Naked Baby Mice

"A guy walks into a bar..."

2008-05-27T10:44:00.005-04:00

...but not for a beer. He's looking for a piece of pie. It's been a long night, he's had enough beer for the week, and all he wants is a good piece of pie. There's a sandwichboard outside the establishment listing the edible fare, and at the bottom of the blackboard is a crude triangular drawing of a slice of steaming pie, chalk squiggles off the top denoting the steam from chalk hashes advertising a latticed crust. He sits down at a table in the dark, brickwalled room, waiting for the lone waitress in the joint to register his presence. There is one other customer at the only other table, a swarthy, bearded man in a filthy brown caftan and torn cutoffs, hunched over the beer he's nursing in a solitary corner across the empty room. After a minute or two of Tom Waits singing of a bad night in Copenhagen, the jukebox clicks and shuffles to the next record. Only then does the waitress open her eyes, revived from her reverie. She extinguishes her cigarette, burnt to the filter and no longer smoking, and walks our boy's way.

"One slice of pie, please."

"What kindja want? We got bloobry, strawbry, apple and chess."

"Blueberry, please. Thanks."

The waitress registers his order without expression, turns on her flat heel, heads to the kitchen from whence comes the violent sound of shouting in languages known to no natives of the region. She returns a moment later, one male voice still grumbling in the kitchen, one slice of steaming blueberry pie on a cracked plate held between her nicotine-stained fingers. She places it in front of our boy and he closes his eyes, fork in hand, savoring for a brief moment the tang of steaming berry coming from his plate, the homey smell of fresh crust made with lard, the welcome, oppressive smolder of the sugar burnt atop the bluechecked lattice.

When our boy opens his eyes, the swarthy man has left his beer across the room and is sitting across the table, an appraising look on his face. "So you've come for the pie, y'have." Our boy doesn't know if this is a question or the end result of the appraising look on the man's face. He nods assent, but before he can reply in the affirmative the swarthy man cuts him off: "They've a good bloobry pie here, lad, but there's far better where I've been."

The smells of pie have colonized our boy's stomach by this point, encouraging the rebel glands at the core of his being to begin digesting naked aroma in anticipation of the real thing. Still he waits, intrigued by the stranger across his table. "And where is this better pie," he asks.

"Not just pie, lad. Bloobry pie, mind. And it's a far way from here, a far way and a dangerous journey." There is a pause, another appraising glare, and only after a disconcerting stare directly into our boy's eyes does the swarthy man continue. "But you don't look the sort who cares for a better pie. Nah," he says with a squint, "you've the look of a dilettante about yeh."

Vaguely offended, still hungry, our boy ignores his fast-cooling pie and bites instead at the line offered him. "I don't know what I've the look of, sir, but I enjoy a slice of blueberry pie as much as the next guy."

The wiresparks from a tram passing outside light the swarthy man's face with a flicker of yellow-white light that delineates a host of scars about his eyes, one milky, dead, the other glistening with beer or intent. "That may be, son, but do you love a slice of bloobry pie more than the next man, or more than the next hundred, thousand, million souls who've gone in search of it? And failed?" A thunderclap provides punctuation for the stranger's next words, "And died?"

Just as curiousity can lead a man to try any sort of offal on a menu, so can it lead a man to forget the beautiful food in front of him as he eyes the scarred stranger who only now breaks into a smile, showing two pink rows of gum where his teeth once lived, upon a time, long ago. "Yeah," says our boy. "I love blueberry pie. Where should I go that's not this heap?"

"Well, lad, allow me to tell you..."

Forty minutes later our boy emerges back into the sodium glare of the streetlamps, raises his collar against the cold, stuffs his hands in his empty coat pockets, looks both ways up and down the empty cobbled street, and begins walking east. In the bar, at his table, a swarthy, half-blind stranger cackles over a cold slice of blueberry pie, taking another bite and laughing open-mouthed, his head thrown back, his naked gums painted purple with fruit.

Two days later our boy is aboard a cargo plane, in the hold, hanging onto the buckle at the end of a canvas strap and trying desperately not to vomit. His face white with exertion and green with the effects of the storm raging outside at 30,000 feet, he calms himself with the image of perfect serenity that is the Perfect Slice Of Blueberry Pie. Suddenly the pilot, parachute already on his back, lurches out of the cockpit into the juddering fuselage, shouts an inaudible farewell and opens the hatch leading outside, jumping into the blackness. Every piece of paper, every hair on our boy's head, indeed the very legs on which he stands, rush toward the open door. The engines whine and fail, the deafening suck of the vacuum wrapping our boy in its velvety omnipresence as the plane begins its nosedive, falling from the sky just as quickly as one would expect of an overloaded cargo plane, but with the silent grace--when viewed from a distance--of a ski jumper returning to earth along his ballistic path.

Swimming clear of the flaming, sizzling wreckage, having miraculously survived, our boy paddles the entire night, treading water, thrashing against the bumping, nibbling jaws of unseen fish stirred from the deep by the crashing plane. As dawn breaks redhot and orangebright over the horizon, he spies the twin smokestacks of an ocean liner puffing closer into view, until the entire horizon is that ship and the men a hundred feet above him are shouting excitedly and pointing in his direction. He blacks out finally, exhausted, as he is pulled to the deck, closing his eyes against the blinding sunlight reflected off his life preserver, whiter than white.

He comes to hours? days? weeks? later to the sound of a klaxon blaring in his tiny metal room. By the only light in the room, a flashing red strobe, he clambers into his pants and through the small metal door, where a stream of small, brown sailors is rushing past him in one direction. He falls in at the end of this line as he feels the boat list to port, finding a new sense of purpose in his legs after he peels himself off the whitewashed wall of the narrow hallway. Arriving on deck, he sees the entire bow engulfed in flames, a company of the small brown sailors attempting to combat the blaze before it reaches the barrels of fuel oil stored just meters away. He is blown clear of the deck when the barrels go off, landing far enough away to watch the boat quickly sinking beneath the midocean swells, the flames onboard extinguished by the onrushing seawater. Finding a man-sized slab of buoyant wreckage nearby, he crawls aboard and promptly returns to the nothingness he had inhabited until only minutes earlier.

Morning. Sand. Sand and ocean. One way our boy looks there's nothing but blue, blue sea. The other, nothing but fiery sand melting into the horizon in great ripples of heat. He thinks for a moment that he might be standing square on the border of heaven and hell, until he notices the bright sky overhead, dotted with birds of prey circling against the sun. Squinting once more toward the horizon, he sees the faint, shimmering outline of a mountain in the far distance. This must be it, he tells himself. And even if it's not, it's somewhere else and I'm still here... He starts to walk inland.

He finds shelter where he can: in the scrawny shadow of a twisted, dead tree; behind a single, house-sized boulder that seems more lost, in all that sand, than he is. Days pass and he finds himself on a vast, dry mudflat, the ground cracked as if it were made of paving stones. The heat is taking its toll. His lips are as parched and cracked as his surroundings, but the mountain is closer than it was yesterday, closer still than the day before, a wavy line of green hills standing between him and salvation. At the end of the next day, delirious with heatstroke, he imagines he's stepping from the cracked flat into a field of waist-high grass. This is it, he tells himself, but hell was back there, so it could be worse... He sinks to slumber in the tall grass, the sky swirling to black overhead.

He awakens to rain pouring down, flattening the grass, wetting his lips and replenishing his spirits. Turning his face to the sky, he opens his mouth and laughs between choking gurgles of pure, fresh rain. Drenched but happy, he charges off at the mountain before him at full speed, guided by the occasional crack of lightning.

Near 2000 meters, the rain turns to snow. The day had broken hours before, but it brought only grey skies, no sun. Advancing upward against the puffy flakes, our boy continues climbing--3000, 4000, 5000--over rocks and crevasses, through snowfield and up jagged ice walls, his destination finally in reach after such a journey, after so many scrapes with death. His feet numb, his teeth chattering, barefoot and half-naked, he stumbles to the threshold of the hut the old stranger had told him about so many weeks ago. Opening the door, he is preceded by a kamikaze windburst of snow rushing toward its death inside the cozy, warm room. A coal fire rages against the cold outside. The wind howls, inflating and deflating the greased-hide windows set into small frames high in the walls. A small, hunched figure steps out from the kitchen, trailing steam and the most inviting aromas our boy has ever experienced. He has a start as he recognizes something in her face, in the way the deep lines in her face converge to highlight one dead, milky eye. But it passes when she smiles, smiles with her whole browned face, the sweetest, only smile he's seen in how long?

"Whatchoo wan'?" she asks our boy, laying her stout, wrinkled hand on his and patting, patting.

"I've t-traveled a long way, ma'am, on the word of a f-friend who told me I might find the best b-blueberry pie in the world right here." He pauses, waiting to see if his words register. "Do you have b-blueberry pie?"

The woman's face maintains its beatific smile as she informs him, "No bloobry. Only goat blood. You wan'?"

"Well," our boy responds. "In that case, just a coffee."

Have Gun, Will Travel.

2008-04-26T04:51:00.006-04:00

I teach the truth to the youth. I say 'Hey youth! Here's the truth:
Better start wearin' bulletproof.' --Ol' Dirty Bastard (RIP)

PART ONE: Yojimbo

Olympos is not a city, not a town, barely a speck on the map, just a bunch of Greek ruins on a pebbly beach. The bus stop is at the top of the mountain road seven clicks up from the valley floor, and you gotta wait for the shuttle van unless you want to hoof it all that way lugging your gear. Once the road flattens out at sea level you drive past dozens of treehouse compounds, guesthouses where the owners, once upon a time, exploited a loophole in the national parks laws that "allowed" them to build structures as long as they weren't anchored directly to terra firma. We piled out of the shuttle and into the closest and busiest of these establishments, already rocking on a Saturday afternoon with a truckload of university students augmenting the sparse traffic before the season here really gets underway. Scoring a room and a few drinks, we ate dinner and talked until late with a couple of professors from the fisheries department at a university in nearby Antalya and bedded down blessedly away from the noise still coming from the party out front.

The next morning was an early rise, the ever-present call to prayer replaced by the cries of the camp's resident peacock and a dozen crowing roosters and barking dogs rolling their respective calls off the high granite canyon walls. We grabbed breakfast and then I lay down for some more shut-eye while D read on the balcony. I rolled over around eleven to shouting from the front and D telling me there was some kind of kerfuffle afoot, that the workmen from the rooming blocks under construction were heading out with 2x4's and lengths of chain, that she was going to check it out. I said "Great, let me know who wins," assuming the uni students were still pissed-up and brawling over who got who's girl the night before. I rolled back over and closed my eyes.

The first gunshot came two minutes later, as D's footsteps clanged back up the metal stairs leading to our room. She opened the door, said "I think somebody's shooting," and stood dumbfounded in the middle of the room, the door unlocked behind her. I finished throwing on my shorts, told her to sit behind the big wooden dresser, locked the door and ran to the window to see what was going on. By this point there had been perhaps four shots spaced irregularly, and with the rocks all around us it was impossible to tell where they were coming from. There were people milling along the walkway leading from the front bar/dining area directly to our building, one guy with a shirt tied around his upper arm, blood dripping from his fingers onto the flagstone path, one girl sobbing hysterically and being led by the shoulders toward the back of the compound. All at once everybody scattered and I could see a man across the rocky riverbed shoulder his weapon, look down the barrel, and fire right at me.

We both felt the concussion of the shot and couldn't tell if our building had been hit, couldn't tell who this guy was aiming for, didn't know what was happening and had no way of finding out. I joined D behind the dresser, crawling on my knees after making sure I had locked the door. At that point we were both in shock, possible scenarios running through our heads. Security footage from Columbine played back before my eyes, dark figures stalking hallways on grainy quarter-inch tape. D and I sat in silence, waiting for the flurry of shots from a different weapon to tell us this siege was over. It never came. The next several shots clarified our situation, that this guy was still working and we needed to get into a room with no windows. "Get in the fucking bathroom," I said to D, "and lock the door." She complied hesitantly, in shock same as myself, and I sat there for a moment, terrified, thinking the most American thought I've had in months:

Why doesn't anyone else here have a gun?

Time passed, don't know how much. About ten shots had been fired, and maybe a minute had passed since the last one before I thought it was safe to peek an eye around the drapes and scout the scene. There was no crazed gunman this time, only the first few people coming out of their hiding places and wandering slowly, cautiously toward the front of the complex. More time passed without a shot, and D came out of the bathroom to join me at the window, kneeling on the spare bed, with two inches or more of wooden paneling between us any any further volleys. The reception girls were running back and forth, with their identical black bobs and blue jeans, tears streaking their heavy makeup. After a moment's silent consensus, we opened the door to look over the balcony, both of us crouching and the door open behind us. As one of the reception girls ran past again, I asked her what was happening. "Nothing nothing--stay in your room," she replied, and then I knew I was going downstairs. I grabbed my camera and a shirt and we slowly marched down the stairs, looking around us for signs of trouble until we joined the pack in front of the main office off the dining area. We saw U, the German tour organizer we'd spoken with the previous afternoon, and she gave us the skinny:

PART TWO: Rashomon

Apparently the next treehouses down the way are owned by relatives of the family that owns the joint where we were staying, and every so often they make like Hatfields and McCoys. The McCoys next door were riled by the full house at our place and things got tetchy between sets of cousins. Punches were thrown, car windows were broken, and eventually some poor dumb crazy son of a bitch picked up his pappy's shotgun and came after Old Man Hatfield. Got him in the shoulder with a load of birdshot, then started working his way down the riverbed, indiscriminately shooting up the buildings, scattering the staff and patrons and generally scaring the piss out of all of us. The shot I saw him take put out the window at reception and lodged in the wooden door, which was open enough to block the direct line between the barrel of his shotgun and our room. He was arrested without incident by the Jandarma who arrived on the scene with bigger guns. Four people were wounded, none killed. Everybody got lucky.

As the story was repeated five or six times for the benefit of late arrivals to the mayhem now coming back from the beach, a little Hatfield girl walked among us with a tray of tiny plastic cups full of cool water. I drank mine in a gulp and watched her ponytail bob through the gathering crowd, and I suddenly felt relief surge up from my feet like hot wind up a subway grate. We were safe, people were starting to crack jokes, and the line at check-out was getting longer. Reasoning that we were never safer than we would be that night, we stayed on and joked about a survivor's discount. Then we hit the beach, soaked up some sun, intermittently muttering "goddamn!" and rehashing the story for each other's benefit, the telling getting easier with each iteration but no less surreal.

That night at dinner we shared our table with P, an Englishman who had arrived in Turkey from Syria and Egypt. He was witness to the recent bread riots in the latter and figured Olympos would be the last place he'd be in danger, but he was standing up front when the gunman next door opened for business. Like D, he had gone out to check the initial fisticuffs, a very human reaction that D likened--only half-jokingly--to that of the dodo bird.* We talked for a while, comparing our versions of events and trying to synthesize a chronology and a coherent whole from all the stories we'd heard. The three of us agreed that the first shot takes you by surprise. You stand there thinking Nawwww... By the second you know it's gunfire and every moment really does stretch to an infinity, only to shrink in recollection as your reactions exist out of time, out of any sense of objective truth. What you're left with are pieces of a whole that, when played again before the mind's eye at 24 frames per second, tell an incomplete story and finish in five.

In the end nobody could agree on how many shots were fired: ten? twelve? twenty? By the time I went back for another bowl of salad the glazers were already at work repairing the hash made of the windows fronting the riverbed road. By morning you'd have to know where to look for the pockmarks in the wooden buildings to tell the place had been shot up. Even the blood on the stone path had dried to an unremarkable cinnamon brown as a new wave of tourists filed in from the shuttle we took back to the road, back to civilization, leaving the Wild West Show in the rising grey dust but taking its telling with us. One story, many versions, all of them true. Peace.

*: The dodo became extinct because of its misguided impulse to run toward the sound of another dodo in distress. Pin one down, let 'er howl, and the rest come running to be exterminated at your leisure. Delicious (while supplies last).

What Do Backpackers Do All Day?

2008-04-17T08:36:00.009-04:00

William Sutcliffe posed this question in his comic novel Are You Experienced?, a singularly uncharitable, snarky, and (in the end, dammit) uplifting tale of a callow English youth embarking on a three month odyssey of India. He goes because he wants to get into his best friend's girlfriend's pants, which is, I suppose, more than enough reason to suffer through the pains of subcontinental travel. The answer, to paraphrase, is "You know, kind of sit around drinking, talking, smoking." Of course he learns something about himself and his fellow man, but the sentiment is an honest assessment of most days on the road for the budget traveler.

But we also read. A lot. I just finished Bill Bryson's Made In America, in which he discourses on the rambling route American English has taken over the last five hundred years. It's a great read for a lot of reasons, not least among them the following gem that answers (in part) some questions raised by the intro to the last post in these pages. To wit:

A not unreasonable question is how a native American bird came to be named for a country four thousand miles away. The answer is that when turkeys first appeared in England, some eighty years before the Mayflower set sail, they were mistakenly supposed to have come from Turkey. They had in fact come from Spain, brought there from Mexico by Hernan Cortés's expedition of 1519. Many other European nations made a similar geographical error in naming the bird. The French thought they came from India and thus called them chickens 'd'Inde,' from which comes the modern French dindon. The Germans, Dutch, and Swedes were even more specifically inaccurate in their presumptions, tracing the bird to the Indian city of Calicut and thus gave it the respective names Kalekuttisch Hün, kalkoen and kalkon. By the 1620s, the turkey was so well known in Europe, and its provenance had so long been assumed to be the Near East, that the Pilgrims were astounded to find them in abundance in their new-found land.

Bryson doesn't comment on what turkeys are called here in Turkey, but clearly the hindi is further evidence of the geographical error made by the French, Germans, Dutch, and Swedes. In any case, they're delicious roasted or deep-fried and go well with American football and cranberry jelly, and that's the last I'll write of them. Promise.

So yeah: What do backpackers do all day? We improve ourselves, bitches. Recognize.

Aside from that, we gripe a lot about how we're priced out of certain areas of the Turkish Riviera by pasty, cankled oldsters in white linen capris (the dudes too) spending pounds and euros. The last few stops on our trek around the southwestern coasts of Turkey have shown us that even before the beginning of the tourist season (Anzac Day on 25 April) the local tour and travel agencies have moved their quotes for kayaking, sailing, and other such leisure activities as one might expect in a land edged by crystal blue water from the Turkish lira (YTL) to the aforementioned currencies, which all go a fair bit further than the same amount of dollars. We've spent the last two days in Kaş sitting in cafés, reading, sipping Turkish çay and walking through one of the most beautiful seaside towns I've ever come across. The mountains behind the town slope into the sea and are terraced up their first halves with vacation villas and hotels for the well-heeled Europeans who flock here in the summertime. It feels a bit like housesitting for a wealthy relative, as most of the hotels aren't open, the cafés are largely empty but for the backgammon-playing Turks who call Kaş home, and we have the run of the place...

...so long as we don't actually want to do anything.

Turkey is not India, as I mentioned last time. Our daily budget in India would just cover most of our accomodation options here, and then there's food and tea and beer and such to consider. We have found a number of affordable options for all the above here, however, as this town of 6000 doesn't eat all its meals at home. Not so in Pamukkale, where we spend two days last week walking past places offering döner kebabs at 7 YTL (normally 2-4, and the high side in İstanbul). Pamukkale is mostly served these days by day-trip tours from nearby cities to the magnificent calcium hot springs and the natural travertines (cascade pools) that flank the hundred-meter mountainside at the top of town. Faced with the daily influx of short-stay visitors who spend two weeks in Turkey without venturing ten meters on their own outside their air-conditioned buses, many of the locals have gotten ambitious in their pricing.

Hit 'em fast, hit 'em hard, and know you'll never see 'em again.

But we scored a good room at our asking price, and there were nooks hidden among the village's winding streets where you could find an honest meal at an honest price. There was one great little joint at the foot of town near our pension that sported a prominent rotisserie oven with whole chickens and sheep's heads rolling over the fire all day, each basting in the other's juices. The guy in charge whipped up a mean kokoreç (a hash of intestine and liver meat with peppers, onions, and garlic) for 1.25 YTL (almost exactly US$1) on half a loaf of crusty white bread. Alas, we didn't get to try the sheep's head, which apparently wound up in a similar hash of brain and cheek.

(Eyeballs optional, bring your own toothpicks.)

So, cheap room and food secured, we felt we could splurge our first night on a small bottle of rakı, the national aniseed liquor, which tastes a bit like Greek ouzo.* We took the hooch back to our place, sat at a table by the empty pool and browsed the new Lonely Planet Turkey, which goes into much more depth than our Europe on a Shoestring. After a short time and a drink or two we found ourselves talking with T&T, two Czech backpackers who came to Turkey for two months of mountain climbing, and A, a Moroccan kid who bought a stake in the pension last summer. Over glasses of local wine we introduced each other to games of risk and daring: we brought out the Jenga Junior set we bought in Ahmedabad, A taught us the burning cigarette/paper napkin/coin-in-the-wine-glass game, and T&T tried to teach us a Czech card game that played like Hearts and that nobody (save the Czechs) understood. By now we were in our cups, it was late, and the Kiwi mum staying downstairs came out to ask all of us very politely to please keep it down. We weren't aware that we were being loud, but apparently--as is true of all language barriers-- by shouting the rules for Czech card games you can overcome the lack of understanding caused by three different native tongues and a couple bottles of Pamukkale Red. Suddenly aware of the time, our collective state of inebriation, and the unacceptable possibility of retiring quietly to our chambers (the Czechs to their tent) for the sleep of the dead, A decided it was time for a defining moment:

"Why don't we take some more wine and climb the mountain?"

We thought that sounded positively brilliant.

Two further bottles stuffed into his waistband (even though it ain't thievin' if he owns the joint), A led our motley crew through the silent streets of Pamukkale, up through the town square to the public park at the base of the travertines. We tiptoed past the sleeping watchman and began the long slog through warm pools of glassy water, marveling at the starry clear night and the lights of Denizli twinkling in the distance. The half moon overhead lit the calcium pools, so white in daylight, a luminescent ice blue as we picked our way through the moonlit, watery dark to the top of the hill, where the ruins of Hierapolis loomed out of the darkness. A short climb further and we were atop a 2000-year-old amphitheater, in the nosebleeds, and A was cracking the wine. Electric footlights still lit the ancient stage below us, adorned by massive columns, statues, and sections of bas-relief marble, cordoned off by a ring of wooden security fencing from the accessible upper reaches of the theater. Warmed by the spring-fed pools we traversed on the way up and the wine, which tasted better and better, we all sat in awe of the ruins--remarkable in daylight, the night made them positively extraordinary, so white against the inky night above. Our conversation roamed and rambled along separate lubricated trains of thought until A hushed us abruptly and we turned to see two security guards, cigarettes burning, the reflective stripes on their uniforms digesting and spitting back the stage lights far below.

"Aw, snap!" thought I, or something similarly urbane. "It's da po-po!" Visions of Midnight Express flashed across my brainpan, of teary showers and burly men named Mustafa and breasts pressed against visiting-room windows, but A was cool. He spoke to the guards in his accented Turkish, they smiled and sat down to finish their smokes a respectful distance behind our party, and we continued drinking and talking under the white flag of truce, easily won.

After a few minutes, I started to wonder. These guys seemed cool enough, weren't asking us for tickets (which we did not possess), so my natural instinct was to see how far I could push our luck. Against the advice of AT&T, and over D's acquiescent shrug that said to the rest He's gonna do it regardless, just get ready to run, I walked over to the guards with a shiteater splitting my face and a very fine vintage enlivening my breath.

"Merhaba," I began, and that was the limit of my Turkish as I spun some thin bullshit about my wife over there, how it's our honeymoon and it'd be great if we could go down to the stage for just one minute. While I gesticulated semi-controlledly in her direction, D waved and smiled as AT&T cautiously observed the scene, corking the wine and preparing to make like trees, quick-like. "Bir minute, ji," I pleaded good-naturedly with the guards, using the Turkish for "one," some English in the middle, and calling them both "sir" in Hindi in case, you know, they spoke that.

So I've got one guard on my side, he's smiling as my unintelligible request draws to its conclusion, and I reflect his smile over to his buddy, who's a little more stone-faced about the proposed dereliction of duty. They confer for the briefest of seconds as I stand there, then a nod comes from Hard Sell and Good Cop holds up his hand, fingers splayed.

"Five minute," he tells me. "Beş, beş."

I thank them in their language, mine, and one or two others for good measure and assemble the gang, we saunter down the huge stone steps, eel through the security fencing, make our way onto the stage. The enormity of the structure became so much clearer from that vantage point; looking up in the direction of the guards to wave another thank you, I couldn't pick them out of the surrounding darkness above. Turning to the gang I set it down: "We've got five minutes down here, it's cooler than shit, and I say we make the most of it. Pick a favorite tune in your native tongue and belt it out for the cheap seats." T&T discuss for a moment before launching into a Czech mountain folksong in wavering duet. I follow suit, let roar my deepest, most operatic baritone rendition of "Camptown Races," which seems to be the only song I can remember on command these days (that and "Stairway to Heaven"--it's been too long since I had access to good music and god it hurts so bad). Paralytic with laughter, D opts out, but it seems A knows at least the "Doo dah, doo dah" from singalongs with his adopted American father, so he joins the tuneless fray.

Our Turkish Idol karaoke exhibition drawn to a merciful close, we set about exploring the stage and taking some quick pictures, including a group shot I set up and ran to join as the camera tilted at about 15 degrees before the shutter tripped, but we were all leaning a bit by that point anyway. A clucking sound from the darkness above summoned us off the stage and we bowed, dutifully clambered back up the stone decks, took last pulls of the wine, thanked the guards and rolled on out.

So I guess I've only explained what backpackers do all night, before they trip home with burning sides to the first round of rooster calls and the faintest whispers of sunlight in the east. I apologize. Maybe I'll fill in the other details some other time. Right now there's a good book**, a cup of tea, and some meat rotating on a spit somewhere that are as close to free as anything in this life. As a wise man*** once wrote: "We make our own fun. Everything else is just entertainment."

Peace.

*: The Turks enjoy their rakı with salty cheese, olives, and fish, much as the Greeks drink their ouzo. Known euphemistically as aslan sütu ("lion's milk"), rakı is clear in the bottle but becomes cloudy with the addition of water. It's a colloid like Sambuca, but not as thick and cloying. Incidentally, the "ı" in Turkish is pronounced "uh," whereas "i" is pronounced "ee". Hence "İstanbul" while "rakı" sounds more like what a Boston grandparent sits in than a North American mountain range.
**: Money, by Martin Amis.
***: David Mamet, in his film State and Main.

A Handy Guide to Asian Fowl

2008-04-10T03:38:00.006-04:00

FUN FACTS ABOUT BIRDS:

1. The word for "turkey" in Turkish is hindi. There's no word in Hindi, but it'll give you dysentery anyway.

2. Storks communicate by clacking their beaks together like castanet players on the meth. They throw their heads back upside-down along their spines and rattle away, sometimes in unison with every stork for miles.

How do I know about storks, you might ask? We've got four couples outside our hostel window building nests perched atop the ruins of a Roman-era aqueduct. They're big birds, white bodies with black wingtips and vivid pink beaks and legs. These are the first storks I've ever seen, and they've come to Selçuk as part of their yearly migration to make their homes amid the crumbling columns of ancient Ephesus. And, yes, they look like they might be large enough to fly with babies in their beaks.

We've come to Selçuk as part of our own migration out of India and back to The World. That migration began with a 4 AM flight last week from Delhi to İstanbul, during which I realized that my final Indian meal had given me another beautiful case of dysentery. After one day of rest and five more exploring the nooks and crannies of a city of 16 million (Bombayesque but not as thickly settled) that straddles the border of Europe and Asia, we moved south to begin in earnest the Turkish leg of this world tour.

The people of Turkey have been the warmest, kindest, most welcoming folks we've met in some time. Our first meal in İstanbul was at a joint down the road from our hostel where we were welcomed with a "Hey, bro, you want kebap and beer?" T, our waiter and entertainer, explained that his command of American street slang came from working with the good soldiers of the US air base near his hometown in Turkey's southeast. He was celebrating his 22nd birthday and practicing his Spanish with us while we ate, showing us pictures of his family and telling us about his English "fiancee" who would be visiting him again soon. He even brought us steaming cups of apple tea (elma çay) and explained that they were "in the house."

Coming from a poor country where we scarcely had a single conversation that wasn't motivated by a sales pitch or a request for money, the little extras offered as appreciation for our patronage have been the most welcome evidence that we are in a different place, a different world. And maybe it's petty to count something like that as a plus for Turkey, or to hold the lack of free shit and "buybacks" against India. But since we've arrived there has been no gawking or scheming, no blatant, bald-faced lies, no deceit, no highway robbery. Nobody's told us our guesthouse has burned down, that his "brother's" hotel is the only alternative in the area and at five times the price. We're treated like people and not walking ATMs, and (goddamn this bourgeois tirade) it's been nice to let our guard down and relax, have a chat and a cup of tea, and not worry about what trap is being laid around the corner.

India was work, even in Goa. Turkey is easy. It's a nice change. The next few weeks we'll bounce around this country on Mercedes buses rolling over paved roads, making a loop and winding up back in İstanbul to stay with some new friends before moving on to Bulgaria, Romania, and the rest of southeast Europe. They might even have storks there, too. I'll keep you posted. Peace.

And I Feel Like A Disco Ball

2008-03-30T09:42:00.005-04:00

A while back I got an email from T, an old friend from Tulane, in which he told me of his own Indian sojourn as a doctor with a humanitarian mission. He wrote of riding the Manali-Leh highway, the highest motorable road in the world, and of other experiences traveling India's northwest that will elude me until we make it back here in the proper season for such altitudes. His closing thoughts included some sage advice, ready for Poor Richard's Almanack:

"Never look down the hole of a north Indian shithouse...you'll never forget the dead dog on which you just dropped a watery load."

Whew, yeah. That's about right. Some days in India are very, very good. Some days are soupy shit on a dead dog, and no telling which one's you.

So T's words have been with me this week as we pack our things and depart this fine, strange country. As I write this, one day before our departure for places more Turkish, we have been in India for six months, two weeks, three days, and a 29th of February. We have logged at least a full fifty days in transit--probably even more, but I prefer not to think of them all at once. We have seen ruins thousands of years old and some dating from the last monsoon. There have been ups and downs and in-betweens too numerous to mention. And it's been a fucking blast.

But how does one sum up such an experience?

Our last morning in Arambol, D and I rose early for a final swim before the two overnights between us and Delhi. We strolled without speaking through the coconut grove separating Girkarwaddo from the beach, soaking in the salty air, heavy with three days of rain and clouds and a distinct feeling of finality. On the beach we walked south past the fishing boats to our favorite spot, where we saw from a distance a crowd gathered in the lapping surf. Thirty or forty people, Indians and gora, radiated around something lying on the sand. While we walked warily closer to the group, five men emerged from its center carrying the dripping greengrey body of an Indian boy maybe twenty years old, dressed for swimming in only his skivvies, lifeless as a sack of grain. They toted him out of the surf and laid him on the hard sand from the night's high tide, where a young traveler, his backpack still strapped on both shoulders, resumed performing CPR. Shocked, we stared at this scene as it played out over the following five minutes. Every couple series of compressions was followed by the men turning the boy on his side, a sickly white foam rolling out of his mouth, as the leader briskly rubbed his midsection to disgorge the fluid he had taken in. From our vantage point I could see two youths in their swimwear kneeling just behind the ring of people circling their friend, the knot of legs and bodies open on their side as if to let them watch. One rocked back and forth and craned his head to face the heavens, his mouth open in a wail that never found voice, before leaning over to punch divots in the hard sand with both fists. The other knelt stockstill, his face void of expression as he stared miles through the scene unfolding before him.

"Come on," I told D. "I don't need to watch some poor fuck die this morning." We walked on down the beach, turning our heads at intervals to check on the situation. While we swam at a short remove from the thinning scrum of people ten minutes or so later, the men again carried the boy, head lolling, fingers dragging in the sand, up the dune and into the coconut grove. This time they didn't stop for CPR. All urgency had evaporated from their movements and demeanors. I couldn't see the two other boys.

So we swam for a while longer as the beach returned to normal, the hawkers toting piles of vivid bedsheets on their heads, the Hello Coconut guy wheeling past on his bike, the couples ambling up from Mandrem for a bite on Glastonbury Street. As the unpromising clouds allowed fewer and fewer random shafts of light to hit the beach, we decided to call it quits, get cracking and packing, take care of a few last-minute details. My feet were in my sandals and I had already turned homeward when D asked, "Are those fins out there?" I spun back around and, sure enough, there were three dorsal fins breaking the water about 75 meters from shore: Dolphins porpoising north. I had heard this was the wrong season for dolphins, but they supposedly abound in the waters off north Goa. We looked at each other, each of us knowing we were going back in, and I kicked my shoes behind me and trotted off into the waves.

I swam out as fast as I could through the surf, bouncing above the swells to spot the fins and adjust my angle. One of them had trailed off southward, but the other two were still breaking the surface on a direct path perpendicular to my approach. Swimming further without seeing any sign of them, I was afraid I might have scared them off when one porpoised fifteen meters off my one o'clock, the other just after that, further off my eleven. They were close enough to watch their dark grey skin throw back the limited midmorning sunlight, dappling a brilliant silver and blue in concert with the glassy still water. I turned and D was smiling and pointing, nodding that Yes, she'd seen it, too. We treaded water for another ten minutes watching them recede, never getting any closer, until they were just shy of the headland at the north end of Arambol beach. Then we got out, dried off, scanned the water all the way back up the beach. Just in case.

So that's India. She'll throw you a dead guy and dolphins in the same morning, just to say Goodbye. Oh well. It's namaste, my dear, you intractable whore, you beautiful tease, adieu. We may meet again sometime. I'll be older, you'll stay the same age. Be well. Take care, and mind the children. Peace.

Everybody's Goan Crazy!

2008-03-16T11:10:00.005-04:00

Love is in the air here in Goa.

There's a brace of baby chicks in the courtyard downstairs from our guesthouse. At the end of the day all the little downy ones are assembled into a wicker basket that seems, in the night, to cheep! of its own accord.

All the well-fed beach dogs of Arambol have hatched the puppies they were working on when we were here in September. A local fisherman down the beach takes his litter one by one into the surf, tosses them lovingly, paternally into the waves and splashes them as they swim back to dry land and their mother, who barks encouragingly from midway up the sand.

And the population of the town has changed from the Israeli dread-n-spliff scene it was in September to a crop of young mulleted Russian couples with very young, very blond toddlers. Everyone here seems to have their kids in tow, in fact, Russian or not. I spent days wondering what the twin-rutted trails in the sand could be, watched the coconut bicycles and the fishing boats going in and out for clues before recognizing stroller tracks for what they were.

But not everyone seems to have their children's safety in mind. There's this Spanish chick who was staying down the road from us with one youngster less blond than the Russian ones, who stared from the inside of a blind turn near the general store in Girkarwaddo as her child negotiated boarding her toy bike (with training wheels) in the middle of the road, on the other side of said blind turn from the vroom-ing scooter-and-Enfield traffic coming towards her. We watched a handful of separate scooters zig and zag to miss this kid in the two minutes between noticing the scene and passing, jaws agape, while Mami lazily instructed the child to put her feet on the pedals and push.

Later the same day there was a new pair of couples checking out rooms in our compound*, where there's a prominent open well at least forty feet deep with an unscreened top. D and I watched from our balcony as one of the couples, lost in haggling over room rates, didn't notice their kid stumbling over to the well to peer over its edge and see just how far down it went. The two feet of cement were just enough to keep the kid from seeing over the lip without climbing on the bricks, so of course he climbed up the bricks to have a better look. He was flat on his belly, legs dangling on the safe side and staring into the abyss when his parents noticed him, clucked him down from the ledge, never moving from their stance across the way. He reluctantly and with difficulty slid himself back to solid ground and toddled back to their side.

So maybe I've suffered from growing up in a litigious and overcautious society, one where Stranger Danger is taught to every kid old enough to talk and where that well would never be left uncapped--except in Texas and Pennsylvania, where they have the Cutest Baby Down A Well Pageants and young contestants vie for bragging rights and parental affection. Maybe I don't understand the degree of freedom you have to provide a child in order to, on the one hand, ensure its successful maturation without, on the other, allowing a weak and stupid child to pollute your name and gene pool.

But maybe these fucking parents are the crazy ones. Hear me out:

Goa has long been a haven for free thinkers and free lovers and those who like their holiday costs as close to free as their thinking and their loving. Since the dawn of time (or at least the 1960's) Goa has been the Indian destination of choice for those wishing to open their minds and expand their horizons and maybe smoke some dope and have naked dance parties on the beach during full moons and other, not-so-full moons.** Or broad daylight, depending on the season. Booze is cheap, hash is everywhere, and people generally wander the beach bronzing and swimming and occasionally passing out for a few hours under the shade of a fishing boat.

Along with the general laissez-faire attitude, there's a cottage industry here in Enlightenment, a broad term I'll use broadly in its capitalized italics. You can get your aura palpated, your chi scrubbed, your chakras opened, your asanas put all in a line. There are workshops for firewalking and kundalini yoga during successive hours in the same venue, and most nights you can join in the big-bamboo-stick-fitness-deal down the beach toward Mandrem (just past the last boat) and improve your flexibility while making yourself impervious to attack by other, less Enlightened souls wielding big bamboo sticks. Then, after a short skinny dip to cool off, you can stroll past every other hippie paying homage (in his/her own way) to the Sun God/dess and catch the fire twirlers when they're blazed enough to make their flowing skirts match their stone.*** Everywhere you go there are fliers posted by tourists looking to share their Enlightenment with you, sort the aforementioned chakras and such, scrub your chi and teach you the Extended Wallet Asana. Need a picture drawn?

This is from a flier touting the services and talents of one Emanuel Lev, whose 30-hour "ThetaHealing" workshop we missed by a blasted six weeks. Shit. Had we made it, we could "Come and experience what your soul already knows through a healing method that has already changed the lives of thousands of people throughout the world." Mr. Lev, you see, is a "Certified Instructor and Practitioner of the Basic DNA1&2 and Advanced ThetaHealing courses, and of the ThetaHealing Abundance and Manifestation workshop," whatsoever those might be. He "Conducts workshops in Israel and around the world [as a] Primal Feelings Therapy Instructor, Reiki Master, Therapist of Bio-Energy, Yoga, Tantra and other techniques... Married to Ruth and father of Zohar Lev." Usually the capital letters in one's credentials are enough for me to know he's qualified to lead my ThetaHealing, but it's nice to know that E's good people and a family man.

Since he kindly left his flier in the restaurant where I take my muesli-fruit-curd breakfasts, well within the line of sight from my favorite table, I will continue to share with you Mr. Lev's plans for total wellness and healing. To wit:

"The Basic ThetaHealing course lasts three days. During this time, from a place of unconditional love, kindness and absolute connection with the creator we will learn how to connect to Theta waves in our brain and to communicate with the power that creates reality. We will learn how to remember the deepest knowledge inside our souls and in the universe... [T]he process is so simple and takes place in an atmosphere of complete happiness and love. During the course we learn together how to open the intuitive centers of sight, hearing and feeling and how to awaken the dormant aspects of our DNA."

I'm sold, but for those of you out there who want more from your ThetaHealing dollar, there's a rundown of the key talking points: "Topics included in the course: easy reach to the theta brain wave, intuitive readings, connecting with the creator, working on belief systems, the seven plans of existence, spontaneous healing, activating your youth gene, working on our DNA to create changes on a genetic level..." (now wait for it, wait for it!) "...and much more..."

I just wish he'd capitalized "creator" in that first bit. His whole seminar seems a little too pagan for my tastes, now that I think about it. I'll go elsewhere to awaken the dormant aspects of my DNA, maybe get that prehensile tail I so envy in our monkey cousins. Or X-ray vision, so's I can get to palpating my own aura more intensively.

Goofing aside, everything's fun and games until someone misplaces her daughter. And now we come to the serious part of today's lecture.

A fifteen-year-old British girl named Scarlett was drugged, beaten, raped, and left in the surf last month in Anjuna, about twelve clicks down the shore from Arambol. Her body washed up the next day and the local cops chalked up the death to drowning. But how did such a young girl go missing after hours from a beach bar in one of the most trafficked towns in Goa? Scarlett was in the care of "a friend" after her mother, mom's boyfriend, and six younger children (!) went, in the words of the BBC report, "further afield." Two Goan men have been arrested and charged with drugging and raping Scarlett, but her mother claims to have no faith in the Goa police or their prospects for closing the case to her satisfaction. "The administration tried its best to hush up the death as a simple case of drowning," she bleats while assuring the world "I think I was probably naive and too trusting of the people around her that claimed to be her friends, but that was probably the worst thing I have done." [Emphasis mine.]

Mom's probably right. She didn't drop the kid down a well or let her be tire-tracked in two by a runaway Honda. That'd be irresponsible. No, she left her fifteen-year-old in the care of seasonal beach shack employees whose only responsibilities are to slowly walk legal intoxicants to tables and proffer (upon demand) all the illegal ones a kid's heart could desire. She let that flower grow and flourish only to leave her, in words almost too apt to write, in water over her head.

In other news, beach life is great. We wake in the morning for a papaya and a swim, then occasionally bounce down to Panaji to catch a flick at the local cineplex. We take care not to run over babies in the middle of the road, and we assiduously remove the bones from every bite of chicken we feed to Supdog. Our consciences--if not our ThetaWaves--are spotless, unsullied, and we're brown like li'l mixed-race babies. May the sunshine in your corners of the world be so bright. Peace.

*: I have given few recommendations in these pages, but let these be my first two: Arambol is the bomb, and God's Gift Guest House is the place to stay. It's a fifteen-minute walk south from Arambol central and Glastonbury Street along a beautiful beach strewn with traditional fishing boats and the occasional naked Russian. The proprietors, Baptiste and Baptiste's brother (whose name I can never remember and so will be known as G) welcomed our tired, sweaty white asses in September and opened up a room for us at an amazing rate. We stayed six days and would have stayed longer, but our feets was itchin'. So when we got down off the bus from Mapusa this time, we knew where we were heading. We'd called ahead to make sure they weren't booked and explained that we had stayed there at the end of the last monsoon and would love to repeat the scene. They said come on by, and when we walked down the path we were greeted with smiles of recognition and amazement that we'd made it back to their neck of the palm grove. A few lingering handshakes later and we'd secured a great room at a good price, considering the season, and we've been there since. We've even adopted one of their dogs, which we've named "Supdog" regardless of his actual appelation. We bring him bits of tandoori chicken dinners and haven't grown tired of saying "Supdog" each time we see him. He never answers "Not much, man, 'sup wit' you?" but he probably speaks Konkani. Whaddyado?
**: Because naked dance parties don't have laws, man.
***: Seriously. We watched the tail end of a spontaneous fire-twirling show the other night and the final performer set his lunghi on fire, took it off, and cast it aside into the surf without missing so much as a single twirl. I mock, but I got nothin' but love for that playa.

"It's OK. I'm With The Bandh."

2008-02-29T03:26:00.007-05:00

This was supposed to be an entry about how funny it was to find a sandstone Kama Sutra ringing a Hindu temple* in a land that forbids even touching in public one's besmitted, beloved, or betrothed. Still funny to see a sandstone dude railing a sandstone horse** while his sandstone friend punches his sandstone bishop, watching and (could it be? really!) cheering him on. But now there's a real story to tell, not just a story about bestiality and how many handmaidens it takes to hold their mistress on her head so's she can get the business upside-down. Anyhoo:

We arrived in Darjeeling on Monday after a night train from Kolkata and a rick to the Sumo stand in Siliguri for a winding ride up the cloud-forest foothills of the Himalaya. We opted against the Toy Train, thinking it was actually our choice to take a shared Tata SUV instead of the more scenic, UNESCO World Heritage rail route. Didn't see a train for the whole length of the narrow-gauge rail, which abutted the road for much of the ride into town. Thought it might be early in the season, might be down for repairs, might just be a holiday for the railworkers. Not so, not so...

A long climb from the jeep stop in Darjeeling to Chowrasta, the main square at the top of town, gave us a room for the nights we planned to spend, one with a fireplace to ward off the wintry chill at 2500 meters in February. Walking the town, we found an overdue meal and Darjeeling tea and pastries and an aimless ramble about before the town's early closing time. That first night we stopped for momos in a Clubside Tibetan joint and ran into G, who stayed at the same hotel as us in Agra. He's not an easy dude to mistake, a 350-pound Washingtonian with a piratical gold hoop through his left ear and a thunderous voice that sounded very odd indeed supporting John McCain between slurps of thukpa. He starts the convo (politics aside) after introductions and recognition by asking us if we're going to Nepal, if we'd like his Lonely Planet. We say yes and we've got one, respectively, and he's surprised to hear we're still going.

"There's a general strike in Nepal through the elections next month," he tells us in his basso profundo. "The whole country's shut down."

This is news to us. We knew Nepal might be sketchy, knew that a walk in the woods might mean an extortion stop by the local Maoist insurgents, but 5000 Nepali rupees should have done the trick and the Maoists (gotta love 'em!) issue receipts and pose for pictures. Guns and red bandannas and all. We were okay with a hundred-dollar photo op with rebels and Kalashnikovs, but news of a strike entirely changed the complexion of our proposed visit.

In the West, a strike means your garbage stinks in the streets for a couple of weeks, that you walk to work instead of taking the subway, that the Golden Globes are canceled but the Oscars roll as promised. Not so over here, Jack. A general strike, known in these parts as a bandh, means that every shop in town--every restaurant, every provisions store, every travel agent, every internet joint, every everybody--is closed. It means buses, Sumos, taxis, and horsecarts are not allowed on the streets, and there are roadblocks to enforce such. It means a disruption of daily life, nominally voluntary but often enforced with pressure tactics that can mean violence for business owners and drivers and the like who disobey the bandh.

It means we weren't going to Nepal. Fuck a duck, spit in its ear. But it gets better:

G: "You know, the Nepalese in Darjeeling district have been in a limited strike since before I got here. The Toy Train's not running, the Himalayan Mountain Institute is closed, the Zoo is closed, et cetera, et cetera." He continued, but we had heard what we needed to hear.

Huh, we thought. So sooner back down the mountain, and still no Toy Train.

The next day we spent figuring out plans to replace Nepal in our itinerary. Should we bounce back to Kolkata and west through Varanasi, pick up some spots in north India we hadn't seen? Nah, we decided. The north has been more expensive, more of a hassle, and generally less inviting than the south. No Nepal meant we might as well get back into a neighborhood we enjoyed the first time through. Southside, beachside, Goa-side. A little digging online found us two cheap tickets leaving Kolkata and landing in Goa a mere five hours later--a trip across a subcontinent in less time that it's taken us to travel one hundred kilometers on surface roads. Amazing stuff, progress. Travel plans solidified, compromise reached that's amenable to both of us, we set off in search of a beer before dinner. Falling asleep that night to a spitting fire (wood wet from the hour-long hailstorm that afternoon), we figured we'd use our last two days in Darjeeling wisely, check out what sights we could, walk the town and its surrounds, visit a monastery or two, and enjoy the crisp mountain air.

Waking up Wednesday morning, it was cold and grey and misty like it had been the last two days. Kanchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world and a stone's throw (in Himalayan terms) from Darjeeling, was still invisible behind the ring of clouds that had enveloped the town since our arrival. So we scrubbed brushed dressed and D, looking down from our hotel room, pointed out that all the stores on the street seemed to still be shuttered at 10 AM. Oh well, we thought. Surely there's a restaurant open down the way. Downstairs, we see that it's not only the shitshops beneath our window, but every door on the Mall is locked. Oh well, we thought. It's early, maybe Wednesday's like Sunday here. Walking down the Mall, the prospect of an open restaurant gets less and less promising. The idea disappears from our minds entirely when we hear the chants coming up the hillside beneath the Planter's Club.

"We want Gorkhaland! We want Gorkhaland!"***

Looking down over the sidewalk's railing, we saw a long procession of locals marching uphill toward us, arms waving, signs unfurled, shovels and brooms and wheelbarrows being brandished and waved and pushed.

Guess what, kids? Limited strike went general that morning. We were the last suckers to find out.

Double-timing back up the hill to Chowrasta and our hotel ahead of the marchers, we wondered why nobody had mentioned anything about this inhospitable turn of events. Not a word from our hotel guys, no signs plastered to shopfronts, no mention of "Stock up on food today" when we left the general store on Tuesday with a disposable razor and a pack of batteries and the assumption we could shop for self-catering goods the next morning. Nothing. Arriving back at the hotel, one of the roomboys stood on the ramp to the main entrance with us, silently watching the parade of protesters snake its way past us to the top of Chowrasta.

"Many problem in Darjeeling," he informed us with an out-of-place smile. "Too many people angry."

Minds where our mouths would like to be, we asked the important question though we already knew the answer: "So this strike, no restaurant? No food? No eating?"

He just laughed like he didn't understand the question. Or he did, and simply didn't want to disappoint us by confirming our fears.

We managed to wrangle eggs and toast (and tea, natch) from the hotel's back supply while the head man assured us that the strike would only last the one day. Placated, we watched the chanting and shovel-waving and flag-flying on the square below our picture windows before the protest turned suddenly, unexpectedly janitorial. The assembled ring of marchers broke up into groups of five and six and methodically swept every inch of Chowrasta, from the statues to the benches, Fiesta to New Dish Chinese. Wheelbarrows followed shovels followed brooms and there was nary a stray paan masala pouch to be found afterwards. It was the oddest ending to any protest I've ever heard of:

"Hell no, we won't go!

"Without sweeping!

"Thoroughly!"

We spent the rest of the day shuttered in our room, watching the rain fall intermittently and napping through the afternoon. As darkness drew in around the mountain we walked between the five-star hotels at the top of the Mall in search of a restaurant that might be open--after all, there must be somebody on the hill spending dollars or euros and unable to leave on such short notice. The folks at the Windamere hooked us up with 600-roop-a-plate dinners with Western and Indian menus, and we were enjoying our steamed string beans and looking forward to the pear and ginger crumble when the English gent at the head of the room piped up, fork tinking on his wineglass.

"So sorry," he began, addressing his group of thirty or so package tourists dining with two ragged backpackers, "but it appears we will not be visiting Kalimpong as planned. As it stands, the police have granted us a permit to leave the city tomorrow afternoon, so our flights to Delhi will not be disrupted." A smattering of sighs and relieved chuckles. "Do try to understand that there is no getting around this inconvenience, that we are in the hands of a political situation and at the mercies of the local authorities. Does anyone have any questions about the new shed-jewel?"

As hands went up around the room and questions were asked and answered, D and I felt our stomachs drop and tighten around the swank food at the mention of "permit to leave." What was happening around us? We asked at our hotel and they informed us that the one-day strike had indeed been extended indefinitely, that the town would continue to be in lockdown except for pharmacies and the local (very British) boarding schools. So how do we get out of town? It's Wednesday night, we've got a flight from Kolkata on Saturday morning and that's thirteen hours by bus or train from Siliguri, which is four hours down a mountain studded with roadblocks like warts on a toad.

Our boy tells us there's another guest who's arranged a Sumo to make the Siliguri run under cover of darkness, he's leaving at 2 AM, he's got the whole jeep booked for himself at the cost of 2000 roops, roughly 50 dollars. For a moment we think we'll pack and run until he continues the story, that the jeep doesn't have permission from the political party that's arranged the bandh and that they're banking against getting stopped by its supporters, which will require a hefty additional baksheesh, or bribe, if they let them pass at all.

Sounds like just about the worst possible scenario, we think. Running lights-out in the inky Himalayan dark down 77 clicks of switchbacked, single-lane road, paved only in stretches, asphalt Band-Aids connecting a lacework of potholes and washouts. And without permission, to boot. We pass and spend a sleepless night wondering just how the shit we're gonna get out of Darjeeling.

Up early, we march down to the police station to ask how we go about securing a permit. Worst case, we're planning to throw ourselves on the mercy of the package-tour Brits staying at the Windamere, see if they can't smuggle us out on the roof of their permitted vehicles. Arriving at the old bus stand, site of the new cop stop, we see a rank of foreigners and Indians with suitcases and expectant faces, tourists awaiting transport out of the deepening political muck in the region. Speaking with the curt, distracted supervising officer, who greets me with "Any problem?" like I'd just asked him directions to the loo and returned in less time than it takes to piss, I find out that the assembled throng is waiting for a bus that will arrive at 9 AM. It's 9:20 and I ask if there's only one bus, if we've got time to get our backpacks and get back before the bus rolls, and he responds simply, "Hurry."

Cursing our lack of preparedness and thanking the gods for Indian Stretchable Time, we hustle back to Chowrasta, throw our bags together, and convince our boy at the hotel to take US twenties as more-than-sufficient payment for our stay (the bandh meant no ATMs, no moneychangers, no way for us to supplement the dwindling supply of rupees we hadn't been warned wouldn't be enough to get us through a strike). Booking it back down the hill and huffingpuffing in the thin mountain air, we arrive to see the same crowd, only bigger, waiting for the same bus. We drop our packs and find a modicum of relief from seeing the same faces as before eyeing us with the wolflike scorn one reserves for competitors at the food dish--"We might look like brothers, but motherfucker I will kill yo' ass if you're between me and that sliding door." We wait.

After thirty minutes or so, a Chevy SUV rolls to a stop just past our bags and a pack of kids speaking French barrels past us with their luggage, including an upright bass in a zippered nylon case. We wait on the situation's periphery, bags shouldered, jockeying for position with the others and watching a bunch of musicians with creative hair secure their instruments and luggage on the roofrack. Four guys, four girls, all speaking French and choosing seats, and then one of the girls says that the driver has told her there's room for two more. New arrival apparently, unaware that Indian private transport can fit a minimum of twenty schoolchildren or ten broad white Western asses. Without hesitation I hoist my bag up to Dreadlock on the roof and grab D's to do the same. The tying-down continues and we all pile in for the wait, watching flatbeds roll in through the police checkpoint with Gorkhalanders arriving for the day's protest (and window-washing?) who don't stop chanting even while they're being frisked.

After thirty minutes or so another dozen jeeps have pulled in behind us, each packing up with tourist-refugees and their belongings. Our procession assembled, a West Bengal police jeep pulls up in front of our lead car and it's Chello, let's go. Barely a click down the road our convoy pulls over for the police to top their tank, and one of the guys in the back of our ride points to the five peaks of Kanchenjunga over the right side of the road, so close you could scoop snowcones from its white tips. We tumble out of the vehicle, oohingahhing, all having arrived recently enough that this is our first glimpse of the mountain, awash in golden late-morning light and fading into mist where the sun hadn't yet ventured. Dreadlock points to another, more distant mountain, a triangle of white barely visible behind the floodlit Kanchenjunga, with a one-word question for our driver: "Everest?" Driver nods his assent and we stand there on the side of the road marveling at how close it seems, yet knowing how many miles and political movements lie in the gulf between.

Back on the road, our Quebecois jeepmates break out everything that's not an upright bass and serenade our group with American bluegrass on mandolin and two guitars. Turns out they've been traveling through southeast Asia busking for their morning chai with hopes of hitting Kathmandu and playing for the backpackers and expats in Thamel. One song, improvised and in French but for the refrain, earned a call-and-response from the whole car:

"We want Gorkhaland! We want Gorkhaland!"

"We want whis-key! We want whis-key!"

Repeat.

So down the mountain we sped, our police escort rotating in each hillside village, our driver laughing at D's comment that it was a "tag-team" operation the WB police were running. In one nameless encampment of a dozen homes and a few hundred demonstrators, our jeep was stopped and the cops ahead of us squealed to a halt and poured out the back of their transport, rifles leveled, lathis poised. Just in case. They let us pass, but there lurked a possibility of a repeat in every one of a dozen or more assembled citizenries around each successive roadblock.

The ride down was alternatingly tense and lighthearted, the protesters outside our windows running to the first extreme; our traveling band, the other. Four hours later we were a short distance from Siliguri and I breathed a sigh of relief seeing storefronts proudly displaying their Technicolor assortments of chips sodas sweets, suddenly aware that the eeriest thing about Darjeeling shutting down was the absence of the rainbow of goods for sale. Having traded that riot of color on every street for the monochrome of steel shutters and padlocks, the little tea town at the top of the hill seemed the least inviting place on earth. "Gorkhaland for Gorkhas," they say. They can have Gorkhaland. It was nice being back in India.

And just as quickly as we arrived "back in India" we left again for Goa, that parallel universe on the Arabian Sea. Writing these words, we've been on the beach in Arambol for a week and will stay here for the remainder of our time in India, barring a few days in Delhi before our flight to Istanbul. It's a brief respite from traveling every day, a chance to chill out away from the problems that plagued our last few stops, to unpack and collect ourselves, to enjoy each other's company. As D said in Darjeeling, "Fuck this shit. I'm goin' to Goa." Eloquent and succinct, it's our mantra of late. This stop is also an opportunity to catch up on the entries I've been meaning to write, stories I haven't yet shared about places not yet mentioned here. Later. Now it's back to the beach. Still a few hours before sunset, you know? Peace.

*: At a place called Khajuraho which, phonetically, sounds a lot like "Cause you're a ho."
**: Incidentally, this is exactly how they got Mr. Ed to talk.
***: The history of the Gorkha (and I defer to the local spelling in this piece instead of the British "Gurkha" or "Ghurka") independence movement is a long one. They've been fighting in Darjeeling district to have their own state carved from West Bengal for almost thirty years, and it was a violent battle for many of those. The beheadings and shootings have abated in the years since an understanding was reached between the Gorkha party chiefs and the Indian government, but the tensions are still high in the region and bandhs in WB number in the ballpark of 50 per annum. For a detailed BBC account of our little fiasco, click here. For more information and history that I can possibly provide, look online and follow links about Nepal's Maoist insurgency to further illuminate the shadowy intricacies of the region's politics. There's also a great book touching on the Gorkha statehood movement by Kiran Desai called The Inheritance of Loss which, coincidentally, D just finished and I'm now reading.

The Lightning Round

2008-02-04T11:41:00.001-05:00

Finding internet joints in India is not difficult. It's no double-axel-triple-lutz, no Mormon whorehouse. It's finding a reliable connection in a land of unexplained power cuts that has proven to be the challenge. Here's to blogging from the developing world.

That being understood, I've an acre or two of ground to cover to get myself to this present day, and presently the sun's sinking slowly Stateside. So with an economy heretofore unknown in these pages, I will endeavor to play catch-up with the last three weeks of perpetual motion. Here goes:

From Diu and horrible illness to Ahmedabad for the Uttarayan Kite Festival. Met up with D's girl R, who's here with IndiCorps for a year working with a community center in one of the city's thekro (slums). D showed a remarkable facility with kites, cutting the strings of two competitors flying their paper birds from the surrounding corrugated rooftops. I needed help floating anything but swear words, which flowed freely each time my kite sank sewerward.

Took the train from Ahmedabad to Jodhpur, in Rajasthan. The old city's all pastel-blue block houses under the massive, imposing Mehrangarh Fort. Saw a great drumline parade on an amble back from the fort through the narrow lanes of the city before downing a makhania lassi, a local specialty that made me reconsider my disbelief of any god who'd lead a people to put saffron, butter, and yogurt in the same glass. The bomb.

From Jodhpur to Jaisalmer, about which the less said the better. Before we'd even arrived there were touts boarding the bus to extol the virtues of their "brother's" guesthouse in town. We'd heard horror stories about folks taking rooms at dirt cheap rates only to be kicked out in the wee hours for not booking a camel safari (the main racket in town) through their place of lodging. Our eventual home for 100 roops a night, The Peacock, was an oasis from the monkeyshit going down everywhere else. The fort was less impressive than Jodhpur's, but it had the dubious distinction of being the only centuries-old sandstone fortification I've walked through to have private bus schedules painted on its aged rock walls. Such was the tacky, tacky scene.

Six hours by bus to Bikaner, where we caught the local camel festival (above left). Rajasthani guys with the aforementioned bitchin' 'staches rode their mounts in from the dunes to compete in pageants showing off their camel-shaving and -festooning abilities. Some truly amazing work on both counts. Our last morning there we made the short bounce out to the Karni Mata Temple in Deshnok, where thousands of sacred rats have the run of the joint. We brought disposable socks for our circumambulations. It's considered auspicious to have a rat scurry over your feet (check check check in the first five minutes) or to spot the lone albino of the bunch, which is seriously good luck we won't be having. Alack.

Skipped Jaipur, Pushkar, Amber and Udaipur for the hassles said to await us there. We'd had it with Rajasthan, which is a cesspool of harrassment and extortion you have to spend your way above.

So Bikaner to Delhi, where we caught a train to Amritsar in Punjab. Home to the Golden Temple, ground zero of the Sikh religion, Amritsar was a pungasm waiting to happen. To wit: D got Sikh our first day there behind a questionable Punjabi thali. Might be the last time she can ever enjoy daal makhani. After a day of convalescence and bland Western food, we caught the Indo-Pak border closing ceremony at Attari-Wagah. Serious high-stepping pomp and circumstance on both sides, with cheering and dancing and absurdly tall soldiers in fan-topped turbans and this one old lady sitting next to us who kept repeating "I am proud Indian, proud Indian." We rode out with three Aussies who had just arrived in India, two dudes and a chick. Chick got Sikh from the bleachers during the ceremony, walked past us dollargreen and visibly unwell. Then her brother got Sikh on the ride back to Amritsar, had to have our Tata Sumo pull over so's he could scoot off into a field to rock the Technicolor yawn. Soon as he's back in the ride and apologizing for the delay, something stinks. Up go the windows and the stench should have gone with the breeze, but it turns out dude stepped in a big sloshy cow puddle on his way back from the yack and all eleven of us were about to get Sikh from the smell. I laughed so hard I snorted, and the Kashmiri women sitting in front of me turned around to make sure I wasn't going to be Sikh all over them. Good times with Indian food and water. We laugh because we know the feeling.

Amritsar to Chandigarh, a planned city and easily the strangest, least Indian place in India. Le Corbusier laid out perfectly rectangular Sectors with sidewalks (!) and clean parkland ribboning through them, a modernist capital complex, and did it all with enough concrete to pave seven inches over Texas. It took one of the new city's code inspectors, though, to put it on the map. Nek Chand (no relation to the city's root) took a bunch of really vivid childhood dreams and truckloads of disused pottery shards, electrical housings, and stray bangles and built himself a fantasyland he dubbed his Rock Garden. They say it's the second-most-visited site in India, but who's counting? Even if they're fudging the numbers, walking around his Xanadu was some of the most fun we've had for ten rupees.

Back through Delhi to Agra, home of the Taj Mahal. It's enormous, it's magnificent, it's a wonder of the world and the headliner of every tourist brochure India prints. But here's something you gotta visit to find out: The whole place smells like foot. You can take that to the bank, put it in your pipe and smoke it, amaze and amuse the next time you're stuck for conversation at a boring dinner party. The Taj Mahal smells like gym class in junior high. Discuss.

A short jump from Agra took us yesterday to the ghost town of Fatehpur Sikri. It's a red sandstone city built by the Mughal emperor Akbar on a site without a water supply. In India. Where it gets, like, hot. Akbar had a 3000-woman harem, something that would tell even the virginal observer he might need a source of hydration late of an evening. Eventually the whole site was abandoned for more hospitable surrounds. The harem went with.

[Whew.]

So now we're in Gwalior. It's dark out. We're seeing another big fort tomorrow, then on to Orchha and the Kama Sutra carvings on the temples of Khajuraho. Moving fast, kids, and now we're working with a deadline. Last week in Delhi we booked an April 1 departure from the capital, arriving in Istanbul for the next leg of this Asian Experiment. Between now and then we've got the Indian Himalayas (east, then west) to catch, with a two-week jaunt through Nepal to link the two sides. It's the lightning round, where the scores can really change. Try to keep up, and I'll do the same.

Oh, and a Call For Submissions:

Given my penchant for rambling digression, you might be left after reading this entry and others with one or more unanswered questions. Plot points hang in the breeze, main characters disappear abruptly and without further mention, "India" might occasionally seem shot through a lens slathered with Vaseline--sorta like reading Shantaram, but without the prison bits.

So I'm interested in what you might want to know. It'll be an exercise in clarification for me, a chance to expound upon the whys and wherefores of our excursion. Ask me (or D) anything, whether you're wondering how long you can wear one pair of boxer-briefs, what's the meter conversion for rickshaws in Pune, or just what the shit a "dhaba-wallah" might be.* Fire away. My email's on the profile page linkable at left. Everything's fair game, and if I don't know the answer I'll make one up. Every question gets a response, and the fun ones I'll compile for a future blog. Until then, cheers. Peace.

*: Three months sixteen days, but they'll change funny colors; meter times six plus two; the wallah who runs the dhaba. Respectively.

Program Music

2008-01-12T05:34:00.001-05:00

OVERTURE: In Which Bob And Jane Move North, The Wheels On The Bus Going 'Round And 'Round

It's been some time since last we caught wind of our heroes' mis/adventures as they cruise the Subcontinent. Wending their way through paddy and grove, town and village, hypermetropolis and whistlestop, they went from verdant Kerala into the alternating bustle and rustle of Karnataka. Returning to a state they loved and vowing to see more of it, they found themselves rolling from Kannur to Mangalore to Madikeri, deep in the heart of Kodagu, a region of hills and mountains and earthy bumps of various sizes in between. Kodagu is coffee country, tea country, and Madikeri is its capital. The market smells of fresh ground joe and sings with the alarms of a thousand knockoff Timexes. And this is where our symphony begins, as Bob and Jane disembark their state bus and leave their watch behind in

MOVEMENT I: The Land That Forgot Time (or, The Agony of Da Feet)

We didn't realize we'd forgotten the watch until we'd checked into a room and wondered what time folks might start serving the regional pork specialties. By then it was too late, our watch and its carabiner still holding back the curtain on a semi-deluxe KSRTC bus bound for Mysore. I miss the carabiner. We bought another watch for eighty rupees in one of the score of stalls in the main bazaar and carried it with us, strapped to the outside of our daypack, on the two-day trek we arranged. The first day was brilliant, a long walk along ridges and switchbacks through coffee, tea and spice plantations with S, our guide. S pointed out every different plant and nut and spore along the way while he shared with us his life story and plans for opening his own guide outfit in Kodagu. He was a wonderful storyteller and a very funny cat, openly curious about life in our United States and ready to laugh at a white boy who thinks every hissing irrigation line might be a king cobra. We stopped around two for lunch with a local Tulu-speaking family, four generations under the same roof, where grandma plied us with home cooking (daal and fresh greens with rice and chai) and great-granny ground betel nuts for paan and great-granddaughter showed us her gimme-a-cavity cute litter of puppies. After seventeen long clicks through the misty green mountains we found ourselves at our campsite near the bottom of the valley outside Madikeri. A small assembly of huts collected around a cave shower and a campfire ring, we roughed it in a mudblock structure equipped with one thirty-foot bed of stretched thatch and bamboo. Our meal that night was served in a tiny home down the dirt road from the hut compound, a simple meal of rice and cabbagey daal with hot chapatis eaten by the light of a flask candle. Returning, I lit a hard-won campfire from scavenged paper scraps and half-dry wood and we warmed ourselves before retiring to our cot for the night.

That first day of the trek was the first time we had worn shoes in almost two months, as sandals are the order of every day here. Consequently, I wore holes in both of my heels that I feared might have revealed bone. Also, while ducking to pass beneath one of many fallen trees, I lost the watch that I'd fastened to a strap on our backpack. So we awakened the second morning with pained feet and no idea of the time. Reporting for breakfast down the road, we found that our internal clocks were roughly accurate. Our new guide, however, had no such guiding sense of punctuality. He was more than an hour late, time we killed playing cricket with our hostess' son among the cow pies and strutting chickens on their tiny acreage. Between our wounded soles and our late start and the distance we had to cover to summit Tadayindemol, the tallest peak in Kodagu, the day was shaping up to be a bear. The trail began easily enough on a paved path with paddy on the downhill, coffee on the up. Where the asphalt ended, though, the going got tough. Steep and rocky where it wasn't steep and knotted with tangling roots, the trail wore on our already tender feet, which in turn took its toll on our knees as we adjusted our stride to compensate for four barking dogs. Over the first seven kilometers up the mountain, we smiled through the pain as every turn brought us more sweeping, verdant vistas of the region. With less than a click to go, though, and all of it in one fifty-degree scramble through the swirl and swell of every gust for 100 miles, D and I had hit our limits. It didn't help that our guide, younger and less experienced than S, spent the climb alternately lagging to SMS his peeps and bounding ahead of us, able to provide no guidance or reassurance or even a reasonable, steady pace. Yesterday's monkeys were weighing heavily on our backs, and my feet felt like two fluffy kittens being devoured by scorpions. Looking up into the sun and realizing we'd had it, we abandoned our quest for the summit, gazing wistfully, defeatedly up at what looked for all the world like fucking Everest.

MOVEMENT II: Don't Just Stand There, Bus A Move!

Our trekking finished (for better or worse), we began a series of bus rides that would bring us to Karnataka's far northeast, to the tiny town of Bidar. Getting there from Madikeri, in the southwesternmost corner of the state, would prove to be a challenge. I've written before about the roads in Karnataka, how their peaks and craters rival anything we climbed in Kodagu, but this leg of our sojourn deserves mention. As the crow flies, Madikeri to Bidar is less than 600 kilometers. It's Boston to NYC. This being India, however, we had to break that trip into four legs, the last being the only day shorter than 10 hours. From Madikeri we rode to Shimoga and stayed the night by the bus stand, leaving for Hospet the next morning. We broke up the journey in Hampi (left), a quaint little burg we loved in October, staying two nights before moving as far as Gulbarga, a twelve-hour gauntlet that put us four hours from Bidar--a joyride by comparison. By the time we arrived we had spent nearly 48 hours on buses as we passed through innumerable villages and bus stands big and small.

And that was why we looked at the trip like a blessing, rather than a curse. For a number of reasons, D and I have felt more at home in the sticks than in the cities. And we've enjoyed daytime bus trips more than the marginally faster trains. You can see more of life as it's lived when it's rolling past your open, rattling window at 25 kilometers an hour than you can when it's whizzing by the barred portals of a rail-prison. You have time to spot the elephants in the forest outside Madikeri, lumbering through the undergrowth twenty meters off the road. Getting down from the bus to Gulbarga and badly needing a piss, you can be followed to the open urinals by a pack of boys asking questions of you, perhaps the only white man to pass through those parts in years, as stage fright blocks your impending flow and you answer, stammering with effort, "America...I am fine...my name is Bob...I gotta piss, how are you?" Those are the moments that make the state buses worth the trouble. They're amazingly cheap (and you get what you pay for), but the slice-of-life value is worth its weight in funky gold noserings.

MOVEMENT III: "Nobody Goes To Bidar..."

--"and it's not clear why." This line is our Lonely Planet's introduction to the marvels of that town. It points out the abundance of Muslim architecture in the area and the ruined fort (left) that encircles empty hills and fields of kids playing cricket. But our guidebook is two years old, and when we arrived in Bidar it looked like a rogue, inland tsunami had washed the fronts off of every building in the old town. The front few meters of stores and offices and family homes had been shorn from the back of the structures, so that walking down the street was like looking in the back of a dollhouse. A dollhouse fronted, mind you, by open sewers bridged by planks that led into open rooms still sporting paintings and calendars on their truncated walls. They're widening the streets in Bidar, kids. And not widening them one-by-one, but all at once. And, this being India, all the work is being done by hand. If you pass through Bidar in ten years, they might still be at it.

We came to Bidar for the local damascene metalwork, bidri. The artisan casts silver into a shape, be it a vase or an elephant or a paan box, then covers it with a flat black amalgam of metals and chisels at it to release the glowing metal beneath. It's really neat stuff, and the best work winds up in museums and palaces across India and the world. The street in Bidar that had been the bidri bazaar, though, was in the heart of the widening venture. As a result of the ongoing improvements only a handful of shops were still tapping away, and the selection and prices were limited and high due to the short supply. Amazed by our effort to come all the way to the heart of the venture, so to speak, several locals pointed us in the direction of the working shops and advised us to haggle, and haggle hard. Keeping their words in mind as we strode purposefully down the street and up to the first and largest shop, I got turned around by a couple of girls asking D her name and nation. So did D, apparently, as with her next step she came down hard on my newly-scabbed right heel with the sole of her Teva. I shouted and spun in pain, scaring two poor children senseless as I clenched my fists and felt my face redden in a snarl, adrenaline rushing to the end of every hair on my body. It hurt so bad it gave me goosebumps. Horrified, D tried to console me and I shrugged her off, figuring we'd just get in the shop and get out again so I could sanitize and cover my wound as quickly as possible. Stepping over the shitmoat and into the workshop to climb the stairs to the newly open-air showroom on the first floor, the men assembled before their pieces started yelling and pointing at my foot, which was bleeding into a pool in the back of my sandals. The helpful salesman (the head artist's son) walked across the street with us to find a bandage as I hobbled and dabbed at the running wound with my bandanna.

That unpleasantness behind us, we were in no position to bargain. When it comes to buying items at fluid prices, you have to start negotiations from a point of strength. Never walk in weak, or with blood puddling around your heels. Picking several pieces from the trove upstairs, we named our price and our boy shot it down, suggesting that maybe we take an item or two out to make the order fit our budget. Standing firm as we could, we thanked them for their time and walked out down the rubblestrewn street to talk over our options. Along the way we passed a small store, open in front like every other building in town but still moving crisps and paan and rupee sweets. A young man called to us in English from the storefront and we stopped to chat, as we weren't really going anywhere anyway. R was home visiting Bidar over the holidays on a break from his work with an avionics firm in Little Rock, Arkansas. His mother, the shopmistress, brought us plates of namkeen and sweet chapatis as we sat in the back of the store and made introductions. R told us how strange it was to see foreigners in Bidar, his words echoing our LP verbatim. We talked about our travels and about life in Little Rock, parting as R's friends rolled up to take him for dinner.

The sun was heading towards a set and we would be rolling the following day (25 Dec 2007) for Aurangabad (500 km, 14 hours), so we cruised back by the bidri shop, where our items were still arranged on a low table upstairs. Our boy smiled his paan-stained smile when I took out two of the pieces and asked him for a new total, which we paid without protest as one of his colleagues polished the silver filigree and wrapped our order in newspaper, tied it in twine, handed it over with both hands.

MOVEMENT IV: A'bad, Xmas, Ellora, Et cetera...

So Christmas was spent on a long, long, long bus ride out of Karnataka and back into Maharashtra. We arrived early for the 9 AM bus, and the folks at the station were extra helpful with our functional illiteracy. Our conductor was the closest thing we had to Santa Claus this year; as we were the only kids riding the whole stretch from Bidar on Christmas and the only blanquitos for miles, he was all smiles every time he passed down the aisle to collect fares. He asked us the usual questions, polishing his limited English, and dragged me by the hand off the bus at a roadside dhaba early in the evening to make D and I try the poha the dhaba-wallah was whipping up. I guess he was worried that the gora (foreigners) might starve to death before the bus pulled in, and he showed a joking brand of concern as he ordered for us and showed us two seats off to the side of the stand where we could sip our chai in peace.

Finally arriving in Aurangabad with an hour of Christmas left on the clock, we checked into our overpriced ('tis the season...) hotel and bounced upstairs for some much-needed grub and a cold mug of cheer. Our turkey was butter chicken; our stuffing, paneer kofta. And as we settled our brains for a short winter's snooze, visions of cave temples danced behind our eyes, whirling us through the snows to the top of Mount Kailasa.

I remember seeing photos of the caves at Ellora in a National Geographic when I was a wee tyke. Don't remember how old or anything, but they were the first site I wanted to visit upon our arrival four months ago. We were warned off by the tail-end of the monsoon and the culture shock and headed south from Mumbai to Goa instead of north onto the Deccan plateau, and my expectations for the caves had grown ever greater in the interim. So when our bus arrived at the gates to the caves, set into a ridge a couple of clicks long and housing 32 different Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain temples, and the Kailasa temple loomed ahead of us like something from a dream, I dropped my shades and my jaw and barged straight ahead.

Pictures are great for a lot of things. Blackmail snaps from the office party, naked babies at bathtime, Uncle Walter and his "disappearing teeth" trick--all well and good inside a 3-inch by 5-inch frame. But even the whizkids at NG couldn't get the wonder of the Kailasa temple at Ellora onto their glossy pages. It just wouldn't fit. Seems it took 150 years for like 10,000 laborers to cut this behemoth from solid rock, a monolithic structure that staggers from every angle. We wandered the grounds with our eyes up, jaws down. Every surface of the main temple is covered by carved elephants, lions, and dancing figures from the great Hindu epics. Stairways and hand-hewn passages allow for circumambulations on three different tiers around the temple proper, and paths lead up the hill behind the site for aerial views that show the attention paid every detail on the top of the buildings, every budding lotus, every crouching lion. I can say, secure in my masculinity, that I got a little misty walking around the joint. It was one of those holy-shit-INDIA! moments that we have every once in a while, something to shake us from the complacency of ass-numbing bus rides and the same petty hassles and haggles we encounter almost everywhere. Ellora was an eyeful and a bag of chips.

So when we got to Ajanta the next day, a longer ride out from A'bad, we were a little awed by the difference. Ellora is renowned for the mastery of its sculpture and remarkable for the fact that three religious traditions added temples at different times over the course of a millenium. The caves at Ajanta are all Buddhist, and were forgotten to history after Indian Buddhism moved north to the Himalaya. Astoundingly plain in their architecture, their fame derives from the incredibly well-preserved original murals (not really frescoes, but close) decking the walls. The paintings were cool, the site was dramatic (a horseshoe ravine with temples about midway between a dry riverbed and the crest of 200-meter cliffs), but the approach was a little too Disney. You arrive at the Ajanta T-junction, 4 clicks from the ravine, where the bus lets you down and you pay a 7-rupee "amenities charge." Then you walk through a gamut of hawkers, vendors, shit shops and chai stalls to get to the buses that roll to the caves (another 7 rupees per head). Then it's up the hill from the bus stand through the outstretched arms of postcard and picturebook salesmen and around the dholi-wallahs who carry the feeble, old, and lazy wealthy around the site on sedan chairs. Finally seeing the curve of the ravine before you, it's then a stop at the ticket counter where you pay your Archaeological Survey of India tiered admission charge (25 rupees for Indians, 250 rupees or US$5 for foreign nationals). Then and only then can you pass through the main gate (and nonfunctioning metal detector) and wait in line at cave after cave to be allowed inside in groups not exceeding 40 people for a time not exceeding 15 minutes. I was half expecting "It's A Small World" to be piped in through speakers once inside the temples, a little animatronic Siddhartha om-ing in time to the rhythm under a smiling, tinselstrewn bodhi tree.

MOVEMENT V: The Five-Star Treatment

From Aurangabad we went back to Pune, where A's folks were kind enough to receive us again. We picked up a care package (mosquito repellent, US coins, wetnaps and two fresh pairs of Ex Officio skivvies--more on them another time) from Florida and had a couple of bomb home-cooked meals before rolling into the big city, big ballers in a pimped-out rickshaw, checking into the Taj Blue Diamond for New Year's Eve. The night before we'd spent picking up some fresh threads at the local department store (cover band knocking off Bryan Adams' "Summer of '69" on the ground floor, housewares on 3), so we were looking oh-so-very after some room service and a hot bath (!). Stylin' and profilin' and such, we cruised up to the library lounge overlooking Koregaon Road for some complimentary cocktails (always comp the whales, daddy, and give 'em the Rain Man Suite) before slinking back to the room, where our fine Indian (Sula, baby, nothing but the best) sparkling wine was chilling in a proper bucket, flutes alongside. The digs were plush (and we couldn't get reservations for any of the real parties in town) so we stayed in and watched the festivities kicking off 2K8 across India on our 42-inch plasma TV while waiting for room service to deliver our pizza (another perk of membership, boss, and if you don't get it then I won't explain, dig?).

The first morning of the year, heads splitting, we headed downstairs for our (comped, natch) killer breakfast buffet, gorged on fresh fruit and cheese and pastries and other such goodies as one won't find everyday here, before booking the massages that are yet another privilege afforded high-rollers such as ourselves. Kneaded and steamed and showered clean, we luxuriated for the rest of the day and night in the sort of accomodation we find (read: "can afford") only once in the bluest of Indian moons. And when we paid the bill (AmEx, yo, for the mad miles) the softest landing we've had in India set us back a little over two bills a night. Not bad for a couple of kids who spend at least an hour a week dickering over ten rupees with sheisty rickshaw-wallahs.

MOVEMENT VI: Conquering The Summit (or, Here Comes The Hotsteppah)

A long day on trains got us from Pune to Mumbai to Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, the first leg of our foray into the north. Finished with the south ("Catch you next time, Orissa! Later on, Andhra Pradesh!") and ready for a different flavor, we spent the night in Ahmedabad (we'd return later, in another installment) before catching a bus to Palitana, little more than a busy, dusty road leading from the bus stand to a hill, Shatrunjaya, topped by 900 Jain temples. We set off for the hilltop after a hearty breakfast around the corner from our hotel, steeling ourselves for the trek ahead.

Among the preparations necessary for such an adventure: Jains revere animals more than most, so no leather. Off with the belt and shoes, thanks. And that wallet, too, mister. Don't make me ask twice. Also, as part of climbing 3572 steps over four clicks of rocky hill is that it's done as a test of austerity, why'n'cha leave that bottled water in the room. We'll sell you cups of water at stops along the two-hour climb. There. So no food in the bag, no water, no leather...no problem, right?

Did I mention the matter of 3572 steps? All the way up the hill we passed ashen Indians raccooned with exhaustion, looking very much the worse for wear. Dholi-wallahs with buns of steel waited along the route to help the fallen, but we shrugged off their advances, determined to master this climb after the shuddering defeat of Tadayindemol. And master it we did. The path wound over foothills, switchbacking and levelling off at times before revealing the templed summit of Shatrunjaya beyond the haze blanketing the Saurashtran plains. I've seen Neuschwanstein, Crazy Ludwig's architectural fairytale in Bavaria that served as the model for the Magic Kingdom's castle. I played back that reveal, coming around the mountain trail and glimpsing it through the Black Forest, as we came upon Shatrunjaya. I'm not sure which was more impressive, but I was dehydrating rapidly by that point and the white marble temples might have seemed more glittery than they really are. We spent a couple of hours scouting the best vistas among the temple complexes and the narrow alleyways separating them, bribing the occasional security guard to let us up the ladders topping many of the twisting, ornately carved spires. Some of the temples are still active sites of worship, and there was a congregation of white-clad Jains wrapping around one of the main temples, waiting for their turn at the inner sanctum. We could only get as far as the marble gate inside, but hearing the chants and seeing the strain of devotion writing lines on the faces of those assembled was something to behold.

CODA: In Which Our Heroes Reprise Past Episodes Of Intestinal Distress

So D fell ill again in Bidar, something I neglected to mention in that passage of this symphony. A little stomach bug, some crampage, a day in bed and all was well. I don't know what felled me in Palitana, but I awoke in the night after Shatrunjaya and before a long bus to Diu with my stomach knotting like two Rajput warriors, their moustaches tied together, trying to lead camel charges in opposite directions.* Eight hours on the bus, sans facilities, only made the situation more desperate. I spent the next five days more or less in bed with the revenge of whatever grabbed me in Cochin, watching bad TV and shitting water until my lips chapped.** It's still following me (thankfully from a slight remove) as I write these words, some three weeks later. D says I should see a doctor, but I'm holding out for the symptoms to fade further or until we hit Delhi, whichever comes first. Whatever happens I'll keep smilin' through the pain, though the strains of my straining might well be the theme music playing behind the rest of our time in India. Until next time, then. Gotta run...

*: It's a stretch, but we're in Rajasthan and these guys have seriously great moustaches and I just thought I'd work that in. The camels are funny, too.
**: You're welcome.

Violent, Tempered.

2007-12-17T02:50:00.000-05:00

On our next-to-last day in Pondicherry, D and I scored some of the bomb local cheese (made by the space-cadet ashramites of Auroville), a fresh baguette, and a bottle of local vino. We made our way to the botanical gardens, where we planned on reveling in our shared Francophilia and enjoying a little picnic among les belles fleurs. We poured the wine into a Nalgene for discreet public consumption and dumped the bottle, wrapped in the plastic bag from the wine shop, in one of the dustbins at the gardens' entrance. We headed off into the gardens, which were surprisingly overgrown and ill-maintained, in search of a bench we could use for our brief repast. Within thirty seconds of sitting down, we're approached by a gang of young boys who ask us if we're enjoying our wine. We feign ignorance of their broken English in the hopes that they'll leave us alone to enjoy our food, and it works...almost. They move off to congregate around and upon a small boulder maybe fifty feet away, chattering amongst themselves and staring at us. Our first bites of gorgonzola curdling in our stomachs under the scrutiny of the pack, we decide to decamp for the beachside promenade to try again. On our way out of the gardens we pass the same dustbin where we'd dumped the bottle, and there's the empty bag blowing along the path. D is putting this scene together in her head, and I see the realization dawn on her that the boys had plucked the bottle (for a deposit?) and discarded the bag mindlessly at their feet, nevermind the trash can right there. The fire behind her eyes making her ears smoke visibly, she starts sputtering with righteous indignation as I re-trash the bag, put my arm around her, say "Nevermind, nevermind, nevermind..."

Across town and on the sand, we find an available bench shaded by a thatched roof, one of a dozen or so bamboo structures dotting the elevated promenade. Taking in the salty air and the sunshine, we set about preparing our feast for the second time. Because Fate laughs at picnickers and French cheese, within seconds we're being harassed by a staggeringly drunk, disheveled Indian man with an empty large Kingfisher in his hand. He's asking for food or a rupee or who-knows-what, and I've had it. I'm all for sharing with the needy, but this dude stank of beer and had the nerve to ask me to fund his next? Fuck that noise. The teat of human kindness had run dry. I stood up and started waving my hands like Get out of here, go bother someone else, move it along, bro but no dice. I then remember I'm waving my open pocketknife in my hand, and realize I must look like I'm brandishing a weapon at an essentially harmless, drunken beggar. Pissed off even more by the tableau we're staging as I'm telling him to bugger off, I put my knife back with the bread and cheese and return to push the man forcefully on down the beach. I lost my cool, no doubt, but I didn't (and don't) regret shoving a hundred-pound Indian drunk away from my hut.

What got me after the fact was how fast I snapped, how quickly I forgot manners and decorum and went for broke on some poor schmuck. These last few weeks had been wearing on D and I, and it was beginning to show. We were tired of paying too much for rickshaws with "broken" meters and shite food in backpacker haunts and occasionally grimy accommodation. We were tired of the haggle and the hassle and the thousands of propositions we received each day, the conditioned responses of locals seeing white skin, the offers of pot and hash and "sightseeing" tuk-tuk rides and the constant barrage that had followed us in every destination since Kodai. And somehow I couldn't even get Zen about the whole issue with my usual bad-day mantra: "Some people work in coal mines...some people work in coal mines..." Before we knew it we were deep in a sticky funk and checking flights anywhere less Indian. A change of scenery was long overdue.

Ah, Kerala!

We arrived in Trivandrum after the longest haul of our journey thus far, a thirteen-hour monster trek southwest from Pondy that put us in the station near midnight. Having booked a room in advance and caring only about a soft place to crash, we hit the room with high hopes for what daylight would reveal around us.

No disappointments there. Trivandrum, Kerala's capital, manages to bustle without the shoulder-checking press of other Indian cities. It's a laid-back, walkable town with a couple of cool museums and a fascinating palace that once housed the local Maharajas. Besides all that, it was the first place we had seen in too long in which our budget realistically reflected What Things Cost. We stayed in a nice room for under 300 roops, had big cheap breakfasts in the surreal brick spiral of the Indian Coffee House around the corner, managed to enjoy a beer together in a welcoming bar down the street. Nobody hassled us as we walked down the street, and more than a few people (the first in a while) struck up conversations as we passed on the sidewalks. The most contentious exchange we had (trying to trade books we had finished reading for black-market reprints at the local book bazaar) was transacted with smiles and laughter. When one seller's friend came between us and offered to settle our genial dispute at a price fifty rupees lower than the one I named, the whole crowd started in on him at once, mock-strangling him as the word "idiot" broke through the swirl of Malayalam curses. We got a good vibe from the place and stayed longer than we initially planned, as much to heal our wounded spirits as our broken budget.

We moved on to Kollam, where we planned to check out Kerala's world-famous backwaters. These navigable waterways wind through innumerable tiny islands, some small enough to hold no more than a single coconut palm, whose lode, when overripe, splashes into the canals like a fat kid cannonballing. We had planned on renting a houseboat and floating a day and night through these wetlands, but the toll taken on our budget and our sanity by Tamil Nadu and Pondicherry precluded any such idylls. Instead, we settled for a half-day canoe tour of Monroe Island and Ashtamudi Lake. The price was right and the day was perfect, and we saw the two-hut villages and the spice gardens and the coconut-fiber ropes being made--in short, all the stuff we came for without any of the congested, petrol-slicked aquatic lanes surrounding the outboard-houseboat traffic jams out of Alleppey. We shared our canoe with two brothers from Hyderabad, A and S, who joked about our limited knowledge of Hindi during the few moments when their eyes were not glued to their Nikons. When S asked us why we weren't taking many snaps, A chided him on our behalf that we were traveling for a long time and couldn't be bothered to capture every curious calf chasing us along the canals. We had a long talk about our travels on the tempo ride back into Kollam, and A was one of the first Indians we've met who really seemed to understand the point of our trip, which is as basic as it is complicated: To experience life as it is lived beyond our homeland. We wished each other well and retired to our hotels, and the next afternoon we headed up the coast to Cochin.

Now, we should have taken our arrival in Cochin as a sign of things to come. We wound up taking the train to avoid a four-and-a-half hour state bus ride. The promised three hours, though, got us only a fraction of the distance we needed to cover, and the train would stop for forty-five minutes at a stretch for no discernible reason. Add that to the fact that we were sitting on our backpacks in the end of a packed carriage, by the very popular toilets, and our state of general frazzle by the time we arrived can be accurately estimated. Cochin was Godzilla, we were Japan. Off the ferry from the mainland it was a twenty-minute stroll through dark streets to our homestay. The proprietors seemed nice enough, a tiny old man and his wife, but the room was expensive (400 rupees for a bed down the hall from the cramped, shared bathroom). After the train ride and given how deserted the town seemed, we opted to take it and maybe look for a better value the next day.

We never found that better value. The problem with Fort Cochin is geographical: Ernakulam, on the mainland, is a big Indian city of a few million with all the accoutrements (traffic, crowds, air and noise pollution) that entails. The Fort area lies at the end of a narrow peninsula across the water and a world away, a scenic twenty-minute, five-rupee ferry ride or a long, expensive taxi or rick from Ernakulam. It's a retreat from the screaming city with trees lining its quiet streets and a relaxed atmosphere that the guidebooks describe, a bit too generously, as "romantic." As such, it is the destination of choice for Western tourists. And again, as such, the local hospitality industry has taken the fact that they're the only game in town and run with it, charging exorbitant rates for basic, no-frills accommodation and terrible food. Sure, you can find nice rooms and meals around, but you're gonna pay for it. That might be A-okay for short-stay tourists spending pounds and Euros, but for two budget travelers moving for eight months on a tanking dollar, it inspired flashbacks to what we'd come to Kerala in the hopes of escaping.

So we knew we wouldn't stay long, and made our short time in Cochin as cheap as we could. We bought tickets to a performance of kathakali, a stylized Keralan dramatic art form that tells the stories of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana using an elaborate system of eye rolls, hand movements, and posturing. There's a codified system of gestures that express "lust," "anger," "passion," "jealousy," and even "how the bee drinks the nectar from the lotus flower." I think the last one might be a sexual innuendo, but it wasn't entirely clear from the short course given before the performance. The show itself is a little bit pantomime, a little bit interpretive dance, and a whole lot weird. These guys spend hours painting themselves into costume, then spend even longer prancing about the stage without uttering any sound other than the occasional grunt. Bells attached to their legs and ankles highlight their movements while a team of drummers and a wailing singer accompany them and "tell" the story of what's going on before them. It's something to behold, and seeing the show was enough to inspire us to check out more of the local art forms.

The next morning, our last in Cochin, we were rudely awakened at eight AM by the owners of our lodge knocking to inform us that their girl had arrived to clean our room. Groggy and not sure if they were telling me what I thought they were, I said we didn't need our room cleaned and we'd be checking out that morning by the appointed time of noon. Thirty minutes later, there's another knock, and this time I'm less groggy and more angry. It's the owner's wife, again telling me that her girl is here to clean our room, adding that she has another reservation for our room and that the party has arrived. I point to the sign above the desk outside our room, which clearly states "CHECKOUT TIME 12 NOON," telling her that we were getting up anyway and would be ready after taking a shower and packing our bags, but letting her know that we would not be hurried out the door because of their poor planning. We had sketched out a lazy morning exit and a late seafood lunch to get the most time out of our budget before seeing an exhibition of kalarippayat, the local martial art, at four that afternoon. So we get cleaned up and we're half-naked and half-packed when another knock comes. I scream "WHAT?!" as I head to the door, belt undone and hair still wet, and this time it's owner and wife, telling me again that they need us out to clean the room. I point again to the sign by the desk, tell him again that it's not my problem, and shut the door. We finish what we're doing and store our bags in the spare room under the stairs, and I tell the owner I'll pay him when we collect our bags later that afternoon.

After a walk through town, we head out to the local fishmongers to haggle for Indian salmon and huge, gorgeous tiger prawns, and take our fish to a seafront shack where they butter and garlic it to perfection for a nominal fee. We luxuriate in the fresh seafood (we bought the fish still breathing) and go for French-press coffee and cake at this chic little art gallery-cum-cafe on one of the nearby backstreets. Having splurged on our meal for the day we go for the kalarippayat exhibition, which was sadly truncated due to the stitches and splints required of half the troupe after the previous night's show. Such injuries are pretty common, apparently, as--besides the flying kicks and swinging staffs and swords--one of the weapons demonstrated is the urumi, a weapon with a handle at the base of four flexible five-meter blades, worn as a belt by women and whirled through the air fast enough to make ribbons of any number of potential attackers on dark country lanes. Fearsome stuff, and the finale of the show.

All smiles after salvaging a great afternoon from the shambles of our morning, we walk back to the guesthouse to secure our packs and set off for the mainland, where we would stay the night before an early train to Kannur. Upon arriving, I go upstairs to find the owner and pay our balance. He asks me why we're leaving, if we don't want to stay another night, and I can't believe my ears. This, after waking us from blissful morning slumber to shuffle us out the door to make way for the next suckers! I tell him there's no way I'd stay there another night, that I don't like the way he does business, and try to pay the 300-rupee balance with a 500-rupee note. Of course, as is so common in every business of any kind in this country, he doesn't have change. He tells me I should go back out, get change, and come back to pay him. I tell him he can go out for the change himself, that I'm ready to leave and I've had enough of his shit for one lifetime, and he insists again that I can get change down the road, in the opposite direction of our ferry. I give up and go downstairs to find D, tell her to shoulder her pack, that we're leaving. We're out the door when the owner calls down from his balcony, obviously concerned, asking where we're going. "To get change," I tell him. "Put your pants on and come with us if you want it." He does just that, comes down the side stairway pulling a face and tells me again we need to go the wrong way for the ferry to get change. I tell him he can come with us to the ferry and get change along the way, but that we won't be walking the other direction. He accuses us of trying to skip out on the bill, and I assent to the walk because now I want to beat a discount out of him for the early wake-up call and the shitshow that our dealings with him have been. We're raising our voices at each other on the walk, I'm telling him again that I don't appreciate being expected to pay the full amount for being kicked out early, and now he's telling me that he's already giving me a discount for not charging me 100 rupees extra to stash our packs for the day. "Is after five o'clock!" he says repeatedly, like our bags were occupying prime real estate in his closet and should be charged by the hour. Of course I know that any reputable lodging will allow for left luggage at no charge for paying customers, and I say as much as colorfully as I know how. "You're the fool," he tells me, at which point we've already cursed each other up and down the empty street after getting the change. I tell him to go to hell and go fuck himself, and regret not giving him specifics on the order in which he might go about such. As it was, I turned on my heel to avoid hitting the son of a bitch, and we walked down the way to the ferry steaming, steaming.

That night in Ernakulam was a relief, as we booked into a proper hotel with posted rates, no haggling, no bullshit, with attached bath and in close proximity to the train station. Having done a load of wash and strung it out to dry, D and I sat under our mosquito net reading for a bit, neither of us saying what we were both thinking, each of us trying again to make lemonade of the day's shitty citrus. We wound up talking through the day, focusing on a bomb plate of seafood and a cool knife show and not the circus of bad business that was the Ham Dale Inn. Agreeing to agree on what we'd take from the day, and knowing what we were going for on the next leg of our journey, we decided to go for a drink at a hotel bar that was reportedly alright for mixed company.

The joint was weird to say the least, with full-wall action portraits of sports heroes like some white skier chick and that Walton kid that played b-ball for Arizona. And the service was what it needed to be, a smile and a plate of roasted chickpeas with every round. I had whisky, D had Kingfisher, and--because I've been brushing my teeth with it and showering in it and occasionally even washing down a Mefloc with it--I put two cubes of the local ice into each of my whisky sevens. We talked over the day again, rehashed our reservations and applause about South India as a whole, and walked back to our room through the silent, dusty backroads of the city.

It only took three hours before I woke in a cold sweat, burning up and freezing all at once, mentally preparing myself for what I knew would be coming: the puking, the shitting, the general and I-need-not-specify-further unpleasantness of dysentery. D woke up a couple of hours later to find me burning up and shaking, asked me what was wrong. I told her and she was up most of the rest of the night holding me when I was cold, soothing me when I was hot, and when the first light shone through the paneless windows she asked me if I was fit to travel. I said roll out, we packed and caught a rick to the station, and I put on a brave (if pallid) face for the six-hour train to Kannur. We were sitting second class seated with a benchful of sari-clad women, none of whom batted an eye at the sick white boy trying to focus on his bootleg copy of Snow while simultaneously fighting off the urge to bumrush the line at the rolling latrine. Kind people, them.

But I digress: After all the trash we'd dealt with in Cochin, we decided to go off the trail in Kannur to find the local ritual of theyyam. Rumor has it this particular Keralan art/ceremony predates Hinduism and owes more to the animist cults that worshipped in the coconut groves before Sri Shiva took hold of the subcontinent some three thousand years ago. Our first taste of Kannur was tinged with the green filter of my discomfort, as we walked for close to two hours before finding a suitable place to hole up for a day or so before testing our (read: "my") mettle for the journey that would be a theyyam hunt. J at the train station's tourist info desk was unusually helpful, pointing us in the direction of one accessible rite being conducted that afternoon (my bowels nixed it) and giving us the name of a temple twenty clicks out of town where they performed it daily at sixish in the PM. He also tipped us off to a kalarippayat show going down at the town square that evening (late enough to be okay), which wound up being the highlight of our Indian Excursion thus far.

We showed up to the Square at the prescribed hour, which was 5:30 PM Indian Stretchable Time. Just like at a good show in New Orleans, they were still setting up the lights and mikes when we arrived. Nevertheless, we decided to sit for a minute and give it thirty more to get moving as the sun set over the western side of the amphitheater. Sitting and wondering what would happen next, we were besieged by a gaggle of highschoolers on a camping conference with the local tourism agency, the DTPC, among whom was J, the helpful gent from the tourist desk at the railway station. S was the first to talk to us, asking us the usual Whatisyourgoodname and Whichisyourcountry? We answered, using our Indian aliases for simplicity, and from there it was a constant backchatter behind the opening act, three women from the paddy fields in Cannanore district singing the local equivalent of Negro spirituals. While S explained the significance of what our foreign ears were hearing, I explained that people in my part of the world would do the same thing, singing to make their hearts smile while performing backbreaking labor for little or no remuneration. S found this corrolary interesting and asked me to sing a verse from one of our tunes. I blanked and looked at D, and the best we could come up with was "Swing low, sweet chariuh-hut, comin' for to carry me hoooome..." The kids ate it up, this off-key rendition of a sad, sad tune, and I listened to their laughter and the keening of the women onstage and hoped that we had struck a common chord and that I hadn't merely been the latest white man to appropriate black music in the name of plying a global audience.

But for these kids, singing a line from a song from our homeland was an important thing. They asked D and I if we'd seen any Malayalam movies, who our favorite heroes and heroines (read: "movie stars") were, whether we might sing another line from another tune for their rolling digital voice recorders. Answering in the negative and drawing blanks and staring into the open, speckled maw of a recording device (in order), I was struck by the soulful strains of "Camptown Races," a song my grandmother used to sing to me when I'd stay at her place in Lexington and needed to go to sleep, all of five years old, thrilled to be in the company of that glorious, mysterious old woman with the mellifluous voice and perfect recall of her youth's songbook.

Doo-dah, doo-dah.

We continued talking with S and his friends, the girls eventually drawing D to their side of the scrum, and J eventually came back with a friend of his televising the cultural festival for a big local network. He asked me if I'd be willing to say a few words about the women singing and the boys swinging flaming coconut husks from steel chains (an altogether enlightening side of kalarippayat we hadn't seen in Cochin). One of S's girls asked me to point them out during the interview to make sure that they'd be famous TV stars, too. I did as they asked and was relieved when the cameraman panned left on my mention of "my friends here telling me about the singing women of the paddy fields..." We sat after the TV crew left and discussed politics ("I hate Bush!" "That's okay, S, we hate him, too.") and religion ("What is your religion?" "I have no religion." "That is good. Hindu, Muslim, Christian, we are all human beings.") and interpersonal relations ("Do you marry for love in USA?" "We marry for whatever reason we like in the States, and not always for the right one."). As the kalarippayat show drew to a close, through the big, fiery finale, S turned to me and said some of the most heartrendingly beautiful things I've ever heard from a 17-year-old Indian boy:

"I am sad, Bob."

"Why're you sad?"

"I am sad because in a short time you will leave, and I will leave, and we will say goodbye, and you will never see me again."

"Sure, but we'll always have Kannur," I said with a grin, visions of Bogart and Bergman making me smile for their sheer incongruity.

"But we will return to our homes in our villages, and you will return to your home in Am'rica, and I have very much liked speaking with you about life."

And I was at a loss. There were no words to express my lack of words for S's surplus. I'm sure I said something trite, something to put him at ease, to assure him that he needn't have asked D and I repeatedly if his conversation "brought distress" to our enjoyment of the performances. I know I don't remember those words, the same as I remember his, but we parted with a handshake and a hug and with best wishes for the future.

The next day we found a theyyam at the temple J pointed us to, and it was a loud, strange display of yellow-painted men with elaborate paunches running around in circles with swords in their hands. The theyyam festival we found the day after was in a lull when we arrived, and we spent the better part of two hours smiling and joking and answering the simple, belabored questions of the young girls who came to greet us while the painted, headdressed men in the temple forecourt were fanned and mobbed, alternately, by their devotees. All told, our stay in Kannur cost us less per day than a seafood smorgasbord in Cochi. And it was worth a thousand times that for the spiritual rejuvenation granted us by a handful of boisterous, inquisitive, beautiful children who expressed so openly and honestly an innocent curiousity about (and concern for) another's ways of life.

And that quickly, in just a few hours of a few days, between bouts of anger and sickness and confusion, we found ourselves rid of the albatross we had been cursing intermittently for the past month. I'd be a schmuck if I pulled out the Whitney Houston, said "I believe that children are the future," but I don't know if I can put it any better right now. It's late, and there are too many words before these. All I know is that we came through a dark time and arrived on the other side smiling, cheerful, and full of hope--not only for ourselves, but for every one of us.

Teach them well and let them lead the way.

G-g-g-g-gelato!

2007-12-05T02:14:00.000-05:00

So if you're in the mood for a laugh, check out this video of D and I barely able to contain ourselves over cold-stone gelato in Chennai. The backstory: We met up with A our first morning in town at his boy P's place, a restaurant where they're introducing the cold-stone concept to India. You know cold-stone, right? Where they flip your scoop on the marble countertop with Reese's Pieces and Heath bar crumbles and granola and such? Well, as luck would have it the folks from ChennaiLive, a do-see-hear website keeping Madrasers abreast of all the hip happenings in their burg, were in the house to shoot video for a short feature on P's joint. Since cold-stone is as American as microwaveable individually wrapped low-carb apple pie, and we were the only Americans in the building, they figured they could ply us with free gelato in exchange for a few raves about the product ("The banana really tastes like banana! OMGee-lato!"). Luckily they figured right. We're such whores...but sexyfine and camera-ready (no hair and makeup for these two divas) after an overnight bus and less than forty winks. Enjoy, and please post any and all snide comments in the space provided. Peace.

Lost And Foundering

2007-11-27T01:44:00.000-05:00

Shortly before we left our jobs to travel, D took a funny phone call at the Indian gig. Given the likelihood that answering the phone there would mean listening to someone start rattling away in a tongue other than English, just hearing the phone ring made my skin crawl in apprehension. Too many years spent working in loud music clubs have damaged my hearing in certain situations, and I'd always have to ask the caller to repeat himself six or seven times. It didn't help, either, that so many South Asians have telephone voices that register about three decibels quieter than a sparrow fart. But D, she's got young ears and excellent phone etiquette, she answers with the name of the joint and her name, then "How may I help you?"

"Hello, Doobie," responds the thick Indian accent on the other end of the line, "walla walla dinnah boo-fay?"

Not even fazed by the misunderstood name or the utter incomprehensibility of the entire exchange, she sussed that the guy's wondering if our lunch buffet might also be available in the evenings. No, she tells him, the dinner menu is a la carte. Thank yous are traded and the call is over. By the time I arrive for my shift later that evening, D and K have adopted the man's strange query as a punchline, infectious as much for the mysteries contained in its nonsense syllables as for the lilting, musical, heavily accented soprano required of its delivery. I still smile when I hear it, and sometimes we bust it out just to crack each other up, lighten a mood. It's become a shorthand for our experience of walking around a foreign land in which we speak but one of the 300 languages in daily use, that of the erstwhile colonizers.

And many times that's not a problem. English is the lingua franca for so many exchanges over here, a common language more common than Hindi in South India, where Tamil, Telugu, Cannada, and Malayalam speakers have resisted efforts at uniting under a common tongue. Team Yahoo!, bright young minds from all over India, spoke English at work and play, and I'd need all the fingers on Shiva's dozen arms to count the times we've watched a beach-cafe table populated by Israelis, Germans, Russians, French kids, and the odd Japanese traveler communicate with their Indian waiter in 31 luscious flavors of English.

This week, however, our functional illiteracy and ignorance of the local tongue have combined to make Sisyphean tasks of even the most mundane interactions. In Chennai, the cosmopolitan burg where we met up with our old boss from Cambridge, A, we were offered numerous suggestions for meals and sights around town. There was this one American-style diner where A recommended the cheeseburger, a hankering I didn't know existed in me until I heard the word ("Mmmmmm, cheeeeeseburger..."). We knew the neighborhood and we knew the name of the joint, we even knew the street it was on, and it still took us two rickshaws, forty-five minutes, and several stops while our drivers asked for directions. The problem, you see, is that many streets in Chennai are known by two names: one given by the English, one reflecting the postcolonial efforts to re-Tamil-ize Tamil Nadu. We've run into this all over India, where the trains stop in Mumbai (Marathi name), not Bombay (English corruption), at VT (Victoria Terminus, as in Queen) and not Chatrapati Shivaji (Marathi king and popular tongue-twister) Terminus. What you call your hometown depends on when you were born there, before or after the new names came in. Most people older than twenty will eschew their native tongues and the current maps and the larger political overtones of reclaiming a land from centuries of colonial rule, referring out of habit to the Anglicized names of cities and streets.

So confusion reigned supreme as we searched out a burger and fries in the land of the Holy Cow. We kept telling the second driver "Spurtank Road," to which he would respond "You wan' go what bank?" And I'd name the road again, slower and louder, all too conscious that I was in danger of being that guy who shouts words from a foreign tongue in the futile, idiotic hope that increased volume might spark recognition in the eyes of a person who does not understand them. We've all seen that guy, whether he's talking to hired help in the States or a tuk-tuk driver in Chennai. He ain't pretty. I didn't want to be him, but I also didn't want to spend any more time than was absolutely necessary sucking blue fumes while being driven in circles. Our progress literally described a squared circle as we left Egmore station, turning south east north west in a diminishing spiral, stopping for directions at a handful of roadside stores until bang in front of us was the diner, checkerboard wall tiles and all. We were three blocks due south of the station, to the best of my reckoning.

Alas, that was one tasty hamburger.

The next day we found ourselves on a similar fool's errand. The Theosophical Society has a large park in Adyar, southeast of the city center, where there's a library with arcane religious texts on display and a 400-year-old banyan tree on the grounds that can shade upwards of 3000 people. Sounds impressive, right? We agreed. We set out from Anna Salai, the center's main drag, on one of the buses our books said would take us to the gates of the park. Just spitballing the issue while waiting for the bus, I tried to get a rate for a rickshaw to the Theosophical Society. Those nine syllables were getting me nowhere, no matter how loud or how slow, so I tried "Adyar Library," an alternate name in our LP. "Adyar?" came the response. "Which hotel you going?"

So close, and yet...

The bus put us out a click and a half from Elliots Beach, which abuts the park on the latter's eastern border. That much we knew. We found the wall surrounding the grounds, but no gate. The gate's address was listed as Blavatsky Avenue, and every road sign (surprisingly there they were, and even in English!) only named numbered cross streets. First Main Road's Second Cross Street, and suchlike. We asked at the sidewalk bubble tea spot that didn't serve bubble tea, and they didn't know what we were asking. We asked the guy at the smokes'n'paan stall outside the no-bubble-tea spot, and he didn't know either. We asked a rickshaw driver who was waiting while his fare conducted business inside one of the homes or shops on one of the cross streets, and our smiling faces were met with the next in a long line of blank stares. Here we were, within sight of the wall surrounding 240 acres of private park containing a tree big enough to toilet paper half of India, and nobody knows how to get inside. Not only did nobody know how to get where we were going, they didn't even seem to know that such a place existed. We may as well have been asking for the directions to the Octopus's Garden, the Black Gate of Mordor, some acid fantasy inhabited by the irretrievably bent. They stared at us like we had frogs in our hair. By the time our last hope extinguished in the unknowing eyes of those we'd asked for help, the park's gates were set to close in minutes. Par for the course, we decided, packing it in and heading back to A's place, heads hanging and brains aching from the effort, leaving Chennai the next morning without having seen anything to justify our trouble.

But some days it's like that. Central Mumbai is a very walkable city, easy to navigate and fun besides. Chennai, not so much. Our maps were not granular enough to be of any assistance beyond figuring which part of town we might be in. Even then, Chennai's a booming city and our maps, granular or not, were at least two years old. Them's the breaks. They can't all be winners, kid.

From the disappointment of Chennai we headed south to Mamallapuram, a stone-carving beachside town that was tiny and easily navigable and presented a perfect chance to clean the frogshit out of our hair. We're now in Pondicherry, a city independent of Tamil Nadu that was held by France until the late 1950's. Here we have encountered the pleasant surprise that is hearing the Parisian tongue spoken by Indian mouths. Yet another curiousity in this land of contradictions, our guesthouse is owned by the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, the main draw for foreigners in Pondy. There's a utopian village on the outskirts of town, funded by the ashram and home to almost 2000 "citizens of the world." D and I are a little creeped out by the whole issue, which is a bit too Heaven's Gate for our tastes. Get this: there's a picture over our bed of the movement's late matriarch, known simply as "The Mother." I've had to fight the impulse to turn it facing the wall, but I think they might be watching and we like the room.

So Mom will watch over our restful slumber for another two nights, we'll rise for croissants in the morning and sip espresso in the afternoon, and Thursday we hop a 13-hour train to Trivandrum, in Kerala. They call it "God's Own Country" in all the Tourism Department literature. Given the Babel trip we've been on these last ten days, it won't surprise me to arrive and find a big grey-haired Jerry-Garcia-lookin' dude smiling down from the sky, shouting in God's Own Language, speaking louder when we don't understand.

Cluck'n'gobble

2007-11-22T07:58:00.000-05:00

If you're reading this back home, we hope you're having a happy Thanksgiving. To everyone else on the planet, happy Thursday. We're here on the shores of the Bay of Bengal dreaming of pumpkin pies and turkey sandwiches, but there's fresh seafood down the street that should make up for what we're missing. So while you're gathering around the table and celebrating everything and everyone you have to be thankful for, know that we're doing the same and including all of you. Best wishes, and may your day be better than your turkey's.

Oh, and one more thing:

I shot my feathered (and de-feathered) friends here at Kodai's Sunday market, where they were on sale for a poultry sum. If you want to see more, we've got chickens and monkeys and holy freakin' cows in glorious full-screen color over there on Webshots. D is arranging the digital shots every week or ten days, so check back often to see what's for dinner. For easy navigating in the future, you'll also find the link on the sidebar menu at left. Peace.

You Shall Know Our Velocity!

2007-11-19T00:34:00.001-05:00

I woke up this morning already sticky from the steam boiling off the teeming streets of Chennai. In the interim between my wristwatch beeping at 6 and my lazy ass rolling out of bed, I had one of those half-sleeping, half-waking dreams that bubbles up fully realized despite its brevity. In the dream I was flying to Paris for breakfast, looking to score nothing more than a chocolate croissant and a demitasse of espresso before my return flight. Knowing my stay would last no longer than it took to secure a morning snack, my dream-self browsed my dream-closet in search of the single shirt that would get me through the trip.* The armchair psychologist in me figures two things: 1) that I'm hungry for something beyond the idli-dosa, and B) that our whirlwind tour of India is less cool breeze than cyclone-force gale.

Here's the post-Bangalore breakdown, with a handy timeline for those of you keeping score:

SAT 3 NOV-TUE 6 NOV: Mysore

We took the afternoon train from Bangles to Mysore, a beautiful route through acres and acres of canefields in full flower, their pink-white tassles rolling in the afternoon breeze. Mysore is a hub for the production of sandalwood and incense, and the Devaraja Market in the town center is a speed-metal concert for the senses. Every other stall features piles of multicolored tikka powder and every other hawker is looking to rub his collection of essential oils on your wrist and forearm. Floral aromas of every olfactory shade perfume the air with such intensity that passing bumblebees explode in midair, unable to process the embarrassment of riches. D left the market after our first trip with ten different scents cloaking her arms, nine of which were so vivid and cloying that she spent twenty minutes at the sink afterward trying to smell like people again. Satisfactorily scrubbed, we ambled toward the Maharaja's Palace for their Sunday night lightshow (pictured). For one hour each week the Palace is illuminated by enough lightbulbs to explain blackouts in Bangladesh. The good folks in charge waive the entrance fee for that one hour, during which a carnival atmosphere and thousands of people descend upon the grounds. Smiles still on our faces and the syrupy scents from the vendors outside the gate firing our appetites, we headed to the nearest sweets shop to sample a half-dozen variations on the four food groups: ghee, gram flour, rosewater and jaggery.**

TUE 6 NOV-WED 7 NOV: Ooty

We'd been flirting with the Western Ghats, the mountain range just inland from the Arabian Sea, for our entire southward crawl from Mumbai. This far south they comprise the Nilgiri (or "Blue Mountain") range, and are dotted with hill stations established by the British Raj. Tea bushes and This White Guy flourish in the cool climate, but the drive (pictured) to Ooty (the universally-preferred alternative to Udaghamandalam) is so much nicer than the reality of the town itself. D said it best, remarking with her characteristic wit that "This place would be cute about twenty years ago, when it was cute." Indeed. Today Ooty is a dusty, smoggy, traffic-choked sprawl that's not even in the same fucking zip code as Cute. In a nutshell, for those who like it nutty: the town's lake, called (I shit you not) Reflections Lake, is a popular pedalboating destination for flocks of Indian tourists. It's also the collection point for like half the town's raw sewage. Cheery, nah? We stayed the night and rolled out on the first bus for

WED 7 NOV-WED 14 NOV: Kodaikanal

After the psychout that was Ooty, we were a little apprehensive on the eight-hour-plus ride to Kodai. As if to allay our fears, the switchbacked road into the mountains, which we ascended in our DVD Coach (playing the original Spiderman in subtitled English), kept climbing and twisting to offer us a better view of the sunset burning over the lakes stretched below the foothills that receded ever further behind us the evening's mist. We pulled into town after dark, tucking into a quick bite before bed and hopeful dreams of a mountain paradise.

Any possibility of disappointment disappeared with the sunrise. Our first daylight glimpse of Kodai revealed a beautiful town tentacled over and between a handful of peaks and valleys around 7000 feet. Gone were the rickshaws of Ooty and their sickening fumes, replaced by the kind of clean, thin, mountain air that induces euphoria rather than chemical lightheadedness. We walked the town, from the Tibetan restaurants and Western-style health-food store on the market road to the long promenade around the town's sewage-free lake to the southern route out of town that seemed perpetually ringed by clouds that stretched out beneath the sun like Shiva's down comforter. Sitting on the balcony of our room and looking out over those milky clouds, we knew that we'd be staying in Kodai for a while.

And good thing, too. We met a handful of people who reinforced our initial impression of the place, people who smiled with an unforced honesty that seemed to radiate from the town's very core, oozing into the groundwater and onto the faces of those lucky enough to call it home. Among them were I, the proprietor of Manna Bake Restaurant, who serves a world-famous apple crumble with custard accompanied by his warm alto and the Indian Christian music playing on the cassette deck. You can read two decades of his guests' handwritten hosannas in the volumes he places before you while you wait for your meal, which he prepares in the open kitchen of his own home, at his four-burner stove, ten paces from your seat at one of two communal tables in his main room. Then there was M (above right, with D), our guide on a grueling trek through the misty mountains (above left). He would stop occasionally to crumble a handful of leaves plucked from a trailside plant before offering them to us to smell and identify, or to point out the place where, only a few months ago, he and a couple of his Canadian charges encountered a ten-foot long king cobra that was none too happy with the uninvited company. All of 4'11" and 80 pounds, he led us for eight hours over rock and mud and along cliff faces dropping off into abyssal cloudcover beneath our feet, wearing his beaten blue flip-flops and a broad smile, never once breaking stride or sweat. As we passed a small, gaudy temple late in the afternoon, he summed up the entirety of Indian spirituality with one remarkably succinct utterance in his broken English:

"See temple? Many temples in India. Many temples, many stories." Then, finishing his thought, pointing at a cast-off chunk of cement beside our path, "You see, looks like stone on ground, but even stone on ground has story in India."

WED 14 NOV-THU 15 NOV: Madurai

M's words still ringing in my ears (and not only for the altitude), we rolled out of Kodai to the temple town of Madurai. Our hotel in the old quarter overlooked the several gopurams marking the massive Meenakshmi temple complex. It was a dizzying view from the roof of the joint (pictured), where we went after nightfall to watch someone a few blocks away set off the remainder of his Diwali fireworks. But the heat and press of the city, naked under the sun that scorches Tamil Nadu's plains even in winter, proved too much for us after idyllic Kodai. So on to

THU 15 NOV-SAT 17 NOV: Trichy

We had heard conflicting reports about Tiruchirappali. The English couple we met along the trail with M recommended it as a fun stop with lots to do, but A in Chennai emailed us that "Trichy is boring." Had A added "crowded around the holidays," we would have known to head straight for the big city. We got off the bus from Madurai and tried to score rooms in at least a dozen hotels and guest houses around the bus stand, exhausting our guidebooks' suggestions and those of every desk clerk insisting that there would be available doubles in the joint next door. We finally threw ourselves at the mercy of Fate, in the form of a rickshaw driver who asked several helpful passersby where there might be a room to be had. We wound up at the front door of the only joint in the area we didn't check about thirty seconds (and thirty rupees) after getting in the rickshaw around the corner. We took the last room in the place, a super-luxe AC room on the top floor with a distant view of the town's puzzlingly famous Rock Fort (pictured), a long climb up a small mountain to two tiny temples. The room was by far the nicest we've stayed in, but with a price tag to match. A single night exceeded our daily budget by almost 50%, but the comfort after so long in questionable digs convinced us to stay two nights in Trichy for no reason other than to enjoy our room.

There followed an overnight bus to Chennai late Saturday, meeting up with A for lunch after a nap Sunday morning, and here we are, typing through a rainy Monday and ready to move on again tomorrow. No wonder I'm dreaming the caviar dreams of the Jet Set. We'll surely stop to smell the jasmine at some point along the road, but the moment-to-moment thrill of seeing new places, faces, and landscapes is too appealing to relent just yet. And just south of here, in the former French colony of Pondicherry, there's a croissant au chocolat that's screaming my name in at least three different languages.

*: I've been in India long enough to absorb some of the local standards of modesty, as I rolled out of bed in this dream already wearing pants.
**: For the uninitiated, that's clarified butter, pulverized chickpea, floral distillate, and raw cane sugar.

Curiouser And Curiouser

2007-11-13T03:08:00.000-05:00

The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a plodding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact, through barriers of time, into its own future. I liked it.

--from Gregory David Roberts' Shantaram

From the moment I read this passage, in which Roberts' narrator recounts his first impressions of Bombay, it lodged in my consciousness like a burr in my slippers. That penultimate sentence perfectly encapsulates our experience of India thus far, where the old and the new dance together, whirling and entwining and making love on the bustling sidewalk between the glass high-rise and the open sewer, begetting a child, India, with her feet in the muddy primeval and her eyes ever turned toward the sunrise.

And nowhere has that enduring dichotomy rung more true than in Bangalore, the capital of India's high-tech industry and foster child of our global economy. We arrived early, getting down from a bus that had traveled through the night over dusty, unpaved roads that were jagged mountain ranges, with peaks and valleys shaking bouncing rollicking us from stolen minutes of fitful slumber. Just outside the city the single dirt lane changed to a crowded modern highway, sardined with the morning's commuters honking and jockeying for position in the crawl toward the 9-to-5. A rickshaw found us and accepted our haggled rate to get to MG (Mahatma Gandhi) Road, the center of town, where we found one of the ubiquitous chain coffeehouses and tucked into large, steaming cups of The Real Thing. We spent an hour or so chatting with an Australian traveler who had arrived in India through Pakistan and China, sharing stories and comparing notes on our experiences thus far. Happily caffeinated and a little jittery after our long night and the shock of brewed black coffee, we parted ways and went in search of food.

We had time to kill, as our Couchsurfing host, P, would not be arriving in Bangles* until late in the afternoon. And we trod the city sidewalks fully laden, as no hotelier could be convinced to keep our packs for a few hours at any price. Strange days, my friends, when not even the baksheesh can get you access to a left-luggage room. South of MG Road, the streets are lined with Western chain stores and restaurants, the signage above your head touting the wares of European and American corporations. You can buy your Levi's next door to the nightclub selling Heineken, get a new pair of Skechers across from the "First International Donut Chain in India." We had read about this proliferation of chain eateries around the MG Road area, and I was in the midst of a full-on Mac Attack by the time we saw the Golden Arches.

Let me explain: We had been restricted to South Indian idli-dosa breakfasts in Gokarna town and the small number of beach shacks dishing out mediocre-to-bad multicuisine fare after the early sunsets made the rocky headlands between the beaches no-travel zones for safety reasons. This had been our enforced diet for a week on Kudle Beach, and while the banoffee pie at Ganga was extraordinary (and dearer by ten rupees than a room for the night), we were roundly unimpressed by the Indian food we had been able to obtain apart from the aforementioned breakfasts. A few nights of lousy curries and strangely palatable pizzas, and I figured we might as well push our tolerances for shite food to the very corners of that greasy envelope.

So I had the Chicken Maharaja Mac** (fries and Coke), and D got the Paneer Salsa Wrap (ditto). And, oddly, they were far from terrible. But we were hungry, so...

A phone check with P gave us an approximate arrival time, so we figured that the best way to kill a couple more hours was to catch a flick. There was a glossy new mega-mall just east of the McDonald's, so we clomped down the road and through the metal detectors in front (the guards laughed when they saw our packs and waved us through with but a cursory pass of their wands). Up the escalators and through the jungle of consumerism, the Inox multiplex had no showtimes that matched our schedule. So, after noting the number of shoe stores (my right Teva blew out in Palolem and was on its last, er, legs?) and the timings of English-language flicks, we set off back toward McD's to another twin-screen cinema and sat down for our first Hindi picture in India.

The typical Bollywood movie is an extravagant affair, its palette every color of a candied kaleidescope, its musical numbers advancing the story as much as (if not more than) the dialogue that marks time between songs. That said, No Smoking is not your typical Bollywood movie. We could make neither heads nor tails of the plot, a dark existential comedy (or was it?) following the travails of a wealthy Mumbaiker who can't seem to kick the habit. It begins with a dream sequence (or was it?) against a snowy backdrop with goosestepping Russian soldiers and a faraway bathtub at the top of a steep hill. Thought balloons emanating from the main character's temples read in English, before switching to Hindi script. This is the sense it made from the first five minutes, and it was all downhill from there. One of P's friends (P2) later told us that it was a really interesting flick examining the courses a life can take following a single decision (or something?), how one's future can change or not, depending upon the choices made or decided against. I'm hip to the idea, and I'd like to check out a subtitled DVD at a later date, but all we got at the time was a really slick light show (with only one musical number) in a dark, air-conditioned room. For that, it was worth the rupees.

After No Smoking, we decided that the coffee from earlier was wearing off to a point that our senses, still not so keen after the long night and the longer morning/afternoon, should be treated to a few glasses of cold draft beer. And then maybe a few more. So we wandered into Guzzler's Inn, which is not nearly as shady as it sounds. In fact, it was refreshing to see an actual bar (gasp!) behind the darkened glass doors, and not the typical dim, dingy, depressing boozing parlour we had learned thus far to avoid. There were even women sitting and drinking and smoking and talking about whatever with their male colleagues and boyfriends. The crowd was young and vital, and guys strolled in with motorcycle helmets in one hand and pool-cue cases in the other, heading for the billiards tables upstairs. We ordered a pitcher of Kingfisher and sat while the surreal scene around us unfolded to the biggest Billboard hits of the 80's and 90's.

A glass or so into our relaxation, it hit me just how fucking foreign Bangalore seemed--for all its familiarity--after our last many weeks in India. The only constant element of our travels has been the fluidity of what it means to be In India. Here we were, sitting across a well-lit table from each other, mixed company among mixed company, listening to American tunes and to our fellow patrons speaking in English***. Hours before, we had eaten American-style fast food and cruised the mall like teenagers in every suburbia anywhere, staring in the windows at the portable advertisements of Western consumer culture**** up for sale at fixed prices, no haggling.

And the kinda sad, embarrassing, pitiable part of it is that it's exactly why we came to Bangalore. The sights and architecture and temples that have been our reasons for other destinations were not in evidence in Bangalore, which boasts a few nice old buildings and a botanical garden amidst the commercialized sprawl that the IT industry and its money have ushered in. I needed a new pair of sandals (which I found the next day after trying on 4400-rupee Nike flip-flops, the new new shit according to the young, punky-haired salesman) and we wanted to catch a flick (we saw one more the next day, this time in English) and eat some really good, expensive food (we had great North Indian and Thai meals at Sikander and Shiok, respectively). In short, we wanted to be American tourists in India's America. We were not disappointed.

So from the Guzzler's Inn to P's home east of the city center. We scarfed street-food dosas over introductions before retiring to some much-needed slumber. The next day was spent wandering the streets and the mall before meeting up with P (pictured left, with D and Me) and Team Yahoo! (pictured above, during pub power outage) at a bar with very mod framed graphic art of Zappa, Bowie, and Clapton. Enjoying the pub culture in the last (read: "only") place we thought we'd find it, we ate spicy Indian pub cuisine and quaffed pitcher upon pitcher until the management signaled that the pumpkin hour was approaching. We whiled away the wee hours after closing time in P2's apartment bitching about the lack of public transpo in Bangles and other notable towns and cities, and P provided the solo guitar accompaniment for a rollicking and horribly off-key round-robin of karaoke. We made dinner plans for the following night, which meant cooking up an Indianized batch of my patented shrimp etouffee after two extended and amazing excursions into the local supermarkets. The cajun drew raves (I'm proud to say) from a crowd of Indian kids making their way in Bangalore's modern marketplace. Sitting and talking with everyone made us feel like the world really is smaller than we let ourselves believe.

For better or worse? I'll leave such speculation to the professionals.

*: An unofficial nickname, one that I like (and will continue to use) as much for its flippancy as for its evoking the favored adornments of Indian women of every caste and class.
**: No beef in the burger joint, natch.
***: Given the 300 languages spoken throughout the country, the young IT set in Bangalore converse in English, a lingua franca more accessible to both North and South Indians than even Hindi.
****: There's a ubiquitous television commercial here for Zeiss spectacle lenses in which a cubicle dweller shows off his name-brand watch and name-brand shoes to his coworkers. Peering over the wall between them, his female colleague sees his generic glasses and exclaims, her nose wrinkled in disgust, "What's on your eyes, man?" Over giggles from the rest of the office, the voiceover intones "Brand nahi toh style nahi," which translates roughly as "Ain't got a brand, it ain't got style." It's one of the most disgusting examples of how pervasive consumer culture is getting over here, and one for which I want to cut the American right out of me. Not that I feel any different about such status-baiting back home.

All The Freaky People

2007-10-28T02:54:00.000-04:00

R was a very large black man, a porter at Bar 625 when I worked there several years ago. He was a simple dude, none too bright, but a nice guy who had the ingenuous enthusiasm of the completely guileless. We invited him to join our pool team, and he hung out with us occasionally when we'd gallivant about the Quarter. He also loved to play frisbee golf after we took him out to LaFreniere the first time. So one morning I finish a graveyard shift a little after eight and we all pile into S's Jeep and drive on out to throw a round of frolf, S, J, R, and me. Well I've been up about 24 hours at this point, and it's the sticky wet guts of summer in New Orleans, and we're not five minutes out of the open-air ride before I'm sweating like the proverbial whore in church. A few holes later and it's just pouring off my forehead, running in thick rivulets over my chest and belly and soaking my shorts. R espies me in my fit of schvitz and, with a note of genuine amazement, informs me that "Gollee, Nate, but you sweatin' like a brotha!"

His observation has been on my mind this week, as I've not ceased my Wringing Human Sponge routine since we arrived in Gokarna. Greetings from the other side of the world, folks. It's humid.

But we know all that, right? Here's the crux of my previous aside: I wanna talk about people.

We left Goa a couple of weeks ago, rode inland aboard a train to Hampi, site of Vijayanagar ruins and amazing, megalithic boulders strewn about like they spilled from a Titan's marble pouch. Gorgeous place. We arrived just prior to the tourist season there, which begins in earnest during a cultural and music festival held in early November. The people were eagerly anticipating the influx of tourists and rupees, polishing their spiels and giving the hard sell on every transaction. Every rickshaw you passed on the street would offer a ride, regardless of the fact that you turned down the last ten offers along the row of parked vehicles (or that you and your girlfriend are riding bikes at the time). Every child in town had a stack of postcards or a map of the area to sell you, often running in packs, each vying to be the first to thrust the same map in your face that you didn't buy the first time. When I stopped one morning for a shave on the way into town, the barber offered me a dozen other services and when I declined and asked how much for the shave, he refused to name a price but instead asked me to pay him an amount of my own choosing commensurate with my approval of the job he'd done. I paid too much, even for a good shave.

But a few rupees here or there ain't no shenanigans. The people of Hampi know their market: tourists taking a break from the scene in Goa, short-stay travellers looking for cheap souvenirs to carry home. Everything and anything was for sale, from fine Gujarati rugs to hand-carved marble figurines to coffee-table books and tailored clothing.* And the salespeople were irrepressible. It was a chore to even price an item, because "We're just looking" was taken universally to mean "We are actively haggling at the moment." "Best prices" were reduced 60 and 75 percent, sometimes to the point of hostile assertions that no profit could possibly be made on a number we didn't even throw out, for an item we didn't even want. The bazaar vibe was hectic, and everybody knows that the foreigners--whether they're looking for ruins to scope or souvenirs to buy or a dry change from the muggy coast--are essentially only there to spend rupees. That's at the bottom of every interaction. Here's a little story:

We were staying the last four nights across the river from Hampi proper, in Vipapuragaddi. This narrow dirt lane between the river and acres of paddy had eight or ten places with huts and bungalows for rent at rates cheaper than the guesthouses in town. To get across the river, one had to take a motorboat across the narrow river, as the nearest bridge was 45 kilometers away. This meant lugging all one's belongings into the boat--not a problem if you're travelling as light as we are, but remember that Hampi has boulders. There was this Swiss dude, wiry and dreadlocked and carrying a backpack and two bouldering crashpads, who boarded the last boat across with us one evening. He had enlisted the help of a local kid to carry the larger of the two pads, still a sizeable burden, for a small sum. Upon arrival at the boat, the boy told him that he wouldn't be taking the boat across, but that they could square their debt and one of the kid's friends would meet him on the other side to carry the pad up the bank and to wherever the guy was staying, for a nominal extra fee. Swiss lightheartedly objects, saying he could carry the weight and that the kid needn't bother, but then the kid tells him, without missing a beat, "No worry about money. Money not important, life is important." The way these words of wisdom rolled off his tongue had us all in guffaws. He continued, saying that it was "good business" for him, "good business" for the dreadlocked Swiss boulderer, "good business" for his buddy across the water. This idea of "good business" was all over Hampi, the point being that a few rupees don't make no nevermind to a tourist benefitting from a bitchin' exchange rate, but can make a world of difference to the families touched by the outlay of even the paltriest sums.

So from Hampi we took a long-ass state bus trip up to Bijapur, which couldn't have been further removed from the traveller-friendly (if commercialized) atmosphere we had gotten used to. We were the only foreigners and we sat at the back of the bus, and with every stop along the seven-hour journey we saw more faces and fewer backs-of-heads. It was clear that we were getting off the beaten path, and I liked it. We smiled at the children and nodded at the adults and, more often than not, got big smiles in return. Between the friendly, curious folks and the beauty of rural Karnataka, I had a really good feeling about the place we were headed. We got down in Bijapur just after dark, walked through the smoggy city to a hotel recommended in the Lonely Planet as "basic, but comfortable." The room was okay, but homeslice manning the desk at Hotel Tourist** acted like he'd either never met one (a tourist, that is) or never liked any of the ones he had met. He was curt and standoffish and seemed utterly offended that we'd want to patronize his establishment. But the price was right and we were tired and hungry and we unslung our packs and went in search of a cold beer and a hot meal.

That was our first mistake. Nowhere in the books did it warn us that a restaurant serving booze in that part of the state would likely be a dingy drinking den, an all-male crowd of boozers gathering in really seedy surrounds for guy talk, bro time, manly shit like cricket and such. But neither did the folks running the joint seem too perturbed that a woman (gasp!) would want to have a seat and sip some suds. It was a weird atmosphere, but it was okay enough and the beer was cold.

So on around our third beer, by which time we've established with our server that--regardless of what it says on the decades-old unbound English fare card--no food is currently being served, (and probably hasn't been since Gandhi was in short pants) the power goes out. It's a fairly common occurrence throughout India, we've found, and we paid it no mind. The staff brought out candles and we were just leaving anyway. But after I've put the notes in the dish for our server to return to the cashier, something hits D in the shoulder. She thinks it's a bug, and is even more eager to leave. Then something else hits me on the back. I reach down the back of my chair and find a peanut. Then another hits the table on a trajectory that says it ain't just falling out the sky. Now we're both furious that somebody would take the opportunity, with the lights out, to act like a chickenshit and throw food at the visitors. And we're even more angry that we can't tell, in the dark, who's doing it. So we walk out scowling, scanning tables for the telltale snack dish, ready to berate the perpetrators in all the colour and flourish that English has to offer, with maybe some Kitchen Spanish thrown in for good measure and its colorful variations on hijo de puta and chinga tu madre en su culo. We get back to street level and collect our wits, just wanting a bite before we retire for the evening, and we get bum steers from everyone--including homeslice at Hotel Tourist--when we enquire about any open restaurants. The lights are still out, so we don't know that the restaurant at the hotel (!) is still open, but we chance it after walking up and down the main drag and not finding anyone still serving. Sure enough, it's open and delicious and all the fuckstain behind the counter would have had to do, in reply to our query, was point one bony, dirty finger across the lobby.

But he didn't, and we went to sleep that night dreading the next day. We had paid two nights in advance (a bad idea, it seemed then) and felt okay about skipping out early and calling the 165 rupees an asshole tax. But we woke up and decided to see what we came for (the Islamic architecture) and just get off the street before dark. It was a good decision. In fact, that would be an understatement. Bijapur (pictured above left) during daylight hours was like another city, full of friendly hellos and warm smiles and genial curiosity as to our provenance and how we are finding their beloved India. Children ran up to us on the street with open amazement, shouting Hello! like it's their mother's name, and older kids practiced their few nice-to-meet-you-what-is-your-good-name English phrases. We said "America" more times that day than I ever had in my life, as everyone was wondering where the foreigners had come from, so far off the tourist trail. Parents handed us their babies so we could pose for photographs, and families asked to snap our picture to show to their loved ones back home. It was a bit like being a movie star, but for our utter anonymity***.

That curiosity and the warm welcomes given us by the locals extended to our next stop, Badami (pictured above right), where we were less of a novelty. Even so, changing buses in Bagalkot en route I was swarmed by fifty or more boys and girls up to 17 or 18 years old while waiting for D to find a ladies' room. I introduced myself to one kid with the fuzzy beginnings of what will surely one day be a great Indian moustache, and he asked me to autograph his school notebook. He showed me the last page, where a traveller from Belgium had signed a simple message of greeting, and I did the same. He thanked me and the crowd was smiling and staring and nobody was saying anything. Overcome for a moment, I just started laughing. I must have looked like a madman, the sweaty white dude in the Indian threads and wraparound shades, laughing with his whole body until his eyes misted, because the kids started laughing in return. We fed on each other's amusement for what was probably only a handful of seconds, but it was a strange and foreign and beautiful exchange that I will remember for the rest of my days. D found me behind the throng of giggly onlookers and signed below my autograph for Fuzzstash and we waved goodbye and boarded our next bus, which didn't leave for another five minutes, and the kids outside were still standing and staring and whispering outside our window until the bus pulled out of the station.

So from Badami to Gokarna, back to the beach, where I'm sweating like a turkey at the end of November. We're staying 2 kilometers over a rocky headland from the main town beach, and it's like another world. Gokarna proper is a pilgrimage site, where Hindu devotees come to worship before one of the most famous shivalinga in all India, after cleansing themselves by shaving their heads and bathing in the sea. Kudle Beach, our home base for the moment, is populated almost exclusively by dreadlocked, painfully skinny stoners from Israel and England and Continental Europe, all refugees from the high-season tariffs up north in Goa. Om Beach (pictured), the next beach south from Kudle, is the new home of a luxe resort served by the only road south of town. This being a prime holiday spot during what is apparently a (just ending) holiday season for Indians, Om has been swarmed by roving bands of single men who wear matching "Goa Es Haven" shit-shop gear and stare at every inch of exposed white female flesh. There's even a sign on the steps leading down to Om politely requesting that Indians not photograph the tourists sunbathing, with or without their permission. It addresses the issue as a matter of upholding India's character in the eyes of foreign tourists, and it hasn't been entirely effective. The Indian Olympic Gawking Teams still cruise the beach in their matching getups until it's time to take a dip in their tighty-whiteys and sidle up alongside the women who have taken to the water to avoid their terrestrial prowling. Chalk it up to curiosity or horniness or just plain poor manners, but the stares are exponentially more unnerving than those from the kids in Bijapur and Bagalkot and Badami. The men have the vacant look of the terminally unlaid, and might as well be wearing t-shirts that read "I'd Rather Be Masturbating--Seriously, I Would. You Don't Even Know. Whew." It's almost enough to spoil the good vibe we got from all the eyes on us everywhere else, but I guess there's assholes wherever you hang your hat. Some folks just don't know how to behave themselves when there's company over. Oh well.

There it is, the nutshell reduction of the lives we've walked through in the past couple of weeks. Next stop, Bangalore. We leave after a couple more days on the beach for our first Couchsurfing experience in India. Looking forward to it, and to seeing what an IT boomtown in a developing nation looks like. More to follow.

*: We did avail ourselves of this last luxury, outfitting ourselves with custom-fitted travelling gear that wears better in the heat and humidity than our Western gear. Total expenditure for handmade clothes (2 men's shirts, 1 pair pants, 1 camise): $23.75
**: --for fuck's sake!--
***: Nobody here can pronounce the sounds in my name, so to prevent confusion and promote easier exchanges, I'm "Bob" in India. D bounces between "Jane" and "Frieda."

Nobody Rides For Free

2007-10-14T01:46:00.000-04:00

It's been a couple of weeks since my last entry, and let me explain the delay: I've become a Beach Person. I've never been much for the sun and sand, as that usually means (in the US at least) a corresponding presence of shit shops and traffic and overpriced Mai Tais and hi-rise condominium complexes that if you lived in you'd be home now. There's also the fact that I burn salmonpink in bright sunshine, usually in strange patterns (hand-shaped patches on my sides and back, raccoon circles round the eyes) due to insufficient training in sunscreen application. It's not that I don't like sand--I dig on the desert, baby, and no mistake--or water--gimme a cascade and a camera and I'm good for the day. Just that the two in combination invite all kind of unattractive consumerist idiocy.

D has been a Beach Person since forever, so she was psyched to move south for a little while (time becomes quickly meaningless there, compressing and expanding like the tides), first in Arambol (pictured above) and then in Palolem, with bounces in between to break up the excruciating bus rides necessary to cover even the smallest distances (more on that later). We arrived in Arambol as the monsoon was hacking its last rattle against the palmy dunes, and after one overnight storm into our first full day we were blessed with an uninterrupted week of sunny sunshine. After an initial sizzle in near-equatorial rays, we commenced to darken like the natives (or not so much). And during that time spent swimming and relaxing and washing off the stench of Mumbai and my illness in Pune, when our only needs were met by walking the half a click up the beach for late breakfasts and lazy sunset dinners, I converted wholeheartedly to the cult of the Sun God. Count me in, brother, and save me a seat up front. Arambol was everything I've never been lucky enough to experience on any shore of any ocean; it was as peaceful and quiet as any place I've ever been. Shit, man, it was serene.

When was the last time you got to use that word? Been a pretty minute for this soul, I can assure you.

We went from that not-your-average walk on the beach in Goa's far north to another in the remote south in Palolem (pictured below).* The latter is a picture postcard, a tourism department brochure, only the prototypical sun-washed crescent of sand and swaying palm trees. The sun sets every night in a notch made by the northwest headland and the island you can walk to at low tide. We watched the entire village (fisherfolk all) pulling their nets from the cove on our last evening there, all chanting a chorus of heave-ho's local equivalent. Dogs and crows and fish eagles caught a whiff of the goings-on and hovered in their own ways, scoping out their choice of the fish that skipped across the surf in frantic attempts to escape the nets and the baskets and the eventual tandoor ovens. Made hungry by the spectacle, we went out for a seafood dinner and dined heartily on the afternoon's catch for something like $12, a real splurge considering the cost of things here and our budget for this excursion.

But I shall stop painting this particular picture, for if I were the one reading this account instead of the one writing it, I'd be ready to kick the author's ass up the block and around the corner. Don't be hatin', though. Let me tell you a story:

Our last morning in Palolem, we shouldered our packs and caught a lassi near the bus stand so we could wait in the shade for the bus that would take us the 4 km to Chaudi (Canacona). That bumpy road traversed, we waited another 30 minutes in the terminal for the bus to Margao, from whence our train to Hampi (east, in neighboring Karnataka, where I am writing this missive) would leave the next morning. Margao's bus and train stations are the clearing houses for southern Goa, and the city itself is not worth telling you it's not worth writing about. We had planned to make it in time to catch a movie and an early bedtime, but the Fates were against us.

So yeah: we're waiting in Chaudi like 30 minutes and milling in a shuffling queue for the eventual bumrush that is boarding buses here, and the bus pulls in--the same bus, we realize, that we rode to get to Palolem a few days prior. That trip was worthy of mention for being the closest I've been to physical carsickness since I was a wee tyke puking in the backseat of the family station wagon. But I digress... We're at a disadvantage for the boarding scrum because of our backpacks and wind up considering ourselves lucky to occupy the "Ladies Only" seats at the front of the bus. Being a Southern gentleman this wasn't my choice of seats, but did I mention the hellish ride that we had on the way in? Besides, there's a sign painted in the same color as the "Ladies Only" that says the bus will only carry "11 Standing," and I'd heed any fool estimating at eleven baker's dozens the number of standing riders on any one bus plying the backroads of Goa.

Anyway, we're in the reserved seats and feeling lucky when I start to wonder why the bus isn't pulling out. Worse yet, the driver and his whistle boy are beside the truck banging on what might be the engine or the tire or (for all we know) the team of 96 squirrels whose combined legpower fuels each bus over here. They look perplexed (the driver & co., not the squirrels) and they're wiping off what must have been a vital piece of bus at some point, and they're drawing a crowd. Some of the men in attendance wear the khaki uniform of bus employees, some are in street clothes, curious passengers who have gotten down to see what's the hubbub. There's intense conversation outside our window and the minutes pass and they're all smiling and laughing that futile laugh that says in any language "We're not going anywhere soon, boys" and we're still on board, sweating our respective tits off because we're not gonna give up these seats, goddammit. Eventually we've been on for maybe 30 minutes, because the next bus to Margao has rolled in heavy and the rest of our fellow passengers are cramming into its remaining available pockets of breathable air. Having none of such foolishness, we get down and opt to wait for the next ride.

For those of you keeping count, that will have been 90 minutes or so waiting to get on a bus that runs our route every half hour for a two-hour trip. It's now high noon and heating up, and we decide that D will carry on our daypack when we board the next bus and I'll wait behind to stow the heavy packs and hopefully find a seat saved for me whenever I can board. The bus finally rolls in and the plan works and we're on the winding mountain road leading north.

But not for long--oho! Not for long. Because not two minutes after noting the proximity of the passing traffic on our starboard side, our bus winds up at the rear end of a traffic stoppage stretching for half a mile up the backside of the mountains. Opting not to wait it out, our driver decides to turn around with a busload of the travellers from the other side of the jam and head back to Chaudi. We persevere, our refund secured and our packs re-shouldered, and walk down the line of stopped cars and trucks and buses to try to do the same as the marooned pilgrims now riding our bus. Down we go, and the situation resolves itself into a degree of clarity. Here's what happened: gasoline truck marked "INFLAMMABLE" in about five languages on its side has lost a squeeze play with the dump truck that tried, inconveniently, to cross a bridge too narrow for the both of them. The driver's side of the gas truck is peeled back like the ragged rind of an orange. No sign of either driver, but there's an Indian crowd around the accident just milling about and collectively biding time, while we're wondering what and where and how to get there. I see gas trucks in accidents and tend to hightail it the other direction, but the calm blanketing the scene was enough to make me chill even in the heat of the day. There was an Italian couple in front of us riding a motorscooter and trying to convince the locals to help them lift it (there wasn't room on the bridge to drive around the wreck) up on the guardrail to walk/roll it past the collision. We watch this scene with a degree of incredulity--hell, everybody's watching with a smile or other expression asking Will they make it?

Yeah, they make it the length of the bridge and bring the scooter down and ride off, and we follow the crowd past the wreck and eventually find a bus heading back to Margao. Easy-peasy, right?

Except that our new driver is apparently pissed at the refund of half his take for the interrupted trip, and he's tearing down the road like a man possessed. I've been accused of driving recklessly from time to time, I love a fast drive on a winding road, but I have seriously never been so scared in a motor vehicle. The bus was tilting around the corners an easy thirty degrees, and even the other native passengers were looking around like WHAT the FUCK?! We've got an hour or so left on this bus and the driver's moving like his next fix is too many miles down the road, and I'm envisioning scenes of carnage and wondering how many Indians I can lift when the time comes and I have the David Banner/Incredible Hulk moment. Even with the whistle boy collecting the fare like it's another day at the office, my adrenaline is still ratcheted way past F and hovering well in the red. I'm watching towns pass in successive blinks of the eye and mentally drawing a map of the road to Margao and trying to place these towns on it, telling myself it's okay, there's only maybe thirty minutes to go, twenty, ten. Then there's Margao and one last hellbent turn around a flyover into town and we get down and brush ourselves off and hide our piss stains and move on with the day as the sun sets, albeit on shaky legs and aching knuckles.

So let this go to show you, kids: Even a day at the beach isn't necessarily a day at the beach. It's hard work kicking this far back, but it's a good gig if you can get it. The punchline? 60-odd kilometers from Palolem to Margao, and this was our day. Until next time.

*: Of the two days we spent in Calangute and Baga breaking up the journey, let me only say that the food was good and we got a nice room at a cut rate. Those two destinations, huge on the package-tour circuit and just now coming into season, are hellholes on a scale rivaled by your Myrtle Beaches and Panama Cities. Yick.

Don't Think About Pink Elephants

2007-09-26T02:26:00.000-04:00

Wow. India. Yeah. It's so...um...Indian here. Where to begin, where to begin...

So I've been dreading writing this entry. I've felt like a duck in a dishwasher over the entire issue. These last ten days have seemed like a month or more, there's been so much new information to assimilate and interpret. I could start with a standby, tell you about the weather: it's fucking hot. Like India hot. Hot and wet. And writing about the weather might lead me to relate how two Americans travelling on a shoestring are smelling these days, how stewing in the heat and sweating out the local cuisine have let us incorporate into our personal aromas the cardomom, the curry, the cumin, the what-have-you that define the food here. And writing about how we smell, I could tell you how everything else we've smelled thus far has been tinged with exhaust fumes. A guy can't write about a billion people without writing about the resultant traffic, the ancient Premier taxis and autorickshaws and motorbikes moving in orchestral anarchy, a postmodern symphony in CO major for millions of two-stroke engines. Or that, trying to beat the crush of vehicular traffic on the crazyhouse streets, you can get crushed (literally, as people do every year) trying to board Mumbai's suburban rail (official motto: "There's always room for one more!").

Hell, maybe I'll just write a full paragraph about what it's like to discover your own asshole at the age of 29. Such are the joys of a land without toilet paper, after all. Until two weeks ago, my anus was kind of like Uranus: the evidence said it's out there, but I ain't had to think about it on the day-to-day. But when it comes to brass tacks, a real man dives in and does what's necessary. And uses hand sanitizer afterward. After all, you'll never see anything in this world if you're not prepared to deal with a little shit. Better your own than anyone else's.

So yeah. Boundaries have been pushed, horizons broadened. I'm writing this entry from Pune, our first stop after Mumbai, and in a few hours we board a bus for the sunny beaches of Goa. The festival honoring Ganesh, the elephant-headed son of Shiva and Parvati, ended last night (or this morning, depending upon your vantage point), and with it goes the incessant banging of drums and cymbals over endless shouts of "Ganapati bappa...morya!" For the unititiated, that loosely translates as "Elephant-headed son of Shiva and Parvati bappa...morya!" No matter what you've heard, enlightenment is thin on the ground over here. I'm as in the dark about the Hindu traditions we've wandered into as I am about the game of cricket. Put the two together, as happened Monday night when India beat Pakistan to win the Twenty20 tournament in South Africa (thanks to Ganesh's intervention, they say), and I'm utterly fucking clueless.

Luckily, though, I got some good advice on our third day here. Invited to a friend's family's place for lunch, we were lucky enough to participate in a prayer chant honoring Ganesh. It was an honor and a privilege, not to mention a complete surprise. It turns out Big G loves the sound of clanging metal, so while all the (Hindu) adults chant, the kids (and us godless white folk) get to bang on handchimes and ring bells. So that we weren't bashing them aimlessly, A's cousin N shared these sage words, words that I decided will be my personal mantra while on this journey:

"Catch the rhythm, then play accordingly."

Indeed. Here's to that.

Farewell and Welcome

2007-09-12T01:21:00.000-04:00

I'll make this brief, as I'm catching a flight in a few short hours. So I've been silent lo these many months. Let it be known: there was good reason. Nay, reasons. Ain't much to write about when you're slaving away for the Man fifty-plus hours a week, and not much to do but slave thusly for the man when you're saving for a year-long jaunt through South Asia. D. and I have been hatching this plan for months now, reading and planning and stashing our rupees in the metaphorical mattress. Our tongues have been tied by dizzying foreign names, our imaginations stoked by pictures and dreams and stories and such. And now the day is upon us. Whoa. Wow. Whoosh. Bags packed eyes open facing east. We'll be landing in Bombay on Friday. One-way tickets and no reservations, nothing in stone. Moving fast and lightish, going where the day takes us. Along the way I'll be posting from the road, letting everyone know what we're getting into on the other side of the world.

So this blog is now a travel blog. About time. Too long too stagnant. Time for some fresh air and new ideas, and you'll notice the first at the top of the page. Until we return, welcome to Naked Baby Asian Mice. Many happy returns. Namaste.

Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor, Your Undertechnologized

2007-01-30T08:35:00.000-05:00

So this weekend was one of the worst working months of my entire lengthy storied* career in the bar/restaurant sector of the service industry. Friday started innocently enough after a nice lunch and a lobster nap and a rolling-in-early for a change. Everything was simpatico, all greasy wheels and whale-snot slick, and there was even an early finish for This Guy. In bed by midnight and blissful slumber soon after with the help of some Mogwai. But roundabout two-thirty in the HEY!-M the kids roll in with heavy buzzes in tow, shouting my name from the foot of the stairs. This has become a trademark move in our humble household, one to which I am not averse. Especially when awakened from said blissful slumber by the pressing weight of female bodies and carefully placed neck and ear smooches. Makes getting up for bored games more than tolerable. So there were Apples and there were Apples and then there was even blissier slumber, and I roll out Saturday morning feeling peachykeen and ready to rock the heavy crowds.

I should have known something was wrong when I'm sitting at the T-stop and my pocket starts buzzing. Never a good sign, especially just before a workday. There are three people on the planet who might call me at 11 AM on a Saturday, and none of it's usually good news. My place of bidness is the last of the three, if first in frequency. I ignore the ring without an ID-check because Hey, I'm on time and enjoying my book even in the frigid temps** and whatever they're gonna tell me can surely be rectified after the thirty minutes it'll take me to get to the Square. So I keep reading and the train comes and shuttles me quickly (for a change) and with expedience toward my destination across a frozen Charles through tunnel over track and I get off and walk out and down the street and then I see the fire trucks.

Five within two blocks, and I'm thinking What's the rumpus? Kess-kuh-say the hubbub, bub? as I'm walking upstairs and I open the door and am greeted by the sight of a dehumidifier the size of a Samoan dwarf working in our tiny office and high-output fans about the floor of the main room and a soggy splosh announcing every step I take. I'm greeted by our owner, fresh off a flight from Delhi, and our GM and they've been there since like two AM--awakened even earlier and powers-of-ten more rudely than I had been--and it seems our faulty little building in New England hasn't the heat it takes to keep the pipes from freezing when it's colder than a welldigger's ass. The sprinkler line, you see, had frozen and burst and showered ironically unfrozen water upon all that we hold sacred in our cozy little establishment. The bills were wet and the checks that pay the bills were wet and the walls were wet and the floor was soaked and even the paperclip holders were filled to overflowing and, most disheartening of that whole inventory of woe and difficulty, our computer and our point-of-sale server and our phone lines and our DSL and everything we run that separates us from your local Waffle House*** was hopelessly flooded and non-operational Until Further Notice.

The knot in my stomach was palpable, felt like an ostrich egg in a poodle's ass, because I knew what was happening: Come hell or (fuck it all) high water, we would open at some point that afternoon. And we would open flying blind, understaffed and unprepared for our forced reversion to that oldest and most dreaded restaurant technology:

Paper.

I'll digress for a moment: At the German gig on Bourbon Street, we worked strictly paper and dot-matrix roll-register. Every plastic transaction was a carbon-imprint for the first year I was there. It's entirely possible we were the last paper-based booze operation in the Southern 48 at the turn of the millennium, and it was a hassle. We got our plastic tips compiled only every six months, at Christmas (like it was a goddamned bonus) and at the beginning of June, when the slooooow months until Labor Day loomed like forgotten dogshit come the first thaw. It's a helluva sound, the shuh-CHUNK! of a handcranked credit card machine as it thunders in behind the bass saxophone of a Dixieland combo, off-tempo and (at least the former) entirely unnecessary in this modern era. But we did it and we took it because it was a pretty good gig, all things considered.

That was a long time ago.

Since then I've worked non-computerized accounting systems, where whatever we've got in the register goes to the bank in the morning. Less, of course, the couple of hundred in change to get us through the next late night. But there was always a swipe machine that magically teleported one's electronic identity to and from a bank's server somewhere in Dubuque or Bangalore, returning with a hopeful approval for the requested loan to be granted us, the payee, by the bank, which would see to their loan's being remitted at some later date by the cardholder at a substantial rate of interest held over a longer term than the desired effects of any purchase made by said cardholder at our place of business. Where, incidentally, we pushed the last legal drugs accompanied by the sweet soulful strains of some seriously grooved entertainment.

My digression complete, let me reinforce that the prospect of working for an indeterminate period of time sans electronic communications in a high-traffic restaurant in a great location in a major American metropolis presented more than a few challenges. The first was procurement of manual credit-card slips. You know, the kind you only see anymore in gas stations in like Stumbleduck, West Dakota.**** Turns out that one wasn't that bad. The second was figuring out how to get messages to and from the tables to the servers to the kitchen (to the line and the tandoor and the foodrunners) to the bar and still get anything approaching the desired bill of fare to the table for which it was intended. The forms were easy enough to locate, as Staples is just downstairs and had reopened after the same flooding issues. So that's okay, but any practical implementation would mean schooling our FOH staff on-the-quick. Luckily they're rockstars and can hold their own despite the several language barriers in our tiny, borderless restaurant. As a bonus, we scored a hostess and a cashier before we opened at 5, so there was help if only for a few precious hours. All set, right?

And then we open, and then the people start trickling in, and then the trickle turns into the second flood we've seen that day and everybody's running and pretty soon it's like watching pit bulls carrying newborns on full heads of Kibbles 'n Meth. Half our kitchen is out on a catering gig, we've got like three new guys on the fireline, one of our dishwashers is drunk somewhere besides Dish for the umpteenth Saturday night in a row, our waitstaff are dealing with inordinately small tips based (one must assume) on the low-tech hindrances upon the timely receipt of food and checks and drinks and such--

--and I realize that none of this is very interesting to anyone who wasn't there and who hasn't worked in this sector of our nation's economy.

So a Nutshell Chronology: Two AM exit after three hours of hand-compiling checks and receipts and CC slips. Sleep (ish). Back again for a Sunday paper lunch, another pipe blows in the back of the building, no water or dishwasher or flushable toilets for two hours, Are We Gonna Close? Water back on, seating and serving for dinner and still working out the kinks from Saturday night. Another late night leaving. Fitful sleep, dreams of wrongs done past lovers mixed with standard Showing Up At Work Naked And Not Knowing Where Anything Is nightmares. Rolling in groggy and wiped for an unscheduled shift, a paper Monday at the start then (YIPPEE! SKIP!) wires fixed and server working but not until we put paper into 'puter. Day to dusk to dark, no fix that works, slammed and weeded and even have to serve (!) an 8-top. Rush dies down. Servers dance, laugh, have well-deserved pint. More paperwork, closed house, entering weekend’s work into system, Wu bangin' out speakers normally reserved for sitars and Hindi yelping, staring at computers and paper tickets from past three days and quickly going blind and numerically illiterate. Totals. Doublechecks. Triples. Forty bones off for the weekend, considering it a victory. Psyched, if hypercaffeinated. Deposit dropped, cab home to DOT, nip from The Good Scotch, too tired to sleep. Blog.

So here we are, and here I am, writing to you from the corner of Humbled and Exhausted. The latter is self-explanatory, but the former is truly a Statement. I saw (or was reminded) this weekend what a fragile relationship we have with technology anymore. In an age when nobody remembers phone numbers ("Screw it in the ear, I've got 'em in my cell!"), few know how to rock when all systems are not Go. It's a challenge to any of us brought up with Cable TV and Nintendo and Toaster Strudels. There were points this weekend when I wanted to quit my job, to walk out of a place that had been flooded--as far as I was concerned--back into the Fucking Stone Age, but something in me wanted to stick it out. I hate not knowing the ending***** to any story, even the most esoteric and inconsequential. I wanted to see how it all panned out, how we would fare when the river rose and the lights failed and the flints were struck while the youngins searched for dry tinder. Most of all, though, I found I craved the difficulty brought about by a dissolution of our feeble bond with modernity, however brief. Reminded me of the road, a feeling I miss far too often anymore. It was a waist-deep, sewer-stinking slog through waters curried with the spare and broken parts of everything since ENIAC, and it was a fucking trial. Sometimes pen and paper are all a man needs. There's no wi-fi in Shangri-La, after all, but nor are there any decent Indian joints.

Bitch though it may have been, we done good. We done better than I would have figgered. That does not make any of it cool. Come the next localized Judgment Day, that next bus to Thunderdome will leave with me still sitting at the station, listening to my iPod, trying to text some other citified bedwetter about this great new ancient history exhibit I saw that centerpieced the Royal typewriter and the rotary phone and a weirdass musical number featuring an unidentifiable shuh-CHUNK! that may or may not have been totally post-techno.

*: Even if storied only unto myself and coworkers and the occasional roommate/girlfriend/vent-buddy/blog... But a brief sidenote to this footnote: There's sympathy and there's empathy and rarely the twain do meet, though everybody hates The Job at some point or another and the storying of such always leads to oneupsmanship in terms of shitty shitty days at the proverbial Office.
**: Which will soon matter more than they do while I wait in the wind and chill for the Inbound. Read on...
***: In terms of technology. Not to be taken as a disparaging remark on the quality or convenience or sheer waffley deliciousness of that Last Bastion Of The American Breakfast.
****: Gorgeous in March, especially during the annual Snipe Hunt.
*****: But I walked out of Basic Instinct 2 with neither curiosity nor regret. Not even about lopsided falsies.

No Joy In Mudville, Pts. 1 & 2

2007-01-23T17:20:00.000-05:00

In terms of opportunities for psychological and spiritual growth, there can be few more strengthening (read: "utterly soul-crushing") experiences than suffering two major defeats in the same six-hour span. Such was the case Sunday evening, when the Saints were hamstrung by Chicago's inhospitable weather (and the Bears) and the Patriots were handed the business end of the proverbial spoon by "The Fucking Colts" (M's words).

Granted, such defeats are only as personal as one allows them to be, and it certainly wasn't me out on the pitch against Brian Urlacher or Peyton Manning. Nor were any of my close personal friends. Yet these defeats are made none the easier by such trifling consolations. When one puts his heart on the chopping block for the three-hour battle that is a Conference Championship, when the laurels of victory mean a ticket to that most hallowed, most super Sunday in all of American sport, one tends to feel the blow of a butcher's blade as if it were less metaphor than reality.

Alas.

There is usually, however, an opportunity for redemption afforded those like myself two Sabbaths hence. He can pull for the team that dusted his favorites, allowing himself the faint rationalization that his team lost to the eventual champions. Or, of course, he can wish those vanquishers fiery deaths in plane crashes and freak microwave-oven explosions. Defeat, then, becomes a test of one's mettle as a sportsman, even one whose proximity to the field of play is distanced by a glowing rack of liquors and an oaken bar.

But what, then, can one do when both of his sides suffer defeat, when his split loyalties are roundly punished by confluences of events and timing and horrible officiating and the like? What is he to do when he can't root for either team without admitting to a key flaw in his fanship?

He can watch the game for the game's sake, free from obligations to adopted homes, but not without a note of bitterness to sour the sweet strains of Prince's halftime program. He can wish either the most impressive defense in the league (Chicago's) or the best quarterback of the last many seasons (Indianapolis') the rewards they deserve for putting up massive numbers against strong opposition. He can revel in the fact that the winningest teams in both conferences are battling for the title in what will likely be a Super Bowl for the books, and not some piddling matchup of less-worthy elevens who may have squeaked through the playoffs unscathed and lucky. He can watch the game without the kind of blinding passion that leads to another Monday morning of horrifying, shuddering realizations of loss and abandonment, such as those he experienced only yesterday.

In short, he can watch some football. And so he shall.

Dispassionately, but with reservations.

Geaux Forth And Be Reborn...

2007-01-15T12:24:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite things about bartending in New Orleans was doing so during football season. As pitiful as most games were, the matchups were always epic, even if only in our own minds. The Saints have always been a hard-luck team, and their fans have grown accustomed to the pitfalls of following a side with such a seeming proclivity for ignominious defeat. There's a truism in sports that goes something like Win, and your fans drink to you; lose, they drink for you.

Or maybe themselves. I forget.

Either way, when your city's Eleven can't even muster a .500 season, you tend to do more of the latter than the former. Too many of those seasons have passed in the forty since the Saints entered the league, but it's always been sorta kinda alright by their fans. Given the fact that there are something like 90,000 bars and taverns in the N.O. metro area in which to root and lament whilst watching the game, there has never been a shortage of rainy-day drinking and armchair analysis. Even when said comes from a barstool sans arms.

When I worked the German gig, there were some Sundays when R from around the corner would be the only Saints fan in the joint (myself, I was a mercenary fan whose alliances were dictated week-by-week by the arrival of new and different hordes of tourists, each a dislocated fan of some likely-better team), and he would be relegated to drinking his Beck's in one of the far corners of the room's modest squarefootage, one tiny television registering with tinny mono sound the drubbing his--our--Saints had brought upon themselves by agreeing to play American Football of a Sunday afternoon. I would sneak over in the rare free moment to brush up on scores and lowlights, as the bulk of the bar's four screens and satellite package was dedicated to sugartitting the out-of-town fans of more prominent clubs who had stumbled down Bourbon Street nursing hangovers only slightly smaller than their Saturday nights, each requiring refreshment of either the tomato or sudsy (and sometimes both) variety. R and I would commiserate and discuss in no brief terms the horrendous choices made by our team, be those choices our coach's, or our quarterback's, or our owner's, or a combination of the lot. More often than not, it was the lot.

And after the German gig, there was a time at the Patio when I was more free to nurture my love/hate relationship with our Saints, when our off-Bourbon crowd was more inclined to sit and indulge their native team during its sixteenish ramblings about the Superdome's and other gridirons. There was even a Playoff game in there somewheres, a by-the-book, standard write-off handed us by the Minnesota Vikings in one of the Twin Cities. Not sure which. And not that it matters.

This Saturday night past, however, there was a rumbling in New Orleans that was palpable (albeit faint and only then through the floor and the soles of one's shoes) even here in the Frozen North. The famously loud Superdome hosted a meeting of men, twenty-two at a time, after which the New New Orleans Saints prevailed and secured for themselves a chilly Next Sunday in Chicago (though that last part was technically determined on the following afternoon). In the forty years of the franchise, this was the first post-season win for the men in black and gold. Sadly, Joe "My Cell Phone Rings Like A" Horn was on the sidelines for the historic event, but Deuce and Reggie made up on the ground what the team lacked in airpower.

But mine is not a sports blog, and this is not an armchair analysis. I have no room in these webpages for play-by-play, and I don't intend to make such room. What I do have is mad space for the things that shake my rafters, that make me shout from the rooftops. And that kind of enthusiasm, at the moment, is reserved for my New Orleans Saints. I have never been moved to root such as I have during these past sixteen weeks for the N.O. Eleven. Seeing them play their first game back in the Superdome on a Monday night, even though I was stuck at the Indian gig, was emotional to the point of ridiculousness. I usually skip halftime shows, but I disregarded more than a few mango margaritas to hear Green Day and U2 pitch and wail in support of a city's rebuilding. Kudos. Bravo. Bravissimo. More power to. Were I at home, tears may have been shed.

Putting my feelings for the city of my growings-up into words has not been easy since I watched it get wiped from off the map after Lady K. It's a feeling of loss that has impacted my being in a way I never expected, and probably more so for the fact that I had moved on by the time She hit. I've been back once since, and it was a rough week. My people were all safe and sound, none drowned in their attics, but there's something about driving through a town one calls home and seeing the Devil's Alphabet on every house in the Ninth Ward, watching the highwater funkline ebb and flow across the fronts of homes down Esplanade and Elysian Fields, knowing that Kermit's on a permanent Texan Tour and Henry's out Colorado way and Shorty's working L.A. in lieu of N.O. gigs because the venues don't exist no more, that makes a man shake out his bandanna and wonder what in the Fuck happened to his nestling place, to his sugarspot, to his home.

That's something for another day, though. On this fine bleary rainy New England morning, there are six days between me and the Saints-Bears game that will require much of my concentration, all of my face-painting skills, and more than a little of my scattershot wherewithal. So until and after then, my best to you and yours, and may your days include prayers and such for a city in Louisiana that was swamped but didn't drown, that died and was reborn, that may be flawed but won't be flogged.

Geaux Saints.

And Peace.

There's Something Wrong With My Pants

2006-12-18T05:34:00.000-05:00

So there's been a lot on my mind recently. First there were GREs and LSATs, then there's still work and life and the living of it. And of course there are the eternal existential ponderings, the endless agonizing and ruminating upon the meaning(s) of the last six words of that last sentence. Wrapped up in the midst of all that monkeystuff, I was out of sorts for a pretty minute here a few weeks ago. Just scatterbrained and spentshot. Allow me to offer two brief short tastes with a common theme:

I'm walking to the T on a Monday afternoon, I've worked doubles all weekend and I'm just turning around back to Cambridge after a long night morning afternoon of studying and listening to whatever my iTunes puts to shuffle. There's a switchbacked trail of Tom Waits and Miles Davis and Townes Van Zandt and The Roots and Morphine and Nina Simone and Belle and Sebastian and U2 and even a gentle dressing of Pearl's Jam glazing my brain, and I'm walking without my legs, just a head bobbing atop feet loosely connected to the rest of my body, the hinges that bend doing most of their work simply not breaking their flex parameters and buckling beneath the flaccid heap of my shuffling frame. I get to Savin Hill and sit down at the end of the platform and pull out Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, which is totally blowing the leftover fragments of my mind still receptive to creative expression. The train pulls in and I get aboard with my index finger holding my place and I sit down and stuff my backpack between my feet because I know--empty as the car is now--I don't want to be taken away from this book when somebody asks me to move my sack from the seat next-to. So I'm sitting there and reading up close (as such works demand) when I notice my fly is down. Even through the boxer briefs I prefer (the freedom of the former with the slim lines of the latter) I can feel the canned air of the train as it makes its way through the opening in my pants, but at this point I've passed a stop or two and there's nothing to be done without announcing to all, "I AM ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE YOU MEET ON PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION WHO HALF-CHEWS AND SPITS APPLE BITS HALFWAY DOWN THE CAR WHILE RATTLING ON TO NOBODY IN SOME STRANGE PIDGIN, OR WHO FARTS LOUDLY AND REPEATEDLY ON THE PLATFORM WHILE TALKING IRRITATEDLY TO HIS WIFE IN THE FISHING CAP WHILE SHE ROCKS WITH HER SHOPPING BAG AND PRETENDS NOT TO NOTICE, OR WHO WALKS INTO THE CAR PAINTED SILVER FROM NOSE TO CHIN AND OFFERS THE WELL-DRESSED WOMAN ACROSS FROM HIM A FIVE-TIMES-FOLDED DOLLAR FOR LISTENING TO HIS RANT ABOUT HOW EDUCATION IS WHAT WE NEED TO SAVE THE GOVERNMENT FROM THE PEOPLE. OH, AND MY FLY IS UNDONE, WHICH MAY OR MAY NOT BE INTENTIONAL AND MAY OR MAY NOT BE EVIDENCE THAT I, MYSELF, AM UNDONE IN MORE THAN THE USUAL WAY. AND THOSE GLOSSY STAINS ON MY WEEKEND-OLD PANTS ARE EITHER SEMEN OR YOGURT. YOU BE THE JUDGE, SINCE YOU WERE HEADING THAT DIRECTION ANYWAY."

I could just give an Excuse Me Smile while I zip up, just another guy on the train who's gotten there without thinking how or in what state of (un)dress, one more Joe on the way to his Average Eking-Out with Other Shit on his mind. But no, I don't. I put the book in one hand, a three-finger split, and with the other I pull my shirttail a little further down from out my zipped jacket, then the jacket down another inch or so until I'm pretty sure I'm covered between the coverage from above (shirt and jacket) and below (open book on lap). And it's about this time that I realize the adjustments I'm making to assuage the suppositions of my trainmates are exactly the kind of adjustments any of my trainmates would expect from someone with lassi spots on his shins and a shifty look in his eye who wanted to keep his fly open without raising too much untoward attention. At that point I give up entirely and just start reading distractedly while counting the stops to Harvard Square, at which point I walk out of the train with backpack in front while surreptitiously zipping with two fingers holding the pull and a pinky anchoring the bottom of the zipper.

So this entire experience wouldn't have stuck with me, nor would it have merited an in-depth explanation, were it not for my time in the security line at Logan International three days later. It's five in the morning and the woman helming the other queue is barking like a Jamaican fishmonger to everyone in the five or six lines not even under her auspices. "Take off dem shoes, chil', and ya belt, sah, and place dat bag flat on de belt, missus..." ad infinitum. Taken as I am by this woman's incessant incantations, I'm unconscious going through the line. I hear her addressing holiday travelers a full thirty feet away, personally and with an authority that only seems to grow with distance. With little more than a "missus" or a "sah," she manages to get the head she intends to turn, to turn. So I'm watching this display and doing what she asks, so as not to draw her attention away from the other, more interesting complaints and requests and suggestions she has rolling out towards the other sheep in the lines. Shoes in my hands, socks sweeping the floor cleaner than it has been swept by the thousands herded in front of me, yet less clean than it will be after those behind me, I unbuckle my belt because it has been recommended by both five years of post-9/11 air travel and the bewitching voice of the woman orchestrating miles of post-9/11 air travelers everyday. But maybe because it's so early or maybe because I've been on autopilot for such a stupefying period of time--and only half disregarding the two hours of sleep I managed to squeeze from the night before--I don't stop there. Before I catch myself from my reverie and sound a reveille I've got my whole pants situation undone and almost below-mast. Around the time I realize this I'm thinking shitshitshit they're gonna corral me in that purgatory past the screeners and the metal detectors and the woman with the voodoo voice and there won't even be any magazines and they'll hold me and search me and wand me and flag me for the no-fly and I might as well have taken up Islam or that whole Sikh thing in college like everyone else 'cause then I'd be able to righteously and rightfully bitch about unfair treatment and cultural biases and maybe by now I'd at least have hair long enough for a turban or one of those gingham-lookin' hats Arafat used to wear even though I can't grow a full beard and I'd never blow myself up for anything but I'd gladly blow up the spot in a second if only I could rhyme or play the guitar and maybe even then they'd get me at security for the long fingernails I'd grown to play those ol' Spanish tunes I like for the loops 'cause now you can't even carry on a nailfile or a pack of Chewels for the gelly centers, even if they hadn't been discontinued in '91.

Around such time I pull myself out of that deep divot of anxiety and hike up my pants and I suddenly couldn't give two shits if the TSA flunkies or my fellow herdees might have witnessed my absentmindedness 'cause goddammit I'm innocent. Like Adam, so am me--though given another minute or two I'd likely have been just as frisky-ass naked as Original Sin and looking for the nearest hot apple pie. No figgy leaf or nothin', just a pantsed white boy wondering where along that windy road behind he'd left his presence of mind. And his drawers.

"There is no tragedy in the death of an old man..."

2006-11-21T15:43:00.000-05:00

"There is no tragedy in the death of an old man. Forgive him his shortcomings, and thank him for all his love and care." --from Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion, 2006

I remember waking up in my frat-house cell in early 1999, turning on the tube and learning of the death of Stanley Kubrick. His final, tarnished Eyes Wide Shut was due for release that summer, a project I had been anticipating throughout the years and years of its gestation. His first film since 1987's Full Metal Jacket, EWS would prove one of his most divisive films, opening amid rumors of extensive recutting by Certified Non-Genius Tom Cruise and a skirmish with the MPAA over an orgy scene that played as something more Disney than debauchery. I got a little choked up that morning upon hearing the news, mostly for all the films that the notorious perfectionist may have had left in his still-vibrant, 70-years-young mind.

So there was a similar choking-up this morning when I read that Robert Altman died yesterday at 81, until I recalled the above line from his latest work. Altman left us with an oeuvre far more extensive than that of Mr. Kubrick, and for that we can be grateful. His work during the 1970's was some of the most exciting filmmaking of that Golden Age, and his most recent entries (with a couple of exceptions) showed that his ear heart touch had not waned in the intervening decades. Altman's deft direction, his uncanny ability to coax from unheralded actors performances worth remembering, his eye for talent and ear for the subtleties of natural dialogue and its overlapping and interweaving, his ability to shift focus not only with his camera but with the microphones as well, have influenced every filmmaker worth his salt who has attempted to catch more than four people in a frame since 1970's M*A*S*H.

Like Kubrick, Altman never failed to make me wonder How'd he do that? His films employed none of the trickery we associate with most cinematic trailblazers, none of the explosions or fast cuts or CGI or other such recent flash-and-bang. What was remarkable about his films is the way that he managed to be the fly-on-the-wall, immortalizing mercurial, minute exchanges between actors within the infinite confines of a working movie set. He was one of the first directors to deploy zooms on his cameras and radio-mic every actor in a scene while still using booms to capture the soundscape of any given filmic landscape. He could do the long take like nobody in the business, and the sound editing on his films was nothing short of perfection. To watch Altman's work is to view the detonation of a tactical nuclear strike, to see the explosions of a moment amid the controlled chaos of everything surrounding the blast. And "controlled chaos" might be the best description of the man's best films. He was a master conductor on a grand stage, an illusionist orchestrating a celluloid medium in a way that always seemed orchestrated, never as haphazard as so many films nowadays, and yet the haphazardness of his famously improvisational sets was what made the orchestrations all the more apparent in the final product. And all the more amazing to witness.

In the days to follow, you will be able to read see hear any number of tributes to Robert Altman. Perhaps the greatest tribute will be evident in the many points on the broad spectrum of talent and age and The Public Eye that the sources of these eulogies will inhabit. Kevin Kline and Lindsay Lohan and Elliott Gould and Neve Campbell and Donald Sutherland and Shelley Duvall and Ryan Phillippe and Meryl Streep and Robin Williams and Liv Tyler and Tom Waits and Julia Roberts and Tim Robbins and Robert Duvall and Julianne Moore and Clive Owen and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Warren Beatty and Julie Christie and Steve Buscemi and Tara Reid and Rene Auberjonois and Lili Taylor and Richard Gere and Kate Hudson and Tim Roth and Helen Hunt and Kenneth Branagh and Farrah Fawcett and Robert Downey, Jr. and countless others will doubtless all have their say as to Altman's legacy. And that's just a small sample of the casts he put together over the years, and only the actors still living to pay tribute. Most will credit him as the greatest director they ever had the privilege of working with, call it an "honor" and cite either a long friendship or a sadly foreshortened collaboration, but one fact remains: Anyone who could find the time, the patience, the wherewithal to put all of those names into the same career had something special that the casual observer might easily overlook. The fact that his casting call has hit its end doesn't leave me with regret the way Kubrick's did, but rather with the knowledge that any tapestry as rich in detail as Robert Altman's filmography will always stand up to multiple viewings.

R.I.P.

Sometimes Titles Don't Quite Cut It.

2006-11-07T03:41:00.000-05:00

Okay. So I’ve seen some pretty fucked-up shit in my day. When I was working my first Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street, a guy walked in at like five in the morning with his scalp hanging over his left eye, cranium visible, sat down at the bar with blood streaming down his face and ordered a Hurricane. I called security, gave him some napkins and sent him to the street. Don’t know how that ended up. When I lived on Magazine Street three blocks from the St. Thomas Projects, gunshots were a nightly occurrence until they razed the complex. I always knew the bullets weren’t intended for me. And there was the time in Lexington this May when I was across the street having a drink and talking with a gangsta rapper from Louisville (of all places, and how gangsta I still don’t know), when somebody at the club next door decided to unload a magazine at a truncated high school graduation party. Gangsta L dropped to the bricks and took off his Wayfarers for the first time that night, while I turned around (a little looped for the Hennessey we were drinking), stood up, and wondered what was going on. Great moment for ignorance and Dutch Courage, me walking around the patio for a better look while thirty people shouted at me to get down with them behind the brick walls surrounding the joint’s sidewalk space. Kids ten years younger than me, growing up in my safe whitebread suburbanized hometown and yet knowing people who fire guns in crowded parties were scattering through the streets like so many…um…frightened children running for their lives from bullets that recognized no names. But none of that compares to what just happened outside our house in the DOT.

That’s Dorchester, Massachusetts. East Coast, represent. Or something.

So I’ve just gotten in from a long night of nothing at the Indian restaurant where I work. Mondays are the cruelest month of the week. Strangely enough, however, I found that my place caters the Wu Tang Clan’s shows when they play Boston. Apparently Meth, Ghost, and GZA love the spicy curry. Who knew? So I’m talking Wu shit with the owner’s son, who has been tight with the Clan for a few years now, been backstage while Meth smoked a pound of bomb grass, been close enough to Ghostface Killah to see that he’s bald underneath the shaved head, been driving lead when the Clan’s driver didn’t know how to get from the Needham location to the show that night. I mention all of this simply because the gangsta beginnings of the evening play into the eventualities that dropped mere moments ago.

Walking home from the T, I’m doing something I never do. I’ve been dropping verses with S. all night while we rehashed the career arcs of RZA and the gang and lamented the untimely (and yet completely predictable) demise of ODB, and I’m walking back through the deserted DOT from Savin Hill reciting “Winter Warz” from Ghostface’s first album, the unfadable Ironman, which I know by heart and haven’t truly appreciated in years. So the first verse is mental, all inside the noggin, and then I realize that ain’t nobody up, ain’t nobody out, it’s Monday night and it’s cold and I might as well drop a rhyme or two on the out-loud tip. Pardon the jargon. It’s a mood. Before I know it I’m rapping out loud, complete with the gaps in comprehension that come with the territory inhabited by the Wu and appropriated by pasty white boys walking through Dorchester, and I’m feeling good. When I reach my door I’ve just finished Cappadonna’s final verse and it all seems ordained to be so. Upstairs I go, out of the workies and into the sweats, and not ten minutes pass before I hear the screech of tires and the breaking of glass outside on the street.

Whitby Terrace is a dead-end, and apparently the folks coming up our way from Godknowswhere didn’t know that much. All I know is that the guy in front was driving a grey mid-90’s sedan and pulled into the driveway next door when he saw that the hill stopped past our house. Behind him came an older, blue/black pickup with room in the bed for a full-size pitchfork. How do I know the size of the bed? Because the motherfucker had a pitchfork. And he was using it.

So Pitchfork Johnny is holding his weapon like a bat, hands clasped just above the tines, when I get to the window to see what’s the rumpus. There’s already been a window smashed (don’t know whose), and he’s beating the hood of his own car with the handle while shouting at the woman who is apparently attached to the dude driving the sedan. The dialogue goes something like this:

Pitchfork Johnny: I know you got my FUCKing money. Gimme my FUCKing MONEY!

Woman: You ain’t nothin’ but a bitch, muthafucka, just a muthafuckin’ BITCH! You lucky my man don’t come out and fuckin’ KILL yo’ DUMB ASS!

PJ: Oh, so the CRACK’s working, huh? You fuckin’ CRACK whore you nothin’ but a CRACK whore with a fuckin’ CRACK WHORE FUCKin’ husband you fuck—

W: Fuck YOU!

Dude In The Sedan: Yeah, FUCK you you punk-ass—

PJ: You’ll be lucky to get out alive you FUCKin’ BITCH. Just SHUT YOUR FUCKIN’ MOUTH or I’ll fuckin’ put this shit right through your fuckin’ EYE!

So at this point the tines are pointed at Dude In The Sedan, whose relationship to Woman and PJ is unclear. Seems like PJ might have picked up Woman at a bar, gotten her high, and wanted to fuck. Then Dude In The Sedan comes in, claims Woman, rolls out. Evidently things did not end amicably at their Place Of Worship, as Whitby Terrace became a vehicular Ground Zero for the further goings-on.

Did I mention that the first motherfucker had a pitchfork? Yeah.

So PJ is chasing Dude around his car--wait…I’m getting ahead of myself. So there’s shoving going on between PJ and Woman, she’s getting right up in his face with full fist-pumping fury, he’s shoving her out of his face and keeping her at arm’s-length with the handle-end of the pitchfork. Some more skirmishing breaks out, and Dude gets out of his sedan and tries to break things up. No dice. PJ chases him back into his ride with the tines pointed at him. Dude rolls in the passenger side, slams the door, slides over to the driver’s seat, starts the car and PJ moves around the sedan methodically, stops in front to put the tines (on the third pass, the first two skittering off the glass like water from the proverbial duck’s back) through the windshield. PJ hops over to the driver’s side-—

--and at this point I’ve already dialed 911 on my cell, which patches through to the Staties. They connect me to Boston Metro PD, who ask me twice to confirm that I’m talking about a dude with a pitchfork and not just a knife. I confirm twice that I’m talking about a fucking pitchfork. I’m on tape somewhere, and I’d really love to hear it again sometime. But anyway—-

--and smashes out the window swinging the tine-end of the pitchfork like Big Papi. Dude rolls out the passenger side from whence he came. All the while there is shouting and screaming and people using words like Fuck Bitch Crack and Cunt. Oh, and Whore. Not sure how they all strung together, as I was on the line trying to describe the situation to the proper, incredulous authorities. Can’t blame ‘em, really. The authorities, that is. So…

At this point PJ is chasing both Dude and Woman around both vehicles, his pitchfork held in front of him with the totally-business-end pointing forward, and there ensues a game of Round Robin. They loop a figure-eight or two around both vehicles before PJ decides he’s had enough and stops, slamming the tines down on his own truck to emphasize his own consternation. And yes, I’m dressing up his mood in highfalutin’ terminology. Muthafucka was pissed. AND he was carrying a fucking pitchfork. Did I mention that? Yeah.

So at some point between me hanging up with 911 and the minute-or-so that the whole chasing-around-the-cars-shit happened, I’m realizing something that really sets me off. While I’m not consciously thinking of the fucked-up shit that I’ve seen, I’ve got some kind of moral compass twirling about inside me that winds up pointing towards revulsion. I realize that I can read horrible shit (B.E. Ellis’ American Psycho) and watch dramatized horror (Eli Roth’s Hostel and the like) and be subjected on a daily basis to the fucked-up goings-on in Iraq (3000 American boys dead and Saddam gets a death sentence, but from Gee-Dubs that’s like a Tic-Tac) and generally assume myself to have a pretty high tolerance for the bad shit that the world throws one’s way. But there was a moment there, as I was watching the happenings from the safety of my third-floor window, when I thought I was going to see at least one person impaled by a fucking pitchfork. Maybe two people. And I was shaken, stirred, moved. There was a moment of stark mental daylight at one in the morning when I saw that this was something I did not want to see. It’s strange how human nature operates, how--no matter what you've seen or how jaded you feel walking through the sevenday--your subconscious can clock in and reiterate that none of the monkeyshit floating before your eyes is monkeyshit to which you need to bear witness. I knew that I didn't want to see some sad motherfucker die on a pitchfork. At least not tonight, and certainly not before I had a beer to quell the nausea that would most certainly ensue. Honestly, that feeling was refreshing. Even if it has since deprived me of much-needed sleep.

To cut the long version somewhat shorter, the two parties involved (Dude and Woman, and Pitchfork Johnny) eventually peeled out down the street when they heard sirens roaring their/our way. By the time the cops arrived and 911 called back to have me walk downstairs and explain my seemingly absurd emergency call, the kids in question were probably no longer in the same ZIP. The cops seemed kind of miffed, too, like they missed something they could tell everybody at work and trade off of for like weeks. When I was walking back up Whitby and the cops were backing down the street, three people gave me shouts from open windows in the 35-degree cold to see what happened, who was it, what was being done. Nobody recognized the Dude or the Woman or Pitchfork Johnny. The guy two doors down on the third floor put it well: “They ain’t even from the block. I said to ‘em, ‘Not ‘round here you don’t. Not ‘round here.’”

ADDENDUM: It bears mentioning here, as I draw to a close and am still wired and probably won’t sleep much or well but might still try, that all the parties involved in the fracas this early morning were white and pasty as my Scots-Irish ass. It might be easy to assume differently, depending upon what you know of the DOT and what you assume from any of the reconstructed dialogue above. Don’t. Assume, that is.

Whose Country?

2006-10-31T15:08:00.000-05:00

So I've been experiencing recently a long period of severe writer's block. Severe enough to merit electroshock, I was beginning to think. There have been false starts and aborted attempts at making a point and far too many hours spent actually working. You know, for, like, remuneration. In between shifts there was that bit on cats that I never could make work, and another about the trend towards documentary-style television sitcoms that just seemed too late-in-the-game to merit serious discussion, and yet another comparing the POW situation in Renoir's Grand Illusion and our current mess in Iraq. Who knows? Maybe these projects will one day come to fruition. Maybe they won't. Maybe they'll grab my fragmentary interest just long enough at some future time that I'll embark upon some misguided, unsolicited monologue in some crowded barroom somewhere and bore the pants off of every pretty lady in earshot.* Time will tell.

At the moment, however, there's a minor cultural curiosity that has gotten my britches in a serious twist for the past two months. It has aroused my ire, my spite, my loathing of everything easy and calculated and pandering and unoriginal and borderline-plagiarized. But first a quick setup:

This new paying gig I've got has me behind yet another bar on Saturdays and Sundays during our beautiful New England autumn, which means that I manage to catch roughly twenty minutes of every collected hour of American football being played across these United States. Sure, we don't have the satellite packages and multiple screens like we did on Bourbon Street, nor are there rampaging, elderly Aggies kissing after every A&M touchdown and drinking White Cadillacs. That's milk and scotch for the uninitiated, just in case elderly Texans embraced in full wrinkly smooch wasn't enough to put you off your feed on a Halloween afternoon. Anyway.

So seeing all this football means that I've also been exposed to the onslaught of corporate sponsorship associated with sporting events of all kinds. Mostly it's beer ads that deal primarily with the long and storied affiliation of drinking and football,** ads that are normally inoffensive enough when you realize that most every American beer commercial anymore portrays beer-swilling, football-watching males in exactly the "guy's guy" light that most of them fantasize about, no matter how ignorant or counterintuitive that light may seem to the rest of the world and women.

The beer ads don't bug me. Some of them are damn funny. Maybe I'm one of those guys.

What does manage to rankle me into fits of ire that I can no longer contain without venting, however, are the non-stop spots (sometimes six or eight per hour of game-time) of those damnably ubiquitous Chevy ads wanting to sell me big, gas-guzzling trucks, all set to the splendiferous strains of John Cougar Fucking Mellencamp's new hit*** "This Is Our Country."

Were this song merely the soundtrack for an American company wishing to sell me an American automobile, I could dig. At the very least, I could ignore. But that, folks, just ain't the case. Chevy has a number of ads set to this jangly pseudo-rock, the most disturbing of which features footage of a flooded New Orleans and the Pillars of Light at Ground Zero in NYC and WPA photographs of the Great Depression in a montage with sandstone arches over the canyons of Arizona/Utah and other such iconic images of What America Means To People Who Should Buy The New 2007 Silverado.**** I get it, alright? We are a nation that can trip and fall and meet with outsized opposition and rebuild itself. Kudos to us. The Spirit of Renewal is not something I question. What I will question is the wisdom of equating a gas-guzzler and images of Modern Americana at a time when we have American children dying overseas for a FUBAR Oil War that has us accelerating the tapping of reserves in pristine wildernesses like Alaska's North Slope (ANWR) to attempt to stave off the flow of blood and oil to and from the Middle East. Sadly, that's a more accurate picture of America right now.

But that's only sorta here or there. What I cannot, by any stretch of my imagination, get behind is the wholesale plagiarism of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" by a Hoosier hack like Mr. Mellencamp, who completely misses the point while appropriating yards of lyric from that poet of the Dust Bowl. A quick sample of JCFM's new ditty:

The Dream is still alive
Someday it will come true
And this country it belongs
To folks like me and you
So let the voice of Freedom
Sing out through this land:
"This is our country."

From the East Coast
To the West Coast
Down the Dixie Highway
Back home
This is our country.

Now take that bit and place it in context: a car company selling a huge truck to people who may or may not need a huge truck, in a country that places some momentary value on having a huge truck so as to better ramble through the nameless-and-named territories of a country built for just such a huge truck, propping JCFM's lyrics up against images (when not of destruction) of the kind of country through which such a huge truck might conceivably ramble and gambol. Might the next verse sound something like this?:

As I went walking
That ribbon of highway
I saw above me
That endless skyway
I saw below me
That golden valley
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun come shining
And I was strolling
In the wheat fields waving
And the dust clouds rolling
A voice come a-chanting
As the fog was a-lifting:
"This land was made for you and me."

This land is your land
This land is my land
From California
To the New York Island
From redwood forests
To the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.

Yeah, but that would be Woody's work. And that's where the visual of Chevy's ad breaks with the lyric of JCFM's version of events and strays hamfistedly into Woody's original. JCFM doesn't quite get the open-road vibe that Guthrie understands, mostly because JCFM's never been there. Not in his songs, at least, and certainly not in the last twenty-odd years. This is a man who doesn't even have about him the prescience of your Lee Greenwoods or your Toby Keiths (the latter of whom, BTW, is "Built Ford Tough"), a man who waits five years into a shite global situation to offer his "Real American" take on the drama unfolding. And let's not forget that the "our country" of which he speaks, the red states to which he panders, are the same God-fearing Americans willing to ignore homosexuals in their bid for equal rights under law, willing to kick out every immigrant making up a workforce that currently puts almost every pound of fresh American produce in their horns-of-plenty. What we're left with is a sad, dwarflike, pompadoured opportunist jumping on a rickety jingoist bandwagon as it passes him somewhere on Sunset between Hollywood and Horseshit.

So corporate synergy makes a certain kind of sense, and timing is everything when you're a has-been rocker whose best days are behind you even as your newest album is about to drop, but I could go the rest of my best days without hearing another strained strain of JCFM's forced bid at red-state appeal and still consider myself an American, albeit of a different sort. The sort who wants to catch Game Two without calculated, corporate-sponsored flag-waving intruding before the first pitch, the sort who wants his football uninterrupted when he has better things to think about than what keeps an aging "musician" in the limelight when "Pink Houses" (yeah, but ain't that America?) slides ever backwards in the rearview.

Happy Halloween, America. There's nothing scarier than the monkeyshit we don't call out and fight against. Get out and vote next Tuesday, and don't set your personal soundtracks to anything involving John Cougar Mellencamp. I leave you with this precious snippet, from his latest's first verse:

Well I can stand beside
Ideas I think are right
And I can stand beside
The idea to stand and fight.

Here's to better ideas, in or out of context. In the meantime, stand and fight such egregious pop trash. Peace.

*: Incidentally, "boring" is not the best means of getting the pants off of every pretty lady in earshot. Like, y'know, just FYI.
**: Less acceptable (though just as appropriate) tie-ins, mostly for their illegality: Michael Irvin as corporate spokesman for the Medellin Cartel ("I'd like to snort the world of Coke..."); Leon Lett proselytizing on behalf of marijuana use and its memory-defeating properties, allowing the user to get nabbed twice for inter-state trafficking within a four-month period. And that's just ex-Cowboys, folks. No mention here of Mark Gastineau (for domestic violence) and Ray Lewis (for totally not stabbing some guy) and Lyle Alzado (for blaming steroids to cover up the whole dying-of-AIDS thing) and Brian Bosworth (for making horrifically shitty action flicks while rocking that notched-upper-sideburns-and-pink-mullet look).
***: Yeah, it's a "hit" before it even comes out as part of some schlocky new album, strictly for its inescapability. By that notion of "hit," Stalin's Purges were a big "hit" in Russia, genocide has been a recurring "hit" in Europe and Africa and Southeast Asia and the American Era of Expansion, and Microsoft Windows is a huge "hit" regardless of how many times it crashes your whole shit. Here's to "hits."
****: I will not post any links to these TV spots, as they are so readily available to anyone watching television for the next three months. If you feel the need to seek them out online because you watch neither television nor American football and you're single and female and scorchingly attractive, feel free to drop me an email and we'll discuss. You'll find a link in the column to the right. Include photos.

Crikey.

2006-09-05T08:15:00.000-04:00

By now everyone on the planet, Down Under and Up Here, has heard of the untimely passing of "The Crocodile Hunter." Barbed through the heart by a stingray in shallow waters off the coast of his island-continent, Steve Irwin went out doing what he loved: bringing Australia's native fauna into the world's living rooms. He has been publicly mourned by his Prime Minister, by the devoted fans who've set up a floral shrine outside his Australia Zoo, by Russell Crowe, and by millions of people the world over who grew to love his quirky, controversial, frontier approach to wildlife conservation. His death came as both a shock and an inevitability, for this was a man who thought nothing of sidling up to 16-foot saltwater crocs, of handling taipans mambas vipers cobras, of diving with every predator of the deep.

The saying goes that we make our own fun, and everything else is entertainment. Steve Irwin made his own fun, crafted a life around bringing that fun to every couchbound entertainment-seeker who caught his show. You could see the gleam in his eyes when he had some monster in a close-up's foreground, the twinkle of a kid bringing home a frog in his lunchbox. "Isn't she a beaut?!" he would whisper with that ripe-for-caricature Aussie awe. "She's gorgeous!" For many, Irwin's exploits were legendary in the pop-culture sense of the term, marveled over for an hour or so and forgotten as soon as the channel flipped. There might be a lingering awareness of the fact that he had his smiling mug in the mouth of a huge reptile, or had grabbed a venomous snake by the tail, but the specifics could tend to fade with each successive televisual moment. Entertainment is, after all, entertainment. It is evanescent and mercurial by nature, lasting only as long as the pixels flicker before the eye.

For the rest of us, Irwin was--and remains--a hero by every definition. He did what we could only hope to do, given the opportunity and the balls-out willingness to stare Death in the face and say, "Not just now, thanks. You'll have your chance soon enough, but not just now."

"Daring" is a word too often used in this entertainment-driven world, a term applied most frequently to trivial pursuits of the mind, of creativity and essential passivity. That last Michael Winterbottom flick was daring, say, or the most recent frame hung on the walls at MOMA. Steve Irwin was Daring. His life required capitalization and, if available, block letters and boldface. And yet he also managed to come across as the most down-to-earth, self-effacing daredevil. He was wired differently than most of us, and it showed.

There's another cliché out there, that you should dress for the job you want, not the job you have. My fondest memory of Steve Irwin, the one I would cite to anyone who mentions his name, is of watching him snorkeling with sea snakes and diving to follow them--clad not in wetsuit trunks Speedo, but in his trademark khaki shorts and shirt. Underwater. Steve Irwin dressed for the job he had, and he did it well. If the clothes make the man, The Crocodile Hunter was more of a man than most of us can ever hope to be--and without ever sacrificing that childlike twinkle. The world is better for his having been here.

Crocs rule. R.I.P.

"everyday"

2006-09-03T09:47:00.000-04:00

My good friend J. sent me the above link late last night, and it's easily the coolest thing I've seen all week. Noah Kalina has taken a candid self-portrait every day for six-and-a-half years (and counting), stitching them all together over some really ominous piano. It's a fascinating glimpse into a person's life. We are privy to his changing hairstyles, living arrangements, random friends/acquaintances in the background, clothes worn and discarded that magically move from desk to floor to back-of-chair, etc. The expressionless camera-presence is the only relative constant.

There's something about the immediacy of Kalina's face in these frames, the contextualization of a life-in-progress that goes on in the periphery around the static, almost serene center. It grabbed me in an unexpected way--much as van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear [below right] draws me in, or Schiele's Self-Portrait with Black Vase [below left], or any of Rembrandt's self-portraits with their luminous-yet-still-murky backgrounds. Each of these works makes me stare into the eyes at the same time I'm looking at what else is in the frame, curious to discover how the mind behind a famous face describes itself by what it makes available in the mise-en-scene.

But Kalina's photography here is more raw, less contrived than a painted self-portrait, where the artist must consider each individual brushstroke. To add another layer of reference to this deconstruction, the animation of his snapshots strikes me as almost pointillist. Like Seurat or Lichtenstein, the overall effect when one stands back from the framed work (or, here, the 6 minutes or so of animation) is something greater than the sum of its individual dots. The viewer is left to infer any stories implied by the changing periphery, and the questions that arise etch the piece with all the contours and textures of a 3-dimensional, 360-degree, "real" life: "Why the beaded necklace near the middle of the piece? Who gave it to him? Why did it suddenly disappear?" "Etc., etc., etc..."

everyday is also a declaration of the power of editing and scoring to alter the meaning of any individual frame in a film. As we have seen recently with the burgeoning craft of "alternative trailers," the image on celluloid is only part of the picture. [My favorite example, taken from one of my favorite films, follows at the end of this post. -N.] By changing the music or the surrounding visual elements of a filmic image, one can effectively re-invent any work in the medium. The Russian film pioneer Lev Kuleshov first described this phenomenon, what would later be called "The Kuleshov Effect." He showed static film of a man's impassive face, then a bowl of soup, then the man's face again, then a coffin, then the man's face, and on and on. Between juxtapositions he would ask his audiences to describe what the man might be feeling. The reaction was overwhelmingly uniform across several versions of the experiment: after the shot of the soup went back to the face, the man was happy because he could eat; after the coffin, the man was sad because someone he knew had died. Keep in mind that the shot of the man's face was the same, changeless and betraying no emotion. What the audience registered was the power of montage, of a filmed moment's context within an edited work rather than as a moment in and of itself. Kalina's blank stare asks his viewers to work the same sort of deduction based on the changing information along the edges of the frame, but at a pace much faster than Kuleshov ever considered.

There's another element at work here that subverts the essential voyeuristic nature of film even as it exploits it. Sure, we have this peek into another's life, and he can't see us watching--but he is staring directly into our eyes from the middle of the frame. It's rare in narrative film to have a character looking directly into the camera (Jonathan Demme uses the technique most unsettlingly in The Silence of the Lambs). It happens more often in documentary film, but for a person to offer, without stutter, "Welcome into my world, my life, my home" from the simultaneous remove and immediacy of a piece like everyday is startling, to say the very least.

Film history lectures aside, a brief admission: it's early yet this rainy Boston Sunday, I've only now hooked up my morning coffee, and everyday was the first thing I saw upon waking after a night of fitful, talkative sleep. I had a definite moment of existential crisis while viewing the piece, wondering where the last six-and-a-half years of my own life have gone while I watched those of another passing before my eyes. I have no doubt that my morning would have been considerably less thoughtful had Kalina scored his epic transformations with, say, The Black Eyed Peas. "Let's Get Retarded" would impart upon the viewer a completely different impression of his work and life than does the current piano score by Carly Comando. Were there also more glaring changes in angle and framing, I probably wouldn't have taken time out of a grey day to write this entry. Behold the power of film, right?

As it stands, this is the kind of project I would advise my kids to undertake as soon as they can wield a camera. It's the perfect complement to a written or video diary (or blog, for that matter), but without all the pressure that a daily catalogue of one's feelings tends to exert over time. A literal fraction of a second each day, and there exists in the digital ether a record of your life in stop-motion. Amazing. Wish I had thought of it years ago. Might start tomorrow. Cheers in the meantime to Mr. Kalina for having the bravery (nay, balls?) to show us the blink-and-you-miss-it passage of time as one man experiences it, at just under 24 frames-per-second.

Things I'm Not Going To Write About

2006-09-01T03:54:00.000-04:00

[zzzz. zzzzyzzzzx. zzzSNAP. What the... Poopytrip! What month is it? September!? Okay... wellywell... Time for a bit of the ol' pipecleaner on the brainside. Don't we all need that from time to time? Like when it's been six weeks of monkeyshit in between you and your last blog post? I owe apologies to everyone who has logged on and been forced to witness the Basketcase-esque abomination that is two Wayanses latched together in a frontal-papoose-style arrangement. Scusilo. Je m'excuse. Et cetera. Ad infinitum.... So here's what I've been working on that will never get a full-length, exhaustive (read: boring) examination in these pages. Consider these open letters as being written to whomever* might be the intended recipient. Peace.]

Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones and NASCAR: There was an ad that hyped the TNT (read: AOL-Time/Warner) airings of NASCAR races, which are in the first place incomprehensible; in the second, inexcusable. I write this, mind you, as a man who spent his formative years in the American South. So take it how you will: am I merely offering apologia for My Redneck Past, or am I genuinely perturbed by Our Red States' Obsession With Men Turning Left? Take the latter. Anyway, the Stones are singing about a woman who's "Driving Too Fast" in this tune, and I can't help thinking it sounds like exactly what I'd expect from a group so...so...septuagenarian? It's a 6-minute track if you steal it, and it's only worth half that. The opening chorus goes something like: "I love you baby I love you too much. / I love you baby that I can't stop the fuss." The "fuss?" Is this some Britslang I ain't party to quite yet, or is it just lazy writing?

MJ: "Hey, Keith, what rhymes with "Much?"

KR: "Er...zzz...wha--Poopytrip! 'Fuss!'"

This is a band that rocked for a few good years (until around 1981ish) on riffs and beats lifted from The Great American Bluesmen. Now they're relegated to the rubbishbin of pop-redneck, corporate-salaried, AOL-Time/Warnerish hackery, re-examining a theme I thought Prince had killed with "Little Red Corvette."

P: "Baby, you much too fast [You got to slow dow-own!]."

Sure she drives too fast, Mick. You're old and crotchety and every old, crotchety man claims that everyone else--hot women included--drives too fast. Show the kind of restraint that Jimi and Bob and Kurt and Janis and Stevie and Hank and Woody and Buddy and Axl did and roll out with some dignity, okay?

Axl?: I'll believe he's still breathing when I hear Chinese Democracy.

Keith Richards and the 1967 Rolling Stones Death Pool: How. I mean. Really. Is it just your cholesterol's low, or what? Were it not for the smoking cigarette dangling from your lips at the Super Bowl, I would have assumed animatronics and Disney-style floofaroo. Kudos if you're not already animatronic. If you're already all gears and pulleys, then you aren't even reading this. With that in mind...

Animatronic Rolling Stones: It's really the only stop after Johnny Depp claims your swagger as his own in a movie based on a theme-park ride. Like Gibson did with his whole Man-On-The-Cross shit.

Mel Gibson? An Anti-Semite? Nah...: Really the ugliest story, but also the most predictable. Here's a guy whose father put out white-power, pro-Nazi newsletters as part of a radical-Catholic movement in Australia while Mel was off growing the Ubermullet that would eventually gain him Lethal Weapons 1 through IV. So when William Wallace switches from beer to SS-and-Sevens, all manner of donkeypiss spews forth. It's wildly ironic that the man who made the most wildly anti-Semitic movie of all time (The Passion of The Christ), when pissed, flails on and on about every Hebrew who's not already his Lord and Saviour. Pick a Jew and stick with it, Mel. Please. I liked The Man Without A Face, really. Cross my heart. No, not that cross, Mel. Just climb down and we'll talk.

Crosses: Better than crescents or Mogen Davids? Who decides? (5 USD on the latter...takers?).

War In The Middle East: Seriously, Lebanon. What? Rocks only beat scissors, and the paper comes from Washington. Be happy with the land you have and just be done with the rest. Thanks.

Nukes In The Middle East: Oh. What? I thought that was just North Korea and Libya and Iran and India and Pakistan and aren't all of these people just pissed off at each other? At US?!?! Okay. Lebanon, listen up: Sorry about that whole last shit. We're cool as long as we're cool, y'know? Just don't do anything I wouldn't, and leave a full tank when you drop off the keys. Rightyroo, rocknroll. Speaking of...

Plane Crashes and Emmys: Congrats, Monk. Congrats, Mister Carell. Congrats, Jon Stewart. O'Brien? Nice show. Don't hold you accountable in any way for anything that happened during that telecast. Your timing's never been flawless (but neither was Johnny's), but this time the flaws found a momentary audience. Fear not: Like the Emmys, the controversy and the crash will fade into distant memory soon enough...

Oliver Stone and World Trade Center: ...until Ollie comes out WAAAAY after the starting bell, murmurs a barely audible "Poopytrip!" and sets to work assassinating your character in 2011. On peyote and Cuban hookers.

Peyote and Cuban Hookers: Um... Yeah, how much por la noche? And how much if you don't melt into David Crosby?

Robert DeNiro: Really, Bob. Dead to me. Don't even bother calling this time.

John Mark Karr: "She loves me, she loves me not. She loves me, she loves me not. I was there in the room, I wasn't even in the state. I just wanted a hug from police officers, or the FBI." Can't skinny and goofy-looking qualify as a capital offense? Please? Just once?

The Chicken I Raped With A Beer Can Last Night: Sorry. I can only imagine how that hurt. If it helps matters any: you were delicious and you were dead. And I promise I'll work that entire carcass into a bitchin' leftover-chix soup. I try to roll like a Plains Indian (feathers, not dots) with that good shit, y'know, use every part of the proverbial buffalo. Even though you can't hunt them anymore, except by private arrangement. Buffalo, that is. Black gold, West-Texas plea. Yeah, um...

Buffalo: Sorry. I meant "bison," and never meant to understate your car-knocking-over ability. Kudos to great SUV-relocation potential, and long may you prosper.

My Pillow: A great place to spend the night. Cheers and

[zzzz...zzzzyzzzzx...zzzSNAP!]

*: Oh, or is it "whoever?" Did you really scroll all the way down here after the asterisk? There are greater problems on the horizon, mi amigo, than my grasp of interstitial M's. Focus.

Bugger Off, Little Man, And May Pestilence Follow Thee All Of Thy Days

2006-07-15T21:19:00.000-04:00

[So it's been a few weeks now since I went completely culture-snob, but it's time I got the following off my chest:]

As a society, as a people, as a country at war with those who would seek to destroy our way of life, we have been fighting on the wrong front(s). Iraq and Afghanistan and (soon-ish enough) Iran are one thing, but Little Man is another. In fact, it would be a fair assessment to state that the new Wayans film represents many of the reasons crazy people want to fly planes into our skyscrapers. I don't think I'm engaged in hyperbole here. Really. Let me explain...

A few months back, I wrote about the furor surrounding the first trailer for United 93. This was a moment in American film that polarized our moviegoing public like nothing that had come before. Sure, there have been many and various shocks to the system over the last hundred-odd years of American film. Many of us know all the landmark moments by heart, but when was the last time you were in a theater to witness people screaming, crying, and/or walking out based on a trailer? It's fair to say that Paul Greengrass' film was a major turning point in the way America deals with the defining moment of this young century, and not only because it was the first film (almost five years on) to show us what it meant to have been on one of 9/11's doomed planes. U93 was gripping and terrifying and challenging and confusing and everything that one could hope to experience in a major motion picture. I use the term "experience" here with the full weight of its definition, which is to say that anyone who walked into the theater faced the unique and horrible prospect of willingly reliving in vivid detail the events of that thunderbolt morning. If filmic entertainments are meant to be candysnacks for our idle brains, U93 was a Twinkie with broken glass in the creamy center. But I digress.

United 93 screened in most houses across the country sans trailers, out of respect to the film's gravity and the memories of those lost on 9/11. One of the consequences, however, of trying to sell such a weighty film, is that its trailer must run alongside those hawking more trivial entertainments. And thus the towering scale of my anger: before sitting through a mediocre crime flick, I saw the trailer for U93 followed by one for Little Man.

That just ain't right, and I believe I owe a brief aside to establish context:

My first job was in a movie theater, and I worked my way up from the popcorn hustle to projection. It was a great gig upstairs in the booth, mostly for the fact that nobody ever personally gave the projectionist a hassle. If a flick was flickering out-of-frame, we found out and corrected the problem. Ditto any sound troubles, any houselight problems, et cetera. But the head projectionist, he who worked Thursday nights and reeled together the Friday platters from the shipping cans, was in charge of assembling the trailers that would screen before any given film in the multiplex. The guidelines were and are relatively lax and commonsense: don't put a trailer for Pulp Fiction on The Lion King, don't put rom-com trailers before a horror flick--basically, just don't confuse the demographic coming to see Film/Genre A with trailers for Films/Genres B,C,D, and so forth.

So how does one build awareness for a Genuine Moment In Film History like U93 without necessarily pairing its trailer with some less-worthy material? It's a challenge, to say the very least. I can almost understand the clusterfuck of confusion that led to U93 being followed by Little Man. Almost. But you can always put U93 last-in-line, and make sure that trailers and features bear some of U93's weight. Somebody upstairs (in the booth, not the heavens) must have been asleep at the wheel to let a spot for Little Man follow the most contentious trailer in recent memory. My surprise at the misstep might have led to my writing off what many other filmgoers deemed a totally decent effort (Lucky Number Slevin), as the bad taste in my mouth lasted well past that film's closing credits. Little Man has since haunted my awareness in a way that few such lamentable attempts at filmmaking have ever bothered me before.

Hence this preamble to the following diatribe:

Little Man is the latest effort in CGI minstrelsy from the Wayans brothers, who apparently are burdened by nothing resembling guilt, shame, or any emotion that might weigh on a human conscience. Their most recent effort was White Chicks, which may have set the lowest possible bar for suspension of disbelief in contemporary film. In that movie Shawn and Marlon (Wayanses, both) were somehow placed undercover (or was it witness protection?) as--you guessed it--white chicks, in the least convincing latex makeup jobs ever witnessed on celluloid.

But oh! how the people laughed at the silly black men in whiteface singing along to really-white emopop! And oh how funny it was to see the big black man fall for the black-man-in-anglobitch-drag-biting-toenails-at-the-dinner-table! What times those were, y'know, in like 2004, before the Civil War and Reconstruction and MLK, Jr. and everything that should have made such hideous displays cause for riots in the fucking streets!

So now we have Little Man, in which Marlon W. plays the world's smallest cat-burglar, forced to hide a diamond the size of his head in the handbag of an upper-middle-class black woman. She's got a clueless husband (Shawn W.) who encourages her to accept the "baby" placed on their doorstep by Marlon's accomplice, the ever-more-disappointing Tracy Morgan. The "baby," of course, is Marlon-the-cat-burglar with a shave and a bonnet and a rattle. Apparently the short bus stopped at Shawn's house before Tracy came by with his bundle of joy, because the lucky young couple have no idea that the "baby" is actually a "grown" man, a midget diamond thief who only wants to get back his "booty."

(Please ignore my cheap and loaded fingerquotes.)

So we're supposed to accept that all the many HILARIOUS! situations that ensue tip neither Shawn nor Wifey to the fact that "baby" is "Marlon-the-thief." Okay. Alright. So even when "baby" is shaving with an electric at the bathroom mirror, smoking a stogie (that never stinks up the rest of the house?), offering his googly-eyed milking-face to the nearest set of tits (cue Benny Hill boob-music), and otherwise convincingly playing an infant WITH TATTOOS!!!, we're to assume that the audience are the only ones privileged with glimpses behind the curtain of the great and powerful Oz, as it were?

Does this kind of reprehensible trash annoy anyone else, or am I the only person this film has managed to piss off without so much as a viewing? Can't we all just get on the bandwagon and declare the damned thing a heresy without ever seeing it?

I have, and I don't feel the least bit guilty about condemning this prisoner without a trial. No, because I saw the trailer. Right after United 93. Those two minutes hurt me in my most private, most American parts. And I wish this film the fate of a criminal, a terrorist, a foreigner locked away without warrant at Gitmo. If only...

Okay, I'm angry. Perhaps irrationally so, but I'm still angry. After all, I'm more than willing to believe that men in capes can fly and dodge bullets and otherwise kick ass, but the idea of Wayanses mugging as midget diamond thieves upsets me in ways I'm not sure I can fully describe. I know it's a trivial pursuit, bashing Little Man, and I should be above raising any debate involving what is most likely a ludicrous steaming turd of a movie. Its quality (or lack thereof) should speak for itself, and there is no reason to expect Little Man will be remembered. Only the most important (or popular) films of any given year survive the passage of time, and I have no doubt that this blip on the monkeyshit radar will go down in history by not going down in history in the first place. When the next thing after DVD comes out, you won't be able to find Little Man in the new format at your local rental house. Mere words are meaningless when one attempts to convey the insignificance, in the grand scheme of things, of a film such as this.

And still it manages to raise my hackles. When this execrable piece of filmmaking makes it to a video shelf, it might sit alongside such underrated classics as Little Big Man and Little Man Tate. Ouch. Ugh. You have no idea how much it infuriates me to even grace this film with a post. Can you imagine what it feels like to know that anyone Googling showtimes for LM might wind up with my words bounding forth from the search engine? But I must. (Write about it, that is.) These thoughts have haunted me long enough. Little Man's very existence represents everything I hate about Hollywood and the machines that create our entertainments, and it's no laughing matter. I am writing this as a public service for anyone who might actually want to see the flick, for anyone who might be in a custodial arrangement with a child who thinks midget thieves posing as babies are funny. I hope the message hits whatever passes for home.

The trailer should be everything most reasonable individuals require to know that they should never see this film. Any introduction that warns "From The Creators Of White Chicks" should be more than enough forewarning for the conscious amongst us. But I will still wager an eyetooth (which ones are those?) and my weaker testicle that the opening weekend gross for Little Man will pass $20M domestic, which is probably more than enough to warrant, in Hollywood's dollarsign eyes, a sequel--or if not a direct follow-up, then at least another fabulous new witch's brew of Wayanses and CGI. The die is cast, and it has a little Marlon-face on every side. Do what you can to avoid the next roll.

This Blog Kills Fascists

2006-07-05T07:04:00.000-04:00

In another of those weird confluences of time and fate, I've been listening again to the Mermaid Avenue albums around the time of this Independence Day. The estate and children of Woody Guthrie commissioned Billy Bragg, Wilco, Natalie Merchant, and Corey Harris to commit the late Woody's unfinished songs to wax (or vinyl, or plastic, as it were) during several studio sessions in 1997 and 1998. I can't think of a songsmith more fitting to ring in another year of our Strange American Democracy than Mr. Woody Guthrie. Was he a Socialist? Yes. A drunk? Okay. Generally an Odd Bird, and beautiful for the oddness? Absofuckinglutely.

Huntington's had more than a bit to do with the last, and maybe something to do with the former. Who's to say?

Most know Guthrie as the author of "This Land Is Your Land" and nothing else. The fact is that he spent his entire life crafting songs of rebellion, songs of unity, songs of putting democracy's tools in the hands of those folk who make democracy work. He also wrote offbeat odes to Hollywood actresses ("Ingrid Bergman"), gutwrenching love songs ("Remember The Mountain Bed," "When The Roses Bloom Again," and "At My Window Sad And Lonely"), strange quasi-Christian tunes ("Blood of the Lamb" and "Christ For President"), and ditties about the invisible people who have to clean up nasty-ass hotel rooms after people like us defile them ("Hot Rod Hotel"). He was a people's poet, the man who influenced Dylan and Baez and Arlo (natch) and pretty much everyone who's put pen to paper and guitar in the name of a cause since Black Monday, 1929. Think of him as the Bob Marley of our American Situation. It's not a stretch. He painted these words on his guitar, for chrissakes: "THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS." Show me a person who doesn't respect that, I'll show you a person I'd rather punch than reason with. Ironic, no?

There's a great documentary the BBC put out detailing the creation of the Mermaid Avenue tapes called Man In The Sand. Check it out if you're interested. Hell, check it out if you're not interested. We owe it to ourselves as Americans to understand that which has--and those who have--come before us. The film and the albums are a hell of an intro. Besides being the most transcendently beautiful, utterly American albums in recent memory, they are a document of what our parents and theirs went through during the first part of the so-called "American Century," the Twentieth. Not so strangely, there is an echo of our modern future in Woody's Depression-era lyrics...

Take this snippet as an example, from "Stetson Kennedy":

"I ain't the world's best writer, ain't the world's best speller,
But when I believe in something I'm the loudest yeller.
If we fix it so you can't make no money on war, well
We'll all forget what we was killin' folks for."

Or this bit, from a piece Woody wrote for the People's World:

"Look like the ring has been drawed and the marbles are all in. The millionaires has throwed their silk hats and our last set of drawers in the ring."

Tell me that the man had an agenda, tell me his politics were neither red-blooded nor American, and I'll tell you you're not seeing clearly this sunshiney morning. But don't tell me that his words don't ring too fucking true in this current day and age. This was a man who served during the last clean war, WWII. He knew no Halliburtons, no Rumsfelds, no Bushes, no Wolfowitzes, no Nixons or Vietfuckingnams. Maybe we need another Woody, somebody with a love for this country so deep and objective, a love loved in spite of and for our shortcomings and blemishes, a love for the idea of America. In closing, a note on America and that love taken from a larger piece:

"Because I seen the pretty and I seen the ugly and it was because I
knew the pretty part that I wanted to change the ugly part,
Because I hated the dirty part that I knew how to feel the love
for the cleaner part,

I looked in a million of her faces and eyes, and I told myself there
was a look on that face that was good, if I could see it there,
in back of all of the shades and shadows of fear and doubt and
ignorance and tangles of debts and worries,

And I guess it is these things that make our country look all lopsided
to some of us, lopped over onto the good and easy side or over
onto the bad and the hard side..."

That middle bit chokes me up. Excuse me. Ahem. Right, so... Follow this link here for the full lyrics to "This Land Is Your Land." I guarantee it's not the same song you belted out in your fourth-grade pageant. If you feel the love, the fire, the anger, drop a comment and tell me how the same heat is relevant in our current global climate. Peace.

Blood, Fireworks, and Dollar Bills

2006-07-04T19:04:00.000-04:00

[A few thoughts on this, our nation's birthday.]

Given the recent outpouring of philanthropy amongst our country's wealthiest citizens, I though it might be time to reflect upon the nature of giving of oneself, be that "self" seated in the soul or in the pocketbook.

Bill Gates recently announced he would be taking a backseat at Microsoft in order to helm his (and his wife's, because I guess half of it's hers) philanthropic organization. Shortly thereafter, Warren Buffett (no relation to Jimmy, and even richer) decided that he would one-up the estimable Mr. and Mrs. Gates by donating approximately $31 BILLION (give or take a buck or two) to their selfsame outfit. Cheers and huzzah to all parties involved, and long may they prosper in their do-gooding. Word.

Coincidentally (because this is how all these thoughts wind up happening), I also just finished You Shall Know Our Velocity!, by Dave Eggers. Mr. Eggers wrote a brilliant novel about two lifelong friends who decide to travel around the world in a week to give away $32K (US). Will, the main character, received the money for being on a lightbulb (read the book) and decided that he must give it away in the most extravagant, eccentric fashion he could contemplate. So he and Hand (his lifelong friend) hit Senegal and Morocco and Latvia and Estonia (though not in that order) and put obscene amounts of currency directly into the hands of the impoverished and deserving.

Will and Hand also decided to strap some cash to a goat with medical tape and a message bearing lightningbolts alongside a line from a Scorpions tune, but that is merely a sidenote. Again, read the book.

The whole "impoverished and deserving" bit is what YSKOV! is about, really. Charity normally takes the form of anonymous people writing not-so-anonymous checks to people who collect said checks (often during obscenely extravagant shindigs) and afterward set about giving the collected monies to deserving parties. Those parties, when the charity is done right, are impoverished and, indeed, deserving. Sometimes people skim, and sometimes charities must pay obscene amounts for the obscenely extravagant shindigs. Alas, such is all in a day's work of giving. But by going directly to the source, by handing out cash in person to the people who need and deserve it, Will and Hand subvert the normal architecture of charitable giving. Will's mom asks him at one point, via telephone, if he doesn't find his mission to be a bit tacky. She means to bring to his attention that handing cash to a person, fingers upon palms, removes the filter of anonymity and distance that most Westerners associate with charity. Surely there must be some guilt that changes hands along with monetary notes, right?

It's an interesting point. After all, when was the last time that you put a quarter in a homeless person's cup, or responded with anything other than eyes-ahead ignorance when a person approached you for cash on the street? Myself, I don't give to anyone in person. But it hurts me when I claim no change at curbside, and it hurts me to reflect upon my stinginess in the comfort of my air-conditioned apartment while I write these words. Will's mom has a point that bears mentioning here: which kind of charity is the right kind of charity, and what are the proper methods and means?

Not all forms of contribution to our fellow humans must take the form of anonymous donation. Were anonymity the key that unlocks our wallets, there would be no Habitat For Humanity, no Save The Children or the like. These charities thrive on the fact that they put a face on need, and that face is multicolored, multiethnic, multineedy. What Will and Hand set out to do is neither tacky nor ill-conceived, though their doubts are what make Eggers' novel great. Reading it made me regret not pitching a bit into the cup of a less-fortunate, not listening to the story of a person who may or may not be in need, withholding the odd smoke from someone with no means to obtain one. Sad, really.

So, in this spirit of giving that the anniversary of the birth of our (outwardly) democratic society puts me, I went out yesterday and donated blood. Sure, it's a somewhat faceless operation, all needles and iodine and t-shirts and weary smiles from your friendly local phlebotomist, but the posters on the walls of the donation sites feature the sort of people I might be helping with my pint of A-Negative. Kids with sickle-cell anemia, people who need a new liver, a new heart, a new pancreas, a new lease on the life I so often take for granted. It's a pleasure to help. It makes me feel good. It doesn't cost a nickel. And it shows how one little prick can help a few people in need.

Take that last comment any way you want.

Every charity, no matter how nameless or faceless it may seem, should eventually help someone with both face and name. That's what helps me sleep at night, at any rate. I hope I'm not simply naïve. Why don't we all get out there during this weeklong celebration of America's independence and help someone else achieve some degree of that precious commodity, independence. It doesn't matter how, when, where, or why you do it--just do it. If it's a dollar or a pint, a billion or a houseraising, give a little back this week in appreciation of everything we hold dear as Americans and human beings. Timeframes are no concern, so if you're reading this next week, next month, next year, get out and give. Every marathon, as they say, takes a step to start. Let today's be the first step of many, and keep the race moving. Peace.

@#%&!

2006-06-22T23:14:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I had the good fortune to watch the second season of Deadwood on DVD. This is how I catch most of my pay-cable shows, since I'm far too cheap (read: poor) to actually spring for the HBO. It's okay, though. Donations are accepted.*

Now, if you haven't been privy to the Deadwood thus far, it's the story of an illegal settlement in what is now South Dakota during 1877-78, a mining town devoid of law and/or order. The town was settled on Indian (Native American) land, without treaty, during a gold rush second (at that time) only to the 1849 strike at Sutter's Mill in California. Deadwood is a lawless town, not unlike many towns of the early American west, but this series marks the first time that such lawlessness and primal language, such utter disregard for civilization and its trappings (and yet, strangely, the attempt to hew civilization from rough stone, dirt, and gold ore) have been shown in any honesty to a viewing public. David Milch, creator and head writer of the show,** has a long history of putting questionable (read: potentially offensive and/or groudbreaking and/or envelope-pushing) material on television, a history that started with Hill Street Blues, on to NYPD Blue, and now he's accepted the opportunity to take salty talk back in time like a pottymouthed Doc Brown with a leather-chaps fetish. Huzzah to David Milch.

But it's the pottymouth I really want to talk about here. In the course of a single episode of Deadwood, one is treated to a plethora ("Si, Jefe, a plethora.") of Fucks, Cocksuckers, Fucking Cocksuckers, Motherfuckers, Cunts, Shitbirds, Shitbags, Shitferbrains, and Motherfucking Shitbird Cocksucker Cunts who may or may not have Shitferbrains. It's truly enlightening dialogue, people, and it's something we're not treated to everyday.

(Unless you work on an aircraft carrier. Or in a bar. But that's beside the besides...)

I also recently availed myself of the Netflix opportunity to see M*A*S*H again--the 1970 Robert Altman film, not the Alan Alda TV show. And, were it not for a spot that aired as an AMC promo for a subtitled-with-trivia airing of an edited version of Altman's film, I would not have known that M*A*S*H was the first (1970!) American motion picture to be released complete with an F-bomb. Amazing.

Nay. Fucking amazing.

Profanity is a strange, strange concept in this day and age. We are a country that has gone through a bloody revolution, a frontier-expansion period of Manifest Destiny that lasted (if you count Alaska) well into last week, gold rushes and industrial revolutions and union wars and Teamsters murders, two World Wars with a third on the way, and a major international asskicking in Vietnam, all of which must have had people saying something more profound than "Sugarbritches, I just got mama-effing shot by that...that...that dagblamed doodoohead." No. NO! Nonononono. That's not the way people talk. Life is not a Looney Tune, and nobody has ever really meant any utterance of "TarNAtion!" When their feet are to the fire, people cuss. Really cuss. Loud and often.

(Except for the Mormons. It's a well-known fact of anatomy that their bodies feature an outlet--not unlike an anus, though not as rosy-smelling--that blows every impetus for foul language out into the ether. I've also heard that rebellious Mormon children sneak into the trash bins at Salt Lake City Starbuck's-es to huff coffee grounds. It's sad, really, to see the brown stains around the mouths and nostrils of so many impressionable young inhibitionists. Sadder still to hear their half-hearted yet caffeine-riddled attempts at cursing through their angst. Tragic, even. But...)

I remember watching the first episode of Milch's NYPD Blue, way back before Zach Morris joined the show. I would have been fourteenish, and I remember Dennis Franz's Detective Sipowicz advising a female ADA to "Ipso facto this [grabbing crotch in handheld-camera closeup], you pissy little bitch." The partial female (and eventually--ugh--Franz-based male) nudity was cool, but mostly I remember the elation I felt hearing those words on broadcast television for the first time. These were words I heard my people using, but they were shocking in spite of the fact that they were an everyday and that I had heard them the Saturday night prior on SNL. Kevin Nealon was doing the Weekend Update, mentioned the fact that Tuesday night's NYPDB premiere would be the first show to air said words on television, therefore rendering the NYPDB's transgressions a tad bit late. Brilliant TV all the way around. Kudos fifteen years after the fact to all involved, should any of you be reading this. My heart goes out to all you bitches.

So Chicago Hope was the first primetime program to air the word Shit, and now it's on every episode of every show on FX (I like The Shield and IASIP, but I just don't get the appeal of Rescue Me***) and even a couple on TNT. Seinfeld (if I remember correctly) even aired a Son Of A Bitch or two during the last few years of its run. They definitely had an Ass in there at some point, and that show is the Gold Standard Of Class in my book.

A movie came out last fall called The Aristocrats, and its tagline was something like: "No Sex. No Violence. Unspeakable Profanity." We saw it at our local arthouse, and R.'s girlfriend A. walked out with 30 minutes left due to the aforementioned unspeakables. Let's allow her to represent Most Of America, while the other of us dirty cocksuckers (metaphorically speaking, here) shall represent Honest Americans Going About Their Entertainment. We sat through the entire film and heard the same unbelievably filthy joke told in numerous incarnations, spun out through various circumstances in an atomsmasher of filth and brilliance, and we laughed our pretty asses off for an hour and a half. Were we offended? No. Was A.? Abso-fucking-lutely. But what, then, was so horrifically offensive about the film? It featured an ages-old vaudeville joke, passed down through generations of dressing-cubicle-inhabitants and greenroom-junkies, that put the onus of a really nasty joke on the teller.**** The very thought of the joke (because the punchline, after all, is always the same) is the offense, as the joke's body changes like a shapeshifter from some much-more-offensive horror flick. And yet that very thought, it would appear, is enough to put a reasonably sensible girl into the lobby with two reels left. Strange.

One of Lexington's reliable local newscasts recently did a two-or-three night Special Report on the Power of Profanity. They claimed that Profanity is losing its power in our go-go modern world, where you can hear on television the same kind of filth you once had to join the Navy to witness. Must have been a slow news week. During one segment they showed a clip from The 40-Year-Old Virgin, in which Steve Carell's titular character screams out "KELLY CLARKSON!" while being waxed by a sadistic Vietnamese salon employee under the watchful glare of his friends. He didn't swear under the torture being visited upon him, and that was indicative of his stature as an uncorrupted male. Were he to have been a non-virgin at the point of his waxing, we might have expected something a little more colorful--if less creative--to have escaped his never-touched-pussy lips. But as it was, the news report used that clip as an example of how we can hope to curb ourselves of the cursing habit, how we can rid our mouths--if not our minds--of the filth that accumulates during lifetimes lived in Profanity's sewage-y wake.

But there's something to be said for Profanity, people, and I'll say it right now: It's Goddamned Mutherfucking Time To Legalize The F-Bomb In America. The S-bomb has already breached our perimeters, and we seem to be faring just as fucking poorly with, as without it. We live in an entertainment-driven society, a society driven by visions of brutality, violence, and anger that seem to be exempt from the rules we place on simple words. You can't say some shit on broadcast television, for instance, but you can show every form of sensational bloodthirsty childraping bodydesecrating whoreslicing gunshotbleeding vengeancekilling traumasurgeoning violence on any show named by abbreviation. Just look at Law & Order, L&O SVU, L&O CI, CSI, CSI:NY, CSI:Miami, ER--and that abbreviation rule excludes shows like Criminal Minds, Medium, Ghost Whisperer, Crossing Jordan, Cold Case, Without A Trace, Numb3rs, and every show like them that's not on the Big Four. Hell, take it back to any other example that's no longer on the air. On television as in film, there is plenty of wiggleroom when you're selling violence, but none when it comes to the profanity that such violence would seem to warrant. Are there simply very urbane, very civil crime victims out there that these shows have found and exploited? Or do we live in the midst of a vicious double standard that rates a heinous act lower than a dirty word on the big totem pole of propriety?

Yes, this society is still fighting its way out of the arms of the Puritans. Yes, this society is still figuring out a place in the world that doesn't involve colonialism on our part or another's. Yes, this society is fighting yet another nonsense war with spurious justifications. We should be angry, people, and we should be able to voice that anger and hear it voiced. Fuck a bunch of "Profanity." It's the trees, not the forest. We seem to be content watching all the manifestations of evil sold to us as entertainment, without any of the recoil, any of the moral encumberance, any of the guilt that should go along with them. We still live, for CHRISSAKES, in a country that won't let us see pictures of the 2500-odd flagdraped coffins we've flown home from Iraq.

And yet, somehow, you can't say "That's a fucking travesty" without drawing dirty looks from the parents of young children nearby, parents whose four-year-olds will eventually wind up the victims of IED's on the streets of Baghdad, or Teheran, or wherever we have to go next for oil.

That's fucked up. I hope you agree. If not, please take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. This is America, after all, and I can tell you to take a flying fuck at the moooooooooon. But be well and take it light, as your opinion is as good as mine.

Peace.

*: In unmarked bills (the larger the better) or checks made payable to "Cash" or "The Human Fund: Money For People." On second thought, let's just stick to the unmarked bills.
**: Third season currently airing Sunday nights at 9 PM (EST) on HBO. The fourth season has been sadly truncated to two two-hour specials set to air at some point in the next decade, or just way-the-fuck-after whenever they get around to filming them. Sopranos fans, you know what I'm talking about.
***: Ironically, even given the freedoms of language I'm talking about in this essay, Denis Leary seems to be pulling punches when he's not swearing more extravagantly.
****: Or, more appropriately, Penn (also the director).

Demonspawn, Bitches! Horror's New New Wave

2006-06-08T22:42:00.000-04:00

Not to jinx it so close to its finish, but we're almost through the Week of the Beast without the world ending, the rivers running red with blood, or cats and dogs playing together. No mass hysteria, no comets or plagues or anything like that. Phew, right? [Pause to wipe nervous sweat from agnostic brow.] What a relief.

Tuesday was officially the epicenter of the WotB, its date (if you're given to such flights of imagination and are wont to drop the occasional meddling zero) ringing hell's bells with its trifecta of gonghammer sixes. And, of course, Tuesday also marked the release of a new take on Richard Donner's* 1976 classic, The Omen. As marketing ploys go, it was an unmitigated success. As films go, let me put it this way:

Had the world ended on Tuesday, had the Beast decided that now's a good time to run amok, twelve-million-dollars-worth of American moviegoers could count seeing the remake as a weight on their eternal souls.** Thank heaven (?) Satan is leaving all the destruction, terror, and mayhem to God these days. Beelzebub has realized it's best to stick with what he knows. He usually just does what comes naturally, laying low until the next Republican needs a slim margin in a major election.

But all that's sort of beside my point, which is this: isn't it strange how the newest thing in horror movies is creepy/haunted/undead/demonspawn children? We seem to have come full-circle from the time of the original Omen, passing through a wave of slasher flicks focused almost exclusively on teenagers and their value as hyperhormonal chainsaw fodder. What happened all of a sudden?

(Technically, the official first entry of this particular brand of horror flick would be Rosemary's Baby, Roman Polanski's 1968 chiller. That film featured Mia Farrow being impregnated by a hairy beast of a Beast in a truly ugly nightmare-rape sequence. Rosemary is the unwitting participant in the proceedings, her husband having sold the Friendly Local Coven a 9-month lease on her womb. See the flick to find out how it all ends, but watch it with the lights out. Really.)

Six years after Rosemary gave birth to Satan's lovechild, the slasher flick was already terrorizing America's teenage demographic. That was the year Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre gave rural Texas a REALLY bad name. A little later, in 1978, John Carpenter set deranged manchild Michael Myers*** loose on teenagers celebrating Halloween. Two years after that, Jason Voorhees terrorized Camp Crystal Lake (and Kevin Bacon) in Friday the 13th. And in 1984, Freddy Krueger planted his flag in the dreams of a generation (and Johnny Depp, for one more pop reference) in Wes Craven's A Nightmare On Elm Street. All of these movies spawned legions of imitators and countless sequels, but not until Scream signaled the slasher-flick's demise (by going totally po-mo on its ass, before ironically falling into the same dead-eyed cycle of rehashings it originally sent up****) did the new new thing in horror drift across the Pacific in a fog-shrouded ghost ship from Japan.

(Pardon that image. It's not accurate. It was actually a fog-shrouded FedEx jet that delivered prints to film festival screenings populated by really hip devil-worshiping zombies cloaked in torn black parkas. On skis. In Utah. Anyway...)

With the rise of the Japanese horror (or J-horror) film in the mid-90's, Hollywood discovered that it was lagging sadly behind the curve of what people really think is scary. The slasher flick had grown bigger than its genre, to the extent that decapitations and dismemberments (ad infinitum) just weren't putting asses in the seats anymore. Into the vacuum rode J-horror movies like Ringu (remade in America as The Ring), Ju-On (The Grudge with Sarah Michelle Gellar), Kairo (this summer's upcoming Pulse), Gin Gwai (technically from Hong Kong via Thailand, but slated for a 2007 remake as The Eye), and Honogurai Mizu No Soko Kara (a mouthful, and the source of 2005's Dark Water). Instead of focusing on the exploits of a superhuman, undead/undying villain (a la Jason or Freddy), these films' "villains" are almost always ghosts seeking to right the wrongs done them in life. There are conclusions despite the evidence of sequels. These films were breaking box-office records overseas while setting the new standard for horror films on other shores. And, not surprisingly, Hollywood has been playing catch-up ever since.

(A quick thought on foreign films in Hollywood: nobody would think about "re-envisioning" The Seventh Seal or 8 1/2 or The 400 Blows. That would be taboo, right? For chrissakes, Gus Van Sant was almost--deservedly--crucified for his shot-by-shot take on Hitchcock's Psycho, and that was a Hollywood flick to begin with. But for some reason Japanese cinema has given us a different rule when it comes to remakes. Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai and The Hidden Fortress became The Magnificent Seven and Star Wars, respectively. And the kitana blade cuts both ways: after all, Kurosawa's Ran was an Asian appropriation of Shakespeare's King Lear. In the aforementioned J-horror case of Ju-On, the Japanese version's original director, Takashi Shimizu, was hired to helm the fucking-up of his own work for Japanese-owned Sony Pictures Entertainment. There's no mystery here, I guess, and I'm not calling for remakes of everything that comes across the A-pond out of some botched notion of equal time. I know that Cash Rules Everything Around the Hollywood Mainstream [CREAHM--get the money!*****], and nobody packs the house for an Austrian like Michael Haneke and his horrific excavations of the human psyche. I'm just saying.)

What each of these J-horror films has in common, besides any Asian origin, is that they all deal somehow with very young children as the perpetrators (or victims, but usually both in that case) of the horror.****** I won't go into any greater detail here, so as not to further bore all of you senseless with my reductive analyses of each film's storyline (get Netflix). Suffice it to say that the goings-on are supernatural in nature, taking the form of beyond-the-grave reprisals for the horrors visited upon children by the adults in the films. Young children represent a raising of stakes within the world of each film, an embodiment of vulnerability and dependence that, once betrayed, leads to otherworldly consequences. But instead of focusing on the exploits of a superhuman, undead/undying villain (a la Jason or Freddy), these films' "villains" are ghosts (and very young ghosts, too) seeking to right the wrongs done them in life. The element of mystery is key to J-horror, and the plotlines usually trace the unraveling of knotty circumstances surrounding the death of an innocent. That being said, and despite the evidence of sequels, the films conclude when the mystery is solved and some form of justice is meted out in the ghosts' names.

So there's a theory out there that every turn in the recent winding history of the horror movie serves as an onscreen portrayal of a society's most potent fears. The American horror flicks of the 1950's (check out Invasion of the Body Snatchers) were thinly veiled allegories of Cold-War paranoia, when even your neighbor (or his alien double) might be the guy who sells the Russkies the Bomb. Zombie movies (at least since George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead) were thematically related, but on the other side of the divide. During the Vietnam-protest counterculture of the late 60's, the zombies were stand-ins for the military-industrial-political complex and every voter unhip enough to support it. Slasher flicks of the late 70's and 80's, which on the whole punished their victims for exploring their sexuality, reflected a strange, seemingly conservative expression of "sex equals death" in a bid for the post-sexual-revolution wallets of the wealthiest teenagers in America's history, the Baby Boomers' children. Later examples of the same genre (especially Craven's Nightmare and its sequels) can be read as early echoes of the AIDS crisis, when nobody knew if their wet dreams might cost them their lives.

The American horror flick experienced a brief denouement in terms of social relevance during the late 80's and early 90's, evidenced by trash like the Leprechaun series, Child's Play and its sequels, and latecomer goofs on Stephen King novels. Only recently has the genre revived itself, ushering in a new wave of American slasher flicks like Eli Roth's supercreepy Cabin Fever and Hostel, and recent big-budget remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (prequel coming this fall) and The Hills Have Eyes. These films owe a great debt to their predecessors in the slasher genre, but their human (if inbred, European, and inbred/deformed--in that order) villains separate them from the Asiatic herd. This American new wave--set apart in tone and content from the J-horror remakes that have flooded the American marketplace around them--are essentially revenge pictures, and have been interpreted as gory ruminations on post-9/11 America and our War on Terror. They are the cinematic expressions of "Let's roll," "Put a boot up their ass," "These colors don't run" and any such jingoism. A couple of them are also genuinely frightening.

During American horror's stagnation, the Japanese were churning out the precursors to the J-horror flicks to come. The animated films of those years (especially Urotsukidoji [Legend of the Overfiend, 1989] and others like it)--while not quite horror flicks, per se--were not wholly, thematically different from American post-WWII horror flicks of sabotage and Commie infiltration. The Manga films showed the first genuine emergence of a fantastical post-nuke paranoia wandering through that country's popular imagination, forty years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the forms that filmic paranoia took are astounding for the grandeur of their oddity. Just look at Urotsukidoji's promotional art [DVD cover pictured], at the mushroom-cloud of light on the Overfiend's chest as he prepares to devour an entire cityscape. Dominated by a famous scene featuring an army of fifty-foot sperm ransacking a hospital in search of impregnable human females, Urotsukidoji stands in testament to a nation and a people still reeling from the brink of nuclear annihilation, still dealing with the collective memory of millions scarred by radioactivity, fear, and loss. Until Russia (Ukraine now) releases anything similar twenty-plus years after Chernobyl, those Japanimation flicks will remain some of the scariest feats of human imagination in the wake of real, personal horror.

So what of this new new wave, then, the J-horror flick? Whether or not (or until) they're bastardized by Hollywood, these films have acquired rabid followings, spawned numerous sequels, and show thematic similarities that can't be coincidental. The ghostly kids, the omnipresent water imagery, the spooky posthumous vengeance, et cetera. And what is it with the children again, all of a sudden? Thirty years after Donner's The Omen, its remake comes out (scripted by David Seltzer, the same man who wrote the original) on 6/6/06, following what have been bumper crops of J-horror remakes that have tilled similar (if not Satanic) territory. Is it simply a glitch of the marketplace, a déjà vu of sorts during which Hollywood attempts to cash in on shit that other folks are doing with more panache? You be the judge. If CREAHM ain't the reason, I sure as hell can't figure it out. Maybe this is globalization in action, and the Japanese are outsourcing their horror-flick ideas like we do helpline operators to Bangalore. It's a mystery at the moment, but perhaps one that will find its solution (and valid interpretations) around the corner. Until then, as long as they aren't serving it up raw (sushi horror?), the kids in Middle America are sure to eat it up.

*: Now that I think of it, Donner's having a bit of a rough summer. Along with the pointless remake already mentioned, his 1978 Superman is also getting a coat of polish (and maybe some manscaping) from Bryan Singer's Superman Returns. Next we know they'll be giving us a remake of Lethal Weapon--as if all three LW sequels, 16 Blocks (also Donner's), Training Day (sorta), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang ('cause gay is the new black?), Die Hards I, II: Die Harder, and With A Vengeance, and Rush Hour plus two sequels (one done, one upcoming--maybe Chinese is the new white?) hadn't already run the mismatched-buddy action-comedy into the fucking ground.
**: In the interest of full disclosure, I was $5.25 of it. BTW, it sucked devilnuts.
***: Not to be confused with Mike Myers, whose recent lack of funny is even more frightening. Lose the no-longer-hilarious Scottish accent, Mike, or I'm gonna forget both the original Wayne's World and the first Austin Powers. Don't test me, bitch. It's been a long week.
****: You know your franchise has jumped the shark when a spoof comes out to spoof your spoof. To wit: Scary Movie, which, not really coincidentally, just released its fourth installment. I'm not even sure how to itemize the ways that franchise has tripped over its own limited cleverness, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with a Wayans brother. Or maybe a Sheen.
*****: Dollah dollah bill, y'all.
******: Kairo (Pulse) is the lone exception, since every rule needs one. Still, you get the point.

Random Friday: Memorial Weekend Edition

2006-05-26T14:00:00.000-04:00

[Wherein our hero posts a collection of queries, ponderings, and dubious trivia to clear his mind for the long weekend ahead. A happy holiday to you all, and remember: a good BBQ is a safe BBQ.]

Benjamin Franklin's suggestion for the official bird of the new United States was the wild turkey. One of the great man's few missteps, it led to an unsuccessful bid at suicide-by-electrified-kite.

McDonald's is running a new commercial in which two coworkers are sharing lunch. One warns the other--who is eating a chicken sandwich from the Arches--that if he keeps eating chicken sandwiches he will turn into a chicken. In one of the darkest turns ever witnessed in a fast-food spot not featuring the Burger King, a Kafkaesque metamorphosis takes place in subsequent scenes as the man, indeed, begins to resemble a chicken. (In one shot, there is a fox in his hallway eyeing him with hungry fox-eyes.) Not shown are the scenes portraying the transformation of the burger-munching co-worker into an inambulatory mound of unprocessed soy filler, torn cowhide, minced hoofparts, and rat excreta.

With bleary, dead, rueful eyes.

Foxes are renowned throughout the animal kingdom for possessing the largest vocabularies of any four-legged beast.

The polar bear is a close second, though their habit of devouring rapt listeners has led to the species' largely oral history becoming shrouded in mystery and speculation.

While most hippopotami never learn to read or write, they are acutely aware that their name derives from the Greek (via Latin) for "river horse." Neither the hippos nor this observer are quite sure what the Greeks were thinking there.

Seriously, though, what's up with the Yeti? You just don't hear from 'em as much as you used to.

Upon his abdication of the English throne, Edward VIII embarked on a brief but lucrative alt-porn career under the pseudonym "Li'l Eddie, Lord Fucking-Hand." No copies of his work survived a direct hit during the Blitz, though Hitler, ironically, was rumored to have been a fan. The loss of the negatives filled the Nazi leader with his only regrets of the Second World War, and led to a debilitating period of self-doubt fueled by schnapps and tearful autoerotic asphyxiation.

Most common euphemism for masturbation [American English]: "spanking the monkey."

Least common euphemism for same: "tap-dancing with Ernie Borgnine."

Number of times it looks like Borgnine might make out with William Holden in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch: 7.

Number of times he actually does: 1. The scene was deleted from the original theatrical release, though sources hail that long-lost clip as a brilliant (if whiskey-soaked) deconstruction of Wild West machismo that paved the way for future gay-in-the-saddle epics like Brokeback Mountain.

Is Borat [at right] wearing a man-thong stretched to the limits of Lycra, or a woman's bathing suit sold by hateful French shopkeepers?

Either way, Borat, nice shoes.

Soul-Sucking Mediocrity Reaches New Heights

2006-05-25T15:19:00.000-04:00

During its fifth season, I managed to catch a collected twenty-odd minutes of "American Idol." And, unsurprisingly, I feel in need of a long shower and perhaps some creepy-albino-monk self-flagellation as penance. Fifteen of those minutes were during last night's season finale, a cavalcade of truly incomprehensible D-list cameos and unforgivably overwrought suspense-mongering on the part of the show's hosts. In the end, it appears more teenage girls with cell phones wished Taylor Hicks were their grandfather than wanted to be Katharine McPhee. The zillion people watching the events unfold live (as we were ceaselessly reminded by the elfin Ryan Seacrest, as if it mattered?) were treated to McPhee performing a duet with Meat Loaf, and to eventual Idol Hicks leading a well-preserved Dionne Warwick around the stage during a not-exactly-all-star rendition of "That's What Friends Are For." The girls and guys evicted from the beach house (different show?) during the past few months returned to show us their pop-medley skills, and 5-watt luminaries like Tori Spelling and a teary David Hasselhoff beamed from the audience during random, irrelevant cutaways from the musical irrelevance unfolding onstage.

Oh, and apparently Prince showed up to cash in the last of the goodwill I was holding for him. I missed that part of the evening's festivities, but I've spoken with his people (all of them equally tiny and well-coiffed, like there's a factory somewhere) and we reached an agreement. I get to keep my copies of 1999 and Purple Rain for all purposes not karaoke, and he never shows up on any jukebox within 500 yards playing anything recorded after the Batman soundtrack. The "Diamonds and Pearls" video is still being contested.

And these were the highlights, mind you. The rest of the show consisted of getting in some final jabs at the most interesting (in the Chinese sense of the word) auditions from the season's first half. Seacrest awarded a handful of horribly misguided kids for publicly butchering the work of the world's most mediocre pop stylists. These segments were introduced with the revelation that "AI" has been overlooked at every TV awards show during its run (thank you, Emmy), even though more people voted during Tuesday night's final showdown than have voted for any American president, ever. Not coincidentally, the latter observation was also the hook for the recent film satire American Dreamz, which I didn't see (but kind of wanted to) because that introduction was simply too damned depressing.

To make a long story short, I just don't get it. Sure, every season is one prolonged exercise in test marketing and product packaging, and there's a long list of manufactured pop acts whose successes were just as calculated as any Idol's. But the irrepressible, stomach-turning earnestness with which these kids (and Hicks) belt out the tiredest, schlockiest, most meaningless pop drivel is enough to drive any conscious observer absolutely fucking batty. Most of the execrable tunes to which the show's assorted performers time their histrionics and vocal flourishes would be cause enough for any member of the target demographic to change the radio station. Even with that fact in mind, however, the kids evidently love hearing dutifully observed covers performed by nobodies backed by the obligatory pop orchestra and gospel choir. I mean, "(I've Had) The Time of My Life?" How anything so predictable and yet so utterly left-field and dated can make the teenyboppers scream is a mystery to me. If you've got an explanation, I invite you to leave a comment at the end of this post.

I know we need our distractions in this frightening modern age, a moment defined by foreign wars predicated upon lies told by shadowy, duplicitous powers-that-be. It's not that I don't understand the popularity of contest programming, which is as old as television. And I get the appeal of witnessing talent plucked from obscurity, an undeniably American dream that drives countless youngsters to seek fame and fortune on the silver screen and the 45. But for my part, hearing Hicks shout a victorious "Soul Patrol!" after being crowned was puzzlingly embarrassing, and not only because I have no idea what the man was talking about. Based on what I saw, I'm not sure where to find the "soul" in his generic performances, and the fact that such a cheesy catchphrase could drive the proceedings filled me with cringing embarrassment, not entirely unwarranted, for everyone involved. Oh, and I'll have to boil my culture-snob eyeballs in bleach to rid them of the slo-mo footage of Hicks and Seacrest writhing on their backs like upended turtles during a gratuitous end-of-show montage. While conducting these necessary ablutions, I'll probably turn on some real pop idols singing their oddest works, like "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" and "Rocky Raccoon," just so I can remind myself that unpredictability and unfathomable, universal popularity can coexist. You can have your Idols, America. I'll stick with The Beatles.

Disco Vanilla Trades In Her 8-Tracks

2006-05-22T23:40:00.000-04:00

So there was this Pepsi (or was it Coke?) commercial a while back that featured two trucks, one from each competing sugarwater purveyor, driving alongside each other down the road. At a stoplight one driver flips a switch, shows the other what kind of system he has thumpin' in the rear of his freight-haulin' ride. A moment passes, then the other driver flips his switch. His truck's side panels open to reveal not a truck full of soda products as one would expect, but many stacks of concert-gauge speakers running heavy on the bass end. The sound from the latter truck dwarfs that of the first, and then the whole second rig starts bouncing on hydraulics. Slogans run in the foreground thereafter, proclaiming the latter pop company's vanilla cola to be less "vanilla" than their competitor's--a strange tactic, given that they're selling, after all, vanilla cola.

Now, I'm fully aware that I might be a year or three late with this somewhat reductive analysis of the Vanilla phenomenon. I even had a professor last semester who asked his class if we weren't responding to Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" because it was too, well, "vanilla." If that's not sure enough a sign that a pop-culture reference has jumped the shark (as the very term "jumping the shark" did about two weeks after the website reared its cyberhead), I'm not sure what is. But hear me out, people, because there have been Interesting New Developments in Vanilla.

Such a proclamation may seem a contradiction-in-terms, but let's look at the evidence. After that initial product introduction (wasn't it a Super Bowl commercial?) there have been a slew of newer variations on the Vanilla theme. There are now cherry-vanilla carbonated beverages, and diet-cherry-vanilla, and raspberry-vanilla-crème (not cream, mind you, but crème--how fancy and urbane!). No less a pitchman than Emeril Fucking Lagasse has shown up shouting "BAM!" from the mountaintops as he sings the praises of Crest Vanilla Mint Whitening Expressions Toothpaste. And where would Vanilla be without her kinda skanky, semi-retired, tarted-up whore of a second cousin, French Vanilla?

(On that note, what is French Vanilla, anyway? Why is it more beige than white--is it egg or something? What makes it "French?" Are there little French kids in an ice-cream sweatshop (?) somewhere doing something more interesting than Breyer's original, plain ol', see-those-vanilla-bean-shavings-that-means-it's-real-vanilla vanilla ice cream? Ahem. I digress.)

The thinking behind the new usage of "Vanilla" is quite obviously racial in overtone, with undercurrents of class instability and a lingering palate of white guilt on the finish. The marketers would have you believe Vanilla is whitebread, WASP, Middle-America, Plain Jane. Vanilla is all "Ahoy, polloi," sporting topsiders and linen pants at the yacht club's cocktail hour. Vanilla has lawn jockeys in the front yard ever since the subdivision council outlawed pink plastic flamingoes, and it doesn't see anything wrong with that. Its darker counterpart in the Neapolitan scheme-of-things (disregarding Strawberry, which is Switzerland in this debate), Chocolate, is the new new thing, the yin to vanilla's yang, the hot new hip-hop shit for the 2K6, even though it's been the same old-school Chocolate for ages untold. Vanilla, it seems, is too old to even be old-school. It's the sockhopper at the Wu-Tang show, it's the moustachioed cops who crash the house party and actually inventory the confiscated weed. Vanilla is the bowtied guys in the Beastie Boys' video who offer soda and pie to all the partygoers who never fought for their right.

To paaaar-tay.

So why, then, does Vanilla seem to be making a comeback in spite of all the aspersions cast her way? Granted: she gets all dressed up in the newest rags, and she's had some surgery to correct both the overbite and the saggy neck, but isn't New Vanilla in the miniskirt and CFMP's just the same old hag with an Extreme Makeover? Why is she worth the bother of Vanilla Mint, Vanilla Crème, Vanilla Raspberry Cherry Swirl Delite? Is there something about Vanilla worth saving?

Apparently the answer is a resounding "YES," at least if you're listening to the marketers who bring the old girl around even while they talk nasty about her to their friends. Sure, New Vanilla's an easy lay, but it hasn't always been that way. She's suddenly willing to try different things, and you might even get her in a three-way with your buddies Minty and Razz (you might even take her Cherry!). It appears that Granny Van is actually hipper than you would think, and the advertising dollars are there to make sure you know it. Maybe Vanilla is the new Chocolate, which--for all its hipness-by-omission, at least in terms of the Vanilla discussion--hasn't seen much in the way of experimentation since the Andes Mint and Cookie Dough ice cream. Not that it's needed any work, mind you.

(But speaking of, doesn't "Chocolate Chip" sound like the nickname you gave your douchebag cousin who played Young M.C. while trying to gouge you for shitty weed when you snuck away from the aforementioned yacht club soiree? Wasn't he just one dirty little chip of wackness in a huge fucking tub of Vanilla?)

It bears noting here that most of New Vanilla's work is hardly worth writing home about, and that's not only because of all the kinky shit she's getting into. Like any good relationship, she's easy to fuck up when you're too busy focusing on other things. So much attention is paid to the dressing-up that somebody seems to have forgotten what Vanilla tasted like in the first place. Strawberry and Chocolate seem to have survived just fine, even when you consider the execrable examples to which they lend their names. It's strange, really, how the simplest experiences are those most easily fouled-up and watered-down. But back to Vanilla. Emeril's much-BAMmed-about toothpaste, for instance, tastes like somebody spat a full swig of Scope mouthwash on a lousy off-brand sundae. Vanilla Coke and Vanilla Pepsi taste about the same (regardless of the creative advertising and dueling cola-hoopties), which is to say that they're nowhere near as good as a fountain soda of either brand with a shot or two of real vanilla syrup. And as for whatever Dr. Pepper thinks he's doing with Vanilla and every berry and cherry hanging from the tree, my prayers are with his patients during this time of misguided distraction.

In the end, I guess there's only one thing we all need to remember: no matter what the corporations who sell us our Things try to throw our way, the best New Shit is almost always the Old Shit. New Vanilla will get busted eventually for working the wrong corner, either by the cops or by some newer, flashier flavor with a razorblade under her tongue and some turf to claim. Old Vanilla will always be right there for us, waiting beneath the cap of an ice-cold IBC Cream Soda. She was born in 1919 and she's had her fair share of bumps in the road, but she's still one of the finest Vanillas this impartial observer has ever enjoyed. Wrinkles and all.

Loose Associations on a Theme

2006-05-08T23:59:00.000-04:00

I told Murray that Albert Speer wanted to build structures that would decay gloriously, impressively, like Roman ruins. No rusty hulks or gnarled steel slums. He knew that Hitler would be in favor of anything that might astonish posterity. He did a drawing of a Reich structure that was to be built of special materials, allowing it to crumble romantically--a drawing of fallen walls, half columns furled in wisteria. The ruin is built into the creation, I said, which shows a certain nostalgia behind the power principle, or a tendency to organize the longings of future generations.

Murray said, "I don't trust anybody's nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It's a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country."

--From White Noise, by Don DeLillo

The Alamo, 1999

It seems like just a little old building, and I guess that's all it was. Is. For some reason I expect John Wayne and a coonskin cap, maybe Jim Bowie or Sam Houston as Disney animatronics telling us about the history of the Little Church That Didn't. For a famous last stand it seems oddly placed near the center of downtown San Antonio, close to a Riverwalk I remember from a strange mid-80's Dabney Coleman flick called Cloak & Dagger. We smoke a bowl in the car and have massive cheeseburgers at a chain restaurant featuring a full side of beef hanging in a windowed butchery at the entrance. Once finished with our half-pounders we get back on the road, back to New Orleans, passing along the way a pickup truck loaded with random wooden frames and cushioned furniture. A Tex-Mex father and son grin and wave at us from the loveseat situated cabside in the truck's bed. The father's longish hair blows down on his forehead before he sweeps it back, an effort in vain riding backwards at 80 mph, as he sips intermittently from a paper bag.

Wrigley Field, 1992

The moms bro sis and I are sitting on the third-base line, watching Ryne Sandberg and the Cubs beat the Astros. My sister claims Sandberg as her favorite player, but given that she's a girl and he's one of my own favorites, I assume H. is just trying to keep up with her brothers. It's my fifth or sixth Major League game, the first that doesn't feature the Cincinnati Reds playing at Riverfront. I can smell the Old Style steaming off the skin of the men in front of us, sick-sweet and maybe a false memory. The famous ivy on the outfield wall is too far away to bear any significant odor, but it looks like it smells green, like fresh money or the hide of a lime rhino. My brother and I try to get into the outfield bleachers late in the game, on an ivy-smelling sensory expedition all our own, and are stopped at the entrance by a man asking for tickets. Wrigley sells out, it seems, even in the early afternoon on a weekday. We walk back to our assigned seats under exposed pipes, big enough to fit a man and hanging fifty feet in the air, as the streetside sunlight cuts visible swaths through the steam rising off every Polish sausage stand.

Keeneland, 2006

Ten years have passed since I last visited the track on a Friday-afternoon bailout from high school. This time around we are old enough to drink overpriced beer and syrupy mint juleps bearing only a name in common with any proper execution of the cocktail. We sip and talk and laugh and bet and lose, though not necessarily in that order. An early morning's jump on the afternoon garners the industrious (we are not among them) a prime seat on the paddock green, a place to throw the blanket, park the cooler, claim a small tract of Bluegrass in the name of whichever sovereign one might choose. Kings Miller and Budweiser rule the day. After the simulcast Derby ends on the Jumbotron and we throng out to the rolling parking pastures, anyone near the fourth turn has a view of the jumbo jet parked at the airport across Versailles Road, the flag of the United Arab Emirates emblazoned on its tailfin. Some sheikh or sultan must have named Lexington the stopping-off point for his bulletproof limo on the way to Friday's Oaks and the big race on Saturday. I wonder if our racetrack's gables and cupolas are visible from the jet's port windows.

Gulf Shores, 2001

Due south of G.S., on a sandbar that might not exist anymore, I'm walking in a stiff, salty breeze with a girl I don't even know. It's past midnight and we're both naked to the waist. Three hours previous, I liberated a bottle of fine German doppelkorn from my workplace and hopped in a beater Saturn with a mysterious brunette and an obese, epileptic golden Labrador. I have known the girl for a week and the dog for the three-hour drive. The girl and I walk, we talk, we drink from the bottle while her dog barks at the surf. We eventually make it back to her family's place on the beach and she promises me we'll go crabbing in the morning, maybe take the jet-ski out on the lagoon side of the sand. We're lying on the couch later and she tells me she's been studying a little shiatsu, asks me to lie back in her lap. She applies a dime's weight beneath her fingertips upon my temples, my earlobes, under my chin, and we both fall asleep listening to the stereo's dying gasps of anonymous jazz. I awake with a start hours later, turn around to find her still sleeping, carry her to bed. We spend the morning doing what people do, disregarding the shades' arrhythmic flapping in the offshore wind.

Bled, 2005

Staying with some newfound friends in Slovenia, I hop a ride to a tiny subalpine lake in the Julian Alps. My guidebook tells me a tiny island in the middle is home to a chapel with a bell that grants the ringer seven years of good luck. So we go to the lake, and we dive from the pier, and we swim the kilometer across to the island, and we walk up the stony path leading from the shoreline to the chapel. And when we get to the chapel, my friends--both Catholics--tell me they'll wait for me in June's diamondbright sunshine, out of a reverent deference to God and to the signs posted that outlaw the entrance of anyone in swimming shorts and bare feet. They leave to me any decision to transgress upon what might be God's own law, in God's own house, on a foolish quest for some rumored modicum of good fortune. Possessing no belief in any divine being, yet ironically possessed of a desire for the divine benefits of said bell-ringing, I scamper into the chapel and jump as high as I can, grabbing the rope and pulling it down with all my weight. When I land again on the stone floor, I leave little wet toeprints behind me as I hightail it out the side entrance. The bell rings for about a minute. As we swim back I'm nearly cut in half by Slovenia's local Olympic sculler knocking out laps in his razorboat. Every soda cap still reads "Please Try Again."

Canyon de Chelly, 2004

I begin the hike down the canyon's side to the White House at 7 AM, after a preliminary peanut butter sandwich watching the Arizona sunrise on the drive up. My camera bag holds three lenses and seven filters, my tripod rests on my shoulder, and my water bottle burbles in anticipation of a full morning's trek. On the way down I stop to photograph the whorls of sandstone on the smooth face of the canyon, trying to catch the alternating red orange yellow gold glinting in the morning sun. Dry desert air blows chill, not yet warmed beneath the rim as I follow the trail to the green canyon floor, onto the Navajo sheep farm where a sign is posted: "No Photographs Please Respect The Inhabitants And Pick Up All Trash." I see the sheep and two Inhabitants and I wave, but they don't even mark my presence. I continue across the bottom to the opposite cliff face, still in shadow awaiting the afternoon's sun. As I look up at the 800-year-old Anasazi ruin, I notice the Native American couple bowing and kneeling at the chain-link fence that separates tourists from the cliff dwelling. The couple are keening, a term I mentally apply to their singing supplications although I know it only from an Irish play I read and forgot years ago. Perhaps they're merely praying. I sit forty yards behind them for thirty minutes, maybe more, when a French family comes singsonging down the trail behind me. We are the only four people in that part of the canyon who have no right to be there, and I hold up a hand offering a universal stop sign, SVP, merci. They cut their conversation tout court and sit with me in the dust. We wait, silently, for words we will never understand to finish echoing from the ancient home with "Adams US Cav 1879" carved into its otherwise still-white façade.

EHD-joo-meh-KAY-shun

2006-05-03T17:33:00.000-04:00

Today I'm going to try something new, a completely novel idea for the blog medium. Are you ready? Here it goes:

A completely unedited, unrehearsed, unscripted, "Reality Blog."

How's that for groundbreaking, right? News as news happens and all that jazz...

I finished my last collegiate exam a few hours ago and I've been thinking of all the amazing things I've seen, all the stupid shit I've done, all the crazy and wonderful people I've met along the way.

(If you don't know who you are, you weren't there. If you were there, you know who you are and your names will be changed. Relax.)

For those of you keeping score, for all those kids in the bleachers who might be adepts at fantasy baseball and such, my record follows:

"9 semesters, 10ish years, 0 RBI."

I'm no statistician, but that should put me up there with the greatest non-DH pitchers of all time.

(What's up, Steve Bedrosian?!)

But of all the people I wanted to call today, one was mysteriously absent. As luck would have it, he's the only person I wanted to talk to. Period. And he's the only photo I can't crop, the only convo I can't fudge, the only scratch that don’t erase.

Everybody tip a cup for Dave. Thanks. I am.

Peace.

Memento Mori

2006-04-30T11:21:00.000-04:00

[I'm four-fifths graduated now from Uni (mad props to my people from Across-The-Pond. For my peeps on this side, it's pronounced "YOO-nee" and it means "college." Also: my mathematical assertion in that first sentence is flawed, yet still relevant.). Anyway, I'm high on life at the moment and what follows is an abridged and embellished version of my final thoughts from a term paper on existentialist thought and literature. Oh: "football" will always be "soccer" to me, since our American version of the former incorporates the quintessentially American stories of Ed "Too Tall" Jones and Michael "Too Coked, Sometimes Even For Crack Whores" Irvin. Peace and love to you and yours, wherever you might rest your heads. Enjoy. -NG]

Any conception of mankind's awareness of death in existential philosophy is something like the memento mori [Latin: "Remember you are mortal."] in the realm of art. It became a tradition near the middle of the last millennium to include in portraiture a reminder of the subject's mortality--a less-than-subtle irony given the fact that a portrait is meant to bestow upon its subject a kind of immortality, at least as much as can be embedded in an image fixed upon a canvas. While the portraitee is situated in a time and place inextricably linked to their experience of life (even if idealized), the fact remains that the painting remains, while the subject does not. The "memento" in these works could be anything from a tiny skull on a mantelpiece, to an hourglass similarly placed, to a full-length, dancing representation of Death with his scythe. We can see it today in works ranging from painting to sculpture to literature, and even in song. The message of "Memento mori" forms the basis of festivals such as Carnevale and Mexico's Day of the Dead, Christian celebrations of life in the face of our own collective mortality. New Orleans, home of Carnival in the United States,* is also the home of a sanctified tradition known as the "jazz funeral." Led by a full-deco brass band (and sometimes two or three), the members of a funeral party wend their way through the streets, dancing and singing, waving their handkerchiefs and pumping their parasols in the air in a defiant final party for the deceased.** Man's*** knowledge of death is the genesis, the cornerstone of every great work of art, in whichever medium one might choose. Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" would be simply a minor section of a major work, were it not for the fact that its triumph, its "Joy," lies in Ludwig Van's momentary willingness to ignore our human mortality. Nobody would waste hours in front of Da Vinci's "Mona Lisa," jockeying for position with the hordes of photographic coup-counters, were it not for the fact that her enigmatic smile represents a stay of the inevitable (i.e. death) for both the subject and the observer. And what could explain our continuing fascination with Romeo and Juliet, without their acute recognition of life's temporal insanity and death's omnipresent finality?

And yet these mainstays of the Western tradition are nothing more than what Pascal would term "diversions," though they hold at their core an acute awareness of Man's mortality. Far from being modes of escapism, they express our collective knowledge (albeit anecdotal) of death. Life, however, remains at the fore as we find our expressions in song and dance, in inebriation and excess, in the general enjoyment of our temporary, earthly bodies. What more can we assume to be true? Yes, they are diversions, but in these diversions we find the most relevant, prescient experience of what it means to be alive, to exist. There remains a simultaneous recognition of death and life, an expression of Kierkegaard's "passion" that finds itself not bemoaning the nature of existence but rather embracing it for (and in spite of) its temporality. After all is said and done, the worst, most grievous diversion of all is the belief that any true understanding of life, death and existence can come from theoretical pursuits. These exercises in frivolity and notion can provide us with starting points for debate, with nomenclature and terminology and methods by which we can attempt to put our hands on such elusive, mercurial concepts--but in the end, each of us is given the task of making his own life. The "how" of existence is not something to be figured out as one would a mathematical problem.

In "The Myth of Sisyphus" Albert Camus writes, "There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." He likens our existential dilemma to the figure from Greek mythology, condemned to an eternity rolling a boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down each time he reaches the top. But Sisyphus understood the absurdity of his fate, and therein, according to Camus, lies his triumph. So, too, must human beings embrace the absurdity of our fate as mortals. What Camus called "scorn," the rest of us can regard as mere acceptance. Regardless of the diversions we seek--be they "dancing, playing the lute, singing, making verses, running at the ring" (from Pascal's "Pensées")--Death waits in the wings as "a possibility in every moment" (per Heidegger). This much is the only given of our existences. Understanding such a momentous truth is our task, one undertaken with all of Kierkegaard's "fear and trembling," but the end result must be one of joy, of passion for each successive, fleeting moment. Our response to "Memento mori" must be "Carpe diem!" To react otherwise would be to cheapen the value of any fear, any trembling, any angst, negating all the good that could come from any of the above. Existence precedes any understanding of it, to paraphrase the Dane. Life, in the end, is in the living of it--and that living is brief. Memento Mori, bitches, and Carpe Diem. Seize the fucking day.

*: Even if Mobile, Alabama claims the first celebration of Mardi Gras in the western hemisphere.
**: The "funeral" part of the term is a misnomer generally agreed upon, as the parades are nothing if not a celebration of life.
***: Please pardon my lack of political correctness. I use "Man" in lieu of "humanity" or another similarly loaded noun purely out of a desire for succinctness. I do not wish to alienate the fifty-one percent of the globe who respond to neither "Man," nor "He."

Friday's Exercise in Randomness

2006-04-28T15:15:00.000-04:00

[Some random facts, musings, and assertions for a Friday afternoon:]

Swans mate for life, bears are notoriously bad with names, and a moose will never give you the correct time. Even if he's wearing a watch.

The only proper answer to "Do you have the time?" is "I've got all the time in the world for you, sweet cheeks."

The square root of 169 is 13, but math skills never got anyone laid. Isaac Newton invented calculus and died a virgin.

"E.R." is currently the only narrative on television to deal with the situation in Darfur.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it, could Manute Bol still use it as a walking stick?

We hold the truth to be self-evident that all men are created equal, but a black man in America only counted as three-fifths of a human being until 1865.

Thinking about baseball and envisioning Margaret Thatcher in B&D gear are the two most effective ways to delay male orgasm.

You can't fake a parade.

The only good elevator ride is a solo elevator ride.

Honestly, who throws his shoe?

Sometimes, no matter how cultured or sophisticated you would like to appear, an unexpected fart will elicit more than its due amount of snickering.

Yawns are contagious, but nobody knows why. My favorite theory is that they are a vestigial growl left over from our days swinging in the trees, and that their contagiousness is now merely an unconscious form of submission to the alpha-primate.

Monkeys fling poo, though I've never seen one yawn.

Nobody flosses three times a day.

Anyone over the age of 22 who watches MTV regularly is trying too hard.

Raiders of the Lost Ark might be the best movie ever.

On that note: Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson can only star in movies that involve threats against their families or wives (respectively), Al Pacino has been screaming instead of acting since his histrionics won him an Oscar for Scent of a Woman, and Robert De Niro needs one more sequel to Meet The Parents before I write him off completely.

Seriously, he's almost dead to me.

More people need to read Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins.

Hunter Thompson made up most of the drug shit in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Still, it's a better story for it.

Grace Slick planned to bring a vial of LSD and spike the punchbowl during an invite to the Nixon White House. She didn't follow through, but that single act could have saved countless lives and changed the course of history.

I'm out, and I'll catch you all on the flipside. Have a nice weekend.

[After consideration, a brief addendum:]

The most effective means of delaying female orgasm is being the guy who thinks about baseball and/or Maggie Thatcher, with or without said B&D gear.

Newton also dabbled in alchemy and may have suffered from mercury poisoning and Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism. No word on that information's effect on the ladies.

Cats always land on their feet, and toast always lands jelly-side down. I have yet to Smuckers a cat and test both hypotheses.

No matter how many stories up, it's always a kick to spit over the railing.

An Open Letter to Robert Wuhl

2006-04-25T14:49:00.000-04:00

Mr. Robert Wuhl
Comedian/Actor/Writer/Filmmaker/Raconteur/Historian
Hollywood, CA, USA

April 25, 2006

Dear Mr. Wuhl,

Last night I had the privilege of catching your HBO special "Assume The Position." Your informative and amusing piece of revisionist history is up there with the best of Carlin and Miller; it’s highbrow didacticism that can still make you blow beer out your nose. I have been a fan of your work for some time, but this latest foray came as a total surprise to me. A totally pleasant surprise, I might add. I laughed, I learned, and I gained a new appreciation for your talents.

I admit that I have not seen your every film appearance, but I attribute that sad truth to the fact that you appear so rarely above the title. For instance: in order to see your performance in Dr. Jekyll and Ms. Hyde, I would have to fast-forward through the bland histrionics of Timothy "I Flew Airplanes For NBC And Now I'm A Gambling-Junkie-Punching-Bag On The Sopranos" Daly and Sean "No Need For Lengthy Nicknames, You Get The Picture" Young. I caught about thirty seconds of this film during a high school job projecting movies at a local multiplex, but they were regrettably not your thirty seconds as "Man With Lighter." I’m sure your cameo was brilliant in spite of its brevity. At the same time, it would be no overstatement to tell you I would have gnawed off my own thumbs to get out of that theater, had said thumbs been inextricably lodged in one of our hundreds of folding seats (deathtraps, incidentally) during a screening. An unlikely scenario, perhaps, but that's the kind of grotesque extreme such films force me to envision.

(I had a similar psychoallergic reaction to Crash, but my girlfriend was enjoying it and I was making amends for one thing or another. I should have just bought her flowers. As it was, I suffered a protracted recurrence of nightmares (bludgeoning and smothering) in addition to a sweaty, screaming, full-blown panic attack in downtown traffic following an Oscars party this spring. There was also the acute sense of free-floating paranoia I experienced while passing a Benetton store in Slovenia, but that's an experience I'd rather not examine in any great detail. We had broken up by then, the girl and I--but Crash was not your fault. You weren't anywhere near it. I digress. Back to the topic at hand.)

Your HBO special was a deft blend of comedy and historical analysis, a retelling of the myths we have come to accept and an explanation of what you termed “The Liberty Valance Effect.” As the man said, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." How very true. Hence: Columbus and Queen Izzy and no mention of the globe; hence: Paul Revere and not Israel Bissell, your "Jewish vacuum cleaner salesman"; hence: Jimmy Stewart getting fat (metaphorically speaking) on John Wayne's dime. History is pop culture, and pop culture has a selective and malleable appreciation of fact. Fiction sells tickets and ad time and newspapers, and truth rarely even rides in the back of the truck. Kudos to you, sir, for ushering this truth to the foreground of our society’s ongoing cultural debate.

Oh, and the way you manage to enlighten both your television audience AND a live classroom brimming with Impressionable Youth, educating and entertaining while still working blue? Bravo, Mr. Wuhl. I bow in awe.

It also happens that I recently revisited, by unrelated coincidence, your brilliant performances in Batman, Bull Durham, and Good Morning, Vietnam. Your fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-or-seventh-bananas (respectively) oozed your distinctive brand of charm, a quality born of endearing self-deprecation and good-natured, quick-witted impertinence. And let me also take a moment to applaud your slow-mo spit-take during Tim Robbins' naked-on-the-mound dream sequence in Ron Shelton's film. I have a feeling Costner would have asked for another take (and probably blown it, too), but you displayed a keen, instinctive awareness that the imperfection of the globule's arc only made the shot funnier. You showed us in that moment the difference between movie stars and real actors.

On that note I will mention "Arli$$" briefly, if only to defend it against some of its snarkiest critics, who continue to knock both you and the series in low, unsolicited blows. You played the lead among an ensemble of quirky sports agents, and perhaps the role followed too quickly on the heels of an overrated Tom Cruise vehicle called Jerry Maguire. Cruise pandered to his audiences' gullible inner romantics. He told us we completed him, we believed it, and even Oscar nearly swooned in starstruck bedazzlement. You, sir, received no such reaction to your demonstration of craft, which you starred in, executive-produced, and also (at points) wrote and directed. Perhaps the lack of consideration on the part of some naysayers could be due to the fact that they were unprepared for your clever, acerbic satire of sports and entertainment. Maybe they wanted more of Cruise's puppydog/pit-bull stare and last-minute declarations of "I Fucked Up But I'm Reasonably Certain At This Point That I Love You." Or perhaps it was due to a general unwillingness (theirs) to accept your ability to carry a thirty-minute pay-cable sitcom, though you did so for seven seasons. Allow me to explain this latter possibility by way of analogy:

I once read somewhere that moths gravitate suicidally toward bulbs and flames because of an optical illusion. Hovering in interrupted darkness, it seems they perceive a light's surrounding glow to be indicative of there being a greater darkness on the other side. Thus, in a mistaken, doomed drive to find the deepest precincts of the night, they unwittingly frizzle-fry themselves in the attempt to get there. I will assume the position that your critics wanted you to remain in that greater darkness beyond the glow of the superstars. In the throes of their conscious or unconscious starfucking, however--which starfucking, as you point out, is "American as apple pie"--they must admit the lure of the darkness beyond. It is there, paradoxically, where your performances shine the brightest. Maybe your critics prefer you to be further down in the cast listings, where your name is a subtle reassurance of quality, and from which position you can single-handedly redeem a shoddy picture without ever appearing obtrusive. Those performances remain, if you will, the honey mustard on the turkey sandwich of many a film--a graceful, understated accent that makes the more celebrated ingredients seem more flavorful, while never overpowering the way Dijon can.

Which is not to suggest that you should avoid the spotlight. On the contrary, there might very well be time and room in the Hollywood pantheon for a Wuhl to stand alongside the great leading men of-a-certain-age. It will, of course, take the right project. Here's hoping you find it. Bill Murray managed to recalibrate his career trajectory while pushing fifty, and Anthony Hopkins was fifty-four when The Silence of the Lambs took him from "respected actor" to Legitimate Movie Star. And keep in mind: the great Orson Welles was doing unmitigated trash by the time he was your age, eventually taking paychecks for frozen-peas commercials and voicing a Transformer in a full-length cartoon. Hollywood is a funny place, Mr. Wuhl, as I'm sure you know. There is time enough under the sun.

In the meantime, keep doing what you're doing. And do more of it, for chrissakes. You do it well. Your natural charisma may be an acquired taste for some, but The Great Unwashed rarely embrace anything but ersatz talents straightaway. Keep working your niche, Mr. Wuhl. Keep working your niche, and everything else will follow.

With sincerest admiration,

Nathan Gordon
Fan

Running On Fumes

2006-04-23T18:24:00.000-04:00

It's a bluebird day here in Bluegrass Country, and I've been watching it roll by beyond mesh screens as I slave away at the computer. Our mild winter was my first after almost a decade in the deep South, and it was nice while it lasted. But days like today make me appreciate springtime even when it's going on without me. The smell of cookouts and blossoming dogwoods, the sounds people make when enjoying the above smells, the sight of bare arms, legs, and midriffs on the female population--these are the things that make you want to sit back and smile, luxuriating in the beauty of our temperate climes.

Depending upon the research you believe, though, those temperate climes may be nearing their end. Global warming is happening as I write this, and carbon dioxide emissions are increasing the world over. China is burning coal at a rate that will see it equaling the rest of the world's combined smokestack output in a few short years. The rain forests are still being cut down, and urban green spaces are still endangered species in their own right. People in the States are driving bigger, less efficient vehicles, and any viable alternatives to fossil fuels are a long way from hitting the mainstream.

This Earth Day saw regular gas prices nearing four dollars around San Francisco and other major metro areas, and we're paying almost three here in Kentucky. Full disclosure: I've got a big red Jeep that I feel guilty driving anymore, but I can't afford to go hybrid or biodiesel or anything else just yet. I drove the Jeep out West in 2004, when gasoline prices were around $2 a gallon at the high end, and I remember cringing when I compared my gas budget with those of previous cross-country excursions in my trusty Honda Civic (the Jellybean Express, or "Bean," so-named for its vaguely pinkish hue). The Bean was a paragon of fuel economy, and it made possible the kind of Great American Road Trip that this country has held sacred since the dawn of the Automobile Era. It's not simple rhapsodizing when I tell you that the American West is best viewed from behind the wheel of a car doing eighty on a straightaway, sun shining through open windows as red desert rolls into purple mountains' majesty stretching the breadth of the horizon. That's freedom, baby--extra large with fries and a shake.

It's also what Bobby Troup was talking about when he wrote a catchy little ditty about Route 66. That road is now officially defunct, but you can find its remaining stretches around the western side of I-40 with a good map. The halcyon days of the road trip may also go the way of 66--that is, if they aren't already dying on the vine of communal memory. You can't just pack up the family, turn on the radio and explore anymore. Not with gas at these prices.* ExxonMobil posted record earnings of $36.1 BILLION dollars in 2005, but their shareholders are the only ones enjoying the windfall. Even they might be forced to hock a few stocks to put juice in the family wagon, as the rest of us just bend over at the pumps (and do a lot more walking), wondering why we're really at war.

It's a terrible, crowning irony that when you go out in search of America, you usually wind up spoiling a little bit of it in some way. Driving through Yellowstone the few times I've been, I always hated the fact that to get anywhere in the park during the summertime you had to sit in traffic, choking down the collected emissions of hundreds and thousands of other vehicles. The walk from the parking lot to Old Faithful takes several minutes while you pass dozens of rows of variegated metallic beasts that get bigger and louder every year. But whaddya do? It's America, that parking lot. And those childlike smiles on everyone's faces when the geyser gets going? That's America, too. And sadly, America is now also a place where such smiles carry a nastier price tag, in terms of both dollars and geopolitics.

You might recognize Winslow, Arizona from the Eagles' "Take It Easy," the tune with Glenn Frey "standin' on a corner" (and there's a small park with a bronze statue of Frey standing on--yup--a downtown corner). Winslow was once a much busier stop along Route 66, but since the interstates were built it's dwindled to a speck in the desert near Meteor Crater. The trains still roll through, and the few motels in town do summertime business with roadweary families stopping for the night. But if the motorists stop motoring, towns like Winslow across this great nation run the risk of turning into so many ghost towns. I can think of few things sadder than imagining my city-dwelling children hearing about the good old days, when their old man could afford to hit the road with only a few hundred bucks to his name and see the wide-open expanses of Flyover Country, long-lost places with names like Tucumcari and Choteau, Green River and Mountain Home.** When airline travel becomes more affordable than the Great American Road Trip, whole stretches of Americana might disappear into history.

I might be accused of speaking hyperbolically and pessimistically on this point, but the greater point remains: we're at a crucial moment in the history of our nation, and gas prices are one symptom of a worsening disease. So what can we do about it, right? How do we preserve our uniquely American experience while crossing such dire cultural, economic, and ecological straits? We can start by haranguing our representatives in Washington who consistently shoot down efforts to make American vehicles more efficient. We can support legislators who support broad strokes like the Kyoto Protocol--which our current administration has ignored, much to the chagrin of the global body politic. We can do our level best to rein in our own emissions, whether that means getting a tune-up or buying a Prius. The problem is bigger than any of us, though it's not beyond changing. Not yet. But the future is happening everyday, and every day that nothing changes means we get closer to a time when you can only see America from the tiny windows in coach class.

And who knows what it might look like by then?

*: Although Barry Sonnenfeld's upcoming RV, starring the recently-just-depressing Robin Williams, seems to be selling just that. It looks pretty lighthearted and the trailer doesn't offer many clues, but I would be interested to see if the issue of gas prices comes up even as a throwaway line. I'm placing no bets, and I'll have to hear about it secondhand. Those nine dollars will almost buy three gallons.
**: Respectively located in New Mexico, Montana, Utah, and Idaho. The latter is curiously removed from the nearest mountain range, more than a hundred miles away. Nobody I asked could offer anything in the way of explanation, but I figure it might be like calling a one-armed southpaw "Righty."

God and Man and Things and Such

2006-04-20T13:18:00.000-04:00

[So I had to write a term paper the other night on the debate between evolutionists and proponents of intelligent design. Bummer of a debate, given that science must deign to debate pseudoscience in today's Big American Theocracy. But that's beside the point, really. I started thinking about creation, at least as the Christians see it, and I realized that it's a good story. It's a great story, but no better or worse than any other. When you're arguing from a basis of faith and not objective truth (lower-case "t" and finger quotes here), any story is equally as good as the rest. For my money, I don't think it gets better--in terms of stories--than the Navajo, who believe that Coyote (the trickster) flung the stars haphazardly into the sky when he got tired of waiting for the First Man and First Woman to do it proper-like. I'm paraphrasing, but that's a damn pretty picture. Anyway, I started wondering what a modern creation story--and I refuse to employ the term "myth" for its loaded meaning--would sound like, one that incorporates what we know and what we're taught. I think the following is a fair assessment of the situation as it stands. The language is what it is, but I think "the facts" are accurately represented. If you find errors, please point them out. I appreciate it. -NG]

IN THE BEGINNING there was the void. There was a flash and a bang. And Things started expanding.

Again.

(Which is to say that they had expanded before, and contracted. And this time Things were expanding. Again.)

Except: there could not have been a bang, really, not even a boom or a poof or a fizzle. There is no sound in a vacuum, and the void was nothing if not a vacuum. Anyway, nobody heard it.

So what was there? One moment there was nothing, and then there was a something so big that it is still expanding, after billions and billions of years. Some of the little bits of that original something glow in the sky at night, and we can even see the closest glowing bit during the daytime. It is warmth, and It is Life, and we see more of It at some times than others. People have called It different names: "Sol," "Father," "Ra." The names do not matter, not really. It is still there, still there, still. There.

But people are a long way off yet. Back to "IN THE BEGINNING." First Things first. First there were Things, and It was one of those Things. And It was warm, and It was Life, and there was Life here on one of the conglomerations of other Things that circled around It. And Life was small, at least at first. Life got bigger. Life grew gills and legs and wings, and Life decided it enjoyed sand as much as water, and earth as much as sand, and sky as much as earth. Life even decided it could make a place for itself in the volcano and under the ice, though without the gills and the legs and the wings. Life was nothing if not amenable to places amenable to Life.

Oh: there were volcanoes. And there was ice. And there was sky and earth and sand and water. And other Things, too. But those Things are only things, and Life was concerning itself with other matters. Life was concerning itself with bugs and spiders and parrots and lemurs and butterflies and lions and tigers and bears and (oh my!) people, and people looked really funny at first. Hairy and thick and coarse and generally not the kind of people people would invite for dinner.

And people moved, and people prospered, and people eventually stopped dragging their knuckles when they moved and prospered. They started walking upright, and people found that walking upright gave them a better view of It. And in the course of Time--another thing people found it advantageous to invent--people started seeing It for what It might be, metaphorically and literally.

They made offerings to It, in the hopes that It would continue to shine and be merciful. Some of those offerings bleated and bucked because they could not understand their importance in the scheme of Things. Some of those offerings screamed words known to the people watching, but the words never lasted long.

And It continued to shine and be merciful--though more merciful at some times than at others. And people dug the good times, and they suffered the bad times in the hopes that the good times would follow. People knew that It was fickle, and yet somehow constant in Its fickleness. Some people started wearing little hats or big coils of fabric on their heads because they thought It might be watching them. Judging them. They thought It might see the bad things they do, their nighttime things. Yet there It is the next morning, just like the day before.

Maybe they know that It will expand and burst into giant tongues of flame like other things in the nighttime. Because It will, eventually. Maybe they feel better hedging their bets until then.

They turn their heads to It when they have a question, a want, a need, but they avoid staring directly at It. Because they know one thing for certain: you can ask It a question ("Whywhenhow?"), but It provides no answers. It does not reply. It need not reply.

And that, as the wise man knows, is Power.

Scattered, Smothered, Covered: In Praise of the American Breakfast

2006-04-17T11:32:00.000-04:00

I took an extended sojourn in Europe last summer as a sort of recharging period between quitting my job and finishing a long-in-waiting university degree. One of my stops was in Budapest, a beautiful city (cities, really) straddling the banks of the blue Danube. I was couchsurfing with a lovely Hungarian woman, Gabi, who bent over backward to show me her hometown. She ferried me around the city in her zippy European hatchback, showing me out-of-the-way destinations I never would have known existed and serving as general-purpose translator for an American with scarcely a phrasebook-level grasp of the only hermetic language in Europe. Gabi had been to the States before, stopping in New York and San Diego at various points for business and pleasure, and her impression of our country was most evident on my last morning sharing her flat, when she offered to cook me a "real American breakfast." She mentioned the idea the night before and I quickly approved, as she'd already prepared me some Hungarian dishes that were unbelievably good. I awoke that morning to the heavy summer breeze wafting through her open windows, the whole place already redolent of porksmoke and coffee--real American-style coffee, meant to be consumed in large mugs and in no way resembling the freeze-dried instant varieties I found elsewhere in central Europe. I walked downstairs bedheaded and smiling, offered a Good Morning in my broken Magyar, and was immediately taken aback by the sheer volume of the meal that awaited me.

There were cereal flakes poured into a bowl only slightly larger than the massive coffee mugs, an open carafe of fresh milk situated nearby. Some Hungarian sausage I had enjoyed on previous mornings was spread out on a platter in all its thin-sliced, paprika-laced glory, alongside a fist-sized chunk of a sweaty local cheese that was pungent and delicious. A glass of fresh orange juice--a delicacy at any time of year in the States, and even more so that far from the groves--sat next to a selection of teas behind another large mug, which was itself abutting the tray of pastries and toast ornamented with pats of real creamery butter. And Gabi stood smiling at me from the stove before she turned her attentions back to the 12-inch skillet nearly overflowing with beautiful, fluffy scrambled eggs punctuated throughout by thick chunks of smoky Hungarian bacon.

After my initial reaction of "God! that looks better than sex," I realized that this entire spread--easily 10,000 calories and collectively weighing in somewhere just under a bull rhino or Fat Elvis after a Vegas buffet--was intended for me and me alone. Gabi had already taken her toast and tea. So I was immediately faced with a couple of realizations regarding my potential responses to the luxuriant smorgasbord before me: either I attempt to eat it all and reinforce her apparent conception of Americans as oblivious gluttons idling in the Land Of Plenty, or I pick and choose my battles on the breakfast front and risk coming off as your typically ungrateful Ugly American abroad. I wound up eating just past my fill (and loving every bite) over the course of an hour or so while we talked about the issues of the day, me and my Goddess of the Morning Repast. I complimented everything she had prepared with an enthusiasm that probably bordered on obsequity, and she accepted my thanks with a gracious, downcast smile. There was an obscene amount of food left over, much of which would go to waste, and as I did the dishes (the least I could do) I offered apologies for my lack of appetite. In her splendiferous, idiosyncratic English, jeweled in Hollywoodisms and gloriously untranslatable French, Spanish, and Magyar idiom, she explained that my worries were unfounded but endearing. It seems she never really expected me to finish everything, but it would have been rude on her part to underestimate my capacity for putting away what she regarded as a potentially regular-sized American portion.

She had an interesting point, and we talked about it for a while as we cleared the air of any cross-cultural misunderstandings. She reminisced about being shocked by the size of the portions at the restaurants she had visited during her time in the States, and I explained that my people also have a correlating fondness for the doggie bag (an amusing attempt at translations ensued) that cuts across every echelon of our dining experience, from the paper sack to the decorative foil swan. Yeah, we Americans eat more in a sitting than most Western cultures do in two meals (or three), and we tend to view these large portions as our entitlement for spending the money. The All-You-Can-Eat buffet is as American as the apple pie waiting on the dessert cart, and it's no accident that obesity, diabetes, and heart disease are among our top killers.

Which is not to say that I don't partake in the above rituals of Americana. I love a good meal as much as the next guy, and a big breakfast is one of my many occasional indulgences. On several road trips Westward I've lamented the passing of the last Waffle House as I hit the Texas-New Mexico border; I've eaten a whole trout with home fries and baked apples before 10 AM in Jackson, Wyoming; I've killed a tall stack of pancakes with four pork sides at a diner in Pocatello, Idaho--and after all these meals I'd get back on the road beaming, sipping a go-cup of coffee and anxiously awaiting the next big-sky adventure around the bend. I love waking up late on a Saturday morning and fixing bacon or sausage with a well-appointed scromelette, a lazy-man's-eggs requiring no flipping skills that I learned on a rafting trip down the Colorado. And during my long tenure in New Orleans, I found that there was no cure for a toenail-curling hangover in 90-percent humidity like a Bloody Mary at Igor's followed by a greasy breakfast on the patio at Slim Goodie's. Every evil deed conducted on a Saturday night miraculously evaporates with the languid perspiration of a muggy Sunday morning. That right there's absolution, baby, and it tastes great with hash browns and a little hot sauce.

And while some would view such predilections as exercises in overkill, I see them as the icing on my American Pop-Tart. There are plenty of mornings I race out the door with nary a nibble in the belly, so the times that I can have a leisurely breakfast, read the paper, maybe do the crossword--these are the days for which I slog through the rest of the busy week. They're a reward and a motivation, the rabbit for my greyhounds, the carrot for my mule. But that morning in Budapest I felt suddenly, acutely conscious of how the rest of the world must view such tendencies, and I wanted to atone more than I wanted to strap on the feedbag. There was a lingering, palpable guilt that overtook me, but I'm now sure that part of it must have been simple homesickness. I think Gabi understood, and I take solace in the fact that such a culture-clash moment ended in mutual understanding. That feeling has only made me appreciate more intensely the little things we too often take for granted in America, and I do so every time I sit down at the Casa de Waffle, during whichever hour of the 24 I decide to take my breakfast. If only I could find more places in my ZIP that offer a five-egg platter and Bloodies on a Sunday forenoon, a little good news in the local paper would be all I'd need to think--if only for a minute--that everything was right with the world.

Don't Gimme No Lip: Comedy And The Moustache

2006-04-14T13:51:00.000-04:00

Whether or not you've seen the actual show, you are by now probably aware that Jason Lee's "Earl" (as in "My Name Is ____") is the most extravagantly moustachioed man on American television since Tom Selleck last drove a Ferrari. Earl's moustache is his calling card, a point of pride, the silent punchline to every joke the show doesn't have to tell. Lee plays Earl as a lovable rube who happens to be wiser than he realizes (strangely, though, exactly as wise as he lets on), and the moustache lends him an air of redneck enlightenment I'm hard-pressed not to associate with the bristly-lipped philosophers of years past, sage old souls like Confucius and Groucho Marx and Ned Flanders.* In a recent episode Earl's camped in a tree outside a little boy's window, talking the kid through a fear of the dark and the boogeyman that Earl himself unwittingly created during a botched robbery (long story, and the reason God created reruns). So while Earl's out on a limb (literally here) playing surrogate father to the kid, answering questions about life and such, the question of Earl's moustache comes up in the course of conversation. The kid asks something to the effect of "Do you like your moustache, Earl?" To which Earl responds:

"Let me tell you something. As soon as your body is ready...grow one."

It's not the sincerity with which the response is delivered that makes it so spit-take funny, it's the way Lee imbues those last two syllables with the wisdom of the ancients, as if he's passing on a well-guarded secret more boys should be hearing at that age. I'm wondering if high school yearbooks for the Classes of 2012 will feature more than the usual amount of facial fur, the eyes above their fuzzy upper lips twinkling with all the honeysweet secrets of time immemorial. It's a fine image, if perhaps too optimistic a view of today's youth. Alas.

There's been no shortage recently of moustaches in American comedy, and Earl's is only the most frequently visible incarnation. The Will Ferrell vehicle Anchorman is a prime example of the trend, as is "Reno 911" (and "COPS," for that matter). And (although I'm ashamed to cite it) in the Farrelly Bros.' Me Myself and Irene, the flashback scenes are indicated as being such not by the standard devices of wavy dissolves or a different film stock, but by showing all the male characters looking exactly the same as they do in the present, but with moustaches. These cases all get at the root of why the moustache is making a comeback, but they also ask the question of whether or not it counts as a comeback at all. You see, the moustache is funny in the above because it's an anachronism. It's a choice, and an ironic one at that. When I referenced "Magnum, P.I." earlier it was no accident. It's really been that long since the solo moustache was a cool thing to have (not unlike a T-Top '83 Firebird, Linda Evans, or a Members Only jacket). Anchorman was set in the mid- to late-70's, "Magnum" was a hit in the early 80's, and cops everywhere just stopped evolving at some point in the Paleolithic era. That they can shave their foreheads is a fucking miracle. They'd get the moustache too, but they haven't yet invented a stone tool that can handle those delicate spots under the nose.

The fact is, outside of Queen tribute bands and the homosexual arena** there's very little place for the moustache in today's cultural landscape. Sure, rock stars rely on creative facial hair to establish themselves as being anti-establishment. Of course there are an assortment of other artists and Hell's Angels and thinkers and the like who don't have to endure job interviews in suits and ties. And it's a given that the occasional woman enjoys a bit of a tickle (not a scratch, mind you) on the ol' Ship's Captain (you know, when it's her birthday or you're just really enthusiastic about being down there, you know, facially***). But by and large, the people seem to be past the 'stache in our go-go modern era.

Who knows, maybe the moustache'll make a real comeback someday soon. The youth are out there, and they might be watching NBC (nobody else is, that's for sure). I've been sporting a semblance of one for a good while now, but it's more out of the aforementioned sense of irony. You'd be amazed the kind of shit you can get away with saying when you've got a goofy-looking distraction under your nose. It's accompanied at the moment by a Guy-Fawkes-lookin' stripe heading chinward that's (I guess, technically) a modified Soul Patch, or what Kinky Friedman once called a "White Man Hater." But times are changing, people. We may soon see the return of a bearded President of the United States. As the old (though long-abandoned) saw goes, you vote for the most convincing moustache. Just think, our Idiot-In-Chief could hide behind his facial scruff instead of finding a safe place behind bullshit rationales for war and a cabinet of theocratic yes-men who'd rather suck a tailpipe than get off the military-industrial gravy train. One thing is for certain: no culture with so many names for the various permutations of hair below the hairline can go long before the pendulum swings back in favor of Mr. Flanders' "Fuzzy Neighbor." I'll be waiting there at the crossroads, my brothers, waiting for Earl and Ned and Freddie Fucking Mercury to show us the way to the Promised Land.

There'll be donuts, ginger ale, and fondue for anyone interested. BYOB.

*: Buddha was clean-shaven, but I like to think it was a choice he made to match the belly and the chrome-dome. We all know how Mrs. Buddha loved the round, smooth type.
**: Really the same arena, and quite an arena it is. The speakers are constantly thumping out Cher's latest and greatest, every stall in the men's room has multiple handlebars and a bidet, and the rainbow pennants hanging from the rafters are just FAHbulous. If the Moustache Pride movement developed a logo, it'd be a rainbow (because it's kind of that shape, you see?), dazzling the eye in a dizzying spectrum of blonde, dirty blonde, brown, black, and grey.
***: And believe me, ladies, I've got enthusiasm to spare. Though I've always secretly thought cunnilingus was kind of like Vietnam must have been: it's hot and wet, you're not really sure if your being there has a purpose, and after all the bombing and shelling you can't even remember the alphabet.