The Perils of Paddleboarding

               “I have never seen someone fall off a board more than you,” Jim Brugman told my blushing self.  Brugman is a surfer, skater, and gifted instructor at Middletown’s Island Surf and Sport.  With nearly two dozen surfboards, boogieboards, skimboards, and Stand-Up Padlleboards, Brugman has transformed a surf bum lifestyle into a busy career.  And while he usually spends fourteen-hour summer days teaching, facilitating, or officiating at Surfer’s End, he spent a futile afternoon attempting to get this oafish reporter balanced on a paddleboard.  Brugman’s young sun-scorched instructors assisted the numerous and diverse patrons (ages 7-70) while he drove me to Third Beach’s stiller waters.  After all, to Jim I was a fresh fish. 

Admittedly, I left Middletown in shame, but I had arrived with confidence.  A former lifeguard, a once-decorated captain of a swim team, I am, in sum, a waterbug.  Surely, I thought, pedagogue Brugman would have a dull time with Poseidon as his pupil. 

                Jim produced two boards. My thick blue paddleboard was nine and a half feet, though boards vary in sizes.  I placed my size fifteen hooves on this baby of a paddleboard and felt the high-density plastic rock beneath my feet.  Brugman modeled how to bend the knees (to mere mortals this gives balance) and keeping the chin tipped upward (a haughty move which would come easily). I was handed a paddle.  To fit my lengthy torso, its extendable was stretched to the limit.  The ideal paddler dips the blade alongside the board and sweeps backward before swapping hands and doing likewise on the opposite side.  I eyed Jim’s slimmer, sleeker board.  It would be my promotion if I could survive this first round of simple stand-and-paddle.

                With a push and an exclamation my baby board and I were off!  And though it handled like a combine, the ole’ girl was steady.  Jim’s paddle sliced through the water; I successfully mimicked these movements and held in my unsubtle paunch for Mercury’s clicking camera.  Beside me, I saw aged windsailors and other lazy paddlers.  With such mellow company, I demanded a rush.  “Jim, I need the open water!”  The instructor agreed.    

               Jim said that the Atlantic never had calmer waves than the day I took his board into Surfer’s End.  So, it is not with a little shame that I admit that even with such pygmy waves, I tumbled off like a pickled cyclist.  I collapsed sixteen times before I stood up once.  Each time I stood tall, at the slightest movement, I felt the need to rinse and repeat.  After the sixteenth dousing, miraculously, I could briefly stand.  I regained the vertical with verve but lasted a mere five minutes.  By collapse number twenty-six, I took a hint.

This vanquished paddler headed for shore and saw a mother—in the mid-afternoon of life, surfing by me with a smile.  It turns out that she was a true natural.  To my added disgrace, both she and her skilled son (Jim offered him a job) came from a land–locked state and took to the boards like a fish to—No!  I’ll just call them lucky.  Keep the boards waxed, Jim.  I’ll be back. 

  

Mark Steinbach: The Organist

Brett Warnke.  “Steinbach to Play at Wickford Festival,” Southern Rhode Island Newspapers, Time Out.  Published July 13, 2010.

Providence—The bright summer afternoon light lanced through Sayles Hall’s wooden rosettes.  Ascending a narrow staircase I could feel the music through the walls.  All 3,000 tubes of Brown University’s famed mechanical organ seemed to exhale as Mark Steinbach, the perched shoeless player, concentrating,   tickled the keys. 

Steinbach, a lecturer, instrument curator, and Brown University teacher was preparing for his upcoming performance.  The Kansas-born organist will play for fifty-minutes at  St.Paul’s Episcopal Church at 55 Main Street, South Kingston; his 2pm concert will be held during Wickford’s Annual Art Festival (July?-?).   

Wearing black ankle highs and a maroon t-shirt he smiled and greeted me but immediately his attention returned to the organ.  “This organ dates from the Impressionist era when notes were muddled and nearly indistinguishable from one another…I just look at it and think, ‘This organ is so 1903.’”  The man cannot sit still.  Steinbach is taller than average but, he has the lithe, compact build of a yoga instructor.  He leapt from his lotus squat at the organ, swung open a slim door, and nimbly scaled two stairs.  “This,” Steinbach said forlornly, “is the organ chamber!”  The anatomy of tubes, pipes, and wiring seemed to be his second-self.  As he pointed to pipes imbedded in a wooden frame my rear rubbed up against a wire.  A deep, ornery, bowel-blast came from the adjoining tube.  “And what did you have for breakfast?” Steinbach said with a grin.          

Before I could finish scribbling a sketch of the pipes he continued, “Now, St. Paul’s organ is different than this beast.  That one is technically considered the ‘oldest organ in use in a church.’  Different than Brown’s, it’s designed in a Baroque style so the listener can hear-- each—distinct-- note.”  He explained the pre-Christian organs in Greek and Roman ampitheatres and detailed how in older organs the air was pumped into the tubes by hand.  The oldest organs in Europe dated from only around 1300 AD.  Apparently, the Christian Medievals remembered the bad old days in pagan Rome where—forced into the arena for bloodsport with slaves and beasts—the organ honked out music to die by.    

 My writing’s furious pace started to cramp my digits.  Thankfully, Steinbach suddenly paused and sat down facing the organ, “You’ve heard of ‘pulling out all the stops?’”  I thought about my achy fingers.  “Well, these knobs above the keys are stops—they control the loudness and tones of a pipe organ.”  He briefly paused.  “I just love the organ.  I can’t sit still.  It’s like dancing!  My feet.  My legs.  I dance on the organ!” 

But when discussing composers and the selected works he would be performing, Steinbach slowed down.  For now, his tentative program includes works by Jean-Philip Rameau, J.S. Bach, Philip Glass, and Mozart.  Steinbach is excited to perform Rameau’s obscure sprightly work about a chicken.  “It’s hilarious!  Look,” he points with one hand while the other jigs between keys, “Co-co-co-co-co-dai!”  He tells me about lesser known pieces and how they are lost to Time.  Bach, for instance, was criticized by his contemporary Adolf Scheibe for being “turgid and sophisticated” and wasn’t known for funny stuff. Yet his pieces could warm the heart of even the most leathery cynics, like pessimist philosopher Emil Cioran who once said, “Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure.”  Steinbach agreed. “Oh, Bach… a musician is always looking for new composers to keep the [musical] language fresh, but Bach is the parent you keep going back to.“  Steinbach mentions an obscure humorous tune Bach wrote, “Coffee, coffee, I must have/If you want to enchant me/Give me some coffee.”  “He must have been a caffeine addict,” Steinbach said.  Remembering a J.M. Coetzee’s quote, I recited it to Steinbach:  “Why is it to Bach and Bach alone I have a longing to speak?”  Steinbach eagerly nodded, “Exactly.”

Some new organ music Steinbach will perform is two parts in a “radical” five moment work called “Dance” by Philip Glass.  Since “Glassworks” release in 1982, the New York composer’s mathematical precision and his repetitious, shifting, and evolving patterns have met with both hostile assault and wild praise.  Steinbach played a thrilling minute of, “Mad Rush,” my favorite Glass piece, before stopping to point out, “Glass is like Bach.  At first he sounds so simple, but if you look closer, he offers endless surprises.” 

Steinbach had nothing but compliments for the cutting-edge rhythmical patterns in Glass’s major period.  “His work is a free trip.  And you can take the word trip however you want it!  It works on you over time….it sets up expectations.  After playing for twenty-five minutes—halfway through—I’m physically exhausted.  It’s so consuming; it plays with your concentration.  By page thirty four I’m on a runner’s high and by page thirty-five I’ve reached nirvana.  And yet by page forty-one I’m sad that it’s ending.”     

But Steinbach insists that organ music be heard live.  “Can you hear this on a CD?”  He kicks the pedals emitting the tube’s hushed whisper, like a portentous gas leak.  “Unless you’ve got a thousand speakers you haven’t heard it.”  My lungs nearly collapsed as he slammed the keyboard in riot, like a discalced Roderick Usher, “Can you hear this on a CD?!” 

Let Them Listen to Cake

NEWPORT -- Within Newport Yachting Center’s stage was a hanging image of the Cascade Range—a snow-dusted mountain and its spiny surroundings.  But something was askew.  The rocky image was in blurry 3-D and fixed below a revolving disco ball.  And after a strange, moaning, indie-ambient introductory act by “Winterpills” the congested, sold-out tent teemed and shook to—what in the world?—Rocky IV’s training montage?  Friday’s CAKE concert did not disappoint if its goal was to push the audience off-center.    

The Sacramento-based band’s reason for being is challenging the status quo, politically and musically.  With helmsman John McCrea’s quirky style and inspiringly radical lyrics, CAKE is one of the great contemporary band’s to keep track of.  CAKE’s songs are clever in their minimalism; McCrea has said that he was inspired by the “skeletal simplicity” of Hank Williams, Sr.’s songs.  (Not to be confused, he specifies, with Williams’ son, an absurd and forgettable conservative whom McCrea loathes.)  Like any interesting performing artist, CAKE uses the best of the old to shape and produce something new—the band’s notable 1996 single being a remake of Gloria Gayner’s “I Will Survive.”  CAKE also refuses to shirk from taking aim at the blowzy frauds and sacred cows of contemporary culture.  In their funky 1993 single “Rock and Roll Lifestyle” McCrea writes of indulgent hipster hypocrites and their corporate patrons, “Excess ain’t rebellion./You’re drinking what they’re selling./Your self destruction doesn’t hurt them./Your chaos won’t convert them./They’re so happy to rebuild it.”  And in “Comfort Eagle,” religion’s false comforts are taken on with punchy verve:  “We are building a religion,/We are building it bigger/We are building/A religion/A limited edition/We are now accepting callers/For these beautiful/Pendant keychains.”

Friday night the audience was treated to these and some of CAKE’s jumping best, most notably, a tour of the band’s early greats--the slowly evolving, delightful, riff and trumpet-heavy “Jolene.”  The audience, heavily comprised of CAKE enthusiasts, seemed to quake and echo as the band performed 2001 chart-topper “Short Skirt, Long Jacket” in which the ideal woman is glibly described using only business clichés.  She can only be accepted with “uninterrupted prosperity” and “smooth liquidation” and the “right dividends.” 

It’s challenging to write a review of CAKE without including the word “irony.”  (The staunchly progressive band was performing at a yacht club.)  McCrea wears the costume of the anti-lead singer, appearing on stage with a foam trucker hat, aviator shades, rubber gloves, an unsubtle tummy, and a mountain man beard.   But beneath such winking and gimmicks, McCrea’s egalitarian lyrics transcend mere irony and often include the urgently political.  The bearded vocalist later dedicated a song to Mexican workers victim to a “disingenuous border policy.”  Beside him on the stage throughout most of the night was a five-foot tall potted tree—not because CAKE are environmentalists or hippies McCrea said, “but because we like trees…they produce food and we might need some in the next twenty years!”  
The concert stopped for nearly five-minutes as McCrea questioned the audience:  “What kind of tree is this?  Don’t shout out. Raise your hand.”  After numerous misfires, one audience member guessed that it was indeed a peach tree.  (CAKE posts pictures of these growing donations and their new owners on the band’s website.) 

McCrea mentioned in a 2005 NPR interview that he thought it was “unfair to put all the focus on the performers.”  He said dryly, “Sometimes people just want to be part of [the show] somehow…I think that’s why in the 1960s people would lift up their shirt(s) and show their boobies; in order to connect with the center of the fire.”  Perhaps that’s why McCrea spent twenty percent of the Newport performance arranging sing-alongs.  First, by gender and then by seating-section, the audience was encouraged if not directed to participate.  (No winners were announced.) 

With a soon to be released album from their own label, CAKE has put Lefty rhetoric into material production.  The album, created through the use of 100% solar power, has shamed the sloppy relativism of indie hacks, money-obsessed rappers, and other contemporaries willing to dutifully walk the corporate line.  If anything, CAKE showed Newport on Friday that there was more to the band than irony.          

       

Jordan's New Style Barbers in Peace Dale, RI

By BRETT WARNKE

WAKEFIELD—Three barbers at Jordan’s New Style snip, clip, and chat on Wakefield’s Main Street.  The previous barbershop relocated after a flood destroyed what had been a cozy basement spot filled with pool tables and the usual haircut mischief.  The shop’s owners decided not to sign a new lease. 

They left but the barber pole stayed.

                Adam Lavelle, 19, grew up in the Chariho region and learned to cut hair with his friends.  He’ll buzz skulls, trim chin spinach, and give you a “freshy.”  But don’t be frightened, parents; that is just Adam’s slang for trimming your neck hair.   By his senior year of high school he knew it is what he wanted to do with life. 

He is a bit more advanced in his trade than a few years ago.  Recently, he cut a design of Michael Jordan hurling through the air on the back of someone’s head.               But you can see how such experiments are successful.  I walked in while Adam was concentrating on a cut and he seemed so focused and concerned, I feared peppering him with too many questions while he worked. 

He recently moved in with his grandmother after her husband died.  Just a few weeks ago he was living on his own in a North Kingstown apartment, watching his spendthrift chums spend money as if they had it. 

                “I love living with Grandma.  I can save money and I can help her out if she needs it,” he said. 

                Adam works for Pedro Torres whose reputation precedes him.  Another barber P.J. Chaloux, who was once Pedro’s customer and now works in the shop, said with urgent certainty, “Pedro’s the best barber in South County.” 

Pedro grew up in Puerto Rico and began cutting hair in backyards when was 13.  He worked in a factory when he was twenty and chopped hair on the side to make additional cash.  Then he was hired on Boon Street and made contact with a matron who decided he was a worthwhile investment.  She paid up the money for the shop, believing in Pedro’s talents, and since the June 14^th opening, Jordan’s is doing well. 

“When you do a good job, people appreciate that.  I try to do the best I can,” he said.  Mothers with their kids, students, and older men clipping wintry beards, all feel welcome Pedro said.

“Everybody’s comfortable here,” Pedro said, “They’re happy when they leave.”

But business anywhere in Rhode Island is squeezed by austerity in these cold recession days.  And a $14 haircut at Jordan’s may seem like just one more expense.  Adam said that he knows people who are cutting their own hair (with mixed results) or growing it out. 

                “People seem to let anybody do their hair these days,” Adam said. 

                P.J. has been barber for seven years and he coaches for the Washington County Raiders, a local football team for elementary school kids.  Like his clipper friends, P.J. grew up “messing around in the house and cutting his buddies hair” and sees his work as an art. 

                “I love it when they leave my chair looking good—it’s like detailing a car. “ 

The mild-mannered Adam and the savvy businessman Pedro did not or would not admit the secret pleasure of all barbers:  Guy Talk. 

P.J. said it plainly:  “This is where married guys come and let it all out.  We chat about sports, I listen to veteran’s stories from their time at war... it’s fun.”

                As I began to leave, I asked for final thoughts.  Adam broke from his pinched concentration with a cheery grin, “If you want to look the best, get it cut by the best.” 

For more information call 401-284-4780 or email the shop at latinloverpr79@hotmail.com.

Carolina: Carla Ricci's Story of South County

By BRETT WARNKE

Charming and memorable stories recount the gossip, play, and struggle of small town life in South County in Carla Ricci’s documentary, Carolina. But paralleling this Rhode Island village’s sweet stories are the harsh realities of poverty, industrialization, disease, and the demise of the region’s peasantry. Nostalgia is easy to find in America today; the desire to get back to a “freer” and “simpler” time often takes the place of actual policy discussions. It’s easier rhetorically, especially around election time. Hence the cliché of running a campaign with poetry and governing in prose The strength of Ricci’s film is denying the nostalgic impulse, simplicity, or a mere oral history and instead pushing for a broader exploration of the historical and economic factors that produced Carolina’s stories.

Carolina begins in the midst of a 19^th century cholera epidemic as public health fails to keep up with the rapidity of urbanization. Rowland Hazard, an industrialist whose father had started the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company, decided to create a place that was “free from the problems of the city and the poverty of the countryside.” To Ricci he was a “dreamer” with a romantic side. He named his factory “Carolina Mills Company” after his wife, Caroline Newbold Hazard who, like Rowland, was born in South Kingstown.

Hazard blew the breath of commerce into a tiny hamlet 30 miles south of Providence, which necessitated streets, parks, schools, infrastructure, and neighborhoods. Such development was unexpected. Carolina was 30 miles from New London, 155 miles from New York City, and 77 miles from Boston. One resident said pungently, “No one would suppose that any business of any kind would do business within a dozen miles of it.”

Ricci briefly explores Hazard’s complicated biography. The bearded industrialist was a profiteer of poor laborers in the North—workers who feared that their boss’s criticisms of slavery would threaten their own livelihoods. But Hazard was also a philanthropist who built schools for children—the same children who worked in his mill, earning $4.50 a week beside their fingerless fathers.

The complexities continue: Hazard spent his winters in New Orleans courting the puffed-up cotton kings who ruled the southern slavocracy. But he also aided freedmen wrongly imprisoned in the North, advised Lincoln during the Civil War, was a conscientious local representative, and protested against runaway railroad monopolies.

By the 20^th century, according to Ricci, Hazard and his successors Tinkham, Metcalf, and Company had “created an entirely new way of living” for the people who worked in the factory. This experiment in industrialization had turned a backward stony agrarian patch, once populated by goat herders, natives, and peasants, into a hamlet with quantitative material growth. As Eric Hobesbawm writes in his study of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes, “For 80% of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s…for since the Neolithic era most human beings had lived off the land and its livestock or harvested the sea as fishers.” Charlie Dyson, a 97 year old yarnspinner who was part of this seismic economic shift. He and others tell the stories of rural austerity and the toil of farm life. “We done the best we could,” he says, “But we were damn poor.”

But southern Rhode Island’s industrial boom ended earlier than the rest of America’s, concluding in 1935. With stiff competition from 2,000 other New England factories, stock speculation, and lax regulation which led to Wall Street’s 1929 collapse, Carolina Mill could no longer turn a profit. It was closed just three years before the infamous hurricane of ’38 further devastated the region.

Ricci’s film moves, if a bit clunkily at times, from decade to decade showing the small town garages, sleepy suburbanization, and local stories that occupy the life of Carolina after its prime. Some stories are interestingly tangential. The shots of Providence and the discussion of 1938 flooding in the city are interesting if not entirely relevant. But do we really need to know about the history of elm tree removal in Carolina? The intriguing investigation of the enormous Wright family—52 of whom lived in the same neighborhood—is a nice touch, but Ricci cuts off the discussion at its most interesting and complex. The ethnic rivalries and religious splintering that some of the Wright girls discuss (the children were barred from marrying someone outside their faith) is left as an anecdote. Why were these small town girls told not allowed to go to Westerly or even Hope Valley? How did small town life impact the view of the larger world of cities and towns? How have these residents since changed or maintained their views about people unlike them? Sadly, none of these questions—which would have contextualized and oriented the viewer to the reality of late 20^th century life in Carolina—are adequately addressed

The goal of a review is not to criticize an artist for what they did not set out to do, but to discuss the merits of what she did attempt. Therefore, as an exploration of Carolina’s ascent and the personal histories of individuals attached to it, Ricci’s film is worth the time of any proud Rhode Islander. Ricci said in an interview, “I wanted to make the history personal and real to the people watching it.” From the notorious Paul Broomfield, a local Grinch, who owned the ruins of the Carolina Mill and superintended the property’s decay to Charlie Dyson’s decision to go to war despite his wife’s reservations, Carolina is a documentary peopled with characters that could be found in the best fiction.