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.

Celebrate!

Dearest Friends,

I hope y’all are doing well, and if you’re amongst family, they’re being kind to you. I'm really thankful to know you, and hope you know I'm thinking of you.

My mother is a pretty hardcore Lutheran, while my father was raised atheist, leaving me a mish-mosh version of Christianity. My old scripture book covered Christmas like this:

“Christmas isn’t only celebrating Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, but the birth of every child. Children of all sizes and races and ages, from a few minutes old, to a whole 90 years present. Children of one, two or many parents; children across the world. Let us take this moment to celebrate the God’s birth within us all.”

While I’m not sure how you think about God, or Jesus, or other messiahs, I think it’s a good day to celebrate children, of all ages.


Love, kisses, and best wishes for a new year,
Aries

PS: The dolls in the photo are Norwegian elves. They are not my parents.

Steam Heat

Warning: Very honest, all names changed to protect privacy.

As a child, I was afraid of heat. Hot showers, steam rooms, saunas -- any confined space with steam and near-scalding water made me nauseous. The instant I started to sweat, boiling bile rose from my belly.

It’s different now. Now, I believe in heat. I love running in the summer, I love laying the sun. I enjoy the suffocating humidity of August in New York, I adore the burning of too-hot miso soup. I delight in sweat. I love dancing so furiously that I am coated with sweat; I love embracing a dance partner and sharing that heat. I love feeling my heart race, and the drip of water sliding down my forehead. I love the taste of salt.

What changed, I wondered. I poked at that childhood fear, teased it, tickled it. Why did I feel vertigo on tile floors?

And then, I saw her face. She was a beautiful woman, with oil-black hair, her features handsome, voice proud. She is an artist, and I see her licking her lips, clutching at water, grasping at cold, desperate hope.

Beautiful Norma, the main character in The Midnight Sun, a classic episode of the Twilight Zone.

I had watched Norma die.