africa, by Josh Swiller My Grade: B

Song Analysis: "It's Only a Paper Moon".

"It's Only a Paper Moon" was written in 1933 by Harold Arlen (music) and E.Y. Harburg (lyrics). Both were probably most famous for having written "Over the Rainbow".  The song was originally written for a Broadway play that went nowhere, and Harburg was asked specifically to write the song from the point of view of a Coney Island street vendor.  The song has been covered numerous times, and its structure embellished in someways to the point where the main melodic theme is virtually unrecognizable.  That being said, the melody carries itself, not leaving entirely too much room for vocal interpretation, which probably isn't necessary for a song whose lyrics are deceptively obtuse when juxtaposed against the major key bounce of the music:  the world is a facade, an oppressive, fake place and only another person's love would make it feel real.  Pretty kick ass for pre-WWII America.

 The version the jazz band I've been honored enough to sing with follows is the Paul McCartney one from the 2012 "Kisses on the Bottom" album.  I could spend an entire entry on what it means when a former Beatle decides to record an album worth of jazz standards and name it "Kisses on the Bottom," as the concept itself makes me want to throw up in my mouth a little bit, but I won't.  What I will say is that McCartney's gentle, unassuming voice lends itself well to interpreting the song.  There's a little call-and-response he has during the B-section with the clarinet, that we've attempted to emulate with the band, but I can't whistle, so I whip out my falsetto, which isn't always dependable.  But there's a potential there for a little loose improvising, which I dig.

It wouldn't be hard to convince me that there are probably a hundred more genuine versions of "Paper Moon" than McCartney's, but it is true to the song, and the arrangement is pretty tasteful and straight forward.

Then again, there's always Lester Young in 1946.  Post World War II, having been kicked out of the army because he was caught on base with dope and booze, Young played a smooth, swaying tenor saxophone and, of all the versions I've listened to, this seems to be the only one that adds some sort of edge to the song.  The melody floats along like a seagull over a (cardboard) sea, in and out, and at times seems a bit explosive.  It's, by far, my favorite version.







Shoot me, but I've never been able to really 'get' Nat King Cole.  Like most of the crooners in the '40s and '50s, he covered about every jazz standard every written.  His voice is pleasant, non-threatening, smooth and predictable, and I mean this in the nicest way.  He is good with the pacing and phrasing and this version of the song- a live, color version of a 1963 for-TV performance is pretty hot, especially the musical interlude after the first two verses, some great, laid back guitar work.  You can view the entire concert on YouTube.





Of course, the coup de grace of all "It's Only a Paper Moon" covers would be James Darren's very special version recorded especially for an episode of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" during the show's seventh season.  The scene prominently featured Quark's Bar, run by a typically business savvy Ferengi- these were the short characters with bulbous, silly putty like heads.  I especially admire how Quark has fallen to the irresistible jazz graces of James Darrens' swagger.

"It's Only a Paper Moon," indeed.  Even in space, you still need love to realize that some things are still, very much real.




In the end, I sing the song very true to the original melody.  It isn't the most challenging, or exciting song to sing, but I really do like the lyrics, and the bridge leaves a little room for creativity, which I hope to work out eventually.

Improving the Jazz Vocabulary, Part 2

Fred Astaire:  "Steppin' Out: Astaire Sings"

Pat Metheny Group: "The Way Up"

Return to Forever: "Light as a Feather"

Thelonious Monk: "Brilliant Corners"

Jose James:  "No Beginning, No End"

Gregory Porter: "Be Good"

Improving The Jazz Vocabulary

I started sitting in with a jazz band that does a lot of standards. It's a really new, invigorating approach to singing for me, and I feel it is actually more in tune with the tone of my voice than the funk/R&B stuff I'm doing with my other band. Plus it is exciting to be able to start digging into a genre I've all but ignored the past two decades. I've done a bit of research and so far have obtained the following albums:

Miles Davis: "Kind of Blue".

Duh.  Where else are you supposed to start?

The Dave Brubeck Quartet:  "Time Out"

I could say the same about this album.  "Take Five" has become such part and parcel of not just jazz culture, but pop culture as well, that it is easy to be dismissive of it sometimes.  I'm trying convince the jazz band I sit in with to cover it.

Charles Mingus: "Ah Um"

There was a time, a couple of decades ago, when me and my roommate were really getting into jazz. We'd sit around in the laundry room doing shots of potato vodka and listen to "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" by Mingus, which was my favorite jazz recording at the time.  I opted for "Ah Um" because it seemed to be the most commonly referenced Mingus album when it came to identifying his 'best'.  It's propulsive, melodic, loose and groovy.  Any album that starts with a tune called "Better Git it in Your Soul" is going to be a beast.

John Coltrane: "Blue Train"

These first four albums are monsters.  I'm pretty intimately familiar with "A Love Supreme", but wanted to start with an album that might be more 'traditional' in a sense, as opposed to the spaces Coltrane took with 'Supreme'.  

Sarah Vaughan w/Clifford Brown

Here's something I can speak about with a modicum of authority: singing.  And, man, nobody could sing like Sarah Vaughan.  The way her voice moves from one octave to another is effortless and breathy. Stunning.

My Top Five Songs of 2013 Because It is Important

5. Courtney Barnett "Avant Gardener"

If you're a girl, this song should just make you want to punch people in the face out of a strange mixture of awesomeness and frustration.  And I would encourage all of the kids at IST to embrace that type of energy.  This song has inhalers, paramedics, hypochondria, and a chorus that says this: "I'm not that good at breathing in.". And really, who is?  (I mean, except when you are ready to destroy an IA. Sigh.)

 

4. Ashley Monroe (w/Blake Shelton) "You Ain't Dolly"

As usual, country music had a very strong crop of female country singers come out and lay down examples of what this type of music really means.  "Like a Rose" is the best country album of the year. Every song is an example of the poignancy and craftsmanship that goes into writing tunes that will weather the the test of time, much less the fathoms of water that lies between the cultures of this world. Because sometimes all you need for validation is for someone to start line dancing in China to your song.

And how awesome is that?




 3. Lorde "Royals"

Thank you mother of the girl who calls her self Lorde. You did something right. Not only did your 16-year old (??????) daughter put out one of the best singles of 2013, her album was also one of the best. A teen-ager who can make something that actually resonates with what it means to be a teen? I don't know. We might have to wait for that. Until, then "Royals" will have to do the ass-kicking. And if you can write a song that can be parodied in a way that makes both the parody and the original two sides of one coin? Well done.

 

2. Daft Punk "Get Loschi"

Oh, Daft Punk. I remember hearing Blind Melon fifteen years before their first single "Never Heard It From a Blind Man" came out. And "Get Lucky" reminded me of that. For about 37 hours I played this song, and everyone was, like, "THIS IS MANNA FROM HEAVEN OH MY GOD PLEASE PINCH ME BECAUSE THIS ISN'T REAL and so on". This song is pop genius, and the guitar is brilliant, and if I never, ever, ever, ever hear it again?

Oh, I'm okay with that.  I'm really, really okay.


.


1. Parquet Courts "Stoned and Starving"

If I had kids whom I had taught guitar come to me and say, "Mr. Loschi, look at we just did!" and show me this video, I would just go ahead and die. Great version of a fanastic, inspiring, youthful, anthemic, ode to weekday afternoons of nothingness in the outer bouroughs. Sigh. I miss that stuff. This is AWESOME.  There is no end to what you can weasel out of this glorious instrument.  Rock on and happy New Year!!!!  May it be it filled with open chords and impromptu jam sessions.

Malouf's Mountain in Dutchess County, New York 5/24-2/26

In Limbe, a beautiful beach town on the southern coast of Cameroon, the Peace Corps volutneers had a house at the top of a hill. The view was astounding- you could see the Atlantic Ocean unfolding from the burning fires of the town, the Equatorial Guinea capital off the coast. Mt. Cameroon was behind us. At night, the bats would dive bomb through the sky. It was a great place to be barefoot, clean and half-drunk.

On the flipside, there was a long, arduous hill you had to climb in order to get the house. Most drivers had no intention of managing the hill and it wasn't uncommon to have someone turn you down, even for a thousand francs, to drive to the top. And at times, when I did convince a driver to do it, I always had this fear of his drive-train being impaled by a ill-placed boulder, ruining his livilhood and casting his family into realms of poverty we can only dream about, causing him to harbor a seething hatred for white-men, which he would eventually channel into a proto-military revolutionary group consisting of marijuana-smokers and child soldiers. They would catch me one day, trying to convince another driver to go up this hill, and they would put me in the center of a pile of tires and set me on fire.

So, more often than not, this paranoia led me to having the driver drop me off at the bottom of the hill for one hundred francs and I would hoof it up. If you did this in pairs or groups, the steepness of the grade rendered all conversation mute. Except for some gutteral comments about the steepness, the climb was made in silence. And once you got to the top, the mere thought of crawling back down again was enough to keep you from leaving.

My wife and I went camping for the first time in years last weekend. The hill leading from the bath house to our campsite was very, very similar to the climb in Limbe, and I couldn't make it without thinking of that trek. Malouf's Mountain is located in Fishkill Ridge, a small group of mountains located in Dutchess County, New York. This is Pete Seeger country, a place where all the locals wear biker t-shirts and have beards and pony tails. Located near the Hudson, it was just recently made part of the Scenic Hudson, which works to protect natural areas in the regions. The unique thing about this campground, however, was it's proximity to the world's greatest city and it's catered philosophy of camping. We took the subway, transferring to the Metro-North at Grand Central Station. After about an hour train ride, we arrived in Beacon, New York. Tracy, a staff member at the park, picked us up in her beat up Corolla. I liked it because it reminded me of delivering pizzas and driving drunk. She dropped us off at a trail-head. She brought our gear up for us, so it was there, at our campsite, when we finished our hike. Hence, the term "catered". There are several hikes you can choose to get to the site. We chose the short one, even though it was early in the day. And it was short: only thirty minutes. A lot of marble and slate, maples and mountain laurels. We saw a nice sized garter snake immediately in the path and the ubiquitous chipmunks, which I'm not used to seeing down south, so they are always interesting. I keep thinking they will talk to me and say something witty, like they do in Disney films. And then we can all sing together.

The sites are on platforms that have tarps and a chow box. The chow box is like a mini-kitchenette. Our site had a tent. We had an endless supply of firewood, which we used quite liberally. I find that nobody in the world likes to start fires more than people who have been holed up in New York City. That first afternoon, we ate hot dogs and beans. When Crissy went to the bathroom, a pretty brutal hike down the side of the mountain, I swear to you I saw something out of the X-Files running up the hill. It was white and made a bee-line straight up the side of the mountain, hit a ridge and then bolted right. It ran like an ostrich, so I know it wasn't a deer, which are common up here. And it couldn't have been a person, but it was big like that. However, it could have been my mind playing tricks on me.




We drank 3/4 of a bottle of Pogue whiskey and wrote songs about insects and ferns. I was excited to use my new sleeping bag and mat. I still need to work on the pillow factor. I usually stuff my stuff-sack for the bag with towels and clothes, but it was disappointing at best. This is a problem I need to fix, along with my shoes (don't have any good ones- I was hiking in my winter boots) and finding pants that fit my skinny ass. My backpack comes with a nice fanny pack, which you wear over your fanny and makes you look completely, utterly stupid, but it was convenient for the short hike we took the next day. We hiked up to the top of the mountain (about 1400 feet), thinking the trail junctioned with another trail, only to find the trail come to a dead-halt. We scrambled up some precariously perched rocks and boulders to try and actually summit the mountain, and we got really close. The top was covered in tough, low-lying brush, so it was impossible to get there. We looked again for the junction, but couldn't find it, and gave up. So we walked back.

The problem with this is that it only took a couple of hours. It is weird being in the woods, in area chockful of trails, and being in the position where you can't find them. I asked a couple of guys later- one of whom said he couldn't find it either- and another who said it was there, for sure. I think we just missed it. We farted around a little longer on another familiar trail, not far from the site, and came back and took a nap.



Malouf's mountain is a catered site. You can order food from them and they will bring it to you. All you have to do is cook it. They pick you up and drop you off at the train station. And they are all very friendly and determined to make this campground a success. It was a good, easy re-introduction into the world of camping and I'm hoping there are more to come.

"Blue Clay People", by William Powers

Plot Synopsis: William Powers scores a position with Catholic Relief Services in Liberia. In charge of allocating money to different programs, Powers runs into problems inherent to international aid. He also breaks up with his American fiance and finds a new Liberian girlfriend. He writes a book about it.

My Two Cents:For a country coming from such dark, dense, violent political upheaval, and it's unique spot in the African continent as a former colony of the U.S.A, for a lack of a better way to put it, "Blue Clay People" can be sometimes surprisingly pithy. The book is an easy read and that's not what I'd expect from a novel about the plight of Liberia. It was interesting reading about the how difficult it was to get anything done over there, but it wasn't interesting reading about his love life. Is the novel about Liberia? Is it about William Powers? Is it about William Power's experience in Liberia? It is more the latter, and while I did not expect a piece of journalistic narrative, a la Aidian Hartley and Howard French, I did want more than the dramatization of a long-distance relationship that was doomed from the start. Anybody over 25 could have told him that. It was equally depressing reading about his relationship with the young Liberian Ciatta. What these asides did was make Powers seem incredibly ill-prepared for the job, as well as unconcerned. He'd have been better off joining the Peace Corps, and writing that memoir. As such, he was put in charge of millions of dollars worth of aid through the Catholic Relief Services. I just don't think he seemed qualified enough to take on that responsibility. With all that being said, it is important that books like this get published, not only to shed light on what is happening in West Africa, but to make us question the various aspects of international aid that sometimes go horribly wrong. As for his love life, hopefully that won't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of African history.

My Grade: C

Neurosis with Mastodon @ the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, Friday, Jan.25th, 2008

The Plot Synopsis: Nuerosis plans a rare show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in Fort Greene, a bit off the beaten path, and adds post-rock addled metal stars Mastodon as a very special guest.

My Two Cents: Usually a town will have one of these buildings and they will be the center of the town. Everyone will know how to navigate based on where they are in relationship with this particular building, usually an old bank or church building. The thing is with New York is that these buildings are everywhere, these just gorgeous feats of architectual integrity, back when it was supposed to be integral to the building of a temple. The structure was incredible, a big open performance space, with a large, seated balcony. The masses in thier black hoodies, noserings and dreadlocks were downstairs in the smoking room, filling the bottom floor with the smell of Brooklyn, circa 1999. The place was not especially laid out for a metal performance, but the shows were okay.

Mastodon sounded a bit muddled. I do appreciate their ability to just attack their instruments with abandonment, to shred me to pieces with fingers that flew up and down the fretboards like pieces of spaghetti. And I especially like hearing the Thin Lizzy/Lynyrd Skynyrd guitar licks fly in there. This was one of the best bands I had ever seen four years ago. They were good tonight, but it was a firmly average show.

Neurosis came on shortly after, sounded much louder and much better. I wasn't as blown away as I was expecting. In fact, my friends split four songs in, but I decided to stay. It got much better and continued to improve, sending me to the schwag table with money to burn, where I bought my own black hoodie, in support of smoking rooms and Masonic Temples.

I staggered out of there, which is what 5 dollar 20-ounce Becks will do to you.

My Grade: C+