Photo and "Spicy Cauliflower with Sesame Recipe" from Heidi Swanson's 101cookbooks.com, adapted from Reza Mahammad's cookbook "Rice, Spice, and Everything Nice"
I love cauliflower. I also love spicy things. For our one-year dating anniversary, Ryan and I are going to celebrate by making homemade hot sauce.
Recently when he and I went out to eat at a North Indian restaurant, we ordered everything “very spicy,” as usual. And as usual, the person taking our order kind of looked at us (particularly Ryan) with widened eyes, which, again, usually means “Yeah, yeah, sure, okay,” and then usually when we get the food it is not very spicy at all.
Fortunately (and unusually), however, this kind restaurateur took us at our word.
Probably some of the best Indian food I’ve had since coming back from a summer in India, in 2004.
And this recipe is not going to even approach that, but it is cauliflower and it is spicy and it does have ginger and cumin and turmeric and caramelized onions and two kinds of chiles, so I am certainly not complaining.
Man, I’ve missed spending real time in the kitchen. I’ve even started generating these weird food metaphors in my head. Yesterday’s fall weather felt heavy and bright, like lemon curd.
One of my favorites from the Hot Sevens. Recently arrived as part of a mix-CD gift from my friend Hozan Alan Senauke (of Berkeley Zen Center and Clear View Project). I had it playing this week when my friend Cat was over for tea, and we both looked at each other with a little jolt of recognition at the final, extra-long, lovely solo on this record, though I couldn’t remember the name of the song.
Last month, while Alan was over’ our place for our Working for Liberation retreat at the Fools (can’t believe I still haven’t written a full piece about that . . . dang), he noticed the two posters hanging in my room: one of Louis Armstrong and one of Billie Holiday. And so he offered to make me a mix.
Jazz of this calibre is what made me first fall in love with music, for real. It wasn’t until high school that I started staying up late into the night, listening to the same album over and over, letting it soak in. I can still practically sing along to the entirety of Kind of Blue.
Much gratitude to Alan, a musician at the mind- heart- body- and community- level.
[Today, former BART police officer Johannes Mehserle was sentenced to 2 years in prison, with 146 days already served, for the involuntary manslaughter of Oscar Grant. The Grant case marked the first time in California’s history that a peace officer was tried for murder.]
Whereas
We as women, transgender people, two-spirit people, queers, gender-oppressed people, and allies of the Bay Area mourn the loss of Oscar Grant;
Whereas we recognize that this young man was just one of countless victims of police violence;
Whereas we understand and experience police repression, particularly in poor, queer, and working-class communities of color;
Whereas we know that police violence both enables and enacts rape, brutalization, and degradation;
Whereas police violence compounds the dangers we face in domestic violence, sex trafficking, and homophobic and transphobic hate crimes;
Whereas police enforce the criminalization of our disabilities, addictions, and mental illnesses;
Whereas police enforce the criminalization of our skin color, sexualities, style of dress and speech, gender identities, religious practices, and nations of origin;
Whereas police violently enforce our subservience to an economy that enriches elites, while slaughtering, starving, sickening, and stealing from us as workers, child-rearers, and culture creators;
Whereas the rich and influential deploy police to violently crush our efforts toward self-determination, from queer social spaces to workplace strikes;
Whereas the rich and influential deploy police to kill or capture our leaders and heroes, like the recently deceased political prisoner Marilyn Buck;
Whereas police are employed to do as they are ordered;
Whereas police violence comes 10% from individual bigotry and improper training, and 90% from a capitalist state system designed to protect property, not people;
Whereas such a property-focused police system, controlled by the rich and influential, enacts and supports gender-based and sexual violence;
And Whereas such a system can never be adequately reformed, based as it is in the fundamental inequality borne of a patriarchal capitalist system:
We maintain compassion for individual police officers who both experience and inflict suffering; who face and enforce mortal danger.
We vow, in the effort to end sexist violence throughout the world, to eradicate the police system of the United States as we know it; and to transcend the misogynist capitalist system that demands this type of policing.
We undertake this mission with no hatred in our hearts toward individual police officers or those who support the police system.
We accept this responsibility out of love for all people, and the unquenchable desire for universal freedom and equality.
In the service of this calling, we will sing, strike, fuck, fight, rest, write, rebel, and rebuild until we achieve liberation for all beings.
I probably won’t be updating Kloncke for the next week or so, and that’s because, for my second time, I’ll be joining the Faithful Fools in their annual Street Retreat: seven days and nights living, sleeping, and reflecting in the streets of the Tenderloin neighborhood, in San Francisco.
Coming to terms with the street retreat as a reflective and humanizing practice has been difficult for me. To be honest, I still feel significant resistance to the idea. Fortunately, though, over the past few weeks I’ve been able to sit with this resistance and discomfort (a time when the dhamma practice has come in handy), talk with friends and other Fools about it, and work through it in a positive way.
Before getting into my reservations and reconciliations, here’s a nice, basic description of what the street retreat, from fellow Fool intern Josh Mann:
Starting this Saturday, I will be participating in my first week-long Street Retreat through the Faithful Fools. I’ll be leaving my money, cell phone, and keys behind and taking a sleeping bag and backpack. I plan to sleep outside and eat mostly in soup kitchens, and I anticipate a lot of searching for public bathrooms. Twice a day, I’ll be meeting up with eight to ten other people to reflect on the experience. And, some of us will be sleeping as a group.
Part of the mission of the Faithful Fools is to “participate in shattering myths about those living in poverty” and to help people discover what is common to all of us regardless of our economic standing or housing status. As a Street Retreat participant, I am asked to reflect throughout the retreat on what keeps me separate from others as well as what connects me.
Ever since my first term in college, I have felt compelled to engage the social issues of poverty and hunger, and I expect that this retreat will help me better understand these issues including the way that public policies, laws, and urban planning affect people with little to no money.
At the same time, the founders of the Faithful Fools put great emphasis on the fact that we are not pretending to be homeless. I will begin the retreat knowing that it has a specific end time on Saturday, October 30th. It also seems important for me to acknowledge that I go as an able-bodied, college-educated U.S. citizen who is white, male, and straight, which will no doubt be a factor in both how other people respond to me and how I experience the streets.
Please keep me in your thoughts this week. I seek to know my own heart, and I need all of the help I can get. I also invite you to participate with me in some way or another wherever you are. I recommend setting aside a little time one day to wander and see who and what you encounter. The spirit of this retreat as I understand it is to meet more deeply the people and places that we sometimes hurry past.
So there’s a little bit of background. As you can see, the retreat is not a study or experiment, nor is it a gimmick for “playing homeless.” The spirit is one of renunciation. We wouldn’t fast in order to “understand what it’s like to be a starving person,” but in order to push and expand our own views of the world we inhabit right now, as we are. It’s not about appropriating or trying on someone else’s experience (the simplistic idea of “standing in someone else’s shoes”), but about peeling off the layers of ourselves, the skins thickened by routine and dualism, that pervert our own views of reality — including our views of ourselves.
What had been bugging me so much, I think (and it disturbed me so strongly that I very nearly backed out of the whole thing), wasn’t the idea of the street retreat itself, but its purported connections to mechanisms of social transformation. I’ve talked on this blog before about what I see as the dangers of believing in a method for changing the world one mind at a time. This approach rightly observes that human social “systems” are made up of individual people, but wrongly induces that these systems are therefore merely the sum of their parts, and that persistent hearts-and-minds education can eventually (through influencing voters and “those in power”) translate into large-scale fundamental social improvements.
I disagree with this approach for various reasons; now isn’t the time to go into ’em. Suffice it to say, now that I’ve managed to decouple the reflective, community side of the street retreat from positive claims about its structural effectiveness, I feel a bit calmer about participating.
One common concern about street retreats is that we are “taking away resources” from people who need them, by eating in soup kitchens and sometimes sleeping in shelters (if we can get in). I sympathize with the concern here, but the way I see it is: we do far more to support poverty and homelessness through our everyday complacency with the capitalist system than we could possibly do by individually taking a couple dozen free meals. The scarcity (of beds, less frequently of food) is artificial.
Another frequent worry, especially from my dad: YOU ARE GOING TO GET YOURSELF KILLED. IT IS DANGEROUS OUT THERE.
Don’t worry, papa. (And others.) From my observation over the past year, there is little danger of random violence on the streets of the Tenderloin. The main types of violence we see here are (1) interpersonal violence among acquaintances, (2) low-level police violence in the form of harassment and enabling rape culture, and (2) structural violence, like the abovementioned artificial scarcity that keep families homeless while apartment buildings sit vacant for years, or the racist, sexist, homophobic criminalization of mental illness and drug addiction.
I guess both of these ‘responses,’ intended to allay fears, kind of sidestep the issues by pointing out how they are dwarfed by larger problems. Well, that’s sort of how it goes for me, at the moment. We’ll see if any more insights come during the week.
Wish me luck! I will try to log some time on the computers in the public library, but the lines are generally long, the connections slow, and the time limits brief.
Today, in honor of World Homeless Day, folks with Homes Not Handcuffs and other groups hosted a “Creative Housing Liberation”: a rally, unpermitted march, and occupation/liberation of a 68-unit apartment building that has been vacant for years now. Coincidentally, that building happened to be right around the corner from our home at the Faithful Fools — a stroke of luck that allowed us to run back and grab a couple of “donations” (a chair and a vase of flowers) to offer to the building.
The event was really well done, and so far everything has gone off without a hitch. Crowd energy was strong; the occupiers had the banner drops all ready for us as our march turned the corner down Eddy Street; they had a dope sound system, powered by a generator, that transformed the corner into a dance party; Food Not Bombs even hooked it up with a tasty dinner for everyone.
Also fortunate: the landlord could not be reached by the police. And since the cops can’t break in and apprehend people without first getting the go-ahead from the landlord, the occupiers will hold the building at least until tomorrow morning.
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Tomorrow, if I have time, I’ll try to add a bit more of my own perspective and analysis on housing occupation as a response to racist, heterosexist state violence in the form of denying people adequate housing. According to the event organizers, 30,000 housing units remain vacant in San Francisco, a city with 15,000 people living in homelessness. In light of this, does occupation of empty buildings seem morally wrong?
More germane to my line of questioning these days: what role can fun, vibrant, direct actions like today’s play in a larger strategic movement to transcend an economic system where, as Introducing Capitalism: A Graphic Guide puts it in a euphemistic half-truth, “the means of production are privately owned”?
(Note: very first chant of the march, as we took the streets? “Homelessness is not a crime! Capitalism IS a crime!”)
Some of the smartest people I know — including my friend Ivan, and what I’ve read/heard by Suzuki Roshi — excel at failing. They know how to fail in ways that allow the flow to continue, if you know what I’m saying. The failure is not crippling, but just part of taking on a difficult challenge. Generally speaking, I think that people with scientific minds (including serious meditators) are pretty good at failing happily. Failing in ways that reveal new opportunities, even as they foreclose the ones we thought we wanted.
Endeavoring to improve on my ability to fail doesn’t mean tackling tasks that seem doomed from the start. That would be too easy! The kind of failure I’m talking about does not come cheap. I am invested. I want to succeed. Each attempt, each step, is made with confidence, commitment, and openness.
Suzuki Roshi says that this is how we move toward enlightenment. Through repeating small moments of enlightenment — those moments of a letting-go mind, a mind that is being, not chasing — while at the same time working hard to deepen and strengthen our practice.
I hope this is somewhat clear, what I’m trying to say. As an example of a recent, happy failure of mine, I wanted to share a letter I wrote to all the people I’d talked to with an interest in building a disarm BART police campaign. My intention in sending it was (1) to let folks know that I would no longer be pursuing the courses I’d proposed (for instance: organizing a direct action of civil disobedience for the day of Mehserle’s sentencing), and Why; and (2) to thank them for the inspiring connections we’d made in the course of the (eventual) failure.
It felt good to write this letter, not only because I have a lot of admiration and goodwill toward each of the recipients (including those with whom I disagree politically), but also because it was an exercise in observing and accepting reality as it is — rather than as I would like it to be. A little inroad into rooting out dukkha.
I’d love to know your thoughts, resonances, and criticisms.
Hello everybody,
Hope this note finds you well!
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been talking with BART workers, Oscar Grant movement organizers, Oakland peacekeepers, Marxist feminists, reverends, priests, meditators, lawyers, non-profiters, poets, anarchists, communists, peace activists, radicals, progressives, friends, and random strangers about the possibility of coalescing a campaign toward disarming the BART police. I and others envisioned this as one small step in aiding a shift from weaponized, racist, capitalist-serving security culture toward community-controlled safety initiatives, dual power, and restorative justice.
Some friends threw an utterly beautiful “Radical BBQ” yesterday in Oakland. Young and old, different races, different genders and presentations, fun, kind, relaxed, co-operative, joyful, political. Food (good heavens — Dani made these amazing stuffed stromboli and vegan bread from scratch); music and dancing; a speech from a MUNI driver (SF public transit) on the struggles they’re facing among the rank-and-file; wonderful art (check the Advance the Struggle banner: gorgeous). And they even provided art supplies for people to do their own thing. I took advantage and sketched out a small banner to use for Radical Sangha. Took it home and spent the night painting and finishing it up.
The banner may come in handy tomorrow evening, as the scheduled Radical Sangha will be meeting and then carpooling to San Quentin prison to join the protest of the first death-penalty execution in California in four years. Albert Greenwood Brown is scheduled to be killed by the state on Wednesday. The decision to resume executions (backed by Jerry Brown) was sudden, and has shocked a lot of folks who’ve been doing anti-death-penalty work for years. I only heard about it last Thursday, through folks in Oscar Grant organizing.
I’ll be writing up some thoughts and questions soon on tactics and strategy for radical organizing (sparked in part by an event the Faithful Fools catered yesterday: a talk by lifelong activist and frequent prisoner Father Louis Vitale, a Franciscan priest who works around anti-nuclear intervention and the School of the Americas Watch). Part of me feels ambivalent about attending a protest of the death penalty, with no clear mechanism for affecting this structural, state violence. But I also feel that with the proper perspective, and in tandem with different types of tactics and organizing, it can be a fruitful part of a holistic, loving, politicized life.
What really bugs me is that I won’t be able to make it to another dope event featuring my friend’s mom: An Evening of Solidarity with Women of Haiti. If you’re in the Bay area and not coming to the execution protest, think about hitting this up instead.
[6:15pm Edit: Now with photos, continued below the jump]
It’s 5am in Sacramento, and I’m about to drive Ryan down to North Fork, California (about a 3 hour trip) to begin his first formal meditation instruction: a 10-day Goenkaji Vipassana course. Yup, that’s the same one I dove headlong into, totally unprepared, a year and a half ago in Barcelona. The wake-up-at-4-am, sit-10-hours-a-day, work-through-some-of-the-toughest-physical-and-psychological-pain-of-my-life-and-come-out-smiling retreat.
Shortly after that first course of mine, I got some sobering love-life advice from a wise (okay—somewhat creepy, and definitely trying to get in my pants, but nevertheless wise) 40something German meditator dude. Dude said: In a two-person relationship, if one person is progressing spiritually and the other is not, it will cause a painful imbalance that is exceptionally difficult to handle. Naturally, individuals have different strengths and interests in life, but when it comes down to it, a big gap in insight progression will probably spell incompatibility.
This makes sense to me. And also scares me. (And not because I presume that I’d be the one advancing.)
Fortunately, though, in the first partnership I enter after this combination-come-on-and-counsel, the partner not only has an intuitive grasp of a lot of dhammic principles (as I see it), but more importantly has a strong and genuine interest in deeply exploring reality, reducing needless suffering, and being guided by compassion.
Lately the 1990’s have been coming back to haunt me. In a good way. A friend is throwing a 90’s-themed party tonight, and while I was visiting my parents’ house this week, my mom pulled out my Young Author Book from 5th or 6th grade. I wish I had it now so that I could quote the author bio page precisely, but I do remember that it included a sentence like, “Her favorite colors are silver, turquoise, purple, black, fuchsia, blue, and white.”
And also: “Her favorite song is ‘Truly Madly Deeply’ by Savage Garden.”
Last night on my way home from Oakland to SF, I boarded the bart train with no intention of handing out any flyers. It was late; I was tired; also feeling a little shy.
I’d been burned the day before while trying to hand out a different flyer on a similar theme. This one announced an October 23 rally sponsored by the Oakland/SF local (Local 10) of the ILWU longshoremen’s union, in solidarity with the Oscar Grant movement. The ILWU has a history of militant, class- and race-conscious organizing: to challenge apartheid South Africa, they shut down the shipping yards along the whole US West Coast. It’s a pretty inspiring labor-community connection (more explanation over at Advance the Struggle blog), and I was jazzed to be talking to folks about it at the Ashby BART seller’s market on a sunny Saturday afternoon.
But you know, rather than talking politics, most of the men I approached were more interested in hitting on me.
Now. As I’ve discussed here before, hollering doesn’t alarm me too much and I generally respond with friendliness or neutrality rather than coldness or anger. But this day, man, I was not in the mood. The previous night I’d been up at a radical politics discussion in Oakland from 9pm til 3 in the morning. Exhaustion left me exposed and tender, with little energy to break through the banter and engage the humans behind the Gaze.
Kloncke 