The House That Occupy Built

The House That Occupy Built

A Better Bet Than the Lottery

by Craig Boehman

Leading up to the March 30, 2012 drawing, Americans spent a record $1.5 billion on lottery tickets for the last Mega Millions jackpot – at odds over 175 million-to-one. Purchases of 60 tickets and more shouldn't raise any eyebrows considering the media buzz about the colossal $640 million payout. When the smoke finally cleared and one-and-a-half billion dollars vanished from peoples' pockets, lottery officials announced there were three winning tickets eligible to split the pre-tax prize of $213 million each. What wasn't widely announced were the 100 million or so people who lost out on at least one dollar in this lousy economy. Not a big deal if you only bought a single ticket. Or five. Or ten. Then there were those who were driven out of desperation, excitement, greed, fantasy, and who knows what else – and spent a lot more than they should have at such astronomical odds and wound up with nothing to show for it except some short-lived excitement and the better-luck-next-time consolation prize.

In other words, they threw their money away.

Image used by permission

We're supposed to feel good about our states receiving a little extra revenue at a time when Republicans and Democrats alike are faced with Greek-like austerity measures in their home states. One safe bet is that no Mega Millions lottery is going remedy our namby-pamby politicians until they're reconciled with the people who elected them. And the Occupy movement is wagering that the people will learn to stand up for themselves and demand that their politicians tax American companies on the same basis as the 'people' that the Supreme Court adjudicated them to be. No amount of lottery spoils furnished to our government could compare to the 'megabucks' robbed from state and federal budgets by these tax-dodging corporations.

Companies like G.E., who in 2010 made $5.1 billion in profits based on US operations. They paid zero in taxes. Not only were they graciously exempted by our elected officials, but they received a tax benefit of $3.2 billion to sweeten the ever sweeter pot. And thirty “large” corporations paid more to lobbyists in 2011 while paying nothing in taxes whatsoever.

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Corporate tax reform would be a good place to start. Creating a trio of multimillionaires overnight straight from the pockets of millions of struggling and have-nots only validates American disparity and further serves the agendas of the 1% by creating envy for an elitist culture that enjoys all the benefits (and more) of being American without having to foot the bill like the rest of us. Maybe our corporate neighbors haven't noticed but we have streets to maintain, hospitals to staff, schools to educate, police and fire departments to fund, and public utilities like water, sewer, and power to provide to a deserving public. Deserving, because these are the same people that corporations hire to work for them in order to turn a profit. And without the 99%, they would be nothing.

Another sure bet – apart from not winning the lottery jackpot each week – is that you probably have no say in who your squandered money will benefit. And maybe you don't care. Odds are good though that your money won't be going to the vacant house across the street that is driving down your property value (I'll talk more about the very house I'm betting on in a moment). According to the Mega Millions website, approximately 50% of every dollar wagered goes to player prizes; 35% goes to government services in member states; and about 15% goes to retailer commissions and lottery operating costs. So if you were unfortunate enough to lose again this week on the lottery, take comfort that at least 50% of the money didn't go to the prize winners you now secretly hate when you see them talking about how they plan on spending all that money – now that they're way richer than the woman who sued Bloomberg for sexual harassment.

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Bloomberg's nemeses in the Occupy Wall Street movement champion far more worthy goals than the lousy pipe dream of winning the lottery. Many groups within Occupy, including activist groups who have been fighting the good fight before Occupy got its start, are working hard to patch up the holes kicked into peoples' lives by the 1%. They're doing it by halting bank foreclosures. They're doing it by getting families back into their homes after they were illegally seized by the banks during the 2011 robo-signing scandal. They're doing it by finding new homes for their fellow neighbors whose mortgage payments ballooned out of control in a crisis created not by the irresponsibility of the 99%, but by the unrepentant greed of the 1%.

And things aren't looking any brighter for those still struggling to stay out of foreclosure. Mark Seifert, executive director of Empowering & Strengthening Ohio's People, was recently quoted in a Reuters piece, “We are right back where we were two years ago. I would put money on 2012 being a bigger year for foreclosures than 2010.”

Time to place your bets. 

Chris Phillips of Buffalo, New York, and fellow activists want to do more than feed and shelter the homeless. They want to build a community. “Hopefully [this will be] Occupy's first official 'Cooperative Community Center' anywhere,” he said. “We envision a safe space for people of all religions and colors, orientations and ideologies, to commune in peace. A place with organic urban farming, classes and tutoring, good food, and of course, all sorts of direct actions and organizing.”

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The house that Occupy Western New York wants to build is located at 1370 Michigan Avenue in the East Side of Buffalo. They are raising the necessary cash on the fundraising site,We Pay. As of this writing, the group has collected $638 of the projected $10,000 needed in order to renovate the site and create a cooperative community center. And they need more help from us if they're ever going to host an open house.

If you're playing the odds, your otherwise lost money would reap more benefits for a community project like this, especially since a lot of the hard work has already been done, including a meeting with the City of Buffalo about plans for the site. According to Occupy Western New York's March 30^th press release:

“Four members of Occupy Western New York sat down with Council Member Pridgen last Friday to discuss having 1370 Michigan Avenue gifted to the community for the purpose of it becoming a Cooperative Community Center. OWNY showed him pictures of 3 tons of garbage that had accumulated over decades and how they had removed it completely.”

Three tons of garbage were removed before they ever begun the fund-raising. That's the kind of audacity you want to see from a team of organizers before you bet $100 on the cause.

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The project got its start with an invitation to move into the house and an offer to take care of the necessary electrical, plumbing, and carpentry by a local community group which asked to be unnamed. Occupy Western New York also secured pledges of support from Buffalo ReUse, a regional favorite for green renovation, and Zee's Property Services.

“So essentially the house is now prepped for big repairs, “ Phillips said. “We painted a good portion of it and removed all garbage off the site. Then we moved to build the renovation team and sat down with Buffalo Common Council Members to earn their support. We knew that if we could win the right Council Member we could have the property gifted to the community for whatever purpose everyone got behind.”

Speaking as an admin for one of the larger Occupy Wall Street pages on Facebook, I have observed that critics of the Occupy movement routinely insult protesters for just 'camping out' and having accomplished nothing, among other things. This line of rhetoric presupposes that we lack leadership or some charismatic, all-unifying leader who needs to step up to the plate and knock one out of Zuccotti Park. What I point out to some of the naysayers is that yes, there are people in this country who still believe in the right to assemble and protest. Free speech isn't dead. And I believe history will look kindly on those who helped organize and take a stand in the inaugural occupation on September 17, 2011. Just as the Arab Spring inspired the Occupy movement, the peoples' rising in New York City served as inspiration for the foundation of hundreds of additional occupations across the country and the world.

So who needs a leader? Why not take it upon ourselves to organize and make our own decisions? But the process of participatory democracy requires just that: participation. Your participation. My participation. Our participation. If you're waiting for a leader, you'll be waiting the rest of your life. You won't find collective leadership in the Democrat and Republican parties – and that's why we're here. Both parties threw us to the jackals on Wall Street. Look no further than to each other for leadership and support for rebuilding community.

Reaching out to local government can sometimes be a helpful place to start.

“We sat down with three of the nine Council Members before we sat down with Darius Pridgen, the representative for the district that our house is in. Mr. Pridgen is also a pastor at a local Baptist church and loved the idea so much he pledged $1,000 to pay for legal fees attached to filing for the 501c3 Cooperative Association status we voted on,” said Phillips.

Image used by permission

Occupy Western New York have aspirations for transforming other such homes in Buffalo once they successfully complete their first official Cooperative Community Center. Their vision for what these new additions to their community could be utilized for beyond their initial functions is only limited by the talent and efforts of those who choose to participate in building the world they want to live in. Phillips said that they see great potential for green implementation, from solar cell research to greenhouse operations to raise food. Repurposed materials would also play a defining role in what the group does in addition to composting and ninja-gardening. For a group whose rallying theme has been centered on the housing and foreclosure crisis, direct action has become the method of choice to protest the transgressions of the 1% as well as an ethos to live by.

My money is on those in the Occupy movement and the many activist groups and individuals dedicated to the people who live on this planet. I won't waste my money on the lottery. Alternatively, I have pledged to give a few bucks every week or so until Occupy Western New York gets their cooperative community center built. I sure hope some of you will join me and others who have already contributed.

We need to do more than vote. Those who seek power have only proven over time that their words are as shallow as their pockets are deep with corporate money. If we were to judge the words of our politicians during the last forty years, we would probably conclude that they carry no 'currency' but for the untold billions siphoned off the public and funneled into vaults of their corporate financiers. It's up to us. Not some other 'us' in the future, but the us of now. 

“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” -Albert Camus

Please consider donating to Help Build a Cooperative Community Center

Stop by and visit Occupy Western New York

"The House That Occupy Built" by Craig Boehman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. 

You are free to copy and distribute work without permission. 

The India Cliché: And the Dance of Poetry and Music

Image by Craig Boehman

The India Cliché

And the Dance of Poetry and Music

by Craig Boehman

I recently saw the 2010 movie, Eat Pray Love, a vapid, PG-13 rated drama-romance hybrid directed by Ryan Murphy and starring Julia Roberts. I don't care to waste any time discussing this cinematic piece of mediocrity, only to say that the plot touches on an irksome cliché which paints India as a purely spiritual land, a place of prayer, meditation, contemplation – and perhaps good for little else. India was where the recently divorced Julia Roberts character came to “pray” before picking up her trifecta in Mali.

What you see perpetrated by this cliché is the idea that India is a spiritual panacea by which one will discover some final state of peace and balance, or spiritual enlightenment, god, etc. The cliché suggests that India is a magical land, full of holy men and gurus anxiously awaiting the arrival of any uninitiated Caucasian embarking on his or her personal vision quest. It's both a pity and a shame that such shallow views on India persist and are further fictionalized by Hollywood in this manner. Or at least that people appear to believe them. A subset of our cliché could be that Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book is an accurate portrayal of 21^st Century life in the modern state of India, or that her streets are full of snake charmers and fire breathers; that there's an elephant behind every corner and tigers crouching in wait for unsuspecting tourists wearing safari hats with pet monkeys on rent for the day from a turbaned Sikh named Habib Talib, who also sells tours to the Himalayas for the chance to meet an old, purple-bearded, eccentric guru who will show you how to levitate five feet above a bed of hot coals for 100 rupees.

Since millions of Americans can't locate the United States on a map, perhaps I should learn to live with this cliché as I do with the rest of them. But would it be asking too much to see more Americans travel outside of their country and learn their geography and experience other cultures firsthand instead of watching crappy movies about it? Would it kill anyone to put down their dumb-phones and pick up a book or one of the overpriced digital readers requiring a monthly subscription with digital copies costing the same as their paperback counterparts?

Image by Craig Boehman

I just returned from my first fantastic trip to India. And just as there's more to Italy than her food, more to Mali than her love, there's a hell of a lot more to India than her spirituality. And India would give Italy a run for its money on cuisine any day of the week. And Mali has nothing on the Bengali girl I plan on marrying!

I'll quit referring to this India cliché as a cliché for the duration of this piece as I've reached the maximum number of accent marks I allow myself before I'm overwhelmed by precocity. But because this 'folly' is so common to the human experience somebody decided to write it down as proverb to warn us. The grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Let's call it the Grass is Greener Syndrome, or GIGS. I like acronyms. I was highly considering 'IGIGS' to further categorize it as an Indian strain, to be written out as 'iGIGS' on purely stylistic grounds – but I do fear lawsuits from companies with recently deceased CEOs looking for a little more cash flow and getting a bad rap for using slave labor (and children, too) in China to make their “cheap” smartphones. So I will leave the 'I' capitalized as nature intended.

Hotel Amjadia, present day
Ginsberg stayed in the upper right corner room
Image by Craig Boehman

The origin IGIGS, at least in modern Western culture, probably owes its existence to a 1968 visit to India by the Beatles (along with other musical acts like the Beach Boys and Donovan) to practice Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. This widely publicized event gained global attention and greatly overshadowed the poet Allen Ginsberg's visit there in 1962, where he traveled extensively in search of a spiritual teacher and took up residence in Calcutta for a few months at the now defunct Hotel Amjadia (pictured left). Despite a mixed response as to whether Ginsberg had found any such teacher during his trip in a 1994 interview by Suranjan Ganguly, what Ginsberg took away from India in regards to the craft of poetry could arguably have had a positive influence on the popularity of spoken word poetry and the poets who utilized music in their recordings and performances in the United States.

Ganguly: All this was 30 years ago. What did India give you that has mattered most, that has stayed with you and will always be there?

Ginsberg: The Indian influence was first of all on the voice itself and on the notion of poetry and music coming together. Pound had revived that notion and shown how far the ancient Greek poets song and poetry were one, even one with dance. The Greek choruses sang and danced and chanted, and Homer and Sappho sang with a five-stringed lyre. So India helped me to rediscover that relationship between poetry and song.

Could we say that Ginsberg was looking for greener grass? Maybe if it was marijuana. But it cannot be said that Ginsberg prepared for his trip lightly or without great interest of the prevailing culture.

“I really didn't know what to ask for,” says Ginsberg, “but I had the idea of going there to look for a teacher. That was definitely the purpose. I had read the Bhagavad Gita and Ramakrishna's Table Talk, the Tibetan Book of the Dead and a lot of Buddhist writing.”

The idea to visit India certainly wasn't whimsical or spur of the moment for Ginsberg. He continues in the interview, “I had some idea of yoga but not much. Actually, when I was twelve years old I heard an American give a lecture on yoga in Patterson, New Jersey. That always intrigued me and it's still vivid in my mind. I had read some Krishnamurthy, some saint poetry, some Yogananda, a little of the Mahabharata, some of the Vedas, and translations by Isherwood and Prabhavananda of the Upanishads. I had also read Lin Yu Tang's Wisdom of the East. Then on the ship I read A Passage to India and Kim, the Jataka tales and some Ramayana.”

The effect India had on Ginsberg, and by the weight of his own influence on poets of his time, we can see the entanglement of music with poetry in the decades to come. Whether we garnish Ginsberg with more accolades above and beyond an honorable mention for the resulting spoken word/music boom is open for debate.

In the late 80s and early 90s “spoken word” albums featuring Allen Ginsberg and other beat poets like William S. Burroughs, hit the marketplace and inspired a new generation of poets who may not have familiar with these living legends. Their elephantine volumes of poetry, prose, and letters aside, it was possible for a new generation of fans to hear these great cultural icons without ever having to pick up one of their books – not necessarily a crime if we keep Ginsberg's Indian account in mind. Needless to say, the popularity Ginsberg enjoyed made collaborations with musical superstars like Paul McCartney, friend and mutual fan, inevitable. Both performed together on Ginsberg's poem, “The Ballad of the Skeletons” during Ginsberg's reading at the Royal Albert Hall on October 16, 1995.

One of the great examples of the marriage between music and poetry arrived with Brooklyn-born poet, John S. Hall, whose deadpan delivery of absurdist narratives were often dark but humorous. In the mid-1980s he formed the band King Missile. The concept came about when Hall decided he needed musical accompaniment to liven up his poetry readings. From this incarnation came chart modest success while signed with Atlantic Records, most notably with the track, “Detachable Penis”. Ironically but all too commonly, success spelled the end for the project when future efforts proved to be too uncommercial for Atlantic. But what Hall accomplished was much more spectacular than any rise and fall story could convey. Hall and company managed to get poetry airplay on MTV and FM radio along side more popular songs during the grunge music explosion in Seattle. I'm talking about poetry alongside the music of iconic bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and Alice in Chains, as well as the plethora of bands that would later gain commercial notoriety. You wouldn't be hearing much else on major radio stations other than Detachable Penis, but on college radio stations you could hear King Missile classics like “Jesus Was Way Cool”, “Martin Scorsese”, “Take Stuff From Work” and “My Heart Is a Flower”. I haven't seen a poet pull off a poetically musical coup like this before or ever since.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Churning on this high tide of poetry came musicians like Henry Rollins in the early 90s, who spoke out from the music world lending his talents to the spoken word scene. As the singer for a hard rock acts such as Black Flag and Rollins Band, he didn't come from a poet's background per se, but his personal narratives of his life, his commentaries on everything from the poetry of moody teens to his hatred of rave music, often poetically expressed in explosive yet entertaining diatribes, nevertheless made everyone take notice much in the way that Bukowski won over certain fans who believed all poets were a bunch of “sissies”. Certainly no one would think this of the take-no-shit Rollins – or at least dare to say it to his face. Rollins toured extensively with his spoken word act for many years having found an audience willing to pay to see what their rocker had to say unaccompanied. He also gained fans who had never really been fans of his music prior to hearing him speak, including Yours Truly.

What I propose here is not a direct correlation of cause and effect between an event that occurred between 1962-63 – Allen Ginsberg's visit to India – and the spoken word/music scene that followed much later. To prove such a claim would be nearly impossible, and to miss the point entirely. But what you will find, if you look close enough, is the influence Ginsberg had on the world of poetry and music alike and to a much broader culture that these arts tend to impress. [Johnn Depp on Ginsberg] [Hunter S. Thompson] [Beck] [Patti Smith] [Abbie Hoffman] [Bono] [Dick Cavett]

Maybe Deepak Chopra was right: “We're living in a time when the world has suddenly discovered India because it's run out of raw material for its imagination. The raw materials for the imagination are inexhaustible here.”

Spoken Word from "Wolf Gin Sonnets"

I'm always looking for music to set my poetry to. If you are interested in collaborating via Creative Commons, let's see what we can do! Send your music below.

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"Shala (School)" Soundtrack Now Available for Download

Boatmen of the Ganges

Embarking into the realm of digital art here. I snapped the original photo on the banks of the Ganges River in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) a couple weeks ago. I used GIMP software to manipulate the original image. 

Boatmen of the Ganges, copyright 2012 by Craig Boehman