At the end of each month here on the Big Something we’ll be bringing you a playlist compiled by our trusty in-house and volunteer DJs. If there’s a song you like or a DJ you trust, please dowload the song and KRCC will get a small portion of the proceeds! Enjoy.

Your Friend and Neighbor Vicky (Morning Music Mix):

My choice would be “Dirty Thirty (featuring Peter Hook)” from The Crystal Method’s Divided By Night. The reason I love Dirty Thirty by the Crystal Method is that it is a total rush of Joy Division/New Order mixed with roll down the car windows, crank it up, and drive…(been missing that lately)
Buy “Dirty Thirty”

General Manager, Delaney Utterback:

“Velvet” by the Big Pink. New release on 4AD. Leave it to 4AD to do emo, and make it sound good. Plus, one of the band members is a dead-ringer for Mark E. Smith from the Fall, pre-structural collapse.

Buy “Velvet”

Jeff Bieri (Blue Plate Special and Afternoon Music Mix):

Neko Case’s “Middle Cyclone” – the title track to her new release on Anti Records…. a song about vulnerability – something that I, as a modern American male, often am….”
Buy “Middle Cyclone”

Jen Newman (Brickhouse, Monday Nights from 8 to 10 p.m.):


Royksopp’s “Vision One” taken from their new album Junior. It’s bouncy and dreamy and samples Stevie Wonder’s “Too High” off Innervisions. Another perfect song from these guys.
Buy “Vision One”

Jeanette Hohman (Surround Sounds, Thursdays from 10 p.m. to Midnight):

My favorite song right now is “Nothing to Worry About” by Swedish trio Peter Bjorn and John. The song opens enthusiastically with a sing-songy choir of little kids and maintains this amazing energy throughout. It’s so fun to start a set of music with this song and see where it takes me!
Buy “Nothing to Worry About”

Steve Harris (Grass Roots Revival, Wednesdays from 8 to 10 p.m.):

“South Carolina Blues” by Junior League Band on Mitchell Williams Fo Govena. Not your typical bluegrass, this blues-infused track features strong vocals and banjo from bandleader Lissy Rosemont is sure to please all fans of Americana music.
Buy “South Carolina Blues”

Eric Cole (In The Groove, Tuesdays from 8 to 10 p.m.):

Derek Trucks “Sweet Inspiration” off their new album “Already Free.”
Buy “Sweet Inspiration”

Matthew Stevens (Brickhouse, Mondays from 8 to10 p.m.):

Nat King Cole – Day In Day Out (Cut Chemist Mix)
Buy “Day In Day Out”

Kelly (Tuesday nights from 10 p.m. to Midnight):

My song of the month is U2’s “No Line On The Horizon,” the title track to the new album. It’s got a great feel to it, reminds me a bit of old U2 mixed with the sound of the last few albums. Great track!
Buy “No Line On The Horizon”

Jennifer Nassimbene (Right Side of My Mind, Late Monday/Early Sunday Midnight to 2 a.m):

“Mantis” by Psychic Ills off Mirror Eye (NY, 2009). Parsons Sound meets primitive Ash Ra Tempel. A good marriage of space rock, tribal drums, and eastern scales.
Buy “Mantis”

GT (Vintage Voltage, Saturdays from 8 to 10 p.m.):

‘Twould have to be Paul Revere and the Raiders’ (known simply and hip-ly enuff at the time, 1970, as “The Raiders”) “Gone Movin’ On”, a rarely heard, transitional (from their older garage-y style, to something slightly more “70’s” in ‘tude and production) single. It should still be available on a fairly comprehensive comp entitled “The Legend of Paul Revere”.
Buy “Gone Movin’ On”

Possibly the most photographed spot in the entire Garden of the Gods, Balanced Rock’s place as a backdrop in tourist photographs for more than a hundred years gives it a status worthy of “the most photographed barn in America” from Don DeLillo’s satirical novel White Noise: “No one sees the barn. Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”

Who among us hasn’t had our photograph taken with Balanced Rock, pretending to prop it or topple it? Who among us hasn’t spent more time looking at the camera that’s photographing us against it than the rock itself? Perhaps the photographs, past and present, are the best evidence that there is no “one” balanced rock. In fact, we believe that the two slide shows below will attest to the terrifying possibility that some Behemoth or Wooly Golem replaces Balanced Rock each night with a Balanced Rock that looks just similar enough to pass for all other Balanced Rocks.

Regardless, these images are but few of what must be millions of images and digital copies that testify to the fascination that Balanced Rock continues to hold for us no matter how many times we pose in front of it.

Let’s start with the past and Matt Mayberry of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum:

Says Mayberry, Director of the Pioneers Museum:

The Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum has an outstanding collection of historic photographs—some 80,000 images in our collection. One of the great series of images in that collection come from Balanced Rock at Garden of the Gods. An exhibit that I’ve always thought about doing, and now will have a chance to do virtually, is to show how beloved Garden of the Gods, and Balanced Rock in particular, have been by tourists coming through and by photographers. Because of the way the road is up there now, it almost requires you take it from one specific location because of the parking lot and the roadway. But this reminds you that there were many different ways to get to Balanced Rock and the park wasn’t as carefully defined in terms of trails as it is today.

The next slideshow is culled from various places on the web as a sampling of the present. Though Sombreros and Burros have given way to track suits and Big Gulps, there is something equally essential about Balanced Rock’s status as evidence. “I’ve been here!” the photos still say. And somehow it’s reassuring.

The Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum is gladly accepting donations of Balanced Rock photographs from any era up to and including the present! Please contact them through their website HERE

(We always appreciate your comments below. If you have tips for other Big Somethings, please email us at thebigsomething@krcc.org. Thanks!)

OK, I suck at baking, am cheap, lazy, dumb and live at an altitude that I’m sure would make it almost impossible to bake anything if I ever bothered to try. That said, even I am capable of making this perfect, beautiful, moist, delicious, yeasty bread (with apologies to the enemies of gluten). It’s so good that you would think that I have magical powers. It’s like a party trick. Yes you, too, can wow your friends with hot and delicious bread.

First off, I did not invent this bread. My wife and I found out about it from Ele Annand’s blog GoAwayWinter.com. She found out about it from the The New York Times, which adapted it from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day: The Discovery That Revolutionizes Home Baking. Which is all to say that we didn’t invent it. That said, I’ve now shared this bread with enough people to realize that enough people don’t yet know about it. So we’re spreading the gospel. I can’t stop baking it.

Now, this recipe IS adapted to make ONE loaf of bread. You’re obviously more than welcome to follow the the recipe at The New York Times for more loaves and if you DON’T have a covered baking dish. However, we like the one loaf recipe and Ele’s suggestion of using a Dutch Oven (or any other covered baking dish or claypot, which work equally well because they all keep in the moisture).

So here it is:

3 cups of unbleached, organic flour + extra for dusting (approx .85 cents)
1 and 1/4 tsp salt (approx .02 cents)
1/4 tsp yeast (approx .02 cents)
1 and 5/8 cup of water (approx .01 cents).

Mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl then add the water and stir it all together until it’s a lump that looks like this:

Then cover it up, preferably with a wet dish towel over the top. We like to wrap the towel around a plate so it stays fairly moist. Like this:

The reason you do this is to keep the bread from drying out because it’s going to sit for about 8 to 12 hours to rise. That’s right: NO KNEADING!

The second rise is shorter, but equally important. Once the bread has risen and doubled (approximately), dust the top with flour, scrape it from the sides of the bowl and flip it around a couple of times. Then cover it again (remoisten towel if necessary). It’ll look like this:

Then, in an hour or two (preferably two if you want it to be lighter and fluffier), preheat your over to 425 degrees with your well-greased (butter or oil both work) covered baking dish in the oven. Once it’s hot, take the baking dish out, dump the bread in and bake it for 30 minutes and it’ll be perfect. If you time it right and get up early to feed your dog or iguana, you can do the second rise at 6 a.m. and then bake it 8 a.m. for a breakfast treat. Or you can do the second rise when you get home from work and have it hot on the table by 7 p.m. When it’s done it’ll look like this (I swear on unleavened bread—it’s amazing!):

Enjoy! You’ll never buy a $5 loaf of bread again… probably.

For further reading in the kneadless bread genre, you might also check out this excellent book: Kneadlessly Simple: Fabulous, Fuss-Free, No-Knead Breads by Nancy Bagget.

[PRINTABLE VERSION]

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Many things in the Pikes Peak region go unseen, but none more sordid and none more underground than Pixie Jousting.

Music = “Strange Victory, Strange Defeat” by the Silver Jews! (If you buy the song from this link, KRCC gets a portion of the proceeds. Thanks!)

If you don’t mind us saying so, this complete comic book by native Colorado Spring artist Kollin Strand is pretty amazing! (To get the full effect, we recommend viewing it in “full-screen” mode by clicking on the arrows in the lower right hand corner). As Kollin rightly points out below, “COMICS ARE HARD WORK!” The fact that he managed to produce this by himself and to do so with such visual elegance is pretty remarkable. Kollin currently attends the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he produced the comic. Here’s what he has to say for himself:

I am 29 years old and live in Chicago. I attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for painting and drawing and work as a freelance illustrator for anyone that will have me. I spent 21 years in Colorado and was fortunate enough to study under some of the local greats. I think they’re great. Floyd Tunson while he was teaching at Palmer, my oldest brother Kel, and Rob Olson at PPCC were the most influential people in the development of my art practice and philosophy. Actually, I don’t have a specific philosophy regarding art as I am stll deciding what the function of art is. I illustrate, a function that is much easier to define. I am drawn to the grotesque and weird for subject matter, although the “Story of Fire” may not reveal that so much. This is the second full length comic I’ve drawn and consider it to be far more successful than my first attempt. My third comic will be a series of short stories that I am still in the process of fleshing out. I hadn’t realized previous to drawing comics how much work they are and how easy it is to have the crucial elements fail to gel. COMICS ARE HARD WORK. Recently I have attempted to expand beyond this style of drawing with experimentations in automatic drawing, light table collaging, and image manipulation that is for the moment completely non representational. I like to make lines, regardless of what the image ends up being.

You can check out more of Kollin Strand’s drawings at his Flickr page HERE.

Jay Maloney (pictured above) was a SPC-4 Army Medic at the 312th Evac Hospital at Chulai in Vietnam from 1968 to 1969. The things he experienced during his tour nearly crushed his spirit. In this personal essay, originally written nearly 20 years ago, Maloney shares what he learned from those experiences and how the power of forgiveness and the awareness of today can reframe the awfulness of war. Click on the player below to listen, or click HERE to download and read a PDF of the original essay from which this recording was adapted. (Music in the audio-essay is “Southbound to Marion” by The Rachel’s).

Jay Maloney is the chief development officer at Colorado College. He graduated from Colorado College in 1975. Jay has a Purple Heart and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Palm. He is married to Dawn Beattie Maloney, a 1981 CC alumna. Jay and Dawn have two adult daughters, Erin and Caroline.

(Please leave feedback in the comments section below or send us your tips for Big Somethings to thebigsomething@krcc.org!)

(Theodore Kang Eastburn, Iraq 2005, flying in a Black Hawk helicopter.)

No Comfort
Remembering My Son, My Soldier

By Kathryn Eastburn

My son Ted was a soldier.

He was a brother, a son, a cousin, a nephew, and a grandson. He was a fisherman, a movie aficionado, an emergency medical technician, a practical joker, and a loyal friend. But foremost, he was a soldier.

It is sometimes hard for me to understand how or from where Ted’s military mindset evolved, given that he grew up in a non-military family with few apparent military influences. It seemed inborn, as inevitable as breathing.

He was born in Korea and adopted at seven months. His first American home was a small cottage in Colorado Springs across the street from a brick firehouse. He loved sitting in the small square patch of grass beyond the front porch, listening as the fire alarm split the air, watching as the shiny red truck backed into the street, and shrieking as the massive engine offended the peace of a quiet afternoon with its deafening diesel roar and window-rattling siren.

His first word was fire truck (pronounced “pie-tuck”).

Teddy was a Lego master, constructing elaborate helicopters (“hockingtockers”) and tanks. In one of my favorite photos, taken when he was around age four, he proudly holds up to his father’s camera a fighter jet, constructed completely of cardboard. As he grew older, he played fireman, policeman, and finally and forever, soldier. He camped out in pup tents, perched a green beret atop his round head, ate MRI’s, and conjured imaginary enemies.

By middle school, his play had become a lifestyle. He shopped for clothes at the Army Surplus Store. He wore polished black combat boots. We lived then in a rambling old four-square Victorian with rooms on three floors, and when Ted moved his bedroom to the third floor, he set up an Army cot camouflaged by netting in a narrow V-shaped dormer. He slept there, surrounded by scratchy military issue wool blankets, for years.

Finally, at age 17, at the end of his junior year in high school, Ted enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserves. I found no small amount of irony in the fact that he had to have a parental permission slip to do that. He attended basic training, finished high school, continued to train with his unit, and was deployed to Iraq. When he returned, he completed advanced training, switched units, and began to prepare for deployment to Afghanistan. But before he deployed for the second time, at age 22, he killed himself. A gunshot to the head.

I cannot write or say those words without a storm rumbling in my brain, a whirlwind of grief, sorrow, anger, guilt, and confusion. It has been nearly two years since Teddy left us, and the storm has not abated. We miss him more, not less, as Memorial Day approaches, as we face the second anniversary of his death, and what would have been his 25th birthday in September.

Ted was given full military honors at his memorial service. His buddies dressed him in uniform and guarded his body at the funeral home, then escorted him to the crematorium. On a stunningly bright and beautiful summer afternoon in Colorado, they stood at attention, their guns pointed skyward. His commanding officers praised his service. His commander commented: “Make no mistake. Ted Eastburn was a casualty of this war.” On the day of his memorial, he was promoted to corporal.

Our family banded together and faced the rest of our lives without him. We have held each other close and have tried to find ways to remember Teddy that do not hurt us more than we already hurt. I left Colorado and sought comfort near family in Galveston, Texas where Teddy grew up fishing with his cousin in the warm Gulf Coast waters.

There has been no comfort in reading and hearing about the rise in suicides among soldiers this year and every year since the U.S. invaded Iraq.

Army figures show that 2,100 soldiers attempted suicide in 2007, the year that my son succeeded. CBS News, with the aid of a detailed analysis by an epidemiologist, reports that veterans aged 20 to 24 who have served in the war on terror had the highest suicide rate among all veterans, and a rate estimated some two to four times higher than civilians from the same age group. Everyone agrees that the number of suicides among American soldiers has been dramatically on the rise over the past five years.

In recent months, top ranking military brass have addressed the urgency of the problem. Major General Mark Graham of Fort Carson has spoken openly about the deaths of his two sons — one an ROTC cadet by suicide in 2003, and one by an improvised explosive device in Iraq in 2004. “Both of my sons died fighting different battles,” said Graham.

Early intervention, better mental health care, and erasure of the stigma attached to needing help in the “can do” environment of the military have been topics widely discussed. The Army’s highest ranking psychiatrist, Brigadier General Dr. Loree K. Sutton, has urged that “seeking help is a sign of profound courage and strength.”

“Truly,” said Sutton, addressing a 2009 suicide prevention conference, “psychological and spiritual health are just as important for readiness as one’s physical health.”

This enlightened attitude and open communication is heartening, but it does not ease the knowledge that my son returned from Iraq and filled out a multiple-choice questionnaire aimed at measuring his psychological health. To every question he answered affirmatively that he was suffering no after effects. When we asked him he told us he was fine, though we could see from his sleep patterns and the level of suppressed rage he carried around that he was not. I suggested, as did his father, that he might see a therapist for what we perceived as depression. He couldn’t do that, he told us, because it would negatively impact his career.

So where does a parent, a wife, a brother, a sister, a loved one of a soldier who has committed suicide in the line of duty find comfort on Memorial Day?

There is no comfort in the fact of my son’s permanent absence or in the memory of the horrible way he died. But I find solace in remembering his dedication to being a soldier. I understand now that he truly wanted to be part of something larger than himself, and that he achieved that goal. I treasure the fact that he loved his country and that he was brave and daring and courageous. I will love forever his steadfastness and his unwavering devotion to his buddies.

I always tell my creative writing students that there are some things we are just not ready to write about, and Teddy’s death has been one of those subjects for me. His death has been the single most present determining factor in my life since the end of July 2007, and I have not yet digested it or synthesized it into anything I feel capable of expressing.

But when I began thinking of writing this piece, a remembrance for Memorial Day, I was blessed with dreams of Teddy. He rarely appears to me in dreams, but when he does it is as if I have been touched by a magical hand. I hold my breath and wake up trying to hold on to the dream.

In this dream, he appears at the kitchen counter. He is around age twelve. He is studying a map, his long fingers tracing lines on its surface. He wears a brown cotton T-shirt and military camo pants. The toes of his black combat boots are spit-shined. Atop his head, against his shiny black hair, a green beret is perched, tilted slightly to the side. He looks up, and then he is gone.

Kathryn Eastburn, formerly editor of the Colorado Springs Independent, is a freelance author, journalist, and teacher. Her books are Simon Says: A True Story of Boys, Guns and Murder (Da Capo Press, 2007) and A Sacred Feast: Reflections on Sacred Harp Singing and Dinner on the Ground (University of Nebraska Press, 2008). Her work has appeared in numerous regional and national publications, and she is a visiting professor at The Colorado College. She resides in Texas.