The Adventures of the Reed Rocket

When I came back to Austin from Nepal, waiting for me was a dusty old broken Sears Silvertone organ that my parents had found for free. I tried to turn it on a couple of times and nothing happened so I kind of forgot about it until December when my good friends John, James, and Jonathan decided to fix it up.

We took it out of its crumbling, bulky formica case and were surprised to find how small the actual musical part was: the reed and keyboard structure resembled a giant harmonica a couple feet long, and  most of the wiring went to a simple electronic beatbox.

You can actually almost play it like a harmonica by blowing into the bottom, but I wouldn't recommend it.

We took off the air pump and separated the ancient broken Italian motor, replacing it with a better one that we found from discarded vacuum cleaners behind a vacuum supply shop (we also replaced the crumbled hose with a vacuum cleaner hose). 

We went to a battery store and weeded through their discarded non-lithium chargeable batteries and hooked them up to our new contraption, and then put the whole thing onto an old external frame backpack. It looked like this:

can't... reach... the 'on' button

It was finished on December 31st, and the stroke of midnight found me strapped into that contraption. We walked up and down Burnet with a banjo and serenaded the partygoers, and up into Billy's Bar where we played Auld Lang Syne in front of the revelers. ("Wooo!" they said. Also: "Play Metallica!") When we first switched it on and the air pump started purring, the bartender nervously asked me if I was about to take off. Because of that and because of the giant motor on the back, we decided to call it a reed rocket. 

Here is a grainy youtube video of the Reed Rocket

A few weeks later Jonathan and John and I took a road trip up to Washington DC to stay in for an indeterminate amount of time John's apartment above a Mexican restaurant in Adams Morgan. I was there for a good chunk of January. My motivations were to check out job prospects and to learn about punk music. We saw Trophy Wife in Baltimore and rented some practice rooms in DC. It was a lot of fun. I also got to visit Casey from Pomona and Nepal Fulbrighters Kent, Hattie, Mikaela, Marissa, and Hannah. They do seem to cluster around DC, these people I know who do interesting things. 

As a member of Occupy Austin, one of Jonathan's main motivations was the January 17th Occupy Congress Rally, and he was excited about the prospect of using the reed rocket as a tool of democratic discourse. The night before the rally we were at HacDC, a DC Hackerspace. They were all involved in crazy interesting projects, but they very kindly helped us out by putting connectors onto the wiring of the reed rocket and building a battery charger. They also gave us some twine and helped us paint and heat-dry a giant canvas Texas flag for the rally. 

They took this video of us fiddling with the reed rocket.

While Jonathan stayed at the Occupy camp, I spent the night soldering connections and charging batteries.

The day of the rally I spent the morning researching awesome protest songs like this, this, and this (with minor lyric changes). Meanwhile, Jonathan was at the rally, livestreaming through his phone to Giant Pipewrench Media and generally protesting and being like a stinging fly on the donkey of society and all that good stuff. Neither of us took pictures, though, so here are few I found on the Internet:

I eventually made it down there and played some songs from within the contraption. Unfortunately, battery and motor troubles caused a premature end to the music (to be honest, I probably could have used some more practice and, er, voice lessons). As I packed the now useless reed organ into the trunk with the keyboard on the bottom, a policeman wandered over and asked me what exactly I was loading into the car:

This doesn't look suspicious, right?

But we were able to convince him that we were musicians and that we were unlikely to cause an (intentional) explosion. We spent the next week wandering around the monuments of DC and getting research passes to check out books at the Library of Congress (this is where Jonathan found Legions of Babel). 

It took me a day to cut a donated bicycle box down to size so that it was small enough to pack on a plane, determine that everything on the organ could legally be placed in checked luggage, and slap large labels on everything that looked suspicious. The reed rocket is now in Austin and after some minor repairs will soon be put back into the service of agitating for democracy. 

Abraham Lincoln and George Orwell at the School of Architecture

Reading about the International Brigades in Legions of Babel: The International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, it is hard to escape the feeling that for the volunteers (many of them students), the war started out as a crusade of high-minded ideals and intellectualism that became more and more bloody and disillusioning. For example, the International Brigades named each of their battalions after socialist or revolutionary figures:

"Generally organized along ethnic lines, the batteries included the "Anna Pauker," largely French and Belgian rather than Rumanian, the "Thälmann" (German), "Skoda" (Czech), "Gramsci" (Italian), the "Daller" (believed to be French) and later the "John Brown" (predominantly American)." (pg. 59)

"The Abraham Lincoln Battalion; the 428-man battalion included an all Cuban section and an Irish section..." (pg. 64)

"Half of the Americans of the battalion wanted to name their unit after Patrick Henry and the other half after Thomas Paine. While they bickered, Canadians, about one-third of the unit's volunteers, submitted and secured the name Mackenzie-Papineau in honor of two nineteenth-century fighters for independence from Britain, one of whom was the grandfather of the then Prime Minister of Canada." (pg. 86)

So it is surreal to read about these revolutionary figures from different periods of history duking it out against the Blackshirts and other elements of Franco's forces. Though they constituted only a small part of the Republican Army, International Brigades were instrumental in the Battle of Madrid. Here it begins to sound like Lewis Carroll:

"General Emil Kleber, the brigade commander, set up his headquarters in the Faculty of  Philosophy and Literature in the University... The rebels penetrated into the University City and eventually reached the School of Philosophy, where they were finally stopped by the Commune de Paris... the rebels secured the School of Architecture, the Clinical Hospital (where Moors happily seized rabbits and other culinary delicacies only to discover that they had been inoculated with various germs), the School of Agriculture and the house of the painter Velazquez, while the Loyalists held the Schools of Science and Philosophy and Medicine." (pgs. 50-51)

Doesn't that sound like bad allegorical fiction? The war for higher learning in the battleground of the mind. There's even a racist-sounding portrayal of the Moors as the barbarians at the gate.

And then you have a literary figure like Ernest Hemingway driving an ambulance and reporting that the casualties of Americans in the fighting were "the sort you never know whether to classify as hysterical or the ultimate act of bravery." (pg. 124)

George Orwell joined the war with a faction that was caught up in the Barcelona May Days, in which Soviet-backed factions fought against other factions of the Republican Army and purged them violently (pg. 106). Orwell escaped because he was recovering from being shot by a sniper. He later wrote many reflections of that time, including Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War, which includes my favorite story of humanity in wartime (part three of that essay), which explains why it is impossible to shoot at a man who is not wearing any pants. The essay captures the feeling of disillusion and frustration at the squabbling and propaganda machine of the Republican Army.