Almosting It

2009-09-18T16:05:00.001+07:00

Wimps

2009-03-17T16:04:00.003+07:00

We've got some big things cooking here in Hanoi, so I haven't had much time to post. Ike, I'll get you more photos as soon as I can. In the meantime, wanted you to see this ORC Worldwide report on the World's 20 Worst Places to Work. Clocking in at number 11: Hanoi, Vietnam! Woohoo!

Wimps.

I used to have picnics at the Bedford-Nostrand G-train stop in Bed-Stuy, wearing a suit, made out of money, with my eyes closed, at midnight! You think a motorbike spooks me? (Really, though, the B-N is a playground, I kid) But yeah, I mean, look at that photo. That spinach-laden bicycle sure looks scary. Here's the article:

No. 11 Hanoi, Vietnam
Overall Grade: High Risk Location
Major Problem: Disease & Sanitation
Other Problems: Medical Facilities, Infrastructure, Political & Social Environment, Culture & Recreation

The Vietnamese capital has a cooler, more comfortable climate than Ho Chi Minh City, and Hanoi's crime problem is also not as severe. On the other hand, Hanoi is the capital of one of the few remaining Communist countries. "Because Hanoi is the seat of government," according to ORC, "any stress related to official policy is heightened here."

So they're telling me Hanoi is more dangerous to work in than Detroit? I mean, I guess they're saying "places to work abroad," but Detroit is "abroad" for people who aren't American which happens to be about 95% of humanity.

Oh, and, I'm buying a house in Detroit for when I get back from Hanoi.

Photophilia

2009-03-03T00:33:00.005+07:00

Alright, I tracked down a memory card reader today so here's a backlog of photos. The theme is our house and the neighborhood. I'll try to walk through what's what, but, they're photos, you know, you get it.

Here are a few shots of the entrance to the house. Living room on the left, kitchen in the back, and staircase on up.

Down here you've got some shots from the roof, looking down the middle of the staircase (that speck at the bottom of the first staircase photo is Ashton) and then looking from the first floor, up the staircase.

We've got more room than we know what to do with here. It's a six bedroom house and six floors. The rooftop terrace is great. But three rooms are languishing in disuse. Hopefully the cockroaches

stay in those rooms and leave us alone.

Alright down here you've also got some shots from the roof, and of our room. I want to get these shots up on the blog, but it's 3am and I'm wiped. So I appologize for the haphazard posting, but, I'll get back into it soon.

Transit

2009-02-26T19:05:00.006+07:00

To cross the street in Hanoi is to have a near-death experience. The last time you heard from me on the traffic here, it was on this blog and I used this quote - from Denis Johnson's Vietnam War epic Tree of Smoke: "Fest continued across the street, heading into the tide of honking motorbikes without pausing, as he'd learned to do. They knew how to keep from hitting pedestrians."

It is more or less true. By which I mean, the less than three inches by which every car, bus, and/or motorbike misses wiping you out by is more than enough to make you throw up a Hail Mary every time you drop a foot on the asphalt. Last I heard, there were about 800 traffic fatalities in Hanoi in 2008. That means, if Hanoi had the population of the United States, there would be about 75,000 traffic fatalities per year. The USA currently has about 33,000 traffic fatalities per year. A 2006 study on Vietnamese driving habits reported these enticing - to Death - tidbits:

"Statistics point to alarming figures that show 50% of drivers of motor bikes do not indicate when turning; 70% don't use the hand brake (sic.); 85% didn't know how to use the horn properly, 90% didn't use head lights properly and 72% didn't wear helmets."

Things, I think, have gotten better since then. When we were in Hanoi a year and a half ago, there wasn't a single helmet to be seen on a moto-rider. Now, they are almost ubiquitous. The only thing people get stopped for in Hanoi, is riding a motorbike without a helmet. So that's a step in the right direction. Still, all these drivers are insane.

There are five types of vehicles on the Hanoi street; bicycles, motorbikes, cars/taxis, American cars, and buses. I'll give a synopsis on each.

Bicycles: These folks don't wear helmets and there is not a single reflective light on any of these bicycles. Mostly they are used by expats, old Vietnamese women who load their bikes down with anything from sandals to rolls of carpeting, and young Vietnamese students. Ashton and I were in a cab on the way home the other day and a kid jumped in front of our car on a bicycle and pedaled calmly as the driver appeared to debate whether or not to slam into his back tire. He blared his horn but the kid didn't move so he drove around him and I saw why the horn hadn't startled him - he had headphones on and was listening to music. I don't see how you can do that more than ten times and not wind up dead at least three of those times.

Motorbikes: They are loud, dirty, and unsafe even with the helmets. People weave through crevices between cars, and traffic lights are entirely optional for motorbikes. Their two-stroke engines are the largest donors to the thick gray haze that squats on Hanoi year-round. The bikes are treated like pickup trucks by many; whatever you need to move around - bricks, gas tanks, eggs, chickens - strap it on the back of your bike and go. Some of the motorbikes wind up as wide as a car. People around here just say, "you get used to driving one after a while." Yeah, well, human beings can get used to lots of things. But getting used to it does not mean you won't get killed by it. This is one of those things not to get used to.

Time-Lapse of Hanoi Traffic at Night

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Cars/Taxis: The taxis are cheap and omnipresent. Everyone uses them; tourists, expats, and locals. You feel, slightly, safe in them. The cars are for the fairly wealthy, and they are the minority vehicles on the road.

American Cars: I don't mean cars made in America, but rather, "cars Americans drive." Like Escalades, Mercedes sedans, Porsche Cayennes, Lexus SUVs. These are less common than any other type of vehicle, but you'll see at least a couple dozen in any day spent wandering Hanoi. They look absurd on the tiny streets and clog up traffic like a blood clot in an artery. I assume most of the people driving them are Vietnamese gangsters or bank workers. I don't think there's much of a difference between the two. The people who drive them would run over a motorbike if it stopped dead in the road ahead of them. If one backs out of a parking spot while you walk behind it, it will not stop and you will have to jump out of the way.

Buses: Basically, they run complicated routes on irregular schedules. But they kill the thing they hit, not the other way around. So. Buses, FTW.

Video Game Wars

2009-02-25T15:09:00.006+07:00

We do this every once in a while, Michael and me. He writes a post, I write a long response; I write a post, he writes a long response and then we post each others' responses and links to the original posts. It's always good, interesting fun.

Michael recently wrote a post on his blog Gamer Think titled "Violence = Quest for Self Identity?" which draws on a Norman Mailer - Marshall McLuhan discussion from a 1968 Summer Way episode (the same clip from which I, oddly enough, drew for this post on my, now-hibernating blog, The Skillman). Check out his post, and then read my response, re-posted below. Happy hunting.

"Maybe, if we begin to think about in game video game violence in this positive light, not as a necessary evil, but as an extremely powerful tool of self discovery, game developers might start taking the use of violence a little more seriously."

Michael,

You make an interesting point, and one that speaks to the nature of video games and our relationship to them. I think it's an all or nothing question; either violent video games are "necessary evils" (although, I think your mother, and mine, would dispute the term "necessary evil" when referring to violence in video games and argue rather successfully for "unnecessary evil," in its stead), or they CAN be powerful tools of self-discovery (I think they certainly are not, right now).

Here's my issue with your optimism:

In a video game, there is no real "roughhousing." I think what McLuhan is talking about, the violence that he addresses, is violence where there is something at stake.

"[McLuhan] conjectures that violence is essentially the quest for group or private identity, and that without that 'interface', without that 'roughhouse', that encounter with the world, you don't get an identity."

The reason it was so profound for you when you punched your friend in the stomach in 3rd grade (2nd grade, for me) was that you saw actual consequences; your friend hurt, and crying. What are the actual consequences in video game violence? Getting set back a level? Losing XP? That's not really putting anything at risk.

I agree with McLuhan's idea that violence can shape identity. It was not until Western Europeans encountered the "other" - be it Aborigine, American Indian, black African, etc. - that notions of superiority based on race, religion, and economy could take root. In absence of that contact and subsequent conflict, that aspect of identity, for better or worse, would not foment. But there were consequences and stakes to that violence. Civilizations ended; lives ended.

My brother was asking me a while ago about a writer, I don't remember his name now, who was working on a piece that asked, "Why don't video games make me cry?" My brother asked me that question and I responded, "because there's nothing really at stake." If I die in COD4, I just move back a bit and start over. If I put a controller in my girlfriend's hands and told her to start playing MGS4:GOP (assuming she inherently knew the controls and could play the game) and she died four hours into game play, I doubt she'd care a bit, she'd just move on with her day.

In reference to your post on PTSD for drone pilots, I find that conclusion totally unsurprising. It proves my point, in fact. The pilots are interacting with a medium - one that feels like a video game interface - which they are used to understanding has no real life consequences. And yet, there is a disconnect and somewhere in their brain they know that the footage they are watching has a real human dying on the other end. The medium and the message are totally scrambled. Their stress is entirely understandable.

Here's a question; there's nothing tangible at stake in a novel, either, but when Judge Holden murders the Kid at the end of Blood Meridian, why do I feel like I've lost something? Why was I surprised how much I didn't want to see that happen? Is it because Cormac McCarthy took his violence seriously (as you suggest game developers should do) or is there something about the finality of the unchanging word on the page that a video game cannot, or has not, replicated?

Finally, and this may or may not be a nail in the coffin, in McLuhan's War and Peace in the Global Village, McLuhan writes, "The self amputation which we call 'new technologies' generate vast new environments against which the individual organism is quite helpless."

If that is true, then the real conflict is not our interaction with the quality of the message of violent video games but, as McLuhan said, the medium by which they are transmitted. If the medium is the message, then who cares how good the violence in the game is, the real violence is going on between our head and our machine and we won't win.

In the opening to that Summer Way bit, the mediator says that in McLuhan's "War and Peace" he "firmly nails down his belief that media will eventually herald 20th century man back to tribalism." Video games might be just another stop on that path.

(Ed.'s note: If you want to see an example of what I'm talking about re: the stress of drone pilots, check out those two videos posted above. They're not videos from drone pilots, but from AC-130 gunships. One video is from Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the other is actual footage of an AC-130 attacking militants in Afghanistan. But the difference between them is negligible.)

Breast Milk

2009-02-21T20:02:00.003+07:00

In Vietnamese, they're called Vu Sua - "milk from the breast." We sat at a little place down the street for lunch the other day and one of the guys working the spot brought us a Star Apple for dessert. It's just about the best fruit I've ever tried. You either split its belly around the equator of the spherical thing and scoop out the innards, or you knead the fruit until it gets mushy inside, jab a hole in the top and suck the juices out like a, well, that's why it's got the name it's got. Plus it's got all sorts of medicinal uses and the sap of the Star Apple tree can be used as a wax substitute on the shelves of wardrobes and closets. So, it's got that going for it, too. And if this is something that exists in the United States - and by "United States" I don't mean the Exotic Florae aisle at the Whole Foods on 14th Street - that I've just missed my whole life, don't blame me. I'm from Jersey.

We Have Eaten Your Forest

2009-02-17T18:00:00.007+07:00

It was in New Orleans, a week or so before I left for Hanoi, that I wandered into Crescent City Books and bought a copy of "We Have Eaten the Forest." It is an account by Georges Condominas who, at twenty-seven, lived with the Mnong Gar, a Vietnamese Central Highland tribe that practiced slash-and-burn agriculture and gauged the passing of time by which portion of the forest they were eating and how long it took for it to regrow. Condominas wrote the book in 1957; just the right moment. A few years later the Mnong Gar, and many other Central Highlands tribes, had their villages torched by the US army and were shuttled to refugee camps in the South. The army wanted to create a free-fire zone where US planes returning to the South could drop remaining bombs on Vietcong supply routes.

I still haven't gotten past the introduction of the book.

In the introduction, written by journalist Richard Critchfield, there is a brief mention of the depiction of the Montagnards (the French colonial name for the highland tribes-people) in Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now." Critchfield wrote:

"The memorable blood-drenched climax of the film [is] a water buffalo being hacked to death by frenzied Montagnards outdoors as Marlon Brando as the crazed Kurtz is killed in his dark, cavelike lair with a machete by his assigned executioner, played by Martin Sheen. The red-splotched psychedelic imagery, as the camera pans back and forth between the buffalo sacrifice and the dying Brando, was intended as a revelation but as critic Pauline Kael said, it merely boiled down to the old saw: 'White man -- he devil.'"

I should say at this point that "Apocalypse Now" has some large thing to do with why I am in Hanoi, Vietnam. I have always been captivated by the film; its elusive morals and its own, bizarre history -- documented in "Hearts of Darkness - A Filmmaker's Apocalypse." I probably watched "Apocalypse Now" a half-dozen times in the few weeks before I left for Vietnam.

There are lessons in the film - and all the labyrinthine storylines that lurk behind it - that are relevant today; the way we talk today about Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Northwest Frontier Province, as the term "Obama's War" hovers above the Afghanistan War, is so similar to how Americans once talked of Vietnam and its people. In "Apocalypse Now" all this muck is distilled into one heaping riddle embodied by Colonel Walter E. Kurtz. To write him off as a white devil is to give up on the game and condemn yourself to repeating the mistakes of Vietnam. Flippant remarks like Kael's betray a mind that is either too intimidated by Kurtz's complexity or simply not up to the task of taking him on. To figure him out might equip you well enough to keep your head while all around you others are losing theirs.

The character for Coppola's Kurtz was partly inspired by a real life Green Beret Colonel named Robert Rheault who served in Vietnam. Rheault was arrested, along with seven other intelligence officers, in 1969 for the murder of a South Vietnamese man who had been engaged in espionage for the US. Rheault and his men had found a photo of the South Vietnamese man, named Thai Khac Chuyen, standing with high-ranking North Vietnamese officers while doing spy work in Cambodia. Chuyen was bound in burlap bags and chains, taken into the South China Sea, shot in the head, and dumped overboard by Rheault and the other officers.

Jeff Stein, who was in Vietnam on similar assignment to Rheault when the assassination took place, wrote a piece for the, now defunct, Vietnam Generation Journal in 1991 on the episode as a, ironically enough, word of warning for Bush v1.0 when he entered his Saddam conundrum period. Stein wrote of his sympathies for Rheault's dilemma, as the Colonel pondered what to do with his treasonous South Vietnamese agent, "I soon learned that the political loyalties of most Viets were splintered along family, clan, religious, and multiple ideological faults. It had been foolhardy to try and fit Viet Nam into our Cold War box. It was impossible to define any Viet, with certainty, as 'procommunist,' 'pro-Saigon,' or 'pro-U.S.', unless they were in uniform and armed. That, in a nutshell, was the whole problem of the war: defining who the enemy was."

Replace a few terms and the same exact sentiment would sum up our problems across Afghanistan, the tribal regions of Pakistan, and Pakistan itself.

This is the historical foundation of the Colonel Kurtz figure - it was a similar unilateral assassination by Kurtz that caused the generals in the Trang to send Willard after Kurtz. And Rheault, like Kurtz, was the quintessential "best of the best." Stein wrote later in his piece:

"Like Kurtz, Rheault was a product of Phillips Exeter Academy and West Point, fluent in French, with a Master's degree in international relations from the University of Paris. He was a paradigm of the Kennedy-era Green Berets, in fact, an upper-class, brilliant soldier as comfortable in a classroom as the straps of a parachute, a guy who could kill in five languages while discoursing on the virtues of Sun Tzu. With the advantage of a post-Viet Nam war, post-Watergate hindsight, I saw him as a metaphor for the kind of hubris that led us into the swamp of Viet Nam."

This is where I diverge with Stein. Kurtz and Rheault were not the types that led us into Vietnam. It was Kennedy and Johnson; McNamara and Westmoreland that got the first boots into the Vietnamese mud. Rheault and Kurtz were the types that thought they could get them out. I recall Kurtz's speech just before his execution by Willard:

"I remember when I was with Special Forces... We went into a camp to innoculate the children. We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying... We went back there and they had come and hacked off every innoculated arm. There they were in a pile, a pile of little arms... And then I realized, like I as shot. Like I was shot with a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God. The genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could understand that these were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love. But they had the strength, the strength to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordal instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgment. Without judgment. Because it is judgment that defeats us."

Kurtz's desertion of the Army's chain of command and flight into the jungles of Cambodia is treated by the upper echelon of the military as a betrayal. But it is not. It is the logical end to which Kurtz must go to win his war. His superiors are not willing to let him fight the war in a way that allows him to win, so he creates his own way of doing so. Kurtz and Rheault are cautionary tales: If you want to go to war with people you don't know in countries you don't understand, then these are the kind of men, these are the kind of tactics you will have to employ in order to win. The better decision might just be not going in the first place.

I have always been frustrated by the willingness of people who write on "Apocalypse Now" and it's literary ancestor, Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," to offer reductionist explanations of the works - Kael and Critchfield's claim that Brando's Kurtz is just a white devil; Barack Obama's assertion in "Dreams From My Father" (which is similar to Chinua Achebe's in "An Image of Africa") that Conrad's novella is a racist story about the perils of contact with black Africans. I don't accept these conclusions and I think they are wrong. Colonel Walter E. Kurtz of "Apocalypse Now" was not a crazed, white-devil. He was a prophetic, tragic hero.

I wrote in an earlier post that Coppola's Kurtz saw Ashton and me in his last moments when he uttered "The horror, the horror." His horror was not with the atrocities he committed, because he never considered them atrocities. His horror was for the reasons his war was fought. Reasons that, in thirty years, would be completely expunged by the sublime presence of western college grads laden with backpacks carrying bugspray and beach reading, not M-1's and hand grenades. So now I am in Hanoi. I'm not sure exactly what I hope to glean by living in the country where all those mistakes of the past were made, as opposed to, say, going to Pakistan where I could watch all those mistakes made again for much higher stakes. Vietnam never had a nuclear weapon, let alone one hundred. I hope, and I am sure, that my reading of Kurtz's character will change over the next year or so. I'm interested to see in what direction. But for now this is where I stand.

Critchfield, in his introduction to "We Have Eaten the Forest," criticizes the scene when Kurtz is hacked to death by Willard while the Montagnards simultaneously sacrifice a buffalo. He shrugs it off as titillation. But later in his introduction, Critchfield writes, "Perhaps the most striking aspect of [the Montagnard] culture is the feasting... that follows ritual sacrifices of prestigious buffaloes and pigs... This shedding of sacrificial blood must respond to a deeply felt need by the Montagnards as there is so much of it and it is so costly for them... The Montagnards' ritual blood sacrifices, which emphasize the spirit world and reverence for ancestors, are strikingly like those of the Maya and other Amerindians. Is there some common root, carried across the Bering Straits by prehistoric migrant tribes?"

I think Critchfield missed the fact that he answered his own question when he discussed Willard's sacrifice of Kurtz. We could ill afford to sacrifice that wisdom, too.

You Know We're Not Hiring Murderers, Right?

2009-02-16T13:28:00.003+07:00

Yeah, this is a weak Cam track but I still can't get it outta my head. "But I know I know it all/ but I follow protocol" Plus it woulda been my jam. Now it's Will's for standing tall at the bottom of The Island.

Junior

2009-02-15T12:15:00.007+07:00

Sources: Braves making late push for Griffey

In news completely unrelated to anything remotely Vietnamese (which you should expect from time to time), the above headline greeted me when I signed onto Gmail this morning. It's a few years late - I remember hoping the Braves would pick up Griffey when they were in talks after he left Seattle - but Griffey's the kind of guy that would go to the Braves and have a twilight-year where he goes for .290/25/90. That's just what the Braves do for guys like him. I hope it happens.

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Valentine's Day Edition

2009-02-15T00:25:00.005+07:00

In the West we blithely associate Valentine's Day with Roman saints like Valentine of Terni - who suffered the mildest of martyrdoms when he was beneficently beaten and beheaded for providing free health care to prisoners in Rome - and, later, the High Middle Age poems of Chaucer who wrote, in Parliament of Fowls, "on seynt Volantynys day When euery byrd comyth there to chese his make," which provided us with the contemporary Valentine's Day tradition of lopping a wedge off a wheele of chese to bestow as a gift upon our mate. However, as with so many Western traditions, we actually owe the origins of Valentine's Day to the East. Specifically, to Hanoi, Vietnam, where, on February 14, 1982 a young man named Sinh Vinh Tieng was smoothed into a fine pate by six hundred passing motorbikes on Hai Ba Trung street in downtown Hanoi whilst crossing the street to give a scarlet rose to his girlfriend.

Now that we have that cleared up, let me get you up to speed on what's been going on with Ashton and me in Hanoi: Jetlag. We missed that Writer's Club Meeting I mentioned in an earlier post to a long nap that ran from 6pm to around midnight on Thursday. Last night we had plans to go to a vegetarian Indian dinner and then watch the Celtics-Mavericks game. That, too, got knocked by nap. We have, however checked out two apartments in the past two days. We saw one yesterday that looked like a nice spot in a neighborhood called Ba Ding which I like because it starts with a "B" and has the same number of syllables as "Brook-lyn".

It was a four-story house with six bedrooms, five bathrooms, kitchen, living-room, and rooftop terrace for $750/month total. Three other interested parties showed up to look at the apartment at the same time as us but then the real-estate agent devolved into all sorts of machinations on length of contracts and whether or not maid service and WiFi would be included in the rent and everyone got jittery and annoyed and boogied. Today, we looked at a place that seemed more promising. Also in Ba Dinh, it's been occupied by some Canadians and Australians for the past couple years and has survived flooding, heavy use, etc. It's a three story affair with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a bigger, nicer rooftop terrace for $800/month with an apparently great maid who comes by twice a week to clean and do laundry and cook Vietnamese meals. So, that's pretty great. The whole apartment search is a little crazy and difficult to know who to trust, but we're making headway. For now, the Bodega Hotel is just fine.

Down the street from both of the apartments we checked out is the Vietnam Army Museum. We walked around the courtyard which is littered with artifacts of the Vietnam War, or, as it is referred to in the North of Vietnam and on the informational placards around the yard, "The American War of Destruction". Ashton was a bit taken aback by my discussion of the variations of flak cannons and anti-aircraft machine guns; Surface-to-Air missiles (SAMs) and B-52 Stratofortresses; Mig-21's and Russian satellite stations. She wondered if boys were just born with knowledge of military equipment. I suggested probably only American ones with too much videogame/History Channel exposure.

It is a small but powerful courtyard. There is the tail portion of a downed B-52 from Operation Linebacker II - the 1972 carpet-bombing mission in which B-52's flying at 50,000 feet dropped 15,000 tons of bombs on Hanoi in twelve days. It was also during Operation Linebacker II that the first B-52, after eight years of missions in Vietnam, was shot down by Vietnamese anti-aircraft weapons. We saw one of the SAM models responsible for those kills; a huge rocket, probably twenty-five feet long, synced up to a Russian satellite dish (the rocket was Russian made, as well, with Cyrillic lettering up and down the side of it.) Just overwhelming how far people go to successfully hurl a chunk of metal through another person's body.

But with the pesky carpet-bombing over, Hanoi is a good city to live in. It's been between between 80 and 90 degrees since we've been here and fairly humid. At night the weather is great; cool and breezy. The heat and humidity during the day would be ok on their own, but coupled with Hanoi's air quality, long walks leave you feeling like you've been sucking your oxygen out of a jar of warm maple syrup. The air is sticky, sweet, and jammed with a thousand indistinguishable flavors and smells whose individual components I don't particularly care to identify.

We've met some interesting people around the city. I met a Belgian diamond dealer from Antwerp who lived in Pyongyang, North Korea for nine years and now lives in Hanoi with his Vietnamese wife who he met in, and brought back from, Pyongyang. Today, we met a couple who run a massage parlor - a young French man and his Vietnamese wife. Also, all expat males here are named Alex. So, that's convenient. Something like four out of the eight or so people we've met have been named Alex. I'm played out in this town already.

Alright, so that's the potpourri. Once things settle down, I'll narrow the focus of these things. Tell you where to find the best street Pho and coolest art galleries. For now, tell your story walking.

Zap

2009-02-12T10:10:00.004+07:00

There are so many wires coiled around the telephone/electrical/who-knows-what-else poll outside my window on Hang Bong street in Hanoi that I feel like I will probably be electrocuted just looking at it. Then there's the guy standing next to it welding without a mask or gloves and spraying sparks everywhere. So we'll keep this post short so as to vacate before the electrical fire.

Twenty hours of flying, thirty pounds less luggage than when we started (Ashton had the option of $405 in overage charges, or losing a pair or two of shoes), we're here in Hanoi. It's great to be back. We're hitting the streets this morning to look for a job and an apartment. Then we're going to the first meeting of the Hanoi Writer's Club. I think Graham Greene is going to be there. It's cool, cloudy, about 68 degrees. Tomorrow night we initiate ourselves by attending Hanoi Basketball Night and watching the Celtics-Mavericks game. That, or we eat some cobra meat and rice whiskey. Either one.

"Kiss me where it smells" she said

2009-01-26T07:25:00.007+07:00

so I'm taking her to Hanoi.

Sometimes I think it is odd that Ashton and I are leaving for the place with, or against, which our forebears defined their sliver of history -- Vietnam. In thirty years my children have convinced myself and their mother and they will study Arabic next semester in Tikrit as members of Northwestern University's "From Saladin to Saddam - A Practical Education on the Tigris"- abroad initiative.

So we must begin by accepting that this adventure is somewhat comical. What is the difference between tragedy and comedy? Timing - about thirty years worth of it, apparently. There appeared in the New York Times last year an article called The Awakening of Hanoi: "'Just wait,' my friend said. 'You will fall in love with the art there.'" What would Colonel Walter E. Kurtz have to say about the contemporary art scene in Hanoi, I wonder. He saw us, me and my girlfriend, in those dying moments; "the horror, the horror."

via videosift.com

Anyhow. History. It is rather an abstract feeling but I know that while I stood on The Mall in Washington, D.C. and watched Barack Obama's inauguration a peaceful transfer of history took place. We claimed our stakes some months ago, me and my cohort, in Obama's narrative and for what happens while he is in office, we bear, and accept, responsibility. That is how history changed hands. And so you'll understand, now, why sometimes I think it is odd we are moving to Hanoi, Vietnam for a year or so.

There are the earnest explanations for this move. That travel is intellectual nourishment; a global community requires global experience; Twain's conclusion that "travel is fatal to bigotry and prejudice." These are all true, all valid, and all seem too trite for me to pass off as my own reason for going to Hanoi. Those are the suit-and-tie lines.

But what is our Reason Why? I suspect that I don't know. This is reassuring somehow- that I am not going for some Thing. I just have to go. And in a year, we'll return and entrench ourselves in the business of shaping this hunk of history before it is handed off again, too soon, or not soon enough.

I hear Kabul is the Prague of the 2030's.

"The agony had been frightful, but it had not been useless. It might, almost, be called a happy ending."

(Ed.'s Note: Some of you might notice this is the same blog I used while traveling about a year ago, but I wanted to give any newcomers a heads-up that all the posts below this one are old from a previous trip; I'm just recycling the blog. Feel free to peruse the old posts; the new ones are forthcoming. Thanks for visiting.)

Stoppage Time

2007-10-29T23:10:00.000+07:00

We're into stoppage time on this here voyage. D-1. Tomorrow at 4 or something we leave London for Newark and thus complete the Kung-Fu-Shaolin-Postmodern-Cirle-Of-Regeneration and return home reincarnated as the lesser beings, bacteria, that feed on the bones of deceased animals (go back to Post-1 if that confuses you). It's all a glorious cycle of death and rebirth, no?

I just had the best haircut of my life in West Hampstead. Not because the haircut was anything spectacular, it looks pretty good, totally fine, but because they had a flatscreen TV with Playstation 3 running Konami's new soccer title which RULES and free Stella Artois for all. Wow, what a thing. I'd go anywhere for anything if I was promised PS3 soccer and free Stella. Of course, now you're wondering, How did Alex do in his games of Pro-Evolution Soccer? Well, I'll indulge you, since you asked.

Game one I played the computer, I was Man U, computer was the Czech National team. I got creamed, 5-1. Next I played one of the guys who worked at the barbers and he beat me 3-0 as Man U, I was AC Milan. Then, we had a rematch. A tightly contested match throughout the 1st half and in the final 5 minutes he scored a nice goal off a lucky post-bounce from a Ronaldo kick. Then. Stoppage time. With seconds on the clock before the half ran out and stoppage time ended, I got a corner. Off the kick my Ronaldo nailed a b-e-a-u-t-i-f-u-l half-bicycle into the top right corner of the goal. No chance to stop it. 1-1 at half. Then, he had a customer come and we had to stop, but I felt I had redeemed US videogame soccer players.

Oh, and then there's London. Don't come here until the dollar's stronger or the pound's weaker. Preferably both. A day ticket on the tube now costs £5.10 which is almost 11 dollars. For one ticket! It's mad. We took a cab home one night from Piccadilly after game 1 of the world series at 5am back to West Hampstead. 21. Not dollars, which might have been understandable/reasonable in NYC. 21 POUNDS. Which is 43ish dollars. Insane. Seriously, I love London at it was great to come back and see everything after four years away but there is just no way to get by cheaply here. The cheapest meal we could get was this dive of an Indian place which was really quite good and had salad/curry deals for £3.99 plus drink. So it comes out to about £9 which is $18. Basically everything here is about NYC prices, but then you have to multiply by 2 for the exchange rate. What is with the dollar?

It's back to Newark, onto work, find an apartment, move everything.

So long, thanks for tuning in.

That's the news from Lake Wobegon.

Ciao.

Frankfurt, Paris, London; A Western European Trifecta

2007-10-26T21:25:00.000+07:00

It's the final days. D-day - 5. Which makes me remember, we didnt get to Normandy. A tough loss that was. We wanted to go but it seemed tough to get around without being able to rent a car. Poor us, too tough to get around Normandy. Certainly our situation would have been more trying than when all those brits, americans, canadians, etc. landed there in 1944.

Anyway, we had a nice time in Frankfurt eating pigs feet and drinking apple wine. Then moved on to Paris where we didnt do much but hang out and meet interesting people at this great bar on Rue Montmartre called Le Cafe Noir; an art director who lived in a flat in Brooklyn with one of The Strokes, a journalism student from Japan studying in Paris wanting to go on to Columbia, a bartender who updated us on the real scoop with Arab immigration to western europe, and an old bald guy who clued us in to who Gainsbourg was. Oh and also an old drunk guy who bought us beers and sang to everyone and then moved on.

Now we're in London where we're staying in West Hampstead at Ashton's uncle's empty apartment. We spent some time hanging out the first night with friends of ours that we met in Taormina, Sicily; Alex and his fiancee Georgia. Alex's dad had just died a few days before we got to London, we found out, and it he was cheered up to see us so we hung out at a pub till late in the night shooting pool and talking with the greek bartender who looked a helluva lot like Vincent Schiaverelli. We also, that night, made friends with a nice old chap named John Blundell who, it turns out, is the director general of the London Institute of Economic Affairs.

I've been trying to get a handle on who he is since then. A free-marketeer, no doubt. He ran Atlas Economic Research Foundation for a time, which took a half a million or so bucks from ExxonMobil but states the need for "independent from corporate sources" thinking in its mission statement. He said his hope with AERF was to "litter the world with free market think tanks." He's a very nice guy who bought us a couple pints last night and is taking us on a walking tour of Westminster on Saturday. I dunno, still sorting this out.

Times about to expire... on my internet session and this trip.

Cheers.

Cche Vuii?

2007-10-20T05:50:00.000+07:00

Apalachin

The Bowery, 1937

Calcaterra Differente, ma, Calcaterra lo Stesso

2007-10-19T17:11:00.000+07:00

The last 24-hour travel day just wrapped up; a bus from Leonforte, in Sicily, to Catania, a 12 hour train from Catania to Rome, a flight from Rome to Vienna, and a connection from Vienna to Frankfurt. All topped off, of course, with Beatrix picking us up at the airport - we're staying with family friends, Thomas and Beatrix Emde in Frankfurt - and taking us over to Wagner's for pig's feet and pitchers of applewine. Good pig's feet, too. Although, of course, I couldn't get Ashton to go for one.

But back to Sicily. So we hauled ass outta Taormina for someplace with cheaper vino and pasta con sarde. Leonforte is a little town, about 14000 people, 20 km from Enna in central Sicily. Leonforte's also the spot my great grandmother and great grandfather left to elope to New York City around the beginning of the 20th century. Their names were Arcangelo Calcaterra (later changed to Carcaterra in the USA) and Carmela Giuffre. No one in my family has been to Leonforte in about 70 years.

Ashton and I showed up in this little burg and started wandering around looking for a place to stay, a Peroni to drink. We found the Peroni first. There wasnt a single pensione, B&B, hotel, inn, nothing in Leonforte. We asked the bartender at the place we were hanging out if he knew where we could buy a tent so we could sleep on the side of the small mountain-hill Leonforte is on. This was our plan.

The bartender, Luigi - a broad-shouldered man with Mussolini like features; round, hairless head, barrel chest, deep voice and hands the size of really, really, big hands - got on the phone and called around and came to our table a few minutes later. With Ashton interpreting the Italian we figured out that he had found us a place, we didnt know where, and that his brother was going to take us there. So we hopped in a van with Luigi's brother and a driver and they took us a few blocks into the center of Leonforte to a real estate agent. The real estate agent took us around the corner and gave us the keys to an apartment that was for sale - beautiful, fully furnished, with a terrace - and that was where we stayed for two nights at 60€ a night. Which is how much we were getting ripped off for for a tiny pensione with nothing in Taormina.

We spent the beginning of our first day like this and after we went out to the Comune Municiapale to look up my family. Theyre sending the records and files in a month. Good deal. We walked outside the Comune and immediately bumped into an 83 year old guy who said he worked in London 40 years ago and spoke some english. I told him about my family history and he said he knew some Calcaterras still in Leonforte and would introduce us to them. This dude was classic Grandpa Simpson. He just talked and talked and every hour or so he said he needed to leave and we said Ok Goodbye! and then hed remember something else we needed to see and walked us to it and went on talking.

THE CALCATERRA'S

The little old dude walked us into a small neighborhood and started talking up the name Calcaterra with a few people and five minutes later the street was packed with people who were Calcaterras or knew Calcaterras or had read mystical books about the land of Calcattera. Not that last one.

Anyway we met a Calcaterra named Rosa, about 65, who was one of three sisters and the last of her line of Calcaterras. We didnt know and couldnt figure out in that street whether we were related or not but I said to her and her family "Calcaterra differente, ma, Calcaterra lo stesso," which is my mangled Italian way of saying "Different Calcaterras, but, the same Calcaterras." They laughed and insisted we join them for dinner the next day, we agreed and took off with our little old dude tour guide.

The little old dude, who is in that picture to the left with Ashton, kept walking us around. He tired out though and by the end of the day, even though he knew we didnt speak much Italian, he just kept saying everything in Italian anyway and we didnt know what was going on. Eventually we said our goodbyes and he went back to the Piazza 4 Novembre where all the other old Sicilian men hang out, all day every day, and smoke cigarettes, or cigars, or pipes and drink cafe and talk and talk and talk.

We spent the night chatting with Luigi and his wife in their bar and now, hopefully, Luigi is gonna come visit in NYC. Everyone in Sicily is in love with NYC although none we met have been there but the allure still lives on. Cool.

The next day we headed over to the Calcaterra's for lunch. It was quite a scene, my man, quite a scene. Four generations of Calcaterra's in one room, about 20 people. From Rosa's 94 year old mother all the way down to Rosa's two rambunctious grandsons, Giuseppe and Simone, who were about 8 and 3, respectively. It was loud, it was full of food, nine people spoke at the same time always, it was Sicilian. Ashton, at this juncture, was also quite the Super Trooper as she put on her game face and ate a course of tortellini with ragu sauce followed up with breaded veal and lamb chops. Trial by fire.

The family imported a couple of friends who spoke english and italian fluently and we talked for hours about New York, the family, where we might be related, etc. etc. etc. It was quite a thing. Rosa's husband, I cant recall his name, I mean it was like three hours and 20 names, way too much, insisted that "whether or not we're related, now you're family." Which of course all sounded much better in his sicilian accent.

We took big family photos, Rosa's husband stuck his coppola - sicilian tough guy hat - on me for the photo and then insisted I keep it. Its awesome, totally cool, and they said that with it I was "puro Siciliano." Not bad. Eventually we had to leave and catch our bus but not before, of course, Rosa's husband's house grappa which could fuel an Indy car, and exchanging of emails all around and guarantees that the Sicilian family was going down to the church to find birth certificates and figure out our potential relationship to them.

We left fat and happy for our long train ride which turned out to be pretty interesting. We rode in a sleeper car with a Tunisian named Mohammed who said he had been in Italy for 3 or 4 years with no papers whatsoever and made a living travelling back and forth from Catania, in Sicily, to Milan selling knockoff Dolce and Gabbanna clothing. He also said he had three apartments in Italy - he was our age, by the way - and made 5000 tax free Euros a month. Thats like 100,000 tax free dollars a year. He invited me to come work with him. I shoulda.

This was also quite an interesting conversation because he spoke Italian, French, and only a little English, so he and would literally speak using three languages three different times in the same sentence. Somehow, though, it worked and we communicated pretty much fine. Drop out of college, Claire, your future is knockoff designer clothing.

Pigs feet are calling.

People Watching in Taormina

2007-10-14T23:50:00.000+07:00

If you're just joining us, the big catch-up post is below this one. What we've got here are some classic People Watching: Taormina, features. Turns out that Taormina kinda sucks. Uber-Touristey-Cliche. Hyper expensive and the would-be nice medieval town is totally bogged down in 25€ fish dishes and lame Armani boutiques. We're up out this bitch 5am tomorrow for greener pastures. Check out the tourists and then get the new-new-news below. How about those matching outfits above? Shudder....
He's got a human head in that plastic bag.
If Paulie Walnuts didn't have an HBO wardrobe to dress him...
Some people come for the beautiful people. We... well, we notice the beautiful people too...
...but we stay for the hideous and ugly who think they look rather fresh.
This man was a crazy person. He said he was Czech and had been travelling in Europe for 15 years with his guitar. Perhaps. He did wear a Sex Pistols t-shirt and drink another man's unfinished beer and smoke a cigarette off the ground so those do point to long, impoverished travels. He wanted to know what we thought of George Bush. I said I thought he was evil and then he looked confused as though he might not actually know who George Bush is...
That... well... that's just a cute, fat, kid.

Five Number One!

2007-10-13T21:56:00.000+07:00

A lot to catch up on so lets take things back to where we left off... A 24 hour train ride from Hue in central Vietnam to Saigon. The picture above, by the way, is in New Delhi, India. We'll get there. So after a night of sleeping on a bunk on a Vietnamese train we're inching closer to Saigon when, at about 7pm, me and Ashton's car-mates, two 45 year old vietnamese guys, come back from dinner. One of them, Sun, is drunk and informs us "Sun, five Heineken!" and promptly brings back four for Ashton and me without us asking. Sun turns out to be a real nice guy with about eight words of English and he takes a real shine to me.

"Alex one, two, three, four, five number one!" Sun declares as he sequentially grabs my beard, my ear, my bicep, points at my chest hair, and grabs my thigh. It's all very flattering, of course. Or terrifying, I don't remember which. Ashton and Sun's pal enjoy the whole thing and Sun repeats my five highlights as he sees them several more times before we get off the train. He then helps us get a cab and sees us off. Nice guy.

Anyway, it's from there onto India. We met an autorickshaw driver the first day named Pinky who takes us all over New Delhi and Old Delhi telling us about the city and showing us the sights. He tells us about his arranged marriage - he's about 50 so it happened a while ago - and how he didn't like it at first but is now happy and has two great kids about me and Ashton's age. Good for him.

The next day we take off for a crash three day tour to Jaipur, Agra, and back to Delhi. Our driver is a very nice Indian guy from a small village outside Delhi. He's 33 and also in an arranged marriage. Except this guy says he likes his job driving tours because it means he only has to see his wife a couple days at a time and then gets to leave on tours for as much as three weeks at a time. He was nice and spoke English very well and we felt badly for him and his arranged marriage.

So as you can see we rode an elephant in Jaipur which was pretty cool. It took us up to this large fort and we wandered around until the baboons that are, evidently, in control of the fort these days, told us it was time to leave. India is quite large and, believe it or not, you can't quite get a good sense of it in just four or five days. And dont believe what they tell you about mosquitoes in India. The only place we saw them at any point while we were there was in the airport in Delhi which isn't so much an airport as it is a building with planes that go there.

Ashton and I also got a little dose of what "otherness" feels like while we were in India. Our driver told us that "Indian men look at American women like tiger looks at lamb." There certainly was a lot of leering. When we got to the Taj Mahal several groups of young Indian men came up to us and, without asking, decided to have their pictures taken with us. I let them the first time each and then told them the next one would cost them money. A joke they seemed to understand and appreciate.

But that was a good thing, I think, that feeling of otherness because, I mean, you know PDS, Skidmore, NYC, Princeton, blah blah blah those places don't exactly teach you that somehow, somewhere you, Alex Alsup, could possibly be "other". It makes me notice how in lots of little ways that have been totally institutionalized American citizens are granted privilege as some sort of "original being" while others are confronted with their nationality consistently. I.e. in any country outside the US if you want to see a website in your language you type in .il for Israel or .gr for Greece instead of .com as in the US. For us .com is no recognition of nationality, just of the way it is you go to a website. But anywhere else if you want your language you have to consciously, or perhaps subconsciously, express your nationality, your otherness from the American-developed system you are using.

After India I have to say I was pretty excited to get to a westernish country like Israel, which was our next stop. We only got to really see Jerusalem, so what follows on my take of Israel cant fairly be said to apply to the whole country since I dont really know it. In Jerusalem people are incredibly unhelpful and snobbish. It is as though you are the first person that has dared interrupt their perpetual cellphone conversation as they work behind the desk at their hotel or internet cafe or restaurant since Jesus walked the streets you are on. Several Israelis we spoke to also had glowing words for George W. Bush - none had anything bad to say - and when we mentioned to a couple Israelis that we had friends teaching in Jordan they remarked that it was terrible to teach Arabs because it taught them how much oil was worth and they shouldn't be educated.

It all seemed rather pathetic and unconstructive for a country who relies on the support of a number of other governments' military strength for its continued existence. It seems a tone of reconciliation and understanding is more in Israel's strategic interest than this snobbish stand-off-ery. These attitudes combined with Israel's recent catastrophic military mistakes and general poor governance is losing Israel a lot of sympathy from me. And, as my Iranian Revolution professor from Ben Gurion University said, "Israelis need to figure out that they're not living in Western Europe." At least some of the ones I met in Jerusalem do. That said, in the airport in Delhi and Istanbul we met a couple young 30ish Israelis from Tel Aviv who seemed much more level headed and able to objectively and less-emotionally talk about Israel. So I guess Jerusalem is maybe kind of Israel's South Carolina or something.

Next we were on to Jordan where this whole angry, emotional Israeli thing became more complicated. The Jordanians we met in Petra and even at the border patrol were incredibly kind and helpful. They seemed thrilled if you just mentioned how beautiful their country is.

And it is absolutely incredible. So gorgeous. I've never seen rocks that look old. These massive sandstone mountains that are disintegrating and have been for 50 million years are gorgeous and where the water is whittling them down you see faces and designs and colors that are just amazing. They're practically Reuben-esque in places. Also several of them spoke about how they had dreams to go to America but have had their visas refused three times by the US embassy and are now barred from trying to come to America ever again. Good policy US. Dumb fucks. The only thing that will keep the US alive and resuscitate its international standing is if people who want to come here are allowed to come here. We need brains, arts, culture, and just plain old people who want to be American. Turning them away is in no way productive and will only breed contempt, cynicism, and ignorance.

So we went to Petra in Jordan with an old friend from CT, Natalie Howe, and her boyfriend, Howard. We did a long, about 6 hours, hike the first day and say tons of great back trails through Petra which is just incredible. So gorgeous. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had a good spot to shoot. Getting back to Israel was an adventure and, as the Colonel Frances Xavier Sands says in "Tree of Smoke," "An adventure is only fun once it's over. If then."

At the border I told my entire life story to two female Israeli interrogators which, actually, wasn't too bad. They were quite nice to talk to and seemed very interested in me and what I do which was quite flattering. After a while they let us through and then at the airport I got interrogated again along with Ashton which was less fun because the woman doing it wasnt as nice or nearly as pretty as the two girls at the border. But we made it out and on to Greece.

We arrived in Greece in Athens and went straight on to this island, Aegina, about an hour off the coast where we had a reservation at a small hotel for two nights. But when we got there it was so beautiful and the family that ran it was so nice we just decided to stay for all five days that we were in Greece. I didnt do a damn thing for four days except fish and swim. Didnt catch a thing. But Ted, a retired expat Brit who ran a small restaurant and bar with his wife in the small town Aghia Marina where we stayed, said that catching stuff wasnt the point on Aegina. Amen. Although the Greeks seem to disagree. One night I felt a couple of tremors run through the hotel which I though were from tectonic shifting but Ted told me the next night that more likely it was some local fisherman using the wily technique of dropping sticks of dynamite into the water to catch their fish. How Homer Simpson of them. Greece was quite relaxing after a lot of not so relaxing stops beforehand. Now we're in Sicily in a town called Taormina on the east coast right on the water. Alitalia tried to lose our luggage yesterday but failed as it came in on a flight right after ours and we got it back with little delay. Although I did manage to lose my credit card in an ATM in Greece. Clever little machine.

So with a little over two weeks left Ashton and I are both healthy, still speaking to each other, happy, and have only three more plane rides left and then I will not enter another airport for approximately nineteen years because I just cant stand it anymore. Ciao, and remember;

"In Sicily, women are more dangerous than shotguns."

Kootchie Kooties

2007-09-27T19:53:00.001+07:00

My man, them North Koreans got it easy. Granite tunnels six and a half feet tall and fresh air and water pumped in from the outside world. Nothing the likes in Cu Chi. I joshed about the Kootchie Kooties when we were in Korea but we saw the real McCoy today, jumping down into the tunnels used by the Cu Chi guerrillas in the Vietnam War.

Well, actually, that ain't quite right. We went down into the reproduction tunnels built for tourists who "aren't quite as hungry" as the guerrillas were, as our tour guide said. These tunnels, though, my man, they were tiny. 1.2 meters high and maybe half as wide. The originals were 80 cm high and about 50-60 cm wide. Those Cu Chi, my man, real deal.

The photos here; you can see Ash popping out of an American M41 Tank taken out in 1970 by an improv Cu Chi landmine. The other shot is me and another dude on our tour moving to a lower level in the tunnels. 140 meters we crawled through the pitch black with bats and big, nasty centipedes all around. Hard, dirty work. It's not much surprise when you see those tunnels that America didn't have the stomach to take that fight. B-52 craters spot the landscape, about 30 feet across each, and that was about the only way to shut down those tunnels and turn them into mass graves. Even so, the big, walking bombs got only the first or so level of the three levels of the tunnels.

Michael Corleone in Cuba:
"Michael: We saw a strange thing on our way here. Some rebels were being arrested, and instead of being arrested, one of them pulled the pin on a grenade he had hidden in his jacket. He took himself and the captain of the command with him. Now, the soldiers are paid to fight; the rebels aren't.
Hyman Roth: What does that tell you?
Michael: They can win."

Indeed they can, my man. At war now with that cluster-fuck in Iraq, seeing this Cu Chi system, this is why the U.S. didn't win in Vietnam and wont win in Iraq. Or Afghanistan, anymore, for that matter. More on this later to come.

2007-09-27T00:13:00.000+07:00

Jason says: "Any day is good enough for St. Patrick's Day! and I always get a partner to go along with me." Cat's a good sport.

2007-09-26T23:48:00.001+07:00

"Then, mistaking a group of garishly dressed men for pirates, Jason boarded a van full of homosexuals and joined their boat protest against the local yacht club." Well, not really. But here are some shots from our windswept journey to Sausalito where we ate some delicious fried octopus tentacles. Those are some clouds rolling down over Sausalito.

2007-09-26T23:42:00.001+07:00

Appropriately, after that last post, I can now begin uploading photos. A cathartic disclaimer that will turn out to be, no doubt. So here we begin; Ashton at night in San Fran. Just above Union Square, not far from our hotel.

Nostalgia

2007-09-25T21:15:00.000+07:00

There are dates getting closer that I remember vividly from a year ago that day. I.e. September 30 last year, my birthday, I remember that day. October 30 last year. A Halloween party then with three Ali G's, two Borats, an Oscar the Grouch fait a complit with trash can. Kudos D. The days this year, a year later, are the hard, flat surfaces on which the memories of those days a year ago will echo. This year I'll end this trip on October 30. Another October 30 I'll remember where I was when...

These are the seeds of nostalgia. This is a bad thing. I find myself, on this trip, taking more photographs than I ever have before. My natural inclination, previously, towards photographs was "fuck 'em." A photo is a forced hard, flat surface. An attempt to create a wall on which a memory can echo when there need not be one. This is when nostalgia becomes unhealthy. What does Murray say in "White Noise" about nostalgia? He says this:

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

Amen, brother.

And yet I take photos. 150 or so by this point last time I checked. I like to look back at the photos and this is proof that I'm feeling nostalgic. Settling grievances. No good, my man. But Evelyn learns who people are through photographs. Does that make them less dangerous, or more? Probably more.

Or...

"Once you’re out of school, it is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity."

Fuck it. A pint, senor!

Dukkha, Samudaya, Nirodha, Magga

2007-09-22T11:05:00.000+07:00

China put the kaibash on my blog and my gastrointestinal system, but nothing a little high-grade antibiotics and movement onto a more "meh..." communist country, Vietnam, couldn't cure. No restrictions on el bloggo here. There's a lot to catch up on here, though, so if you don't like the length implications of a first sentence like, "Stately plump, Buck Mulligan..." (That's one for the grown-ups, out there) then trot on down to the next flash in the pan fast-food-deep-fried-open-the-hatch-down-the-gullet-blog.

We track back to South Korea in a sort of "sing me a song, oh muse, of a time when I was in a land the communists didn't end with the whole kit and kaboodle." Not quite right though because this song's gonna sing us right up In Front Of Them All and a little across. That's right, the DMZ. Now, for you civvies that's what we in Platoon Philosophy call the DE-MILITARIZED ZONE which separates the South and North of the Korean peninsula. Ashton and I rose at 0500, trecked about 5 kliks to Camp Kim and boarded a civilian transport unit which took us and the other 35 in-country Americans up to the DMZ. Two UN Special Forces debriefed us and then loaded us onto a military bus and took us straight to the line itself.

Madness.

We offloaded - "do not look at the North Korean soldiers, they will take pictures of you they will look at you through binoculars, do not engage them in any way, stay in double-file lines, do not run across the border." So there we stood. 35 Americans in a UN building - more a square box - half in North Korea and half in the South. On the south side the Koreans built a big, giant, stone building to welcome reunited families from the North. On the North side the Koreans built a bigger Stone building that is empty. Some soldiers stand around and spend their time photographing American and UN soldiers. One of the most heavily fortified borders in the world is a photo-op.

We saw Freedom Village from about 9 kliks away - this is the city, probably a hundred or so buildings, that the North built to counter a village on the South's side. The village on the South side has about 200 farmers that make a tax-free $86,000/year selling their crops exclusively to the government. Freedom Village, the North's answer, is a ghost-town. Uninhabited. A hundred empty buildings with no doors, no windows, and subwoofers the size of Panzer Tanks blaring propaganda - or at least they were until 2004 when the North figured it wasn't doing much of anything for an empty town. The South's village has a big South Korean flag. Real big. So the North felt compelled to have bigger flag. Way bigger. Dry weight, the North's flag is 800 Kilos.

The UN boys told us the story about how the guard-posts the North and South used to have on one anothers' sides - the North had a couple slightly on the South side and the South had a couple slightly on the North side - disappeared. Good story, too. Adapted:

"There was a tree. And the South had a guard-post they couldn't see because of the tree, but the North could see the post and the South didn't like that equation. So the US and UN sent some guys to cut the limbs offa that there tree. Now th'm boys from the North di'nt like not having consultation prior to the hedgin' operation so they sent some boys to slow that operation up. 'Bout 30 of 'em to deal with the six American and UN forces/hedge trimmers. And you see what ensued, here, in this little here sitchyation, is that a fracas broke out, and that fracas turned into a ruckus, which developed into an all-out-bawls-to-the-walls-brawl. In the end you had two American officers hacked to bits with an ax, dead, by Northern soldiers. Well the U.S. didn't much like that so a few days later they went back to cut down that tree. But, Platoon Philosophy! Hooah. They went in heavy. And I mean heavy. A platoon to guard the trimmers. And U2 aircrafy. A squadron of F-15's. A company of tanks, and an aircraft carrier and its battle fleet off the coast on Defcon 2 alert."

I. am. not. shitting. you.

The best part is, the North freaked out and totally abandoned the whole border while they cut down the tree. A tree.

Anywho, after these excursions Ashton and I turned into a couple of Kootchie Kooties minus the Lurp training (read Denis Johnson's new one) and hopped down into one of the DPRK tunnels, one of at least four, which the North had had tunneling into the South's territory 71 meters underground to the end of putting 30,000 troops an hour in Seoul ASAP. They got found, obviously, and are now part of the tourist attraction. They're cold and deep and granite. Don't go. It's a long climb back up them.

Well the DMZ was quite a thing. A little heart of darkness in the middle of country full of the nicest people I've ever encountered. Also the cleanest water in the world. Every restaurant has a hyper-filtration system the size of a refrigerator and these UV-ray cabinets to sterilize the cups. Man I missed that in China.

China, man, fucking China. It's big, it's hot, and on a clear day, you can see all the way to the top layer of the smog that blankets everything. Everyone's got a serious skin disease in Beijing, it's bad news, and the baby's all wear these assless chaps so they can take a crap in the streets. But that's just what you get on the way to the hostel, it gets better. Everyone should change their shopping habits. Instead of shopping for stuff like, once a month, everyone should hop on a jet and fly their asses to China once every five years - or Vietnam, although I'm not as well versed here yet - and buy everything they want. Bootleg DVD's of like, The Simpsons Movie, the Silk Markets, the Pajiayuan antique markets. Man the stuff's incredible and cheap as dirt. I got eight brand new DVD's, all sorts of great stuff, for $7. They had me trying to buy all six seasons of The Sopranos on DVD. How much? 300 rmb. Know how much that is? Like $37. For like 50 DVDs!? I didn't do it, no room, but a steal. Matt Knight's gonna kill me.

Oh, and don't drink the water. Or eat the dog. The blowtorched 'em right outside our hotel, apparently. Thank goodness I didn't see it.

The Great Wall. It's gorgeous. More awe-inspiring than anything I've seen since the Braves won the '95 World Series. But it will kick your ass. You think it's like, or at least I thought it was like, the way it looks in pictures - basically smooth, stone walkways rolling lazily over swooning hills. As Borat would say, "NOT!" The thing is craggy, impossibly steep, full of loose stones, poor markings, and potentially bone-breaking pitfalls. We walked about four and a half miles of it. No picnic. These people, villagers from villages along the wall that have like 20 inhabitants, walk with you and help you and then want you to buy stuff from them but will get you mad cuz they just run up and down the thing all day every day. Stupid out of shape American. Still no chance to get photos up yet, it looks like this computer had a grenade tossed inside of its CPU, don't know when, hopefully soon.

We chilled with Brian in Beijing, drank some really potent rice wine. 56% alcohol or something ridiculous like that - to quote Ralph Wiggum's reaction to the poison berries, "It tastes like burning." The food was amazing though, so good and so cheap and Brian kept us moving and busy taking the subway all over, seeing the Forbidden City and Tian'amen Square. Then I got sick. Real sick. Like, fever of 103 and can't get out of bed for three days sick. Just barely recuped in time to make the flight to Vietnam. So now we're in Hanoi where the mopeds zip around thicker than tzi-tzi flies around a rotting caribou's corpse - I hope that analogy holds up to scrutiny. Seriously, these mopeds are INSANE. Denis Johnson's new novel - "Tree of Smoke" - (spectacular, by the way) takes place in Vietnam, southeast asia, 60's era, has this line about the mopeds, "Fest continued across the street, heading into the tide of honking motorbikes without pausing, as he'd learned to do. They knew how to keep from hitting pedestrians." Uh, well, maybe. I dunno. So far Ashton and I just close our eyes and sprint across screaming until we hit a wall on the other side.

Alright. Until next time. Tell your story walking.

Ben and Carrie: Couple names I've been stewing around; Paisley or Falcon. I like Falcon. Something like Falcon Burn-Rhubber Alsup. The "h" adds that je ne said quoi, non? Bon chance.

-Al

''I Just Took Three Ambien and I Can't Lift My Arms''

2007-09-12T07:04:00.000+07:00

Anyone who says ''ít's a small world,'' hasn't spent 12 hours flying across it over the Pacific in United Airlines coach. Actually, it wasn't that bad. They keep you full of crappy movies and wine so you doze through most of it. But getting to Korea was a little dream-scapey. It just didn't really make sense that I was in a Korean city that wasn't encapsulated within, say, New York, or San Francisco. But here we are, Korea. We went someplace for dinner last night around the street from our hostel and ordered I Have No Idea What and Ashton ended up with pork but she's a trooper and ate around it.

The folks at our hostel seem to be quite nice and we're now scrambling to figure out what we want to get in in the two full days we're here before we go to Beijing and meet Bri-Guy Griffin. I'm going to look for some Mr. Sparkle to do my laundry with (that'll be Simspsons, 8-22 for all the ignoramouses out there who aren't up on their postmodern American scripture.)

Also, my international cellphone seems to be not so internationally inclined. No signal, no signal, no signal. No idea what's going on. Sucks.

Anyway, we're off to somewhere. Quote of the day: ''You have very lucky dishes, Mr. Simpson. Mr. Sparkle indetifies himself as a magnet for foodstuffs. He boasts that he will banish dirt to the land of wind and ghosts.''

Murder and Tetracyclene

2007-09-10T02:26:00.001+07:00

We took the bus the other day on the way back up from Haight and I overheard an intriguing conversation between three rather hobo-styled older men. Two guys were sitting next to each other discussing their relative allergies to tetracyclene and when a third homeless guy sat down next to Ashton and me, one of the two engaged in conversation asked the guy next to us how he was doing. "Remind me to murder you in the morning," he replied. Then, with a little air-writing flourish, "I'll make a note of it." The other two guys seemed content enough with this response.

We went into Sausalito on the ferry yesterday with Jason of the Sigals of Brarely Rd. Princeton, New Jersey, and his girlfriend, Cat. There are some intriguing photographs of Jason on the ferry with mischievous, Mephistophelian grins on the way out - to be uploaded when possible.

Brian Griffin says this blog is outlawed in China. Wise on their part, but I'm still coming.

Goddamn That M.C. Made My Day

2007-09-08T11:30:00.000+07:00

It's an oblique Erik B. and Rakim reference, so if you don't get it then you wont understand why I bought an $8 pair of consignment Makaveli jeans today, either. But I did, and they're dope. San Francisco is like one big M.C. Escher work - you walk a square block and you go uphill four times. It ain't right. There also seem to be a lot of contradictions in this city; the hippies look more homeless than hippie, the rich folks look more SoHo than San Fran, and the homeless look kinda chic (not really, but I needed to complete that contradiction-trifecta.) The people are nice, helpful - the first thing Ashton and I saw when we got off the BART yesterday was a homeless guy helping some tourists find a cheaper and quicker way to get on a cable car than the Union Square stop they were waiting for. It all makes ya miss NYC - what I'd give to have a cabbie curse me out in Swahili and a homeless guy ask me to send him a check - C/O Jesus, address, The Pentagon (catch up on your Simpsons season nine, episode one if you want catch that one before it passes you by.) Chinatown is rife with good deals and great meals and the bar we went to on Haight today featured a rotund barkeep who gave us good prices and pointed out the foibles in our beer selections. But he was a good dude. Oh, one other thing, there's this South Park episode where San Francisco gets destroyed by all the "Smug" its citizens create by thinking they're better than anywhere else because they drive hybrid cars, but I've seen just as many Escalades and Hummers here as anywhere else. Although the public transport is very eco-friendly. And there was a guy at a bar we went to last night who kept talking about how San Francisco should be a beacon for the rest of the world, but he also talked a lot about how he didn't feel like he needed to really worry about paying off his gambling debts for various reasons so I'm not sure he's the savior we're looking for. Two more days here, no pictures b/c the computer here seems to be designed to prevent my uploading them. Perhaps in Korea. Anybody need a pocketful of semiconductors? Let us know once we get to Asia-land.
Yours in perpetuity,
AAAD

Pagliacci, or, The Docket, or, The Overture

2007-09-05T23:44:00.002+07:00

Someday, we'll all end up like this. Which is to say, reincarnated as the bacteria that lives on the skulls of deceased lesser beings like this Whatever That Is. But until then we are humans with arms and legs and mouths that lead to stomachs. Sometimes, those stomachs get bored of eating the local array of small rodents and vegetation so the arms and legs have to take the stomachs to new places for new small rodents and vegetation. Tomorrow we leave for greener pastures and less bacterial rodents. More on what San Francisco has to offer in these departments once we get there. But now it's time for the overture:

Jerry Seinfeld in the episode "The Opera":
"Overture, curtains, lights
This is it, you'll hit the heights
And oh what heights we'll hit
On with the show this is it
Tonight what heights we'll hit
On with the show this is it"

So here's the docket; Newark-San Francisco-Seoul-Beijing-Hanoi-Ho Chi Minh-Kuala Lampur (layover)- New Delhi-Istanbul (layover)-Tel Aviv-Petra (To reenact Indiana Jones scenes)-Athens-Palermo-Rome-Frankfurt-Paris-Normandy-London-Newark

There, now no more questions on this because I can't recite it anymore. It's me, it's my girlfriend, Ashton, and a pocket full of dreams and Immodium. Stay Tuned. Maybe we'll run into a tragic clown named Pagliacci. Or Joe Davola.