Mike Rauscher Tells the Truth

At 12:21am in Mudd Library, John Andreoni, scholar and gentleman, composes a syllabus addition for his Environmental Justice Literature class, recommending his teacher add “The Hunger Games” to the reading list. At some point, Benjamin George-Hinnant, man about town, joins him and discusses the difficulties of memory. Mike Rauscher, philosopher-king, joins them, and speaks about the nature of thought, bicycling, and nature.

Engaged in this conversation, I compiled some of Mr. Rauscher’s thoughts, the ones simple enough for my sleep-slowed fingers.

Please think of our conversation as: “MIKE RAUSCHER TELLS THE TRUTH.”

_

Nature:
You can take an environmental justice class to tell you that capitalism is wrong, but it doesn't tell you why nature is wrong for all the same reasons.

Think of the sun just shitting out all that power. Plants are the short-sightedness of Nature. So much of culture puts them on the pedestal of vitality, but they're a local energy minimum. They limit like the market.

Destroy the plants.

Permaculture is the rotten end of culture.

Centralization is beautiful.

[At 1:21am, Messrs Rauscher, Andreoni, and Hinnant discuss whether the earth must be round. That conversation involved engineering detail far beyond my stenographic skill. If memory serves, they were able to suggest other viable shapes.]

Thought:
That’s all there is to learning: computation built out of cell activity.

Trust in the false prophets. Introspection is lying to you,

All decision making is just the embellishment of what happens when you grab a potato chip.

Bicycles:

“It is all carrot, no string.”

“You cannot commune with it, you can only be it.”

Nature II:

My research into Pony Magic have revealed to me that we are the precipice of the apocalypse.

Nick Cave: artist, dancer, teacher

Adult learning seems so different from “student” learning. The type of learning I excelled at -- memorization, test-taking, auditory recall -- is no longer as useful as it was. My nice adult communications job is great, and has involved learning lots of new systems very quickly, but it's not the stuff I'm so skilled at. I learn by listening. I learn by writing.

I miss lectures, guys.

So, I've gone out and found them.

The first was pure chance. I was restless, and chattering with Adam and Rachel. Adam is my splendid hero-friend-landlord, an accompanist at Cleveland Institute of Music. Rachel is a gorgeous viola player from Vancouver. They wanted to eat dinner; I wanted to shoot fireworks into power-lines. We compromised by walking to the Barking Spider, a beer bar with live music every night. I examined the bands listed on the side of the door, when out walks Emelio.

"Emelio?!"

If you did theater at Oberlin, or graduated from my year, you knew Emelio. Emelio is fabulous, kind, and hilariously funny— he attracts friends and followers easily. In my dofus way, I always balked at talking with him because, well, he’s just so cool.

"Aries?!"

He lives in Tremont, works in a community garden project, and was on his way to a lecture at CIA.

"It's for Nick Cave," he said.

"The musician?"

"Nah, the textiles artist. You should go! It'll be great!"

Nick Cave, the artist-not-musician, was absolutely fantastic. He pairs art with movement -- he studied modern dance with Alvin Ailey, and creates amazing wearable art pieces called Soundsuits. The first Soundsuits was made of twigs, completely overtaking the body of the wearer; others are constructed out of human hair, creating an enormous fur glories. He transforms people into muppets, blurring an individual’s gender, race, and class. He speaks softly and melodiously, and during his talk, I drifted between attentiveness and dreamy nap-land. He made all my fantasies seem so real.



The first Soundsuit!

The Scientific Question

A favor: can you think of a question for me?


… Not just any question.


What question could you ask a passerby on the street to gauge how much they grasped chemistry, physics, and biology? What signals basic scientific knowledge? What queries create a gradient between simple understanding, some analytical skill, and total cluelessness?


Right now, I like these ones:

How does the sun work?

What remains after you burn something?

Why is the sky blue?

What causes the dramatic colors of a sunset?


Or:

Can you define density? Mass? Heat?

The Illegal Internship

The first task to complete at my internship is to hire my replacement. Center for a New Culture wants another feisty young person, willing to work for food and housing, but no pay, at a socially active not-for-profit.

Of course, it's never that simple.

Most unpaid internships are flatly illegal. Or, they are conducted in a way that violates minimum wage laws, and a variety of labor rules. Volunteer work for a for-profit company is also very sticky, as is the provision of room and board. You don't even want to talk about stipends. In some ways, the more an employer wants to give an intern, the more legally suspect they become.

It's hard to follow the law, dammit. And I am trying.

Radegast: Swing and Absinthe

I’d heard good things about Radegast, a swing and blues venue in Brooklyn. My impressions were slightly dimmed right before I stepped in.

At the corner, a dude yelled to me, “Hey, Miss!”

“Hey, yeah?” I yelled back.

“You’re a fucking whore!” he screamed.

“Goddamn Brooklyn,” I thought and walked into the place.

Radegast was a beer garden, the German theme thicker than Bavarian crème. The space was huge, the ceilings high, with a huge bar at the center and tables off to the side. Everything was dark wood, flagons, and lager —above the mantle was a painting of a Hessian military man with impressive muttonchops. The busy bartenders resembled underwear models, with more tattoos. Das Calvin Kleinen.

As I took off my coat, the Blue Vipers of Brooklyn, an amazing swing band, started their first song. But something was missing: the dancers.






Das Calvin Kleinen Bartenders.