Facebook

I’m no great lover of FB, but I have a lot of friends and family who I can’t easily be in touch with any other way. For better or for worse, FB is a major center of social and informational gravity, a major feature of the landscape, and for all our complaints about privacy, I don’t see us abandoning it en masse.

Flickr

Despite Yahoo’s neglect, this continues to be the internet’s most wonderful image storage and sharing tool, bar none. All the graphics I create for this blog live on Flickr, and the community there continues to be a lively one.

Google+

I don’t really know what to do with this yet, or whether I’m all that committed to it. I mostly just repost my blog posts and music there if I want to widen their reach. I don’t follow other people’s posts either. Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Instagram

This frivolous-seeming iPhone app has turned into a steady source of creative gratification for me. Nine times out of ten I’d rather take Instagram photos than carry around a real digital camera. The iPhone is an awkward camera at best, but the pleasure of the filters and the instant sharing overcomes the app’s limitations. I automatically send all my photos to Tumblr and Flickr.

LinkedIn

I’m not as active in the LinkedIn groups as I should be, since Quora scratches that itch for me more effectively. But the news feed is intermittently interesting, the job postings are easy to use, and it’s a handy way to keep my professional contacts in one place.

Quora

My favorite web thing of the moment. It’s ostensibly a Q&A site, but it’s also been a rich source of blog inspiration, a networking tool, a social game and a bottomless source of amusement. It fills some of the hole left by the decimation of my Delicious network. Enjoy it now, while it still has a high signal to noise ratio.

SoundCloud

Out of all the music sharing tools I’ve tried, this is the winner. Its embedded player is attractive and elegant, the timed comments feature is a nifty one, and it has a lively community. It plays very nicely with Tumblr, Facebook and Google+ too.

Tumblr

I initially regarded Tumblr as a toy, a source of amusing internet memes and pictures of strange animals, but as I follow more people there, it’s becoming steadily more substantive. I’m starting to find full-blown essays and news there that I don’t see elsewhere. Also, the steady stream of science imagery is a daily pleasure. Effortless one-click reblogging is still the killer feature. Not too many people I know in real life follow me on Tumblr, so I automatically send all my posts there to Facebook — I wouldn’t anyone to miss a silly internet meme or picture of a strange animal.

Twitter

While Facebook is good for being in touch with people I know, Twitter has been the best tool for me to get connected to people I don’t know. I’ve even made some valued real-life friends there, as well as a bunch of valuable professional connections. But mostly it’s a hub for ideas, news, gossip, hip-hop slang and pop cultural amusement. As the saying goes, Twitter is the golf course for geeks. I mostly access it via Hootsuite.

WordPress

This blog continues to be the hub of my online life. I might post fragmentary or partial ideas elsewhere, and then they mature into complete thoughts here. Quora has been a really good source of blog fodder recently, and my old blog posts have been getting new life as Quora answers. A happy synergy.

Miscellany

I use Instapaper constantly, and not just for offline reading — it’s a good way to make web pages more readable on the iPhone, especially Wikipedia articles. I didn’t list it here because it’s not really social, and I don’t publish anything on it.

I still make nominal use of Delicious, but it’s fallen far out of the regular rotation.

I stream everything to FriendFeed, purely for SEO reasons.

My wife is addicted to Metafilter, and I look in on that from time to time, but haven’t had the brainspace yet to participate. I get a ton of traffic to my blog from Stumbleupon and Reddit, but again, don’t have the bandwidth to participate in those sites.

DJ BC also did a remarkable album-length mashup of Jay-Z and Brian Eno:

Speaking of Jay, it’s a cliche by now, but Danger Mouse’s Grey Album really is a remarkable piece of work.

For creative use of pop, you’ve got to love DJ Earworm’s United State Of Pop series.

Diplo and M.I.A. deserve props for Piracy Funds Terrorism, especially their reworking of “Walk Like An Egyptian.”

The Walsh brothers did the best Wu-Tang mashup I’ve ever heard: Wugazi!

Finally, I don’t know if I’m one of the best mashup artists, but I’m pretty darn good.

Mashups by ethanhein

Additional recommendations are welcome in the comments.

Original post on Quora

Wanna Be Startin’ Something megamix by ethanhein

Bitter Sweet Symphony Megamix by ethanhein

Human Nature Megamix by ethanhein

Prudence Never Can Say Goodbye by ethanhein

Na Na Na Na by ethanhein

I have one friend who’s a full-time professional singer-songwriter, touring on the lesbian folk circuit. She puts out albums once in a while but those aren’t a major source of revenue; they seem mostly to serve as souvenirs from her gigs. She supplements her touring income with some freelance non-musical work around the sides. Her life is possible because a) she’s just unbelievably good at what she does, b) she’s well-connected to a warm circle of fellow singer-songwriters who form a mutually supportive scene, and c) she doesn’t mind living on the road for long spans of time. I did a little light touring with a band that she was also in, and it just killed me. I couldn’t take it, even for a few days at a time. I need to be close to home. So no touring musician life for me.

Another singer-songwriter of my acquaintance also tours constantly, though not in support of her own work. She’s a horn player who does gigs with a few very high-profile pop acts, several medium-level bands in wildly different styles and many local and session gigs around the sides. Her own material doesn’t seem to be much of a source of income, though that may change someday. She can make her career work because she’s a highly versatile and well-trained musician adaptable to any situation. Also, she has a master’s, so she can get good teaching jobs. She’s also easy to get along with, and has a high tolerance for life on the road. There are times when I envy her, but I get upset when I have to play music I don’t like, and she has a high enough level of professionalism to be able to enjoy whatever she’s playing, so she’s better suited to her life than I would be.

A trumpet player and singer I know has been fronting a series of bands for several years. His current one substantially supports themselves through busking, along with occasional tours, private parties and the like. For several years he mostly paid the bills as a web programmer, and also led percussion classes for corporate groups on company retreats, but has mostly stopped needing to do that. Busking is hard work that doesn’t pay well, so his life is a little on the ascetic side — I admire his commitment tremendously.

A bassist I’ve done a lot of work with has been working cruise ships for the past few years. On the plus side, he gets paid to see the world and play his bass every day. On the minus side, he’s even more nomadic than people who tour, and he has no say about the music that he’s playing. I understand why he likes it but you couldn’t pay me enough.

Other singer-songwriters I know who perform and record at a pro level have day jobs ranging from music therapy to commercial illustration to beer distribution to cartoon voice acting to various kinds of teaching. Some folks also do weddings and DJ gigs, production, film scoring, commercial jingles, musical theater or children’s music. I know very few musicians who have no other kind of job at all; most of them are either independently wealthy, or have very supportive significant others, or simply choose to live in abject poverty.

As for myself, I’ve found that it’s more important to me to play music that I like and that I have artistic control over than it is to be involved in music in any capacity. So I work full-time at the ACLU doing online outreach, a job which I like very much. I produce tracks at night and on the weekend. I gigged really heavily for a number of years but have pretty much completely stopped, because the low pay and general indignity of the live music world isn’t worth it to me anymore. I love teaching lessons and hope to do that forever. I also record and produce other people’s stuff, which sometimes I enjoy, and which sometimes is just as tedious as any other kind of technical work. I love film scoring and theater, and would like to be doing more of it, but in the meantime am content to pursue my own ideas and whims and give away the results on the web: http://soundcloud.com/ethanhein

I guess my point in saying all of this is that there are many different ways to be a musician, and the word “professional” encompasses many different ways of making a living. It’s up to you to figure out what you enjoy, what you can get paid for, and how to juggle it all with the other demands on you as a person. Good luck!

Original post on Quora

And here are the first three minutes of the film:

Are white hip-hop fans stealing black culture?

The film’s central thesis is stated by Paul Mooney: “Eminem is blackface without makeup.” Mooney draws an equivalence between the stealing of black culture by white people with the literal stealing of black people during slavery. However much white people enjoy hip-hop, Mooney views us as unwelcome intruders and appropriators.

I feel the moral force of Mooney’s argument, but it glosses over many complexities. Hip-hop has never belonged exclusively to black people. The practitioners and fans have come from a broad spectrum of races, cultures and classes from the beginning. Also, blackness isn’t synonymous with the traditional hip-hop signifiers: being urban, street, poor, etc. And who says the fans of a musical form have to live the same experiences as the artists? As Aesop Rock says in the movie: “I love Star Wars but I’ve never been to space.”

Still, all of that aside, there are a lot of embarassing white rappers and hip-hop fans. It’s worth asking hard questions of anyone in a socially dominant group who adopts the trappings of a less-dominant group.

So who’s exploiting who?

The story of music in America is one of powerful people exploiting marginalized people. Hip-hop is no exception. But the situation is complex. The film shows a hip-hop tour of Harlem, where the tour guide distributes bling and Kangol caps to the bemused, mostly white and Asian participants. This would seem like a textbook example of the worst and most demeaning kind of exploitation… except that the tour is run by Grandmaster Kaz of the Sugarhill Gang. Does he get a pass because he’s exploiting his own culture? Can a founding father of hip-hop exploit himself?

Vanilla Ice is another complex case. In the film he claims that he was a victim of exploitation, not a perpetrator of it. He says that he revered hip-hop growing up, and that he was duped into a clownish bastardization of the music he loves by the lure of money. At first blush he appears to be an exploiter, not an exploitee — you could argue that he got to cash in because of his race. But then, Will Smith was a corny, market-friendly rapper too. Was he an exploiter, or an exploitee, or both, or neither? I don’t have the answer.

Acting black vs acting cool

One of the film’s most compelling characters is a white girl from small-town Indiana who was deeply involved in wigger culture. She explains her appropriation of hip-hop style: “I didn’t want to be black. I wanted to be cool.” If the cool people you know of are mostly black, or behave in stereotypically “black” ways, it’s natural to want to act “black” too.

For me, hip-hop is so cool because a release from the stifling pressures of bourgeois professionalism. Hip-hop gives uptight, repressed people like me a way to access and validate our more aggressive side, to give vent to anti-authoritarian urges, to use improper language, and to give attention and validation to bodily pleasures. I can say confidently that my inner life would be severely impoverished without hip-hop, and so would my cultural and social lives. But how do I embrace and participate in this culture without becoming the thieving white oppressor, perpetuating ugly stereotypes for my own selfish benefit?

Why are some white rappers fine while others are unbearable?

The film thoroughly documents all the wrong ways of being a white hip-hop musician or fan. The worst example isn’t Vanilla Ice, it’s a duo of dreadlocked white chicks called Empire Isis, appearing at 0:42 in the second video above. Empire Isis rap in a style influenced by dancehall reggae. Or at least, they used to. If you visit their web site now, you’ll see they’ve undergone a dramatic image makeover, perhaps motivated by being portrayed in the film as the most clueless pair of white wanna-be Rastafarians since Ras Trent:

In fairness to Empire Isis, their frontwoman is multiracial, not white. But I still get a strong Ras Trent vibe from them. After the screening I asked a couple of the NYU students sitting next to me why they thought Empire Isis is so wack, whereas everybody loves MC Serch. (When Serch came up in the film’s montage of lame white rappers, the girl behind me exclaimed, “Oh, why you wanna hate?”) One NYU kid’s assessment: Empire Isis is so bad not because they’re appropriating an oppressed culture, but because they’re doing it so ineptly. MC Serch gets a pass because he can actually rap. NYU Kid offered Natalie Portman’s SNL gangsta rap video as a positive white rap role model. Natalie might be playing a self-mocking character, NYU Kid argued, but she brings so much heat and passion to the gangsta role that she deserves to inhabit it.

Al Jolson and Eminem

The film is most provocative in its examination of Al Jolson and blackface. After mostly supporting Paul Mooney’s assertion that wiggers are no different from the minstrels of yore, the movie then gives Jolson a surprisingly sympathetic reading. This is a bold move, because the most embarrassing people depicted in the film aside from Empire Isis are the members of the still-active Al Jolson society. They don’t wear blackface so far as I know, but the film does show a dude performing “Mammy” to an audience on Long Island without a trace of irony. It’s a total facepalm moment. And yet, a historian in the film gives Al Jolson credit for making a good-faith effort to show love and respect to black culture. Jolson said that he found his most authentic self singing in blackface. I’m appalled at the ignorance of that idea, but I have to ask myself how different it is from the way I feel about rapping that Ice Cube song. Growing up in the time and place I did has made me more culturally and politically sophisticated than Al Jolson, so I have better manners and am more careful to show my feelings respectfully. But am I that different?

America is the land of mutts. We can’t be expected to keep our musical interests within our class and racial identities. If I’m going to defend my own motivation for wanting to participate in hip-hop music and culture as coming from a place of love, then I need to at least give Al Jolson the benefit of the doubt. I’m not trying to apologize for blackface, which I continue to find disgusting. If minstrelry is a form of admiration, it’s an ignorant, warped form. And white, upper-class hip-hop fans like me have the privilege of being ignorant without having to suffer any negative consequences, except being portrayed negatively in documentaries. The question isn’t, should white kids like hip-hop? The real question is, what’s the most appropriate way to reach across power differentials when exploring other cultures’ music?

Are wiggers intruding into a private space?

Harry Allen gives a powerful argument why hip-hop is more than just a style of music in his essay “The Unbearable Whiteness Of Emceeing: What The Eminence Of Eminem Says About Race” (pdf link), first published in The Source, February 2003. It mostly concerns 8 Mile, the loosely biographical story of Eminem overcoming his whiteness to win rap battles. As his epigram, Allen quotes James Baldwin:

“Negro speech is vivid largely because it is private. It is a kind of emotional shorthand — or sleight-of-hand — by means of which Negroes express, not only their relationship to each other, but their judgment of the white world. And, as the white world takes over this vocabulary — without the faintest notion of what really means — the vocabulary is forced to change. The same thing is true of Negro music, which has had to become more compelling in order to continue to express any of the private or collective experience.”
–from “Sermons and Blue,” The New York Times Review of Books, March 29, 1959

Allen’s essay is worth quoting at length:

Compared to Black artists, Eminem, like Vanilla Ice, Beastie Boys, 3rd Bass and a number of white rappers before him, got more by doing less; an almost sure way to mark someone as white under the system of race. (Asked by novelist Zadie Smith in Vibe how he’d grown as an artist while making The Eminem Show, he replied, “I learned how to ride a beat better…. On the last album, I hadn’t completely mastered it yet, to sink into the beat…I’d listen, and I’d be like, ‘why am I so far behind that beat? The first album was terrible — like, I was playing catch-up with the beat constantly” Oh, my.) As well this charge — that race has greased white people’s way—that they haven’t really earned what they possess — is, in this writer’s experience, the accusation that white people typically find most infuriating.

Watching 8 Mile at the multiplex, I was struck by a number of facts: the unusual whiteness of the New York City theatre audience for what is, essentially, a rap movie; that at least one filmgoing couple was, generously, well past retirement age; the flat, cardboard quality of the film’s characters; that, with exemption of Eminem, nobody has any parents, and everyone seems inexplicably focused on “Rabbit,” as Eminem’s character, Jimmy Smith Jr. is nicknamed. Everyone seems usually concerned with what he’s going to do or not do, what he thinks or feels. Characters orbit him in a way that, especially if you’re Black, feels completely false. Eminem has been widely compared to Elvis Presley, due to both men’s so-called “white-trash” roots, controversy-counting careers, and enormous success mining Black music and importing it to white audiences. This contrast has been drawn by persons as disparate as Sir Paul McCartney, Leiber and Stoller (who wrote Elvis’s hit “jailhouse Rock”) Public Enemy’s Chuck D—and by Eminem himself. In the video for “Without Me” Eminem appears briefly as Presley in this bloated, near-death form, self-mockingly rapping, “I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley/To do Black music so selfishly/ And use it to get myself wealthy…”

But, in truth, the Tarzan narrative—that of a white infant, abandoned by its mother and father and raised by apes, who rises to dominate the non-white people and environment around him—gets closer to the heart of Eminem as a phenomenon. (“The baiting of Blacks was Tarzan’s chief divertissement,” wrote his creator, Edgar Rice Burroughs, neatly summarizing 8 Mile’s climax.) As well, the Tarzan myth also neatly sockets into one of white supremacy’s most enduring structures; the Black facilitation of white development (BFWD); that is, Black people, often at great cost to themselves, working to, again, improve white people.

I think my job as a white hip-hop fan is to listen closely to Harry Allen and Paul Mooney, to take their arguments seriously, and to not react defensively. The right attitude for me is to remember that I’m a guest in this culture, that I should behave as I would in someone else’s home. I should probably leave the Ice Cube songs to Ice Cube. I can let my own music be informed and influenced by my hip-hop heroes without imitating them. I can learn from people different from me and then go back to work at trying to be myself.

My mom is Jewish, so that’s enough for the tribe to have welcomed me as one of their own, but it’s a complex question as to what that membership means. Wikipedia has two separate articles for Judaism and Jews, to distinguish the religion from the ethnicity, and I definitely belong to the ethnicity more than the religion.

My most significant personal connection to the tribe, aside from family Passover seders and Seinfeld appreciation, has come through music, specifically klezmer music. I may not know my way around the Torah, but I know my harmonic minor modes inside and out.

Klezmer is mostly secular, for partying and dancing. Musically it overlaps with sacred Jewish music, but the subject matter tends to be a lot more earthly. A good analogy is the relationship between black gospel music and secular R&B. Jewish sacred music is sung in Hebrew; klezmer songs are usually in Yiddish. Also, klezmer songs usually have more of a dance beat, though they also sometimes make use of the rubato feel you hear in temple.

As jazz has Miles and Coltrane, and rock has the Beatles and the Stones, so klezmer has Dave Tarras and Naftule Brandwein. Dave is like the Beatles — polished, virtuosic, conversant with many musical styles. Naftule is like the Stones — more raw, more gutsy, inhabiting a single personal style that varies little from song to song. The best introduction to these guys is on the Rough Guide To Klezmer, which combines old-timey traditional music with newer hipster revivalists.

The first two tracks on the Rough Guide are recordings of “Fun Tashlikh,” first the 1990 version by the Klezmatics, then the 1930s or 40s version by Naftule.

The name means “on returning from the river.” “Fun” is related to the German “von,” meaning “from.” Tashlikh is the ritual of casting out your sins on Rosh Hashanah. The Klezmatics version isn’t embeddable, but it’s worth seeking out. It opens with wild shrieking bass clarinet and gets more intense from there. My Jewish relatives aren’t much given to ecstatic states, so it’s nice to hear that at least some parts of the tribe still know how to throw down.

Another standout track from the Rough Guide is “Der Gassen Nigen” by Harry Kandel’s Orchestra, from 1923. I’d love to embed it, but I can’t find it on the web. The tune sounds like a heartbreaking dirge, so I was extremely amused to learn that it’s actually a wedding processional. The name means “the street song,” and it was traditionally played as the bride and groom went back to their house from the temple where they were married. This says a lot about Jewish expectations around marriage. Kidding aside, “Der Gassen Nigun” is one of the most beautiful melodies I’ve ever heard. (The Rough Guide also includes Klezmokum’s maudlin modern version, which, meh.)

“Meron Nign (Tune From Meron)” by The Klezmer Conservatory Band is another Rough Guide standout. It kicks off with a killer unaccompanied mandolin solo that just begs to be sampled. I’ve found a lot of creative inspiration from dropping pieces of it into my tracks.

The only real-life klezmer band I’ve ever been part of was called F Train Klezmer. We weren’t very good. The high point of our performing career was at an old folks’ home in Washington Heights; otherwise we mostly just struggled through traditional material in the trombone player’s living room in Queens. I’ve tried to get various of my other bands interested in klezmer material too, without much success. I’m hoping that this post will draw more klezmer nerds out of the woodwork.

So what’s in this music for me? There’s the historical value — it’s good to know what kind of music my Yiddish-speaking great-grandparents were listening to. Getting into klez was a big bonding moment with my late grandmother, who danced to stuff like Dave and Naftule when she was young.

There’s present-day value too. I dig the sound of exotic Arabic-sounding scales over Western dance music forms. The easiest entry point into klez for Western-trained musicians is the Ahava Raba scale, also known as the phrygian dominant scale, the Freygish mode, and the Hava Nagilah scale. Jazz folks will recognize it as the fifth mode of the harmonic minor scale.

“Fun Tashlikh” uses something like diminished scale in its A section, and lydian dominant in the B section. It’s refreshing to my ears to be reminded that the major scale and its modes aren’t the be-all and end-all of popularly accessible music. Also, it’s cool to discover that flat seconds and fifths aren’t the exclusive province of highbrow artsy music. For all their exoticism, klezmer tunes are perfectly accessible to first-time western listeners.

Klezmer often gets referred to as “Jewish jazz.” This is an appealing name, and it has some basis in reality;Benny Goodman did take clarinet lessons from Dave Tarras. But jazz isn’t really the right analogy. The improvisation in klezmer is mostly variations and embellishments on the melodies, not like the harmonically-guided freeform lines in jazz solos. Klezmer is more like Jewish blues, or Jewish country. The scales are different, but the subject matter is mostly the same. Also, like blues and country, klezmer is full of soulfully expressive microtones.

Digging into klezmer also put me in contact with the music of the New York City Yiddish theater scene, which combined traditional shtetl sounds with American jazz and showtunes. You can hear this music, along with ads for various Lower East Side businesses, courtesy of the Yiddish Radio Project.

I’m especially drawn to the Yiddish vaudevillian Aaron Lebedeff. He was a comedian given to singing in “Yinglish,” going between Yiddish and English in mid-phrase. Here’s one of his big hits, lamenting how confusing America is to the newly-arrived Jewish immigrant. The chorus translates to “What can you do, it’s America.” I feel that way a lot.

My absolute favorite Aaron Lebedeff song is called “I Like She,” which I learned during my F Train Klezmer adventure. It’s pretty much impossible to find online, which is too bad because it’s hilarious. Sample lyrics:

She’s got cheeks like fresh tomatoes
She’s sweet like herring mit potatoes
I like she, and I like she and that’s all.

Klezmer is a distinctly fringe taste in America outside of Jewish hipsters in New York and their most elderly relatives. But it’s making a comeback in its original home in Eastern Europe. When I was in Krakow visiting Anna’s family, the klezmer musicians probably outnumbered the Jews significantly. My great-grandparents were mostly relieved to be putting the shtetl behind them and were eager to embrace American culture. For me, though, American culture has too many empty calories. Outsider music like klezmer, along with blues, jazz and hip-hop, feels a lot more nutritious.

I’ll close with the Klezmatics singing a traditional anthem of brotherly love, “Ale Brider.” Here’s a translation of the lyrics.

Oy, oy, oy, oy!

First stop yesterday was Kipuka Puaulu, a rainforest bird park on the lower slopes of Mauna Loa. We heard more birds than we saw, aside from the many pheasants crisscrossing the trail. Hawaii is absolutely infested with pheasants. There’s a phrase I don’t find myself typing very often.

We took a drive part of the way up Mauna Loa itself because there’s supposed to be a terrific overlook up there of all the smaller volcanoes. The drive up was like a trip through Middle Earth; the vegetation kept changing every time we gained a little elevation, and I didn’t recognize any of it.

Then we finally got up to the lookout point and all we saw was swirling vog. That’s not a typo, it’s short for “volcanic smog,” the mixture of sulfur dioxide and water vapor emitted by the volcano. The lower slope of the volcano is pretty in a menacing, otherworldly way. It’s mostly red volcanic rock with tough shrubs growing out of it, many bleached white for some reason — maybe the omnipresent sulfurous fumes?

There weren’t as many birds as down in the bird park, but the ones we saw were cool. There are a lot of little red songbirds with wildly curved beaks. The web informs me that they’re called ‘I’iwi or Scarlet Hawaiian Honeycreepers. They have a complex song that Anna compared to R2D2.

We drove down off the volcano, where it was a damp sixty degrees, to Hilo, where it was sunny and eighty. Hilo reminds me of San Francisco — it has that frontier-town architecture mixed with sweeping ocean views and palm trees. The ocean front has a few fancy hotels but mostly it’s spacious parks full of immense, otherworldly banyan trees. This seems like amazingly progressive urban planning for a small, not-very-prosperous city, but we later learned that the parks are pragmatic. Every time there’s a tsunami, everything along the bay gets leveled, so they finally figured that there’s no point in letting people build anything there. The hotels are “tsunami-proof,” which just means that the bottom floors have flimsy walls that are meant to be easily swept away, leaving the support pillars intact.

Anna’s main objective was the Hilo farmer’s market. The Kona farmer’s market was a dozen hippies in tents, but the Hilo market is a serious institution. It covers a couple of full blocks and includes the full diversity of tropical agriculture. There are also people selling orchids, aloha shirts and various handcrafts ranging from tourist junk to gorgeous high-end woodwork. Lunch was melt-in-your-mouth kalua pig with sweet potatoes, rice, salty salmon and ti leaves (I had thought they were saying “tea leaves” but no.) I also tried a kind of spam sushi, which tastes much better than it sounds. We also had what I think were banana spring rolls, and drank out of a young coconut that the vendor hacked open with a machete. Very Gilligan’s Island.

After the farmer’s market we took in Liliuokalani Park and Gardens, a big formal Japanese garden and arboretum by the water. The place is full of zebra doves, Hilo’s version of the pigeon. The water features communicate with the ocean and there were little kids fishing in them. This park isn’t just for tourists, it seems to be a really popular hangout for Hilo’s residents. People were barbecuing, skateboarding, jogging, hanging out. We saw Hawaii’s entire goth population, all three of them, looking like they really would prefer to be somewhere else. In the bay right by the picnic tables we saw a few manta rays grazing in the shallow water.

I was spellbound, but the Hawaiians were totally jaded. The kids passing by were all talking about the much bigger ones they’ve all seen.

I was looking at a kid’s book about Barack Obama a couple of days ago, and it had a quote from Michelle: “To understand Barack, you really have to understand Hawaii.” I’m not sure what she meant by that, but maybe part of it is that he has the Spock-like affect because after growing up here, nothing surprises him.

After the better part of a day taking care of urgent internet business, and the not-so-urgent business of finding me something to read on the plane home, we finally made it outside to do something Hawaii-y: a trip to Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park, on Snorkel Bob’s list of recommended snorkeling locations. While it’s a beautiful place, it’s not so ideal for snorkeling, due to a combination of high surf and jagged rocks. I wore my sneakers instead of fins and braced against the bottom in kind of a football center crouch, watching the fish get swept to and fro by the current.

The park is yet another fantastic black lava landscape, with a lively egret population. Wandering around a field of black, grey, brown and blue boulders, I came across a single huge hunk of pure white coral seemingly placed there by Andy Goldsworthy. Nearby there was a tide pool a good fifteen feet up a cliff above the ocean level. The rocks are placed so that particularly big waves get channeled all the way up there to slosh water in.

On our way back toward the parking lot, we passed a particular stand of trees with about a billion mynah birds chattering in it. The noise was incredible. We talked to a profoundly stoned local guy named Solomon, who shook his three-toned long hair at what a nuisance they are. We got out of there just before an epic rainstorm swept in — it rained so hard that night that the power went out.

The next day was a big one. We got an early start on our final snorkel before returning the gear. We did a second visit to Kahaluu Bay Beach Park right by our condo. It still feels weird that there’s so much intense marine life right there where the cruise ships dock. Two visits out of two, the coral drew blood from me. Sigh. But it was well worth it. Right before we were about to pack it in, Anna spotted a great big sea turtle, nonchalantly munching algae off the rocks in two feet of water, right by the beach.

In the aquarium sea turtles swim around placidly. It was very different seeing one tossed around in the surf, sometimes completely upside down. We tried to keep a respectful distance but the waves kept throwing us towards it.  It didn’t seem to mind us, though. No wonder these guys are endangered. I wanted to be like, dude! We don’t have your best interests at heart. I mean, Anna and I do, but in general, you should avoid us.

So then we returned our masks and fins and got in the car to head over to the other end of the island. The road passes through a lot of farm and ranch territory, largely devoted to the growing of very high-end coffee. Anna wanted a cup, and you’d think that the Kona district would be the place to get a good one. But no. The farmers all just sell beans, no one is brewing any. She finally had to settle for a really gross can of sugary coffee from the supermarket.

The coffee quest wasn’t a total loss, though. We stopped at a particular farm because in addition to advertising coffee for sale, there was also a zebra in a pen out front. We ended up hanging out with Leonard the farmer for the better part of an hour, and it’s a testament to his wondrous eccentricity that we completely forgot to ask about the zebra. Leonard and his wife Sudy keep Watusi cattle, peacocks, guinea fowl and various exotic chickens. There’s a large family of large black semi-feral pigs hanging around their yard at all times. Leonard introduced us to all the animals, told us about being a fifth generation Hawaiian rancher, detailed the proper way to roast a pig (in a pit, wrapped in tea leaves and then banana leaves) and suggested various tourist attractions. We bought some coffee beans, and they also gave us a big good-smelling plumeria flower. Nice people.

We swung around the bottom part of the island and stopped in at a black sand beach that Leonard had recommended. I was thinking how all the black sand and black rocks are kind of goth, but then realized that Hawaii is probably the least goth place in the universe. This beach was backed by a big freshwater pond full of lilypads with Hawaiian ducks swimming in it. On the beach was another sea turtle, chilling out in the shallow water and grazing while being photographed by the better part of a busload of tourists.

Our destination for the drive was Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. We’re staying in the nearby town called, charmingly, Volcano. We got in as dusk was settling, but it was enough time to poke our heads into the park. These volcanoes are very active. Half the park is closed off as of this writing because of poisonous gas conditions. Mostly the scenery is the same lush rainforest as other higher-altitude parts of the island, but then there’s a gigantic crater with steam rising menacingly from various holes and crevices.

The main crater is mostly quiet at the moment but after dark we went to an overlook where you can see a football-field-sized cauldron of lava glowing orange through the mist. Pretty freaky!

We took our first trip off the Kona coast and went to check out the more rugged and rural north coast of the Big Island. A lot of the drive took us up the seemingly endless lava plain that makes up the northwest quarter of the island. It looks a lot like Iceland, except it’s sunnier and there’s more shrubbery. There aren’t any big flat surfaces for graffiti, so instead the Hawaiians write their roadside messages by arranging white coral on the black lava.

Once we got up off the coast, the landscape got greener, hillier and a lot more agricultural. We saw cows, sheep, horses, chickens, and even some goats. If not for the tropical plants and occasional sweeping ocean views, we could have been in Vermont.

We find the economics here to be mysterious. Hawaii is so expensive and isolated, how could you possibly make a living raising goats? Are all of these farms a source of amusement for rich transplants and retirees, or are they all just fronts for lucrative pot farming, or what?

I didn’t think to bring the cable that connects my phone to the car stereo, so as we do all this driving, we’re dependent on radio for entertainment. Hawaii is long on natural beauty but a little lacking in its musical culture. The radio is about 60% lite reggae, 25% lite pop and 15% Nashville country. Forget about hip-hop or anything edgy, there isn’t even a classic rock station. Thank god for NPR.

Our friend Katie lent us a book of hikes on the Big Island. The very first one it lists is the Waipio Valley. It’s a secluded spot between two almost vertical cliffs, with a little river snaking down to a black sand beach. The only way down is by a narrow single-lane road that you could almost rappel down. Here’s the view from the top.

The valley is inhabited by even crunchier hippies than the ones we met at the Kona farmer’s market. They have electricity down there, but that’s apparently a quite recent development. One of the “roads” is a six-inch-deep stream — we saw a grandmotherly white-haired lady nonchalantly drive her pickup truck up it. There seems to be some marginal tropical agriculture happening; again, how it all works financially is a mystery. It feels more like Jurassic Park than a farming community. Looming in the background is a pair of waterfalls plunging off the cliffside to feed the river. The trees are densely hung with vines, and there are colorful flowers of the kind that you see on Hawaiian shirts.

After we walked around the valley a little, we went out to the beach you see in the picture, which is truly epic. Not only does it have cliffs and god rays and the river winding through round porous volcanic rocks, but there are also horses roaming freely. I couldn’t tell if they’re wild or just have very laid-back owners. Anna observed that the only thing missing is rainbows and unicorns.

We dragged ourselves back up the cliffside road and drove up to the nearby Kalopa State Recreation Area to take in some more nature before it got dark. It’s a forest preserve with a lovingly maintained rainforest arboretum, and we basically had the place to ourselves. The park brochures are charmingly earnest and old-school, written on a typewriter. They’re dated 1992 but could easily have been written in 1952. There are trees with rainbow-colored bark and pink leaves, and prehistoric-looking ferns. The ground is littered with smashed guavas, making the place look like a tragic accident at the smoothie factory. We saw a lot of mongooses slinking around, and a couple of pheasants, descended from birds inexplicably imported from Nepal.

Before we left we stuffed our suitcases with bulk food and power bars from the Food Coop, and we’ve been cooking all of our meals since we got here. But after all the hiking we finally had our first dinner out, and it was a classy one, at Merriman’s in Waimea. The high-end locavore movement was late in arriving to Hawaii, but now it seems to have fully taken root, and Merriman’s is holding the banner high. We ate all kinds of local treats: pickled passionfruit, sauteed ferns, ahi, pork, lamb, and the most expensive and sensationally delicious cups of coffee of our lives. It was like boiled dark chocolate bars. In the movie of our trip, our waiter would be played by Johnny Depp in full manic mode. He had a Fu Manchu beard and his thumb and pinkie nails were painted a shiny turquoise. I asked him what the story was there and he explained without a trace of irony that it was to widen his shaka.

The tiki motif is getting old, but the music was nice, including a gorgeous lap steel instrumental version of “Wichita Lineman.” Way better than cheesy reggae.

The next day we got up bright and early to go on an organized snorkeling trip run by Sea Paradise in Kealakekua Bay, the site of the Captain Cook monument. We had wanted to hike down there, but development on the coast has made that difficult, and it turned out to be better to see it from the water anyway. Sea Paradise took us out in a catamaran, and I want to pause to enjoy that word. Catamaran. Catamaran! It’s fun just typing it.

We had a good couple of hours bobbing around the bay among the banyan trees and giant boulders, gawking at the psychedelic fish and coral. It’s like being in a screen saver. If you’re interested in how complex forms emerge and self-organize through natural selection, there’s no better place to see it in action than in the ocean around Hawaii. The patterning on the fish is a dazzling display of cellular automata and reaction-diffusion. Steven Wolfram would be in heaven.

The magic isn’t just that the fish are so colorful and groovy, or that there are so many of them. It’s that they’re mostly so unconcerned by human presence. A few fish avoided us but most went about their business as if we weren’t there. The needlefish especially were willing to hang in my face making prolonged eye contact.

The weirdest thing I saw all day was a crown-of-thorns starfish. It took me a while to figure out whether it’s an animal, a plant or a particularly weird coral shape. It’s a good foot wide at least.

It’s a depressingly recurring theme: spectacular exotic creature turns out to be invasive or in some way harmful to Hawaii’s delicate ecosystem. The crown-of-thorns starfish isn’t an invader, but it is a problem. It eats coral, putting more pressure on the already beleaguered reefs, and its natural predator, the conch, has been fished nearly into oblivion.

Snorkeling is fun but exhausting. Two hours of it plus a boat ride on other end completely wiped us out. We mostly spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping.