the pine press volume 41, issue 10 “Wet, hot dreams of Michigan�
Submissions are always welcome. pinepress@gmail.com
§ If you have ideas for events and you’d like to involve the entire cooperative system, tell your house Education Officer. Remember, your Education Officer loves you.
Table of Contents
1 2 3 4 5 6 7–8 9 10 11 12–16 17 18 19 20 21 22 24 25
Terminal Arts, Shae Valko Untitled essay, Korey Hurni Roasted pineapple with Thyme-Ginger Ice, Roxanne Kieme Summer, Tobias Roth Early summer playlist, Ratt Mevers On things that suck, Ratt Mevers Bats, Adele Wunsch Co-ops are not cheap, Mike Davidson Travelogue back from SXSW, Mike Davidson The British are Coming!, Shae Valko DEMF 2011, or Learning from My Mistakes: A Preventative Guide to DEMF 2012 and Beyond, Kelly Caldwell O-renovations, Tera Watson Ode to Orion, Tera Watson Building a lasting community, Honey Brown Responsibility, Kate Walquist When did I know summer had arrived?, First Third MSU SHC Capital Improvements Proposal: Vesta Memorial Swimming Pool, Andrew Baczewski and Devin Schnepp, submitted by Kate Walquist Untitled comic, Amelia Larson Looking for something to do?, Roxanne Kieme
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A Meditation on Yoga I think people who do yoga must have very difficult lives. I say this because whenever I go to yoga class, the mantra seems to be, “releaaseeee the trials and tribulations that you weathered before stepping into our zen zone. Ommmmmm.” The phrase “crappy day” is invariably used at least three times, regardless of which studio I’m attending. This is weird because usually I don’t think I’m having a particularly crappy day until I’m laying in a dim room and some lady is giving me examples of why my day might have been crappy unbeknownst to me. Perhaps I was late for work. Perhaps I had an exam. Perhaps I am having trouble with a friend or a relative. Perhaps my upstairs neighbors are loud. Perhaps my friends in Beal don’t do their own dishes. Perhaps my car got towed. Perhaps the cost of gas is keeping me up at night. Perhaps I am hung over. Invariably, I can check off some of those possibilities, and then I get grumpy. So I’m lying in yoga class, thinking about my suddenly Crappy Day, listening to my teacher freestyle some yogic wisdom at me. And I wonder if it’s all a big conspiracy, because as far as I’m concerned, no one does yoga just for shits and giggles. It’s not really scenic like bike riding; you don’t feel the wind in your hair—instead, you’re baking inside this humid, smelly wooden box as people fling their sweat on you or accidentally graze your forehead with their slimy, warty, wrinkled foot. Yoga isn’t a game like soccer or basketball; you don’t get to beat someone up like in wrestling or boxing. And it isn’t relaxing. It’s very much the opposite. Sleeping or having my nails done is relaxing. Yoga requires intense concentration, good listening skills, and flexibility of both my tendons and my patience. Virtually all the reasons that anybody does anything are absent in yoga. The answer is obvious: when I go to yoga class, I’m being hoodwinked into thinking that I’m having a crappy day, and that I’m in the process of being cured. As a child, whenever I would get hurt and my parents would explain that it “could be worse” I was obligated to calmly tell them that yes, although I have a paper cut instead of a sharpened metal beam puncturing my stomach, my paper cut still hurts. And knowing that I am beam-free doesn’t make my paper cut hurt any less. It still sucks to have a paper cut. As Carl Jung said, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” So when my yoga teachers tell me to be grateful for what I’m not afflicted with, or offer me up the yogic alternative to my crappy day, inside I protest, “everything is relative!”
We bend down and we come back up. We stretch and retract. We inhale and exhale. Regardless of the teacher’s insistence of “being present” in the posture, of working through the pain, of sitting with it and welcoming it and all those karmic things, at the release the teacher will tell us, “There. Now you feel better than before.” Like he or she wants to prove that we once had it worse, and now the pain has been alleviated and we are more enlightened. But if there is a sliding scale for pain I’m not sure how to use it, or if I even believe in it. Everybody is always looking for their next reprieve, the next time their pain will be subdued. And the consensus is that pain makes the release more joyful, it makes you stronger, etc. But I’m not really interested in “dealing with” or “letting go” of my crappy days. I’m more interested in getting to have them. And that’s not martyrdom or masochism, because I hate stupid shit just as much as anybody else—probably even more—and I think I’m entitled to that. But I want these experiences. I’m not looking for a means to an end. Don’t tell me about my crappy days. The other day I walked into a class led by a teacher I didn’t recognize. The class’s energy was lagging, and she was getting frustrated. Finally, she said, “If you don’t want to do yoga, I don’t know why you’re here. If you aren’t going to do yoga, you might as well leave.” Thank God someone got it. She wasn’t mad at us because we weren’t relaxing enough. She was mad because we weren’t working hard enough for it to hurt. If I’m not going to do my crappy days, I might as well leave. §
by Kelly Caldwell
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Discovery Zone
While April is often a stressful month for students and most cannot recall anything that happened in April aside from schoolwork, last April was a bit more significant for New Community Cooperative. It began with a work weekend that left us with a storage room that was no longer a war-zone and three discoveries. The first discovery was that the storage room did, in fact, have a floor. This was a highly debated topic for quite some time until it was cleaned, since no one in recent history could remember stepping on anything other than paint cans, Christmas lights and precariously stacked pieces of furniture, some covered in puke. The second discovery was a very large box filled with a number of personal items that someone had left. In most instances, we would simply throw them away, but these items left seemed a bit too personal to just throw away. After some careful snooping, we discovered that the old New Communist, Suzi, had lived in the house from 2002–2003 at least. We also learned what she and all her friends looked like, what her grandparents looked like, what size clothes she wore, her family members’ names and what classes she took. After some brief deliberation on what to do (we would contact her and tell her we have things that we think are fairly important), we put everything back and closed up the box. Well, we put almost everything back. The one thing we kept was the composite picture from her sorority, which now hangs on our bulletin board with a small piece of paper pointing to one of her sorority sisters. Oddly enough, the girl looks just like one of our own housemates Anna.
The third discovery is perhaps the most mysterious of all. We found a shoebox, and when the first person opened the shoebox, a scream was heard throughout the house. Some thought perhaps there was a dead rat or a stack of unmarked $100 bills, but no. It was better than that. It was something that we marvelled over for days, and something that no New Communist can tell you what we’ve done with it due to a vow of silence. Something amazing. We found a sexy Santa outfit, complete with mini-skirt and bra. Merry Christmas! §
by Kate Walquist
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Summer-loving Co-opers, It has come to my attention from more than one house that there has been a wave of bike thievery and other petty theft this summer in our houses. From what I hear through the grapevine and directly, bikes have been disappearing from outside racks and inside bike storage areas. I just wanted to catch everyone up on what has been happening and remind everyone to lock things up, inside or out. Although we can never truly prevent the unexpected, there are simple actions that every house can take to avoid becoming an easy target. Here’s a few:
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Keep your exterior doors shut, they lock automatically. I’ve noticed that I can walk into many of our houses day or night without anyone being around to notice. You’re making it too easy. Shut the door.
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Make sure that any exterior lighting is in working order. Outdoor lights do a lot to slow down would be bandits and drunken destructives.
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Keep your ground accessible windows locked. Many break-ins over the years have been facilitated by an unlocked window.
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Keep your yard/parking/dumpster areas in good shape. Limit clutter, broken furniture, and tend to weeds etc. If it looks like you don’t care enough to manage the outside of the property, it’s very likely that windows and doors are open for business as well.
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Don’t leave valuables unattended in common areas, and remember to lock your room door.
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Watch for people who don’t belong. You know who they are, and if they are checking out your windows or doors or trying to weasel their way into your house, get rid of them and alert the other members of your house to do the same. Just because someone says they know someone or have permission to be there it doesn’t mean it’s true. Be good people, be friendly and accommodating when appropriate, just remember that this is not a house, it is your home. Does this sketchy person belong in or around your home?
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Put house security on your house meeting agenda. Talk about it with everyone and agree on a standard level of accountability for keeping the above mentioned actions maintained. Do’s and don’ts. Security is an issue that requires everyone to be on board.
Last but not least, the co-ops do not protect you from damages incurred by disaster (fire, water, theft, etc.) so we recommend that all members purchase renter’s insurance. Another option that may be available for some members is utilizing special add-ons from parent’s home insurance. You can insure laptops and other electronics, bikes, or whatever the insurance provider allows, and usually for only a small fee. Prevention is the only way for us to stop theft and property destruction in our cooperatives, and it has to be a community effort. Remember that this is a college town, and bad things are inevitable. In some ways, however, you can limit the impact before it happens. So anyway, hide your kids, hide your wives… Yours in Cooperation, Dan Tooman §
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Five things that I will and As many of you may know, I’m leaving Michigan for Chicago this August to start grad school. Save the all too short month I spent in Manhattan after sophomore year, this will be the first time in my life that I’ve lived outside of this state. As is true for most big transitions, I feel somewhat ambivalent about the move. On the one hand, I’m excited at the prospect of continuing my education and gaining some perspective outside of the Great Lakes State. On the other, there are some things about Michigan I’m really going to miss. So, I present the Pine Press Michigan edition with the comprehensive list of what I will and won’t be nostalgic for this fall. Things I will Miss (In Order of Importance): 4) The Upper Peninsula
2) Lansing/Detroit
I lived the first eighteen years of my life in the Upper Peninsula I’m not going to pretend the area isn’t—like most of Michigan—a physical representation of the death of industry in the Midwest and an ominous glimpse into the future of this country’s job market. However, there are pretty trees. And rocks. That counts for something…right? I mean, there is a certain charm about the quiet serenity of an area on the verge of becoming a ghost town. I don’t have to deal with as many assholes in the UP as I do when I’m downstate simply because the UP is less populated.
Despite growing up in the UP and the first two items on this list, I’ve never been a huge naturejunkie. Sorry, earth-loving co-op kids, but I much prefer manmade beauty. I love me some urban splendor and my two favorite Michigan cities— Detroit and Lansing—provide just that. I’m going to miss day trips to the Detroit Institute of Arts and long afternoons browsing antique shops in Old Town. As much as I adore Chicago, I think my heart will always belong to these two locations.
3) Lake Superior Fuck all the other great lakes. They can suck it. Lake Superior is the best. It’s clean, clear straight down to the bottom like bathwater that’s colder than OJ Simpson’s heart. When I was in California for spring break, some of my friends whined about how cold the ocean was. Bitch, please. You haven’t felt cold until you dive head first into the body of water that swallowed the Edmund Fitzgerald. Do it in early March, if possible.
1) The Seasons There’s nothing quite like the relief that comes when the snow finally melts in spring or when the unbearable summer heat gives way to the crisp fall coldness. First snows, color changes, sitting on the porch drinking to celebrate the temperature getting above sixty degrees. The seasons break up the monotony of day-to-day life a bit, giving me something to get excited about. I feel this phenomenon will be somewhat less noticeable in a big city.
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won’t miss about Michigan state Things I Won’t Miss (Also in Order of Importance): 4) The Upper Peninsula
2) Michigan State University
I told you I’m an ambivalent person. I have mixed feelings about everything, so the UP makes both lists. As much as I love less people being around, the people who do populate that area can be pretty fucking unbearable. Whether it’s a redneck trying to find loopholes in the law so he can gun down endangered species or a kid in my high school saying Abraham Lincoln was the worst president because he freed the slaves1, the UP is not home to the best or the brightest of Michiganders. And as nature-filled as the UP is, it’s undeniable that it lacks culture. I once stumbled upon a copy of On The Origin of Species in the fiction section of the local bookstore.
Okay, before you come running at me with pitchforks, hear me out. I got a great education at MSU and met some fantastic professors. That being said, I’m sick and tired of Big 10 University culture. The rape controversy on our basketball team, the fact that I can’t walk down M.A.C at night without some tool screaming, “Show me your tits!”, and the hoards of drunken imbeciles I encounter every game day is enough to make me want to run away and never come back. It’s a good thing my grad school prides itself on having zero sports teams, fraternities, or sororities. Seriously, it’ll be nice to go into a bar and not have to listen to some asshole in the line in front of me let out a resounding, “Gaaaaaaaaaay, brah!” when he finds out there’s a five dollar cover.
3) The Politics With a tort reform psycho representing Michigan’s first district and Rick Snyder taking over local governments with his emergency manager bullshit, the politics in Michigan are becoming more conservative than the lovechild of Michelle Bachman and Ronald Reagan. I’m not saying Illinois is going to be much better politically. The entire Midwest is now a breeding ground for young Republicans. However, if you’re sitting in a pile of shit and you move to another pile of shit, are you honestly going to miss the first pile?
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1) The Economy I guess they call it a depression because it’s fucking depressing. Watching friends send out 50+ job applications for easy, part-time jobs and then not get one damn call back is discouraging as hell. I know that the rest of the country isn’t doing much better in this respect, but Michigan does consistently rank among the lowest in the fifty states in term of our economy. Plus, see the comment in number 3 on this list about the pile of shit. §
Yes, this ACTUALLY happened. by Erin Wisti
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Summer maintenance minute by Toon Danman
A piano runs through it. So what.
Slat walls, cloth wiring, and horse hair plaster.
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Hedrick is just cool.
That tile looks familiar. A fine choice, Orion.
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Ferency has gone painting wild. First the kitchen....
...and then the living room. Zolton would be proud. Bear is proud.
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Always ready.
Blistering hot temperatures in the Orion kiln nearly derailed our efforts to recover the floors, but the cool shade of the tree room kept us on track.
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That rolling chair delivers mail to all of the bedrooms.
Lizzy Maynard and Bearden Lachesis of Key Largo house engage in an afternoon battle of wits. To Lizzy go the spoils. The nearby Haslett Armory can be seen in the background. ยง
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Michigan in summertime by Tobias Roth Michigan is a great place for the great time that is summer. We get some super hot days and some cool days, a little mix for the constantly changing wild Michigan weather. Coming off of a 4th of July weekend that many people spent going up north to visit the various lakes in Michigan and going to visit their family, there is a wide variety of places in the state of Michigan to go and find some good water to swim in. Some of my favorites are even the smaller lakes hidden away in different places up north, for example the ones in Manistee and near Vanderbilt. Another one of the great things about Michigan is the large amount of music festivals that are offered all over the state. I think the amount of festivals that we have is fairly unique, it has come to the point when there are multiple festivals about every weekend somewhere in Michigan. Blissfest is one of the big ones, the weekend of July 8–10, which is a big folk festival in Harbor Springs. Hoxeyville has also become one of the major ones in the past decade, which runs August 19–21 this year. Check out the line-up; it will be great this year! Harvest Gathering is also another local favorite to the Michigan folk scene hosted at the Earthwork farm, the home of Seth Bernard and now May Erlewine (who are also getting married soon). Harvest will be September 16–18 this year and has all the great Earthwork musicians that you should definitely check out if you do not know about already and some others. This festival is great for everyone. There is also an East Lansing Summer League for Ultimate Frisbee. The league has already started but if anyone wants to come and watch to learn more about the game sometime you are welcome to, and we also need more female players for almost every team, if you are interested and ideally know some about the game already but also if you are just athletic and want to learn come out to the East Lansing soccer complex around 6:30 on Tuesdays! §
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Frustration by Michael Davidson Remember that time I never lied? I only fell asleep next to your ass. The days cast long shadows. What was I to do, if you only stretched to their full embrace? Who said what and where? Who drank, smoked, and swore? We both did them all. We both shared in the glow. We both strained to stay still. Fading laughter. Waking silence. Morning prayer. What a steep decline. What a terribly long commitment (for 17 hours I stayed steady.) Working hard and wishing to stay the night Your night life starts hours later than mine How could that ever be fine? You act as if I don’t give a care You want so much more I just have to say that it’s just not going to be Stay christian, so long as you live high Stay steady, so long as you live hard Stay in college, so long as you live free What I cannot say means so much more What I can say is that I live so heavy. The written word comes so easy when there’s so much to put on paper §
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Names Narration Narrator
“By Ratt Mevers.” Who is Ratt Mevers? I couldn’t tell you. A few of you out there are thinking that they know precisely who Ratt Mevers is. Perhaps you think you could point him out in the streets, or maybe have shared delicious barbecued food with Ratt Mevers. More of you still have no idea who Ratt Mevers is; maybe you’ve read one of Ratt Mevers’ articles. Maybe not. This question of identity, however, isn’t a personal one. Instead it’s a quiet examination of the alienated, fractured self that is, I would argue, inherent to writing as a mode of creation.
Bob Dylan once said, well, lots of stuff. But was it really Bob Dylan saying it? If not, was it Robert Zimmerman—Dylan’s birth name—saying it? Could it be both? How does it matter? First let’s look at the possible reasons for the name change. In his own words, “You’re born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free.” A simple enough explanation, and that may be all there is to it, but a name is a heavily loaded symbol, and changing a name pulls the trigger. It is understood that Dylan Thomas was familiar to Bob Dylan, and the fact that Zimmerman is a distinctly Jewish name is not one that can be ignored. I’m suggesting that it is clear Bob Dylan wanted to me more closely associated with Dylan Thomas, or that he was trying to cloak his Jewish heritage, latent or otherwise. These meanings, however, should not be ignored. Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens)1 is likely the most discussed pseudonym. Guy A. Cadwell puts it best in Samuel Clemens’ Magical Pseudonym, “The pseudonym [Mark Twain] has been considered to be many things, as for example a merely conventional signature, a true self, a false self, a catalytic agent that enabled a journalist to become a man of letters, and an ineffable sign that Clemens’ genius had its essential roots in the American West and in comedy.” I won’t get into the details and nuances;
other people have done it better, but the use of a pseudonym is a subtle illustration of both the distance and the closeness of a writer to the work; the closeness being that there is an essential tie between the creator and the created, the distance being that the total expression of the individual is limited and therefore incomplete. That being understood, it stands that the work and the name are not two separate identities.
But what of those who choose to use their birth names as their credited name on a work? Is there still the same wavering boundary between the work and the creator? Certainly. Literature is essentially a unification of the individual with the word. A work cannot be produced without an author, and that author is invariably going to include some of their perceptions, ideas, thoughts, idiosyncrasies, and touches of individuality, regardless of how instructive, basic, and objective the work may seem. Choosing a single word alone is determined by an incomputable number of experiences, memorized definitions, and congruent thoughts all coupled at once in an incredibly dense and complex instance. The physics of expression aside, the discussion of the value of a name is a persistent one. Juliet’s famous words seem almost unignorable in this discussion: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet2 Despite the truth to Juliet’s dismissal of the impact of names on the physical elements of a rose, the world in which we live would be inarguably different if the term rose no longer held the same meaning. For a small example, my grandmother would most probably not have been named after the flower, for instance. The difference seems
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by Ratt Mevers by Ratt Mevers by Ratt Mevers by Ratt Mevers
small, but there is undoubtably a connection between language and perception of the world, especially in the realms of the abstract.3 This issue isn’t restricted to the realm of the Pine Press. Since the dawn of modernism in literature, there has been an especially intense examination and exploration of the author’s role in literature. From modernists like James Joyce through Simon S. Burroughs, leading all the way through the culmination of the “art about art” postmodernist traditions with the likes of Cynthia Ozick, and so on, there has been an ever-growing insistence on the understanding of the self through literature, be it through form or content. Even the nebulous world of literature, or even art as a whole can’t contain the exploration of identity; it naturally flows into the world of social and mass media. AIM, Myspace, and eventually Facebook (though not to the same extent), as well as other networking sights, blogs, and various other sites, saw the advent of pseudonym fever. Anyone can have any name, personality, and image that they want. If you can think it, you can become it. One can even be entirely anonymous on sights if they so choose, which is at least somewhat responsible for the rise of websites such as 4chan.org, an image board that has spawned some of the most loathsome, hilarious and inspiring material on the internet. In short, identity is something most probably grappled with more in our generation than ever before, and literature is perhaps the most explorative mode of creativity for the field yet. §
1
For those unfamiliar with the pseudonym, the phrase mark twain is often shouted by boatsmen as a unit of measurement along the Mississippi River, where Clemens spent much of his life). 2
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1–2)
3 It seemed inappropriate to include a discussion of this particular theory at this point. For more information, see Lera Boroditsky’s article Does Language Shape Through?: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conception of Time.
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Drawings by Phoenix House, except “Where have you been this summer?” by Sowmya Surapur.
Notes from a nasty wreck by Michael Davidson
Who even knows how it started anymore? I think it was at Raft. It was right after Judo. I was still wearing my rash guard when they took me in, or so I assume. Next moment I was up, “high-five”-ing the nurse, and telling my friends sorry. I breathe in. UUUUUUUUUNNNNNNHHHHHHHHH! -10am Once again, oh my god... it hurts to breathe. -12pm I turn onto my side, my chest aches and my arm hurts, back to my back. -2pm I feel sick. -4pm I finally get up. -6:30pm After a fit of coughs, I remember it, I was talking to the short, black, cute female Waldo. Yeah, then I distinctly recall announcing that I felt great. Another draw from the Grand Daddy. Lights go out. No, no, it goes back a few draws further, we’re outside the house talking to some guy dressed in a cape or something. We had just gotten to to Phoenix, when we started taking hits from the bottle, following it up with a drag from a bottle of cherry coke. Yeah, but why do I feel like death? Nothing really bad happened, I hope. I go to the bathroom and notice across the length and width of the back of my forearm is a long blistering scab. It occurs to me that my cough and arm could quite possibly be related. It hits me again, I pulled my IV out and stated that I had to go. They put me back on the bed, I must have cursed them out a bit, until they brought in my good friends, Andrew and Greg. I offered them sexual favors for their unyielding support in this time of crisis, winning over the nurse’s generosity and favor with a high five and maybe a one liner. I’m now looking down into a bag from Sparrow hospital full of last night’s clothes. Blood-smeared scrubs, what a thing to wear to a Halloween party. I was Dr. Blake Downs from Children’s Hospital, that includes the blood splattered chest and clown make up. I would not find one person to ever mention the massive burn, that I had fallen into a fire, nor that I had succumbed to smoke inhalation that night (not even the Sparrow medical personnel,) but from the evidence presented to me, what else could it have been? While the memories of that night are few and far between, the comic ironies will never escape me. The $2K medical bill sent to my parent’s was a nice touch, Sparrow. One thing absent from the bill, any notice for treating burns. Luckily my insurance still covered it, but the massive scar will stain my body forever. §
What Dreams Have Taught Me
by Shae Valko
There are several things I have learned from my dreams that warrant sharing with all of you eleven people who actually read the pine press. In dreams, I have discovered that:
I can turn into a cockroach, as long as someone else turns into a praying mantis first. If I search around my house long enough, I will eventually find a pornstar. I can’t drive anywhere unless I’m naked. Serial killers may be slow, but their eyes emit some sort of adhesive. I really like eating soil. Everyone must have gone to a teleportation party as I am the only person in the town to not be able to appear and disappear suddenly. Bulls have Manchester, English accents when you ask them “Do you ever wish your milk was desirable?” Chainsaw fights are a valid and common form of conflict resolution.
The sand in Egypt is edible. Watching paint dry is boring, unless you have shadow puppet theatre. Mosquitoes will stop biting if you take the time to stop and listen to their problems for a change, you assholes! In the future, potatoes rule the world. Boners are the only things that carry over into the real world after a dream ends. You only remember half of your dreams because someone always bludgeons you over the head with something in your dream…but they do a half-assed job of it. In Belize, my nipples are worshipped as gods. Errrrrm…..Michigan has solid local things. §