TWO LINKS FOR THE WORLD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KIKgR1OFSY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfhPbHaMpkc

According to the stats, this blog is read around the world.  I hope so.  These vids are from Portland, Oregon, in the last few days.

The top link is the nude female demonstrator who prompted the mystery feds to leave.  The bottom link is "Moms Against Feds."

Extreme vulnerability is something learned from that Chinese man standing in front of a tank.  Community solidarity in mom populations previously unempowered and discounted is something learned in Central America.

THE SONG OF THE TURTLE

These many recent breakthroughs about how neurons work are possible because now we have the ability to look at one cell at a time, to see messages go slipping down the axons to the next cell, to figure out what’s happening to the molecules in the cell, even which atoms of the mitochrondria are going on walkabout and what it means when electrons jump.  We know now that the neocortex is six layers thick and the layers are connected through and through by columns.  Only mammals have this, but ALL mammals have this.  All mammals have that neocortex wrapped around the brain.  Only humans have a PRE-FRONTAL neocortex behind their forehead, over their eyes.

http://3tags.org/article/for-the-first-time-researchers-see-structure-that-allows-brain-cells-to-communicate 

But recently, by being able to describe cell by cell, the scientists have figured out that birds do have neocortex, but it’s not in sheets wrapped around the rest of the brain.  If it’s a matter of how many neurons they have, they’re smarter than monkeys, so numbers can’t be the whole story.

“Both the mammalian neocortex and a structure in the bird brain called the dorsal ventricular ridge (DVR) originate from an embryonic region called the telencephalon. But the two regions mature into very different shapes, with the neocortex made up of six distinct cortical layers while the DVR contains large clusters of neurons called nuclei.”

It appears that one little nuclei of neurons is what enables birds to sing, and the premise is that an equivalent, possibly “Broca’s brain”, is the same thing in humans and enables us to speak.  Our words are songs.

“A similar experiment was conducted in a species of turtle, and revealed yet another anatomical possibility for neocortex-like cells. Instead of a six-layer neocortex or a cluster of nuclei, the turtle brain had layer 4- and 5-like cells “distributed along a single layer of the species' dorsal cortex.

If turtles had that little nuclei, perhaps they could sing, but the Song of Solomon meant turtledoves.  There are no singing reptiles.  Right?

Brains are cumulative — that means that the old brain versions are not discarded when new ones develop, but rather the old parts are kept whether changed and newly useful, or simply there, or interfering.  The connecting filaments wind back and forth through old and new.

Brains are ecologies, not homogenous tissues but clusters of specialized but communicating cells, some grouped into organs and others as independent as the original eukaryotic one-celled animals we came from, still capable of telling which direction is forward and what the environment tastes like.  

I don’t understand this passage, so I’ll just note it and leave the wiki-links.  “There are two types of cortex in the neocortex, the proisocortex and the true isocortex. The pro-isocortex is a transitional area between the true isocortex, and the periallocortex (part of the allocortex). It is found in the cingulate cortex (part of the limbic system), in Brodmann's areas 24, 25, 30 and 32, the insula and the parahippocampal gyrus.”

So far what I get about a lot of brain stuff is that they can tell the little bits are subtly different and sometimes what they do, so they just label them to make a way of talking about them.  “Archicortex is a type of cortical tissue that consists of three laminae (layers of neuronal cell bodies).  It has fewer layers than both neocortex, which has six, and paleocortex, which has either four or five. Because the number of laminae that compose a type of cortical tissue seems to be directly proportional to both the information-processing capabilities of that tissue and its phylogenetic age, paleocortex is thought to be an intermediate between neocortex and archicortex in both aspects, and archicortex is thought to be the oldest and most basic type of cortical tissue.”

So now I’m going to say that ideas are just big echoes of brain tissue;  first we label, then we guess, then we test -- often by ablation which means destruction.  The brain is limited by the size of the skull, the turtle is limited by the size of its shell, and people are limited by the boundaries of their experiences.  My visitors over the past couple of weeks were all friends in the Sixties when I was in Browning.  Unlike the people in Valier, who are full of fantasies about the rez except for those who moved here after years there, these friends had real experience in the same place, but a time long ago, a time that amounts now to a far distant place.

We all left for various reasons, some of us continued to cross paths in Portland or maybe just on the Internet, and so our constructed idea-shells are quite different.  As it turns out, because since 1999 I’ve deliberately limited myself to this little house lined with binders of writing and books for reading, I’m probably the most different. Some of the characteristics that I have strengthened for writing, are not good for socializing.  For instance, my rigid daily workflow or my long chains of logic and failure to pause for response.  Hard on conversation.  It seemed to me that they just didn’t believe much of what I said.  They were urban-suspicious, rejecting of difference, and echoed the conventional media, though it's the subset for educated urban people.

Portland, OR

They don’t care to know all this detailed stuff about the brain or thinking.  Why should they?  They cling to the world of our college years when there was science over here and humanities over there and “religion” was anything it said it was.  They still think "church."  All these friends are writers in a passing way, but still are totally naive about the developments of print and publishing over the past decade.  When I get intense about it, they ask what I’d like for dessert.

But somehow that culture — polite and limited, competent but not quite informed, charming but exasperating — must be wrapped around by layers of the one I live in — not the one represented by a physical town, but the one built since 1999 out of ideas as they evolved into an ecology of premises, many of them created out of the destruction/conversion of dyads from oppositions into interacting continuums.  My ideas are worrisome, full of danger, crossing into taboos they’ve skirted all their lives, while using secrecy as a shield.  They think I’ve been hoaxed.

The Pearl District

I’m not really here and yet I’m more deeply here than I am anyplace else.  Because I live in ideas and one of the strongest ideas is that my body in its grappling is my brain/self but the grapple extends through empathy into the world far outside my body.  I just have to remember to eat and pay the bills.  My friends get that (they fed me) and they’re doing well.  All I can give them is my time and my ideas, but it’s awkward.  They accept politely and lay them aside.  We don’t quite have the right structure for our brain cells to communicate.  It’s okay.  But it makes for incoherent posts like this one.

RUSSELL ROWLAND, MONTANA WRITER

Russell Rowland, a Billings-based author, gave a reading at the Valier library last night from his most recent book:  “Fifty-Six Counties: A Montana Journey.”  Pleasant chat with lots of factoids and stories, a few unifying concepts.  An excellent example of what we used to call “Montana books,” a label supposed to guarantee popularity.  Local people will like this one.  I fear that people from other places might not “get it.”

The book is from Bangtail Press which has devolved from a nexus in Helena:  Falcon Press (which needs to be distinguished from other publishers with the same name), Globe Pequot (which moved away), Far Country,  Riverbend, Mountain Press.  These people may be the conceivers of the idea of “Montana literature” as a brand and coveted status.  Certainly they provide the connectors between writers and readers who shared an obsession entangling the concepts of “last,” “best” and “place.”  It defines a group of people as distinct as the cabal of Manhattan readers and writers that dominate publishing in other much more "sophisticated" ways.  

Whether there’s money in the Montana writing obsession is open to question, but a lot of writers lost confidence and moved to Portland, the new hot spot.  Some say because of a shortage of jobs that authors could do while still writing.  Strangely, as the number of writers shrank, the numbers of publishers grew.  The weight of writing and general humanities activity has moved from Missoula to Bozeman/Billings.

One of the locally published magazines most tightly linked into this community of writers has been Big Sky Journal.  Allen Morris Jones, the editor, is himself a writer.  His “indicator book” is “a highly-regarded look at the ethics of hunting, A Quiet Place of Violence.”  High end hook and bullet stuff, philosophizing just short of Foucault, observable geology, liberal sentiments, cowboy university ideas, and gorgeous photography.  The mag supports advertising for the quite wealthy but not all that sophisticated — a sort of peoples’ “wealth” of place and local persons.

No Indians.  And the Indians don’t care.

This whole Montana context boils down to the statewide commodification of bourgeois people who require successful people to have virtue, hear the faint echo of Norse Valkyrie sagas, and love the outdoors even where there are cows.  In the Flathead Valley, Missoula struggles with the Pacific Coast,  temperature inversions scented by paper mills, and scandals.

Missoula

In 1999 the Humanities of Montana (an independent organization), created in Missoula the Montana Festival of the Book, which I attended at first thinking it was a kind of think tank.  But it was really a pop-up bookstore with promotional readings and panels, each controlled by a moderator who didn’t let anything get controversial.  Over the years the “Festival” became more and more a tight circle of controllers and a wider loop of contributors until suddenly it seemed that Garrison Keillor had been living in Montana all along.  Then it ended in 2014.  I hadn’t attended since the death of Jimmy Welch.

Jim Whilt, Poet of the Rockies

Lately I’ve been thinking about Jim Whilt, who in the Sixties used to come around Scriver Studio to stock us up with new copies of “Mountain Memories” or some other chapbook of his local doggerel.  Here’s a sample:  Whilt's preface to Giggles from Glacier Guides (1935):  “In submitting this little booklet to the public I am doing so for the simple reason that every season when I arrive in the park my suitcase had not stopped rocking before some dude asked me why I did not put some of the park vocabulary into print so they could take back home some of the western phrases so they could show their friends to just what extent the English language has been roped, abused hog-tied and even murdered. So my pen started leaking and this is what leaked out.”  

Glacier Park writing is a small genre of its own based on the superiority of the colorful.  (If only grizzlies could write.)  Of course, cowboy poetry has developed into a cult of its own with festivals and famous writers — even songsters.

Getting back to Billings, Rowland co-edited a book called “West of 98: Living and Writing the New American West.”  I’ve only read the introduction by Lynn Stegner, daughter-in-law of Wallace Stegner who was local (Montana and Saskatchewan) until he discovered Utah and then California. He identified the real definer of the West as water or rather the lack.    Kim Stafford, writer son of the distinguished poet William Stafford in Portland, referred to this anthology as “renegade writers” but they look to me like the same familiar folks.  University grads, edited, published, promoted and awarded honors.  Good friends who write excellent blurbs for each other.  Their writing is pretty damn good, I admit.  But new blood is not welcome.  They just say it is.

Sometimes I think about who I would include in a literary Salon d’Refuses.  “The Salon des Refusés, French for "exhibition of rejects", is generally an exhibition of works rejected by the jury of the official Paris Salon, but the term is most famously used to refer to the Salon des Refusés of 1863.”  Who would I name?  And in the end, what would separate them from the popular published writers?  I would suggest domestication.  Many of the refusées are hot-heads and rebels, fueled by obsession and leaning towards terrorism.  Others might be gay or too violently tough or give priority to feminist categories.  The Missoula academic women seem to bump over to Idaho or Washington.

"Prospector" by Lyndon Pomeroy, a mentor of Rowland's father

Rowland tells the painful story of his father taking his welded cowboy art to a street fair in San Francisco.  Like Bob Scriver and myself taking bronzes into Gump’s, it was being invisible, discounted, even disrespected.  NOT successful.  They just didn’t value cowboy stuff, couldn’t SEE it.  But what I see is that art sales and writing — more than other things — are an interaction of forces, some social and some personal, some just a matter of timing and economic forces.  It’s not about quality.  You can accept it, adjust and succeed, or be defiant.  Actually, I’ve learned another way.  I do what I do for my own satisfaction and the rest is karma.  

I think that some people believe that if there isn’t some goad to action, like fear of failure, people will sit down and do nothing.  Related is the idea that there are “grades” to be awarded by authorities and that unless a person gets A’s, they fail.  These are old school dogmas that ought to be spiked even in schools.

Rowland’s family sagas ring true to me — my own family’s land ownership conflicts (which are short of murder -- so far) center in Oregon timber and sheep country.  But Rowland’s novels are quiet and competent, like Rowland, which may mean they sink below consciousness for many people.  A local woman said to me once, “If anyone tries to write about my family, I’ll kill them.”  In wide open country where things happen, secrecy is the name of the game.  But, more than that, the feeling is superstitious — like aboriginals afraid of having their picture taken for fear of their souls being stolen.  Make of it what you will.

AND UNDER THAT PORTLAND, ANOTHER PORTLAND

Myself and Duncan McTavish, early Fifties

It’s been raining for a few days which always prompts memories of my first decades living in Portland, OR, 1939 to 1978.  They were defined by our house, 51XX NE 15^th Av. which my father bought from my uncle, whose first real-estate job was selling bank repossessions resulting from the Great Depression.  It was a beautifully detailed house that’s still occupied and has probably had additions made.  My father’s proposal to my mother was in part based on offering a life in that house.  And a life it was!   In 1998 we carried my mother out in a body bag early in the morning after her death.  Before the mortician zipped up the bag, I laid in a big bouquet of pink Stargazer lilies.  She was 89.

I live in Montana now, the place I went after college in 1961: the Blackfeet Reservation.  I bought this house with one-third of her house.  (I have two brothers.)  I don’t think about Portland a whole lot since there’s so much to think about right here, but among my other names I claim “Stays Put Woman.”  I suppose that’s “Stays Put Woman #2.”  My father was a traveling man and I admire that life but I’d need a lot of money to do it now.  No more sleeping in the back of a pickup or van parked in some hidden spot.

Paul, Mark, Mary Strachan (mid-Fifties)

This morning I took a cruise through the Oregonian and found a series being reprinted about NE and N Portland. http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/08/roots_of_gentrification_key_mo.html#incart_river 

One heading is “East Portland Was Almost a City.”  In my years it was still Albina, a farm town that had developed into an immigrant community: many craftsmen and small-time manufacturers; furniture, fuel, grocery and drug stores; libraries, banks, J.C. Penneys and Fred Meyer.  We went everywhere on foot or by bus because my father used the car in his work as a field man for Pacific Supply Cooperative.  My paternal grandparents had chosen this section of Portland and originally bought a doctor’s house on 15^th.  A third-degree cousin still lives on that street.  It was a calmly functioning location with undercurrents of heart break because of ties to Europe at war.

Vanport Flood (1948) no fatalities -- the water rose gradually.

Then came the Vanport flood, which revealed another internal town, this one African American from the South.  The Kaiser shipyards had brought in labor and housed them on the Columbia River flood plain.  Now they were displaced into old houses near the Willamette that they didn’t own.  Economics were literally black and white.  By the time divorce forced me back to Portland in 1973, Jefferson High School and Vernon Grade School were mostly black.  Burned out on teaching but looking for a dependable civil service job, I became the first female animal control officer.  The hiring panel included a black man with fire in his eye.  He was sympathetic to my rez stories.

Animal control is a street service job and I learned Portland all over again.  My assigned section was SE which included hippies (Hawthorne), academics (Reed College) and low income recently-country people plus felons (Errol Heights).  NE and N was black.  I discovered that Roselawn, a short and narrow street that ended behind our house, lined with small owner-built houses where my classmates had lived, was now considered one of the most dangerous in the city.  Our most effective officer in NE was a small blonde woman who took no nonsense off anyone.  We were an activist, progressive animal control operation and I became education coordinator, working with other city entities and the media.  Now I learned the political ropes.  I can’t tell you how disappointed I was when Goldschmidt turned out to confirm all his wife’s suspicions.

Pretty soon my night classes and new church membership (Unitarian Universalist) had pushed me to leave for Chicago again, this time to U of Chicago and its adjunct UU seminary.  I didn’t come back to Portland until I’d left the ministry ten years later, been “non-renewed” from Heart Butte School, and was once again broke enough to take refuge with my mother, already harboring my brother who’d suffered brain damage in a fall.

It was a good thing he was there because now the house was engulfed in gang wars and the more subtle real estate destructive corruption, both based in the expanding black community.  The first night I was back, sleeping in my van at the curb, there was a shotgun exchange back and forth across 15th a hundred feet from my head.  Gunfire was usual in the evening, close enough that my brother, former Marine MP, made us turn out all the lights and sit on the floor until it had gone by.  In the morning he took his mug of coffee out to the street, wandering back and forth to add to his collection of spent cartridges.  In a few years at least nine bodies were found next door or nearby.  I was there sleeping on a rollaway for eight months until I found another civil service job with the City of Portland Bureau of Buildings.  Yet another Portland.

My '90's apartment was the farthest to the left, main floor.

On a ridealong with one of the city building inspectors who was assigned N and NE Portland, I saw the kind of things that were common in Southside Chicago.  The city, prompted by the minister of my childhood church, Vernon Presbyterian, began a crackdown campaign on slum landlords.  I helped design the computer algorithm that identified them.  One had rented to me in the Seventies.  I’d had to pay the electric bill for his fancy big house to keep the security lights on around our apartments.  

Now, in the Nineties, the apartment building where I rented had a major hole in the roof and I tried to get one of the building inspectors to cite it, but he was afraid to be too aggressive and the renter was afraid he’d have to pay more.  It came to nothing.  There was a coke dealer living under me and another one across the hall.  I liked the one across the hall.  He was Japanese, a gentleman, no furniture at all except a bedroll, and when he came home at 3AM, he knocked on my door because my cat came into the building with him and sat at my door, waiting.

Elementary school students in Portland memorize the bridges.

During this time attention was being given to earthquakes, which might take out the many bridges across the Willamette, and to the rising problem of the homeless and the many Hispanic drug peddlers.  On the bus going home I could see them -- mostly youngsters -- running through the downtown and sometimes shooting.  Several people were killed in cross-fire.

Once the bus was caught in a confrontation and one of the men was backed up under my window at PPD gunpoint.  I should have moved away, but I was hypnotized by the three-carat diamond stud in his ear.  Another time I was waiting for my own bus when the bus that served my old nabe came by.  The door opened and everyone on board began to rap on the windows and yell at me, "Get on the bus!"  My mother was on the bus and she had said loudly,  “Oh, there’s my daughter!”  I got on the bus and bowed to the seated crowd, all of us laughing and applauding.

West Hills slide destruction

Then I transferred to the Site Development team, all soils engineers, geologists, and one landscaper.  Now I learned about the slowly sliding West Hills, the unpredictable Johnson Creek drainage, and flood plain mitigation rules that enraged everyone.  Newcomers moved to Portland, lived there ten years, saw no floods and assumed this was the way it would always be.  

Developers were constantly after the empty land where Vanport had been.  My boss, a particularly intelligent and principled man, was called on to say why it wasn’t a great place to build a new prison.  He pointed out that the people would be locked in, unable to escape a flood which was inevitable.  His questioners said, “Who cares?  They’d just be convicts anyway!”  And Bill said quietly, “My brother is a prison guard.  I take a different view.”

Portland as it was once, Mt. St. Helens intact.

My basic view of Portland is as a river-bound location in a valley among volcanoes.  The people and the patterning of their residence has changed from the original native American settlement to trader cabins to homesteaders, on and on.  Same here in Montana on the East Slope.  Fortunes go well, then collapse, then give way to a new order.  It’s personal.  But then it’s NOT personal.  It’s not even human.

Mt. St. Helens erupting.

DANCING WELL WITH PARTNERS

Me, 1962 or so. 

High school dramatics saved my life.  Not the life everyone saw with me walking around, a good girl getting good grades, but the REAL life where I had dragonfly wings and could sing in a strange key no one could hear.  Even writing was not a comfort in those days with the “creative writing” teacher demanding that I demonstrate the robin’s rain call I claimed I knew  (I did.)  Everyone praised too quickly -- no one really “grokked.”  Teachers would ask me to “help” and “befriend” obviously unhappy classmates, never hearing the shrieking in my own head.  I needed a community of people like me.

Onstage one can shriek -- in costume -- even in high school and certainly in real university theatre classes. What I learned was the necessity of empathy, the vicarious inhabitation of other people’s worlds and motives.  The Blackfeet reservation was “grad school” where the trade-off for the survival of the group versus survival of the individual was “for reals,” truly life and death.  Being “nice” was a defensive pose but no guarantee of not starving.  White skin helped but it was a minority identity.  The whole delicate diplomacy of advance and retreat according to race, gender, status, is always a dance.

Queens of the Ball

Last night I watched “Paris Is Burning” for the first time (you can find it online).  It was filmed when I was circuit-riding through Montana with 19^th century frontier Methodism as a script, so I never heard about it at the time.  I don't think many people did.  It’s a movie about dressing up and posing as the person you “really” are.   I mean, REALLY are. The other aspect is about forming groups:  “houses,” as in couture; “family” to replace the one that threw you out; "voguing" and "throwing shade" as ways of extravagantly interfacing one’s most flamboyant showing-off self with all the competitors and sympathizers, judgers and defenders.  Very tribal.  A rumbling rhumba.

I don’t think anyone has ever interpreted “Paris Is Burning” -- the whole phenomenon of a minority blazing out in a protected setting -- in terms of a Native American pow-wow.  Surely fancy-dancing is not so different from voguing, a way of yearning and mocking at the same time.  No 19^th century warrior or hunter danced in a whirl of bright ribbons and ostrich feathers, but neither does the 21^st century dancer have to fear the cavalry will come to shoot them dead as they once did.  (Gays still might worry.  Hispanics?  We're all worrying.)  The two forces -- self-expression and community solidarity -- combine in a very powerful way on that grassy campground next to Browning.  The families, like "ball houses” act in the same competitive way, driving each other to higher achievement, but sheltering the vulnerable.

Portland, OR, Leadership Forum

In the Nineties I still had heard nothing about this movie and even now it’s discussed more in terms of Gay than Black, New Orleans in Harlem.  In that decade I was working for the City of Portland, which was trying to come to terms with the Black population it acquired in wartime when Kaiser brought in shipyard labor.  Affirmative action meant that I was working with Blacks, getting to know them at least a little bit.  They knew that movie. 

When I got on the bus and saw an empty seat next to one of my Black coworkers, I hesitated to sit there and he saw that, so then I was determined to sit there.  We talked about golf.  He’d stop by my desk and ask if I had any hand cream and I’d give him some from the tube in my drawer.  (We worked so much with paper that our hands were always dry.)  Then I thought I’d be generous and gave him a tube of his own -- too late seeing that he took it as rejection, not wanting to share a water fountain.  We step on each other's toes.

There were enough Blacks that they interacted among each other, less guarded than otherwise.  One of them, a young (and according to them, very spoiled) woman would occasionally “vogue.”  When I imitated her, everyone was both amused and nervous.  It was indiscrete.  Was it hostile?

These ladies are in my old nabe in Portland.

The men of color were careful not to be anything but conventional in a white way.  One older dignified man was constantly treated like a slave by our little white hen of a boss, I think because she was afraid of him.  Me, too.  I mean, she was afraid of me, too.  He and I became sympathizers.  He was a strong church person and since I was thinking about all those issues, I decided to attend his church.  He met me there, thinking I would feel isolated, and his small son came along as chaperone so no one would get the wrong idea.  People were dressed as for a coronation, fabulous upper-class Brit couture with hats like herons spreading wings.  Everything was patterned.  The music was soaring.  It was another moment when people who usually had to keep their heads down for safety were able to really cut loose, not in a low way, but as an entitlement to the best, most powerful, most splendid.  Star power.  Status.

Octavia St. Laurent

People in middle-class white America don’t much dress up for church anymore.  Even the pastors are not so likely to wear robes and enter in procession with the choir.  There seems to be a feeling that it would be “fake,” pretentious.  But poor people don't admire dressing down.  The funeral practice on the rez now -- if the family can afford it -- features pall-bearers wearing new matching cowboy shirts with emblematic armbands.  

Priests still dress up, though the Pope now dresses down.  It's a matter of distinguishing oneself in the vocabulary of wardrobe.   (In the wonderful comic strip called “Francis,” he tries on Benedict’s fancy red shoes and finds himself in Kansas!) 

http://www.gocomics.com/francis/2014/06/09#.U8FN-BaFWFI

Francis demonstrates empathy.

Somehow the hippie/back-to-the-land/anti-arrogance/grunge levelers and deflators have gone a little too far:  they’ve damaged the joy of extravagance, the satirical flamboyance of dressing-up and “playing the role.”   The fairy godmother no longer helps us "go to the ball in in a fabulous gown."  

The “mothers” of the “houses” who are interviewed in “Paris Is Burning,” take a protective, encouraging but not unrealistic, view of their “babies.”  They know these youngsters have been thrown out of their birth families; they know they survive through shop-lifting, sexwork, low-pay drudge work, whatever they have to do; they know that they are constantly in danger and, in fact, one of the most appealing people interviewed is found dead before the end of the movie.  (Octavia St. Laurent has also died.)  In such communities an aquifer of tears is just under the surface.  If it converts to fuel, the fire consumes cities.  Not just Paris.

Religion as institution can enable and justify destruction.  But as small voluntary organic organizations like the former Elks gymnasium productions in “Paris Is Burning,” they can give life, a ground of being where individuals can take root for survival.  They must be kept secret, or at least confidential, so as to attract only those who are seeking them.  They cannot be produced by advertising campaigns like those the denominations fund in hopes of growth.  In fact, even the North American Indian Days pow-wow has become something like a State Fair with out-of-state carnival rides and gimcrack vendors.  $500 fee for a booth on the fairway.  Locals can't afford them.

Military "drag" is popular around the world.

A few years ago Tom Cruise came through to promote Scientology, claiming Indian spirituality as Euros constantly do.  Several people gave Cruise valuable gifts, like solidly beaded vests, expecting that he would reciprocate by maybe inviting them to stay at his place in Hollywood.  NOT.  He thought he was entitled to homage.  Sometimes gay people come to the rez, thinking that all indigenous people are levelers, innocent of social prejudice and ranking.  NOT.  Every tribe has its own gender arrangements, but all respect wealth.  Most are a little uneasy around African-Americans unless they've spent time in the city.

Maybe such organic communities as the ones in the film are on the internet now.  There's a LOT of dance on YouTube, amazing moves.  It wasn’t until the action shifted to pocket computers that filaments of empathy could connect people.  Maybe we need to see faces as well as hearing voices and music. I’m told that soon every school child on the rez will be given a “tablet”.  Let it happen.  We should hand out smart phones all over Central America.  Give them city, give them “houses.”  Call the tribes.  

This is the fifth step of this process of achieving deep meaning: connecting to all these others and what they are feeling.  Find your people.  This is a powerful way to move the out-skin world to the in-skin understanding of who and where you are.  It will take you back to expanding the repertoire of your own bodily instrument, your sensorium.

Hopi Homecoming Royalty