vocables

Yeah so i thought i should wait till something genuinely EXCITING happened before indulging myself in correspondence again, but now the accumulating of quite interesting things has built up and i can hold back no longer.

spent thursday and wedensday in LA, that mecca of 'culture', doing the regetns meeting. was a really good experience actually, even though i wasn't too useful. me, erika and mark (the two facilitators of my uc and the bomb class and top people) were the contingent from santa cruz, there were meant to be 2 cars full but lots of poeple pulled out at the last minute. we drove down to santa barbara, passing through the artichoke capital of the world again, where we stopped for burritos. it is crazy taht you can drive an hour away from santa cruz and get out to a completely different vibe- this small town (castroville!) is a farming community, so loads of mexicans and very cheap food. the restaurant we went to was only in spanish, with an old mexican guyu that didn't speak english, we were the only customers, and he made the nicest burritos. delved down to the depths of my memory to remember my basic spanish, and managed to not look silly. 'y burrito supero por favor'

then got to santa barbara and met up with the rest of the group- only about 7 other people- who were busy making paper cranes to represent all the warheads in the US arsenal (10,000). the coordinators, two post-grads who went to santa cruz, have got campaigning down to an art, learnt lots and lots from them, their idea was to disrupt the meeting long enough for the regents not to be able to talk about the nuclear labs they manage and symbolically represent our lack of a voice int he process. so we woke up the next morning at 4.30am with an inspiration message about a lion 'waking up from its slumber', shaking off and going to fight a battle. then we all piled into a van and left for LA. my job was to provide legal observer and media contact outside whilst the rest went in and disrupted till they got arrested. i really wanted to be in there with them, but after the last meeting and pepper spray thing i was warned by the internatinal student office that if i got even cited (the thing 1 below arrested) i would have to get an attorney, which i can't afford, and might get expelled and kicked out of the country, which would not be conducive to stopping nuclear proliferation.

so we got the LA campus, which was tshirt weather even at 730am, prepared and everyone went in. the campus newspaper's headline was of a guy int he ibrary being TASERED by police for not producing the right id!!!http://dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?id=38960 . the most disturbing thing is that i am not particularly surprised anymore by this sort of thing. found the building, i started flyering and petitioning people, but NOONE was interested. people either ignored me completely in a nervous fashion, brushed me off or, after listening to me spieling for a while, just shook their head and walked away. it was pretty frustrating. eventually i liberated a huge poster, wrote on the back, stuck it up outside the building the meeting was being held in with the petition underneath and played mbira and clarinet, hoping that people would be drawn in by that and then sign the petition. it iddn't really work. i got like 10 signatures in about 3 hours. i had been warned that people in LA were colder than here, but it was still surprising. i could almost see the bubble around the people walking past. or smell the fear. and then someone came out and said the disruption had happened, and everyone had been arrested, and then the media came and i did some interviews ( http://dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?id=38998 ) and then we went to a park in beverly hills (!) and had nice food.

it was a really tight crowd of people, dedicated and thoughtful and with a variety of experience. campaigners in america are very america-centred, and when they start tackling international issues they can sometimes come across with a bit too much hyperbole and 'us and them' sort of thing, but they are certainly dedicated. it was also great to be able to get down to the deeper ideological questions with them on the journey, especially seeing as we had all turned up for an action that has a 0.001 chance of ever succeeding, and will take hours and hours to ever get close. so talk of campaign timescales, cooperation vs subversion with authorities, building sustainable movements etc. really interesting stuff. on the way home to santa cruz we stopped at erika's parents house in san luis de bisbo. her mum made us a phat spread, including english cheese and apple stew and ice cream, and i ate quickly and hungrily, safe in the knowledge that that is what we always do in england, so can't be rude :) . so all in all worthwhile, even though i missed quite a key jazz theory class.

we only have 3 weeks of term left, it has gone by so fast, but i think i have achieved quite alot on most fronts, except in terms of forging a good group of friends, but i guess i had to sacrifice something to the music. having said that, i am starting to get to know the crew of my flatmates, who are all nice. on tuesday night at about 10pm i was working hard when suddenly shitloads of people turned up at our house and a spontanious party ensued- it was really great! about 30 people, music making, and i was properly introduced to people by my flatmates as 'the new housemate', which meant i had an easy way to chat to people and everyone liked me, no worries, no noia! great stuff. had some great conversations and now have a base of people i know so i can go to other parties with the housmates. very good. just as i got a bottle of red and started getting myself in for the long party haul some people left and it was reduced to a stoning session, which was ok too. i was jamming with a great piano player who i thought was maybe on coke or soemthing cos he was being well intense, and then he excused himself and i noticed he had blood all round his nostril! i think i kept a straight face. and some mescalin and mushie taking, but i wasn't offered and didjn't really want any. to be fair there were some dicks there, but if they are nice to me i can be nice back. and then last night i went to another party at some beach villa thing, everyone seemed to be into 60s british rock and were a bit disappointed that i wasn't an authority on the topic.

so i am feeling much more upbeat at the moment rather than the last week or so; this time last week i was feelign well shitty. the rain had come with a vengence and reminded me lots and lots of lovely miserable england and all its people and joys. but the sun has come back, at least temporarily, and everything is ok.i think the moment of mental change was when i cooked a huge pot of potato soup, with coconut milk and assorted delicious veggies.

also last week was mine and alice's long procrastinated over open mic appearance- there are several every week but we never manage to coordinate ourselves to be in the same place at the same time to play. anyhow, we played for an hour or so beforehand and alice played me some of her new songs- which are disgustingly catchy and really good quality also- and then we decided on 'like a prayer' by madonna as our finale cover- very exciting. so yeah, we went and i think we ripped it up, alice has got a quality stage presence, even when she is stressed out, and the electric keyboard she was using kept having too much energy running through it and would cut out like 16 bars into every song, so eventually she had to play everything on guitar, but it wasn't too bad. i found myself harmonising higher than alice in like a prayer, harking back to the many years spent singing micheal jackson at st.peters. the crowd went wild. but anyway, met some cool musicians and we are going to try and set up a weekly electric jam on a wednesday, so very worthwhile. directly after there was this guy reading that allen ginsberg poem 'howl', which i thought was going to be great, but he acted out all the lines in quite a chirpy fashion almost lke he was parodying it.

beforehand we went and ate- alice swiped me into the dining hall on her card, cos my 'meal plan' got cancelled when i moved out, so took the opportunity to stock up on munchies- max showed me the excellent 'bagels in the jumper' tecnique, so got two packs of bagels, a fat slop of hummus (with too mcuh garlic in) and about 10 cookies, so well done everyone.

the other big achievement of the week was adding the final plants to full up my allotment, at midnight underneath the full moon with no torch but a wand that reflected the moonlight, and everything seemed alive. the final list of growth is
veggies:
broccoli
spinach (half of which has been eaten by gophers already)
cauliflower
beet-leaves (like beetroot but you eat the leaves)
herbs:
rosemary
thyme
lemongrass
echinasia
chives
oregano
peppermint (which is soooooo cool)
and lavender cotton, which is in the 'misc' corner.

all in a plot about 1 by 3 metres, so it is all packed in, but all good. and some of them i am told grow real quick, and so we will be able to prune and have herbs to cook with soon hopefully.

oh i saw a BRILLIANT FILM last week, dirty pretty things, really one of the best films i have ever seen, set in london, all about two asylum seekers, a nigerian guy who doesn't talk much but is the pillar of strength and righeousness, and a beautiful amelie-like eastern european girl and their stuggle, but it was one of those film that in the beginning is really funny and then suddenly it just gets dark but still is funny when you least expect it. if you haven't seen it, check it out!

the US midterm elections were pretty intense here- apart from voting in or out a generic set of politicians, there are also ltos of propositions all voters have to vote on. the main ones were prop 85, which was trying to make it mandatory for minors to tell their parents if they were getting an abortion, callous 'religious' wank (got defeated after a huge campaign, wey!), putting a huge tax on tabacco (it is dirt cheap here- the same price for 25 grams as it is for 12.5 in england) which also got defeated, a prop to make cannabis the lowest priority of police (so in theory if you were J walking with a fat spliff, they would do you for J walking! it was passed!), and a prop to increase the minimum wage to $925, which was defeated (very shit, that was the most important one in my opinion) and there was a huge campaign saying that local businesses would have to close down, which ws rubbish but seemingly effective.

since i moved in i had been hearing what sounded like walrus's screaming, and one morning last week i went and tried to find out what it was, turns out loads and loads of sealions hang around below the pier at santa cruz (which is a bit like blackpool pier i think, or brighton) and bark and scratch themselves. so now each night when i go outside and smoke i bark back to them.

so anyway after the party last night i had to get up at 730am to go to lawrence livermore national (nuclear) lab, a couple of hours drive away, to see the nuke weapons complex with my own eyes. imagine something between a chemical processing plant and an army barracks. we went into the 'discovery centre', a greenwashed museam type thing to explain all the nice things they do at the labs with the 15% of its money that doesn't got to nuclear weapons reseach. got a tour from this retired engineer who was very ncie but didn't really grasp our more probing questions. he did show is this crazy stuff that looks a bit like a dense spiders web or a bit of hard tiny bubbles, but opaque, that is made up of 99.9% air and the rest silicone, that is has just been invented to trap the dust and substance that a comet or meteorite gives off as it moves, its tail. really cool, i took some just incase i come across a comet. afterwards we got an 'alternative tour' by a lady from a local anti-nuke pressure group, who showed us which building was which etc. the police came almost straigtaway, even though we werne't trespassing or doing anythign wrong, and surrounded our little group while the lady talked.

so now i am home and there is a party here later that i need to be ready for, so going to take a little nap. i don't feel tired but quite giddy so i think it si best.

oh, and if you have a moment, sign the online petition to end the use of depleted uranium in warheads - http://www.icbuw.org/campaign/?id_topic=1&id=1 - the site also has loads of info about all the horrible effects of DU.

i keep thinking about buying a raincoat or something, but then i remember that everything is relative, and that england is bleak and freezing right now, and i will enjoy it more if i can remember how beautiful it is here even when it is a bit cold :) . how is the weather there, and everything else?

desanitization (originally sent 31/10/06)

just done that stupid thing where i have lots of leftover food and decide to cook it all in one go in one pan as an omelette but then there is far too much food and i have to throw some of it away anyway (although at the moment i am just leaving it and hoping i will be hungry again soon)

i hadn't eaten for ages anyway, which always makes me think i can eat more than i can. got called to a surprise (to me) meeting at 8pm just when i was abotu to eat to discuss the next steps for the girl who has got federal charges against her after that demo the other week. as you would imagine, the university bosses are being well underhand and trying to get people to make statements against her, recording conversations with supposed 'impartial advice' people and generally trying to show they are hard nuts and are not going to be compromised by a few smelly anarchists. i didn't really have much to input, what with not knowing anythign about the legal systems here or having any experience of these type of things and how to sort them out. apprently you can ring the 'district administrator' and ask to have charges dropped against someone even if you are only a member of the public. crazy stuff. there seemed to be a bit of an unspoken 'we know none of what we are doing is really going to help, but we have a duty to do it anyway' running through the meeting though, and i didn't feel very energised comng out of it.

during intros in nearly all meetings here they do a 'silly question' or ice breaker or whatever; today it was 'what are you going to be for halloween?'- here some couples go as matching things (!), so someone was going to be a doughnut to someone elses cup of coffee, and another peter pan and wendy. thanks to a random encounter at the weekend i had a solid answer- i am going to be a marine (with full on marine formal dress) with a clowns face and red nose, like in Oh what a Lovely War. originally when this person gave me the marines outfit after i told her i didn't have anything to wear i thought i might put a bullet hole in my head, but i think being a clown face does the same job in a less aggressive way. i am also going to speak in an mid-west american accent for the duration. i hope we get to attend some good parties- someone said today that santa cruz is the halloween capital of the world, so much so that in the downtown area tommorow night any fines you get (for drinking, littering etc) and TREBLED, so you have to pay like $480 if you have an open can on the street!! american capitalism knows no limits.

americans on england:
do you have forests?
does weed exist there?
do all english people drink like tanks?
do you go to france much?
do you like your accent?
"english people make me /think /so much...

so anyway, everything is pretty swell here apart from getting slightly tired of being asked the same things all the time and people pretending to understand what i am saying when they don't. i spent most of the weekend in my allotment, which i am now sharing with a lovely girl called elisa, who shares more than 3 letters with alida, and our plot now consists of

chives
cauliflower (which i thought was brocolli when i planted it)
basil (which actually is looking pretty peaky and yellow already)
peppermint (i was so excited when i realised peppermint is actually a plant)
lavender cotton
spinach

when we first started working we just had a load of weedy, dry, lumpy sandy soil, and the process of converting into a healthy patch was possibly the most enjoyable thing i have done since i got here. it is so peaceful i breathe deeply without even noticing it. also the seeds that lauren gave me have now started to grow a second set of leaves, making them look like green diamonds from above.

you know i was saying how weed was mashing my head? well i think maybe i just had some bad stuff then, because more recently everything has been much morerelaxed, though i must admit i haven't been smoking with random people much since that time. i have been having great times with my Mbira instead though; i now completely get what i read in books last year about how players think the mbira 'teaches them' new patterns and how melodies can be formed from the various harmonics available. i go out after everything is finished for the day (like i will when i finish this email) and smoke and play and my mind wonders off to different things and when i am thinking about bad or frustrating things or things i wish i hadn't done (and maybe this is a sort of paranoia in itself??) i find that the music i am making is similarly restless and it almost feels as if my negative energy is going out through the instrument. i must add a disclaimer to all of the above that maybe this is all just a construct of the cannabis, like the appeal of buckets full of jelly babies.

spent the weekend before this one at an anti-nuke conference in santa barbara, which is just north of Los Angeles. had a really nice time getting to know the people from my UC and the Bomb class who turned from people you see twice a week and debate with to people you can hug and jam with. (the activist crowd here hug quite alot, boys on boys and everything, which is brill but because i have been missing good hugs, but the shift has been so sudden i briefly became really self aware when hugging which was wierd but now it is ok again). the conference itself was really interesting, though i don't feel like we are going to make a dent in the US military juggernaut anytime soon, and i learned a shitload about native american history and their current struggles. it seems like the last big legitimate racism here directed against the native peoples- the pope created the 'doctine of discovery' when cook and others were setting sail around the world, basically saying that it was a good christian's duty to either convert any natives they came across or kill them, or at the very least take their land, and this law was used as recently as 1996 to justify repossession of native american land by the federal government!!! unbelievable. also 70% or all american nuclear waste is currently dumped on native american reservations (cos the peopel can't afford to say no to the money reparations offered cos they are in such a tight fix) etc etc the list is as long as my arm, but got to meet some amazing native american elders who are fighting for their rights and have a chat with them. there is a remote possibility i will be able to visit a reservation at some point and stay with a tribe called the Western Shoshone and do a bit of ethnomusicology fieldwork (:)) but everyone makes promises at conferences that get forgotten i guess, especially big ones.

santa barbara the town and campus is pretty insane. they have automatic paper towel dispensers and urinals that disinfect your piss /as you piss /by releasing blue goo from inside the urinal when your piss lands on it/. /playboy rates it the 4th biggest party campus in USA./ /word on the street is that 1/3 of students have herpes and i heard one guy asking if a girl wanted to sleep in his tent with 'we are in santa barbara after all...'. there are 9 square blocks filled entirely with students, thousands of them, mostly minted, with huge fraternity and sorority houses with their bollocks latin crests painted on the houses. it was the closest i have come to the OC so far. in amongst all this shite though was a 'tent city' in the middle of campus where about 20 people were camping out to protest about 24 families who are being kicked out of their houses to make way for more student accomodation. on the last night me and a few others camped with them in solidarity and had a great jam with this big tall black guy (a rarity on campus) who was rapping about how the last 4 years of his life at uni were so shit and racist and after i was like 'it can't be THAT racist' and he took me to the nearest toilets which had white power slogans and monkey references scrawled all over the cubicle walls. i couldn't believe it. then later, just as i was getting comfy in my sleeping bag at 3am, the guy who gave me tent space was like 'ah, you have rizlas, do you want to go on an adventure?', and he took me on his handlebars to the beach and then along a cliff to this little spot where someone had build a wooden platform out of the cliff and nailed 3 chairs to it. great stuff.

we have mid terms exams here, had music of india on tuesday, was possibly the easiest exam i have ever done, just multiple choice then some true or false!!! "an alap has no rhythmic accompniment, true of false??' i could have shat on the exam paper and still passed. tommorow is jazz theory exam though, which is going to be pretty tough, i have to (amonst other things) play chord progressions on the piano and SING, and improvise infront of the whole class.

i cooked a full english breakfast for my flat on sunday (minus beans and hash browns) to mark my leaving. it sort of reinforced my decision to go- only max said thank you for the food or commented on whether he liked it or not. i asked edmund if he enjoyed it and he shrugged and left the room (but to be fair he ate it all which i was happy about) and. one of my flatmates is coming round on friday to pick all my stuff up, then i will slowly move in over the weekend. it is going to be cool i think. ohoh! there is also this thing called 'free skool santa cruz' starting next week where members of the community just put on lessons according their skills, i guess like a formal skill swap, but there is a whole course on bike /building /and maintainance, trips foraging for fruit and other things around the town, survival in the woods trips, how to cook acorns, how to brew mead, all these things just because people want to share the knowledge. amazing. should start one up everywhere. before i left sam's dad was telling me about trotsky's 'transitional demands' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_demands) and i think this maybe a really relevant one.

and i played 'soccer' for the second time on friday also. we lost 5-0 but i gave up thinking i was too cool for school and playing in midfield and switched back to defence where i was pretty pleased with how i played (only 1 of the five goals was when i was defending, the others i was rolling subbed off or fannying aroudn being a striker), put in some well solid challenges but then got a yellow card for slide tackling. i got the ball. YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SLIDE TACKLE!!!!!!! bullshit. i tried to explain to the ref that slide tacking was the highest art in football but i don't think he fully understood what i was saying. american footballers are nippy and can be skillfull but have little spacial or positional awareness and, apparently, have grown up thinking challenging hard is a bad thing, so it was a whole different ball game and one that we lost. i was well impressed with this girl from new york who was playing left back- she had that cooler than thou east coast attitude with her descrete eyebrow piercing and long shorts, looked like she had grown up on the set of the film Kids, but she was really good at football and kept shouting at me to do things, which i thought was great.

so yeah, some things are starting to grind me down a bit, mainly american fear and rudeness, but mostly i am feeling much more settled these last weeks. santa cruz is starting to open up her secrets to me (turns out the girls who had my bike all of last week have 3 huge cannabis plants growing on their yard, and let me taste one of them, then gave me a sizeable bag of bud butter for nowt!!! buzzing) and i am excited. simon is coming at easter and we are going to bike down the coast. the more the merrier.

speak soon
love ben