Recycle Bicycle

Getting Your Hands Oily
In New Britain at Recycle Bicycle, kids are taught how to put together bicycles, and how to grow up in the process
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate, June 21, 2007

Stacy Hall was surrounded by chaos and bicycle parts. The Louisiana-born Recycle Bicycle shop volunteer was surrounded by a group of New Britain kids aged nine through fourteen. Hall seemed to be everywhere in the shop at once, with his Creole accent booming over the fray of enthusiastic kids giving advice and instruction.

"You don't need no brakes?" Hall asked a boy who was eager to bring a rehabbed bike home. "That's what the dead man said, too."

Hall and his fellow volunteer Jason Daniels — AKA Mr. D — were leading about a dozen kids in the "Earn a Bike" program through bicycle repairs at the Recycle Bicycle shop at 85 Arch Street in New Britain. The kids were mostly new to the program, but some had worked long enough to earn their 10 "good faith hours" and go home with a loaner bike.

Several of the kids told me they were looking forward to getting their own new bike after working a total of 48 hours.

Later, the same energy was present, but the kids were intently focused, working on bicycles. 13-year-old Alexis Lopez, a brash youngster who wore his hair in cornrows, puzzled over how to remove a part from the bicycle in front of him.

"People donate bikes to the bike shop. If they ain't that good, then we strip them and if there's good pieces, people might take them and put them on their own bikes," Lopez said.

I watched him for a couple of minutes as he tried different techniques to remove a pesky part. It was his third week in the program and he was still learning his way around the innards of bicycles. Mr D. worked with him, giving him a minimal amount of instruction, as he wanted Lopez to figure it out himself.

By then, the whole group of kids were scattered throughout the work space, putting chains on bikes, removing pedals and performing other tasks.

"They're alright. You gotta holler at them and everything because some of them need that," Hall said.

"I don't think you could call what Stacy does hollering," Mr D. said, causing an explosion of laughter among the kids.

When asked what he would call it, Mr. D responded with a grunt that caused a second laugh explosion.

"Bothering each other, fighting in the store, intimidating each other — that doesn't happen here. I'm the baddest one here," Hall said.

Hall gave an example of a recent success story, and directed me a newspaper clipping on a wall about a BMX racer named Hector Gonzalez. "We got a guy, Hector Gonzalez. He's getting all A's in school now, but he used to be a terrible kid. He was! Now he's graduating in another week or two," Hall said. "He's got all A's, sponsors for his racing. Complete turnaround."

The program began ten years ago by New Britain High School teacher Cliff Parker, after Mary Anne Drury, a coordinator for New Britain's weed and seed community development program, asked a crowd at a community meeting if there anyone was interested in fixing bicycles that were donated from the New Britain police impound.

Parker and his fellow cyclist Mark Hoffman agreed, and set to work on the bikes in an unheated, unlit garage. After a year, they moved into a city-owned property on Oak Street, and started receiving funding from the weed and seed program, and grants from the American Savings Foundation and the Community Foundation of Greater New Britain. Later they moved to their present downtown New Britain location.

While a significant number of bikes are still donated by the New Britain police, donations come from a variety of other sources as well. The store now offers repair services, bike tune ups and sells new and reconditioned bicycles. New Britain courts assign juvenile offenders there for community service.

In addition, the New Britain BMX Racing team is run out of the shop, and a BMX course dedicated to the team is evidently under construction. Parker estimated that over a thousand New Britain kids have gone through the program, and that three hundred are currently involved.

While the shop is a step up from the program's first location, its intended purpose has remained the same.

"From its inception, the idea was we weren't just going to get bikes and give them to the kids. We were going to get the kids to fix the bikes," Parker said. As the program grew, Parker noticed reoccuring patterns about the kids who came to the shop to work.

"What we realized about three years in, is that we attracting kids who, in a large part had failed in school in every conceivable way," Parker said. "It just seemed this kinetic, physically engaged, moderately structured mentoring situation we created & was appealing to the kids that were the least successful at school."

Working with bicycles, Parker said, provided a tangible goal whose progress could be steadily observed.

"What we found was our kids could see the relevance of learning here in a way they couldn't see it in school," Parker said.

The bicycle the kids earn through the program provide incentive to stay, and through rehabbing bicycles, they experience goal-oriented working.

"If the bike doesn't work, it doesn't work& You can't say, oh, great job, and the wheel falls off. You've got to say great start, but it still doesn't work," Parker said. "There are real parameters of success and failure that can not be ignored, no matter how supportive you try to be or the trial and error process."

Parker and his crew had planned to move the shop down the road into an empty storefront by this time. That plan had to be put on hold when the building caught on fire the night before Thanksgiving. They plan to move into the space in September. With the display space available there, they'll look more like a professional bike shop.

Well, as professional as a bike shop managed by boisterous associates of the earn a bike program can look.

"Who knew that teaching these kids to be sales people — when the product is something that they liked and had some knowledgeable command over — would be an incentive to teach them how to be involved in the business world?" Parker asked. Read more!

Food Not Bombs

Panic in the Park
Hartford's Food Not Bombs causes a stir, but is unshaken
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate, June 28, 2007

Hartford's chapter of Food Not Bombs has weathered a storm over the last month. First, a drop in volunteers forced them to temporarily downgrade their twice weekly sessions of serving free vegetarian meals in Bushnell Park (they're starting up again in July, and volunteers are encouraged to e-mail hartfordfnb@hotmail.com).

And secondly, they inadvertently caused a hilarious panic in the park. On Sunday, June 11, one of FNB's leftover cardboard boxes put the city of Hartford in a tailspin, a turn of events the FNB crew found extremely puzzling.

"That sinister-looking cardboard box with a cupcake drawn on it and decorated with a bedazzler?" FNB volunteer Sean Murphy said, ruefully.

It was a cardboard box labelled "Not Bombs." Unless it was a terrorist group with a sci-fi level understanding of nanotechnology and with a Magritte-like approach to labelling, it was pretty clearly not a threat. Still, the Hartford police mobilized in force and created one of the funniest overreactions to a nonthreatening object since, well, I have to go back to the Boston Mooninite Box on this one.

The reaction was especially odd as it wasn't the first time such a box would have appeared in the park after an FNB session.

"We respect every place we go to and don't leave messes around," Dave Rozza said. "But what happens is sometimes we get down to the park and people come late and we have food left over, so we leave it in a box and people can take it. Usually it's gone quick."

Hartford police did not respond to requests for comment.

Despite the recent troubles, Hartford's FNB have kept rolling along. In the 13 years since the group started in Hartford, they haven't missed a Sunday. In addition, the Hartford group's scope has extended beyond Hartford.

"We were the first Food Not Bombs to respond to New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, and one of the first emergency responders in general," Rozza said.

The dozens of people who showed up at their most recent Bushnell Park event seemed pretty happy to see them. They were surprisingly effusive about the quality of the vegetarian food served by FNB, with one woman calling it delicious, and another man praising its "nutrify-ing" nature. That was a surprise considering the cook's somewhat self effacing assessment of his talents.

"I make delicious slop. Actually, slop is a bad description. I make delicious vegetable slurry," Murphy said.

The only complaint had nothing to do with the food. Bobby Houston, a man who said he was homeless by choice, complained over the political content. The lack of it.

"We don't always talk about anarchist politics at FNB. We try to keep it apolitical and not preachy at all," FNB volunteer Ken Tong said. Like others in the group, Tong is a committed anarchist, but said the primary purpose of the FNB is to simply feed people.

"All you have to do is voice concern," Houston said.

Rozza was surprised at the request for more of a message along with the food.

"That's never happened before," Rozza laughed. Read more!

Salvia

Meet the New Drug
Controversial yet legal, the herbal psychedelic salvia is readily available in Connecticut. But does it work?
By Adam Bulger
Hartford Advocate, August 2, 2007

The cluster of kids gathered by the counter mentioned salvia when I walked into the head shop. The four college-age rocker-looking kids and the store's owner were discussing legal highs, like herbal ecstasy and various smokable herbs. Those were good, they said, but none of them produced as intense an experience as salvia.

By a strange coincidence, I was there to buy salvia divinorum, a legal herbal drug with alleged hallucinogenic properties. A member of the sage family of plants and native to Mexico, salvia is sold as a leaf or an extract that can be smoked or chewed. The potency of extracts increase as the cost goes up. Salvia graded as 10X contains 10 times more Salvinorum A, the active ingredient of salvia, then the same amount of salvia leaves, is generally the cheapest. Salvia graded as 50x is more expensive. Salvia experts told me that the labelling system is misleading, as the potency of salvia varies widely.

Once I said I was a reporter and interested in buying salvia, advice was dispensed rapidly and haphazardly, from both the customers and the store's owner. I was handed a pamphlet about the herbal drug that included a short history and a long list of instructions, which emphasized in all capital letters that I should not drive or operate any type of machinery while under the influence of salvia.

I was told I shouldn't take it alone. I was warned that I would most certainly drool while I was on the drug. The smoke from the cured leaves was harsh, they said, and I couldn't just roll it up and smoke it; a water pipe was needed to cool the smoke. The high lasts about 20 minutes, but would seem like an hour.

Cautionary stories about friends and peers were shared. This one guy who smoked salvia thought a glass coffee table was a well and tried to swim in it. A girl took the drug and believed her body was made out of Lego pieces.

According to Bryan Roth, a director for the National Institute of Mental Health, those experiences illustrate the dissociative experiences salvia users typically have.
"For most people it's pretty overwhelming because they're more or less instantaneously transported to an alternative universe," Roth said.

I walked out of the store with a plastic lid filled with 20X grade salvia (the highest grade available at the store) and a small red water pipe. I felt pretty spooked. I had assumed salvia's effects were going to be as negligible as smoking banana peels. As anxious as I was, I decided not to enlist the aid of a sitter. I was first of all a grown man who hasn't required tending by a babysitter in the last quarter century or so, and secondly averse to having people watch me drool. Thirdly, my girlfriend was out of town, and she is the only person I think I'd really trust in such a situation.

I went home and struggled to remember how to load screens into a bong (it's been a while) and spilled the contents of the salvia container onto my coffee table. I made a Rhapsody play list, including "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd, a song I planned on using as a ripcord I could pull if I started freaking out, and poured myself a glass of water and opened a can of beer and put them on the kitchen counter.

I pulled two hits from the bong and, as instructed, held the smoke in as long as I could. The effects of the salvia kicked in almost immediately. The music I was playing — Spiritualized's Live at Royal Albert Hall album — suddenly seemed extremely intense. My computer was nearby, and I typed out the sentence "If I knew it was going to do this to the music, I would have done it to the whole apartment."

When I looked up from the typo-ridden sentence, the air seemed like it was streaked with waves, and the walls seemed to pulsate. I stood up to get closer to the music, which seemed to be capable of taking me on an intense journey.

I was both elated because the drug worked and panicked because the drug worked. I was down the rabbit hole, and wondered if I should have heeded the warnings of the head-shop kids.
Then, two songs into the play list, the rush subsided, leaving behind an unpleasant lightheadedness. I felt over-heated and ripped off. For the next couple of hours I was tired, mellow and stupid. I felt hung over the following day.

Judging from the dozens of videos of salvia trips uploaded to the video-sharing website YouTube, my mild experience with salvia was not the norm (or maybe I can just handle my shit better than most, or my self-administered dosage was too low). The salvia users on the internet videos freak out like crazy in trips that last nearly a half an hour.

The videos straddle the line between hilarity and deeply disturbing — a mix the Internet was made for. Reactions range from giddiness to seeming regressions into atavistic states. The salvia-takers, who are mostly white males who appear to be in their early 20s, remove their pants, babble like idiots and, yes, drool.

Thanks to media reports, governmental action and maybe even those YouTube videos, salvia divinorum has snowballed into a topic of concern nationwide. It's illegal in Delaware, Missouri and Louisiana. Other states, including New Jersey and Louisiana, have proposed banning it, and two proposals have been forwarded to prohibit it at the national level. Currently, the federal Drug Enforcement Agency classifies salvia as a drug of concern, but has not yet defined it as a scheduled narcotic.

Salvia isn't some recently-created designer drug. Native to the Oaxaca region of Mexico, salvia has been used in shamanistic rituals and as a healing agent for centuries. It's been known to the industrialized world since the 1930s and sold commercially since the mid 1990s.

Interest in salvia seems to have spiked in the last two years. In the past two months alone, newspapers across the United States and Canada have run editorials and articles with headlines like "Hallucinogenic Salvia a Growing Threat" (San Bernardino County Sun), "Salvia: Harmless Recreation or a Dangerous Drug?" (Wisconsin State Journal) and "Herb Poses Dangers to Users" (The Calgary Herald).

The headlines imply salvia is causing some sort of an international drug apocalypse. A reader could easily infer that the streets of San Bernardino, Wisconsin and Calgary are piled high with strung-out salvia heads, and the city emergency rooms and morgues are clogged by the shattered bodies and tattered corpses of salvia users. Evidently, that inference would be incorrect.

"There's not a single documented case of overdose. There's not a single documented case of an emergency room visit. There's not a single documented case of addiction," salvia researcher John Mendelson said.

Why all the fuss and why now, then? Jag Davies, the director of communications for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, an organization that studies the possible medicinal and therapeutic benefits of drugs like MDMA and LSD, said salvia is following a familiar trajectory for naturally-occurring controlled substances.

"It's a very similar pattern, and we've seen it happen over and over again throughout history. Salvia, for example, is a plant that's been used for thousands of years in Mexico by indigenous people with relatively little side effects when used in a safe context that's part of the social order of the society," Davies said. "Then it starts getting spread in underground circles. Once it gets to a critical mass, the media goes into hysteria mode."

The arguable critical mass event for salvia was the 2006 suicide of Delaware teenager Brett Chidester. Sometime before taking his own life, the 17-year-old honors student told his mother he had experimented with salvia. Reportedly, in his conversations with his mother, Chidester said he didn't like the drug. In his suicide note, Chidester reportedly wrote that he couldn't go on living after he "learned the secrets of life." The rest of the note hasn't been made public. Pro-salvia websites and sources have contended that the line wasn't in reference to Chidester's salvia use, and speculated that other factors — divorced parents, acne medication, drinking, etc, — led to his decision to take his own life. Chidester's mother has maintained that salvia, along with depression, were the major contributing factors in her son's suicide.

The Delaware state legislature, led by Democratic state senator Karen E. Peterson, passed Senate Bill # 259, nicknamed "Brett's Law" in the spring of 2006. The bill made salvia divinorum a schedule-one controlled substance in the state, which prohibited its sale and use.

The precise way salvia divinorum acts in the human mind isn't yet known. Articles about how the drug affects mice, chimpanzees and other animals have appeared in scientific and medical journals for years. The first human study with controlled conditions is only now currently underway. John Mendelson, senior scientist at the Research Institute at California Pacific Medical Center, is operating the study, and he told me that the neurochemical makeup of salvia is unique.

"It really represents something completely new in medicine. Basically, salvinorum A [salvia divinorum's active ingredient], what kids are using now and is available on the net, activates a unique set of receptors," Mendelson said.

Mendelson and others believe the potential medical applications for such a substance are great.
"They appear to mediate some effects of bipolar disease, some forms of mania and possibly HIV," Mendelson said. "There's a lot of excitement around something that specifically and potently activates kappa receptors."

Mendelson said he's worried that the pressure in many quarters to make salvia illegal would have a negative impact on the scientific study of the plant. If the drug were classed as a controlled narcotic, obtaining salvia would become exponentially more difficult for researchers.
"I think the politicians who are pushing control here are just idiots. They're ignorant. They hear that some kids have gotten high and they want to make it illegal. They don't consider the consequences of that," Mendelson said.

The possible consequences extend beyond the scientific community. The most dramatic consequence, Mendelson feared, would be on the drug's recreational users.

"Some people will go to jail for it and have their lives completely ruined. And right now there's no underground commerce in this drug, and there will be," Mendelson said. "How stupid can you get — to actually ask for a new drug abuse problem? With scheduling, it'll actually make kids say 'This stuff is good and it really gets you loaded.' It's like the government seal of approval."

Salvia is available in several stores in the Hartford area that sell paraphernalia — an employee at one store told me it was popular. According to state police public information officer Trooper William Tate, Connecticut hasn't encountered problems relating to salvia.

"If there's no law that's applicable to the substance, there's no action that can be taken," Tate said.

A search of the Connecticut Legislature's website for salvia didn't return anything.
However, some local merchants are hesitant to sell salvia. The Trading Post in Canton, which sells water pipes and legal purported psychoactive substances, for example, does not sell it. Trading Post owner Bill Buell said that while he recognized salvia would sell, he didn't want to be responsible for its possible consequences.

"I just, I don't know. I don't see how any good can come out of it. I'm not comfortable with it. I'm just not comfortable with what it can do and the potential problems it can cause," Buell said.
A store owner who does sell salvia said he had his reservations about the drug.

"It really shouldn't be legal," the store owner, who asked not to be identified, said. He worried that someone would take salvia and drive a car or otherwise cause an accident. Read more!

GG Allin

Naked Aggression
A documentary looks at the life and death of reviled "scum punk" GG Allin
By Adam Bulger
Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies
Hartford Advocate, August 9, 2007

I think it's important that the world remember GG Allin, but I'm not exactly sure why. As the 1994 documentary Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies attests, the self-proclaimed "scum rocker" was vile, violent and, arguably, intellectually indefensible. Allin's shows were blood-soaked, shit-smeared messes that almost invariably ended with either a police raid, an assault or a riot. Sometimes all three.

For extreme tactics, no one compares with Allin, who died in 1993 of a heroin overdose. He considered his audience to be his enemy, and not metaphorically. He brutalized the people who came to his shows, men and women alike.

He played at small clubs, loaded up on cocaine and laxatives, and would regularly shit on stage, with the smell would overpowering the room, clearing people out. His performances would have been brutal endurance contests if the shows weren't habitually shut down three songs into the set or less. He was at the border of performance and violence, and he didn't let pesky concerns about art stand in the way of brutality.

The documentary Hated, which was re-released this month in a special edition, is one of the most shocking movies ever made. That's not hyperbole — I challenge anyone to not flinch while watching a woman piss in GG Allin's mouth, causing him to vomit, but not stop. Or when he eats a hot dog freshly pulled out from someone's ass.

But the violence against women is the most shocking part of the movie. He grabs a woman at a concert by her hair and drags her across the floor and flat-out assaults another at a spoken-word performance.

Allin was fascinated by serial killers (which, in a post-Marilyn Manson world, seems more like the sign of a hack than a deviant) and corresponded and met with infamous killer clown John Wayne Gacy, who provides the glowing quote that opens the movie. Allin was a no stranger to the institutional life himself — before the film was shot, he served two years in prison for assaulting an underage girl. When he's asked about his future plans in the movie he says he wants to stay a step ahead of the law, which he was ultimately unable to do; his 1992 tour was interrupted when he was arrested for violating parole.

His outlaw-ness wasn't sexy, though. It was dirty and repulsive, a brutal display of awful animal instincts. He performed naked, but his lumpy body and tiny drug- shriveled cock were displays of ugliness, not Red Hot Chili Peppers-style athletic sexiness.

In the period of Allin's life captured in the documentary, Allin wore aviator shades and hooded jackets. He probably would have been tickled to hear that the year after he died, the a widely distributed police sketch the Unabomber stole the look, minus the Genghis Khan moustache.
Allin's music was actually pretty good. He mostly played poppy hardcore songs that were simple, fast and catchy. He even put out a David Allan Coe-style country record that's eminently listenable.

There's a moment in the film where Allin sings Warren Zevon's "Carmelita" on a beat-up acoustic guitar. There's been a lot of versions of that song — Linda Ronstadt's is probably the most famous — but Allin's out-of-tune guitars and buzzsaw vocals sell the story of a man "strung out on heroin on the outskirts of town" better than anyone.

The film periodically cuts away to a GG Allin fan named Unk for comments. Looking like a nerdier and pudgier Lou Barlow, Unk attempts to provide insight into the appeal of GG Allin. He says he thinks Allin's onstage antics were hilarious. There's a moment where Unk talks about Allin's hatred for authority figures, and says that Allin hated authority figures for just having authority. Allin's wasn't a thought-out rebellion. It was a reaction, like kicking out your leg when a doctor hits your knee with a hammer.

But maybe it's good that he didn't think out his rebellion. The film contains a real eye-opening segment with former bandmate Chicken John, who left the Allin's backing band, the Murder Junkies, because he thought Allin lacked imagination. Promising to kill yourself onstage, a promise Allin made but failed to pull off, was nothing, John says. He should do something that would really register, like killing the president.

Todd Phillips directed the film while a student at New York University. Phillips went on to direct mainstream comedies, including the undisputed classic Old School and the unfairly maligned Starsky and Hutch.
As a rookie documentarian, he pulls off a job that's both amazing and disappointing. He's mostly not to blame; as he explains in his director's commentary, none of his documentary subjects wanted to cooperate. With limited access and modest resources, getting relevant footage was a challenge. He expertly strung together what he had — concert footage, interviews, news stories and talk show appearances — and created a formal, composed documentary about a bent, wild subject.

The film is visceral and fascinating, but something feels missing. We get the feelings about Allin, but not all the facts. There are interviews with Allin's childhood friends (Phillips says in the director's commentary were told that they were being filmed for an MTV documentary) who recount Allin's lifelong misanthropy and early encounters with drugs, and superbly bleak footage of northern New England, where Allin grew up. But the rise of GG Allin and the Murder Junkies from obscurity to infamy, a story one would assume to be like a cross between Eddie and the Cruisers and Taxi Driver, isn't outlined in the movie.

Thankfully, the bonus features on the disc fill in a lot of blank spots. The interview with Allin's mother is particularly revealing, as she talks casually about Allin's hellaciously brutal childhood. Allin's birthname was Jesus Christ Allin — a purported fact that sounded like it could have been self-attributed mythology. He became GG when his younger brother Merle couldn't pronounce Jesus, and called him Jee-Jee instead. That was apparently the only cute thing about Allin's developmental years; the family lived in a cramped New Hampshire cabin that lacked electricity, and no one was allowed to speak after dark.

Merle, who later became his brother's bass player, is interviewed at length in another bonus feature, and provides one of the film's commentary tracks. It's refreshing to see that he's grown out the Hitler moustache he had in the original film. In an interview with Murder Junkies drummer Dino, who looks like a punk rock mannequin, Merle rattles through Allin's history with music, and his progression from Iggy Pop-style frontman into, well, GG Allin. Merle — who seems like an ultra-laid-back dude when he's not cheering on women getting beat up — maintains and lives off of his brother's legacy, selling Allin merchandise on GGallin.com and touring with a reconstituted version of the Murder Junkies.

Thanks to Merle, and the re-release of the film, Allin's legacy lives on. Is that a good thing? Well, if you accept the premise that punk rock is the attempt at expressing pure nihilism, GG Allin was the ultimate punk rocker. Johnny Rotten might have screamed that there was no future, but Allin didn't even seem to have a present. It's the closest to the nasty truth that punk rock implied. Read more!