The Cedar Board

Chasing Ghosts in Tangier

2011-05-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

On spring break, I left my study abroad program in Cordoba, Spain, and headed south by train towards Tangier, Morocco, the birthplace of my father Alberto and the former home of his parents, both of whom had died before I was born. Grandma Sol died from cancer in Tangier when my father was 7. By the time Grandpa Giuseppe died twenty years later, my father had followed him to Rome and New York, only to leave home, become a hippie, and settle in the West.

Armed with a map of the city’s walled medina, a small black ski-boot bag full of clothes, and my tattered brown journal, my plan was to discover as much as I could about the African echoes of my family’s past. At best, I hoped to find a relative of my grandmother’s, her grave, or some other physical sign of her existence. At the very least, I yearned to walk the same street that my family had walked fifty years before. First, I’d have to spend a night in the small port town of Algeciras, which sent daily ferries across the strait of Gibraltar to Tangier.

Preparing for this trip, I failed to recruit any of my fellow study-abroad students, or any Spanish students for that matter, who by then were lounging on the beaches of the Costa del Sol. I sat alone, reviewing my journal for the few clues that my father had dictated to me. Grandma’s full name was Sol Pinto Attanasio, her parents were Albert and Sara Pinto. She had an October birthday (he didn’t know the day), and died in 1960. She gave birth to my father in the Spanish Hospital. Grandpa Giuseppe had worked in the Italian consulate.

The red Andalusian mesas and bluffs whisked past the train window. The dry hills reminded me of my home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Going south, the train approached the 35^th degree of northern latitude which transects both Santa Fe and Tangier. Rows of irrigation ditches split valleys, sage green from orchards of olive trees. In Spanish, as well as New Mexican spanglish, ditches are called, acequias, from the Arabic sāqiyah. The Guadalquivir River, which the train line followed, connected Cordoba and the olive growing region to the Atlantic ocean and the Mediterranean sea. Since Roman times, ships have navigated the wide river, sending olive-oil as close as Italy and as far as Trader Joe’s.

Outside the train station in Algeciras, streetlights broke the darkness of the night, illuminating grey apartment blocks. Disoriented in the dark, it took a while to find Hotel Lisboa, where I had booked a room the night before. The sounds of trucks on the highway and the illuminated cranes in the port reminded of other transit cities like El Paso, Juarez, Hong Kong and Shenzhen, where any number of things can happen.

By noon the next day, I stood on the third deck of the ferry with a ham sandwich in my belly and a camera in my hand. As the ferry pulled southward, I stared portside toward the British enclave of Gibraltar, a bare rock of a peninsula on which I never set foot. Behind the boat, up the hill in front of a brick government building, the green and white stripes of the Andalusian flag flopped in a mild wind. The flag depicted a lion-skin clad Hercules with a club over his shoulder, two docile lions at his feet, and two white columns at his back. According to Greek myth, Hercules tore Iberia and North Africa apart leaving his two pillars, the rock of Gibraltar on one side and the Jebel Musa on the other. For the ancients, the “pillars of Hercules” marked the end of the known world.

Sol grew up in Tangier. Spanish was her first language, but she spoke Arabic and French in the street. I think that she taught my father Arabic at home. One of my aunts in Rome told me that when he arrived to Italy after Sol’s death, he carried with him an Arabic exercise book full of elementary scribbles. The aunt who told me this, Lina, married Guiseppe’s brother after meeting him in Tangiers. Lina and family had fled Spain after Franco won the civil war in the 1930s. They were joined by exiles from all over Europe and North America, from refugees of World War II, to disenchanted expats like the literary giants Paul Bowles and Jack Kerouac.

Two hours later, the ferry pulled into the port of Tangier. Above the harbor, and to the right, the tight medina and its medieval walls hugged a slope caked in houses of mud and concrete. To the left, the new city extended behind the medina down the beach, stocked with hotels at every stage of construction: foundations flanked by cranes, iron skeletons clothed with scaffolding, shiny twenty storied buildings with neon signs, and derelict hulks ready for demolition. The Europeans hadn’t made it to the beach yet but dozens of little boys in swim suits teased the surf, running in zigzags, watched by mothers covered from head to toe in black, and fathers wearing suits in the hot sun. Near a sea wall protecting the harbor, small fishing boats with young men working plastic rods lay anchored, bobbing in the seawater. When Kerouac came into the same port with fellow beat William Burroughs in 1957, The high rise hotels didn’t yet exist, and looking up at the hill he saw a uniformly white medina. “Then like seeing sudden slow files of Mohammedan women in white I saw the white roofs of the little port of Tangiers sitting right there in the elbow of the land, on the water,” he wrote, in his loosely autobiographical book, Desolation Angels. Instead of fisherman, the little boats carried pimps that ferryyelled up at his boat in Spanish, offering young male prostitutes.

Once out of the port, I was mobbed by drug dealers and “guides,” walking scumbags who offered me everything from hotels to hash to whores. I hated these hawkers, but it was difficult to pass judgment when a post-Kerouac wave of thrill seekers had come to Tangiers for decades. Like horseflies, they patrolled every inch along the main strip, the Avenue d’Espagne, so numerous and incessant that I couldn’t stop, let alone unfold a map, without being devoured. After twenty minutes of walking with my back to the sea, the hustlers disappeared. Yellow delivery trucks and old Mercedes cabs whipped by me, slowing only for the giant roundabouts that fed into four or five connecting streets. Short wrinkled men dressed in brown and black djellabas sat on café patios drinking tea, with their hoods down. Women walked wearing pink, black, blue or yellow hijabs in and out of electronics stores, butcher shops, and banks.

I stopped at the first landmark that matched up to my cheap map, a bus station marked by a dirt patch and about a hundred young men dressed in tight European tee-shirts carrying plastic bags, duffel bags, backpacks and boxes. I had strayed from the medina, and tried to get there without retracing my steps through the swarm of guides. A few hours and three miles later, I found myself on an undeveloped knoll of dirt and grass. Muslim graves scattered across this hill, that was neither a cemetery nor a park. Could one of these belong to Sol? I doubted it. As a Sephardic—an Iberian or NorthAfrican Jew—her grave probably sat in a Jewish cemetery. Below, the south side of the medina looked inviting, its rock wall opening up at a bab—a large gate—through which donkeys, motorcycles and the occasional rusty Renault passed freely.

The first break in the narrow road was the Petit Soco, the little market, a wide and uneven patch of cobblestone with shops running along the edges. At the café on the uphill side I ordered mint tea, sweetened with more honey than a bee hive. Later, my father told me that he had lived in an apartment above the Petit Soco, from which he watched a weekly donkey market. In Desolation Angels, Kerouac recounts a visit the same square, at the same time that my father lived there. He calles it by the Spanish name, the Zoco Chico.

“We’d just picked us up over desultory coffees in the Zoco Chico with a man in a red fez whom [Burroughs] confidently accused (to me) of causing hepatitis […]. With an old olive can, with a hole in it, another hole for the mouth, we stuffed raw red opium in the well hole and got it lit and inhaled huge blue gobs of opium smoke.”

Across the street, the Pension Mauritania offered me a small single room with a terrace overlooking the Soco for 50 Dirham per night, or about five Euros. A receptionist named Hassan spoke Spanish, which he studied from a worn textbook at the front desk of the hotel. This stocky fellow was my age—22—and after chatting for an hour, I felt that I had at least one friend on the continent. At dusk I crawled back into the street, bought a sandwich stuffed with french-fries, beef sausage, olives, sprouts, carrots and lettuce, and brought it back to my terrace. The temperature was perfect and the city alive. Orange clouds drifted overhead past the waxing moon and I could see a planet shining to the south. Was it Venus?

The next day I woke up late. Hassan wasn’t at the front desk, but he popped out of a backroom carrying a prayer rug.

“Praying?” I said.

“Yes,” he replied, with a smile.

“You pray every day?”

“Of course, I am a Muslim.”

“How about Friday mass? You go to that?”

“No, I can’t, I have work, so I pray here.” Then, he asked me questions. I explained that I was from New Mexico and normally studied in Vermont, but now studied in Spain. We chatted about his mother, with whom he lived on the northern edge of the medina. Two of his friends came to visit him at work. Like most Moroccan youth, they spoke French and Arabic, but not Spanish. The first one, a man with glasses and styled black hair, didn’t speak. The other, a woman with deep brown eyes and a Playboy logo t-shirt, had just come from class at the local University. She spoke so fast in Arabic that I wondered if even Hassan could understand her. She asked why I had come to Tangier, and Hassan was happy, and perhaps even proud, to translate. When I told these three Muslims that my grandmother was Sephardic, an Arab Jew, they delighted at my Moroccan connection. After his friends left, Hassan offered to take me out.

“Tomorrow you come to my house and my mother will prepare you dinner. Then I show you the medina,” he said. I agreed

At 7 am, I walked through the medina. In the back of my mind, it was a scouting mission to erase my unease at walking the city in the dark with Hassan. On the northern side of the median, near where Hassan said his mother lived, the wall opened up to a panoramic view of the port and the sea. Across the straight, a thick strip of black and grey marked Spain. Each year thousands of migrants from Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa crossed to Spain. Hassan had friends in Madrid, who wrote on his Facebook page and sent gifts by mail. The modern Fascists across Europe called Muslim immigration an invasion, a reenactment of the Islamic conquests when armies of Arabs and Bedouins crossed to Spain to conquer the weak Visigoth kingdom in 711 B.C.E. In Madrid, I’d met plenty of migrants. And if they were invaders, they were armed with mops, brooms, and cloaked in the social invisibility of nightshifts and strange accents. In my imagination, those migrants traced the reverse path of Sephardic refugees who fled from of the Spanish inquisition to Morocco.

On the map, the old Italian Consulate looked close. A short walk down the edge of the Kasbah, up Rue Assad Ibn al Farrat, a busy public hospital sat on one side of the street. Guards in dull tan uniforms blew silver whistles directing human and vehicular traffic through the green metal gates. Moroccans went in and out. Some waited on crutches, while others exited wearing head bandages or carrying plastic bags marked “Rx.”

The old Italian Consulate lay on the other side of the street unmarked and abandoned, with a high iron gate and the grotesque remains of a call box. I peered through the bars, across a large abandoned parkway, toward the two-story white building on the other side. Before Morocco’s independence and the consulate’s move to Rabat, it had been the residence of the Italian ambassador, and the office of the consulate staff. As I looked at the slate roof, the two large horseshoe arches on the second floor, and the French doors at the entrance on the ground floor, I saw a black-and-white version of my young 1950s grandfather, in his starched navy uniform carrying a briefcase, with important business to attend to. My grandfather worked there as the military attaché to the ambassador. A communications chief, he did intelligence work. My father once told me that he spied on the Russians in a US-led surveillance effort, spending weeks on fishing boats in the Aegean.

On the other side of the medina in the new city, I found a large white synagogue. I waited in the empty entry chamber while men prayed in Hebrew in the next room. The first person I saw, a solitary white man with a blue yarmulke, didn’t speak English or Spanish. He sent out his nephew, a pale skinny teenager with thick glasses. It was obvious from their whiteness that these were European, Ashkenazi Jews, and that I might not be as welcome as I had hoped.

“Hi, I am… doing genealogical research on my Jewish grandmother from here, do you know of any Sephardic cemeteries or cemetery records?” I said, stumbling on each factual detail.

“I am sorry, but it is Passover, and we are very busy,” said the boy, with a face that wondered if I even knew what Passover was.

“Maybe come back next week,” he said motioning subtly towards the door.

Back in the medina, I figured I might as well do some shopping. Peddlers of handicrafts and factory-made trinkets dominated the alleyways, while producers and vendors lined the wider streets. Compared to the guides on the beach, they were incredibly respectful. One young man who sold me a leather belt after a friendly round of haggling put it this way: “Those guys on the beach, they make us look bad. They lie, they cheat, and then no one wants to buy anything.”

That evening, I met Hassan at the Mauritania and we walked up the hill to his mother’s house on the northern side of the medina. A gateway in the ancient wall opened to a view of the strait, the same one I had seen that morning, but dotted with lights along the coast of Spain. Hassan’s house, whose entrance also faced the strait, was the size of a school bus cut in half and stacked on top of itself. The walls, roof, and ceiling were all painted purple over smooth yet uneven plaster. The first floor was a kitchen, a dining room and an entryway separated by walls, but not doors. Hassan’s mother greeted us with a white gap-toothed grin. She was chubby, wrinkled, dark-skinned, and wore a black smock with a black-and-rose-patterned hijab. I didn’t ask about Hassan’s father. Together we ate oily fried fish, a yellow dish of garbanzo beans, and unleavened flatbread. After dinner, Hassan and I walked the medina, discussing Islamic saints in between greeting the neighbors. At the local cyber café, we got on Facebook together. He showed me pictures of his past girlfriends. Hassan was a pious ladies man, who wouldn’t dare sleep with his sweethearts before marriage, but flirted with every girl we passed on the street.

The next day I found the Spanish Hospital where my father was born. I couldn’t go in, but I loitered around the entrance and took a photo for my father. Then, I bummed around the beach, eventually running into some teenagers doing parkour, which is a type of street gymnastics, like skateboarding without the skateboard. They did handstands on pillars and executed spectacular jumps over the stairs. I juggled rocks for them, which sent them into a frenzy of Facebook name sharing. They spoke English, and wanted to know everything about America, the land of motocross and Vin Diesel.

Back with Hassan at the Mauritania, I thought back to a conversation with my father about looking for people with my grandmother’s maiden name, “Pinto.” “There are too many, like probably sixty families” he had told me. I asked Hassan for a phone book. Considering how little I had found in the past few days, I thought it might be worth a try. We scanned the equivalent of the White Pages, and found Pinto. There was only one. I dialed and a woman answered. I spoke in Spanish, figuring that if they only spoke Arabic we already had a deal breaker for meeting.

“Hello, I’m looking for Señor Pinto, is he available?” I said.

“No, he’s out of town, on business,” she said. I explained that my grandmother was a Pinto, and that my father was born in Tangier.

“So, are you folks… Sephardic?”

“Yes, yes we are.” She told me to call back later, when her husband had returned and explained that yes, most of the Sephardic had immigrated to Israel. I tried back a few times but never got Mr. Pinto on the phone. He existed though, and his wife existed, and that was enough for me.

On my last day I checked out of the Mauritania and said goodbye to Hassan. I slung my bag over my shoulder and made my way towards the American Consulate Museum at the western entrance of the medina. As with the Italian Consulate, diplomatic functions had moved to the new capital in Rabat. Still, the Americans kept it up, because it was the first American-owned building outside the US. On my way out, I asked one of the guards if he knew of a Sephardic cemetery.

“Yes, right down the alley, just outside the walls,” he said.

Outside, I circled the cemetery, which spanned a couple of blocks and was enclosed on all sides by a nine-foot whitewashed wall. A green hut with signs in Arabic and Hebrew marked the entrance, locked by a chain. With a few more days on my hands, I might have found out the visiting hours or conned my way in, but I had to leave.

At the port, I searched for a ferry ticket. Of the five or so ferry companies, none of them were offering tickets for 40 Euros or less, the price I paid coming from Spain. Frustrated with this, I tried to find the passport stamping office, to at least get that out of the way. A jittery hustler intercepted me, shoving a customs form in my face and demanding he help me complete it. Perhaps because of the innocence of the scam—he wasn’t selling me hash or trying to be my guide for the weekend—I caved easily. As I finished the form, the hustler tried to lure in a man walking away from a white van.

“No, Uncle, I don’t need your help, fuck,” he said in Spanish with a thick Zaragozan accent. Massive brown dreadlocks sprouted out of his orange headband. He wore loose-fitting pants and a hand-made Moroccan shirt; unbuttoned, showing is tanned skin and muscular frame.

“You crossing, Uncle? You bought a ferry ticket?” he asked me, calling me uncle, the Spanish equivalent of “dude.”

“No, not yet.”

“Well, I’ve got a van and another person, and I’m trying to bargain a deal”

“You can bargain the ferry tickets?”

“One can bargain anything here, Uncle.”

“Ya, sounds great,” I said. The Spaniard, whose name was Sergio, led me to the white van, a hollowed-out bread delivery truck from Zaragoza. Inside, a little blonde Czech girl named Petra sat on the giant mattress built into the back part of the van. She had ridden up with Sergio from Marrakesh after traveling with her boyfriend for three months. The boyfriend wanted to hike in the Atlas Mountains, but she needed to go back for a job interview. Tie-dye tapestries hung from the walls and a set of black speakers took up half the floor, pumping out airy techno music. Forty minutes later, after I had learned the Czech word for beer and friend (pivo, kamradka), Sergio came back.

“Twenty-eight Euros per person and eighty five for the van,” he said. “Now we have to get gas, cheap Moroccan gas.” We closed up the van, and he turned around, driving out of the port. At the nearest gas station, Sergio bargained the gas down from 13 Dirhams per liter to 11. Back at the port, we lined up with the other cars. Sergio manned the wheel, trying to hustle up the line, chatting up the customs officers. In the back, the Czech girl waited.

“Mattress is not showing,” she said in her broken English.

“What?”

“Mattress is secret,” she said. I peered to the front of the van and out at the customs officer with his smart black hat, brown uniform and silver badge.

“What is it? What is under the mattress?” I whispered urgently. The van lurched forward, and we pulled onto the boat, associating me even more with the possibly drug-dealing hippies. What would happen at the Spanish customs office on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar? Was I sitting on bricks of Moroccan hash?

“Look,” said the Petra. I slowly pulled back the mattress sheet, revealing layer upon layer of brightly colored textiles. I laughed. Sergio finished with the customs people, rolled up the windows, and looked back at me with his victorious grin.

“I don’t like to pay the tariff,” he said. “I take these to the stores in Spain and make myself enough money, maybe come back to Morocco for three months after.”

We crossed the border and drove towards Marbella, where I would meet my distant relatives, the former Spanish exiles. I thought of my dad, who was Sergio’s age when he left my grandfather’s house in New York and became a hippie in the West. I scanned through the pictures that I had taken for him: the Italian Consulate, the Spanish Hospital, the Soco Chico, the rock of Gibraltar. Maybe I could invoke some nostalgic memories from him. In the back of the van, the music poured out of the speakers. Large jugs of olive oil sat on the floor, next to cartons of fresh vegetables and stacks of Moroccan bread. Small town Moroccan olive presses didn’t completely separate the meat from the oil. Pieces of olive meat drifted around the bottles, giving the oil had a tinge of kalmata taste. Sergio and Petra extolled to me the virtues of a raw food diet. They were on their way to a raw food hippie gathering in southern Spain and I was welcome to join them. Tomatoes, celery and bell peppers tasted good raw. I tore off a strip from a pizza sized piece of Moroccan bread, soaked it in olive oil, and savored the taste of the olive-flesh silt.

Update on submissions

2011-03-06T08:19:00.000-08:00

For those two or three of you people in the universe who want to read every scrap of my writing, you can see new stuff from time to time in the Middlebury Campus... An article on faculty tenure was the cover story a few months ago, and before that I did this little piece about expanding the inter-library loan system (oh yes, riveting material!). I will post links to future campus articles that I write, but you can always check this weeks edition here.

I've been withholding some mediocre material from last semester and summer that just didn't seem ready to see the light of day (thus the lack of posts in the past year). Stay tuned for more tidbits like the translated "Calzados" piece, as well as my early forays into the spoken-word world.

The Best Shod People--Translation of Los Mejores Calzados into English

2011-01-31T12:31:00.000-08:00

“The Best Shod People” (Los mejor calzados) from Aquí pasan cosas raras (1975) by Luisa Valenzuela. Translation by Cedar Attanasio.

The context: Valenzuela, an Argentinian writer, invents an absurd situation to critique the social and political system of her country in the 1970s.

An invasion of beggars, but there’s one consolation: none of them are in need of shoes. Shoes are surplus. It’s true that in certain situations, the shoe has to be taken off of some severed leg found in the bushes, and it only serves to shoe one foot. But this doesn’t usually happen. In general the corpse is found all nice and whole with both shoes intact. However, the clothes are useless. Usually they have holes from bullets and stains from blood, or they have been ripped to shreds, or electric shocks have left them with burns that are ugly and difficult to hide. For this reason we don’t count on the clothes, but the shoes are spot on. And in general we are talking about shoes that have suffered very little use because their owners are not allowed to get very far in life. The owners barely poke their heads out, they barely think (and thinking does not wear out shoes) and it´s a foregone conclusion and they only get a few steps before they cut their path short.

That is, we find shoes, and as they are not always the size that is needed. We have put up an exchange shop in the fallow fields of Bajo. We charge a few meager pesos for the service: you can’t ask a beggar for much, but it still helps him to pay for some mate tea and a butter biscuit. We only make real money when we finally pull off a real sale. Sometimes the relatives of the dead, who knows how, come to know of our existence. They make it all the way to us to plead that we sell them the shoes of the deceased, if we have them. The shoes are the only thing that they can bury, poor things, because surely they’d never be allowed to take the body.
It is really quite lamentable that a good pair of shoes leaves circulation, but we have to make a living too, and besides, we can’t deny ourselves the opportunity of performing this public service. What we do is true missionary work, and that’s how it is understood by the police, who never bother us while we prowl through bushes, ditches, clearings, groves and the other nooks and crannies where corpses can be hidden. The police know quite well that it’s thanks to us that this city can boast of having the beggars with the nicest shoes in the world.

For quotes on Spanish to English translations, email me at cedarattanasio[at]gmail.com

“An Obama Reflection from a Different Perspective”

2010-02-07T16:26:00.000-08:00

Last week was the first anniversary of Obama’s presidency. Commentators from MSNBC to Fox tried to argue about total success or abysmal failure of the president using a period as superficial as a year, and metrics as superficial as grades. What’s with the Nobel Peace Prize? Why aren’t the health care debates on C-SPAN? I’m neither qualified nor interested in taking on those issues. I hope none of you, regardless of their political views, lost sleep over what the president’s “grade” is according to 24 hour news networks.

However, I do think it is a nice time to look back on how he got into office in the first place. Hopefully I can spur your nostalgia with some of my own reflections.
It was 2007, and the good democratic candidates (I’m talking about Richardson and Kucinich, obviously), had been trimmed out pretty fast. In their absence, all that remained were Edwards, Obama, and Hillary; vassals of homogeneous policies. All we liberals had left to decide was which smiles shone brightest and which handshakes felt the strongest. Obama’s ethos—his swagger, his charisma, his rhetoric—stood out for me the most and I’ll tell you why.

Unlike Clinton or McCain, he had no established political heritage on which to ground his persona. It made him seem more accessible. His personal story foreshadowed the challenges that I would soon face “a year out of college” in a city where I too would be “without money or family connections.” I liked that. He was an outsider reaching out to outsiders, and I wasn’t alone in feeling like he was speaking specifically about me.

Obama’s ethos as an outsider is by no means unique. Politicians as far back as Cicero (think 60 B.C.E.) have dealt with being from outside the social elite. Unlike Cicero’s ancient Rome, where being a “new man” was frowned upon, the contemporary climate of American identity politics climate allowed Obama to turn outsider his status into an electoral weapon.

Those of you who read the "My Name is" article know that I’m sometimes insecure that my name—“Cedar”—might somehow limit my social mobility. My irrational fears were consoled by Barack Hussein Obama’s remarks at the 2004 DNC conference about “hope [for] a skinny kid with a funny name that believes that America has a place for him too.” Yes: in Obama’s America funny-named people, immigrant kids, and atheists like me would have a place at the table. Those other aspects of my identity—atheist, immigrant— were taken on in other speeches, like his 2006 speech on religion.

Not all of Obama’s advantages in the election were fair. His youth (he was 46, younger than my parents), which I’ll talk about more in a minute, really helped him against McCain. In his campaign against Clinton, Obama benefited from a sexist atmosphere. Clinton was caught in a double bind: she was expected to have a motherly focus on family but the grit of a future commander in chief, feminine appeal without showing cleavage, and sensitivity without crying. While I sympathized with her predicament, I did not appreciate here response. She reacted in a similar way as Condoleezza Rice (of whom I had a very negative opinion), by overcompensating in masculinity. Her incendiary threats to Iran (“we will obliterate them”) are one of many examples. Meanwhile, Obama was free to outwardly empathetic and kind, while still projecting a Lincoln-like strength.

Most important for my blue-collar 19-year-old vote, Obama showed an appreciation for so-called “low-culture” such as hip-hop. I first heard him speak on the subject in a contextless interview via You Tube. After being asked which rap artists he listened too, he said with completely natural language “lately I’ve been listening to a lot of Jay-Z and, I mean, this ‘American Gangster’ [album] is tight.” He even went on to analyze the style while simultaneously showing his personal relationship with the widely known artist: “as Jay would say, ‘he got flow’”.

Even though his opponents labeled him an elitist, young people recognized his ethos of understanding. Where Bill Clinton pioneered—“I experimented with …and I didn't like it. I didn't inhale…”—Barack Obama perfected—“I inhaled, that was the point.” In contrast to Obama’s appreciation of hip-hop and students on scholarships, Clinton’s rhetoric on “young people” seemed to lack substance. I was put-off by her comment that people my age “think that work is a four letter word.” Obama may have criticized apathy, but never through blame. He was not elitist. He may have graduated from Harvard Law School, but at he understood our reality and his ethos still recognized our potential.

Obama didn’t get here randomly. He stirred up the politics of the left in a way that pasty prunes like Kucinich and Gore never could. The genius of Obama’s campaign was how he constructed a persona that embodied American pluralism. Everyone could find a niche in his vision of the American Dream, especially if they were sick of the status quo. In closing, I hope that weeks of superficial punditry does not stop anyone from reflecting on the only plausibly tangible element of the anniversary: the culmination of an election that you won, lost, or missed while watching Grey’s Anatomy.

My Name Is ________

2009-12-30T13:59:00.000-08:00

My last name, “Attanasio”, is Italian from Greek (Αθανάσιος), meaning “eternal life”. My middle name, “Joseph”, honors my grandfather Giuseppe who moved with my father from Italy in the mid sixties. My first name, “Cedar,” comes from a specific cedar tree in the Montana. It was the only ancient tree left in a clear-cut of a giant grove where my parents used to spend the summer.

Having a name like “Cedar” has colored my life, to say the least. The main thing about having an odd name is that you are noticeable in a number of different ways. I’ve always stood out in a stack of applications or on a school roster. People tend to remember my name. For better or for worse, I’m very easy to google. I was thinking about what it’s like to live with an unusual name one while I was at work. I happened to be on shift with two peculiarly named co-workers.

“My mom always knew what I was up to when I was young”, says Niles Hanson, my coworker. Niles is 36. When he was a teenager he got into all the trouble you can imagine—hard drugs, alcoholism, theft, etc. Even though he’s cleaned up, become a semi-successful personal trainer, and accomplished a stable home life, his name, “Niles”, is still infamous in his native Seattle.

Notoriety—for fame or infamy—is a common experience for us strange-namers. In my teens I was a bit of a Casanova. Even though I haven’t lived in Santa Fe much in the past four years, immortal memory of my name brings grins to women I meet for the first time. “Oh, Cedar, I know who you are”. Maybe I kissed their friend in high school. Maybe I flashed them at a party when I was 16. They are certain that I am the subject of whatever the story that they heard from their high school giggle buddies.

Recently, I’ve become aware of another Cedar in my town. People who meet me for the first time often think that we are the same person. Some of them have explained to me that the other Cedar is a coke-dealer. And so I’ve always had this feeling that people are going to hear my name and try to buy drugs from me. I take comfort in a fantasy that people might confuse him with me. I imagine that this “Cedar” is in a bar on the south side of town, trying to get some woman’s number. She is resisting saying “no—I know who you are”, while he tries to explain that no, he’s not the Casanova Cedar, he’s the coke-dealer Cedar.

My other Strange-Name coworker is what I’d call “socially successful”. Her phone rings off the hook. Her Baby Gap shirts and Saran Wrap jeans encase a perfect and nubile body. She wears her perpetual boy drama like a lapis cameo; with pride. She describes her given name—Juniper Storm—as a blemish on her image. Everyone thinks she’s is a hippie—that is, until they see her. For someone who tries hard to be a normal Santa Fe party girl, the name “Juniper Storm” pulls at her ego like a hangnail. “It sucks”, she eloquently laments. As she was recounting stories of childhood taunting, I thought back to when I first met Juniper. One of my friends cleverly suggested that we should “cross-pollinate”. This is the last girl on earth that I would marry, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a tree-themed family? My jumpy wife, Juniper, my stout son, Spruce, and my whimsical daughter, Willow.

Just like Juniper, everyone I’ve met has commented on my name at some point. In preschool it was “Cedar, Peter, pumpkin eater.” I went to school with Hispanics for years. In elementary school spun variations on my name that could only be realized by a Northern New Mexico accent. “Cheddar”, was the most absurd. “Caesar” I actually liked. Sometimes a person can’t quite remember my name and calls me by another tree. “Pine” is the most common in New Mexico. “Maple” and “oak” seem to be the default trees on the East Coast.

At some point during my conversation with Niles and Juniper our boss walked in. “Hey Dennis,” I said, “Tell us what it’s like to have a boring name!” He pondered my question for a minute. Dennis Hayworth is a squat, funny looking fellow, with squat Kool-Aid-green bangs that never seem to rest where they’re supposed to. Skinny as a stick and pasty as the icing on our restaurant’s cakes, Dennis is one of the few British people who actually live in New Mexico. It was for these reasons that I was surprised by the answer he gave, in his thick, limey accent. “I suppose I value the anonymity”. In an American town, Dennis suffers the same sense of being “the other” as Juniper and I. However he is dealing with businesses orders online or loan applications in an office, Dennis’ “normal” name gives him status that we never have.

Odd names are, of course, relative to what is perceived as “normal”. I’ve been to a number of hippie festivals where attendants slap on new names, like putting on a mask for a party. The nature theme comes on pretty strong, and people start calling themselves things like “Echo”, “Starflower”, and other such nonsense. In places like raves and music festivals, where people get in touch with alter egos and suppressed emotions, new names can help you separate yourself from your “normal” identity. Sometimes, like Dracula at a costume party, I’ll get the awkward question. “So, what’s your real name?”

A few years ago I embarked (haha—“Cedar embarked”—funny, right?) on a solo trip to Guatemala. When I showed up, I introduced myself to my Guatemalan friend’s family. Her father literally admonished me for my name. “Guatemalans won’t get that”, he said. He pressed me for another name, and I confessed that my middle name was Joseph, so we changed it to that. I didn’t resist his odd challenge to my odd name. Instead, I relished the chance to experience Dennis´s anonymity. I knew that in Spanish Joseph becomes “José”. What I didn’t know is that in Guatemala the nickname for José is Chepe.

I was Chepe for three months. I was Chepe with my friends. I was “Profe (professor) Chepe” at the school where I was volunteering. And there were certain vulnerable moments in which having this new name was just plain strange. One morning I woke up in that half-asleep-oh-God-where-am-I-state. I started making a quick mental assessment of my surroundings. I’m in an apartment—my apartment. I’m in Antigua—in Guatemala. There is a girl—Mette—in my bed; that’s my girlfriend from Denmark. But before I processed the most important thing to know when waking up, Mette turned to me and said “Good morning Chepe!” Imagine my terror. Nevertheless, conspicuousness was comfortable in Guatemala, where I was already standing out as a white kid with poor grammar and a strange accent. I got to avoid the all-too-familiar “so your parents are hippies…” conversation. My new name gave me a shred of conservative respectability, and allowed me to connect more easily with Guatemalans.

When I was a kid I was obsessed with flags. I copied existing flags. I invented new countries for which to make new flags. I eventually came across the Lebanese flag, which has a prominent tree on it. The tree is, of course, the cedar of Lebanon, the chief emblem of the country’s national identity. The intersection between my name and an important symbol of Lebanese statehood is a unique icebreaker with Lebanese people. One of a handful of my Lebanese friends, Alaa, was the first to explain more of the history to me. Aside from the flag, there is also the Cedar Revolution (also known as the Independence Intifada), which led to the peaceful withdrawal of Syrian troops in 2005. The connection is random and, perhaps, superficial. But the encounters I’ve had because of my name are very real, and have woven themselves into my life experience.

I’m getting a little self-conscious about the logistical aspects of name. You might take me seriously when I’m writing about funny names, but would you feel strange to see Cedar Attanasio on a government report? Would The Census or the CIA hesitate, even momentarily, to hire someone with an odd name? Perhaps I should hide my name in initials. C.J. Attanasio: a decent and respectable Italian name. On the other hand, would I get an edge with “Cedar” if were applying to work with an environmental NGO? Perhaps I should write it in all caps so that it screams out.

Jonah Sparrowhawk Zimmerberg-Helms, a close friend and aspiring director, has a similar problem. The dash between is surnames is just distracting, and “Sparrowhawk” certainly doesn’t help. He wanted to shorten it down to J.Z. Helms, but he hated being called “Jay-Z”, as if he were trying to imitate the rapper. Plus, take away the “Zimmerberg” and you lose valuable Jewish networking capital, an accepted currency in the entertainment world. About the start internships with major film companies, he has decided on “Jonah Zimmerberg Helms”. Erasing the dash and shooting off the “Sparrowhawk” may seem simple, but it took him years to make those choices.

We assume that it is easy to change your name. Bond does it. Spiderman does it. New brides do it, although less and less. I asked Juniper if she wanted change her name. She automatically said “ya, duh”, but she hasn’t exactly gone to court yet. Because even though she’s focused on a narrow ideal— sexy, trendy—he name lets her stand out from all of the other sexy, trendy, twenty-somethings in her social group. At the end of the day, her name defines a certain part of her imbedded beneath her playgirl image. A man like Niles, who has tarnished his name in the past, can’t help but be proud to repair his image instead of changing his name and pretending that “Niles” never existed. To change your name, to sell out, you need a good reason such as Jonah Sparrowhawk’s film career. I doubt that his mom will ever stop calling him “Sparrow” though.

My name carries a history of insecurity as well as individuality. It is a marker of embarrassing childhood moments and a monument to my eccentric heritage. I get chances to change my name all the time. Every time I make a new friend, move to a new place, or go to a new hippie festival I get to call myself whatever I want. But I don’t need any masks. Juniper can choose the name she wants, Jonah can make the name he needs, but I’m going to introduce myself as “Cedar Joseph Attanasio”, just plain old me.

Poem: "Seasons"

2009-12-14T08:18:00.000-08:00

I think that, when my hazel eyes first met yours,
I watched our love open up--
into a golden plain of summer grasses,
lit by a never-setting sun.

No, really, it started like Vermont leaves changing
from warm green to passionate orange
making me afraid that we would fall fast--
wide red leaf soon browned and crumpled.

In truth, I get swept by the biting winter
winds of your passionate teeth,
enveloped in your snowflake quilt.
I prepare myself for an inevitable spring (that never comes).

My solace is family laughter and mulled wine.
Celibacy accompanied by Christmas cookies.
Solitary valentine’s days are more than fine.
Eyes refreshed, innocent like rookies.

Open Letter of Admiration to Jon Stewart

2009-11-08T20:36:00.000-08:00

This is a fan letter that I recently wrote to Jon Stewart. It doesn't follow my normal guidelines for blog submissions, but for those of you who check back here often, I hope it will tide you over while I trudge through the final month of school. Oh,and the episode I talk about in the letter was a great one. You can see it here.

Dear Jon Stewart,

As a young man with the infinite opportunities of the world ahead of me, I have often sympathized with the day in, day out grind, of the talk show host. I watched your interview with Wanda Sykes tonight and, upon hearing your mutual dismay that “talk shows are where [comedians] go to die” I was compelled to write to you. Bear with me a moment.

I began watching your show religiously at 17, when I was attending boarding school in Hong Kong. I was one of five Americans at the school who, every other night, would gather in the common room to watch your Daily Show. You and your staff cured our homesickness, kept us engaged in the politics, and helped us get through the trying days of adolescence.

Now, in my third year of college, I still watch your show day in, and day out. For some reason your satire of the issues that I often take so seriously (immigration, freedom of speech, human rights etc.) allows me to stay engaged with these issues without becoming disheartened. The road to having a positive impact on the world is long and arduous, and I would like to thank you for making it more bearable.

I hope that one day, after all of my adventures and experiments, I too will find a place where I can have a positive affect on my nation day in, and day out (as you undoubtedly have). I hope also that you will never believe that the Daily Show is the “end” of your career. For me, my family, and my future children, your quirky satire and serious political commentary are being immortalized every night that you enter the studio. Again: thank you for your daily grind, and please don’t “move on” to making any silly movies.

Sincerely Yours,

Cedar J. Attanasio

Dreaming to Fly

2009-10-04T20:52:00.000-07:00

I soar high above cobalt blue mountains. My Mickey-Mouse T-shirt ripples in the wind as I circle the purple columns of cloud. An evergreen valley beckons below. I float down above the pines. It is a good dream. But like many of my dreams, the consciousness that follows leaves an empty aftertaste. I am five and I know that I can not fly.

Two weeks later I have a follow-up dream. I appear in my neighbor’s living room, and I tell her about my flying dream. I tell her that the dream did not fool me. I know that I cannot fly. She comforts me by telling me that although I may not be able to fly, I can certainly levitate if I focus hard enough. Of course I can levitate! After all, it is a fair compromise between flying and walking. This dream is believable.

Too believable, in fact. After a while I forget that my neighbor's advice came in a dream. Unlike my dream of flying, this one soon becomes a bona fide memory. And I remember that I can levitate. So I lay down on my back. I purposefully place my arms at my side, and I focus. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to activate what must be my levitation muscle. Nothing. I roll over to my chest. No matter how hard I try, I can't even get an inch off the carpet. I rise slowly onto my feet, hop on the couch and sit, grounded in the Guatemalan green blanket that covers our couch.

Some time after the divorce I want to be a nurse, like my mother. Another time after the divorce, I want to be a carpenter, like my father. Like all seven-year olds, I want to be an astronaut. I want to be whisked away to another world. The DK Big Book of Airplanes teaches young boys about substitutes for flight. The Apache helicopter. Shoots 800 rounds per minute. KaKaKaKaKa! My friend tells me that rich people in France fly to school in little, yellow helicopters. I want a helicopter. When I'm twelve I get to ride in one. For five minutes I am carried over the Crazy Horse Memorial. I see the rocks and the trees from a new angle, and then it is over.

The blow makes Maria’s nose drip to the ground; Justin wants to stab me with a sharpened dowel. This, of course, is middle school. Unlike the budding criminals around me, I have the tools to fall with style. I leap with my rollerblades, descend with my skis, scale cliffs with my Tevas, and jump off of them again. For one, two, three—sometimes as many as five seconds I fly downward. Then I land. Sometimes I land on a mountain covered in snow. Sometimes I land in a river filled with mud. I always want to get back into the air.

Pixar captures our dreams with an all-digital short, “Toy Story”. Buzz Lightyear thinks he can fly, the arrogant spaceman—Woody, the level-headed cowboy reminds him that they are toys, that Buzz is just falling with style. In less than ninety minutes, Buzz and I grow up. We are toys like everyone else, and we cannot fly.

I am seventeen. I believe that I am a man now. And I know that, short of becoming an astronaut, I will never fly. I watch Airplane enviously from my economy seat. Through the double-paned window I can see him soar happily through the Pacific air, gracefully blinking his lights. Fourteen hours later I am in Hong Kong. My boarding school is on the ocean, the farthest from the sky that I have ever lived, or so I tell myself.

I train in the pool, like the astronauts do. I learn about bouncy, safety, and the buddy systems. I am a Coral Monitor, and this is my community service. We go out for our first dive in Hong Kong. I am going down there to take out the ghost nets, measure the coral health, and save the sea. Little do I know, the sea will save me. The day is grey, the waves are choppy.

I am 17, and I do not know that I can fly. I submerge completely as if into a dream. All sounds disappear. I float down above groves of fire coral. The reef stretches to eternity, forming valleys of paradise. The alien sea life becomes a stage of intersecting color wheels, slowly flushing out the limits of my perception. I float above the sea world at my will. And I pity the poor astronauts who have to visit a barren moon.

What Kind of Company am I?

2009-08-27T11:17:00.001-07:00

What Kind of Company Will I Be?

In the film Good Will Hunting the main character's love interest, Skylar, observes that

"Growing up in England, you know, I went to a very
nice school. You know, it was kind of progressive,
organic, do-it-yourself, private school. Then Harvard.
And then med-school. You know, if you think about it,
at the end, my brain's going to be worth two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars"

I am in a similar situation. Look at what has been invested into my education so far, and what will be put in by the time I graduate from college:

United World College: $23,000 x 2 years = $46,000
Middlebury College : $50,000 x 4 years = $200,000

This investment totals $246,000 excluding flights and drinking money. That's more than my boss is buying his restaurant for. In a way, my brain is a small start-up company. What is this company's mission? Is it a day labor agency? A think tank? Is it for-profit, non-profit, or not-for-profit? Either way it needs to be productive; to garner some social, political or traditional capital.

How do I measure success? I'll start from a purely financial perspective. A first-class education should amp up the $10/hr. ($20,000/yr.) minimum wage in Santa Fe, but by how much? Should I make a certain percentage of profit from my $246,000 each year? If this money were sitting in a bank it could make 2% ($4,920). If it were being invested in a small buisness--such as a restaurant-- it could get around a 6% ($14,760) return rate¹. To be considered a worthy financial investment, my education should get me a 25K-35K per year.

Of course, there are other ways of measuring success. Considering that the my primary stake holder, Shelby Davis, is a philanthropist hell-bent on improving the world, finance might not be the best measure of value. If Mr. Davis had invested my tuition in Google when I had started at UWC, it would have doubled. But he didn't, because he had something different in mind. Time is money, and quality time spent on acts of good will are also valuable returns on investment.

We'll see how my corporate culture changes over time. Hopefully once my company has a clear charter it will be corporately responsible, not only for self-promotion just really create shared value with my community. Lastly, time can always be reinvested into my company, a la graduate-school.

What kind of company are you? How do you measure success? Leave a comment to join the conversation.

Editing and proofreading credits: Jean Rapp (jeanrappart.com), Sean McLean, Steve Rapp (rappdesign.com)

notes

¹ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/11/your-money/11iht-mfood_ed3_.html?pagewanted=2

Art and Academia (Part I: Personality Switch)

2009-07-28T17:30:00.001-07:00

Art and Academia (Part I: Personality Switch)

People have diversely colored potential locked inside of them, and you never know what will squeeze it out of them.

Jonah and I grew up together. We were both raised in similar environments: rural and suburban hippie households in New Mexico. We spent so much time together in our youth--rafting, going to rainbow gatherings, playing hockey--about a fifth of our waking hours were what I would call shared experience. Still, we were very different people.

I was always the artsy one, drawing constantly Celtic knot work, sketching etc. Jonah went to private middle school, and by freshman year he was ready to take his SATs in Latin. He also excelled in physics and chemistry. He had a lot to live up to: his father graduated from MIT, his uncle worked high up at NIH. He wanted to be a neurologist. I on the other hand went to a public middle school that was a breeding ground for gangs and a flea market for drugs. Even though I loved to learn I just wanted to get out. Plus the only one who had gotten an academic degree in my family was my grandfather, who was also the least cool person I knew.

My sophomore and his junior year of high school, Jonah and I essentially "dropped out". My reasons were obvious. I hated the prison-like environment, the pledge of allegiance, and the gang-mentality that both "hoods" and "jocks" shared. I think Jonah was sick of his preppy peers and the plastic expectations of overpriced Santa Fe preparatory schools.

Despite being "dropouts", we were still very active. We had a home-school community, we took classes at the local community college, etc. Either way, we had freedom from curricula, morning classes, role call, and, in my case, hall fights.

Jonah continued to prep himself for the ivy-league, but slowly changed direction. I remember one day he was choosing his community college classes and couldn't decide between psychology and physics so he called the Harvard admission office to ask their opinion. Which one would look better on a transcript? He got an answer that surprised him. "Which ever one you are more passionate about", the admissions person said. I think that was the point were the tables started to turn. In an identical environment, at almost the same age, Jonah began to switch places on the art academia spectrum.

Even though I was useless were Jonah shined--conjugation, math, and tests of all forms-- I started to transform into a book worm. I also started to dwell on the question "how do I make the world a better place?" At that time I couldn't see how art--from my fathers funky musical grooves to the work of my hero M.C. Escher--was alleviating the suffering in the world. I started to volunteer a lot. I read books like "The 9-11 Commision Reports".

Meanwhile, Jonah's psychology-class-transcript-Harvard revelation was like a gateway drug. He distanced himself from hard science on a logarithmic scale. First neurologist fell to psychologist, than psychologist fell to filmmaker. Thats right: art. With the mediums of theater and film he started to explore themes I was brushing over in my readings: social conflict, personal pain, and inner emotion.

When Jonah applied to Harvard, Williams, and a few other select schools, he was a mess. "Part of the reason I didn't get in was because I was spending so much time [writing and directing a play], because it was a euphoric break from my education", he once told me. Torn between his programming and his true passions, he didn't really give 100% on his application. He wasn't accepted. Instead of settling for a middle-ground school like Lewis and Clark he submitted a surefire application to the University of New Mexico (U.N.M.) and started to make his first feature-length film.

Epilogue

Despite my ineptitude with the SATs, I got accepted to the the United World College program, a rigorous boarding school. It prepared me for, and ultimately led me to Middlebury College, where I study Geography. Thats right, I'm a science major. Jonah eventually transferred from U.N.M. to an prominent media arts school, Emerson College. He is one semester from graduating with a degree in film. He was recently flown to Greece for two weeks to act in a movie produced by The Helenic Radio and Television Company.

You can find trailers for Jonah's film at his website. A collection of his shorts and music videos are on his youtube channel.

To apply to be a United World College Scholar, visit the website of the U.S.A. National Committee.

Goals of blog:

2009-07-28T17:23:00.001-07:00

The Cedar Board: a new blog with a new mission. Gone are the days when I sporadically regurgitate the events of my life onto a poorly edited, diary-like web page.

The Cedar Board will be a more focused space. It will be:

1. A Showcase: for writing coming out of academic classes by me or my peers that are written in a accessible manner. (If you would like to be a guest author, email thecedarboard@gmail.com, with the subject line "author")

2. Informative and Thoughtful: personal narrative pieces that Interest me personally and speak to a situation or theme relevant to a wider audience

3. Consistent: Published at least 4 times per year at fairly regular intervals until at least 2012

4. Edited: I will be asking for guested editors to do one round of feedback and another round of proofreading. This will make post more enjoyable for everyone. (If you would like to volunteer as a guest editor, email thecedarboard@gmail.com with the subject line "editor)

5. Sold-out: Yes, there will be ads. If you don't like it, send me money and I'll take them off.