When is Google going to build a BART station in Mountain View?

I've said this aloud now a couple of places where it might have caught ears, so I just want to put it down here, in html, where I can point to it when I'm sixty years old and drunk and need to win an argument to prove to myself that I still have my marbles (which I won't).

When is Google going to sponsor a BART station in Mountain View?  I mean, right?

Easy basic bargaining positions: Google names a traditional, subterranean BART station anything it cares to put within fifteen characters (12 for hexi-symmetry??? What do I know?), to be followed by a slash and the municipal name, Mountain View.

Presumably there would be public space and space to let, which the parties could squabble for control of, and frankly, I'm seeing high-tech maintenance and service yards, a system hub for the South Bay.

Google throws some agreed on portion (80%) into the the service hub and station, and BART, the counties, municipalities and any other corporate partners (Stanford/Palo Alto, Facebook HQ/Menlo Park, Apple HQ/Cupertino, etc.) fund rails, other stations and ongoing BART operations for the future.

If the municipalities think its appropriate to declare a fixed period for the corporate naming to continue, they can do so, but I'd leave 'em permanent.  If the companies move or fall, the stations will remain as monuments to their opulence and splendor.

Ok, GO.

Trust the Art and Not the Artist

Apropos of the previous post, I wanted to write something about this principle I learned in school, one of those basic principles for a whole discipline that is also strangely descriptive of human life or behavior in a more general way.

So I studied a lot of history and read a lot of books in school, its obvious from my writing, if you know nothing else about me.  I actually got two B.A.s and a minor in my four and a half years, not that either B.A. is of any value.  In addition to the History degree most people know about, I also got a degree in a department called Comparative Literature, which sounds even more like bullshit than History, right?  What it actually is, and should just be called, for the sake of graduates, just so people fucking know what they studied, is Art Criticism, pure and simple, because what they mean by comparative is contextualizing a piece of art, let's just say a book, for the sake of argument, in the wider thought atmosphere of all culture contemporary to the artist at the time of the piece's creation.  So you're saying what this song meant, not just to music, but to painting at the same time.  How does Edouard Manet sitting and smoking cigarettes with Marcel Proust, his lifelong friend, influence the perspective of the two famous artists?  What do they share?  What do they argue about?  What do they go round and round about, one convincing the other before having his own mind ultimately changed by something his friend said?  What are they working on in their studios when they have the argument?  How does the human story produce the meaning of the 'Objet d'Art' (as it's called)?

So the basic principle I wanted to discuss comes from this discipline, which stresses the factual nature of beauty, even if its description is elusive.  It's the aphorism I used to head this post, that when there comes a time when a literary interpretation of the piece comes into contention with something the artist themself said about their art, or even about the individual piece itself, in looking for the meaning of the art, you trust the art and not the artist.

This is weird, right?  So if John fucking Lennon's corporeal spirit tells you that Imagine is an imperialist anthem meant as a call to arms to go out and conquer the brown people and drive the yellow ones out into space, you can look him in the eye and tell him, "That's all very well and good, John, but the world read it the other way: the meaning that made it art is the pacifist, compassionate love message that derives from a straightforward reading."  Yes, this means that artists can be (and often are) completely wrong about the actual meaning of their own art.  This also means that, for all cultural intents and purposes, a song that has as wide a distribution as Sympathy for the Devil speaks through the actual voice of the devil.  It tells us things we don't want to hear (Anastasia screamed in vain), that even the men on the tanks (the heroes, even the anti-hero, Rommel, of WWII) are symbols of the darker side of man triumphant, and that, lastly of all, maybe, just maybe, its the villain we should be the more concerned about, extending our concern, our investigative reporting, and our care to the guy who came up feeling hard-done-by in a world that doesn't have to be that way.

But that doesn't mean that what the artist thinks or intends or says doesn't matter at all.  In terms of contextualizing and opening a window on how the art is made, the artist's testimony is essential, its only in terms of that final decision on meaning, when all is said and done, and the conflicting, cross-cutting influences have all been weighed, and a social or cultural interpretation must be made, that the rule-of-thumb defaults you toward the interpretive meaning over the stated one.  It puts substantial pressure on the social scientist/humanist doing the interpreting to use very solid theoretical analysis of the symbolism of the objets, but what it comes down to is whether or not you accept that social and cultural realities are as solid a set of laws governing human behavior as physics.  If you do, then you can contextualize many choices, or rule out motivations, based on when the art was created.  An artist can claim that a fortunate coincidence in symbols with another popular icon was intentional, but if the documentable history shows that they did not or could not have known about the symbol at the time the scene was shot, or whatever the art was, you can say for sure that the symbol was put in there for a different reason.  It's likely, however, that the independent choice of two iconic artists to use the same symbol comes from some deeper seated cultural focusing on symbols like it.

Do you see how it works?  The artist says it was just a publicity stunt, look at me, look how smart I am.  The art itself says it wasn't a publicity stunt, he just had a seagull's shadow on the sidewalk for fifteen seconds at the beginning of his music video because he thought the camera shot was badass when they were taping and made sure it ended up in the video.  But from knowing that it was coincidental, we can then say something deeper about the sea-bird, silhouetted on concrete as a symbol for how the society at large wanted to be spoken to at the time, for what feelings and emotions were making connections with audiences.

In a way, since art is a pure distillation of action into value, it's as much as to say that actions speak louder than words, but I think it goes farther, in that it says that even the most studied, sometimes elaborate actions can speak for you in spite of yourself, by signaling subconsciously, and saying things you believe, but never intended to give voice.  And more than that, that what you say or do can mean, to a large number of people, and mean, to the vast majority of them, something entirely unrelated to what it means to you.  Not to just start pulling down famous quotes, but I'm now also reminded of the Gladiator line, "what we do in life, echoes for eternity."  Our actions really do have a butterfly effect on the future, and most of that effect comes from our perception in the eyes of other people.

Trust the art means that, even though what makes art meaningful may be what the artist was thinking when they wrote it, what makes art art, what makes it beautiful, is the reaction it causes the auditor, the interpretation.  There is no art without the perceiver, the audience.  If you allow the projector to give all of the meaning to a piece, simply because they gave it shape, then you silence your own voice expressed in seeing something in the piece and responding to it.  You do not have to respond to it.  I was going to say art, 'you do not have to respond to art,' but that's not true.  You can ignore it, dislike it, be unimpressed by it or whathaveyou, but art causes a reaction.  What you do not have to do is validate every glob of acrylic and pigment slapped on an old rag and called art by reacting to it.  IF its art, and if you're letting it happen, it will cause a reaction.  If it is not, then hopefully its at least pretty.

One Question

A lot of people used to talk about (until someone wrote a song about it) their one, most important question for the Judeo-Christian God.  I've always had just one for the "Devil."  That question would be: "I understand courtesy, and I obviously understand taste, but tell me about sympathy, who are you to need sympathy?"

I mean, it's not as if I do not understand the psychology of abuse and something of psychosis. Enough to know that, as the dominated in an abusive relationship with the deity who psychologically raped Abraham, not to mention Issac, who killed all of humanity then threatened never to do it again with an iconic reminder, whose commandments include "no one may be jealous but me," (I'm sorry, did I mistranslate that?  I meant "You can't worship anyone but me!") the Judeo-Christian Devil would have to be psychologically pretty fucked up, and no mistake.  You cannot help but feel pity for the Judeo-Christian Devil (and I use this label with the understanding that the devil is a mystical anti-god in 'Hebrew' mythology, not an official part of the story in the Old Testament), but feeling pity for the devil, however sentimentally evocative his story of abuse and ostracization may be, does not earn him my sympathy.

Sympathy means that I see things your way for a moment.  Assuming that mythology is being treated as factual to the point of there being a specifically Abrahamic, single, all-encompassing anti-deity, then this being's actions in Job alone, the Hebrew Bible being the single historically 'reliable' volume of the Abrahamic bibles, makes him no better than the proper god Yaweh, you remember, the abusive father.  Its like you're watching that Eddie Murphy/Dan Aykroyd (sp?) movie Trading Places, and, just because they happen to be two rich guys, you say to yourself, well, I have to marry one of them, they're rich.  No thought for the fact that there might be other rich people (other deities) out there, we're stuck with either Randolph or Mortimer.  No reason, we just decided that Mortimer's edict that we pretend no one else is rich but them was worth accepting.  And Mortimer's a little better than Randolph, right?  I mean, he's in charge at least, and Randolph is his little Grey Eminence, ruthlessly playing the adversary to all of Mortimer's marginally more just rule.

No, I'm not prepared to have sympathy for the devil, not without him going on trial, arguing his case for me, submitting his actual behavior to my judgement.  If he deserves my sympathy, it will not be because he has convinced me with his silver tongue that 'god' is really the evil one.  They're both assholes, from all appearances, the question could only be whether there is any moral ambivalence at all anywhere in the objective actions and consequences of others and of fate and physics, however physics operates on deities.  I'm prepared to believe that it is entirely possible that Yaweh is the real villain in the personal rivalry between the two, I've pointed out that he's clearly a HUGE dick, based on the stories he brags about and has his disciples write down.  IF that 'real' story is in fact as bad as it seems perfectly plausible that it could be, then, and only then, would I be willing to meet the Judeo-Christian Devil with sympathy, courtesy and taste.

The Three Musketeers, Part II: Dumas and Misogyny

So, sadly, there is more to write about the charming little French novel I recommended to readers a few days ago.  It turns out, this funny little comedy has a rather gruesome ending, with an administration of state-sanctioned capital punishment the ultimate expression of justice and a free France.  Of course, French style, the capital punishment is a beheading, though not with a guillotine, yet, obviously.

This, however, is not the reason why the 'serious' portion of the comedia merited a second post so soon after the first.  The justice is unfortunately served against a woman, whose original crime, the thing which set her off on a feedback loop of growing ostracization and criminalization, is that at age fourteen or sixteen or so she, a young, whip-smart, bombshell French blonde, 'placed' in a Catholic convent as a novice, fucked a seminary student.  That's her ultimate crime, the thing which caused Athos to attempt to hang her; that, rightly or wrongly, prejudiced her English husband's brother toward thinking she'd poisoned the English husband; that puts her in a position where only ruthless obedience to Cardinal Richelieu buys her the privacy to live the life a bombshell twenty-five-year-old, widowed French noblewoman could normally expect to have, assuming she'd escaped convent life.

Here's the story, and remember, that enough of the children's movie is from the book to keep you current with the plot.  Milady de Winter was not actually tried for the theft that led to her branding, it was her lover, who, apparently, took it upon himself to steal valuables from the church of the convent they were trying to escape who was caught, tried and branded for the theft.  The lover's brother, who happens to be the local executioner, and charged with such punishments as branding a fleur de lis on thieves' shoulders, finds her, ties her up and brands her vigilante style, as revenge for having corrupted his brother.

What's a little repulsive about the whole thing--and remember, judging Dumas, while forgetting that he's a Catholic, during the counter-reformation, who's affirming his Catholic faith all the while declaring his political independence from its church, is what's called 'anachronistic' in the study of history, meaning that it's not exactly fair.  What's a little repulsive anyways, is that this is taken to justify all of the other crimes that are heaped upon her in what is, after all, because she's a spy and they have to try her by the old laws of chivalry and execute the beheading before the cardinal can get wind of it and reverse the gears of French justice, a kangaroo court.

Now, keep in mind, this woman has poisoned D'Artagnan's mistress not two days before, and that with the dying woman's word for testimony, which even an American court, today, would accept into evidence.  She's guilty and dead to rights on a capital crime, and she's the only villain in the book who's not an historical figure that Dumas can kill off whenever it pleases him.  But its makes the boring part of the novel that much more difficult to read that this woman, who might honestly be called more a victim than a perpetrator of crimes up, at least, until her marriage to the Count de Winter, gets piled up with these misogynistic, male-sexual-insecurity-rooted accusations for the commission of a crime natural to animal behavior.

Athos, especially, who has persecuted her for six or seven years, based on this brand, which has no legal basis, for a crime that she, herself, did not actually commit, however much the author makes it clear that, for the purposes of the actual character, she would believably have been encouraging the seminarian, even manipulating him into it, falls deeply in your esteem as he presides over her capital punishment for a second time.

I guess I still give the book an over all positive recommendation, I mean, anachrony and all, but its sad about how Athos comes out looking...

Alexandre Dumas and Nationalism

So, I've been reading the three musketeers on my phone, lately, and its awesome, hilarious, fun, a little raunchy and very French. The funniest thing about the whole book is that, although its about an affaire d'honneur that becomes a oneupsmanship race between the cardinal and this young, upstart Gascon boy, with the Gascon winning (forgetting the boy). All along however, if you already know the story, which of course, everyone misknows in the movie generation, you realize that in the original story, pre-children's movie adaptations, the honor involved is the Queen's, but in a very French, marry-for-money-love-a-lover sort of way, so that all of these tit-for-tat, public rivalries, some of them deadly, and all of which make up the very real fight that is going on just then over Nationalism, are set against a background of a life or death battle to get the Queen of France LAID! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh! Shaft of light, choir of angels, the whole nine yards.

So this fight, Nationalism, for those who don't know the whole story, at the time, was about whether one was going to be loyal to one's ethnic, supreme ruler, or one's own ethnic nation alone and independent, which is essentially the way to look at the reformation, as an ethnic split in Europe, with Protestants, ironically, more loyal to English interests than Spain or France ever were to Roman power. Nationhood, however, was the epic battle of the day, and if you're going to write the great French novel, you write it about one man, fighting the odds and the power of Rome. The marriage between the French king and a very desirable Spanish Habsburg princess was a tense one, but it was an important source of independent cooperation between Spain, Austria and France against Italy, and a direct line of succession is the best way to keep the sovereignty stable enough for all of the little moves that make up a grassroots struggle against an authority as far-reaching as the Catholic church.  Fights like those that D'Artagnan fights, the little punk Bernajoux, who is responsible for picking many of the fights between Cardinalists and King's men (i.e. Musketeers) in Paris, the haughty Count, who works for the cardinal in a capacity to have permission to cross the channel when a port is sealed, even the greedy, relatively rich commoner, his landlord. So if the French king cannot, in fact, be induced to conceive a child with the queen, and since all of the nobility of Europe is a single, extended family at the time anyways, it is no matter to nationalists who the crown prince's father is, so long as the world never truly knows, and the child is raised to think of France as his country, his birthright.

In The Man in the Iron Mask, Dumas underlines this exact point again, by taking for a king a man who has been imprisoned by the prior King of France all his life, but in France, by Frenchmen. In the end, like the dirt poor Gascon, who has nothing but his title and his father's hideous, barely marketable horse, he naturally sides with his homeland, and his people, which give the Gascon a much greater chance of social mobility, and represents the freedom so long denied to the new king, who knows little of religion, only has thoughts on right and wrong. It does not matter who is King of France, Dumas is saying, so long as he is French, first of all, and more or less just, second of all.

So it's funny every time D'Artagnan sets off on another super secret undercover mission.  This is when he's most like the don Quijote that Dumas compares him to, the farcical figure who imagines windmills on a distant hill to be giants and charges headlong, but in the end, he is actually doing something productive for the Nationalist cause.  It's funny and so very French, and if you're nerd enough to appreciate the irony, and remember all along that D'Artagnan is a ridiculous figure, it's a laugh aloud read.

No Peas

The last affordable grocery store between the Oakland border and the North Berkeley BART, excepting the Grocery Outlet on University two blocks from the freeway, closed for the last time 20 minutes ago. I know they just rebuilt the north Berkeley Safeway, and maybe they're planning to do the same thing down here, but until such time, only rich people (Whole Foods and Berkeley Bowl customers) are able to shop for a full selection of dairy, fresh produce, frozen foods and meats (especially pork products) in south Berkeley.

Wave Again

So, a few days ago, as I was writing the cover letter for that East Bay Express job, I overheard a woman talking to her friend, apparently about her son or daughter (the story that follows makes me think son) as if they were just a lazy good-for-nothing freeloader who was not in school because his mother told him it was what he must do, and did not have the slightest understanding of the meaning of hard work. This, as students on their summer break work feverishly around her at 1 o'clock on a Friday and she sips coffee and bitches to a friend. She caught my attention with a tone of righteous mockery, saying something like, "...and he goes, that sounds like third wave feminism..." clearly skeptical of the very existence or certainly the accuracy of such a categorization. I get it. I'd never heard of "third wave feminism" growing up raised by a third wave feminist (and her Suffrage/Women's Lib mother), and in point of fact, the very term itself is confusing and obfuscating, because if the third wave is essentially the elderstateswomen of the women's lib era and their proteges of the eighties and nineties (and that, to the best of my understanding is what merits the name), then it's really the fourth wave. Right? I mean, I'm a dude, but Seneca Falls is a wave of its own, Suffrage is a generation later, lumped with the depression, and Women's Lib is after the war and into Vietnam. Right? I mean, can we get it straight, please? I can understand how "third wavers" would rather not be pinned down, it's been their modus for thirty years now, "that's not what I said," "who are you to ask that question," and so forth, but unfortunately their children have been hearing those lines for thirty years. If "third" is the first word a substantial number of women scholars have ever voluntarily used to self-label, then we'll take third regardless of the reason you want to obfuscate the uniqueness of your ideology. Because that's really what this was about, that lady's denial of categorization, the misnomer label, used to cause confusion about just what constitutes a "third wave feminist," its about not wanting to be distinguished from earlier, successful movements because the inevitability of women gaining suffrage and thence moving into the workforce in a federated republic felt like momentum that should be tapped, that the image of inevitability would go a long way in creating the inevitability of a world according to Gloria Steinem. It was the Hillary Clinton strategy for winning the presidency. But here's the thing. Gloria Steinem did a couple of wonderful things, half a century ago. But Gloria Steinem is a bitch. And contrary to a recent Tina Fey meme I've seen going around, bitches do not get shit done, bitches get one or two things done, then everyone around them is too alienated to work with, for, or even in charge of them. Which makes "third wave" sort of ironic, really, since its the third thing, the third goal, the one that, whatever it should have been, won't get accomplished because the feminist movement turned into the Bitch Movement for the eighties and nineties. Its no coincidence that the label that "third wave" is meant to substitute for, academically, is "femme nazi," women who didn't want to be labeled certainly did not want to be labeled with that moniker for eternity, and 'we,' the academy, that good old boys club, accommodated with the first thing that was even slightly acceptable. And that's the real thing, that nothing substantial does distinguish the third wave strategically or tactically except for the bitchy attitude, and as some idiot trying to "take back the word" on Political Animals, that shitty send up of Clinton family drama that I watched hoping it would be another West Wing, said, "Never call a bitch a bitch, us bitches hate that." But here's the thing, those bitches are just a bunch of bitches, they don't have a point, you don't have to listen to their idiocy, because somewhere (I just know it) there is a rational woman, and you can always count on at least, like, twenty percent of all women to be in lucid windows of rationality at any given moment (that's a joke, get it?). No, you don't have to listen to their shit because no one else wants to hear their shit. Don't tell the bitch she's a bitch, tell the fucking world, and the world will respond "right on! You're right, man, fuck that bitch," and then she'll really hate that, because she'll be as powerless as she's always felt. Ok, I'm just gonna start spit-balling names for a new "wave" here, now, if I don't come up with many now I'll edit them in later or do another post: Fivers, um...Environmental Feminism, Gender Fusion, I don't know, I'm getting off topic. Bitch, is not the only thing worthy of critique about their ideology, its just the only real reason they've been shrinking instead of growing for the first time in a century. These are the assumptions that, of course, no group wishes to examine, and which the "third wavers" have successfully used to escape scrutiny by never publishing a crystallizing ideological manifesto. We all know the mantras however. I've already discussed the one about "All men think about is sex," (cliffsnotes: the reality is that sex is something that men are always thinking about, but even the human male's mind can hold more than that single, simple thought, at one time) Another, which I have to deal with in my thesis, is the refusal to accept anthropological explanations for social behaviors, the refusal to believe that discipline of mind and training from birth cannot overcome all inborn instincts, and the ridiculous belief that we would even want to do such a thing to our kids. Of course, with my thesis, the problem is a, you guessed it, third wave feminist, objecting to my application of this assumption to feminists broadly. I told him, I have worked through a simple argument, premise by premise with a woman my own age of a decidedly third-wave outlook, got buy in, at great effort, having to change the subject back to my argument, multiple times, but finally had buy in on every single minor and major premise, in sequence, without interruption. When I proposed the inevitable logical conclusion, this young woman flatly refused to acknowledge it, having no refutation, no rational argument at all. You're telling me that a student who is that adamantly irrational regarding a single point, who was intelligent enough for me to work through the logic piece by piece, knowing she could follow it, is not doing so according to an ideological belief? What about the scholar from my own literature. I did not have to depart my own literature to find an almost verbatim reprise of the point I refute in the thesis, and this from a scholar I agree with on every assertion she makes, I just disagree with her on this philosophical assertion she makes in the introduction to her article. The one female scholar after 1950 I agree with, I think. Of course, there's only one before 1950, and none before 1985 on my part of Africa. I'll end the post with a book recommendation, especially for women aspiring to be anthropologists or archaeology. Gertrude Caton-Thompson, with a woman photographer and a woman ethnologist, excavated The Great Zimbabwe in the 1930's, and was the first person to confirm beyond doubt the sequence of exclusively indigenous builders. Her report is the most professional, informative and straightforward example of the archaeologist's trade I have ever read (although my experience is limited to Africa, that's not insubstantial), and she's a BADASS. Not a bitch, but a fucking badass.

Help Wanted

Male human seeking female human being. Am perfectly capable of cleaning, feeding, driving and providing for my sustenance on a daily basis, as well as fixing broken things, building or assembling from poor plans, taking blame for bad ideas or missed plans, etc. Somehow can't figure out doing laundry or dishes on a consistent basis and can't find the motivation to clean my room but once a month.

On Media

So I'm writing today in honor of the East Bay Express, which posted a writing job on craigslist I'd love to get. I mentioned that I'm from SoCal, that I read the LA Times, and that I've been disappointed with both the SF Chronicle and the Oakland Trib and I wanted to write about what, as a reader, makes a newspaper worth reading, especially in print. Every time I get far enough south to catch a print copy of the LA Times, I find at least one article that impresses me with the editors' willingness to depart from traditional journalistic objectivity, not for the purpose of editorializing, as the Chronicle's journalists will happily do above the fold on the front page, but to offer deeper, sophisticated information on a complex or controversial topic, objectively, but with a serene confidence in the quantifiable truth of scientific conclusions and modern knowledge. The LA Times is not an outlet for conspiracy theorists or blowhards making more of their tiny, isolated little concern than it merits within the political movement it belongs to. Don't get me wrong, the editorial board is clearly far more conservative than its readership, and it engages in not-too-subtle, cynical attempts at mind control, like publishing in detail on every perceived gaffe by Barack Obama and giving every Hillary Clinton New Hampshire field office opening six-inches more than it deserved, while ignoring Clinton gaffes and Obama press releases alike. I wrote a letter to the editors about the coverage of the Occupy camp outside city hall, L.A. The letter lambasted politicians and newspapers alike for focusing on the $700,000 cost of replacing grass in a city park (done with one-third native growth, BTW, and looks more beautiful than before the protest) over the uncounted billions at stake to the general public if banks are allowed to continue over-leveraging and over-consolidating. I noted that the banks were a revenue stream both for the politicians themselves and for the papers, in which they advertise. When the paper printed my letter, it delivered my message faithfully, but with all idea of a media role in the narrative expertly edited out, without ellipses, as if it had never been. Hell, I don't care, I'm just glad my name got printed, and I'm still sitting here using their paper as my standard of what a print-news source should be, affordable, intelligent, objective and with enough funding to actually merit world and national news bureaus. That's the thing. There are only so many worthwhile international and national journalists in this world, apparently, and with a number of them just as good or better on camera or writing for someone on camera, there are probably only enough left over for, what, six worthwhile papers with true national stature? I doubt that many. Certainly, if you're not going to invest in the editing and journalists to compete to be one of those six, you're much better off just buying your news from the Associated Press and focusing on what a newspaper is really meant to be, the cultural touchstone, the community voice expressing the view and the concerns of the average reader, publishing their questions, concerns and divergent views when an issue really gets in their heads. Local papers should just be local papers. Just because your editorial board has pretensions that they, or their city, should be something more, does not excuse their wasting resources on terrible coverage just to say they have a Washington Bureau. Community newspapers are a necessity, the only thing print news still offers that digital media can't, physical community. It is a rare outlet that will be able to crystallize community over a large enough region today to stay funding a national print desk, LA, Chicago, New York. Atlanta, some Texas rag and Seattle are maybes, at best. San Francisco, sadly, has ceded this position to L.A. The world would have wanted San Fran, L.A. probably would not have fought it for long, but Bay Area residents are happy with their own insular, self-oriented attitudes. I say self-oriented, rather than self-centered, very deliberately, because its often very positively intended, this self-interest, it is merely personal, often extremely so. If you surrender the initiative for driving culture, however, you can't still try to have a relevant newspaper, because you've given up the very reason anyone would have to care about your voice. Just accept it that no one will want to buy your words outside your own area, win as many readers at home as you can, for being the best damn place to find out what's going on this weekend anywhere around, and don't waste your revenues on national news. Turn a profit. Survive. Your classified section, the comics and maybe a horoscope, the best Su Do Ku available, and the letters page. Focus on what people actually want. But there's still one thing, besides the fundamental rules at work, that makes the LA Times stand out, to me. On Tuesday, I was able to pick up a Times on my way to the Amtrak station. I didn't get to read it 'til I got into the city, because I was pleasantly diverted through most of the ride, but even on getting home at 8 pm I continued reading, because it was so refreshing to have. Now, Tuesday's Times had all of the regular trash that every other news outlet had that day. In depth bullshit on the Zimmerman trial, Monday morning quarterbacking of the BART strike, other in depth bullshit on that ex-spy asshole who can't stand up for the actions he calls heroic and tell the world why they are in court, sentimentalist trash on the firefighters in Arizona who just died. I skipped every one of those except the BART strike, stuff, something I usually don't have to do, but it was one of those banner days for shitty news, no matter what outlet you use. Inside the front section, next to the second half of the trite, paper-selling sentimentalist article on the dead firefighters from Southern California (bringing it home, even when its national news), was an article about what might have happened. It never says so, not directly, but the article very subtly makes it clear what seems to have happened. It begins by saying, matter-of-factly, and without undue emphasis, that at the time of the tragedy the fire was burning right through the middle of this town. The residents have been evacuated, and I'm making more of it than the paper did, but the fire was burning through people's homes. From there the article says that the team was fighting at the head of the fire, a direct confrontation strategy that is simply described as "rare," with no speculation whatsoever regarding why the decision may have been made to use it in this case. The article goes on to describe "proper" firefighting technique, always establishing a fall-back position of sufficient size, prior to attacking the fire lines, fighting with one foot "in the black," which the journalist translates for lay readers as, with one foot in burned-out space at the side of the fire. The article closes with direct quotes from agencies responsible for investigating the aftermaths of fire-related fatalities, and with opponents of universal investigations, one of whom points out that, in fire-fighting, the idea of holding a command entity responsible for a split-second decision that resulted in deaths minutes or hours down the road is not always right or fair. It becomes quite clear that what happened is nothing more or less than that these twenty men, only one of whom survived, made a reasoned decision, probably with universal consciousness of the risks, to skip the fall-back positions, to risk the fire head on, because people's homes were burning, that they sacrificed their safety and ultimately their lives, because that was their jobs, and when there was time to do the job safely, they did, but when people's lives are on fire, they were gonna put that job first. None of that hero worship comes through in the news article, not directly. It's just obvious, because the editors wanted it to be obvious, and the journalist wrote it well, exactly what happened, and exactly who these men were. So, to the East Bay Express; I am not trying to write that article for your paper, because that's national news, and your paper is rightly conscious of its geography and readership, but I want to write news about real things, that real people care about, that informs them of what really happened, so that without scandal, without baseless recriminations and without torture to the families of good men, the real story can get out right away, even if there aren't two sources, or even one, who will go on record to say it.

The Five Elements

It occurred to me, as I wikipedia stumbled across a debate between medieval muslim theologians and philosophers on the qur'anic verse that says the moon split, as predicted in advance by the prophet, that in a very real way, the so called five elements (*singsong* love, or really, life, being the fifth) really do describe the five things necessary to colonize another planet.

According to wikipedia, "splitting of the moon," philosophers argued that the verse could not refer to a literal splitting of the moon because, unlike the earth, the moon was not made up of all of the elements.  Now, this is not what that random ass old muslim scholar was talking about, but I got to thinking, that the reason the theory that a meteor impact had in some way made the moon look split open was not viable is because, although the moon is made up of earth, it has no fire, no molten core.  The fact that the moon also has no air or (much) water is not relevant to the splitting of the moon thing, but is absolutely true, that is what makes the moon uninhabitable, it is a rocky body, but without atmosphere, mass enough to have tectonic shifts, or liquid water.

I truly believe there is something to the idea of ancient aliens, but I do not believe in convenient space travel, so the idea of things like "the four/five elements" being an axiomatic list of the things necessary to support life on a distant planet is one of the sorts of things I credit oral traditions with being capable of preserving.

Imagine, if you will, some roughly human life somewhere in the solar system.  It is made up of DNA because DNA is such a fundamental molecule that it develops independently into the same thing instead of being built differently on every planet where life begins.  It progresses to the point where it is capable of sending small colony ships out on generations-long journeys between the stars.  When the colonists leave their own solar system they are completely on their own, without even effective means of communication, and although they propagate life in barren systems, or put humanoid colonies in "wild" systems, they inevitably would lose a lot of the social knowledge the original astronauts who lifted off from the home world would have had, especially because they would have had to devote their lives to figuring out the particularities of survival in the new world.

I don't know.  That's just my brand of crazy coming out.

The Voting Rights Act

There are numerous instances in American history where a president, faced with a hostile Supreme Court and an inconvenient ruling said "Fuck you.  I'm the po-lice.  Enforce that."  Not only did the country survive, in some instances it was made a better place by it.

On a more practical note, it would be completely reasonable to say "Ok, the Voting Rights Act as a whole is a matter of national security, interstate commerce and federal election law.  Congress must treat this as an injunction to change the basis by which "a history of prejudicial voting laws" is defined, but until it does, I am obliged by national security interests to maintain the existing map."

Everyone gets what they claim to want.

Racist shits trying to undo fifty years on a technicality, through a stacked Supreme Court, still get to go fuck themselves.

A Small Comment on Bay Area Fashion

The problem with having two teams in the East Bay that wear 'gold' is that it translates itself into casual and even formal fashion, and, sadly, yellow is just a hideous color for clothing.

The Saddest Part

So I was having a conversation with my mother and siblings the other day.  My sister has just gotten comfortable in the first relationship she's ever been in that seems at least as likely as not to end in marriage, and my mother asked her, as people in relationships are prone to doing of other people who are not actually dating anymore, about what dating was like in the Bay Area.

I wasn't really listening to what she said about what women think of men in general, which, come to think of it, is really the more important testimonial, given that she's a woman, but she said something about men thinking of women as generally too shy, to which I interjected that I probably don't represent what most men think of women around here, but that if shy is the word that would occur to the average guy, I think it would be somewhat inaccurate and I reminded them both of what Ana told us about meeting her new boyfriend.

I had been there for the occasion, and it could not have been more obvious when Jerreau (sp?), a friend of our cousin Sarah who met us for burritos one day, asked her if she wanted to go for a bike ride some time, that he was asking her out romantically.  For whatever reason, however, Ana was slow on the uptake.  A week later she asked my dad if the meeting had likely been a date, and, of course, with no more information than you the reader have, he assured her that it had been.

A month later, when she was clearly in the relationship, she said, in retelling the story over dinner for those who hadn't seen her in a while, that, because she hadn't been sure it was a date or not, she'd probably been far nicer to him that she would have been if she'd known.

Now, she said this in all seriousness, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

On another block or a different walk from the dating conversation with Mom and Ana, we were back on the subject, this time with my brother in my sister's place and Ana walking ahead with my Dad.

I think I reopened the issue with a comment I've had on tap for a while now and felt, even at the time I spoke it, like it might have been only half relevant, that "If women understood, on a deep and collective level, that men are exactly what they are expected to be in order to get laid, and if rarely more, certainly never less, a lot of women I know would be treated better by their men, or rather, they'd be treated better by better men."

My mother latched on to the comment, saying that if all that men are interested in at first encounter with a woman is sex, a woman is justified in being a little defensive.

And here is the saddest thing.

The saddest thing about our now-mainstream 'feminist' upbringing is that treating men as if they were soulless, cynical, insatiable, unrepentant 'playas,' on permanent fuck patrol doesn't simply give them an open invitation to be, it demands that they conform to this absolutely pathetic, bullshit notion (and it gives them as false and even more destructive an image of the male as the more famous media image of the female).

Two facts to keep in mind.  A.) The male reproductive system reverts, after a certain period of inactivity, usually about the six month range, to a state of hyper-sensitivity that some refer to as "born-again-virginity" due to the increased likelihood of premature ejaculation in these circumstances.  This means that, if a man does not get laid regularly, at least twice a year, his chances of satisfying a partner and therefore of retaining a partner, and therefore of getting laid in the first place in the second six months after a failed first six, are drastically reduced.  Human males are not just rewarded by evolution if they get laid, they're punished by evolution if they do not have physical sex regularly, masturbation only extends the six-month period marginally.

B.) The human brain, even the MALE one, is perfectly capable of holding two thoughts in it at once.

(and a third, a BTW one, that easily more than three quarters of guys want nothing more in life than a rewarding, monogamous relationship, children and a white picket fence.  YES.  If this is really news to you, I'm very, very sorry)

Hell, its capable of holding three thoughts, four motivations and seven different, conflicting emotions at once, I think it's capable of saying to itself, without breaking stride, "Wow, I wanna fuck that woman and see if she's intelligent enough to carry my babies."

This phrase "all that guys are interested in is sex" was composed by a pathetic loser, not a feminist.  A proper, anthropologically and sociologically supported statement, as true feminism has always been rooted in science, not the emotionality (which solid science shows women are more likely to base decisions on than men, go fuck yourselves) of a lonely, resentful spinster, would be "guys are always interested in sex."

This is why my father and I both knew, without second thought, that "a bike ride in the Sunset district" was of course, always a date, no matter how delicately or skillfully her boyfriend danced around the idea to keep her disarmed.  But its also why I like Jerreau, or rather, why I don't dislike him enough to have given him a chance to make me like him, which he did.  Because I accept that he wants to fuck my sister, but he was also willing to do that bullshit dance just to go out with her, who is so hook, line and sinker a third-wave feminist, no matter how hard I've tried to push her past third-wave mentalities.  Now whether that's a testament to how amazing he thought my sister was, or if it's just the basic learned behavior of a long-term, single-male resident of the region I don't really care, you adapt to your surroundings, even if your surrounding are stupid.  The point is that he was willing to do it, completely, no reservations, for her, and that as far as I can tell he dances with one woman if he's made a promise.

The ladies of the San Francisco Bay Area will have to forgive me if I don't feel much like learning this dance. I've certainly not met one yet who was worth my becoming a lying asshole just to prove that I'm not a lying asshole.

I also have this thing for Cheap Trick.

I mean to say I want women who are willing to own it that they want me, I'm REALLY fucking turned off by third-class treatment just because I'm not willing to LIE that I'm not trying to fuck you.  Even bigger a turn-off?  The idea that any relationship I would have with you WOULD HAVE STARTED WITH A FUCKING LIE!!!  Are you fucking kidding me?  HOW is this desirable!?!  "Prove to me that you're honestly interested in a relationship with me by lying to me convincingly about what you are and are not interested in."  No. I'm sorry.  I know I've already left a few women up here butt-hurt because I wouldn't just PLAY them, but game is for fucking CHILDREN, and I'm genuinely not fucking interested, I will not fucking hesitate to pass up a sure thing to fuck you if it means I'd have to play you, even slightly, to do it.  I JUST DON'T WANT A LIAR FOR A LOVER, sorry.

A Recent Personal Realization

I probably shouldn't post this, as it will be a bit revelatory and I'm still looking for a job.

But I'm not exactly the type to let that stop me from exploring myself, now am I?  I suppose I'll just have to be sure to keep posting regularly for a while, and hope to bury this little 'vulnerability' episode deep enough in the archived posts that no prospective employer takes the time to get to it.

Of course, I'll need to change the title...

Eh.

So I've realized recently that I've always been a lot like that kid in The Emperor's New Clothes, or at least I've always relished that role whenever it came my way.

That's not much of a realization, in and of itself, obviously--"hey, I look like my mom!"--no, the thing I thought was worth writing about on it is the further realization that, while that kid is brilliant, and honest, and sees keenly, and just has that thing, that indescribable way of doing things that doesn't even reflect in an IQ test, and all of that, that kid is also just a little fucking annoying.

Not least to the Emperor, who, let's not forget, is something of a non-conformist, (fashion-, at least) forward-thinking radical himself.

And here's the thing, often as not, its that kid that gets run out of town, not the emperor, or at the very least, the kid has to go too, because he reminds the people of their embarrassment, whether he talks about it or not.

Socrates (another reflection-of-self I've seen lately) dies, in the end, let's not forget. Sure, he's remembered forever, and his lesson about pure democracy led to the (slightly) more robust Latin republic, etc., etc., etc. But Socrates is fucking DEAD, man, he's seeing none of it.

So the little boy has to grow up, he's got to learn to pick his poisons (had to), learn to ask questions instead of just knowing the answer, but most of all, I think, he's got to be more vulnerable, oddly. This is because when your biggest risk is the crowd, its best to give its members a little blood in advance, one at a time, to satisfy them you can be wrong about something smaller than the epic things your dreamy, sea-monster brain (rising out of nowhere, lashing out inexplicably here or there, overpowering all local forces before dissipating into an harmless-looking, invertebrate blob, floating on the horizon) is usually concerned with.

In other words, when you seem untouchable, people inevitably start to think about how to take you down.

Wait.  I'm not going to delete the previous five lines, because there's something in there, too, but I've had another thought.

That kid, in some ways, is the real tyrant.  The people, don't forget, are happy.  They like their emperor, even if they can see his balls flopping about under those invisible clothes he wears.  Hell, they may even have started having mainstream fashion conversations about scrotal piercings and other cosmetic opportunities now available under the new clothes.

Yes, he represents a tyranny of the mind, of the real, that the people don't want to hear.  That they might need to hear it, before they all spend their money on fabric no one will buy in any other town, doesn't change the fact that they are unwilling thinkers.

So maybe blood sacrifice isn't the answer, huh?  How does the metaphor translate if the solution is bloodsport?

How do you make it fun to face the illusions you've built up in your mind because they seemed easier than dealing with the truth (which I suppose, metaphorically, must have been a shortage of fabric)?

I suppose this is easy, right?  Methods that have been tested time and again, to the point that even ethical distinctions are well understood.

Start by isolating one of the crowd.  Quickly and effectively otherize them.  Mock them about what the entire crowd is doing stupidly.  Never acknowledge that the rest of the crowd is doing the same thing.

"Hey, look everybody!  The village idiot thinks the Emperor's really wearing invisible clothes!  He doesn't understand that he's just naked, pretending to wear clothes!  What an idiot, right?!?"

For ethical application, attempt to choose someone with the moral strength to laugh at themselves, otherize them with something endearing rather than embarrassing, and perhaps include self in the otherization, to the continuing exclusion of the crowd.  If ethical application seems impossible, at least try to choose someone who deserves it.

"Oh my god, everybody, I need your help!  You know senile old granny, she's 'round the bend again, thinks that the Emperor's really wearing invisible clothes!  Help me explain to her.  Oh granny, you're so silly, I almost thought you were right for a second, I could have sworn I saw the light shimmer off it as he danced, but then I realized they all been having a joke on us, he's just naked and they're pretending he's wearing beautiful clothes.  Granny, granny, granny, they almost had us, didn't they?"

An Open Letter to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Prime Minister of Turkey:

Mr. Erdoğan:

I wish to express my admiration for you, above all, as a champion of justice and of freedom of world historical significance. As an admirer, I would like to lend you my words for a public statement you have been literally dying (whether you're willing to admit it) to find the words and the personal courage to publish. I am sure a good Turkish translator will have no trouble preserving the spirit of what I say, its all pretty universal:



I, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a sailor's son, a child of Turkey and of Asia, born in the most beautiful city in Europe, etc. etc., you can tell it better than I, have been blessed by God to be esteemed a leader by my own people. The great heroes of freedom, of whom I am truly blessed of God to have yet a hope of joining, if we, as a Turkish nation, can find a place for compassion in our hearts during this, the first civil crisis of a new Turkey, have set a precedent of humility that their aspirant successors abrogate at their immortal peril.

The eyes of God and of men cannot look down on me if I decide to seek the Presidency of my nation, for I have played the game skillfully, and by the rules. If my partisans are, in all humility, more securely in power, within the law, than the law is really meant to give to any single organization, and if I, therefore, have more power than the leader of a free country is meant to possess within his own borders, then it falls to me, in the sight of God, as a leader of free men, to assure my countrymen that I remember my people, that I will not abridge their freedom, and that I will not resist legitimate attempts to unseat my government at the ballot box.

For my people's future, for the future of the political movement I do not wish to die with me, and for my own immortal reputation, I will not serve concurrently as the leader of my political party and the president of my nation. To some this will seem an insufficient, insignificant gesture, political theater, meant to appease just enough people to survive this crisis, and to them I say, ORGANIZE!!! Use these moments in the streets together, misbehaving in the name of justice, taunting your countrymen in uniform with hurled insults and hurled stones, use this time to glorify your people, in the name of justice, and of righteousness, and in the glory of God.

Challenge me. Challenge my AK Party to be better, to serve you better, to lead you better. Because you are right: I have, in some sense, too much power, even if I still feel infuriatingly powerless in times like these, and you, the younger generation, the rising heart of a growing Turkish Nation do not see yourselves in the laws of my party. But this is not because I am right, or wrong, or a dictator or a democrat. It is because I am in power in a still-young democracy and because you, Turkey, you must find yourself in this crisis, for my party is what you, its members, make of it, what you challenge it to be.

This is not about a park, although I have ordered a review of the development plan to evaluate if there are ways that the community which felt slighted in the planning process can be accommodated. This development, however, must go forward, ultimately. Turkey must go forward, and although this neighborhood and many beautiful Turkish places across the nation will be forever changed in this process, together, as a nation, we will build a future that has as much to give us pride in being Turkish as the past we have, with reverence, and respect, build anew.



At least, that's what I would say, and do, if I were in your position. You are not the foolish Mr. Putin, to watch the reputation and the nation you have carefully nurtured crumble around you because you do not feel personally ready to stop working. At a certain point, the same work that was righteous yesterday becomes tyranny tomorrow, and you, sir, do not get to choose when that is.

Respectfully,

George Levin

Courage and Liberalism

Hi, I haven't posted in a long time, and I don't know if I'm about to begin posting regularly again, but I've just changed the description-box text and want to address the issue at greater length. In the description box I note that a number of 'liberals' have behaved as if I were not a 'true' liberal because I did not continue protesting the war after the invasion of Iraq began. The truly liberal position regarding Iraq and Afghanistan is that once you fight a war somewhere, however good or bad the reasons for starting it in the first place, you are obliged to rebuild what you destroyed for both moral AND self-interested reasons. Not rebuilding Afghanistan in the 80s is the whole reason we are there again now. Furthermore, it is just SAD that its become the "liberal" position that we ought to abandon these people to their fates just because of the absurd notion that all war is unwarranted aggression. You do NOT always get to be the one who chooses when violence takes place. Just because you make a show of not wanting to fight is no guarantee that someone else in the world will oblige you. If you choose not to fight when someone more selfish than yourself is using any means of coercion necessary to get what they want it doesn't make you more high-minded or more civilized or smarter or better or more admirable than that person, it makes you a fucking coward. "They that can give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin The worst part of this whole thing is that, in the twentieth century, liberals had the sense to actually stick to the proven track record of Keynesian economics in post war occupation periods. We invested in rebuilding Europe and Japan with the Marshall Plan and today both are thriving economies, in temporary downturns due to their insane turns toward "supply" side economics, but still in solid position clearly traceable to our investment in their futures. Now, we've decided that its all just too hard. Its too hard to explain Keynes and its too hard to fight. The way it looks is that, when it was WHITE people whose roads and power stations and airports we were rebuilding it all made sense and we were fine with it, but now that its a bunch of BROWN people, we can't be bothered to spend American lives on investment in their (and OUR!!!) security. THAT has somehow become the LIBERAL position. Are you fucking joking? One more quick thing, so-called liberals whine that there is no clear path to victory, that there is no clear GOAL to the war in Afghanistan. Funny, I could have sworn that the GOAL was peace and that the ABUNDANTLY CLEAR PATH to the peace is to rebuild the functioning nation that we've SCOURED FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH over fifty years of warfare there. Not us exclusively, mind, but we were responsible for the proxy war there that the Soviets brought, so it amounts to the same thing. Will we be fighting to build that nation through IED explosions and continuing loss of life? Well, yes, that's the whole issue, THERE'S IED EXPLOSIONS GOING ON AND ITS OUR JOB TO STOP THEM, you fucking tools. IED explosions are the physical manifestation of a social problem and we can only eradicate the physical symptom by addressing the underlying disease, not by running away from it. If we do, we'll only be watching helplessly in Afghanistan fifty years from now the way we are in Syria today. Sad libs, just sad.

Chapter Seven

I’ve been thinking about my Nana a lot lately. It made me cry last night how much I miss her. We were at evening prayer in the sitting room (yes, we are obliged to pray before and after tea and meals, and a half hour reading of the “word of god” at night after dinner. I’m undercover as a non-practicing but baptized Christian for the sake of reducing friction with my homestay ‘mama’) and I have nothing to do but sit quietly and think, because the whole session is in Kiswahili, when all of a sudden I’m thinking about her and the tears start rolling down my face. Embarrassing, yes, but it had been building in mind all day and had finally come to the boiling point here in the quiet of my mind at this, the first real opportunity I’d had for the quiet reflection my heart had been craving all day.
First, because a couple of my friends have asked, I’m going to interject that the reason I came to Africa a month and a half before the volunteer program I’m now working in began was to do some preliminary, primary research for my Master’s thesis, which will be starting in the fall. Because I’m in a separate M.A. program I still need to apply for schools to get accepted to do my Ph.D., which means that I need to do everything I can to set myself off from the pack, including writing a thesis based on real ‘primary’ source research, which means documents actually written by the subjects of the history.
I went to Moçambique to find documents in the national historical archives, if they existed, written by the earliest Portuguese colonists of East Africa. It turned out there was nothing there that was not in the national archives in Lisbon, and I’ve told you a bit about the drama I’ve had getting those home. In the end, the experience of dealing with the bureaucracy and finding something I want, even if I could have found it somewhere else more easily, combined with the fact that I got to get culturally familiar with the country I’ll be writing my thesis on, made the trip worth it academically. And of course, from a purely experiential perspective it was awesome just to see a new and different place.
Now I’m in Mateves, Tanzania, a village in Arusha Province, whose capital, Arusha town, is the biggest city in the north and the center of tourism for Mount Kilimanjaro. I’m here with an organization, OneHeartSource, which is building a mid-sized compound in Mateves that currently supports a small orphanage, a little corn field (‘maize’ in local parlance) and the offices from which they administer the volunteer program.
The volunteers, in addition to mentoring and tutoring the orphans, do manual labor to expand the site (currently focused on a permanent structure for a chicken coop and a pair of five-a-side soccer fields which will be the first facility in a growing community center/clinic complex), teach AIDS/HIV and sex education in local elementary and secondary schools, and live in homestays around the village with families, who get compensated for the cost and inconvenience of hosting us and also benefit from the educational interactions and the individual generosity of the volunteers.
Sunday night, we stayed in Arusha after going on a day-hike to a truly spectacular waterfall. At dinner with a few of the other volunteers the topic of crazy family members came up and, of course, my beloved, departed grandmother was one of the subjects. In the course of describing her I talked about how politically passionate she had been, how she knew Cesar Chavez and how, for a certain memorable period of my mother’s life, she had used to wear intra-uterine contraceptive devices as earrings specifically so that whenever someone asked her about her ‘interesting’ jewelry, she could strike up a conversation about family planning and a woman’s right to control her own reproductive process.
The next morning, we got back to work in Mateves planning our lessons for that afternoon and I ran across a question from our ‘Swali box’ (‘Question box’) that had caught my eye when we’d first translated them. “If you’ve been hiding a condom for a long time, when you use it, will it break?”
Now, there are, of course, all sorts of innocent explanations for the motivation of this question. ‘Hiding’ may have just meant saving; it might have meant hiding from friends to avoid getting teased; it might have meant hiding it from parents in order to hide from them the fact that their child is sexually active or thinking about becoming so. But it also opens up the possibility that the child is afraid of being caught buying new ones, which are subsidized by the government and temptingly cheap, less than eight American cents for a three-pack, because of cultural mores against contraception. Now, regardless of why the child would be hiding them, if I ever knew my Nana, and I like to think I did, the necessity of ensuring that this child had safe access to contraception (even though it’s a sixth grade class, there are older kids in there too because of the state of education in Tanzania) would have rang in her head like an alarm bell.
Partly because of her, and partly just because I’m my grandmother’s grandson and, as I like to think of it, ‘they’ raised me right, I wanted to offer to talk to any of the kids after class who were feeling nervous about buying or getting condoms. I was vetoed by my teaching partners and by the section coordinator who was worried about the repercussions for OHS if word got out to parents that we were giving out condoms in school (which is not precisely what I proposed, I must say). Frankly, I was pretty disappointed in that policy. I’m perfectly willing to take full individual responsibility for it and to do whatever it would take for OHS to maintain the opportunity for plausible deniability, and I think it shows a lack of the courage of our convictions to pass the buck on such an issue.
Anyways, with one thing and another, and arguing, although deferentially, if you can imagine me being deferential, for the importance of it, I had a pretty introspective day during which thoughts about my ideals chased thoughts of my need to learn to bend in high wind, which chased thoughts of my Nana around and around my brain. The whole thing makes me teary eyed again just thinking about how we failed to do what I think she would have wanted us to do, but at the same time, I know she would have wanted me to go with the flow and how proud of me she would have been just for trying and for everything else I’m doing here and for how far I’m coming in my pursuit of my career and everything.
OK. It’s late, I’m gonna break up again if I write about it any longer, and I need to get up early tomorrow if I’m gonna get a run (yes, Ma, I’m running in the mornings regularly here), so good night, strong values and passionate dreams to you all.
I love you Nana.

3/8/10

Chapter Six

Well, I’m headed north now, but nothing is really happening except that the god, English language book that I finally found a few days ago got forgotten in the bed of the pick-up that I got a ride to the hotel in last night. So, I guess I’m stuck with nothing to do but write again. I think I’ll go back and try and finish the narrative of the trip to South Africa.
The South Africa v. Mexico match ended somewhat disappointingly, and I gathered my things to go. I jumped in a taxi, told him to take me to the cheapest hotel he knew and off we go. We’ve only just left the airport grounds when I look through my backpack and realize…
“Crap! I forgot the laptop in the internet café!” I’d plugged it in to get a little bit of a charge.
See, this is where I’m glad it took me a while to write this part. I’ve mentioned it enough in subsequent stories that my mom already knows what happened to her computer. Still, it raised my heart rate for quite a little bit there while we raced back for it. Still, the driver didn’t seem all that annoyed about having to pay the entry toll twice for one fare, and I don’t think he even charged me extra for it, although there’s no way of knowing since there are no taxi meters anywhere on the continent as far as I know (though admittedly I can’t say about South Africa or Egypt).
At any rate, I stayed in this ‘cheap’ hotel for $35 U.S. Nice place, admittedly, and a good transitional place for getting used to African accommodations. I suppose the first twenty-four hours was an acclimatization period in more ways than one. Thus far, knock on wood, it’s the only period during which I was suckered into spending more money than I should have or for something that I didn’t really want or need.
The next morning I went out looking for a bus south. Now the classic image of travel in developing countries is the heavily overloaded mini-bus carrying as many chickens as people inside, and I’ve ridden in my fair share since I’ve been here, certainly. But for international or long distance travel I’ve found that there are plenty of charter bus companies, many running busses far more comfortable than a Greyhound, and at competitive prices.
In this case, none of the three bus lines I visited had any buses headed south that day, or rather, because they left daily at 6 a.m. they had already gone. So I booked a bus for the next morning and had the day to kill. Looking back, I realize I probably could have caught a chapa or dalla-dalla, the local names for the informal mini-busses, but that doesn’t really mean I would have saved any time or money, given that it would not have taken me all the way to Dar-es-Salaam and I would have had to hopscotch all the way.
So, I decided to wander Nairobi, which I didn’t really get to do the last time I was in Kenya. Firstly, this is because I was too young to feel really safe wandering about an African city alone, and secondly, Bernard (my ‘uncle,’ as in, not by blood, but in spirit for those of you who don’t know him) had basically taken me on a scenery-and-wildlife, game parks sort of tour of the country, and the surveying I did with his mapping crew was all in small villages. Thus, I had resolved that this was to be my social and cultural tour in order to round out my experience of the region.
I bought a city map (god thing, too, because there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to the streets, crazy for a colonial capital) and picked out a few destinations within walking distance and set off. I hadn’t gone far when I was stopped by two strangers who began to chat me up about where I was staying, what I was doing and so forth. Turns out they’re tour guides. First, they set me up in a new hotel at like a third or something of the price of the first and then they proceeded to sell me a day tour to a couple of destinations around the city. This was the second and, knock on wood again, the last noteworthy ‘scam’ I was suckered into. It’s not that they didn’t show me some cool shit: a giraffe conservatory where I got to hand feed, pet, take pictures with and be head-butted by giraffes (“Careful! If you don’t keep feeding her while you’re close she’ll butt you!” Said the keeper to two pretty girls just moments after I’d been butted. Thanks for the warning, guy.); I got an interesting view of the main slum, apparently the second biggest in Africa, an odd point of pride, and the site of much of the worst post-election violence a few years ago; and then the national museum, which is mostly natural history and therefore quite boring if you’ve ever been to a natural history museum anywhere in the world, because, with the exception of a few different local animals, natural history is all the same worldwide; but it was definitely things I did not strictly need to see in order to have a fun, exciting and informative day in Nairobi. Heck, I might have made it to the museum, at least, on foot.
After showing me around, the guy who’d been my guide, one of them having gone off to find another group of tourists to rob (joking, he’s got his living to make, same as anyone), the first guy took me to a local bar he liked and we watched the first game of the day. Afterwards, he wanted to take me to get a couple of prostitutes, and he at least insisted that I should be giving him a tip, on top of the 40 bucks or so I’d paid in Kenyan shillings for the tour in the first place. This was after I’d paid for a six-pack-worth of beers for us in the bar, and for a tour that I’d been pretty clear that I did not really need from him from the beginning. Finally I got rid of him, no further tips, no whores, and went back to the room, took a beer snooze and missed both goals in the U.S. v. England game, but caught the ending. I got up at 5:30 in the morning in order to get to the bus pick-up before the guide guy, who insisted he’d need to show me the way to the bus a block and a half from my hotel and would surely have hassled me for another tip. All things considered, I felt pretty tired getting on the bus for Tanzania.
I think I’ll stop here, but I’m hoping to get us all the way across the Zimbabwe border in the next entry, so maybe we’ll be all caught up the present soon. Love to all.

24/7/10-25/7/10

Chapter Five

I got robbed last night.

Calm down mom, dad, I’m alright, everyone is alright, I lost my Blackberry, some cash and the cheap local phone I bought for staying in contact with people here. Wallet is safe, they didn’t get my cards or even the $50 U.S. that was in it. They were incredibly amateur, which made them that much more dangerous, in some ways, but which also made it possible to resist here and there in little ways, hold this or that back and get away with it.

Again, I’m fine, perfectly safe, they never even pointed a gun directly at me, it’s OK. I lost a few pictures, some of which I can take again, and other than that I think I got away clean except for about $60 worth of the phone and currency. My Blackberry is insured and the face was so scratched it was gonna need to be replaced when I got back to the states anyways.

You want the story? OK, here it goes:

I’m in the tiny little bar section of this Thai restaurant, hanging out for the last time with this one friend I’ve met here before I head north in a few days. We’re talking, laughing, planning to go out to a real bar in a few minutes when two black guys come in, no big deal, one is carrying an AK-47 and the other has a handgun, but I don’t see it at first, so I figure the one guy is just the restaurant’s security guard. Around here you see automatic weapons many times a day, so the simple fact of a guy carrying one is no cause for alarm.

It’s not until they start shouting, pushing people around and reaching in peoples’ pockets that you realize what’s going on. Soon people are on the ground or sitting in chairs against the walls with their hands up.

They don’t speak English well at all, but they tell us to put our phones on the floor and they keep shouting at each other to hurry, hurry, and something about a taxi. I pull out my cheap phone and make sure they see me put it down, then they demand cash, I pull out my wallet, thumb the Meticais out of it and fling them at him. For a moment he gestures at me like he’s gonna demand that I open the wallet and show him that it’s empty, but he gets distracted by something else in the room and I tuck the wallet behind me between the two chairs I’m sitting on and the wall. When he looks back at me he notices the square shape in my pocket and reaches for it. Disappointed—I’d almost saved the Blackberry from them—I pull it out and chuck it at him.

After that, I’m basically a spectator. The one with the handgun, at some point before this, had pointed it over peoples’ heads at the wall and fired it. I was looking right at him, I saw where the gun was pointed. There was no impact, no ricochet, the sound was too quiet. It was clearly a replica. Still, the other guy has a real enough looking AK-47, although he holds it very inexpertly. For a moment I tell myself how easy it would be to get ahold of the barrel and keep him from leveling it at anyone. But I tell myself not to be a hero and I just sit there with my heart pounding. I don’t feel helpless: like I said, it would be easy to disarm these guys, seeing as they’ve only got one gun. I’m not helpless, I’m just restraining myself. They’re not worth resisting over a few hundred Meticais.

Good thing, too, because the unintended consequences are impossible to predict. Soon a third guy comes in, with another hand gun that looks just like the first, but I can’t know for sure. And later, it turns out there was a fourth one on the patio which, from the description of the Chinese men out there, sounds like he was carrying a shotgun.

Now the owner, who’s quite drunk, is shouting at them, advancing on them, “So what!” he says in his thick South African accent, “I’m old! Kill me! Go ahead, just kill me!”

They level the AK at his chest and I think to myself, I’m gonna see someone killed tonight. In my mind’s eye I can literally see the blood blossoming on his chest and I can’t look away.

Finally, after an interminable instant, the owner’s friends pull him away and soon the guys have left and we’re all standing around trying to figure out if that really just happened. The bar around us is in chaos, the owner is pissed at everyone and everything, he runs outside, comes back in demanding his keys, saying that the guys’ taxi has “fucked them.” Someone reaches into the fuse box and turns out the lights, which seems like a bad idea, but apparently it prevents the owner from finding the keys. He fumes around, yelling at everyone, talking about how his dignity has been taken from him, which I understand, but he also points at two or three of us younger American guys, calling us ‘Marines’ and saying we’re cowards. Whatever, he was drunk, and he had a right to be pissed. I don’t take it personally.

Meanwhile there’s an older Swedish lady FREAKING. Screaming, crying, slapping her husband. Turns out they took her wedding ring, a tennis bracelet and her purse, which she was sitting on and seems to feel they would not have noticed if her husband hadn’t volunteered it. I feel for both of them. I did the same thing she did with my wallet, didn’t I? But I know he was just trying to keep his wife safe, and there’s not really time to think in that situation. Sucks.

All is said and done and we leave. Our local numbers are put on a list at the bar, but none of us really expect to get anything back. It all still seems surreal, and the only difference I feel is I’m a little bit more nervous walking on the street at night, but otherwise, it really almost feels like nothing’s changed. Some of the people who were there don’t want to post this stuff on their blog. Think it reinforces a prejudiced view of Africa. But this is where it happened. You can’t ignore it and think it will go away once people stop being racist. The only way to make it stop is to take it on, and the best way to do that is to make people talk about it and about how to stop it from happening in the first place. It’s all a very weird and mixed-up set of feelings that I doubt will ever get sorted out.

18/7/10

Chapter Four

I’m doin’ it! I’m feelin’ it an’ I’m doin’ it. Here’s the opening trip story, at least as far as Dubai, for now, we’ll see how much I feel like writing.

Those who received my very first e-mail are aware already that I missed my scheduled flight. I arrived at Tom Bradley International Terminal as the flight was leaving, walked up to the front desk of Emirates STRESSING; on the edge of tears really. But the guy was great to me, gave me a coupon for a discounted night’s stay which, despite being in El Segundo, was kindof ok, and confirmed me on the next day’s flight instead of leaving me on standby, which was incredibly kind of him.

So I went wandering up Sepulveda to find a RadioShack, the last act of my trusty Blackberry before relegation to the position of fallback camera after I packed the charger chord for my parents’ camera but forgot the camera itself, and ran across a great little ghetto fabulous sports bar with low light and red crushed velvet wallpaper (the ribs were amazing, by the way, kind of a honey sesame seasoning) and watched game 3 of the NBA finals. It would be weeks until I got word that it had gone seven games and the Lakers had won. I got none of the details.

But I took good advantage of the hotel’s free WiFi (another ‘last’) to download four solid articles of East African history, which I printed up in the management office in the morning, great thanks to the staff of La Hacienda for that. Then I took a soak in the hot tub and my last morning newspaper in English and some Mexican food, which I rightly expected I’d not find much of here. I got to the airport before the desk even opened and was through security with about three hours to kill, which I believe I spent on a final proofreading of my term paper (which I’ve gotten an ‘A’ on, by the way, simplifying my life considerably).

It’s difficult to condense a sixteen hour plane ride into an appropriately engaging half page, but that is somewhat simplified by the fact that I spent the whole thing reading and annotating the first two articles, sleeping for a few hours, and then writing up the first of two ‘historiographical summaries’ still due before my quarter was truly over. This was aided considerably by the fact that Emirates furnishes their long-haul planes with two power outlets for every three-seat row, but hindered by the fact that they also provide individual screens for every seat, a couple-hundred-video library and video games to boot. Those amenities, added to the leggy blonde Australian flight attendant, who flirted quite pleasantly throughout most of the flight (being the first passenger checked in, by about twenty hours, I got a bulkhead seat, so her fold-up was right across from me) and the really sexy uniforms they wear, including a red hat with a scarf pinned at the temple which hangs down and then wraps around the collar (the only time they have to wear it over their nose and mouth is if they get off the plane in Saudi Arabia: I asked) makes Emirates, hands down, the best airline in the world. I’m not a terribly experienced international traveler, but first hand I can say its better than British Airways, KLM or Lufthansa, and I have agreement for others who’ve flown with more.

Ok, enough with the Emirates ad. We landed in Dubai in the most opulent airport EVER, went through customs pretty quickly, although I ran into some trouble at the declarations post after two guards carrying M4s (I can’t tell you how strange it is to walk by police and even private security toting serious firepower: Beretta, Kalashnikov, serious shotguns held so frankly you’d almost…almost…think they were toys. But you get used to it) noticed me taking pictures of the fuckin’ marble-columned, literally acres-wide baggage claim area. They waved me on when I was a little too willing to open my bag for them (“No, no, no, tell me if you’re carrying anything to declare.” Tourist.).

So, you walk out of the air conditioned arrivals terminal and the heat hits you like a sledge. Luckily its early evening and the desert gets steadily cooler but never so far as cold, or even really cool. They take you to in a bus to the Millennium Airport Hotel, which is as opulent as everything in Dubai, even though the rooms in the ‘Emirates Wing,’ which are compped, including dinner, anytime snack and breakfast for passengers with overnight layovers, like me, are quite modest.

I had a bit of an embarrassing episode when I first got into the room. None of the lights would turn on. The TV turned on, and I even went so far as to check the circuit board before calling the front desk in confusion.

*Sigh* “Sir, you must put you key card in the slot by the door.”

It had looked like a light switch, but it had no moving parts.

Tourist.

So I grab a cab downtown with the doctor and lawyer twins who’d sat next to me on the plane, but we got dropped off in the wrong place and by the time we’ve walked almost the whole ‘round it looking for the entrance, the gates are closed and we miss our chance to go to the top of whatever-it’s-called tower, currently the tallest in the world or something, I think. Shit, saved me some money, though. Turns out its quite expensive for some vertigo and a few photographs.

So we took a few pictures from the base, wandered around Dubai Mall, which is like Mall of America type of huge, then headed off to this bar the Sheila had told us about. I will say about the tower that it’s a pretty impressive building that won’t fit in the camera frame, or even the field of human vision, whole. You look at the base and start looking up and up from about fifty yards away and by the time you get about halfway up, the lights at the bottom have already disappeared from even your peripheral vision.

The bar was also impressive. Four patios on two levels, two rooms indoors, live music, covers of John Mayer unfortunately, three bars and beach access with some impressive yachts at anchor in the bay. The Sheraton Hotel was next door. The place had taken advantage of the transit crowd, like us, by building a big white dome, air-conditioned and with its own bar and a big screen TV feed. It was the night of the opening ceremony and it was kind of crowded when we first got there, but it soon emptied out and we hung out on one of the patios, near a fountain with a broad pool that must have been quite expensive to feed with clear blue water in the desert air during the day.

We met up with a couple of guys we’d eaten dinner with at the hotel who had made it to the top of the tower, saw their photos and had some weak, overpriced drinks. Whatever, I figured I was lucky to find a wet bar at all in a Muslim country. The one guy was a kind-of douchie if gregarious thirty-something bartender from San Diego (“Don’t say I’m from L.A.!” Wah.) and the other his lapdog friend, so I went home with the twins. I had another summary to write, after all, and I surprised myself by mustering the motivation to read a page or two before going to bed.

Last word on Dubai is to repeat what I told the twins, slightly buzzed at a price that should have gotten me plastered, in the cab on the ultra-modern ten-lane main freeway on the way back to the hotel. It’s a place that feels so foreign to me that I can’t really be sure, but I think, with a few more weeks in town that it’s a place I’d really enjoy.

The trip to Nairobi was a six hour version of the same flight from L.A. but a less luxurious plane and a flight attendant team made up of the most incredible variety of gorgeous women you can imagine from the senior attendant, a gorgeous Nilotic black woman, maybe Sudanese, but with an unfortunate angry demeanor, to a buxom blonde Dutch, a dark haired beauty and the new girl they were training, a perfect-featured Spanish girl who I swear would have been putty for me if she hadn’t been training and I hadn’t had to write.

I still had a page or two to write when I got off the plane. Had to find an ATM, then bought a Nigerian team jersey to get change for the bills it gave me, The jersey cost five times as much as the visa it facilitated and I still haven’t worn it since I didn’t make the game. Now it’s basically useless since the damn team’s banned from playing internationally for two years. Fuck. Oh well, at least it saved me thirty or more dollars on the Zimbabwean visa.

I found a café on the airport campus that let me plug in, but I didn’t finish the paper (so vague and distracted because of the noise that I’m frankly surprised I did well enough on it to pull the full ‘A’ in the class) until the seventieth minute, so I missed the South Africa goal and only barely caught Mexico’s equalizer after dashing off an e-mail and attachments at a badly virus infected internet café next door that’s almost sunk my last flashdrive and I barely kept off my mom’s computer. I did keep it clean, Ma, I swear, but we really should get a Norton subscription on this thing. I’m finally sold on the two hundred dollars a year for it.

Took a couple of pics of the café where I caught the end of the game to commemorate the end of my term and the belated beginning of my summer trip. (But it looks like I've lost these pictures, at least until I get a new Blackberry and can upload the backup of the main memory drive onto it from the old one)

2/7/10-3/7/10