I spent this past weekend with a great group of friends in the Cumberland Water Gap, a rural area in Western Maryland where we were attending a Bluegrass music festival called Delfest. I’ve never actually been to a music festival of any sort (crazy it’s taken me this long!), so I didn’t have a lot of expectations coming into the weekend save having a good time and spending time outdoors.

The festival, in short, rocked, totally going beyond the pretty basic things I’d hoped for. It was pure summertime goodness; we saw great music, camped out at the foot of a mountain, went tubing down a river that looped around the grounds, made friends with strangers, and lost our sense of time for two days. (The answer to “What time is it?” was invariably: “it’s Del o’clock.”, or, every so often “ten to Del.”, and occasionally, “half past Del.”) And so a big part of being there was just about enjoying myself – getting some space from an increasingly busy, stressful and packed upcoming month, spending time with friends, soaking in the good vibes and remembering the spontaneity and adventure that can come with arriving in an open space with no real plans.

At the same time, the budding learning scientist in me was having a whole other experience of the festival. As someone planning on studying the learning that happens in informal environments, those outside of school and not traditionally thought of as ‘educational’, I was also viewing the event as part of what media scholar Henry Jenkins would call a Participatory Culture, and as what learning theorist Jim Gee calls a Semiotic Domain with an associated Affinity Space. All pretty high concepts for sure, each with their own useful nuances, but in the most basic sense I was seeing an open community of people dedicated to a particular idea or practice, in this case Bluegrass music, come together to do their thing, share and learn from each other (though likely not framing it as such) and in doing so define and redefine what that space means both in terms of its core practices as well as its broader culture and associated quirks.

I saw amateurs working with experts – small jam circles of musicians with varied levels of talent playing around campfires with assorted string instruments where anybody could come and join in, contributing whatever they could even if it was just singing along or playing some simple chords, along with main-stage shows featuring artists recognized as being at the top of their trade, setting a (perhaps contested) standard for what good practice looks like in the community.

I saw plenty of things not immediately related to the musical practice itself but that emerged around it; the throwing of small, soft glowsticks amongst a concert-going crowd, each landing and then getting hurled up into the air again, fans dancing with wanton abandon in varied styles, substance use and perhaps abuse, and a do-it-yourself camping culture where people constructed elaborate tents, fires and meals. These are the sorts of things that give nuance, character and attitude to these kinds of informal spaces, and are an expression of the underlying values of the community – each points to a certain ethos or narrative endemic to the larger whole.

I noted various demographic groups as they became visible; low income local white folks from Appalachia that I’d associate with NASCAR and country music, “hippy” types in tie-die and dreadlocks, young professionals from DC, New York and other metropolitan areas, often working in politics, journalism or education (forgive the heuristics here) – as well as noticing those that were absent. I counted about 15 people of color and no one that was easily identifiable to me as queer while I was there out of what was easily over a thousand people.

And I reflected on what it meant for me to be doing pretty much all of this observation and analysis automatically, remembering a line that references Rilke from a great short piece by Mark Federman called The Tao of Thesis [pdf], about how one engages in thesis-level work:

“You will view the world and your entire existence through research-coloured glasses. The thesis process becomes less an effort to find answers, and more a vehicle through which you can live your question.”

My time at Delfest is interesting because it is one of several experiences that I’ve had as I near the beginning of my doctoral work where I started to consistently notice the world as data parsed by a particular lens, and it’s prompting me to wonder what it will be like to put on these glasses full time when I enter graduate school – what’s gained, what’s lost, and what the edges are to look out for when doing this strange exercise while still trying to live an integral life, one viewed through many lenses and that acknowledges the limitations of a singular viewpoint. I’m excited to find out.

Each year, I go on a meditation retreat with an incredible group of about twenty friends and mentors.  We meet in a house on Martha’s Vineyard where we spend 7 days together meditating in silence and then have a weekend of hanging out, socializing, sharing what we’re up to in our lives and spending time on the beach.  We’ve been doing this now for eight years, and I just returned a couple of days ago from our most recent retreat. (You can see pictures from prior years here.) While I can write a lot about this unique group, how it came to be, the wonderful individuals that are a part of it and the joys and challenges of the experiment in spiritual community that we’ve been engaging in for almost a decade, I’m going to save that for another time.

What I wanted to share was one of the practices that we have, one where people in the group give talks about our experience on the spiritual path. Colloquially these are called dharma talks in the Buddhist community, and they are generally given by meditation teachers and masters on specific themes and ideas from the “dharma”, or Buddha’s teachings. One thing I always loved about our group is that there is a trust in the ability of every person in it to bring the wisdom of their own experience to the larger community, as opposed to reserving the sharing of knowledge to those in the group that are formally spiritual teachers.

Over the years, these dharma talks have been one of the things that I look forward to most.  They’re invariably funny, profound and personal, and I’ve learned a lot from my fellow meditators through them.  I gave one last year, which I just now got a digital copy of, so I thought I’d share it.

The talk was on the topic of resonance and the significant role it plays on the spiritual path.  It has a lot to do with rhetoric as well, though I didn’t think of it in those terms at the time. Through the talk I weave in fan fiction and appropriation, ancient serial killers, Ze Frank, mental jujitsu and Obama, and I personally think it’s both fun and interesting. For those that would like to listen, you can download an mp3 here, or listen through the player below.  One caveat is that the very beginning is a little confusing out of context, as the talk was given in the middle of a week where others had given talks that I referenced then, a second is that while some concepts I talk about will only be familiar to those with background in Buddhism, overall the general message is widely applicable in my opinion. Also, when I use the word “practice”, it’s referring to the overall practice of the Buddhist path which includes meditation, worldview and ethical frameworks.  Enjoy!

As has become habit over the past couple of years, this past week I headed over to the NYU Interactive Telecommunications Program Winter Show. ITP is a graduate program started by Red Burns with a mission to “explore the imaginative use of communications technologies — how they might augment, improve, and bring delight and art into people’s lives.” While not as robust as last year’s Spring Show (due to the fact that the Spring show is often a display of many of the grad students’ master theses), the Winter Show definitely lived up to ITP’s vision of producing imaginative uses of tech.  I’ll share some of my favorite projects.

As would be appropriate, the first project on display when you walked into the show was ITP Guest Book, a web project meant to be accessed via an iPhone or iPod Touch that helped show goers leave comments on specific projects and navigate the space via a built in map and project categorization system.  While I loved the concept, I didn’t really find myself utilizing the app, preferring to organically navigate the space and save my commenting for the blog, where I could leverage a bit more of a hindsight view of things.

Many of the show’s projects were less utilitarian of course, with a whole slew that fell on the more artistic side of the technological spectrum.  My absolute favorite in the arts category was tek(s)nesonic, which featured a projected screen which captured those that walked in front of a camera and then mapped falling letters and numbers (which viewers could enter themselves) into the image, each of which were associated with different sound samples.  People who found themselves in the frame could then interact with the falling characters, “catching” them and activating the associated sounds.  I found myself delighted when a P would land on my shoulders and start beeping until I moved and it continued to fall.  Ingenious.

Also featured in the “delightful interactive art” category was Dynamic Ground, which featured some neato “floor tiles” which expanded and contracted when stepped on.  Could definitely see this as an incredible museum installation in which an entire room’s floor shifted and danced, so to speak, in response to people’s movement.  Check it out below. (video courtesy of the project’s creators)

On the more serious side of things, the ITP show often features projects with a political or pro-social bent, and my favorite of these was called The Bed, which was a dynamic data visualization of conflicts around the world. Faux blood would drip down onto a projected map of the world in places where conflicts are occurring, or, at least, in places where the media has decided to report on conflict.  The “drips” were based on feeds from news organizations that were pulled into and analyzed by a semantic computer program that looked for words associated with conflict.  I didn’t get to watch it develop over time, seeing it at the very beginning of the show when it started creating its visualization, but even then there were already multiple conflict zones mapped in the Middle East, with only one in all of Africa.  I think the project really portrayed well how perceptions of global conflict are shaped (and skewed) by a news media that is highly selective and not necessarily fully representative of events happening across the globe.

One project that particularly spoke to me was another data visualization (these types of projects were definitely well represented at the show) not of geopolitics but rather of energy use.  It was called Energy Informatics, and the goal of the project was to make tangible how energy usage changes over time in the places most relevant to us: our residences.  Using  NYU residence halls as an example, the visualization overlaid a translucent color map onto a real image of the building.  The color map would change over time representing how energy usage in the halls went up and down over the course of the day.  I definitely think that this type of visualization will become increasingly important over time.

The final project I’ll share which struck my fancy was called Online|Offline ChessGame.  I mainly loved it because it was a new take on an old idea: correspondence chess.  In the project, each of the players uses a physical chess pieces and board just as they would in a standard game, but one that was modified to allow for play at a distance.  The board would indicate what moves an opponent is making, allowing a person to move those pieces to maintain a physical setup of where the game is at.  As the possibility of chess play over a distance became more viable than ever with the advent of the internet, much of the physicality of the game was lost with people playing on screens.  I’m all for technology that allows us the advantages that advanced telecommunications makes possible, without the need to sit and stare at a screen for hours.

Overall, some really great projects at the show.  Congrats to all the participants.

See here, and below, for my full photoset from the show.

My fellow meditators in the windows of ABC Home

When I signed up to be part of the Interdependence Project’s meditation marathon, to sit for 24 hours in the windows of the most sheeshy home furnishing store in New York City as part of a fundraiser for the organization, I knew it would be intense.  I just didn’t know what the nature of that intensity would be.  I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about or preparing for the sit, as I didn’t have much context for this kind of experience to base any preparation on.  I mostly considered that I’d be sitting for 24 hours (with of course walking meditation mixed in), and the only context I had for such an extended period of meditation was meditation retreats, usually about a week long, that I’ve been going on for some time now.  Those retreats are, naturally, very intense from an internal standpoint.  Generally retreatants, or yogis as they’re often called, are in idyllic surroundings with delicious food and lots of silence, but are so intimately engaged in focused meditation that they tend to experience euphoric highs but also debilitating lows, with plenty of peacefulness and straightup boredom mixed in.  And so when I was thinking about what to prepare for when sitting 24 hours, I largely thought of it in these terms, as a subjective experience.

What I basically forgot about was that I’d be sitting in an *extremely* public space, a street level storefront window that’s meant to highlight things to otherwise uninterested passers by.  And wow, were the passers by  interested.  I guess it isn’t everyday that you see about a dozen people meditating in window, but wow.  The fact that our 24 hours included a Friday night in a pretty busy part of New York City probably helped in terms of the amount of attention we got.  Here are some of the general sentiments I heard, paraphrased:

“Are they for real?”

“Are they real?”

“Wow, those people are incredible. That’s discipline!”

“I wish I could do that.”

“I used to meditate, I should really start again.”

“What a waste of time.”

“Get a life!”

“How much do you cost?! I want to take you home!” (Note: not a paraphrase.)

There were obviously many more, and some pretty extreme ones as well.  Many people tapped, and sometimes even banged, on the windows, I guess to try to disturb something they thought wasn’t meant to be. Many others laughed, sometimes at us, sometimes more at how surreal the whole thing was. One person, in the more late hours of Friday night, even mooned one of the window sections. The drunk people definitely got the prize for most colorful responses.  At the same time, these highly visible responses shouldn’t overshadow the many people that quietly stopped, watched, even meditated with us, and engaged the IDP volunteers that were present to talk to people about what the event was and invite them to come for free meditation classes that were being held inside of ABC home throughout the day on Saturday.

While most of the time my eyes were closed, I did eventually start sit with my eyes open and downcast so that I could stay awake. Once I started doing that, more people would actually try to engage me, making faces, tapping, staring, and taking photos. (I actually don’t think I’ve ever been photographed more over the course of a day in my life.)  One person flipped me a bird.  Many others smiled.  Some even bowed.  Towards the end, I kept my eyes open more and more, still meditating, but often smiling back and doing lovingkindness practice, radiating well wishes for all the folks who stopped and those that didn’t.

These reactions, the inter-subjective experiences of what was essentially a group of people in dialogue over the course of 24 hours,  actually ended up being the defining aspect of my experience, as opposed to any subjective, internal mind states that might have come up (though I’ll admit that the knee pain was pretty bad). The range of those responses, how they changed over the course of the 24 hours, and my own reactions to them, ended up making my meditation experience one of relationship and dialogue about what people perceived myself and my fellow meditators to be doing.

Ultimately, what we were doing, and what I failed to reflect on in advance of the sit, was starting a conversation.  Our t-shirts said “Sit Down, Rise Up”, the Interdependence Project’s slogan. Our public sitting was an embodiment of our philosophy: if we wish to change the world, we need to change our minds, and with changed minds, we engage more effectively and compassionately with others (though the process isn’t near that linear). The people meditating started a conversation with passers by, and the many IDP volunteers that were there with flyers and talking points closed the loop and let them know what our work was all about.  And I think that people were affected, if only to see for a moment a group of people trying to better their hearts.

Many thanks to all the people that sponsored me to sit, to my fellow meditators and volunteers at the Interdependence Project, to my friends Nick, Rik and Sebené that dropped by to show support, and to all of the people that stopped for a moment to consider what we were doing.  May all beings find happiness.

And… here’s me sitting in a window. :)

More pictures from the event here and here.

And so tonight I found myself in the familiar situation of arriving at the Brooklyn Museum (best polling place ever) not really knowing much about the people on the ballot.  Last time this happened I figured that I should use the resources I had at hand to become an at least somewhat informed voter, so I sat down on the floor, took out my iPhone, and painstakingly reviewed various articles about the candidates on its small screen.

This time, I thankfully had my laptop with me, and using the museum’s free wifi, was able to do critical last minute research to inform my decisions.  I checked the sites of various local organizations that I know to see who they endorsed, as well as the local section of the Times to get their take on who would be best for various offices.  Armed with a much greater understanding of who the people on the ballot were and where they stood on various issues, I entered one of those classic New York polling booths, made my selection, and pulled the lever with a sense that I had not only done my civic duty by voting, but didn’t waste my vote as a result of being entirely uninformed.

Now, I acknowledge that I personally could have done a lot better in terms of following these elections, especially recognizing the importance of these local offices and their impact on my work, neighborhood and city.  At the same time, I don’t think that I was that unique.  People are busy, New Yorkers especially.  These candidates have far less resources than those in national Presidential or Congressional races, so we don’t see a lot of advertising from them, save on the day of (the streets were littered with postcards proclaiming various candidates’ virtues today).  The mainstream news media does cover them, but not on the front page and not nearly as thoroughly as it does for more prominent elections, as we do live in a market driven media system and the demand isn’t as great for this kind of reportage.  As a result the demand for information was left to the last minute for a person like me, and so I approached the problem in the way that seemed to make the most sense given the situation: I got the information at the point of decision.

Doing so, I engaged in what educational theorists call “just in time” learning.  This kind of learning is contrasted to “just in case” learning, where the learner learns something on the chance that they might need to know it at a later point, but the situation in which they might apply it is certainly not present, and may never be.  For a great example of just in case learning, think back to a good bit of your high school experience.  I swear I have never used trigonometry.  Anyhow, just in time learning is basically how most people in practical contexts actually manage to get things done, calling on the resources that they need to accomplish a task as they’re working on it.

For example, when I first started my job I had this idea that I should take a class on using the image editing program Photoshop.  The level of busyness at work meant that I never got around to it, but as I began to do projects that required me to use it, I would ask my colleagues for a couple of minutes of their time to show me how to get something to work.  I know know how to do the kinds of things that I need to when using the program.

So, as opposed to sitting around reading books that might be relevant at some point (though there certainly is a big place for that, and a good learner will figure out the right balance between these two approaches), someone engaged in just in time learning learns the information that is most relevant to the current moment, as opposed to some potential future moment.

My thought, after having my experience this evening, was that perhaps people don’t vote on election day not because they’re too busy, or don’t fully care, but rather that they don’t want to waste their time with something they know nothing about.  What if, though, they knew that there was a bank of laptops at the polling station, and that they could look candidates up, just as I had, when that information was most critical?  Regardless of this pie in the sky policy idea, down the line the majority of the population will be carrying some sort of device that connects them to the vast amount of information on the net in any case, and so I wonder how civic participation might change if more and more people simply decide to go into that polling station, knowing that they can take a couple of minutes to figure out how they want to vote, as opposed to just skipping the whole process entirely.

I agree that the speech was really wonderful, and important, but do have a bone to pick with Obama on this one.  Hear me out.

Throughout the entire speech the predominant theme was that youth need to take responsibility for their own education.  Don’t drop out.  Don’t disrespect your teachers.  Do the work even if it may not seem relevant.  And above all, it’s ultimately up to you whether you succeed or not.  Generally good messages, but really only good messages for students.

For society at large, we know, however, that “it takes a village”, to quote an old African proverb, and that the village that was put in charge of education has failed.  It has failed because it was designed for a different world, and has been ornery in the face of adaptation.  It has failed through cutting costs, it has failed through irrelevant content, it has failed by favoring teaching methods that are at best boring and at worst antagonize young people to the idea of learning.  It has failed to realize that it needs to teach attitudes and orientations as opposed to facts and figures.  And it’s a failure that Obama didn’t mention a word about, glossing over this ossified aspect of American society using a fail safe mantra of rugged American individualism when what the education system really needed was a serious jolt about how this is a problem of communities and systems, of parent involvement and teacher training and of fear in the face of special interests that control testing and textbooks, as opposed to just giving a pep talk to kids saying that they should take their studies more seriously.  After all, if you were given the system that they were, would you?

When taken in the larger context, Obama certainly said some nice things, but no where near enough.  This was a fine thing for the president to say to young people on their first day back to school, but if this President wants to make any impression on me when it comes to education, he’ll have to say, and do, much much more.  This was his first day of school to me, and he did alright.  An A for effort and showing up.  We’ll see what his grades are like, though, at the end of the year.

I’m aiming to raise $1,000 to support this budding community, whose members are dedicated to examining their own lives and their engagement with the world through the lens of interdependence, one that implicitly acknowledges the connection that we all have to one another.  It’s in this spirit that I ask you to support me.  Conscious and active grassroots communities are able to thrive with the help of people that believe in their value, and if you do, please support me as much as you’re able.

If you’d like to sponsor me for one of my 24 hours of sitting, you can give $42, which would be awesome, as then I’d need only 23 more people to do the same!  Alternatively, I invite you to give what you want and how you want.  More is great.  Less is great.  All is appreciated.  I thank you all in advance for your support.  If you have any questions about the organization, the work that I’m involved in, and how we’ll be aiming to utilize the funds raised, don’t hesitate to be in touch (Rafi at empathetics dot org), or check out the event details over at the ID Project’s web site.

In short, my grandfather was an Hungarian American Communist who was one of the founders of the Transport Workers Union, became a high level official in the Hungarian Communist Government, and eventually defected from said government for a host of reasons not least of which was total disillusionment with Communism as it manifested in its brutal and paranoid form in cold war Hungary.

As I conducted initial research about his life, one of the key books that I found was called In Transit, a great read that documents the history of the TWU.  It’s by a labor historian, Josh Freeman, who teaches here in New York at the City University of New York Graduate Center.  I figured that since he was so close, literally blocks from my office, I’d try to contact him and see if we could meet to chat and possibly fill in some blanks I had in the story of my grandfather’s life.  Luckily, Josh is a really wonderful man and sat down with me for a long conversation where he was able to give me some historical context within which I could better understand what I’m coming to realize is an even more fascinating and complex political and personal history than I imagined.

While I won’t go over everything that I discovered in that meeting, one of the most interesting points, regarding my grandfather’s move to Hungary and joining the government there, does merit mention.  My understanding of his move from my research up to that point was that he found himself on trial and about to be deported from the States in 1947 (apparently along with many other major labor leaders) and that the International Communist Party reached out and offered him a position in the Hungarian government, which he took for obvious reasons of both avoiding deportation and joining what was possibly one of the top 500 or 1,000 highest posts in the entire country of Hungary .  While this view of events was not quite inaccurate, Josh was able to offer some context around what was going on at the time in Eastern Europe that led him to believe that the Hungarian government wasn’t being entirely generous in the case of my grandfather.

He shared that at the same time that McCarthyism and the Red Scare was burgeoning in the United States, there was a parallel xenophobic climate coming to a head in Eastern Europe.  In the US, the government persecuted suspected Communists. In Eastern Europe, many governments, including the Hungarian Government, persecuted suspected Western spies, or anyone inconvenient that could be portrayed as such. This was a period during which homegrown Communists in Eastern European satellite countries were being ousted by the USSR in favor of politicians whose loyalties lied more deeply with the central authorities in the East.  The use of Show Trials, elaborate constructed and highly public hoaxes, was quite a popular method of doing so.

This persecution in Eastern Europe, as compared to the States, was far more sinister. People targeted at best disappeared to concentration camps, and at worst, just disappeared, likely hung or otherwise killed by secret police forces.  These show trials often targeted people that could easily be suspected of having ties to Western governments and those that had cosmopolitan backgrounds for the purposes of showing the general population the need to be ever vigilant against insidious Western spies.  In addition, there was a strong antisemitic bent to the persecution.  My grandfather fit all of the characteristics of someone that would be a target of these show trials.  He had spent most of his adult life in the United States, and spent most of that time in New York City, one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world.  He was, of course, also Jewish.  Nevermind, of course, that he was a card carrying Communist and successfully organized not an insignificant portion of “the proletariat” in New York City, this could easily be written off as a front.  Joshua believed that rather than being brought to Hungary due to a need on the part of the government for effective institutional leaders, though this may have been a pretense, the real reason for his journey there, from the perspective of the government, was to be the subject of or play a role in one of these show trials.

In the end my grandfather was not part of these trials in any way, though when their invalidity was made public in the mid 1950′s, it had a significant impact on my grandfather and greatly increased his disillusionment with the Communist regime.  Why he wasn’t involved though is a bit of a mystery if we take this premise to be accurate.  Josh believed that it might have been some sort of bureaucratic snafu, though this wasn’t totally working for me as an explanation.

Reflecting on my grandfather’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Affairs, though, I remembered a meeting that he had shortly after his arrival there with a very high level government official.  In the meeting, he was questioned heavily about the loyalties of various prominent American Communists, which he strongly vouched for in the face of accusations against them.  (see pages 18-20 of the testimony if you’re interested in reading about this meeting).  My thought was that there was a possibility that this meeting had some sort of effect on the official that caused him to decide not to involve my grandfather in the trials.

This further context put an entirely new spin on the story I’d constructed about my grandfather, and when I was in the meeting with Josh reflecting on what the implications of this would have been for my life had things turned out differently, I voiced that it was a bit surreal that but for a bureaucratic snafu or a chance meeting my grandfather avoided untimely death and I was able to sit there in an office on 35th street.  Sometimes, life just does that I guess.

Curious about this point of the trials, I went home after the meeting and decided to see if I could find anything in my grandfather’s testimony that might have pointed to this morbid premise.  Upon a closer examination of it, I found one reference that I had glossed over when I first read the document.  In one series of questions, my grandfather stated that in his later years in Hungary he believed that he might have been brought to Hungary to be a confessor in the show trial of László Rajk, perhaps the best known of the Hungarian show trials.  He mentions it just in passing in the testimony, but nothing more is said about why he believed this, so for the most part this aspect of the story remains a mystery.  I did find it significant though that there was some evidence other than Josh’s intuition that pointed to this possibility.

Needless to say, while I might never discover the full context behind the conditions that brought my grandfather to Hungary, I am finding the uncovering of various parts of both his history and the larger Cold War context in which it was situated quite fascinating.  The next stop on my search is the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, located at New York University.  Josh informed me that I’ll be able to find there personal correspondence between my grandfather and other TWU leaders, photographs from his time as a labor leader in New York, and even some film footage of him in action.  I have a date set with an archivist there in October, and I look forward to sharing what I find.