 | Dr. G's Guaranteed Fat Loss ProgramFat people should really be called survivors. At least in Paleolithic times, that would be so. In the face of food shortage, the human body turned calories into fat—a sort of on-the-body emergency food storage system. Our bodies still respond to food shortage (dieting) the same way—which may result in weight loss, but fat gain. Dr. G. says: If you want to be healthy and strong, eat. And exercise. Gain muscle; lose fat.
by Paul Gahlinger, MD
Summer is more than half over and the outdoor pool still beckons. That new tube of sun block is untouched. And the bathing suit… uh oh, it’s a little tight with that chub you picked up over last winter. You feel like a walrus that has waddled onto shore. The dinner roll over your hips is complemented by puffy pockets on your neck, your arms, your chest, thighs, knees—even your ankles.
Congratulations. We humans bow before you. You are a survivor.
To explain this, let’s back up a little—say, to about 24,000 years ago. This era was called the Paleolithic. Paleo, meaning “old,” and lithic, “stone.” In other words, the Old Stone Age. People at that time were fully modern humans. With a haircut and some new clothes, they could pass unnoticed today. Pictured here is a figurine from that period. It is often referred to as the Venus of Willendorf, after the Austrian town near where it was found (it is now in the Natural History Museum in Vienna). Art historian Christopher Witcombe describes it as a “remarkably realistic representation of a fat woman.” She has seven concentric rows of neatly plaited hair, with braids falling down her face and neck. Small markings on her wrists seem to indicate the presence of bracelets. Particular attention was given to her genital area, with the labia of the vulva carefully etched and made clearly visible. There are two things I am sure of about this figurine. The first is that it was carved by a man. And the second, that he was in love.
Life in the stone age had some nice features. You could wake up to a sparkling sunrise in pristine skies. Beachside property was readily available. No telemarketers. On the downside, you often risked getting eaten by a big cat, clubbed by your neighbor, or—far more often—starving to death when the winter lasted too long or the summer drought was too intense. Starvation was then, and still is now in many parts of the world, the greatest threat to life.
Humans, and indeed most animals, are hard-wired to avoid this. The chubby ones manage to save up a few calories to last through the lean times. The skinny ones die. There is a physiological rule of thumb: Without oxygen, you can live for four minutes; without water, for four days; and without food, for 40 days. That’s if you are at normal weight. A truly fat person, given water and chewing some roots for vitamins and minerals, can live without food for as long as a year. That is the person who survived. If you are a man, that is the woman you want, who will give birth to a healthy baby and have full breasts to feed it, and still be around in a few years to take care of the child. To the guy who carved the Venus, she was the angelic ideal of beauty, of health and survival. This is what fat people really should be called: survivors.
Of course, things have changed over the last few millennia. Now we have a supermarket in every neighborhood with 7-Elevens between them. If we don’t want to walk that far, we can order pizza or Chinese or whatever right to the house. And that’s if we somehow run out of food in our 19-cubic-foot side-by-side Subzero refrigerator. Evidently, starvation is the one thing we don’t have to worry about.
Today, our picture of beauty has also changed. Let’s consider Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston. She is on dozens of magazine covers. She is also dead. In 2006, at age 21, she died of anorexia. Never mind other preposterous icons of beauty such as Calista Flockhart, who would evoke sympathy from the starving villagers in the Sudan. The fact is that for most people throughout history, our look of beauty would be the look of someone who is sick.
OK. Let’s get back to your chub. Now you know why it’s there—because you are the best! I understand this is not much reassurance when you want to look trim and slim in your lycra swimsuit. The question I hear so often is, “I’ve tried so many diets! How can I lose weight?” The first thing to realize is that you do not want to lose weight. You want to lose fat.
There is no secret to shedding body weight. You can lose more than 10 pounds in one day by sweating it off, by taking cathartics to induce diarrhea, or by taking diuretics to urinate out your body water. But all of these forms of weight loss are accomplished by losing body water, which is unhealthy, and you gain the weight right back when you rehydrate.
Diets are the worst way to lose body fat. Any type of food shortage signals your brain: “Hey, we’ve got a possible starvation threat here—so conserve energy and pack on the pounds!”
Let’s look at the science. The authoritative International Journal of Clinical Practice recently evaluated weight loss programs in a report with the rather daunting title, “Neuroendocrine Regulation of Energy Homeostasis.” Basically, here is what it says: The body tries to regulate its weight, balancing its energy needs with food intake. If food intake is unreliable (as when dieting!), the body stores extra energy to carry it through the dips. At the same time, the dieting body slows down metabolism to burn as few calories as possible. The desire to eat is largely influenced by a number of hormones that carry signals from the stomach and intestine to the hypothalamus of the brain. At least a dozen fat-regulating hormones have been identified—including leptin, insulin, ghrelin, oxyntomodulin, neuropeptide Y (NPY), proopiomelanocortin (POMC) and others. New drugs that block these hormones have shown some promise in causing weight loss. For example, Orlistat (marketed as Xenical) blocks pancreatic lipase so that you cannot digest dietary fat. Rimonabant (Acomplia, and other brands) blocks the brain’s cannabinoid receptors (the receptors which give marijuana users the munchies), and therefore takes away appetite. Sibutramine (Meridia), originally developed as anti-depressant, also takes away appetite. Remember the Fen-phen fiasco of the 1990s? It was by far the most popular weight loss drug—until users started showing up with damaged heart valves. The resulting lawsuits from 50,000 users cost the manufacturer $14 billion. The fen is now gone but the phen is still available. Phentermine can wreak havoc on your heart, not to mention causing insomnia and impotence.
The word diet really means two very different things that are endlessly confused with each other. The first meaning is the sort of food you eat. As in, “the diet of koala bears is eucalyptus leaves,” or “you should eat a healthy diet.” The second meaning is to limit food, as in being on the Atkins diet, Slimfast diet, grapefruit diet, or Oprah’s latest diet.
These two meanings of the word are constantly mixed up.
The truth about diet is incredibly simple and well-known and just plain common sense. All you need to do is eat well, which you can accomplish by the following:
• Don’t eat packaged foods.
• Don’t add salt to anything—your taste buds will adapt.
• Lay off the sugar and fats (including hydrogenated oils, which have trans-fats—about the worst stuff you can put in your body).
The difference between fat and oil is that fat is generally solid at room temperature, and oil is liquid. Oils are fine, and fish oil, olive oil, and canola oil are especially great. (Not that you’d want to cook with fish oil. But a daily dose, straight-up, is a very good thing.)
It is that simple. You don’t have to spend a fortune. Look at your food bill. How much of the money goes to packaged foods? And if you really want to economize, get a 100-pound sack of rice and a 50-pound sack of beans. For about $100, you will have enough food for a year that is more nutritious than your previous, garbage-heavy (in more ways than one) diet.
Why buy an expensive box of sugary cereal when you can get rolled oats (which you can eat uncooked if you like) with fresh fruit—at half the cost with 100 times more nutrition? Become a label reader. Don’t believe cereals with names like “Swiss muesli.” I’ve lived in Switzerland and believe me, real muesli is nothing like the crap they sell in the store. (Here is my 500-year-old family recipe: rolled oats, shredded apple, raisins, cinnamon, raw sheep’s milk—OK, you may have to substitute that last one.) You like soup? Get a crock pot and a pressure cooker. You like meat? Don’t read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.”
So much for diet and nutrition.
The real way to lose fat
Let’s start with a metaphor every American understands. Cars. Imagine you have a Corvette. Fast, slim, but it gets as little as seven miles to the gallon. Now imagine you have a Prius; you can go a long way between fill-ups. Now imagine you have a Prius with a 500-gallon auxiliary fuel tank in the back, because maybe you want to drive across the country without stopping to fill up. That’s like a fat person—stored energy for the long haul.
How in the world are you going to empty that extra fuel tank? The answer is to drive like the Corvette. Pedal to the metal. When you drive the extra-tank Prius, you first have to burn up the gas in your regular tank. Once that is gone, you dip into the reserve tank.
Your body is pretty much the same. You need energy to live. Just sleeping or lounging around uses maybe 1,500 calories or so per day (there are formulas for your exact number). A full 20% of that is used by your brain. When you need more during exercise, you first use the glycogen in your muscles and liver. It takes about 20 minutes of exercise to deplete those supplies—and then you open the door to your fat store. Each pound of fat holds about 3,500 calories. Each pound also contains about a mile of fine blood vessels. Think about that. Every minute, for every additional pound of fat, your heart has to push blood through an extra mile of capillaries. No wonder blood pressure goes up!
You may be thinking—“If my car has an extra gas tank in the back, why not just take it out?” A lot of people do this, usually by liposuction. But it actually doesn’t work that way. This is because there are two stores of body fat: the fat under your skin (subcutaneous fat), and the fat around your organs (visceral fat). Subcutaneous fat is good. It gives women their beautiful rounded curves. It is the difference between men who look like Michelangelo’s statue of David and men who are steroid-pumped body-building freaks. Every woman I know prefers the former. Subcutaneous fat makes skin glow and feel nice; when you lose it, skin becomes wrinkly and leathery. Visceral fat, on the other hand, is not so good. You need some to cushion the organs, but obesity packs most of its fat inside the body cavity and around the intestines. It is a set-up for diabetes, heart failure, and it’s associated with a higher risk of cancer and many other diseases.
The problem with liposuction is that it can only take away subcutaneous fat, not visceral fat. It is the visceral fat that you want to reduce.
At last, as promised, here is how you burn off that fat
The first thing that I recommend to everyone is to get a heart rate monitor. You can spend a lot on fancy ones that download data to your computer and even have a GPS built into them. A $50 basic one will do just fine. (At my MediCruiser clinic, we’ll give you a 20% discount on one.) You don’t really need a heart rate monitor—it is basically just to keep you honest—but it can make your fat loss program far more effective (and interesting).
The exercise program is simple: You set your heart rate monitor to your target level (easily found online or in the monitor instructions). Then you can do whatever you like, as long as your heart rate is in the target zone. It doesn’t matter. Run, bike, swim, hike, rowing machine, power walk, have sex…if your heart rate is on target, you are using oxygen—oxygen to burn fat. To lose weight, you should be in the target zone for an hour a day, six days a week. It is a lot, but you can watch TV, listen to music, chat on the phone, even read the paper while you are doing it. Take a few minutes to warm up, and leave 10-15 minutes to cool down and do some stretching. I recommend 60 minutes at target because the first 20 minutes are needed just to use up your glycogen, and only after that do you tap into the fat reserves.
I also suggest doing this in the morning for a couple of reasons. First, it takes some discipline. By doing it in the morning, perhaps after a cup of coffee to get going, you have it out of the way for the day. Otherwise, daily tasks tend to build up and edge out other activities, and after a long day, you might not be up for an hour’s exercise. Second, this exercise will make you stronger, fitter, give you more energy, and rev up your metabolism—all day long. In fact, you’ll find that you are sleeping warmer because you will be burning more calories even at night.
Make the discipline easier on yourself. With a regular schedule, preferably exercising with others who will reinforce your practice, you will be more consistent.
Muscle weighs more than fat. Many who begin a new fitness program are surprised to find they don’t lose weight—some even gain weight! But it is fat loss that is important. If you follow this program, you will lose fat—I guarantee it—probably about a quarter pound a day. Not body weight, but body fat. When you lose fat this way, it will stay off. It is a positive trend that gets stronger, not a negative trend like diets or drugs that inevitably fail.
Fat loss can be measured several ways: hydrostatic weighing, in which you are submerged in water; calipers, commonly used at fitness clubs; and the new scales with electrical impedance. None of these is 100% reliable or accurate. The new scales are pretty good in my opinion. (The Taylor bodyfat scale is highly rated by Good Housekeeping and sells for around $50.) I especially like the ones with four electrodes (rather than just feet), which can show visceral fat as well as total fat.
Do you need a fancy scale? Probably not. You’ll know when that fat turns to muscle. Your clothes will fit better. You’ll have more energy and strength.
And—don’t worry. You’ll still survive.
Paul Gahlinger is the president & CEO of MediCruiser, an urgent care clinic and house call service that he calls “21st century health care.” www.medicruiser.com. He is a regular contributor to CATALYST.
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 | Etsy: The New Handmade WorldA hundred Utah crafters have shops in the online world of Etsy, a thrilling aggregate of art festival, farmers' market, gallery stroll and hipster craft bazaar the size of a small city.
by Amy Tullius
I come upon Etsy by chance. A friend sends me a link, and when I log on, I am shocked by what I find: a giant online marketplace where artists from around the world sell their crafts. It is like wandering into a thrilling aggregate of the Art Festival, Farmer’s Market, gallery stroll, and a hipster craft bazaar the size of a small city.
I am first struck by the site’s innovative and delightful search interfaces. You can search by color: mouse over a field of colored bubbles and click on, say, tomato red. Ten windows pop up with tomato red journals, rings, cardholders, and paintings. More structured shopping options like categories of crafts or gift guides help navigate the daunting number of shops if you’re not such a follow-your-nose kind of shopper. Etsy members also curate groupings of favorite items—almost like craft mix-tapes—and post them on the treasury page. You can shop Etsy by geography—whiz around the globe using the geolocator interface and click randomly to find art in, say, Iceland or maybe Puerto Rico.
Etsy is fascinating, inspiring and completely addictive—it provides some of the most exhilarating shopping I’ve ever done. But it’s more than that. Etsy is the antidote for the blasé monodesign of late model capitalism: it is wildly diverse, creative, and exciting.
Etsy’s founder Robert Kalin created the site as cure for the meaninglessness of modern shopping. “The web completely changes the way that world commerce works,” he says. “Etsy as a whole is providing viable alternatives to shopping at places like Wal-Mart.” Kalin also says that the “human-to-human relationship of the person who’s making and selling [a product] to the person who is buying it is at the core of what Etsy is.” Sales are between buyer and seller on Etsy, with the site taking only 3.5% of each sale. Contrast that to selling in a retail environment, where an artist would expect to pay a 40-50% commission to the boutique. Local artist Dana Robison, creator of Piddies baby slippers, says that when she joined Etsy, it “opened my eyes to the fact that everything we purchase doesn’t have to be mass-produced under conditions most of us wouldn’t condone. Etsy has made me mindful of the amount of work and time that goes into handmade products, and the value in supporting artists and artisans who are not mass-producing their products but are making each one by hand.”
If such a thing is possible, Etsy is a kind of socialized capitalism. It is ethical capitalism that respects all parties involved in the transaction: first and foremost the artist, the buyer, and then the greater community of sellers and buyers. It provides not just beautiful art and products, but a warm sense of community and belonging to one’s world. Even though you have access to and are connecting with craftspeople from around the country and the globe, it feels as if it is a small community.
But what about our local community?
Back to the great Etsy search interfaces. I click the link for “shop local” and type in “Utah.” One hundred of the most recently updated shops pop up featuring crochet hats, photography, leather journals, baby booties, cards, beadwork, buttons, and handbags. If I were only to shop in Utah, Etsy would be a treasure. Here are a few of my favorite finds:
Full Spectrum & Beanchild
www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5305402
Full Spectrum and Beanchild are the screenprinted clothing shops of Sonya Evans, an artist out of Clinton, Utah who taught herself to screenprint while she was living in Oregon so that she could work from home while her daughter was young. She started out selling her work at farmer’s markets until a friend told her about Etsy.
Her designs are edgy and graphic, featuring unexpected hand-screenprinted octopi and jellyfish, 10-speeds, and pinking shears on tee shirts, bags, pillow covers, and tea towels.
Beanchild, the children’s clothing counterpart of the Full Spectrum, is a line of screenprinted baby clothes including a skull and crossbones black cotton diaper cover, a newborn onesie with a red antennaed shrimp across the tummy, and itty little hoodies with angel wings.
Sonya says that becoming a part of Etsy made her want to buy everything handmade and local. “Buying things that are not handmade feels meaningless now,” she says.
She says she never expected the business to become so successful. Her Etsy shop has brought her national attention, from a review in a New Jersey newspaper to a contact from Rachel Ray’s PR people to see if she’d like to send over an owl tee shirt to be featured in the magazine. She’s had international sales lately from as far as Russia, Germany and Norway, and gets orders all the time from the UK and Australia. “That’s all from being on Etsy. Otherwise, I was just in a little booth by myself in Eugene, Oregon.”
Piddies
www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5445160
Piddies might be the cutest things in the world. Dana Robison handsews and embroiders these sweet little baby slippers out of her home near Liberty Park in Salt Lake. She opened her Etsy shop just last November and put up 10 pairs of slippers to see what happened. The first pair sold within an hour.
I ask if she’d sold her work before Etsy, and she tells me “no, but I have been sewing, crocheting, crafting, and building all of my life and have always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I’ve always asked myself, ‘would there be a market for this?’ when I created something I felt was unique.” Etsy has given her a marketplace to test the waters without much risk. She custom makes each pair of slippers as they’re ordered, so demand drives her production.
Her slippers are mostly birds, darling felt bird mary janes with blanket stitches along the edges, and stick-out wings, beaks and tails. There are chartreuse baby bird slippers with turquoise wings and tail, a little orange beak, and tiny perfect embroidered yellow feet on the bellies/soles. She has red and green parrot slippers, little yellow chicken slippers, and sweet little orange goldfish slippers with kissy red lips and blue bubbles embroidered on the bottom.
Dana tells me that she was amazed at the friendliness and supportiveness of the Etsy community. “From the very first day,” she says, “there were people coming out of the woodwork to encourage me.”
Romy Brett
www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=21595
Romy B started out just shopping on Etsy, but after a couple of months, decided to open her own shop. She had met several of the artists in the community through the “contact” section, and the people she met made it easy for her to get started. “One made my logo,” she says, “another made my icon, another helped with business cards. There is a PIF section (pay it forward) where others get good karma for helping me. At that point I started listing items.” (After she tells me this, I do a search on Etsy for “pay it forward” and it’s true! Six pages of free or donated items and services pop up. The idea is that the kindness is catching.)
Romy B’s shop includes tiny pictures of power women—Wonder Woman, Marilyn Monroe, Frida Kahlo, and the Virgin of Guadalupe (to name a few)—in the wee circular frames of magnetized bottle caps. She also has hand-painted tiny drawings in bottle cap frames, Madonna and glitter-encrusted matchbooks, and whimsical stuffed plush critters. In addition to her Etsy shop she sells at galleries around the nation, and locally at the Women’s Art Center, the Blue Cockatoo, Utah Artists Hands, the Artspace City Center basement patio during gallery stroll and at the Salt Lake Farmers’ Market.
Dirty Bird
www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5248376
Remember the scene in Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent movie masterpiece “Metropolis” when the robot woman is revealed and comes to life? Dirty Bird’s Metropolis photo bracelet includes a still of that scene as well as three other stills from the film captured in glass and silver. Perhaps you’re into zeppelins: Now you can have four glass-encased images of dirigibles silently drifting, launching, and elegantly crashing in flame for all time around your wrist. Old anatomy illustrations? Dirty Bird has you covered. Lovely and haunting, the bracelets are attractive from a distance, and fascinating up close.
Melissa Dallof is the force behind the shop—which she says is more of a hobby than anything else. She’s in her final year of law school, and making the jewelry is a fun side project and creative outlet. Dallof says she has been surprised by the items that have been successful in her Etsy shop. “Etsy reaches such a large audience,” she says, “you can do something unusual and somebody out there will like it. I think I’m going to add a photo bracelet of different Eames chairs. And seriously, in my circle of acquaintances, how many people are going to say ‘Oooh, Eames chair jewelry!’ or be excited about jewelry made from old films? But on Etsy, there are people who share my weird little fixations.”
Lii Lii
www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5061740
Lii Lii is the work of Yvette Daley, another Salt Lake City artist. Lii Lii is a vast Etsy store featuring jewelry made of vintage Scrabble pieces decoupaged in decorative bits of beautiful paper. Flipping through her hundreds of necklaces and earrings, one is lured by blackbirds, arts and crafts daisies, a printed honeybee diagram, Japanese owls, brown blossoms against a blue sky, 1920s floral wallpaper designs, china patterns, and tiny Eiffel Towers.
Yvette says she was also surprised at how friendly the Etsy community is. She says that “people want to include me, as the maker of their jewelry, in their purchase experience. They write to me to tell me about an experience they had while wearing one of my pieces of jewelry. They send me pictures to show me how they look wearing my jewelry. I sometimes get emails months later from customers who want to let me know they are still wearing their jewelry and loving it.”
ByKali
www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5418707
When I first talked with Kali Mellus, she was in the process of transitioning from a physical shop to an almost exclusively online business. When she wasn’t sure if she would be able to renew her shop lease, she decided to take the business online, work from home, and use Etsy as the main venue for selling her work.
Kali’s art is industrial but elegant: she makes necklaces and belt buckles with pins, nails, staples and washers imbedded in layers of resin. I’ve been a fan of her stuff for quite some time, so it was disappointing for me to hear that she was closing her Pierpont gallery. But when I caught up with her a few months later, she told me, “As far as this Etsy thing goes. I could not have expected it to go as well as it has. I was the featured seller about a month ago and since then I have sold over 100 pieces.” She told me she was nervous about closing her gallery, so signed up for various summer festivals and local markets, and is now having to sprint to keep up with the demand for her work.
Certainly Etsy is not a substitute for going out and buying art from local shops and art festivals, but it is a great way for local artists to maintain creativity and autonomy while taking their business to a larger audience, and it is a way to nurture the creativity and diversity of people in the rest of the world. It is a global community based on respect for kindness and each artist’s uniqueness. Shop local, think global? On Etsy, it’s almost the same thing.
Amie Tullius is a short story writer, essayist, and lover of the arts. She is a recent transplant from San Fransisco, where she completed an MFA in writing at the California College of the Arts. She now lives in Park City with her fiance and dogs.
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 | You Are Not Reading EnoughHas the internet killed the joys of sitting down with a good book?
by Mark Morford
The pile is waiting. The pile is getting higher. The pile looks impressive, probably isn’t, still feels slightly overwhelming, vaguely threatening, even as it sighs, waits, drums its fingers on the inside of my skull, promising all manner of wonder and insight and syntactical bliss if I’d just, please, maybe, right now, even for just an hour or three, pay it some serious, focused attention. Please?
It’s a bit of a problem. More than that, it’s a moral, ethical, personal issue, a deep indignity of the soul, a painful twist to the nipple of my id.
See, I love books. Admire and appreciate and adore. Was a lit major at Berkeley, read voraciously, still love to read, still like to consider myself a big consumer of books and deep thinker about bookish issues and ideas and authoralia.
And yet, if I’m painfully honest, I have to admit it: I barely read books anymore. Not nearly like I used to, anyway. Not for a long, long time. And chances are, if you’re at all addicted to the new media vortex, neither do you.
It’s become a social conundrum, a cultural sore spot, a morose sign of the times. The question has been posed by agents and writers and a confused, hyperconsolidating publishing industry: What happened to all the readers? What happened to the culture of books? And the hint of fatalism, just underneath: If few truly read anymore, what of the state of the American mind? How much more dumbing down can we possibly stand?
Oh sure, books still sell, product is moving like crazy, but by and large it’s truckloads of self-help and how-to flooding over a precious handful of sure-hit novelists, topped off with the grand cherry that is Oprah, single-handedly keeping the tepid melodramatic coming-of-age family saga alive. In between, 18 zillion copies of “Eat, Pray, Love.”
But overall, the message is bleak: Fewer writers of real talent are being discovered, fewer publishers are willing to take any sort of risk, and serious, literary-minded reading, that glorious pastime, that fine personal art, the immersive and transportive and beautiful intellectual fertilizer, appears to be giving way to the more addictive but far less nourishing hellbeast of new media and the Net.
It’s an easy beast to blame. I skimmed through Nicholas Carr’s fascinating and depressing piece in the recent Atlantic Monthly (“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”), which talks up, among other things, the downfall of deep reading, of spending uninterrupted hours immersed in a literary tome or even a long essay, a victim to modern media’s vicious ADD, short-attention-span approach to engaging the world of ideas.
Carr’s upshot: The Net might actually be rewiring our brains, changing the way we read because it’s changing the way we think, forcibly adapting us to tolerate only bite-sized summations and simplified blips at the expense of deeper thought, of the ability to parse ideas, to sink in for a long, committed intellectual journey.
Proof? That’s easy: Just try to sit down with that dense copy of W.G. Sebald or Haruki Murakami after spending any portion of your week online, and watch as your Net-addled brain becomes almost instantly anxious and frustrated, eager after just a couple thousand words to jump away, ogle pictures, watch dumb teens humiliate themselves on YouTube, buy some shoes.
Christ, if TV numbs you out, encourages a passive, flaccid state of intellectual disengagement, the Net does the opposite, slamming so many tiny shots of pseudo-meaning and media and nothingness into your brain over the course of a few hours, it’s like getting stung by a swarm of horny bees.
It seems all dour and dreary and unfortunate because not a week goes by that you don’t hear about some gloomy book fair or publishing industry merger or the death of a legendary independent bookstore that just couldn’t compete not only with Amazon, but with a generation trained to read nothing more challenging or lengthy than grammatically mangled e-mails or snarky text messages or snide 300-word pop culture takedowns on Gawker.
Ah, but I do believe all is not lost. There is lingering hope. I am moderately sure a brain thusly amped on the wicked energy drink of the Web can, through honest time spent, through forcibly yanking the Ethernet cable out of one’s cerebral cortex, be re-rewired, untrained, re-addicted to the deeper juice. In fact, it isn’t that difficult, really. We just like to think it is.
I can personally attest. About a year ago the most astounding thing happened: The hard drive on my MacBook suffered a rare and painful meltdown when I was away on vacation. I was, much to my initial horror, to be email/Net-free for over a week. What was I missing? Who was emailing? What about all the blogs and the news and the Significant Global Happenings? What of all the salacious offerings of nubile flesh and social wonderment stroking my in-box as I sat there, entirely cut off and adrift?
Mercifully, the yoga kicked in and I quickly shrugged, sighed, noted the incredible opportunity, the gods trying to tell me to unplug. I hit the bookstore and bought three thick, sticky literary novels like a misguided vegan buys some grass-fed steaks for the first time, and devoured them whole.
As I did so, an amazing thing happened. Time slowed down. The brain quickly returned to its normal breathing. The mental seizures and the near-constant desire to click away and leap to something different, faded and soon vanished. And the books I so loved suddenly moved from the bottom of the intellectual priority list straight back to their original, top-tiered state of grace.
I vowed to never let them drop so low again.
Even though, right now, they have. Even though, right now, even as I add to the glorious pile of must-reads on my desk, I realize I’ve been sucked back into Net-time again, back to the world of instant feedback and clickable everything, as the pile grows heavy and scornful and lonely. Ah but here again, an opportunity. For it is here that I remember the most wonderfully humbling lesson of all ...
When I finally got my precious MacBook back, when all email was restored and all Net access was regranted and I was able to dive back into the perky digital maelstrom, when I spent a few hours and got all caught up, it finally hit me: I’d missed exactly nothing. The world was exactly the same. The beautiful churn continued, same as it ever was, with or without me. Isn’t that fantastic? Someone should write a book about it.
Mark Morford is a yoga instructor, fiction writer and editor/columnist for sfgate.com.
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 | Concept Art: The Art of ConsumptionChristo plans a monument to the folly of oil.
by Diane Olson
Given that the largest manmade structure on earth is a garbage dump (the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island), it seems fitting that the world’s largest proposed art piece is a stack of used oil barrels that would dwarf the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Mastaba: Project for the United Arab Emirates” was conceived in 1977, when oil cost $13 a barrel. Thirty-one years later, with crude now fetching $119 a barrel, and production long past peak, the Mastaba is the ultimate monument to our collective folly. Its form based on a type of trapezoidal tomb used in ancient Egypt, the Mastaba would consist of 390,500 empty, garishly colored, 55-gallon oil barrels, stacked 984 feet wide, 492 feet high and 738 feet deep. (By comparison, the Salt Lake Mormon temple is 118 feet wide and 107 feet tall.)
Christo began working with used oil barrels in the late 1950s, not because they were symbolic, but because they were cheap, large and unbreakable. He wrapped the first batches, after wrestling them to his seventh-floor studio on Rue Saint-Sénoch, in Paris. His largest previous oil barrel project was 1999’s “The Wall—13,000 Oil Barrels,” in Oberhausen, Germany.
Unlike most of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s creations, which typically exist for only two weeks, and are as much event as art, the Mastaba would be engineered to last 5,000 years. Also atypically, the project would not be self-funded by the artists; should it come to fruition, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, a Middle Eastern federation of seven states in the Persian Gulf, would pick up the bill, though Christo and Jeanne-Claude have already spent $1 million of their own money on preliminaries. The exact location for the Mastaba has yet to be finalized, though Christo and Jeanne-Claude visualize it on a slightly rising plane somewhere in the Arabian Desert.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been collaborating on art installations since 1961. They were born at the same hour on the same day in 1935, and have a son, Cyril, who is a poet. Christo creates the art and Jeanne-Claude manages the massive and complex installations, which typically require hundreds of permits. The couple is best known for projects such as wrapping the Berlin Reichstag and the Pont-Neuf Bridge in fabric, and for “The Gates in Central Park,” which hung there for two weeks in February 2005. Their next project is “Over the River: Project for the Arkansas River,” for which they will suspend 5.9 miles of fabric above the Arkansas River in Colorado, following the course of the river for two weeks in 2012.
—Diane Olson
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 | Slow Food Challenge 2008SWM w/o kitchen chooses his secret weapon.
by David Hoza
As a single male without a good kitchen, far from the skills that made me a versatile baker and cook back in the day, I’m used to living with food on demand, whether from the supermarket, the whole foods market or the farmer’s market. Andrea and Mike Heidinger, who spearhead this year’s Slow Food Challenge, want participants to eat from the local, natural palette for a month, at least a week. I’m hoping I can make it through a day.
Finding substitutes for things like olive oil, coffee and baking powder can be more than a little daunting. Sure, you can make crackers and get by without bread, but can you make dinner when you haven’t been past the farmer’s market this evening, it’s getting late, the kids are whining and you’ve had a whirlwind kind of day? The blog at least offers a community bulletin board for recipes, stories and who’s got what where when. Community support may be the name of the game.
In preparation for the 2008 Slow Food Challenge, I’ve decided I really need to set my priorities. I figure what I got-ta got-ta do is find that one key missing ingredient in my home. With coffee, Luna Bars, and all the exotic spices of life on the way out, it’s certain I’ll want to hunt high and low and make certain I’ve got my honey in hand before anything else is decided.
Who wouldn’t want to start things right with some all natural, organic, locally grown honey? Of course the imagination runs away with the possibilities of a honey that comes from the hive next door, sweetening everything! I’d make everything with my honey. The big question would be what to leave my honey out of—in a partnership worldview, what would Honey prefer to be left out of?
The answer could be an elegant solution derived from a very local sense of place, as John Todd or U of U Professor Fred Montague might say. It sure don’t take no Goldilocks to know how much honey is “just right.” All you brilliant kitchen mavens know what I’m talkin’ ‘bout, mm-hm.
Without coffee, I imagine my honey sweetening up the morning, and for dessert, sweetening up the evening considerably. With this kind of satisfaction day in and day out, I might come to miss such pleasure in the heat of work and the day. Knowing where to find my honey, I wouldn’t have to go far, and that is a real source of pleasure and security, let me tell you.
Sure, I could wish for a little afternoon delight, savor honey very warm with fresh mint, but you know what they say; absence makes the heart grow fonder. We imagine the grail of opportunities to be a place where you could grow whatever you wanted whenever you wanted it. Imagine if you didn’t have to go all the way to Green River in the summertime to find yourself a honeydew! But the Slow Food Challenge is all about giving you the opportunity to experience in every season its turn, and we’d all get sick of honeydew this, and honeydew that.
The hardest thing in the world, I think, is just to let my honey be. You can imagine what expectations we have, what with Sweet Honey in the Rock, Tupelo Honey, (Mudhoney?) and the like. But life isn’t really worth living if you demand everything on your own terms. The Midas touch may give everything that sweet golden amber, yet turn to stone what you would own. Besides, look at what we have the possibility of having right in our own back yard! Humming ever so sweetly from the Wasatch, from high in the Uintas, from isolated ranges west as far as the Great Basin and the Deep Creeks, the ever so salacious Wild Mountain Honey, mmmm…!
The Slow Food Challenge 2008
Officially begins: August 16
Recommended duration: 1 week or 1 month
Find the Challenge: at your plate and market
Locally sponsored events: by Slow Food Utah, Wasatch Community Gardens, TreeUtah and The People’s Market. Check their websites for specific events.
Stories and recipes at: http://localfoodchallenge.blogspot.com/
The Challenge:
Eat naturally grown local foods from within a 250- or 100-mile radius of home. Challenge yourself! Eat only from the local, seasonal palette of natural foods! Find substitutes or alternatives to foreign ingredients and processed foods. Do without olive oil, coffee and imported meats and cheeses. Get to know ingredients of different packaged and restaurant foods, and find, create and make breakfasts, lunches, dinners and snacks that are made up of local, natural ingredients. Discover what natural foods grow in your neighborhood and surrounding region. Join others and support one another in a healthy, low-carbon, buy-local lifestyle experiment. Most of all, have fun!
History:
The first local Slow Food Challenge was organized in 2007 by Andrea Henkels Heidinger of The Green Building Center, and led by Andrea and husband Mike. Andrea won the Utah Society for Environmental Education’s Educator of the Year award in recognition of the event.
David M. Hoza lived off the grid for 10 years. You can find him at sustainability@diamondpointcoaching.com.t
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 | Adult Beverages: Utah WhiskeyHigh West Distillery brings the Wild West back to Utah.
by Scott Evans
Each spring the desert beckons me. About this time each year, I grasp for books, maps and literature that compels me to pack my gear and get on the road. My current reading choices, “All the Pretty Horses” by Cormac McCarthy and “Angle of Repose” by Wallace Stegner, have only increased my salivation.
On nearly every adventure, an excellent bottle of booze accompanies me on my journey. After a recent tasting and tour of Utah’s first distillery since Prohibition, High West Distillery, I believe I’ve found a most fitting travel companion. Their Rendezvous Rye Whiskey features more than a complex glass of whiskey; it packs a punch of history as well. High West Distillery named their “initial public offering” whiskey after the annual rendezvous of trappers and settlers that took place in Cache Valley, Utah where, in 1826, the West’s first recorded whiskey-fest took place as the mountain men gathered to exchange pelts for supplies.
With a background in biochemistry, High West Distillery owner David Perkins has long appreciated whiskey and bourbon. He began distilling in 2005 after an inspirational trip to the Makers Mark distillery in Kentucky. Three years of hard work and some mentoring from a master distiller has resulted in Rendezvous rye whiskey, which can be found at Utah state liquor stores ($40/750 ml). The handcrafted glass bottles reflect the crafted nature of what’s inside, Perkins says. He doesn’t “chill filter” the final product (a standard cosmetic step) making for a slight cloudiness and, Perkins says, enhanced flavor.
He keeps a mailing address in Park City, but his beautiful, manually operated copper pot still and small staff reside in a westside Salt Lake City warehouse while awaiting their official digs in Park City. High West’s ambitious plans include revamping the 100-year-old livery stable in old town and to be distilling on-site by 2009. In addition to rye whiskey, High West has released Vodka 7000 (referring to Park City’s elevation), distilled primarily from oats. Future offerings will likely include local fruit-infused vodkas and possibly some eau de vies (spirits distilled from fruit brandy) as well.
Before it gets to the bottle, Rendezvous Rye is made from crushed grain (rye in this case) mixed with water in a “mash tank” where fermentation begins. Then the liquid, or wort, is transferred to fermenters, and the mashed grain is left behind Next, yeast is added to the mash causing a bubbling fermentation. Up to this point, the process mirrors beer production; it takes about a day to get the wort to the fermenters and two to three days for full fermentation to take place. In fact, the whiskey-maker’s name for fully fermented wort is beer.
The departure from beer-making begins when the beer is transferred to the still, which heats the beer to 175 degrees, causing the alcohol to evaporate. The evaporated liquid is cooled, captured and transferred to barrels to age. Every whiskey producer has its own trade secrets about length of time in the barrel and what type of barrel is used. Rendezvous Rye is made from two 100% rye whiskeys; one aged for six years and the other for 16 years.
Whiskey (also spelled whisky) is a general term that refers to any alcoholic beverage distilled from fermented grain mash (barley, rye, wheat or corn) and aged in wood. The variations in spelling generally correspond with the country of origin. The United States and Ireland refer to “whiskey” and “whiskeys” while Japan, Scotland, Wales and Canada all utilize “whisky,” with “whiskies” for the plural form.
Understanding the differences between bourbon, scotch, rye and Canadian— all types of whiskey—can make the inexperienced whiskey drinkers’ eyes glass over. To briefly clear the smoke: Bourbon is an American whiskey made primarily from corn which is distilled in Bourbon County, Kentucky; it’s aged in new oak for at least two years. Scotch whiskey is made mostly from barley, distilled in Scotland and aged in used oak barrels for a minimum of three years. Rye whiskey is American and has to be made from at least 51% rye mash. Canadian whiskey is made from a blend of grains and is aged in wood for a minimum of three years.
For a state with such strong feelings about controlling the sale of alcohol, Utah has a rich history of drinking and distilling whiskey. Historical records show that some early settlers were makers and sellers of whiskey. As early as 1859, a portion of Main Street in Salt Lake City was known “Whiskey Street.” The drink of choice on Whiskey Street and its environs was a local whiskey named “Valley Tan.”
With historical relevance, High West Distillery tempts our state with world-class whiskey. A true artisan whiskey, Rendezvous Rye surpasses the historic Valley Tan with finesse and style. It was recently awarded the Double Gold Medal at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, the Grammys of the spirits worlds. Rendezvous Rye whiskey is a godsend for Utah and anyone who appreciates a good stiff drink.
Scott Evans is a manager and liquor buyer at Squatters.
High West Distillery
3555 W. 1500 South
801.972.2566
www.info@highwestdistillery.com
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 | Manly FoodsCome winter, you will be grateful that you have carefully preserved both your love and your vegetables. Here's what to do with all those cukes, zucchinis, tomatoes, basil & green chilis.
by Judyth Hill
I really want to write about men. Men have lately been rather uppermost on my ever-lovin’ mind, if not in my bed. Then I remembered, in the nick, as we say, of time, that I’m also a food writer.
So, I’ve added vegetables. They do share something in common, like needing lots of sun, water and rich soil. No, I think that’s primarily about vegetables.
Well, they both provide roughage, and basic nutritional...
Uhn, no, that could be wrong.
Well, shining eyes, and glowing skin. There. Eat a large helping of men daily, and you’ll… hmmm.
There must be a connection.
I mean my very first cookbook, that sweet treasure, given me by my mother when my wooden spoon was longer than my arm, was “The Settlement Cookbook.” And it said, clear as day, right on the cover, “The Way To A Man’s Heart.”
But maybe they just meant the meat and potatoes. And of course, the cakes, the stollen and küchen. I think those recipes actually commence: take one man, one ring, seven promises, two sets of in-laws, one stereo, and mix with…but perhaps I digress.
Start over. Vegetables. Green, yellow, red, purple, blue-black. I think the hearts of men come in those colors: I know their ties do.
Diced, julienne, cubed, sliced, grated to pulp. I know some men who definitely feel like the end products of an enraged Cuisinart.
Sautéed, stuffed, braised, grilled; so many ways, so little time.
Be that as it may, it’s harvest time, in life if not in love.
But what a strange year! A fickle New Mexico spring has left us bereft of the usual abundancies of apricots and peaches, and there’s nary an apple to be seen in many of our orchards.
Though, like good men, there are a splendid few.
And tomatoes, scarce because they need warm nights (hmmm) to reach that ripe ruby state, that ready burst of juicy heat in the mouth ...but sheesh, when you have one…
Ok, ok, enough. It has been a year for green beans, bush beans, and oh those squashes, turning king-size in their and our gardeny dreams.
This is the current green thumb report from my poetfriend Joan Logghe: last year at this time, we canned and jammed and dried and froze in a frenzy of plenty. ‘Til I convinced her as the gemmy little jars emerged from their steam bath, that what we both really needed was to go shopping immediately.
Two black and one coral dress later we both were rested and perky, and infinitely ready. At least I was.
Much like the grasshopper and ant, however, I have lived to see the wisdom of her ways, as her jewel-like syrups and plump peach halves emerged to enliven Sunday pancakes, or roll sensuously down the side of two ice cold scoops of vanilla Haagen Daz.
Such is the truth of seasonal desires.
Deep in your winter, you will be grateful that you have carefully preserved both your love and your vegetables. And if you haven’t the blessing of filling a colander in your own garden’s dewy morning, there is always the privileged option of your local Farmers’ Market.
First, let’s deal with the arsenal of summer squashes at hand, oddly confirming a notion I have never succumbed to, namely, that you can have too much of a good thing.
A simple and delicious bread and butter pickle can be put up with zucchini and yellow squash, and these late summer afternoons are the perfect weather to do so.
A Profundity of Pickles
4 lbs zucchini
2 t. celery seed
1 lb. small white onions
2 t. turmeric
1/2 c. salt
2 t. dry mustard
1 qt. cider vinegar
2 t. mustard seed
2 c. sugar
Slice the squash and peeled onions thinly. Cover with water and the salt. Let stand 1 hour, then drain off salt water. This will crisp the vegetables.
Combine the remaining ingredients, bring to a boil, and pour over the drained squash. Let marinate 1 hour.
Bring the mixture to a boil, cook three minutes.
Pack into pint mason jars and boil, covered, in a hot water bath for 20 minutes. Remove jars from water bath and allow to cool to room temperature and seal.
Of course, you know that zucchini bread is one of the delights of fall. Spicy, with the round, warm flavors of cinnamon and ginger, it’s rather idyllic, like certain men, slathered generously with sweet butter and accompanied by a tall cool glass of cider.
This is a non-dairy recipe and you could even substitute a cup of honey for the sugar. It will be just as lovely and P.C. too!
Best Zucchini Bread
Preheat oven to 325º.
3 eggs
1 3/4 c. granulated sugar
1 c. vegetable oil
1 T. vanilla
3 c. all purpose flour
1 t. salt
1 t. baking soda
1/2 t. baking powder
2 c. grated raw peeled zucchini
1 T. cinnamon
1/2 t. pumpkin pie spice, ginger, allspice, clove to taste
Possible to toss in as the mood and cupboard contents dictate:
1 c. walnuts, chocolate chips, or raisins
Beat eggs until light and foamy. Add sugar (or honey), oil, zucchini and vanilla.
Combine all the dry ingredients in a separate bowl. Stir into the wet just until moistened. Batter should still be a bit lumpy.
Pour into two greased loaf pans. Bake 1 hour, or until a toothpick inserted near the center of the pan comes out dry, and the top, when lightly touched with a delicately inquiring fingertip, springs back.
This bread freezes beautifully.
If you’re still overburdened squashwise, the large ones make an excellent Zuke Parmesan. Dip half-inch thick slices in beaten, peppery egg, then bread crumbs, and sautée them. Then you layer them in a casserole dish with a nicely basily tomato sauce and generous slabs of mozzarella betwixt and between. Sprinkle lavishly with Parmesan and bake for an hour or so at 325º. This dish, a delicious pinot, and candlelight says it all.
Now this is really cool:
Sun (well, almost) Dried Tomatoes
Preheat oven to 200º.
Slice perfect Roma tomatoes thinly, or cherry tomatoes in half, and sprinkle with salt. Place on a cookie sheet and bake for 6 hours, or until crispy.
These can be frozen for long-term storing, and your pizzas will go on automatic gourmet with these poised on the gooey, lascivious cheese. Or, mix the tomatoes with excellent olive oil, fresh basil, chopped herbs of choice, and crushed fresh garlic. This makes a lush, heady sauce added to a bit moreoil for hot, al dente pasta; or aheady hors d’oeuvre spread on fat, velvety slices of buffalo mozzarellawith maybe a deep, well-bred Merlot. Oooooo, that Bear’s Lair ’06 is way que good, and quite easy on the pocketbook.
However you may choose to enjoy men or summer’s provender, trust me, these tomatoes will be a treasure in your culinary toolkit
And last, but surely not least, autumn caches for winter to come require pesto, which a wise cook knows to freeze neatly in ice cube trays, ready to pop into a marinara, a creamy what-have-you sauce, or enjoy simply solo, heated à point, for a whoosh of summer’s bounty revisited.
Or merely defrost, warm gently, and schmear on crisp Italian bread with cool slivers of crisp Anjou pears.
This entirely fabulous and genius version of pesto, is especially interesting because it marries two extraordinary gems of the green world, basil and green chile, traditional flavors of the old and new world both. It also begins with a man, to wit, the utterly and divinely brilliant Felipe Ortega, world-renowned master and maestro of micaceous pottery, as well as a effervescently creative chef, who devised this salutary recipe.
Sr. Ortega, multi-talented, multi-lingual, runs a wild and inspiring pottery studio cum B & B, Owl Peak, nestled among the majestically rivered, piñon and yucca blanketed mesas of La Madera, New Mexico. His shapely pots, hand-crafted (by coil, not wheel) of clay dug from the ancestral locale of his people, and open-fired, are a rich, deep mahogany color, the slip ashimmer with mica specks, like tiny stars.
A visit will profit you a gorgeous meal, perhaps a pottery class, and assuredly, time spent in the company and abode of a 100% original beauty-maker of the first order.
And a man who knows his vegetables.
Felipe Ortega’s Green Chile Pesto
4 large cloves of garlic
1 c. well packed, fresh basil
1 c. well-drained, roasted, peeled and chopped green chile*
1 1/2 c. freshly grated Parmesan cheese
2/3 c. piñon nuts, finely chopped
1/2 t. salt (add more as you desire)
1 c. olive oil
In a blender, make a paste of all ingredients except the oil.
Gradually add in oil, and if desired 1/4 cup of grated Parmesan cheese.
Whether your fantasies run toward men or vegetables, remember: both require tenderness and attention, and a sultry, joyous cook does not live by bread alone.
Judyth Hill is a poet and former bakery owner. She has published six books of poetry and is the author of the internationally acclaimed poem, “Wage Peace.” www.Rockmirth.com
* Authentic New Mexico green chile is available from www.buenofoods.com. (800) 952-4453
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 | Letter to the Editor: Regarding Mark GafniWe, the undersigned, support Rabbi Marc Gafni in clearing his name and moving forward with his life.
We, the undersigned, support Rabbi Marc Gafni in clearing his name and moving forward with his life.
We want to thank Catalyst magazine for doing such a nuanced, insightful and courageous piece of Journalism. In a time when people all to easily seek to impose superficial explanations on far more interesting and complex realities is a breath of fresh air. Your view of the four factors that created this situation rings true to us who have investigated this thoroughly and your willingness to say clearly that Gafni suffered a major injustice was courageous and important.
Each of us has spent lots of time looking at this story. We each have had, like many thousands of others, a sustained positive experience of Gafni's goodness, each of us in different contexts. We experiences his genuine care and love for others, his integrity, not to speak of his wildly profound wisdom and commitment to teaching and service.
We write this rather extensive letter to the editor, stating our understanding of all this, to add our voices in support of Marc's future unfolding which all of us are convinced will be of great service to many people
As we know, in this age of the Internet, anyone who views you in a way that satisfies him or her and vilifies you can get wide circulation. It does not matter if what is claimed is true or not, only that someone has decided to blog it, post it, or offer it to the cyberworld.
Often such stories are given space on search engines, and even picked up by the legitimate media. Efforts to right the record are laborious and often yield no long-term results. Put simply, the slanted or falsified claim, the inaccurate spin, or the angry diatribe can overtake common sense and distort the true chain of events.
Such has been the case with Rabbi Marc Gafni. Gafni, a talented, bohemian and iconoclastic teacher, ran an informal populist movement of Jewish revival, meeting in his home in Israel, on Israel's beaches and in other informal settings. He conferred no degrees, held no institutional positions, and promised no one the World to Come. He was somewhat of a celebrity rabbi-scholar. Critics and enthusiasts alike acknowledge the depth of his scholarship, what one writer called his "dazzling brilliance", his vision and his commitment. We and others who know him well experience his goodness, his sincerity, his caring and genuine love for people. We also experience his human complexity.
Gafni was both wise and foolish. Because he worked, traveled and taught virtually around the clock, he tended to become involved with some of the women in his circle.
They were all adult, powerful, self-determined women who became romantically or sexually involved with him at different times. Having reviewed hundreds of pages of documentary evidence, including first-person correspondence between Gafni and these women at the time of their engagements, we have come to the following conclusions:
Their encounters were mutual, consensual and based on affection and attraction and often initiated by the women.
There was never any form of false promise or deception to gain sexual relations.
There was no inappropriate deployment of power.
In this, we reject the culturally prevalent assumption that in these situations a male leader is necessarily more powerful and the woman who engages with him necessarily powerless. In fact, as several leading feminist writers have pointed out, both sides in such engagements often hold both power and vulnerability.
Still, as happens all too often in contemporary sexual dynamics, a false story line emerged in which Marc was portrayed as someone engaged in a form of sexual harassment.
These assertions were then cleverly linked to reports that had been circulated in the Jewish press and on disreputable Internet sites, claiming that Gafni had, 25 and 30 years before, had sexual relations with two under-age women. This is not true. These allegations as reported on the Internet distort both the nature of those relationships and the substance of the engagements. An internationally respected expert in polygraph testing administered three polygraph tests to Marc, supporting the assertion that these two claims are untrue in the manner that they were reported on the Internet and in the press.
In one of the stories Gafni himself was only 19 and just out of high school and the woman was in the first year of high school. The relationship involved no more than mutual teenage petting, and both of them at the time experienced at the time it as a deeply loving relationship. Both, the extent and nature of this relationship as described here has been supported by polygraph.
In the second story as well, there was a very limited one-time contact between the 25 year Gafni and a 16-year-old woman, who according to polygraph, asked Gafni to have sexual relations with her, which he refused. Of course, since he was a youth leader at the time, any intimate contact was wrong on Gafni's part. But nothing abusive in the sense suggested in the falsified or distorted internet stories took place. The polygraph confirms this. That said, in statements on his website, Gafni has publicly acknowledged his mistakes in these contexts, as well as his regrets in not having been fully transparent to his earlier supporters regarding one aspect of this latter story.
Gafni sought advice on his initial and later decision not to be transparent in this regard, from credible figures in the Jewish community. He followed their advice. His reasons for doing so are understandable, though unfortunate, but not indicative of any sort of pathology on his part. All the psychological evaluations confirm this. He has publicly expressed his regret for that mistaken decision.
All the professional evaluations of Gafni's character and behavior in this and in any other regard have stated that attempts to portray him as abusive in relationships is unfounded.
One of the most outrageous and vicious manifestations over the last several years has been hate blogs and other ill-informed sources, which suggested that Gafni was accused of rape which is categorically false and blogs which claimed that he was guilt of statutory rape which, as supported by Polygraph, by Gafni's statements, and by the statements of the woman in question herself, is also categorically false.
Unfortunately for Gafni, it seems that in his world there were enough detractors willing to support the false claims. As provocative and energetic teachers often do, he had attracted both popularity and envy, both affection and enmity. Apparently he took up too much space for some in the teaching world. One of the evaluators suggests that hidden motives involving power, malice, and hypocrisy, particularly among certain sectors of rabbinic and lay leadership contributed to layer the sub-text of this story.
The complaints were immediately accepted as true, even though unproven, and a sort of lynch-mob-style hysteria set into motion a chain of events that ended with Gafni being forced into a self-imposed exile. This happened without any attempt, before or after, by former colleagues to even contact Gafni or discover his side of the story. This is the clearest indication that under the cover of sexual politics something very not kosher happened here.
Not surprisingly, some of the very same rabbis and spiritual teachers who condemned him, and who have acted against him behind the scenes, have themselves engaged in unconventional sexual behavior, and made similar mistakes. It would appear that when what one writer called 'sexual hysteria' takes over, self-protective fear in many forms overcomes decency, fairness and friendship. All this contributes to an atmosphere that Alan Dershowitz correctly labeled sexual McCarthyism.
At this point, the purveyors of several "hate" blogs ostensibly dedicated to "outing" Jewish clerics joined the pursuit and flooded the internet with feverishly slanderous stories, aimed at destroying this man's reputation irrevocably. As in McCarthyism, which played on our legitimate fear of the evil of communism, sexual McCarthyism manipulates our valid fear of sexual abuse. One blogger, who has built her professional life on a ludicrous claim that Jews in the context of satantic cults, including herself, ritually sacrificed babies, ran viciously libelous postings calling Gafni a "confessed molester", "predator" and the like. Sadly there is little one can do to sue successfully for internet slander.
So now, we come to reclaim this complex, gentle, audacious and good soul.
The facts of this story are simply put:
To reiterate: Gafni's computer records, containing hundreds of emails and instant messages between him and the women, at the time of the relationships and afterwards, which had been deleted from his computer, are now recovered, and show that he deployed no form of abusive power over these powerful adult women.
There was never any implied or explicit quid pro quo in any of these relationships.
The correspondence shows the tenor of the relationships to be mutual, affectionate and respectful and often sexually initiated by the women themselves.
The polygraph tests mentioned above, conducted by an independent and well-respected international expert, support Marc's assertion that there was no sexual harassment or the like at all.
Independent psychological evaluators, who reviewed the records of the women's own first-person accounts of the events at the time, also fully support the simple truth that none of these relationships involved sexual harassment of any kind.
Gafni , for much of his life was a post-conventional bohemian. He did make mistakes in some of his sexual choices through the years. Where possible and appropriate he has asked forgiveness.
Information about all of this, as well as a number of professional evaluations, can be found on his website, www.marcgafni.com under the "controversy" tab. These should be sufficient for all fair-minded people to exonerate Gafni of any suggestion that he is a sexual harasser.
So why has this story persisted?
Gafni chose to leave Israel, rather than fight. He did this for two reasons. First, his computer files had been deleted, apparently deliberately, and he needed to recover them in order to prove his innocence. Secondly, as someone with a commitment to serve his community, he did not want to create a public spectacle by attacking his attackers. Thirdly, he wanted time to do the inner work needed to identify his responsibility in the contribution system that allowed these shocking events to unfold.
In his angst, he penned a letter of remorse that was an outpouring of his devastated emotional state at the time of the explosion. On reflection, it would have behooved him to have waited for a calmer moment, but he was deeply wounded to his core. His desire was to end the hysteria, and he mistakenly believed that he could do so by taking upon himself the responsibility for any problems or "sickness" that had arisen in the organization he had founded.
Gafni has suffered and done profound inner work, validated by objective professional evaluations. He is neither predator, molester, nor harasser. Quite the opposite. He is, in the words of one of the evaluators, "an intensely moral man who is completely reputable." He is also a complex, loving, good and sometimes naive man, who took the wrong path by involving himself with women he should never have engaged.
Rabbi Gafni has been misjudged, abandoned without evidence by people with ulterior motives, and used as a scapegoat for the kinds of shadow issues that are held in many spiritual communities.
Rabbi Gafni has chosen to move on with his life. He has chosen, unless given no alternative, not to counter-attack, despite strong advice to the contrary. In the future
,there will be those who see the complexity of his past as a reason to not study with him. Many Others, however, will recognize that this difficult journey has served as an alchemical fire that has forged in him new wisdom about life and spirit.
Gafni has chosen to dedicate himself to writing a series of new book which will share some of his new understanding, to sharing his wisdom as a teacher and spiritual artist as well as to social activism with a group dedicated to fighting genocide, human rights abuses and sexual abuse in the form of human trafficking.
Dr. Gabriel Cousens, Author, Teacher, Director Tree of Life Center
Rabbi Gershon Winkler, Author, Teacher, Director Walking Stick Foundation
Rabbi Avram Davis, Founder Author, Founder Chochmat HaLev Center San Fransico
Sally Kempton, Author, Teacher, Director of Dharana Foundation
Claudia Klefeeld, Artist, Philanthropist
Dalit Arnon, Artist, Student at Bayit Chadash
Thank you for writing and publishing the extraordinary article, "Trial by Internet?", about Rabbi Gafni's challenging spiritual saga. When I first encountered Rabbia Gafni's teachings I immediately recognized him as one of the most important voices in contemporary Jewish spirituality. Unfortunately, at that time, I held back from pursuing his teachings further, because of a naive knee-jerk reaction to all the hate blogs against him. I'm sad to say this happened even though, as a seasoned psychotherapist, I've encountered many scenarios where alleged victims made convincing accusations, often against loved-ones, only to be ultimately found out as having been engaged in a pathological projective dynamic. Your remarkable journalism reminds me to stay honest in pursuit of knowledge, sharp to the complexity and nuance of life stories, and hopeful that pubilc media can act to expose truth, rather than distort it, as is so often the case. Bravo!
—Brad Satkin
I enjoyed and very much appreciated your article on Marc Gafni.
Having once heard Marc teach, I found him to be heartfelt and wise.
The internet stories never seemed to me to be the real story.
I was waiting to hear more and hope that your article will help to set the record straight.
Thanks for taking on this controversial story.
—Stacia Lansman M.D.
Thank you, Greta deJong and Jeff Bell, for your article about Rabbi Marc Gafni: "Trial by Internet?" (July 2008, catalystmagazine.net). It was certainly time for someone to put the pieces together. Respect and honor are due you, and praise as well, for the journalistic labor you undertook. Few would qualify for the task or the merits.
Marc is a most remarkable person - one who lives life, and is equally hearty and brilliant - and so he too easily is cherished or misunderstood, engaged or shunned, loved or scorned. Gifts like Marc should come with requirements for authentic listening, constructive predisposition and reciprocity. Careless people should not apply.
Until recently, I did not know of Marc, or his brilliance, or his internet trial. When I met him, there was no preface or prejudice. He began traveling with a group of friends, and he became my friend. I love him like a brother. He is my brother now.
Marc needs truth tellers, and few have the courage and gumption, persistence and skill, and the discernment to do the job. Thank you.
—Bruce W. Fritch
Fritch Consulting
Thank you for doing the article on Marc Gafni. I am glad to hear he is back teaching.
—Susan Dasch
Someone sent me a link to your piece on Marc Gafni and I was delighted to discover the wonderful CatalystMagazine website. It was like reconnecting with an old friend. We don't live in Utah anymore but our old home is still in our hearts. It's great to see Catalyst still covering the important, quirky and cool news of the West.
I doubt you remember me but you published my very first story in Catalyst back in 1993. It was about archeaoastronomy in the Four Corners region. It took a decade but that story was the catalyst that launched me into my current career as a journalist. It wasn't easy to begin as a rookie reporter in my mid 40s but now I file stories for Colorado Public Radio and my work has also been featured on NPR and Voice of America. My photos and print stories have appeared in the Denver Post, the National Post (Canada) and I'm on staff at our local weekly newspaper.
It was your willingness to give me a chance and your upbeat encouragement so long ago that gave me the courage to embark on this midlife career change.
Thanks and keep doing the good work! It makes a difference in many ways.
—Shanna Lewis
Just wanted you to know that I love what you've done over the years with Catalyst - I can appreciate that there must have been times when it would have been easy to say it was too much trouble - but you've grown it into an essential part of the community.
I'm going to be moving to North Carolina after 30 years here in the valley and I will miss my regular Catalyst fix - thank you so much for putting it online -
—Jeannie Patton, CEO
Utah Association of CPAs
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