I neohippie, alcuni dei quali si possono incontrare nelle piazze delle protesteanti-status quo, da Zuccotti Park a New York a Boise in Idaho, contestano ancora il materialismo, il consumismo e il denaro come unico metro di valutazione del successo, ma non si accontentano di rifugiarsi nel loro mondo. Cercano di ricostruire la società americana a partire dalle fondamenta. Vogliono ridurre il divario trai pochi sempre più ricchi e una classe media sempre più povera (quello che chiamano il 99% della popolazione). Sollecitano una maggiore attenzione nei confrontidell’ambiente. Sognano un’America piu’ solidale.

“Come i loro predecessori degli anni ’60, i giovani hippie di oggi ascoltanoancora Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane e i Grateful Dead, ma frequentano alcuni tra i college più prestigiosi d’America, studiano economia, scienze ambientali, architettura eco-sostenibile. E una volta laureati fondano ONG, si mobilitano, si impegnano a cambiare le cose,” spiega a IL, Oana Dan, ricercatrice di Sociologia all’Università di Harvard e autrice del recente studio The Late-Modern Hippie, a study of cultural choice.

Spesso cresciuti in comunita’ non convenzionali sparpagliate per gli Stati Uniti, da Arcata in California a DeltaJunction in Alaska, i neohippie sono una delle anime di Occupied Wall Street, la protestacontro quella che i manifestanti chiamano l’ingordigia di Wall Street e la montantediseguaglianza sociale.

Capelli biondi setosi, bandana e jeans zampa di elefante, Jessica Clifford,23 anni, originaria dell’Ohio e laureata all Brown University, e’ a ZuccottiPark da inizio ottobre: “Negli ultimi trent’anni,” racconta aIL, “si e’ lasciato che l’1% della popolazione arraffasse alle spese di tuttigli altri. E’ ora di raddrizzare la rotta.”

Visto da questa tendopoli multicolore a due passi da Wall Street, il nuovomovimento appare come un arcipelago di gruppi e persone dal retroterraculturale diversissimo, dai no-global di Seattle ai veterani dell’Iraq passandoper anarchici pacifisti, ma tutti sono accomunati da un ventaglio di frustrazioni,prima fra tutte la scarsita’ di posti di lavoro. Ben il 45% degli americani trai 16 e i 29 anni oggi non ha un impiego, contro il 33% del 2000, secondo recentissimidati del Census Bureau, l’Istat americano.

Sintomatica della situazione di emergenza e’ la presenza tra lecomponenti di Occupied Wall Street di una sottocultura poco nota in passato perla contestazione: gli hipster. Ragazzi tra i 20 e i 30anni concentrati in citta’ come New York, San Francisco e Portland in Oregon, gli hipster provengono di solitodalla borghesia di provincia. Generalmente hanno una laurea in materielegate all’arte, alla musica, alla moda; rifiutano i canoni estetici dominantinegli Stati Uniti e non rivendicano alcuna appartenenza politica.

“Storicamente la differenza tra hippie e hipster,” spiega laricercatrice Dan, “e’ che i primi tentano di andare contro il loro tempo,contestando la cultura dominante; i secondi non combattono la societa’, sipreoccupano solo di anticiparne le tendenze. Ma adesso la situazione e’ precariaper tutti, cosi’, persino loro, sentono il bisogno di alzare la voce”.

Con la crisi economica cominciata nell’estatedel 2008, questi giovani hipster, artisti o presunti tali, hanno pagato daziopiu’ di altri al mercato asfittico, divenendo, nei centri urbani, l’emblema del telelavoro precario e spessosottopagato. Scovarli nei loro pseudo-uffici e’ facilissimo. Basta andare neibar piu’ alla moda di rioni underground di Brooklyn come Bushwick eWilliamsburg.

Qualche giorno fa, nel caffe’-pasticceria specializzatoin sfornati di rabarbaro The Blue Stove a Williamsburg, una ventina di hipster congli occhialoni retro’ e la classica camicia di flanella a scacchi rossi e nerierano seduti al bancone pigiati come sardine, gli occhi fissi sullo schermo delloro MacBookPro. C’era la documentarista-baby sitter-personal trainer, c’erala pittrice-correttrice di bozze-blogger, c’era il giornalistafreelance-insegnante di arabo. Strozzati dai pagamenti deiprestiti universitari, molti sopravvivono con questi slash jobs, i cosiddetti “impieghitrattino”.

“L’altra settimana sono andata a un colloquioper un lavoro di design con appena 34 dollari sul conto corrente,” ci raccontala ventiduenne Martha Zimmer. “Non si puo’ vivere continuamente con l’ansia dinon riuscire a mettere insieme l’affitto mentre ci sono questi banchieri che sifregano i soldi”.

L’ansia di Zimmer riflette quella dei giovani di ZuccottiPark, delle altre centinaia di piazze americane e dei molti che non scendono instrada ma sostengono il movimento, anche finanziariamente. Per quasi due terzi (64.2%) si tratta di persone sottoi 34 anni. Piu’ di nove su dieci (92.1%) sono universitari o neolaureati. Lastragrande maggioranza dei visitatori del sito e’ costituita da bianchi(81.3%), due terzi (67%) sono maschi. Solo meta’ (50.4%) lavora a full-time, unquinto (20.4%) a tempo parziale. E, illustra lo studio del Sociologo della City University di New York Héctor Cordero-Guzmán, gli altri (13.1%) sono disoccupati.

Gli attivisti, pero’, si schermiscono rispetto a qualsiasi tentativodi mappare il movimento e i suoi fan: “Se Occupied Wall Street fosse una stoffasarebbe color arcobaleno,” spiega da Boston Ed Needham, uno dei portavoce di OWS.“Abbiamo dalla nostra pensionati, sindacati, veterani, neohippie, hipster, perfinosuper ricchi che vengono in piazza a dire ‘tassatemi di piu’, il sistemaattuale e’ vergognoso’”.

Come eterogenei sono i gruppi che lo formano, molteplicisono pure gli slogan. Alcuni dicono di volersi disfare della Fed, la bancacentrale, altri puntano il dito contro la corruzione dei banchieri, altriancora vorrebbero partiti meno litigiosi e miopi, piu’ fondi a scuola esanita’, no a qualsiasi guerra.

“Per ottenere un impatto, le proteste devonoavere un obiettivo chiaro,” ci spiega Andy Smith, esperto in attivismo di massae coautore del libro ‘The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Waysto Use Social Media to Drive Social Change’. “Nel caso della rivolta in Egitto,per esempio, il movimento e’ stato efficacie perche’ il target era ovvio atutti, si trattava del presidente Hosni Mubarak.

Sia Needham sia osservatori indipendenti come Edward Walker,Sociologo alla University of California Los Angeles specializzato in movimentidi protesta, pero’, concordano su un primo obiettivo centrato da Occupied WallStreet: riportare l’attenzione pubblica sui problemi veri del Paese. “Granparte del ruolo dei movimenti sociali e’ semplicemente cambiare l’agenda politicadi una nazione,” spiega Walker a IL. “Finoad agosto i media parlavano sempre di debito pubblico. Adesso le telecamere tornanoad accendersi sulla disoccupazione e l’ineguaglianza sociale. Non e’ poco”.

Nel saggio ‘How the Hippies SavedPhysics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival’ David Kaiser, storico della scienza al Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teorizzache un manipolo di hippie illuminati degli anni ‘60 hanno aiutato la ricercanel campo della Fisica a non sbagliare strada. Al tempo, nei laboratori, la meccanica quantistica venivaapplicata acriticamente. Loro hanno sottolineato l’importanza delleimplicazioni filosofiche della teoria. Ora, dice Kaiser, questi neohippiepotrebbero sollecitare la politica a tornare sui binari giusti. “A volte,”spiega Kaiser a IL, “per cambiare qualcosa c’e’ bisogno di qualcuno che ponga domandeeccentriche o complesse. Prima o poi ci sara’ chi tentera’ di fornire risposte”.

Contact me: 001.347.855.7190, damianobeltrami AT gmail DOT com.

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One To World is a non profit organization that brings Fulbright scholars and other international students to New York City public schools to introduce and explain their native cultures in order to break down prejudices and create cross-cultural understanding. The organization also serves a few private schools as well.

Watch Siobhan Ni Mhaolagain, a Fulbright language and teaching assistant from Dublin, Ireland, teaching the students of the Harlem Academy how to dance to “Some Say the Devil is Dead”, an old Irish jig that has been danced for generations in Irish homes and local parish halls.

Top New York beatboxers Taylor McFerrin (son of Bobby McFerrin) and Chesney Snow teach blind and visually impaired students at Lavelle School for the Blind how to produce drum beats, rhythms and musical sounds using their mouth, lips, tongue and voice.

“I love getting on the mic and doing all kinds of beats,” said 21-year-old Steven Spinelli. “You prove to other people out there that you can do something - you can make music with your mouth.”

Watch the video below to see the most recent beatboxing class, and to help keep this program running click here:

James Kim, a hip-hop event marketer and co-founder of the nonprofit organization Bridging Education & Art Together, started the Beat Rockers program at Lavelle last fall, after he visited the Bronx school for a event.
“I was like, wow, look at the effect that music has on these kids,” Kim said. “What they need is beatboxing!”

Traditionally, farmers take it easy in the winter. But urban farmer Ben Flanner has never been so busy. He is trying to get more New York rooftops ready to grow new shingles of Sun Gold tomatoes, salad greens, and carrots before the next season begins.

“We want to see a lot more roofs across the city covered with farms and growing healthy vegetables,” said Flanner, head farmer at Brooklyn Grange, New York’s biggest rooftop farm located (despite its name) in Long Island City, Queens.

Started last May, in its first season the 40,000 square-foot organic rooftop farm covered with 1.2 million pounds of soil provided New Yorkers with 15,000 pounds of fresh produce that was traditionally shipped into the city from far away, creating pollution and waste.

Almost a year into the project, Flanner has now learned some lessons which he willingly shares.

“In terms of crops, plants in the nightshade family including tomatoes, peppers and eggplants worked very well,” he said. “Salad greens, carrots, and radishes also worked. Big cabbage plants don’t work quite as well ’cause they are deep, heavy feeders.”

Flanner’s project was not without its bugs–the animal, not the electronic kind. Insects are a problem of organic farming everywhere. However, reconstructed natural eco-systems like a roof don’t harbor natural predators, so the pests can turn out to be even more obnoxious than usual.

“We had some harlequin bugs,” Flanner said. “In the next season we’ll focus on introducing natural predators to those bugs as well as staying on top of them and literally killing them with our fingers.”

How to tackle the wind was another lesson learned.

“You want to minimize the stress on the plant to as low level as possible, ’cause then they grow faster and more healthy,” Flanner said. “You have to get creative with bamboo sticks to set up tripods and supports and protect the plants.”

Brooklyn Grange products are sold directly to restaurants including Fatty Cue, Vesta and also Roberta’s, whose owners, Brandon Hoy and Chris Parachini, are Brooklyn Grange partners.

The rooftop farm products can also be found at markets like the one at the first floor of the Queens building where the farm is located (3718 Northern Boulevard) and at the one in front of Roberta’s in Bushwick.

Brooklyn Grange also has a selling system called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) where members pay a lump sum for a weekly supply of fresh vegetables. For $20 a week, CSA members receive a bag of mixed produce each week of the growing season.

The reaction of the community has been overwhelmingly positive, from the volunteers who helped install the farm to the ones who showed up to donate plants and seeds for the roof.

“We were given strawberry plants, raspberries, peppers, bamboo,” Flanner said with a laugh. “It’s great that people get involved, it creates a better sense of partnership with everyone in the community.”

The Brooklyn Grange has many goals: to create and prove that rooftop farms are a sustainable business, to get the community involved in the project, and to encourage people to eat more healthily.

“There is a lot of interest and a lot of enthusiasm towards the Grange, we’ve been speaking with a lot of people,” Flanner said. “We’d really like to see more rooftop farms around.”

Filled with prune or cherry, Janine Frank’s round, slightly sweet Kolachi pastries could come straight from an old-school Slovakian bakery. And Sherry Rousso’s 2-inch-square vegan treats decorated with gold dust could come from a hip Williamsburg shop.

But these two delicacies come from the same place, an industrial building on a block in Long Island City, Queens: a street shared with rundown car washes and mechanics’ garages.

Frank, a former real estate investor, and Rousso, a part-time agent for commercial cameramen, are among the 95 food makers who rent a spot at the kitchen of the Entrepreneur Space, an incubator for fledgling food operations and other businesses on 37th Street near Northern Boulevard.

The 5,500-square-foot commercial kitchen is a refuge for unemployed New Yorkers who want to start their own businesses, a laboratory for the ones who have jobs but would love to change gears, and a paradise for “slash careerists” - people who want to combine more than one career.

“Here we nurture small businesses until they become big enough to flap their wings and go out on their own,” said Kathrine Gregory, coordinator and soul of the kitchen since 2005.

Scheduled to close down last summer, when the union-backed nonprofit group that sustained it could no longer afford to lease the space, the kitchen is still humming. The Queens Economic Development Corporation (QEDC) took over the facility last September. It invested $100,000 in the venture and offered its business expertise to bakers like Frank and Rousso.

“We realized that this was a wonderful resource here in Long Island City,” said Seth Bornstein, executive director of QEDC. “This goes back to our mission, creating jobs in Queens.”

New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) provided QEDC with a $170,000 grant to help subsidize the fit-out and development of the space, after which time it is expected to be self-sustaining. It is one of eight incubators that the City has launched across industry sectors to provide affordable space to start-ups and to facilitate networking among tenants. The City has launched more than 60 initiatives to support entrepreneurship and encourage start-up companies to locate and grow in New York City.

“From our industrial studies we find food to be one of the sectors in the manufacturing space that is still growing in New York,” said Ann Li, Director at the Center for Economic Transformation at NYCEDC. “We wanted to ride that momentum and support that sector.”

The kitchen solves many problems. It provides cooks with a space that they don’t have at home, allows them to manufacture in volume; it’s fully equipped and complies with all city health regulations. The operation also fosters partnerships with other entrepreneurs who rent offices in the same building, people who might help food entrepreneurs draft a marketing plan or keep their books.

The commercial kitchen is open 24/7 on a shift basis. The most expensive time slot runs from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. ($231), the cheapest from 1 a.m. to 7 a.m. ($154).

“At first I was intimidated by all the machines and the equipment, but the staff here is wonderful, the facility is wonderful,” Rousso said. “They are very supportive, it really is an incubating kind of establishment, I feel very nurtured here.”

Gregory said that most of her clients have a real knack for cooking. They don’t bake just bread. They make a kaleidoscope of products: hand-ground blue-corn tortillas, chocolate-covered pretzels, mini-falafel, granola, pickles and chutney, croquettes, and everything in between.

What all the people who show up at this kitchen have in common is a great passion for and commitment to what they do: “When you know you have something good and you feel it in your soul, you should go for it,” said Frank, as she cut decadent triple-chocolate biscotti in small, round bits. “I just love making everyone happy, and this is my way of doing it.”

On a recent Saturday afternoon, a group of improvisational comedians performed a collection of brand new stories for children at the Drama Book Shop in Midtown. The tales that the Story Pirates brought to life featured kings, ghosts, and elaborate plots. But the Story Pirates didn’t write them; the authors were kids.

Greisbert Nunez, a 4th grader from PS 73 in the Bronx who loves writing and football, wrote “Kung Fu Fighting Ninja Squirrels.” Joshua Perez, 8, authored “Shadow’s Lamp.” Second grader Brandon Santana, also from PS 73, penned “The Silly King.” And Braden Donoian, a second grader from PS 234 into soccer and baseball put together “Baseball Game Gone Wrong.”

“We celebrate words and ideas of kids. We tell them that what they have to say is important,”said Benjamin Salka, the executive director of Story Pirates. “We try to give them the tools and the confidence to make their stories heard.”

Since 2003, this arts and creative writing organization, with a rotating roster of more than 100 actors, has gone to New York schools, asking kids to come up with original stories. Then they act them out, and the results are often surprising.

“Adults write what they think kids want to hear, or are supposed to hear,” Salka said. “Kids have no filters; they use their own imagination, logic, and language.”

The Pirates make a point of honoring kids’ own creativity and logic. They act out stories the way they are written rather than tweaking them or correcting their language. “Once a kid wrote a story called Cakeface, and one line read ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about how much that cake tasted,’” said Lee Overtree, the Story Pirates’ artistic director, with a laugh. “It was an awesome way to express that concept.”

Story Pirates performs in more than 100 schools during the school year and has a regular Saturday gig at 2pm at the Drama Book Shop on 40th Street in Manhattan, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. They also organize birthday parties for about $1,000, including food.

“It was funny and entertaining,” commented John Perez, the father of Joshua, one of the young authors. “Kids have an amazing imagination. It’s great that these Pirates help them to bring it on stage.”
But it is the troupe’s work in schools that constitutes the core of what Story Pirates does. The performers teach kids to create dramatic stories. The children have fun, and in the process, they gain confidence in their writing abilities. Usually two weeks after the workshops, the actors go back to the classroom and perform a selection of the students’ original stories. All the writers receive feedback and positive comments about their work.

“Once the students see the Story Pirates’ performance, and they realize that their ideas are being used, and they hear their words on stage–it definitely inspires them and motivates them to write more,” said Ann Ledo, an educator at the Bronx Charter School for the Arts, one of the schools involved in the Story Pirates’ program.

In late 2008 Jean Carlos, a shy PS 154 elementary school student, wrote a three-sentence story during a Story Pirates workshop. His was one of the tales picked for performance two weeks later to his delight and surprise. When the Story Pirates came back to his class the next year, Jean Carlos stood up and handed one of the Pirates a piece of paper.

“This new story was much more complex and well-structured. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and the best part was that the teacher didn’t know anything about it. Jean Carlos had worked on it during his own free time,” said Overtree. “It was a pretty neat moment to see his new passion for writing, which lead to an improvement in his writing skills.”

On a recent Thursday evening in a cramped room by the Gowanus canal in Brooklyn, Joe Holdner was fixing a Dutch-style chandelier made in China, David Mahfouda a black umbrella, and Alex Krupnik a metronome that stubbornly refused to tick.

It was just their regular weekly night at Fixers’ Collective, a workshop organized by the non-profit organization Proteus and Gowanus, an interdisciplinary gallery and reading room.

The Collective sprang out of “Mend”, a yearlong interactive exhibition at the gallery started in spring 2009. One of the attendees, Mahfouda, showed up with a tattered 130-foot American flag, and a few people decided to help him restore it. The experience was so much fun that gallery co-founders Tammy Pittman and Sasha Chavchavadze along with Mahfouda decided to make it a regular thing. With a goal of increasing material literacy in the community, the Collective fosters an ethic of creative caring toward objects that are part of everyday life.

“Anyone can bring something in and tinker with it. If you don’t fix it, you can turn it into something else,” said Pittman, adding that wonderful things happen at the workshop. “We turned an MP3 player into a telephone. Somebody once turned a shoe into a lamp. We had a salad spinner that became a kind of chandelier.”

Pittman is proud of the wide response to the project. Since the experiment started, more than 300 people have taken a stab at repairing things that others might toss.

“I’m sort of the new kid on the block here,” said Holder, a 67-year-old local. “I am a compulsive repairer, and I enjoy getting a piece of garbage back into circulation again; it’s gratifying to save something from the trash heap.”

When Jennie Dundas and Alexis Miesen opened Blue Marble Ice Cream in 2007, they wanted it to be bigger than a humble, eco-conscious, all organic ice cream shop in Brooklyn. But they never imagined that their business would lead them halfway around the world to Rwanda, still recovering from the brutal civil war that claimed nearly one million lives.

The project “Sweet Dreams” came about in July 2008 when Dundas, an actress by trade, met a Rwandan woman, Odile Gakire Katese, at a theater workshop in Utah. Katese heard that Dundas owned an ice cream shop and asked her to start one in Butare, Rwanda’s second largest city.

Katese, artistic director at the University of Butare’s Center for Arts and Drama, thought an ice cream shop could give jobs to women widowed by war and boost the economy. But more importantly, she wanted to share the simple pleasure of ice cream to reawaken happiness that had been dulled by the 1994 genocide.

“Rwandan women want to reshape life in its simple and sweetest form,” Katese said. “We want to share moments that are not embossed by despair and death. We want to create a place where poverty, disease and illiteracy are not obstacles to happiness and barriers between human beings.”

Dundas and Miesen started a non-profit organization, Blue Marble Dreams, and embraced the project enthusiastically, applying for an American Express grant to extend their business across the ocean. They got community support, a key requirement of the grant, but did not win in the end. Undeterred, they organized a fundraiser and got a few angel donors interested in the project.

This January, the two owners went on an exploratory trip to meet Katese and a number of Rwandan women eager to get involved in the business, which they would eventually take over. The women were really excited, but wondered whether Rwandans would like a cold product not part of their diet, and they worried about the cost of the treat.

“I was very, very important to us that we not create a product that is only accessible to non-Rwandans,” Dundas said. “The whole point was that common people would enjoy this.”

Once a reasonable price was set, Dundas and Miesen approached the manufacturer Taylor Products, and the company donated an ice cream machine, shipping it all the way from South Africa to Rwanda. Despite a few initial glitches, the grand opening was ultimately a great success.

“Watching people eating ice cream for the first time was one of the most hilarious and gratifying experiences,” Miesen said with a laugh. “The older customers were so shocked by the coldness of it and many asked, ‘Does it has to be this cold? It’s quite cold.’”

Dundas and Miesen are thrilled that this “sweet dream” has finally come to life, the shop is open and people are enjoying sweet cream, passion fruit, pineapple and coffee ice cream — with toppings ranging from granola to fresh fruit. But the business, they point out, it is still very much in its infancy.

“Like any small business it needs a little bit of influx of cash to augment the operations,” Miesen said. “So we are still raising funds, we are still seeking our angel investors who want to support this shop and really make sure it has the resources it needs to succeed.”

As we walked down Graham Avenue in East Williamsburg, we would often pass by a headstone shop that had stacks of bread in the window — certainly an odd combination. Who was behind the idea to sell bread with cemetery headstones.

Jerry Ragusa, the owner of the funerary business told us that this is “the best bread above ground”, or, if we preferred, “the bread to die for”. So we decided to enquire further.