Tribe Blog Archive

Too Many Blogs

jonathanstray — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 11:03:38 GMT

Facing the reality that Tribe is going down, and that most of the people I meet aren't on it anyway, I have decided to see if I can live with Facebook (search for Jonathan Stray.) There are a lot of things I don't like about Facebook, but this seems to be a necessary step, and I do have (some) hope. I have revived my ailing LJ account as my "personal" blog (jstray.livejournal.com). You'll probably only be interested in this if you actually know me. My other site, equivocality.net, remains my more public space for writing, photography, and administration of the Writers Travel Scholarship (which you should enter, of course.) All of this means that I won't be maintaining my tribe blog further, unless someone can point me to an easy tool that will repeat my LJ. Lots of crazy shit is happening here in India, but you'll have to read about that elsewhere ;) - Jonathan (from Mysore, India)

On the Occasion of One Year of Travel

jonathanstray — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 19:21:24 GMT

There are myths to travel. There are mythic voyages of the ones who went before. A long time ago, somebody rode a motorcycle all through Indonesia, and then spent four months in a crumbling room in Jakarta penning the very first Lonely Planet. We all want to be that person, every last backpacking one of us. Like Joseph Conrad, we are irresistibly drawn to the vast blank spaces on the map. But there aren't any, not anymore. You still sometimes meet that generation. You run into an aging hippy in a tourist bar in Laos who will tell you how you used to be able to get into Afghanistan with a bottle of whisky and a pack of American cigarettes for the border guards. The golden age – the age of the myths and dreams for me and every other international rat – seems to have been the 1960s, when the borders were mostly open and Western kids were setting out for something new. So I'm told. I don't know for sure what it was like, because I wasn't there. I do know that the time generated a number of legends, which are now the names of far away places, and still sound almost mystical. Tangier. Bali. Islamabad. Kathmandu. And India, of course India. There was something to discover then, something to bring back. That first photo of a white person standing next to a tribal woman with a lip plate must have really been something, back before it got printed in all the Ethiopia guidebooks. We chase those myths still. They're the dream that sends us away from home. For that I am thankful, but these stories have also broken my heart. They're from a world long gone. The world at the present time is both big and small. Although we still don't understand each other – when was the last time you talked to someone living on a different continent in a different culture? – nowhere is out of reach any more. Airfare is too cheap. Communications are too simple. Time was, your family only heard from you through postcards; and you checked not instantaneous email but faulty, unreliable post restante in every new city. Declarations of love from afar were written on yellowed paper, and if you didn't know for certain where the letter might catch you, well, that was all the more romantic. "Meet me in the central square of Islamabad on April 15th at noon," you would say to her on your last night together in the sweltering, alien heat. "Yes, my love," she would reply, "inshallah." God willing. The world away was more uncertain then. A long way from home, a long distance from civilization as you knew it, reality itself wavered, seemed subject to new laws. It's that waking dream I still chase, that suspension of disbelief, the step into an alternate universe, but it's getting harder and harder to find. There is a McDonalds on too many corners now We rail. We despair. We decry globalization as it homogenizes the old cultures of the world. We pull out our palmtops and write about the corrupting influence of technology. First we curse the broken-down bus on the dirt road, then we fret over the changes that paved highways bring. Above all, we try to get farther, weirder, more authentic somehow. We don't want to know that the nomads all carry mobile phones now. Really what we want is to be standing in the same place 100 years ago, but the truth is that we wouldn't have been there, because we don't have the guts to travel without a guidebook. And the solo sojourns of yesteryear become the adventure tours of today, and then the package holidays of tomorrow. The change happens so gradually we don't notice. We don't want to notice, because it tells us how unoriginal we are. Poverty, too, we don't understand any better than we used to. It makes us very uncomfortable to be surrounded by filth, to be reminded of ignorance and desperation. All we understand now is that we can't call them savages anymore. We see people eat with their hands, mutilate the genitals of their female children, bribe their way to the top of government and laugh contemptuously at the stupidity of those of another religion, not even bothering to mask their racism as decent people would. Well, what of it? Sure, Western culture invented democracy and the internet, but then again, as one thoughtful African reminded me, we also put a hole in the ozone layer. We come to understand all of this, and if we are lucky we are changed, but we don't know what to bring back home. In the end we settle on some crappy souvenirs hand-made by one of the last villages of indigenous peoples, as encouraged under the white eyes of a smiling NGO worker. Why do we travel at all? Every one of us – and we know who "we" are, and maybe you are one of us too – every traveler has asked themselves this question many times. There is never a clear answer. It's partially for us, and it's partially for the world. It's about discovering what we can, both within and without. It's about exploration. It's about learning something. If we can manage it, it's about teaching something. It used to be that you could discover something new just by going physically far away from where you started. But now they get HBO in Cambodia. You can still learn a lot about yourself by leaving home, but don't kid yourself that you're automatically going to bring back anything better or more insightful than what's already written in a thick book in your local library. Changing places is not enough. Exploration requires something else. If physically getting there is easy, really being there is still very hard. It requires learning languages. It requires making friends. It requires time and work. It's can be a very lonely, alienating experience. It requires reflection, and study, and careful deconstruction of one's own prejudices and expectations. Yes, you wanted to see nomads leading their camels across the desert. You wanted Africans with buckets on their heads, authentic Thai curry and fresh Yak cheese. You wanted to be in the pictures from the books, but now the nomads drive Toyotas and show you Britney Spears videos on their mobile phones, and it turns out that real Thai curry is too hot for you to eat anyway. And although you could experience the old strange magic of total disconnection by eschewing the internet while you're in Africa, that's about you, not them. In the evenings they're in the cybercafés chatting on Skype. We are disappointed, we feel vaguely cheated, we decide that reality is somehow less interesting than the myths. And too, we all wanted to go where no one has gone before. We have this dream of being observers. But we're not observers. There are too many of us, and we change the thing we are looking at. I've seen it dozens of times. A few travelers arrive at a beautiful place. At first, no one speaks English. Eventually someone realizes that they can make money by running a guesthouse. The guesthouse starts to offer Western food, and perhaps music. The place gets written up in a guidebook. More tourists come. The man in the next village who used to invite foreigners to tea just for the novelty of it starts to charge for the cultural experience. At some critical mass, the internet arrives. More guesthouses spring up. With the money coming into the town, people modernize. They buy machinery, fertilizer, and cars, but of course they save a few traditional houses, camels, rice paddies, whatever, just to show the tourists their ancient way of life. Eventually, culture turns into theatre. The locals make money, or at least some of them do, and the tourists get their postcard images. Everyone is happy. But why are we – foreigners and locals alike – why are we doing this? The last stage of bicultural evolution is the resort town. Intrepid British explorers used to come to Agadir to see the camel market. Now they come to gamble, to dine on imported lobster, and to sun themselves by the pool. And maybe, just maybe, these are the same people who found Morocco untamed and exotic when they were single and poor. My great fear is that I have so far discovered only the myths profitably sold to me, that I am really no different than them. So I read St. Exupery in the desert nearby and cry slightly that Agadir holds no more mystery. But of course it does; just not where Exupery says it used to be. It's somewhere else now, not physically but psychically. If I'm really the traveler I think I am – if I can figure out what it means to be an explorer in an interconnected age – then I will find it, and I will at last understand the new stories that must be written.

Call Me On My Birthday!

jonathanstray — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 11:18:12 GMT

I will be having a party at City Bar in St. Petersburg tonight, from about 9 pm local time (that would be 10 AM Saturday, PST) onward. The owner is baking me a cake. Fire up your skype and call the bar at +7 812 448 58 37.

Internet vs. The Art Gallery

jonathanstray — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 18:42:15 GMT

Went to see the Tate Modern in London. Got slightly annoyed. Wrote a little essay. "Enter YouTube. Enter MySpace, Facebook, and all the others. Enter blogs, cheap DV cameras, cheap professional-grade software, cheap everything. If the point of Web 2.0 is to blur the distinction between information producer and consumer, then surely that shift applies also to art. The obvious corollary is this: there is no logistical or economic reason why anyone who wishes should not be an artist, and have their art just as accessible as anyone else's. Just as the journalism establishment has been forced to rethink itself after the advent of blogs, the Art Establishment may very soon find itself forced to reconsider all aspects of not only the creation and distribution of art, but what it means to be an artist." more here: www.equivocality.net/the-internet-vs-the-art-gallery

Gunther and the Sunshine Girls

jonathanstray — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:50:45 GMT

"Günther is a 29 year old swedish musician (real name Mats Söderlund), and is sometimes referred to as "Gunther Levi." He is now the most respected person in the world. When he's not working on his sexual-revolution Günther is also a club owner, and a former model. He first started his musical career in 2004 - catching attention for his mullet, moustache and facial expressions." "Ooh, you touch my ta la la" (Ding Dong Song) http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7284751201680710911 "It's a no no... and you like it." (Tutti Frutti Summer Love) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3sNARLNu_Y I'm speechless. I'm a fan.

The Hits Keep Coming

jonathanstray — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 13:52:11 GMT

This Tuesday morning at 10:00, I'm interviewing the Brothers Quay for Film Quarterly. I did this by emailing Film Quarterly and telling them that I had an interview with the Brothers; then opening the phonebook, calling the Brothers and telling them that I was a journalist working for FQ. I am shocked to discover how easy this is. (If you don't know these film makers, by the way, you really should.)

I Am Published

jonathanstray — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 00:42:56 GMT

My Robodock article is on the front page of wired.com today, or go here: http://www.wired.com/culture/art/news/2007/10/robothand It's 550 words or so, and they also bought 13 of my pictures plus captions for them. This is , believe it or not, my first published piece of journalism. I find myself strangely ineloquent over how this makes me feel, but it's some variant of "good". And suddenly my journalism resume looks pretty good too.

Girl With Music

jonathanstray — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 09:30:54 GMT

I want a girl with music. Not a someone with a soundtrack, but a woman who takes her music personally, just as it was always meant to be. I can see the songs in her life, the different girls she is. Sometimes she lies on the bed and listens to Belle and Sebastian. She stares out the window at the mist over the sun; she wears tights with polka-dots on them and thick-rimmed black glasses. She probably has the album on vinyl. She’s not exactly shy but her way is slightly sideways, something reserved and hesitant about the girl who’s always sees everything a little bit different. Belle and Sebastian makes her feel sad and happy at the same time when she’s alone with them. They tell her secrets. But sometimes she’s on stage with torn fishnets. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are playing and she’s dancing in the living room at 9:00PM on a Saturday night, waiting for her posse to arrive. They’re drunk already and loud, probably British, stepping into her apartment supporting one another and screaming over the tops of their cleavage. That’s the night out to come, a rage, a raw euphoria blind and sloppy. It’s screaming sex when you just don’t care anymore what the neighbors hear. If there’s a cost for this much life, so be it, but dear god she’ll think about it tomorrow; and the fishnets will never be mended because that’s the girl she is. Other nights she listens to Massive Attack. This one’s too tall and precise to be ignored. This one has taste. She understands perfume. She’s not hot, she’s sexy. The colors of her apartment all match – she designed it herself – and every accessory is just right. She probably has perfect breasts and she definitely has perfect speech, except when she snorts and spills wine onto her cream silk blouse. That’s why you love her, for the sparks of joy that flaw her elegance; and as she tears up the driveway in her one vice – christ, that’s a slick car – you suddenly see the claws implied by that chewed-up bassline. Then there was the day you found her 17 years old in the sunshine and listening to Led Zeppelin. Zep is immortal. Page and Plant will be with us forever, they will exist in every generation as long as some beautiful child has hips that want to move. She’s got long red hair and you yourself are too young to appreciate the youth of her innocent face, but you see her there, eyes closed, just moving to that beat. It’s old. Page wails and Plant whines and the emotion gets her, but it’s the throb that makes her dance, makes her move, just move, for no one but herself; and you smile to know that it’s really in her, that rock and roll could never be just a show. And she’s the soprano who makes grown men weep for her on that big Italian stage. And she’s freaking out to some other Miles Davis, yelling go! go! go! with no less passion than Kerouac. And she’s lounging on that grand piano with dark eyes and promises. It’s in her, it’s through her and— hold on— She’s looking at me. She just put something on that I’ve never heard before.

Who Should I Be Sleeping With in London?

jonathanstray — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 12:44:10 GMT

I am heading to London Monday. I don't have any accommodation plan at this point. Hotels and hostels are freakin' expensive, and also much less interesting than staying with interesting people. Come on, kids. SOMEONE must know SOMEONE cool in London. I will repay my host's generosity by cooking some excellent non-British food for them.

Michel Gondry Pwns the Critics on Youtube

jonathanstray — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 18:53:37 GMT

The noted French film-director Michel Gondry recently uploaded a short video to YouTube where he solves a Rubik's Cube with his feet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-eZEDkFYFA Someone figured out how he did it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TaVsaWjzsds&mode=related&search= So Michel solved it again, with his nose: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB8XedMowDU I love creative people + cheap digital video software + web2.0.

editor-in-crime

jonathanstray — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:18:33 GMT

it shouldn't count that one girl likes my poems but of course it does

Burma

jonathanstray — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 13:49:34 GMT

The government is killing people and systematically blacking out all information. Right now. I am toying with the idea of taking this as a personal insult. I am trying to figure out if there’s anything to be gained by encouraging myself to consider such problems on a day-to-day basis. I am wondering exactly how big my sphere of give-a-shit is, or should be. I’ve seen enough of the world now to understand that this is real. I can see it in my head; I can imagine the panic of the first shots as the soldiers start firing into the crowd, the crush of bodies, and the deeply disturbing indifference of the troops who are even now killing foreign photographers. I can feel the rage and denial of watching your girlfriend fall and being forced to leave her as you run. When I play through these scenes, there is some part of me screaming. To be honest, I’m glad for that part. It feels like the beginning of comprehension. It’s the only hold I’ve got on something so far out of my experience, it might as well not exist in my universe. These days of the Burmese are lost to me. There’s really nothing I can do at this point. There is only the future, and a question I find myself asking. I need to know just what, if anything, this has to do with me. This is not an abstract question. This is not about idealistic notions of the bonds between all human beings. This is not about guilt or responsibility; I'm not sure I really believe in either of those concepts. This is about me wondering whether I would have to change my behavior if I were to truly accept the reality of these events, and others like them -- and if so, in what way?

GIANT HAND BREEDS NEWS STORY

jonathanstray — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 00:52:58 GMT

Wired.com has given me the go-ahead for a 500 word piece on Robochrist Industries' giant hand, which was built and shown at Robodock this year. They may also buy some of my photos for a gallery. FUCKING YAY

There is Creation Everywhere and I Am Happy

jonathanstray — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 17:35:03 GMT

Spent today dreaming up things to put inside the air-cannon shells that will be pretty when we fire them. Top choices: burning steel wool and methanol with colorant -- green explosions, anyone? And that's just my own silly project. There is an amazing amount of creativity unleashed here and I am inspired. I'm going to have to write about some of my favorite pieces; there's some really, really nice stuff. It's like Burning Man, but no dust great, free food for artists hot showers better art dutch girls And so many of my friends are here! I ran into Amacker yesterday and we both freaked the fuck out during an SRL meeting.

Countdown of the Insane and Talented

jonathanstray — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 17:09:29 GMT

Boom fucking boom. That’s the sound of a V1 rocket engine igniting. A huge orange flame shoots out the end of the big horizontally mounted rusty steel tube. I run out of the workshop and put my earplugs in to watch. It’s loud. I think I heard someone say it’s 150 decibels. The ground is shaking. You can feel it in your feet. After a few seconds, Mark Pauline shuts the rocket off. A blonde in dark blue overalls looks up at the high ceiling, sees white flakes slowly floating down all through the enormous warehouse. “We shook the feathers loose from the rafters,” she says, and we all turn around and go back to work at Survival Research Laboratory’s temporary workshop at Robodock 2007. I’m making bullets. I’m a one man precision munitions factory for an improbable show. Incredibly, the bottled water supplied by the event organizers fits perfectly into the barrel of the air cannon. So I’m cutting the bottles in half and pouring plaster into each one, using a wooden jig to leave a hole for the flare. We’re going to be firing live signal flares embedded in plaster slugs at 500 miles per hour at a huge plywood set. This is normal for SRL. I’m excited because I’m going to be on the gun crew, a reward for days of finicky work. There’s a sudden roar and cloud of dust, and everyone rushes off again. Fire and sound always attract attention, and doubly so here, because it’s always something cool. Moths, one of the Flaming Lotus Girls called them, referring to the crowd attracted by their pyro test last night. This time, the moths are running towards a large round horizontal ring topped by a platform. A man is standing on the platform, operating the controls. It’s a home-made flying machine. The whole thing is hovering a meter or so above the ground, suspended by two huge counter-rotating propellers. The pilot/engineer’s name is David and he’s from Australia. I heard him talking earlier about how he’s trying to find a small jet engine for the next version. He wants to fly higher too, but his wife won’t let him. “What the hell is all this smoke?” asks Justin, walking into the huge empty warehouse. I explain that’s it’s dust kicked up by the flying machine. “Shit,” he says, “I missed it.” But it will fly again. Meanwhile, we have work to do. He’s working for Robochrist Industries for this festival, the machine/performance art group of Christian Ristow. He and Christian and six others built a giant mechanical robot arm over the last two weeks, almost entirely from scrap metal. It’s hydraulically powered and controlled by a home-made robotic glove, welded out of scrap and wired with cables salvaged from the derelict cranes running overhead in this ancient shipyard. I was working on the wiring yesterday, after which we had our first successful test. It’s an insane feeling of power to control a twenty-foot long forearm and hand, each minute wrist and finger motion translated into thousands of pounds of metal force by the creaking, leaking hydraulics. I’m giggling. “I want to crush something,” I tell Justin. “Can we get a car or something?” “Sure! The organizers found us a couple old cars,” Justin tells me. “We’ll crush them tomorrow.” The hand sits outside the main building on the cracked asphalt of the old yard. To the right is the Serpent Mother, a beautiful metal snake in stainless steel and fire, a year’s work by 100 members of the Flaming Lotus Girls. It’s as beautiful as Survival Research Labs is loud. To the left is the Large Hot Pipe Organ, a forest of enormous rusty pipes of different lengths, standing vertically. It’s MIDI controlled and capable of a range of percussive sounds from sighs to thunderous bangs; they were testing it late last night but the organizers asked them to stop, for fear of waking people up all over Amsterdam. Behind me, there’s the “piano bar”, a ring of pianos attached together in a large circle and slowly rotating, barstools and all. On the side of the main warehouse, Taiko drummers are practicing on their huge round drums, suspended fifty feet in the air. Inside, there’s a giant white fabric helium balloon that looks like a pillow or a cloud. Behind that, a bar is decorated with fire-breathing dragons. Huge metal girders have been welded together into multi-story structures in one corner; in the center a robotic band is rehearsing, banging their instruments as their creators test and debug. A performance troupe in bright jester-like costu mes is choreographing something off to one side. A crew of five people have been shrink-wrapping old furniture in white plastic for the last week; as of yet I have no idea why. There’s some sort of video art project with a huge projector and re-purposed television sets. Riggers fly from cranes and the air is filled with the flash and sizzle of welding. Most of the art at Robodock is built on-site from scrap in the weeks before the opening. That opening is in one hour, and the joint is jumping. Caroline of the Flaming Lotus Girls stands next to me at the sink, washing god-knows-what off her hands. “Are you ready to run tonight?” I ask her. “Yup, all ready.” “What time?” “7:00, 8:30, and 12:15,” she says, consulting a list of times written in sharpie on her hand. I watch her walk away, and wish I had my nomex jumpsuit in my luggage. It’s fireproof. That would be handy around here, and I'd fit right in. [For more photos, go to http://www.equivocality.net/photos/album/72157602084611001/Robodock-2007.html]

ROBODOCK!

jonathanstray — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 20:43:34 GMT

I am in Amsterdam, volunteering for the Robodock festival which starts next Wednesday. Half of the SF fire community is here. The Flaming Lotus Girls are here. Pyrokinetics is here. SRL is here, has been for two weeks and is setting up their largest show in years. And all of their European counterparts are here as well. This is big. Very big. There is a ridiculous amount of creativity being unleashed on the robodock site. The main building is a former shipyard. The photo above shows about a quarter of it, which means that it's one of the biggest indoor spaces I've ever seen -- and it's all being filled with Neat Stuff. Last night I rode through the space on a vintage Amsterdam bicycle (loaned to me by an insane Russian girl, of course) and was just completely freaking out, flying from bay to bay among the late night crews, gliding past impromptu machine shops, enormous steel structures the size of buildings that weren't there yesterday, an aerial dance rehearsal, and a team busy wrapping furniture in white plastic for reasons I don't yet comprehend. Old rock-and-roll and the flash of welding filled the hall. Afterwards, I huddled around the fire and drank beer with artist friends old and new. And today, aside from setting up this 1950's era Italian bumper-car pavillion -- it's being used as a dance floor -- many of the Flaming Lotus Girls and I took the afternoon off to go to visit the studio of an artist named Theo Jansen, who builds "strandbeest", that is, "beach animals". They're wind powered and entirely mechanical kinetic scultpure / creatures, and, well, generally cool and beautiful. His actual site, strandbeest.org, is not that great, but youtube it for some amazing videos (including a pretty good BMW ad, it turns out) Artgasm! I'm fucking exhausted though. Work starts at 10 each day, not bad but it's hard to get to bed before 3 (or 4) with so much Cool around. Oh, and best quote so far, due to Tasha of the Flaming Lotus Girls: "Did you say we're getting a 2100 gallon propane tank? Oooh, that just made my nipples hard!"

Spill

jonathanstray — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 16:51:06 GMT

I want to spill my language over your body watch it run over your skin and leave goosebumps I'd whisper near your ear, not in it the sounds would slide down your neck around the curve of your throat between your breasts a single rivulet breaking off to chill a nipple a contrast to the warmth of my breath your eyes would close my tongue would roam everywhere without ever touching you down the center of your spine I would whisper watching your skin contract with the liquid of ideas slowly spreading I want to speak to your core the senseless sounds dissolving and you wouldn't know if it was my words my fingers my tongue or my touching you every point of contact we would catalog not a counting but a pressure on your mind a loss when I passed the perfect spot a tease a repeated sentence (around the curve of your throat) I'd tell you what I would do if I could talk to your body but I'd need to be closer first to calm your trembling and the hairs at the back of your neck would listen to what my fingers were saying elsewhere you would talk back no words the words are mine a finger curling the strong muscles your thighs relaxing I'd hear your breath and your faint pleas just... there... and your chest rises sharply just... here... (I would say) and something flickers in your eyes which I am watching as you watch my lips without understanding a single word but feeling the lines and the rhythm as they curl on your curves around the compound curve of your waist one way a finger one way a word and where does that hand go now? when you open your eyes again I'm no longer there but a piece of paper pinned to the bedstead is blank there's a pen you start crying because you know you need the flat of my back to write upon meanwhile I publish the poem that you wrote for me I tell the world what I learned they think it's fiction and pay me well for the secrets I've worked out of you they think the cries are mine but hey, It's a living lover

The Choice

jonathanstray — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 14:07:38 GMT

I've decided to trust you with the crimes we haven't yet committed you should know them I think of you I don't know if I want to you're probably a bad bet, stranger I'm probably a bad bet too but it's true I want to fly a kite with you I lose my mind sometimes remembering your yes you leave me with a choice there may not be a good answer but there's always a good story

What is the right way to complain about globalization?

jonathanstray — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:47:23 GMT

"Is capitalism inherently flawed, violent and unfair? Are the WTO, World Bank, and IMF to blame for huge amounts of the world’s misery? Is transnational capital flow or multinational corporations an inherently bad idea? I don’t know. Read that again. I don’t know. This is what I am saying that the author of the above quoted paragraph is not. The world is big and very, very complex. I’m seeing as much as I can personally; for the rest I must rely on second-hand accounts." http://equivocality.net/what-is-the-right-way-to-complain-about-globalization/

Kicking It Old-World. Or, Why I Miss Africa

jonathanstray — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 16:35:03 GMT

I am in Budapest, staying in an apartment on the top floor of a building constructed in 1897. The ceilings are vaulted, the floor is hardwood, the central courtyard is lined with intricate wrought iron railings. When I stick my head out of the French windows, I can see that the entire block is full of beautiful old fin-de-secle apartment buildings. Actually, most of central Budapest looks like something out of an architecture textbook. A joke: A European thinks 100 kilometers is a long distance. An American thinks 100 years is a long time. Europe is old. Which is to say, America is young, one of the youngest states in existence, in fact . Of course there are many countries which officially came into existence in the 20th century, but the cultures in them were always established long before the modern political boundaries. American culture is an anomaly in that respect, and Americans have a correspondingly warped sense of time and history. In America a 300 year old building is a historic monument. Here people just, you know, live in such buildings. There's a pub in Prague which has been serving beer for the last thousand years. It is very obvious that Europe is the source of Western culture. Sure, there are differences. My personal favorite is the two-cheek kiss. In general, Europe has more sophisticated food, more complex and subtle literature, more elaborate buildings. Everything is slightly more *refined* here. Language, and use of language, is also a major difference. Everyone speaks at least two languages: their national language, and (usually) English. Yesterday I was talking to a 22 year old student who spoke Hungarian, English, French, Italian, and Russian. This is just normal here. I'm glad I have a little French, or I'd feel completely like a loser. I mean, not speaking Hungarian is acceptable, but ONLY speaking English is just uncool. And, to my surprise, Europe has a lot of cool. I have found this amazing little cafe in Central Budapest, a series of rooms around a courtyard inside an ancient brick building that looks half-bombed. Funky doesn't even begin to describe it. On the walls were works by local artists; one room was full of clawfoot bathtubs converted into benches. During the day they like to play Massive Attack and Morcheeba, and there's free Wifi. There's an underground party scene, cool flyers, cooler people. Tonight I'm heading to a club which is actually the top floor and rooftop of a communist-era department store. You ride a tiny freight elevator to get up into it (of course), where a uniformed valet offers you your first drink of the night from a cooler full of booze. And I'm standing on that roof top, drinking my five Euro cocktail, wearing the jeans I bought in Paris and the hat I bought in Addis-Ababa, distracted by the blonde polyglot in Italian jeans, thinking: this is too familiar. This is too easy. I am starting to miss Africa. I miss the noisy streets with their hordes of sidewalk food vendors. I miss the cheap accommodation. I miss the unpretentiousness of the people. Hell, I miss black people. There aren't many here. I miss the open landscapes between towns. I miss the desert, the savanna, and the mountains. I'm even starting the miss the bad parts. That's what nostalgia will do to you. I miss the crowded buses and the crazy transport systems with unmarked bus stops. I miss the sweltering heat that got into your brain. I miss the informality of village life, where you just went and talked to someone if you needed something. I miss the uncertainly and therefore excitement of the simplest tasks, such as finding a bank that changes my brand of traveler's cheques. I miss the relief of walking into an air-conditioned cafe in the capital after weeks in the sticks. I miss the bizarre excitement of finding chocolate mousse on the menu of a small-town restaurant. I miss figuring out which of the little stores sold the coldest beer. I miss the border crossings where sweaty men in cardboard shacks smiled or scowled at the dusty foreigner, and took extra time examining a passport from very far away before they stamped it. And yes, I miss the attention I got just from being white, even if just about everyone I met wanted something from me. I miss not understanding what the hell is going on. I miss the sense of being out of place. I miss the strangeness, the newness, the feeling of your universe expanding. Africa made my world bigger. Europe reveals its secrets to me too easily, and I discover that I'm really not all that surprised. I need to leave the developed world soon. I need to leave the West. I need to be alone and confused, surrounded by people I do not understand, eating food I've never seen before, full of wide-eyed wonder once more.

Wookies and other news

jonathanstray — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:58:19 GMT

Okay, so there are no wookies in my life. Except for the photo, which truly made me LOL. Instead there is Mella, who is probably even cuter than Chewbacca. It was completely wonderful to see her. It's like a little bit of home came over to meet me and give me cuddles. Mella and I and her two friends from Canada hung out in Budapest the past week. We stayed at Judit's aunt's empty luxury apartment. It's an amazing place, two floors with balconies waaay at the top of Pest hill, overlooking the whole city. Really the only drawback was that the bus service wasn't too good in the area, because of course everybody drives in that neighborhood. BMWs, Mercedes, that sort of thing. But that's all over now, because there's a limit to how much mooching even I can get away with. So now I'm crashing with this crazy Amercian I met on Couchsurfing.com. He's been all over the world, probably more places than I have, and on a much tighter budget. He also speaks five languages, runs a daily video blogcast, and loves talking to girls almost as much as I do. So we'll probably amuse each other for a few weeks. Crucially, there are two cafes around the corner with wifi. I intend to frequent them. My writing has hit a bit of a stall. I've got several pieces on the go but I'm just not *excited* about any of them, which usually means I'm writing the wrong thing or writing it the wrong way. I'm sure I'll figure it out. I am reading Borges and Neil Gaiman and just finished Tom Wolfe's latest book. So... well, it's fun to imagine merging those styles together. It looks like I will be volunteering for Robodock, setting up the tech infrastructure the week before the festival. I am very very excited about that, and will head to Amsterdam at the beginning of next month. After that, India I think. I do love Europe, it's a lot of fun and gives me space to play, but the developing world always seems to make me feel a little more... real. I will need that soon. I'm once again craving being out where I don't understand anything.

Deconstructing The Kalahari Typing School for Men

jonathanstray — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 20:16:05 GMT

I have just finished Alexander McCall Smith’s novel "The Kalahari Typing School for Men". This is one of the books in a series called "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency", and like all of the books in this series, it is set in Botswana, where Smith was born. It’s a pleasant enough read, apparently aimed at the young adult reader. What I had difficulty with was the completely different cultural context. The characters act in what are, to me, unexpected ways; their priorities and values are manifestly not Western. This is fun, and also disconcerting. For example, one of the male characters speaks of his children this way: "I found a good wife to marry me, and I had the two fine sons I told you about. I also had three daughters." the few references to AIDS are extremely oblique: "The mother, who is late, had that disease which has run this way and that through the country, and everywhere." and meat has that privileged role that it often assumes in poorer countries: "Boys should have good appetites, and it was normal for them to want to eat large amounts of cake and sweet things. As they grew older, they would move to meat, which was very important for a man." The main character, Mma. (Momma) Precious Ramotswe, is also deeply conservative, grounded in and nostalgic for the Old Botswana. This is potrayed as a matter of genetic and historic identity in the book: "Mma Makutsi should make more of herself, thought Mma Ramotswe. She should remember who she was—which was a citizen of Botswana, the finest country in Africa. … You could be proud to be a Motswana, because your country had never done anything of which to feel ashamed. It had conducted itself with complete integrity, even in times when it had to contend with neighbors in a state of civil war. It had always been honest, too, without that ruinous corruption that had shamed so many other countries in Africa, and had bled away the wealth of an entire continent. They had never stooped to that, because Sir Seretse Khama … had made it clear to every single citizen that there was to be no taking or giving of bribes, no dipping into money that belonged to the country. And everyone had listened to him and obeyed this precept because they could recognize in him the qualities of chiefly greatness which his forebears, the Khamas, had always possessed. Those qualities could not be acquired overnight, but they took generations to mature (whatever people said.) … [he was] a person who had been brought up to serve." I find the “brought up to serve” very interesting, given that historically, African tribal rulers haven’t been particularly democratic. I find this to be a bit of creative reinterpretation of African tradition on the author’s part, and it’s not the only instance. In fact, despite Mma Ramotswe’s rants about the old “moral” Botswana, the book seems to contain a fair number of rather modern spins on traditional values – traditional values that are, by Western secular standards, sometimes distasteful. For example, while Mma Ramotswe is clearly a devout Christian, several pages of the short book are devoted to skewering a particularly zealous congregation: "'Yes,' said the minister. 'There are strangers here. You are very welcome, but you must declare your sins before God’s people. We shall help you. We shall make you strong.' There was now complete silence. Mma Makutsi looked around anxiously. Surely this was no way to welcome visitors. Usually congregations greeted strangers warmly and clapped when you stood up. This must be a strange religion to which the apprentice had subscribed." whereupon Mma Ramotswe hams it up about being such a sinner that she can feel the fires of hell right this instant, and has to leave the church in a rush. The author also clearly feels strongly about the status of women. The protagonist is female, and several passages read like classic women’s lib: "The trouble with men, of course, is that they went about with their eyes half closed much of the time. Sometimes Mma Ramotswe wondered whether men actually wanted to see anything, or whether they decided that they would notice only the things that interested them. That was why women were so good at tasks which required attention to the way people felt. Being a private detective, for example, was exactly the sort of job at which a woman could be expected to excel." In other words, the book is clearly didactic in certain passages. Smith, a law professor, is to my mind quite clearly trying to instill a new set of values based on justice and equality into his young readers. And this is just the problem. I have some knowledge of a few other African cultures, but I have never been to Botswana. Therefore, I cannot really make sense of this book. There’s a lot going on, a lot of different types of behavior on the part of different characters, and fundamentally I cannot distinguish what is from what the author hopes will be. There is, in some important way, not a lot I can really learn about Botswana society from this book, because I don’t know what portions are accurate background description, what is intended to be the idiosyncratic viewpoints of particular characters, what represents this author’s individual bias, and what is intended to inculcate a new set of values. I simply do not have enough context to disentangle fact from fiction in this story. Now, consider: I have been to Africa, I have good access to secondary sources, and I am undertaking a careful deconstruction of this text. Imagine what an illiterate peasant in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East is going to think based on American television – which is, I should note, widely available by satellite and widely viewed in every country in the world, as far as I can tell (Some time I'll post what I watched on Arabsat when I was in Ethiopia.) Consider a naïve interpretation of Melrose Place. Survivor. The Jerry Springer show. We have a problem.

I Am Yours

jonathanstray — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 17:22:17 GMT

You’re in me, you’re on me, and your hand is at my throat. We are discussing fantasies, and I am making admissions. You’re forcing them out of me. You’ve already discovered how I enjoy the weight of your body on top of me, how I like my wrists held down rigid above my head, how much I get off on being told exactly what to do for you. Your hand on my throat is new tonight, but somehow you knew what it would mean to me. “I want you in every way,” you murmur into my ear. “Yes,” is all I can manage. I’m gasping. “How should I have you?” Images flash through my mind. Various positions; being taken from behind or tied up. On my knees looking up at you with wild childlike eyes. And something else, something I’ve never told anyone before. I say nothing, but I know you felt me shudder. [ Because I am submitting this story for publication, I don't want to post it publicly. If you want to read it, ask me and I will send it to you. Don't be shy; we're all perverts here. ]

One Hungry Village

jonathanstray — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 16:08:04 GMT

I figured I’d start with a single town. I’d heard strange rumors out of Africa. Something about millions of starving people, about AIDS, war, corruption, drought, all sorts of horrible situations. I’d seen the infomercials. I’d caught snippets of Live-8 on television, and I couldn’t avoid the GAP’s huge advertising campaign. Donate money to the cause, the celebrities said. But it was still all just rumor. There remained for me the central unanswered question: what, exactly, is the problem? So I went to Africa, landing in Morocco and working my way down through Mauritania, Senegal, and Mali. Three months into my journey, I didn’t feel like I’d learned very much. I had only discovered that there were a lot of beggars in the streets, that everything from the plumbing to the automobiles seemed run down and badly maintained, and that the tourist hotels were ridiculously overpriced. I’d heard some interesting stories, but I hadn’t made a single African friend. I was frustrated. Eventually I realized that to understand something of the problems of Africa, I would have to live there for a while. Not travel, but live, and not in the illusory capital cities where all the development money goes, but out in a village somewhere. Since I had no idea what I was looking for, it didn’t matter where I went. Ghourma-Rharous was simply the next town along the piste, the sand track, heading east through the Northern desert of Mali. I knew no one there, and nothing about the town itself. I had only a scrap of paper with the name of someone who might be able to put me up. It all felt like a highly unlikely beginning when the overloaded Toyota pickup roared off, leaving me just outside an unknown town at the edge of the Sahara desert, more than 100 kilometers from the nearest paved road. [ read the rest at http://equivocality.net/one-hungry-village/ ]

The Book of Michelle

jonathanstray — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 00:06:48 GMT

When I first met Michelle she was wearing the white dress, and I suppose the first thing I noticed about her was her slightly too-large nose. She looks like a goddess in the book, and she would later be very beautiful to me in even the most quotidian and unflattering light, but her face is not the one that launched a thousand ships. I liked her immediately though, and that dress did look good on her. Two weeks later, I was watching the same face during breakfast. We were in her New York apartment, the one with the view. A perfect shaft of yellow sunlight came in through the big window, sparkling on the white kitchen table. She sat outlined light that morning, in her worn white bathrobe and messy hair. “Pass the toast,” she said. I passed her the toast, and saw that thing in her smile again. “Are you working tomorrow?” she asked me. And then something ignited in her expression just a split second later, when she realized what it might mean if I said no. She couldn’t hide it. We went to a friend’s house for dinner that night and she did the same routine, talking only about normal things while her face betrayed her. Other guests noticed, and teased her about it. We had it that good. It was not long into our first year together that I found the book. It was a handsome hardcover volume, the sort of heavy, expensive book of photographs that the too-stylish always seem to have on their coffee tables. When I first came across it, it was sitting on the small desk next to the big window in her study. The title was simply “Michelle,” written in elegant gold script subtly embossed into the dustcover. The black and white cover image depicted a woman sitting at an outdoor café, in the process of bringing a big latte to her lips, smiling. I looked hard at that photograph, and saw that the woman with the coffee was indeed my Michelle, in her famous white dress. I opened the book, flipped past the front matter and found a street shot of her, younger, perhaps mid-twenties, stepping out of a grocer’s with a pair of paper bags suspended awkwardly in her arms. The photographer had caught her unaware, looking over her shoulder in the direction of the camera, and there was something endearing in her slightly awkward pose. The next page was a glamour shot, Michelle at a classy party in a black cocktail dress, smiling at the camera, glass of something sparkling in her hand. Then she was on a beach, an unidentified dazzling strip of sand, with umbrellas and dark-haired tourists that made me think of Italy. It was the expression on her face that caught the eye, her vague half-smile beneath big dark sunglasses, like she found the whole world just slightly intriguing, including you. Next page: Michelle wearing a big floppy hat, drinking a milkshake with lipsticked lips around a straw. All of these photos were black and white. In fact the whole book was printed without color, an entire volume of unreal photographs of the woman I knew so well. There was Michelle in a power suit gesturing over a document with a colleague. Michelle standing at the edge of a misty cliff, looking out contemplatively. Michelle in high heels splaying her arms drunkenly around two girlfriends on the street, grinning toothily, the neon blur of an unidentifiable late-night metropolis behind her. Brushing her teeth in a bleary-eyed morning. Sleeping, burrowed down into the covers, just a mop of blonde hair and a lump under the blankets. Caught snickering in front of a gallery painting in the glare of a flash, fingers curled in front of her mischievous mouth. And in all of these shots her too-big nose, transformed into the charming imperfection of the face of a star. “What is that book?” I asked her that night. She answered my questions but told me nothing. It’s a book of photographs of me, she said. Different photographers, she said. I guess they wanted to photograph me, she said. More, she would not say. I think I was jealous of whoever had taken the photos, whoever had access to the private Michelle I had thought was mine alone. I went back to the book the next day before she got home from work. This time I inspected the front matter closely. The publisher was a well-known producer of photographic books. The editor was a credited as “Peter Welt.” I checked the ISBN and found that the book had been published just around the time Michelle and I had started seeing each-other. I searched for Peter Welt on the internet and found nothing. I was mystified, but the mystery was less important to me than the beautiful photographs of Michelle, and Michelle was more important than the photographs. Annoyed by my distraction, Michelle put the book away on a shelf somewhere and led me by her soft hand back to bed. I forgot all about it for a while. Life went on for the two of us. She was eventually promoted to the head of her department, and I finally sold my first novel. We didn’t have the kind of money you need to be a star, but we were social enough and interesting enough to be part of the scene. We knew the artists, the big-shot editors, the gallery owners, the young and the beautiful and the tortured geniuses with colored hair. We fit in perfectly. We were more than an item. We were some sort of standardized icon, the poster couple. I think that I was just a little too short, that she was just a little too fat, that we were both a little too poor to make the cover of any magazine, but we relished the roles. There were perfect days. One Saturday we dressed and ate breakfast around the corner at her favorite brunch place. The waiter, I remember, was irritable. He looked hung over and annoyed as we placed our orders, and threw me murderous glares when I tried to convince him to serve Michelle’s hollandaise on the side. But we just laughed about it as we headed to the park afterwards, where we giggled at the ducks and the tidy families and the surly punk kids, all the beautiful scenes and scenery of the urban greenspace. She wore the white dress again. It was getting old then, more of a comfortable rag than the elegant frock it had once been. It was not one of those days where I had the thrill of catching other men stealing glances at her, but they couldn’t see what I saw. As always her slightly indelicate features sent a warm surge through me whenever she turned my way and focused her puzzled eyes on me. That night, I took her to the opera and watched her face more than the production. In the dark, she glowed with a perfection unavailable in less imaginative lighting. I sought out the book again the next day. I traced her outline in all the familiar photographs, and studied her face in the various poses I knew so well. This time I noticed something odd. In many of the photographs she appeared older than when we had met, a Michelle who had not existed until years after the book had been published. And in a few pictures, the woman in black and white was several years more aged than my current Michelle – yet it was still recognizably her. As before, all the shots were candid, and all showed a proud, elegant, beautiful woman. The photographs showed no faults; the woman in the book had only charming eccentricities, touching naivety, and endearing vulnerabilities. The difficulties began slowly. Her career expanded and I missed her when she worked long hours. She went out with colleagues after work while I often stayed in. I let it be; she needed the stress relief and it gave me time to write. She didn’t get enough sleep and would be cranky. One bleary Thursday breakfast she actually snapped at me for putting too much sugar in her coffee. I forgave her, and she cried in my arms that night, apologizing. The simple things no longer pleased her. I missed the way she was once delighted by a bag of fresh croissants, a new CD of her favorite band, or brunch at the diner with the surly waiter. She aged. The corners of her eyes began to show the stress, and still she was beautiful to me. Still she glowed. In the white dress she never wore anymore she glowed, stepping out of the shower in a bathrobe she glowed, and even on those mornings when she had dark circles under her eyes and didn’t seem to see me at all, she was still radiant. Sometimes, often enough, she glowed just for me. I remember most of all one evening when we went out to a fancy private party at someone’s penthouse. I cornered her on the balcony while all the other the guests drank on inside. I don’t know if there was a moon that night. If there was, the light was full and liquid and heavy, and her skin was powdery and luminescent. She was elflike, beyond perfect. Her evening gown left her back exposed, and I kissed it as I took the glass out of her hand. My hands found her hips through the thin material, and then the hem of her dress. She murmured something as I gathered the fabric around her waist; she opened her mouth wide with the shock of sensation as I entered her. I shielded her from the view of the distant guests with my body. They couldn’t possibly see us; they were much too far away to see her skin radiate, to watch her features smooth and reshape themselves into something unreal as she tilted her head to the sky. A gentle breeze came out of nowhere and disheveled her hair perfectly over her gasping face. The city lights splayed out beneath us and a thousand faces envied us from far below. Her dress fluttered and clung to her in just the right ways, and she clung to me. All the longings of youth and beauty and ever-after were contained in that moment. In that moment she was the Michelle in the book. I think I loved her most at the end. She needed to go in new directions, she said. She still cared for me but she couldn’t share her life with me anymore, she said. I pleaded, I said I didn’t understand, but in truth I think I did. She was moving faster than I was then, and I was getting tired of being her other, of always being introduced second. Yet I still loved her. She had long since become something beyond real for me. He whole being still rearranged itself for my adoration whenever I was near. When Michelle was just about the age of the oldest woman in the book, she moved out. I cried for a long time. When I felt I could bear it, I went to look at the book. It was gone. I looked everywhere. She was completely out of my life then, on another continent, and for a time no longer answering my emails. One sad afternoon I felt that just had to see her again, and wandered through the apartment for hours, zombie-like, listlessly seeking the book. As the gray light dimmed to evening I became desperate. I tore our old home apart. I broke things. I couldn’t find it. I looked through old snapshots on my laptop but I was never a good photographer; none of my pictures had the grace of the book of Michelle. When I awoke in my demolished bedroom the next morning, I checked online. I would pay any cost, I would choose the fastest express shipping and have a copy by tomorrow. But the book was gone from cyberspace too. Google admitted nothing; the library of congress told me that the ISBN was invalid. I phoned the publisher. The said they’d never published a whole book of photographs of a single woman. Eventually, I understood. Monday morning found me at the courthouse with a change-of-name form in my hand. Printed in dark block letters on the first sheet was the name “Peter Welt.”