–by Christopher D. White, editor-in-chief, Rager Media

Photo: Zen priest and punk rocker Brad Warner leafs through a copy of Out on the Autumn River: The Selected Poems of Du Mu, David Young and Jiann Lin's groundbreaking translation of poems by the 9th-Century master of the short lyric Du Mu.

According to Bob Ethington at the Akron-Summit County Public Library, there were about 150 people in attendance at the Brad Warner reading at the Main Library downtown Wednesday night. So this is yet another Main Event Series gig that has been an unqualified success, and it was exciting to see bookworms demonstrating their sincerity by braving the treacherous weather. Some clever soul once said—(and I wish I knew who first said this so that I could attribute credit): there are only three seasons in Ohio: rain, snow, and construction. Yeah, we get more than our fair share of unfair weather, but I still say it beats living in Tornado Alley or out in wildfireland, or anywhere on the West Coast that’s geologically immature and seismically ‘iffey.’

I won’t go into details about Warner’s books and/or the life of Brad Werner, which David Giffels explored in excellent detail the other day. I’m more interested in ruminating a little bit about why I think it’s an excellent thing that Brad Warner received such a warm homecoming welcome.

Click here to read the David Giffels story about Brad Warner.

But first here are a few notes and random impressions, beginning with a digression about my own offbeat religious background. I’m not a religious person, per se, but my mother used to take my brother, my two sisters, and me to a series of non-denominational "holy-roller" churches, and her then-husband was an atheist. I spent my summers with my father, who was unreligious through my early childhood, and who moved to Philadelphia when I was 8 and lived the Sufi life as a member of the M.R. Bawa Muhaiyadeen fellowship, with his 2nd wife, who studied the teachings of the Sufi teacher M.R. Bawa Muhaiyadeen. For those unfamiliar with Sufism, it’s a mystical and long-established offshoot of Islam that has been somewhat persecuted throughout its history because it accepts congregants from other faiths, and though most Sufis are Muslim, and say prayers in Arabic, they welcome people from other faiths to worship with them, and acknowledge and give blessings to many of the same figures in the Bible, including Jesus, David, etc.. So there’s a strong interfaith component to Sufism that profoundly impressed and influenced me. I don't currently claim a religion, but I know that my religious upbringing helped to develop my moral framework, and generally helped to make me a better person. There are motifs common to all of the major religious traditions. Christians and Muslims both pray to God. All of the major religious traditions emphasize that sacrifice and discipline make us more morally perfect. But it was obvious to me from a young age that the major religions have more in common with one another than most of their practitioners are willing to acknowledge, and any tradition which encourages people to be better people is OK by me.

Certainly, when one thinks of Akron, “Zen priest punk-rocker” is not the first thing that comes to mind. But that’s not because Akron doesn’t produce quirky talent—Akron seems to produce exceptional misfits at an alarming rate. It’s just that traditionally, the greatest minds that Rubber City produced had an irritating tendency to leave Akron. Some of this has to do with the post-rubber economic collapse, but though our town has always had its coven-like pockets of cosmopolitan types, bohemians, and various sorts of eccentrics, Akron is culturally close to the more socially conservative South. It’s only a partial exaggeration to say that Akron is the capital of West Virginia. Being that it’s bounded to the south and east by Appalachia, if it weren’t for historical and political considerations, the Mason-Dixie line might be considered as something of an artificial boundary. And so despite that we live in a city of nearly a quarter of a million people, with a metropolitan area of roughly half a million, for decades, Akron has had a small-town feel that many, particularly nonmainstream types, found to be alienating and stifling. Akron maintained its Rust-and-Bible-Belt identity to such a thorough degree, that creative professionals and those with strongly individual personalities, by and large, would want to live and work anywhere BUT Akron, simply because for so long, it wasn’t easy being unusual and living in Akron.

Some creative and exceptionally individualistic native Akronites, in the past, managed to develop advance coping skills; but more commonly, they were sensitive and vulnerable to Akron’s heavy-handed admonishments against creative and unorthodox impulses. This has also helped to create a long tradition of strong underground resistance, but the option and temptation to leave and seek like-minded company elsewhere was always so tantalizingly available.

Speaking of quirky talent: pictured above is eccentric "junk artist" P.R. Miller; already the subject of documentary, a biography of P.R. is currently being written.

When I was in my teens, (late 80’s, early 90’s), I wasn’t the only one whose definition of failure began with the premise that one somehow hadn’t managed to escape from Akron. I fell in love with James Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man in Marlene Boyce’s English class at Central-Hower High School, inspired by Stephen Daedalus’ flight from industrial and blighted Dublin, with its restrictions on personality and obligations to family, church, and state; the parallels between Akron and Dublin were, to my young mind, uncanny, and so Joyce's novel inspired me with hope as I began to hatch my own escape plan.

This all, of course, has changed dramatically in the last decade or so. The Akron from which people like Brad Werner and Chrissie Hynde and Devo escaped is not the Akron that developers, professionals, and investors now embrace. Akron is not yet the epicenter of the information age, but what’s important to note is how much progress has been made. In terms of percentage of total positive change, the progress is nothing less than miraculous. For all the changes already finished or afoot, many will still be surprised by how much will change in Rubber City in the coming decades, and how dramatically this will effect our collective way of life, with all of the accompanying discomforts of increasing diversity. There will be ongoing cosmopolitanizing growing pains, as Akronites continue to adjust. But it’s a good sign that Akron’s-own Brad Warner was so gracefully hosted in what is essentially his hometown—that is, where he came of age. Warner remarked several times about how he normally tells his stories on stages everywhere, but how different and strange it was to talk about these things with an audience of people who were actually there when those events unfolded.

Much progress. But miles to go before we sleep…

This is a fine example for us to follow, if we’re interested in how our behavior can help effect the growth of opportunities in our region. We Ohioans are practical, no-nonsense people as rule, and as a result, we tend to have a lower tolerance for behavior that we might consider to be blatant acts of foppery, or lifestyles that seem more at home than in, say, California than here in The Heartland. Just as an example of how these cultural adjustments can come to a head in the court of common opinion, I’ll use the example of a “Voice of the People” letter that I read in The Beacon Journal recently, where someone had objected to Chrissie Hynde being referred to as a hometown “hero.” The reader was apparently puzzled that one would stretch the definition of “hero” to include someone who plays music and “eats veggies.” As far as I know, Chrissie Hynde doesn’t have “rescuing babies from fires” on her resume, and so perhaps won’t fit a stringent definition of “hero.” But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t treat her with a little bit of V.I.P. treatment—treatment that will increase the likelihood that she’ll keep using some of her star-power here at home.

The writer of the letter’s response is a natural enough reaction based on a kind of knee-jerk provincialism that occurs in any community, and against which cosmopolitizing forces must continually contend. It seems to me that if we can understand that these attitudes will arise as natural tensions as we become a first-class city—and are willing to find a way to deal with them—that we might open up a wider dialog to help people understand just exactly what it means to become a city that will attract the talented (albeit wacky at times) sorts that city leaders all over America are hankering to recruit. I suspect that the VOP letter comes from a position that doesn’t understand the nature and power of celebrity, and how fame can be used for leverage in real money-producing activities. We should understand and acknowledge that impulse, which is a product of a culture built on the exercising steadfastness and good, practical sense—a mindset that encourages and values hard, honest, work—and someone like Chrissie Hynde, with her extremely odd and individualistic personality, is likely to be unsettling for someone who knows that everything in the world is changing rapidly, and seeks moral clarity in confusing times.

But we’ll need to make a conscious effort to adjust to a whole new paradigm that demands entirely new ways of thinking. Someone with a 20th Century sensibility is likely to understand how one makes money from something that you can touch, that you produce and ship and receive. Celebrity, like other intellectual property, is a commodity that many have a hard time understanding, simply because it doesn’t exist in the traditional physical sense, and is therefore elusive/slippery.

Whether or not one cares for vegetarian menus, people like Chrissie Hynde are essential to our economic future. Think of LeBron James, and how he had Akron’s area code, 330, tattooed on his arm, and that there’s a map of Akron on the bottom of his latest Nike shoe, (with the result that, perhaps for the first time ever, Clevelanders are suffering from a bad case of Akron Envy). We should work to ensure that celebrities continue to endorse our city by going out of our way to be a little more tolerant and patient with what are fairly harmless eccentricities. So what that Chrissie Hynde says that anyone who eats meat is a terrorist? Chrissie Hynde is not exactly a threat to anyone, and isn’t it possible that having Chrissie Hynde around shouting about cruelty to animals adds an element of charm and uniqueness to our community, and perhaps even a splash of offbeat glamour? Nike paid LeBron James $90 million dollars to endorse its product. Akron gets all of these endorsements from LeBron out of the goodness of his heart. Akron needs LeBron. LeBron doesn’t need Akron so much. So instead of castigating LeBron, for instance, for wearing the hat of a certain New York team, perhaps we should be thankful that he doesn’t play for a New York team, or any other team that would gladly benefit from the billions—yes billions—of dollars that this one single celebrity will generate for those around him. Same thing goes for Chrissie Hynde. I’m not a vegetarian or vegan—but I’m certain that Chrissie Hynde can freely espouse her vegan gospel in London with much less difficulty than in her own hometown, which, of course, should not be the case.

Common sense will always be important, and will have its appropriate applications. But the premium now placed on “common sense” will increasingly shift to “uncommon sense” and the assumption will be that, though common sense is excellent for common problems, uncommon problems require uncommon solutions. The uncommon solution is the stuff imagination is made of, imagination is the stuff that creativity is made of, and creative talent is an especially valuable thing nowadays. Lest one be tempted to pooh-pooh the importance of developing the imaginative capacity, let us remember that what happened on 9/11/2001 has been widely and accurately described as a “failure of the imagination.” But the pentagon and the civil service people aren’t the only ones with failure-of-imagination issues. The Great American Imagination is one that conceived of the United States itself. Crucial to luring creative professionals to our area is the task of establishing communities where the creative mind and the fiercely individualistic personality will not feel out of place. To some of you, these creative types might rub you the wrong way. But I assure you, Chrissie Hynde doesn’t bite, (not humans, anyway, being vegan), and there are worse things than having a little bit of Hollyweird in our own backyards. We should send the message that there’s room for everyone here, even Zen punk-rockers and eccentric friends of Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello. And remember: there may be no ‘I’ in ‘team;’” but there is an “I” in “vision.”

The Akrocentric is published by Rager Media, Inc. Click here to visit Rager Media's website.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 10th, 2007 at 5:59 am and is filed under Authors from Ohio, Book publishing, Booksignings, Entrepreneurship in poetry and literature, Famous Ohio Authors, author events, famous authors from Akron. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.