HBM141: Filthy Riches

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Image by Jeff Emtman.

 

When a group of broke college students start throwing lavish feasts, HBM host Jeff Emtman begins to wonder at the source of the food, initially assuming it was stolen.  But he’s soon corrected.  Confronted with the shocking amount of food waste in the local dumpsters, he quickly turns into a freegan dumpster diving evangelist, but is often thwarted by an angry employee of a local produce stand.  An employee whose face is always hidden by a bright headlamp. 

Content Note: Language and descriptions of violence.

These encounters rattle him, making it hard for him to separate reality from his recurring night terrors about the incidents.  But, years later, and more than a hundred of miles away, he has an encounter in a chocolate dumpster which cures him of those nightmares. 

Many thanks to Jesse Chappelle and Hallie Sloan, who helped in the research of this episode. 

 
 
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Sponsor


Coffee Beer of Portland Oregon.

Coffee Beer gets you to and from the best parts of your day.  Located at 4142 SE 42nd Ave, Portland, OR 97206, they serve coffee, beer, snacks and groceries for pick-up and delivery.  Order yours at coffeebeerdelivers.com

Coffee Beer’s merch can be shipped!  Shirts, mugs and more, at coffeebeer.me

Thank you Coffee Beer for sponsoring HBM!

Jeff likes Coffee Beer’s “Leave Me Alone” shirt. 

Season 9 = February 17th

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Image by Jeff Emtman.

Image by Jeff Emtman.

 

Season 9 will be here soon!  We’ll bring you ten new episodes about fear, beauty and the unknown.  

We’ll see the fight for survival and beauty of the microscopic world.  We’ll learn how balloons can be used to capture the souls of doomed buildings.  We’ll listen for alien transmissions on a reserved shortwave frequency.  We’ll luxuriate in the scent discarded cocoa bean husks. and you’ll get quick-fixes to all your problems from the all-knowing, hyper-dimensional entity that sometimes advises Jeff in his sleep. 

As a side note, we’ve been re-shuffling some things behind the scenes on the podcast feed.  If you’ve got duplicate episodes showing up, you can likely fix that by unsubscribing and re-subscribing to Here Be Monsters.  Thanks for your patience! 

Also, we have a Patreon now.  Your support is very much appreciated.  Thank you! 

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

 

HBM Continues as an Independent Podcast

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For the last five years, Here Be Monsters has been a part of KCRW.  And in those years, we’ve put out a 100+ episodes under KCRW’s imprint.  

However, moving forward, HBM will continue as an independent production, and no longer be distributed through the KCRW feed.

This departure leaves HBM entirely unfunded.  So for our upcoming ninth season, we’re seeking community sponsors.  We’d love to promote your business or project or just say some words that are meaningful to you.  Become a sponsor of HBM today.  

Please note that the release date of Season 9 is currently unknown.  Probably early 2021. 

We’ll be transferring our feed off of KCRW’s servers in the coming month.  If we do it right, you won’t have to do anything on your end.  If you’re experiencing any difficulty with the feed, please send us an email or tweet at us. 

💗 Thank you so much for your endless support. 💗

 

The Eras of Here Be Monsters (HBM). Infographic by Jeff Emtman. Click to enlarge.

HBM140: The New Black Wall Street

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A man surveying the damage of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 with a sun rising and pillars of smoke billowing. Original image from the collection of the Oklahoma Historical Society. Digital collage by Jeff Emtman.

 

There used to be a neighborhood in Tulsa where Black people were wealthy. They owned businesses, built a giant church, a public library. Some Black Tulsans even owned airplanes. Booker T. Washington called it “Black Wall Street.” Others called it “Little Africa” and today, most call it “Greenwood.” 

Content Note: Descriptions of racial violence, several mentions of a suicide, language.

In the early 1900s, the neighborhood was prosperous and thriving, but Black Tulsans were still a racial minority in a young city that already had a reputation for vigilante justice. A local chapter of the KKK was starting to form. 

In the Spring of 1921, a Black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland was brought into custody for allegedly assaulting a white woman. Over the coming night and day, a huge mob of white Tulsans burned and looted and murdered in Greenwood and the surrounding areas. Dozens or possibly even hundreds of Black Tulsans died, thousands became homeless. 

But authorities never held anyone responsible. In fact, they detained many Black residents, some for up to a week. And insurance claims made in the aftermath were denied, as the insurance policies did not cover “riots.” 

 
 

In the decades that followed. Records of the event went missing, some fear they were destroyed. The mass graves have yet to be found. And many Black Tulsans believed they could face retribution for speaking out about the event. It wasn’t even taught in school until recently. 

As a result, a lot of Tulsans still don’t know the history of Greenwood. 

Local rapper Steph Simon was one of them. He grew up near Greenwood, and he went to middle school there. But it wasn’t until his 20’s when he stumbled upon a documentary about the massacre on Youtube. From there, he became obsessed with learning more about the true story of Tulsa. And in 2019, he released an album called Born on Black Wall Street where he reintroduces himself as “Diamond Dicky Ro” in homage to the young shoeshiner whom white mobs tried and failed to lynch on that night in 1921. 

In 2011, an Oklahoman journalist named Lee Roy Chapman wrote an article for the publication This Land. Chapman’s story, The Nightmare in Dreamland, was a devastating re-telling of the life’s story of an Oklahoman legend--a “founder” of Tulsa named Tate Brady. Brady was well known as an oil tycoon and hotel owner who ran in the elite circles. However, buried by history was Brady’s legacy of violence and racial animus. He was a defender of the Confederacy, he was credibly accused of tarring and feathering some IWW union members, and for part of his life, he was in the Ku Klux Klan. And on the night of the massacre, Brady was there, acting as a night watchman. He reported seeing several dead black people in the streets in or around Greenwood. 

With these revelations, a movement started to remove the Brady name from Tulsa. That movement succeeded partially, but the Brady name is still a part of the Tulsan landscape. 

When Steph Simon shot the cover image for Born On Black Wall Street, he wanted to incorporate the symbolism of Tate Brady. So he went to Brady’s former mansion—a house modelled visually after the house of Robert E. Lee’s, with murals of the Confederacy painted inside and big stone columns out front. It sits on a hill overlooking historic Greenwood. And he stood on the front steps of the mansion only to see a childhood friend driving by. It was Felix Jones, an ex-NFL running back. The two grew up together. To Simon’s surprise, Jones revealed that he’d just bought the mansion. And he invited Simon inside. 

 

 

Together they thought up ideas on how to transform the legacy of the house from something hateful to something loving. So Simon invited about a hundred Black kids to come have a party on the lawn while he filmed the music video for his single “Upside”. 

After that, Simon and Jones started throwing concerts there, drawing huge crowds and starting the slowly re-contextualizing the house into something positive. They renamed the house “Skyline Mansion.”

As this transformation took place, another local DJ and producer, Stevie Johnson woke up in a cold sweat one night. He’d had a dream about rebuilding Black Wall Street, figuratively and literally. He opened his laptop and wrote down his ideas frantically, trying to remember his vision. And soon after, he started to act on it. 

His first step was Fire in Little Africa: a commemorative rap album to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, featuring nearly sixty artists from Oklahoma. And over the course of a weekend in early 2020, rappers and community members and businesses filled Skyline Mansion to record dozens of tracks for the album. 

Fire in Little Africa will be available in February of 2021. Their podcast is out now. They’re also curating spotify playlists of the featured artists, and they’re accepting donations via the Tulsa Community Foundation. 

 
 

On this episode of Here Be Monsters, Taylor Hosking visits the former Brady Mansion to talk to the musicians who are looking to build a new Black Wall Street in Tulsa. Taylor also published an article in CityLab called Avenging the Tulsa Race Massacre With Hip Hop.

A lot of people and organizations helped make this episode possible. We’d like to thank Steph Simon, Verse, Stevie Johnson, Keeng Cut, Written Quincy, Bobby Eaton, Felix Jones, Dan Hanh, Mechelle Brown, Chris Davis, Shruti Dhalwala, Brandon Oldham, Ben Lindsey, John DeLore, The George Kaiser Family Foundation, The Oklahoma Historical Society, and The Woody Guthrie Center. 

Producer: Taylor Hosking (Instagram) (Twitter)
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: Steph Simon, Verse, (see embedded YouTube playlist 😀☝) The Black Spot

Also heard on this episode: recordings from Black Lives Matter protests made by Neroli Price of Seattle, Washington; Bryanna Buie of Wilmington, North Carolina; and Bethany Donkin of Oxford, UK. 

More About the Tulsa Race Massacre:

- Official Report from 2001 which describes the events of 1921 in detail and with context. 

- Educational comic about the massacre published by the Atlantic and sponsored by HBO’s Watchmen. 

- Riot and Remembrance By James S. Hirsch

 

HBM139: Acceptable Pains

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Image by Jeff Emtman.

 

Hedonism seems pretty appealing right now—seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. On HBM137: Superhappiness, the hedonist philosopher, David Pearce imagined a future free of the systemic harms we currently experience: poverty, oppression, violence, and disease. 

But David thinks that even an idyllic, egalitarian society wouldn’t ensure universal happiness. He thinks that the only way to make everyone blissfully happy is to use technology and genetic engineering to make physical and emotional pain obsolete.

“I'm a mammal, just like an aardvark is, just like a possum is. And they don't get epidurals.”
— Ashlynn Owen-Kachikis

HBM producer Bethany Denton doesn’t fully agree. She thinks that heartbreak, homesickness, grief can all be good pain, pains that can make us better and kinder people in the long run.

So what should the role of pain be in society? And further, what about the pains that we opt into, the pains we volunteer for?

On this episode of Here Be Monsters, Bethany interviews people about long distance running, unmedicated childbirth, and voluntary crucifixion in the Philippines.

Will James is a reporter for KNKX Public Radio. Ashlynn Owen-Kachikis is a special education teacher. Carlo Nakar is a social worker and recurring guest on HBM.

Producer: Bethany Denton
Editor: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot, Flowers, Olecranon Rebellion

 

HBM138: Did Neanderthals Bury their Dead?

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Foreground: Flowers drawn by 16th century naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi. Midground: The reconstructed skull of Shanidar 1. Photo by James Gordon. Background: View from mouth of Shanidar Cave, photo by Graeme Barker. Digital composite by Jeff Emtman.

 

There’s a large cave in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan. It looks out over green and yellow fields and a river far below. Starting in the 1950’s, the American archaeologist Dr. Ralph Solecki led a team who excavated a trench in Shanidar Cave, discovering the remains of ten Neanderthals who died about 50,000 years ago. 

Dr. Solecki’s discoveries helped ‘humanize’ Neanderthals, a species of early humans often thought of as the brutish, stupid cousins of our species. In sharp contrast, Solecki believed Neanderthals to be nuanced, technologically adept, interested in art and ritual. Solecki suggested that the bodies at Shanidar Cave were intentionally buried. 

Many of Dr. Solecki’s theories on the complexity of Neanderthal minds seem to be correct. But he also made a famous claim about one of the bodies, named “Shanidar 4.” This individual was found with flower pollen around the body. Solecki suggested this was a ‘flower burial’, an intentional death ritual where flowers were laid on the body, possibly to signify the passing of an important member. This interpretation was not universally accepted, as others pointed out there are several ways for pollen to wind up on a skeleton. 

Half a century later, Dr. Emma Pomeroy from Cambridge University went back to Shanidar Cave with a team of archaeologists. They kept digging, hoping to help contextualize Solecki’s findings. To their surprise, they found more bodies. And their findings seem to support Solecki’s theories. The bodies were likely intentionally buried, and they were discovered in soil that contained mineralized plant remains, meaning that the pollen in Solecki’s findings couldn’t have come from modern contamination. 

 
 

It’s possible that Shanidar Cave may have been a significant spot for Neanderthals. But Dr. Pomeroy believes that further work is still needed. Currently, their excavations and lab work are on hold due to the current coronavirus pandemic. 

Dr. Pomeroy admits to imagining the lives of the Neanderthals she studies. She wonders how they spoke to each other, and what they believed about death and the rituals surrounding it. These things don’t preserve in the fossil record though, so we’re all stuck interpreting from clues, like the source of a bit of pollen or the maker of a tiny piece of string.  These clues have the ability to teach us the “humanity” of some of our closest evolutionary cousins. 

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Editor: Bethany Denton
Music: The Black Spot, Phantom Fauna

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