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In the Mix

The G Shot

Exercise Guru Greg “Vitamin G” Flenoy Takes a Natural Approach to Fitness

    Oakland’s Greg Flenoy is a 60-year-old fitness wizard whose magical elixir comes packaged as exercise. He performs his alchemy with a unique system he has been evolving for close on 50 years—ever since the day he molded hand weights from the red clay of the dirt road that fronted the small east Texas house he grew up in. In his affable, encouraging way, leading by example, the super-fit fitness mentor with the silver-grey dreadlock braid and the white beard has helped innumerable men and women muscle up, get stronger, sometimes slimmer and, if you believe him, more youthful. (“You’re getting older, but you’re also getting younger,” he is fond of saying to his more mature female students as they grow healthier and more toned.)
    Called “Vitamin G” by some people for the energy boost he gives them, and “Master G” by others who see him as their body-mind guru, he has worked out with “probably 30,000, but I’ll say 15,000” people since he completed a four-year U.S. Navy stint in 1969 and started using the Cleveland Cascade on the east side of Lake Merritt as his sparring/workout base.
    His training is grounded in capoeira, the Afro-Brazilian martial arts practice, and a lifetime spent exploring different forms of exercise. He uses the ground, what’s available in nature, sometimes boxing gloves and, at the Cascade, often the stairs.
    Possibly the greatest gift Flenoy received was when his older brother refused, on returning from Army duty with money in his pocket, to buy the then-young teenager the work-out weights he wanted. “My brother said, ‘Use your own body weight,’ and showed me how; incorporating nature—tree limbs for bars, for example, and the ground for resistance.”
    This now plays out at the Cascade where Flenoy has students use the stairs to walk up and down backward, forward, sideways—sometimes upside down—on hands and feet. He is all about balance and flow, calmness and strength, exertion and relaxation, strength and flexibility; and everything is grounded in wisdom and logic. For example, “a lot of my exercises involve touching the ground because being inverted helps the nervous system and expands the blood vessels. You know how some people bend down and then get dizzy when they stand up? These exercises prevent that.”
    Flenoy has been known to do nonstop sequences of 1,000 cartwheels—a cartwheel is called an aú in capoeira lingo—and regularly does 200 on the flat area near the base of the Cascade. “Quintessence capoeira is when you’re not anticipating, not planning, and going with the flow. Capoeira represents life,” he says sagely as he teaches yet another student to start off low to the ground, right foot, right hand, left hand, left foot, introducing the basic moves.
    One gets the sense that had Flenoy been able to forge marketing magic from the clay of his childhood, he would be franchising his forms and techniques. He gets students by word of mouth—people who find him. Yet he has devised a safety program for exiting high-rise buildings and a work-out routine for the military; he is an elixir of youth for seniors, a miracle waiting to happen for the out of shape—the magical force of the Cleveland Cascade.
    Contact Greg Flenoy by e-mail at kandgtbs2@msn.com.

OAKLAND MADE

MerryMakers

The Fart Heard Round the World

    In her Grand Avenue office, Clair Frederick sits surrounded by boxes filled with popular children’s book characters—Captain Underpants, Olivia (the piglet), Walter the Farting Dog. Frederick’s Oakland-based company, MerryMakers, has transformed approximately three dozen storybook characters into three-dimensional plush toys and has custom-designed toys for museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and historical sites such as Colonial Williamsburg. The Louvre in Paris recently wanted a small Napoleon doll it could sell in its gift shop, Frederick says, holding up a plush version of the diminutive general.
    According to Frederick, a 46-year-old mother of two who founded the six-person company in 1993, Walter the Farting Dog doll has turned into one of MerryMakers’ biggest sellers. She picks up the doll and gives it a little squeeze, causing it to emit a tooting noise. An electric sound chip inside the stuffed toy makes the dog fart, she explains. Other popular products include plush versions of Skippyjon Jones the hyperactive kitten and Junie B. Jones the kindergartner.
    Frederick works closely with publishers to identify, develop and market the dolls. After obtaining the licensing rights, she uses freelancers trained in textile and industrial design to make a sample doll, which is then tweaked with the author’s input. Once the sample is finalized, the dolls are mass-manufactured in China. Most of the dolls are about 8 inches in length. Frederick prefers to keep them on the small side so that they don’t overshadow the book, which is paramount, she says. To keep the focus on books and the importance of reading, she avoids licensing characters that are on television.
    Wiggling a monkey puppet with one finger, Frederick stresses that the dolls, which are safe for all ages, should be played with, not collected.
    MerryMakers dolls are sold in gift, book and toy stores and catalogs. Most retail for about $14. For more information, visit www.merrymakersinc.com.                 

IN THE SCENE

That Floating Feeling

    “When you get here you’ll shower and shampoo; then you’ll float like a cork for an hour; then you’ll shower and shampoo again to get the salt off.” And no, I didn’t need a swimsuit. “Just bring a brush or a comb. Everything else is here.”
    Prepping me for what used to be called a sensory deprivation experience when I was a psych student in the ’70s was Allison Walton, the managing partner at Float, a “flotation center” and art gallery that she and her partner, Filomena Serpa, call an urban art spa.
    The gallery showcases Oakland artists. Exhibitions change monthly, and the setting provides a relaxed, colorful, artsy atmosphere for the floatation-tank therapy sessions they offer. Research suggests that floating reduces blood pressure, relieves stress and tension, promotes circulation, stimulates creativity and a whole lot more. “It helps with jetlag and hangovers,” Walton adds, citing personal experience.
    Stepping into the body-temperature water in which 1,000 pounds of Epsom salts have been dissolved—to keep one buoyant, remove toxins, facilitate relaxation and more—and wearing nothing but the yellow earplugs floaters are given to keep the ears dry, I wondered what to expect. I closed myself in, as instructed, lay down in the 10.5-inch-deep water—and immediately popped to the surface, as Walton had said I would. She has floated for years for stress management. When traveling in London and Europe, she’d see many places to float. But in the United States, they were difficult to find. In the 18 months since they opened Float, they’ve noticed the resurgence of a trend.
    And what better way to duck off and get instant relief from sensory overload? I quickly felt remarkably “held” and able to relax, alone with myself in the silence and the pitch dark, doing “the lazy person’s yoga,” as Walton called it later. When I left, my senses were alert. The traffic noises seemed magnified. Later, at the Alameda Library, the sound of a woman snoring and teenagers talking—usually distractions and annoyances—made me smile. Someone must have pulled my cork—or was I still floating? A week later my upper back tension had not returned, but I knew I would.
    Float Floatation Center – Art Gallery, by appointment 10 a.m.–10 p.m. Tue.–Sat., 1091 Calcot Place, No. 116, (510) 535-1702, www.thefloatcenter.com.

ABOUT A MINDFULNESS TEACHER

Richard Shankman: Minding the Moment

    The bell rings and children file excitedly into the classroom. As the lesson progresses, some kids tune out. Others squirm in their seats. But at Park Day School in Oakland and a handful of other local schools, the youngsters are learning how to focus with a technique called mindfulness.
    Oakland meditator Richard Shankman started teaching this skill to California prison inmates in the 1970s and feels anyone can learn to quiet the mind and body. “Everyone can learn to pay attention to what’s going on within them and open their hearts to what’s going on with others,” he says.
    Working with adults gave Shankman the idea to bring mindfulness to children, whose mental patterns haven’t been set so deeply. “It’s good to give them the tools in their formative years,” he says. “We may start out, especially with little ones, with a bell we ring. We’ll have the kids do nothing but pay attention to the bell.” Shankman says the next step is to have them pay attention to their breathing, then share examples of when staying calm might be useful in their lives. “In the advanced classes we become aware of how our emotions affect
our bodies.”
    If mindfulness sounds like meditation, Shankman notes it’s not a religious thing—just a way to learn some important life skills. And the kids say it’s working. “When my sister gets on my nerves,” one Emerson Elementary School third grader shared in his journal, “I tell her to leave me alone so I can take a deep breath.” Armed with this kind of feedback, Shankman hopes the technique will eventually be taught in every school in America. “Right now we’re just focusing on a few schools and trying to do it right,” he says calmly.    

Superficial Beauty

Oakland Couple David Gans and Rita Hurault Bring Watery Harmonies to Light

    Something about the elusive, ever-shifting play of light on water has long inspired poets, artists and musicians. The Grateful Dead sang about a “ripple in still water,” and water’s surface is the subject of a joint photo exhibit at north Oakland’s Nomad Café by Grateful Dead book author and radio host David Gans and his wife Rita Hurault. Although Gans occasionally performs as a singer-songwriter at the Nomad, it was a coincidence that cafe owner Chris Waters found Gans’ photos on flickr (www.flickr.com/photos/dgans) and asked him and Hurault to display their water photos at the cafe.
    Gans shot his photos with a digital camera during a visit to Hawaii, then manipulated them with Photoshop. Hurault, a teacher at San Francisco’s Tule Elk Park Child Development Center, took her photos on various Sierra backpacking trips; she also shot digital, but left them unaltered. “I’m all digital at this point,” says Hurault. “I miss the darkroom, the struggle to find the right shot that captures the way you saw the light and shadow in that canyon. But I don’t miss the chemicals.”
    In the 1980s, Gans took photos to accompany his work as a freelance music journalist. Writing and photography fell off over the past decade because his nationally syndicated radio show, “The Grateful Dead Hour” (www.gdhour.com), his Wednesday night program on Berkeley’s KPFA-FM, 94.1, “Dead to the World,” and his role as recording artist and touring troubadour take up so much time. Of his return to photography and his debut showing, Gans quips, “I’ve had so many careers that I didn’t make a living at, I don’t expect that I’ll become a world-renowned nature photographer and have to give up my life as a musician.”
    Recently, Gans and Hurault wrote their first song together, “The Bounty of the County.” “That was a fall song, harvest time,” he says. “Now we’re working on a spring song about vegetables.” Vegetables, especially those at the Grand Lake Farmers Market near their Haddon Hill home, is another subject he loves to shoot. “You just look through the viewfinder and you see these amazing, mutant twin tomatoes, and potatoes in all strange shapes!” But no ripples.
    See Gans and Huault’s exhibit, Personalizing the Universal and Universalizing the Personal, Jan. 2–31 at Nomad Café, 6500 Shattuck Ave. (510) 595-5344, www.nomadcafe.net.

Homework for Happiness

New Harbinger Puts a Positive Spin on Self-Help Books

    When psychologist Matthew McKay and writer Patrick Fanning founded Oakland-based New Harbinger Publications in 1973, the self-help genre was itself in need of a little help. “There’d be 15 chapters on how awful a problem was and then one chapter with a few aphoristic suggestions about what to do,” McKay says of the “ain’t it awful” message that dominated pop psychology books a generation ago. “You were inspired to change but given no tools.”
    McKay and Fanning pioneered a new model of self-help book that strives to be more empowering and practical than victimizing and vague. Although New Harbinger titles read like lead-ins to Woody Allen one-liners—10 Simple Solutions to Panic, The Depression Workbook, Loving Someone with Bipolar Disorder, Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding—the books provide step-by-step guidelines, in simple yet scientifically based prose, that regular people can follow to deal with fear and self-loathing and achieve lasting change.
    Intended mainly as do-it-yourself “bibliotherapy,” New Harbinger books (published at a rate of about 50 per year out of the Shattuck Avenue home base) are nonetheless used by mental-health professionals as adjuncts to their clinical work, sort of like homework for happiness.
    McKay, co-author of top sellers such as The Relaxation & Stress Reduction Workbook and When Anger Hurts, is attuned to criticism that the product-and-personality-driven, $8 billion-a-year self-help industry does more harm than good overall. “The industry invents—or at least comes up with new descriptions of—problems and then says, ‘Here, by the way, is the answer to the problem we’ve made you aware of and perhaps even invented,’ ” he says. “But that’s not responsible self-help.” New Harbinger (www.newharbinger.com) is different, he explains, because “we’re not interested in fad problems. … We focus on things that are real, defined areas of struggle for people and for which there are scientifically proven treatments.”
    Even with the best self-help book in hand, however, some people inevitably will resist change or revert to old ways. “The biggest problem is fear,” says McKay. “Anytime you’re going to make a change in your life, it means stopping old coping strategies … and almost by definition, you’re going to have to encounter psychological monsters.”
    For repeat customers—er, make that imperfect individuals or struggling seekers—there’s surely another book in the catalog that’s sure to help.

Music to the People

    Angela Wellman doesn’t prac­tice trombone as much as she’d like these days. Her role as founder and dean of the Oakland Public Conservatory of Music eats up her time. Founded with the intention to “open the world of music to all through access to quality instruction in a nurturing environment” and “provide economical study in a variety of musical arts,” OPCM (www.opcmusic.org) offers an array of classes for all ages, from beginning guitar for kids to Zimbabwean marimba and Irish song. The faculty includes such esteemed Bay Area musicians as Bill Bell (piano), India Cooke (violin), Babatunde Lea (drums, percussion), Avotcja (spoken word) and Ron Stallings (saxophone).
    Wellman grew up in a family of musicians in Kansas City, Mo., and has been playing trombone ever since. When her uncle died, she inherited his collection of his good friend Count Basie’s band charts and makes use of them today in her 17-piece Count Basie Tribute Orchestara. But OPCM “isn’t about jazz,” Wellman says. “It’s about music, from Mozart to Basie to Irish folk music. I hope to someday have a place where we can rewrite American music history. Blues, jazz, R&B, even reggae, they’re all part of American music now, and they wouldn’t exist without the African experience here. Most conservatories don’t just leave out the African-American side; they are Eurocentric and leave out the American side.”
    OPCM began to take shape in 2004 when Wellman met Regina Schaeffer, who shared the dream and had access to seed money. They found an ample, 4,400-square-foot space with soaring 30-foot ceilings at 1616 Franklin St., and opened the school in October 2005, initially offering private instruction, and adding community classes in January 2006.
    Wellman is already looking beyond OPCM to starting a sister school in Kansas City, and then others. “It’s what the creator intended for me to do with my life,” she says. “As I look back now that I’m 51, I see everything I’ve done is toward this public music conservatory movement.”

DIALOGUES

Brahm Ahmadi: Populist Farmer

    Brahm Ahmadi is the last guy you’d figure for a farmer. But the West Oakland activist runs a 2-acre spread in Sunol, with disadvantaged youth as his farmhands. The Ag Park is just part of Ahmadi’s plan to promote healthy eating in the hood with school gardens, community cooking classes and easier access to fresh food. As executive director of the nonprofit People’s Grocery, he’s also on track to open a full service, cooperative grocery store by the end of 2008.

This passion for fresh food—does it go back to your childhood? 
    I grew up in the east part of L.A. in somewhat of a low-income community, predominantly Latino. We didn’t have grocery stores nearby. I do remember the time and effort it took my family and my mother in particular to do shopping—and we had a vehicle.

How hard is it to sell investors on your concept of an inner-city market?
    There’s a prejudice and a presumption that these communities do not have spending power. It’s very surprising when you meet with executives from large supermarket corporations, the sort of antiquated misinformation that they have about these communities. The reality is that they’re changing quite dramatically. This community’s [West Oakland] household income has grown by 22 percent in the last five years, and the population has increased by 40 percent in the last 10 years.

How do you find the youth to work in the Ag Park?
    We recruit directly through the community. This is a community where youth are totally unemployed and have very little to no opportunities at all, so we’re inundated with applications. This year we had funding for eight positions and we had over 60 applications.

Any success stories?
    We’ve got one kid going to UC Davis right now with a double major in agroecology and economic development. Charletta Harris started with us when she was 16. She was very motivated and outspoken—one of the more spunky ones.

Paying kids to grow vegetables is one thing. How do you get a whole generation to start eating them in a pop culture where fast food rules?
    It’s using the tools that they are already engaging in, be it entertainment, hip-hop, rap, MySpace, text messaging. Those kinds of things are ways these young people interact all the time and generally where they find their role models.

So getting a rapper to rhyme about organic spinach might be the ticket?
    The irony is that there are actually a number of rappers who have sort of a gangster profile and brand, and behind the scenes they’re actually completely different. 50 Cent, for example, is a big gangster rapper and he’s like an organic and local food nut—secretly. He likes fresh fruit from the farmers markets.