I am not sure why this quote from Tim Ferriss has had such an effect on me over the years, but it has:

“There have been several points in my life… at which I saw my future as another fat man in a midlife-crisis BMW.  I simply looked at those who were 15-20 years ahead of me on the same (professional) track… and it scared the hell out of me.”

This passage from “The 4-Hour Workweek” is one of the most motivating I have come across in current lifestyle lit.

Whenever I feel like my priorities are off or I am making bad long-term decisions I try to project out 20 years or so and think about what will happen if I continue life like this:

Boring Job – Will I be stuck in a mind-numbing job?  A close friend of mine just graduated from law school last weekend.  We had some downtime after the commencement ceremony and were talking about what motivated our generation relative to what motivated that of our parents.

We decided (perhaps unfairly) that whereas our parents’ generation had money as their main motivator when it came to professional life, our motivators were more lifestyle driven.

For example, if you wanted to recruit our parents’ generation when they were young professionals you could lock them in by promising to double their income.  That, while still attractive, would not go as far with our generation which would likely prefer a 50% increase in income, two weeks of additional paid vacation and the option to work from home.

More importantly, Gen Y professionals crave meaning in their work lives.  THAT is why the bald, fat man in the red BMW scares the crap out of us.  We don’t want to be corporate automatons.

Ridiculous Mortgage – As the options of mobile living and worldwide travel/work become more and more of a reality today, home ownership (with the recent memory of home values plummeting insanely) is less and less of a draw.  Why tie yourself down to one location?  Why sign yourself up for the golden handcuffs of an awful (yet well-paid) job just to pay the mortgage for a house that you have long-since come to resent despite its square footage?

Estranged Spouse and Kids – If there were ever a thing that the boomers proved conclusively, it is the fact that their obsession with work and materialism ruined families.  Time away from home skewed priorities and the Western epidemic of workaholism has added up to a lifestyle where relationships that should matter, don’t.  The result is the most dysfunctional set of family dynamics on record.

Overworked – Allow me to continue on the subject of workaholism. An entrepreneur friend of mine with a lot of physician friends says that he hears the same thing over and over:  “How do I get out of the rat race?  I want out!”  These doctors, while well paid, fully realize that if they stop working their 12 hour days, shuttling patients in and out of their offices, the game is over, no moolah.  So they are trapped.  And they hate it.

Obese – When you take on boomer work values you also take on their tendency to be obese.  Part of what’s so scary about the guy in the red BMW is that, despite his status symbol, he is a chunkster.  Nobody is impressed.  And worse yet, the rat race is only going to make it worse.  The downward spiral of horrible lifestyle decisions, fueled by comfort food, late hours, terrible relationship and anti-depressants is a heart attack waiting to happen.  We need something new.

Savvy, global do-gooding

We each have an opportunity to define this “new” lifestyle.  My goals behind CultureMutt are to help contribute to this conversation about a healthier, more compassionate, more exciting, more globally-minded lifestyle.  We need to get intentional about savvy, global do-gooding.  What is the cost of a little experimentation when the “norm” is the rat race and nobody healthy enjoys it?

Another Tim Ferriss quote:

“Gold is getting old.  The New Rich (NR) are those who abandon the deferred-life plan and create luxury lifestyles in the present using the currency of the New Rich: time and mobility.  This is an art and a science we will refer to as Lifestyle Design (LD).”

Stay tuned, the next couple posts will be about Lifestyle Design.

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Bjorn Karlman

Photo Courtesy of Peniel Eya

One of the friends that I am in touch with from childhood is Peniel Eya, a Cameroonian that I met when we were both about seven, growing up in a rural corner of the Philippines, about an hour from Manila.  In the picture opposite, we respectively make up the back left and right.  We were as close as early grade schoolers could get and shared a lot of experiences in school, sports and overall rabble rousing. As Peniel was one of my first close friends I remember being extra bummed when his family left the Philippines after a few years to go back to Cameroon.  Friendship, even back then, was a huge deal to me.

International Posse

I’ve made a lot of other close friends in the years since but I am really glad that Peniel and I are still in touch (and that he posts good pics on Facebook so I can illustrate my posts:)).  Being able to look back at the 20+ years that we have been friends I like to reflect on how friends impact me.  Peniel gave me insight into his Cameroonian/Francaphone culture and I learned a lot from this exposure.  Other closest friends were Filipino, Korean, Ghanian and Singaporian.  Although this kind of international exposure didn’t exactly solidify anything about my Swedish identity, I feel like it gave me a good start in becoming more of a world citizen.

Your Influencers

Several months ago I wrote a post titled Choose Your Friends Carefully… Building Your International Think Tank.  In it I made a case for having a strong accountability group of positive friends who push you towards becoming a better person.  I want to develop on that.  I really believe that, whether or not it is immediately obvious, we more often than not end up being the average of the handful of people that we hang around the most.  I mean this in the broader sense of environment – both online and day-to-day in-person interaction. Because this is reality, it makes a lot of sense to be proactive about the kinds of friendships you create.

Choose Friends that are Different

Does your network bring out the best in you?  Do your friends make you a generous world citizen?  Do they exert positive peer pressure on you?  Do they make you want to give of yourself more, to be more open-minded?  I have often found that developing friendships with people from vastly different backgrounds from me can really help me grow.  For example, moving up to to Northern California I was initially very nervous about the transition from ultra urban LA living and the accompanying lifestyle and political norms, to the exact opposite up north. For non-Californian CultureMutt readers, Northern and Southern California may as well be two different states.  There is no love lost between the two parts of the state.  ”You’ll stick out like a sore thumb”, I was warned as I announced I was leaving LA for a little Norcal mountain town.  And I did.  But more than three years later I am really grateful for my friends up here that have helped me grow.

The Challenge

As we start another week, let’s pause and be grateful for the friendships we do have.  Let’s also give some thought to how we can grow our circles to become more open-minded, better rounded and more generous.

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some volunteer friends pretending to pass out after feasting in a Seoul restaurant

There is something seriously refreshing about service-minded globetrotters.  Some of the best people I have ever met, I have gotten to know on campuses and other outposts around the world.  They have generally been volunteers of some kind or people working for nonprofits.  Once you take away money as the main motivator in people’s lives and add a love for global travel in its place, people tend to really blossom into amazing human beings.   They just seem to automatically sound more interesting, more fun and better rounded.  They have real spark and a definite energy about them.  It’s incredible and I always enjoy meeting them.

I’ve often tried to work out what it is that makes these globe trotters tick.  Here are a few things that I have observed:

1) They see the bigger picture

I remember skiing with a guy in Northern Sweden who was convinced that he would never need to learn English.  I was 16 at the time but I still felt like the guy needed to travel a little and expand his understanding of the world.  The tragedy is that he may actually have been right.  If you stay in the same place your whole life, you may not need to grow and develop into an informed world citizen.  But you miss so much by this kind of complacency.  Those that travel are almost automatically more open minded, tolerant, understanding and more likely to see the bigger picture.  This is a very valuable quality.  Getting stuck in provincial nit-picking bickering is highly unattractive and a waste of time.

2) They are more curious – Travel – specifically service-minded travel – grows you as a human being.  It specifically grows your mind and forces you to ask questions – both of yourself and of those around you.  You discover more ways of being human.  You learn that there are different and often better ways of doing things.  You discover the beauty of other cultures and ways of seeing life.  It is exciting and drives you to learn more and more.  As you try to help people from other places, you yourself grow – it is always a two-way street. 

3) They are flexible – Anyone who has traveled extensively or done service-related work oversees knows that in order to be happy you have got to learn to be flexible.  You do give up a lot of c0ntrol in travel.  That is part of the beauty.  New environments will often mean an unpredictable schedule, re-written rules and a lot of other situations forcing you out of your comfort zone.  It is here that the seasoned international do-gooder adapts and stretches – it is healthy and a very positive thing.

4) They love the unknown – One step further than learning flexibility is actually learning to love the unknown. I find that seasoned service-minded relocators actually relish the adventure and growth that comes from deliberately tackling more of the unknown than most will see.  A foreign environment keeps you on your toes because you are constantly exploring and learning.  What lies ahead is unknown and with practice you can learn to see this for the excellent, suspense-filled growth opportunity it brings  rather than mourning the loss of the familiar.

A service mindset, powered by global travel has incredible power to make you a better, more interesting and exciting individual.  Why delay?  Find a cause, find a location and make the jump.  The world and you yourself will be better for it.

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Bjorn Karlman

The reason I am so passionate about what I call savvy, global do-gooding is that it quite literally has changed my life more than once.  Between finishing the equivalent of high school in England and finishing college in the United States I had done the following:

1) Spent 12 months with an international volunteer organization that had me stationed in two Filipino villages for the first six months and then a little town in Swedish Lappland that was 80 miles from the Arctic Circle and so far north that people cared more about their snowmobiles than they did about their cars.  I taught English, worked with kids and built several lasting friendships.

2) Studied in Cedex, France for an entire school year, just across the border from Geneva, Switzerland.  I skied the Alps; floated in the Mediterranean; ambled around Paris and bluffed my way around Monte Carlo casinos.  And I learned French:)

3) Taken a year out of college in the United States to work doing Public Relations, recruiting and some teaching at the international boarding school that I had attended several years prior in Watford, just north of London.

4) Spent a semester studying Spanish in Buenos Aires, Argentina.  In addition to all the language classes I went to Tango shows; survived the madness of a River-Boca match (the biggest soccer rivalry in Argentina) and dodged some genuinely energetic political protesting, complete with gas bombs.

In each case what I craved more than language acquisition or work experience was transformational life experience.  I wanted to reinvent myself each time.  I wanted to be a very different person after each period abroad.  I wanted to put the regular growth experience on steroids.  Although I had a number of disappointments and some painful failures, I can honestly say that these times abroad stretched me and allowed for the growth I was seeking.  I’ve deconstructed my experiences to understand them better and I’ve come up with a a list of benefits to taking a “gap” year abroad to study, work or travel abroad:

1)  A Clean Slate – For better of for worse, relocating abroad gives you a chance to start from scratch.  Yes, this means starting from ground zero to build a social circle and to get to know the neighborhood.  But it also means that past missteps and complicated messes are behind you and you have a completely new opportunity to create your life.  Build it from the ground up.  The first time I was abroad I took advantage of the clean slate to transition from being a 16 year-old high school nerd to a far more independent and socially courageous 17 year-old.

2)  You are more receptive to learning abroad – Where you might tune out mentors and helpful friends at home due to long-developed biases, the newness of being abroad means that you are grateful for those that help you and you learn more readily about the culture around you.  I found that while I was highly critical of my own culture and society, going abroad allowed me to rest that sense of cultural self-critique and genuinely enjoy learning from those around me because what they brought to me was fresh and new.

3)  Language acquisition helps you understand a new way to be human – You cannot begin to understand culture and people before you understand their language.  And the beauty of different languages is that they allow for different expressions of what it means to be human.  When you start to learn languages you begin to realize that certain sentiments can only be correctly expressed in certain languages… Try translating a Spanish love song by a popular artist like Shakira into English and you’ll see what I mean – beautiful in Spanish, cheesy in English.

4)  Negative home influences are nowhere to be found  - I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to get complacent when my surroundings get too familiar.  I find a niche of friends, carve out a comfortable life rhythm and settle into a little too much of an autopilot existence.  The negative attitudes, limiting beliefs, low expectations and general monotony of everything around me threatens to become part of me.  Travel has helped me shake this cloud of mediocrity.  With travel my surroundings change, I meet happy fellow adventurers and I am constantly confronted with exciting new ideas.  Travel is a great way to jump start life when it seems to grind to a halt. 

5)  You are who you say you are – As much as it is “important to be yourself”, it is equally true that you can define and redefine yourself throughout life.  In no context is this more true than when you are on the road.  I’ve noticed that international service projects in particular are great because you can seize them as opportunities to become who you really want to become, a better person.  Whether you end up become more self-aware or whether you successfully learn to be a very different person from emulating the life of an excellent service-minded mentor, travel provides a great new environment to focus on service and intentional development.

I would love to hear your top reasons for taking a year out abroad.  Leave me your thoughts by leaving a comment!

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Bjorn Karlman

Less than a week after my family moved to the Philippines in the late 80′s, we were burgled for the first time.  We lived on a campus patrolled by shot gun-wielding guards.  Once one of them fired a warning shot at a would-be robber as he took a metal saw to the bars outside my bedroom (luckily, I was out.)  Within two years of our arrival there was an attempted military coup in the Philippines that I distinctly remember because of the bombs that could be heard in the background of programming on local radio.  Also, my favorite Manila supermarket turned out to be one of the temporary rebel strongholds.

Shortly after we moved houses, the father of the family that moved into our old house was tortured, shot and buried in the sugar cane fields that stretched for miles behind my house.  Reports of murders and kidnappings were not rare.  As a kid I was not allowed to tell my grandmother some of the stories from the Philippines because they would freak her out too much.

Having said all this, I would not trade these growing up experiences for anything and I would fully recommend travel to the Philippines.  Does that make me a reckless adrenaline junky?  Am I ignoring lessons that my earlier experiences should have taught me?  I don’t think so  Here’s my list of reasons not to let “dangerous” travel conditions put your off world travel:

Trouble spots are usually easily avoided
Just like any major American city, there are parts that are safe and parts that you avoid.  Guide books, locals and some basic street smarts will help you dodge the problem areas and enjoy the majority of the country.  Chances are that, with the exception of particularly war-torn countries, you’ll be about as safe overseas as you’d been staying at home.  You’ll find that reality is rarely as bad as the rumors you’ve heard.  Which brings me on to the next point…

Media hype
The media thrives off of sensationalizing any story.  The pictures, statistics and quotes of overall despair sell newspapers and the public eats it up.  So often, dangers are blown out of proportion.  A riot, skirmish or other security risk will happen in a specific area and the media will portray the whole country as being under siege.  And it goes both ways.  I have European friends who are afraid to come to the US because they know people carry guns and we have school shootings .  Based on hearsay and media hype, they’ve convinced themselves that they are in danger of being shot while visiting the US.

Local friends
I’ve been able to navigate many potential problems just by having local friends.  Locals will often appreciate your friendly overtures and will take special care of you.  They typically want to make sure you have the best experience possible while visiting their country so they will tell you what to say or not to say, how to travel and how to conduct yourself

Use the resources available to you in order to plan effectively
Some useful sites to check out for travel advice and warnings are:

U.S. Department of State International Travel Information

UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office Travel Advice by Country

The cost of NOT traveling outweighs the risks involved

The greatest risk of loss associated with travel is not taking the trip.  Outside extreme case scenarios, you are generally better off taking a trip and growing from the experience of adventure, exposure to new cultures and exploring a new way of life than you are staying at home and trembling at the thought of something different.  So go ahead, be adventurous.  Be smart in your travel but also learn that you are far better off taking risks and experiencing the world than you are staying put.

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16 year-old me and some friends I met while working in the Philippines...

I was fifteen and my mind was made up.  I was about to finish secondary school (high school) in England and I was anxious to get out and experience more of life than I got within the confines of British boarding school restrictions.  The plan was that almost immediately after school let out, I would move to the Philippines (where I had spent five years as a child) for a year of volunteer work.  I was excited.

And finally the day came.  Soon after turning 16 I found myself saying goodbye to my parents and sister at London’s Heathrow airport and jumping on a plane bound for the Middle East (for a stop over) and then Manila.  I was so excited I could barely contain myself.  Finally, I was living life on my own terms.  “This is what freedom feels like,”  I told myself.

After a fairly uneventful layover in Abu Dhabi and several more hours of inpatient waiting, I finally got to Manila and was whisked into a van by representatives from the volunteer organization.

The drama started just outside the airport where there had been a shooting and the victim was bleeding in a car nearby.  I remember getting really nervous because I was afraid that the gunman was still close by.  Nothing happened.  Traffic finally thinned and we were able to make our escape from the area.  Kind of an interesting re-introduction to Manila.

The year of volunteer service turned out to have its triumphs and disappointments – I ended up spending half of my time in the Philippines and the other half (mostly) in northern Sweden.  I taught English, organized activities for children and assisted clergy with some local projects.  Some of my greatest experiences of excitement, fear, loneliness, elation and confusion stem from that year. Its been 12 years since my experience and a lot of the specific memories are fading from my memory but if there is one thing that is sure, it is that I was changed to the core by the experience.  I came back to England having experienced more accelerated personal growth than I have ever experienced since.  Looking back I am glad I did what I did.

Here are the key advantages of the year abroad that have sold me on the concept of service years or gap years as near essential life experiments in personal growth:

We all need to experience raw freedom

The sense of near total freedom that I experienced while setting my own rules as a teenager was dramatic. My experiment with being deliberately counter cultural seemed to pay off.  There was something brilliant about doing something entirely different from what others were doing.  While I could have been home investing in gaming consoles and Brit pop, I was learning languages, living two minutes walk from a beach with the warmest water conceivable and learning the ins and outs of rice harvesting.

More than enough time for serious soul searching

Being away from the usual comfort zone of friends and family that understood me meant that I had a lot of time for introspection.  It led to a great deal of growth.  Some of it was really tough… especially when it came to considering the idea that I may have been completely wrong about opinions and forgone conclusions in the past.

Reinvention.

As I mentioned, I came back from my year abroad a VERY different person from the person I was at the outset. The year was transformational and I very intentionally planned the future and the person I wanted to be upon my return.  I never stopped being me but I was able to basically direct my own growth and development.

Heightened Love/Hate Relationship with “Home”

Being away for a year increased my appreciation for the advantages of life at home and heightened my awareness of the weaknesses of societal norms at home.  Coming back to England was amazing on the one hand.  I loved my family, London, old school red telephone booths, etc. but more than ever, I had experienced a different way of being human and saw more clearly the flaws of the consumer-driven, blinkered European approach to life.

Learning to see the options others ignore

More than anything, the year abroad mean that I got to experience the fact that I really had options in life.  I could craft my own experience.  That is a truth I hope to never forget.  Life is so much more than ridiculous office cubicles, boring corporate nonsense and two weeks vacation a year.  Life can be radically different and better.  It really is as simple as making the right decisions.  We can all decide to navigate our own destiny.

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Bjorn Karlman

Do your friends enable you to live a life of savvy, global do-gooding? Do they inspire you? Do they hold you accountable? Are they worth the investment of your time and energy? Do they expand your vision? We are the average of the friends that we keep in our closest circle so these are questions well worth seriously considering.

At the end of college some friends and I started what we loosely called the “Think Tank”. We had all gone to college in Michigan and for a variety of reasons, about 10 of us ended up in Southern California. We would meet once a month or so and talk over problems that we were dealing with – our points of greatest religious faith and doubt, our plans for the future and our life philosophies. The conversations were something you could literally feed off of. They were absolutely superb. I left them feeling like I could tackle anything. I remember one session lasted from 3 PM to 3 AM – with 7-10 of us sitting in the same living room for the entire conversation. It was spontaneous, high energy and enthusiastic.

Since those early post college days I have moved up to Northern California but at the wedding of one of the think tank members in Newport Beach a few weeks ago, talk of the think tank resumed. Without exception, all of the original members of the think thank are still highly motivated to do oversees service of some kind and to expand their experience of the “other”.

I love this. I can’t say how important it is for me in my life to have friends that encourage the best in me. Friends like these are almost impossible to come across and when you have them they are worth keeping.

Do your natural habits and rhythms lend themselves to maintaining these kinds of relationships? If you are a world traveler, are you allowing time zones and physical distance to come between you and your maintaining these kinds of friendships? I often am guilty of this.

As a Third Culture Kid, I am used to meeting people in some corner of the world, enjoying mutually fun times and then moving on, realizing that international relationships are hard to maintain. While this is true, it does not need to define how we live our lives.

Here’s what I suggest: a regularly held accountability session with multiple close friends. I am experimenting with this in my conversations with five people: my wife, my sister, two college buddies and a designer friend. My conversations are more than just fun (or painful when it comes to admitting that I’ve slacked in some area). They keep me on track. The accountability checks are forcing me to stay on task and to maintain an open mind and a huge appetite for more than the mundane reality strewn around in everyday life.

Another tip – don’t make it too difficulty to keep your accountability commitment with friends. And also, be easy on yourself. Adherence to super strict guidelines for conversation frequency and content tends to start off strong and then crash. Don’t make the mistake of falling into that… it’s immensely demotivating and best avoided

With that said I wish you the best of luck as you build your international network of friends and fellow adventurers. There is little than cannot be accomplished if you have the right kind of support.

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Smart Stubbornness

If there is a single characteristic that I think I admire most about some of the key people I’ve befriended around the world, it would probably be their determination not to fit in.  I am not saying that I admire cultural oafs who make no attempt to assimilate with local culture.   What I mean is that, contrary to the masses, these people that I find extraordinary do not let their surroundings define them.  They rise above their immediate cultural and societal influences.

I was reading recently about exactly this kind of person in Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect, a book that makes a case for seeing deliberate exposure to cultural diversity as important in facilitating the best kind of innovation.

A Different Swede

Johansson tells the story of Marcus Samuelsson, who, at the time of the book’s writing was the Executive Chef of a prestigious New York-based Swedish restaurant.  Samelsson is anything but typical.  He is a black Swede, adopted with his sister from Ethiopia by Swedish parents and a globe-trotting geologist father who traveled with the kids a lot when they were young.  Samuelsson caught the travel bug and so continued by working in culinary apprenticeships in Switzerland and Austria and then later working on a cruise line that circumvented the globe.   He later ended up in New York where he was promoted to Executive Chef soon after starting at the prestigious Swedish restaurant Aquavit.

“I never saw Gothenburg as my be-all and end-all… unlike most of my friends, who all planned to stay in the area.” said Samuelsson about his growing up in this Swedish hometown.

A Brilliant Chef

This determination to look past immediate constraints and to think bigger than present surroundings demanded is clearly what fueled Samuelsson to be extraordinary. His brilliant culinary creations took his New York restaurant from serving “good” Swedish cuisine to innovating with ingenious culinary creations inspired, not only by Samuelsson’s grounding in Swedish cuisine, but by his fascination with different world cuisines.  His dishes included Caramelized Lobster  – Seaweed Pasta, Sea Urchin Sausage and Cauliflower Sauce (a fun Asian twist on a Swedish classic) and Chocolate Ganash – Bell Pepper and Raspberry Sorbet and Lemon Grass Yogurt (Raspberry sorbet is as Swedish as blond hair and blue eyes but lemon grass yogurt?  Not so much.)

His extremely innovative dishes won his restaurant a rare three-star review by the New York Times and brought Samuelsson a mountain of publicity including being named Best Chef in New York City by the James Beard Foundation and being recognized as one of the Global Leaders of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. I don’t know about you, but just reading about this restaurant makes me want to visit it.

But back to the point.  Aquavit would not be the same restaurant nor Samuelsson the same superstar, had he not bucked convention and decided to live a truly cosmopolitan, convention-crumbling lifestyle.  Being different is VITAL.

Confessions of a TCK

Some of my love of the different probably comes from personal bias since I grew up feeling different all my life.  I grew up as a TCK (Third Culture Kid).  A TCK is someone who grows up in a culture different from their own and ends up creating a third culture for themselves – a hybrid of the local culture and that of their national or cultural origin.  I grew up as a Swede in Asia and my three best friends consisted of a Ghanian, a Singaporian and a Korean – all of us going to an Americanized “International” school just outside Manila in the Philippines.  I’ve kept in touch with these guys since and although we all settled in the US, we also have all lived fairly counter-cultural lives.

The Singaporian jokes that, as opposed to recent “fresh-off-the-boat” (FOB) immigrants, he is SOB “still-on-the-boat” because he brings such a cultural hodge podge of accents to his stab at the American life.  The Ghanian is a Family Practice doctor in Florida and the Korean now lives in Southern California and is studying medicine after spending years in China, learning fluent Mandarin, marrying a local and becoming a doctor of eastern medicine.  These people are awesome and are some of the most interesting people I know.

In Praise of Rebels

Some more of Johansson to conclude:  “The mere fact that an individual is different from most people around him promotes more open and divergent, perhaps even rebellious thinking in that person.  Such a person is more prone to question traditions, rules, and boundaries – and to search for answers where others may not think to.”

So here’s my challenge for you and for me for the future:  Take deliberate steps not to fit in with the status quo.  It is time to experience the “other” and to be extraordinary.

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Shoot ‘Dem Like Birds Promo from Traveling Muse on Vimeo.

A fellow culturemutt

Meet Leslie Foster.  He’s a buddy of mine who is not just a fellow globetrotter and culturemutt, we have also lived in the same places – a school campus near Manila in the Philippines, South East England and Hollywood.  Leslie is a fascinating guy.  His dreams dwarf those of mere mortals.  He is the driving force behind one of the coolest ideas I have come across in the last few years…

A remarkable muse

Traveling Muse is Leslie’s baby.  It’s a collective of artists, mostly based in the LA area that, in its own words, is “telling the stories of people whose voices are not heard… exploring social activism, the collisions between art and spirituality, creating art communally, and celebrating our vagabond experience”.  I know several of these artists myself and can vouch for the fact that they practice what they preach.  And that’s where this next part comes in:

A trip to Jamaica… but not what you think…

The project Leslie and his tribe of artists are tackling next is nothing if not ambitious. It’s called “Shoot ‘Dem Like Birds / Stories of courage from Jamaica, one of the most homophobic nations on Earth.” The sad reality is that in addition to pristine white sand beaches and one of the most relaxed, fun loving cultures, Jamaica is home to some of the worst physical violence against gays and lesbians. Leslie and his team are traveling to Jamaica to shoot a film telling the stories of those who are doing their best to fight the violence. This is savvy, global do-gooding at its best. Check out the video and the fundraising page and do your part to wish Leslie good luck!

Bjorn Karlman

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Talk to enough of the American cultural elite about the upcoming World Cup and you’re bound to hear about those ignorant xenophobes in the fly-over states and their backwards claims that soccer is un-American and a gateway to socialism.  Unlike the demographics of soccer in the rest of the world where it is the game of the masses, the bulk of soccer in the United States is confined to women’s leagues, recent immigrant enclaves or upper middle class suburban communities where births are particularly awkward as one has to accommodate the silver spoon protruding from each babe’s rear.

Despite optimistic attempts at tapping into the star power of international brands like Beckham, Major League Soccer (MLS) in the United States is at best considered an emerging league and, more frequently, is the butt of jokes in the American sporting world.  This truth puts America at odds with the rest of the world, not because anyone is defending the quality of the MLS (everyone agrees it sucks), but because soccer is, by far, the most popular sport in the world.

The World Cup is not only the biggest sporting event on the planet, IT IS THE BIGGEST EVENT, end of story.  FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, estimates the viewership of the 2006 World Cup final at 715 million viewers.  Despite this kind of worldwide interest in the sport, the average American is barely aware of the World Cup and is still saying things like, “If they got rid of the goal keepers I might watch it.”  The reasons for this kind of unawareness are complex.  Access is one of them. Twenty years ago, following major European games basically required learning a second language and hunting around for obscure international newspapers.  Even today, coverage of world soccer on American sports websites is thin.  But the problem is not just access.  You also have cultural crusaders in what How Soccer Explains the World‘s Franklin Foer calls the “anti-soccer lobby”.

Says Foer: “There exists an important cleavage between the parts of the country that have adopted soccer as its pastime and the places that haven’t.  And this distinction lays bare an underrated source of American cultural cleavage: globalization.”   The message is clear: parts of the country – the blue parts on the electoral map – tend to be more susceptible to globalization and are therefore more interested in a global phenomenon like soccer. The red states cling to guns and religion and baseball and shun outside influences like soccer. Zeroing in on the anti-soccer lobby, Foer sums up the haters’ sentiment as he quotes USA Today’s Tom Weir: “Hating soccer is more American than apple pie, driving a pickup, or spending Saturday afternoons channel surfing with the remote control.”

Foer quotes prominent American conservative, former Buffalo Bills quarterback Jack Kemp who, in 1986 said the following on the floor of Congress: “I think it is important for all those young out there, who someday hope to play real football, where you throw it”; that “a distinction should be made that football is democratic, capitalism, whereas soccer is a European socialist (sport).”  It seems that wild claims on the Congressional floor about creeping socialism never go out of style.

Foer also quotes radio shock jock Jim Rome who raved, “My son is not playing soccer.  I will hand him ice skates and a shimmering sequined blouse before I hand him a soccer ball.”  With this kind of rabid and fundamentally maddening reasoning adding to the national conversation, it is no wonder that many stay away from soccer.

Max Bergmann for the Huffington Post: “What is so bizarre about this is how much the neocons sound like American-hating Europeans. Both dismiss American talent, American enthusiasm for soccer, and American understanding of the game. Just as neocons — and other soccer-hating sports writers of my parents generation — insist that we don’t get soccer and don’t care, European soccer writers are right there with them saying that Americans don’t get it and don’t care.”

David Winner, author of Brilliant Orange / The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Soccer, claims that American soccer fans  “tend to lean liberal”  like Holland’s national team because they are “predisposed to liking the country itself”.  He then waxes lyrical about how Holland “represents the best that bourgeois society has to offer: a genuine liberal spirit, the epitome of a certain idea of civilization.”

Soccer Against the Enemy’s Simon Kuper writes, “The game remains too good a way of understanding the world to discard.”  “In the States, being a New Fan is often a mark of being a cosmopolitan.  Soccer’s advance in the country is an idex of how American daily life is globalizing.  The two groups of Americans who are probably keenest on the game – immigrants and their direct descendants on the one hand, and the highly educated on the other – are precisely the most globalized Americans.” (He includes Obama, “the alleged West Ham fan… son of a U.S. born mother and immigrant father,” in this cross-section of America).

In The Ball is Round / A Global History of Soccer, David Goldblatt quotes British historian Eric Hobsbawm who wrote, “The twentieth century was the American century in every way but one: sport.”  Goldblatt says, “This is not exactly news to anyone, but it remains an extraordinary and under-explored anomaly; an almost unique reversal of the dominant patterns of global influence and power.”

So what should the future hold for America and soccer?  Will we continue to see the cultural cleavage grow as it is pushed up by soccer, or are there other options?  As a Swede I’ve had to nurse my own disappointment at not having Sweden qualify for this summer’s World Cup with the hope that the US will go far instead.  The US advanced to the quarter finals in what many considered the coming of age of the US team at the 2002 World Cup.  Americans that had previously not paid attention to soccer learned that the US could not only compete in the sport, but that it had a chance of dominating.   Although the 2006 World Cup was a disappointment, continued American successes, along with the forces of globalization will hopefully result in a burqa being tossed over our supple cleavage.  America has always enjoyed a new frontier to conquer.  Why not soccer?

“Soccer’s mission in the United States is not, I think, to supplement or challenge American football, baseball or basketball, but to offer a conduit to the rest of the world; a sporting antidote to the excesses of isolationism, a prism for understanding the world that the United States may currently shape but will increasingly be shaped by.”  (Goldblatt )

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Bjorn Karlman