A Brooklynite on the Ice

Top Secret Mission

2012-02-29T11:08:00.001-05:00

On Superbowl Sunday a man sidled up to me and said: "Headed for Liberia, huh? How would you feel about taking over, you know, a small package for me?" We had only met that evening, at a party during the first half. It was now deep into the second, and over halftime both of us had changed venues, independently moving from one Red Hook bowl party to the next. It was hard not to think that he was following me around, trying to enlist me in some nefarious scheme. Between us was a sea of guacamole, and mountainous bags of chips, all destined to be neglected, for we were only minutes from the end of the fourth quarter. Some people nearby who had overheard this exchange looked at us strangely. "A package?"

Exhibit A

"You know what I'm talking about," he said. "Take some along with you. I like to think of them as my children, going out into the world and spreading far and wide." Curiouser and curiouser. Then I understood. The man was the artist, Beriah Wall; I've written about him, but I had never laid eyes on him before. He's the guy responsible for manufacturing and distributing small coinlike clay lozenges that can turn up anywhere: in a flowerpot, on the stoop, atop a fencepost, on the welcome mat. A mass distribution of free art, a decades-long project. Wall had been handing them out at the party, shaking hands with fellow guests and pressing a clay coin into their palm. "This is for you."

B

I said that I would be pleased, no, more than that, proud, to carry a collection of Beriah Walls across the Atlantic; this is just the sort of pointless activity that makes life meaningful. Then I went back to grazing on the corn chips and thought nothing more about it.

C

Two days later, in a frenzy of packing and tidying, I went out the front door and down the stoop to take out a bag of trash. There, in the corner of the diminutive top landing, was half a sandwich baggie brimming with contraband disks. They had arrived at just the perfect time to go into my luggage. At Kennedy Airport, for the first time in living memory, nobody asked me if I had accepted any parcels from unknown persons. It seemed a good omen for the mission.

D

In Monrovia, the Liberian customs agent eyed us warily, for we had 19 pieces of luggage, mostly tactical duffle bags and vast black plastic impact-resistant suitcases filled with documentary film gear. I kept my secret bundle to myself and hoped we would not be too closely scrutinized. How to explain several dozen coin-shaped circles of fired clay, bearing messages like "Us / They," "Frog / Boil" "Sober / Somber"? I was pretty sure they weren't illegal, but looking at this particular import from the perspective of an African bureaucrat I was also confident they were inexplicable. However, they don't call the local enlisted production personnel on film shoots "fixers" for nothing, and in no time we were waltzing through the nothing-to-declare zone with our four mountainous luggage carts.

E

As I made my way into Liberia, a memory came to me, of a long ago New Year's eve. In 1985 I was in Paris, and after a much too long and much too festive champagne-soaked evening, some friends and I decided that the proper way to begin the year would be to drive drunk to Versailles and witness the dawn departure of the sober maniacs of the Paris-Dakar auto rally, the hell-for-leather trans-Saharan car and truck race. At the time, I was caught up in the romance and urban chic of graffiti, and as we wandered amongst the impressive monster trucks, their every surface plastered with corporate automotive advertizing, I surreptitiously added my own logo to more than one, drunkenly and gleefully imagining my signature bouncing over the rocky terrain all the way to Senegal. Beriah Wall's clay coins share something of the graffitist's ethos. They are the artist's mark on the world. They disperse on unpredictable and unchartable journeys, they make a web, an enveloping network of declarations of their creator's existence. I took a few in my pocket each morning as we headed out to film, placing them here and there in our daily travels. I hope whoever found them got as much amusement, bemusement and abstract, fleeting pleasure as I experienced, when I first came across one in the bed of my truck in Brooklyn.

Partial list of collaborations:

A The illicit baggy on the nightstand in my Monrovia hotel room.

B A Beriah Wall on a retaining wall, at the International Rescue Committee HQ, Monrovia.

C "Us / They" on a garden shed with gang and Manchester Football Club graffiti, somewhere in the hood.

D At the African Methodist Episcopal University.

E At a palm oil wholesale dealership at Redlight market.

F1 At city hall, interior.

F2 At city hall, exterior.

G Left as a tip upon departure, in my hotel room safe.

Fishing and Faith

2012-02-12T07:28:00.001-05:00

It takes a lot of faith to venture out into the Atlantic Ocean day after day to cast one's nets from a dugout canoe, propelled only by hand-carved wooden paddles. Protection is needed. The resting fishing boats pulled up on the beach in Monrovia are a testament to that faith and to that need; there is scarcely a single vessel without a biblical citation or a praise to the Lord emblazoned on the side. But like tap-taps, the ornately painted microbuses that serve as the entirety of Haiti's public transit system, the decoration of the Monrovia fleet juxtaposes a variety of elements from the spiritual, athletic and political worlds. Painting the insignia of the Manchester United Football Club on the side of a wheelbarrow, or of a canoe, is about making an association with the very best. The painter provides, literally, a brush with greatness. Your paintjob affiliates you with supremacy, whether represented by the divine, or a star attacking midfielder. You show respect, you ask for protection, you brand yourself, you are endorsed.

The hand-carved fleet, at rest

"Fresh and Ready / Only God #2"

"In Jesus Name / Chelsea Football Club / Acts 5:10 (Miraculous signs and wonders wrought among the people)"

Chelsea FC, detail

All praises be to the United Nations

"Manchester United / Only God #1"

"Heavenly Father"

Fixing the nets

Working up a thirst

2012-02-08T17:37:00.001-05:00

Today's offerings at "Taylor Entertainment Spot," a hole-in-the-wall corner tavern / bodega in Congo Town, Monrovia

The proprietor wandered out of his closet-sized shop to learn why I was taking a picture of his wall, so I struck up a conversation. I know what "Man Power" is, as I had the misfortune to drink some of it in Ghana a few years back. What's "God Father?" I asked.

"It's this," he said, reaching into a plastic bin of empties. A petite bottle of this fine whiskey goes for 80 Liberian dollars. That's about $1.10.

The Happy Cell Phone Times

2012-02-07T19:52:00.000-05:00

Exuberant mobile telephone aficionados, in the Monrovia, Liberia airport.

Photo: David Smoler

Guilty as Charged

2012-01-27T16:45:00.002-05:00

Interesting things are happening in Guatemala. Despite the election of Otto Perez Molina, installed as president just a couple of weeks ago, the Guatemalan judiciary proved its bravery and independence two days ago by indicting former General and one-time de facto president Ephraín Ríos Montt on charges of genocide. Ríos Montt was Otto Perez Molina's boss in the grim dark 1980s, when something like 200,000 Mayan Indian highland peasants were massacred by the dictadura. Perez Molina's election, on a campaign to restore security in a country that suffers from Juarez-like rates of murder and impunity, was generally seen as a setback to the cause of justice for the victims of the genocide. He is a genocide-denier and a former military man.

But on the same day that Perez Molina was sworn into office, Ríos Montt, leader of the junta in the bloodiest days of 1982 and 1983, ended his twelve-year term as a congressman, and with it ended his legislative immunity from prosecution. With pre-emptive bluster, he promptly announced that he was prepared to present himself before the courts, should they require his testimony. The courts, and specifically a heroic judge, Carol Patricia Flores Blanco, took him up on his offer. Flores Blanco decided two days ago that there is sufficient evidence to merit a trial, and Ríos Montt is now under house arrest. Impunity and corruption reign in Guatemala, and we may be some distance from seeing Ríos Montt rotting in prison, but that he went directly from a seat in Congress to home-bound defendant is, in the context of the country, extraordinarily significant. The Mayan majority, ostracized, marginalized and disenfranchised since the arrival of the Spanish conquest, may finally get some justice.

For background on the genocide and on Ríos Montt I highly recommend you seek out and see Pamela Yates' latest film, Granito, which among other things presents evidence of his guilt, in footage she shot in Guatemala thirty years ago. I'm very proud that I got the chance to work on this film. I'll be even happier if Ríos Montt goes to jail in any part because of it.

Today's Semiotic Malfunction: Please Enjoy Passively

2012-01-24T15:07:00.000-05:00

In Fort Greene Park, where on one recent evening I passively walked past this sign and the monument it protects.

Happy Lower Manhattan Firecracker Day!

2012-01-23T17:30:00.001-05:00

Time to Make the Cookies! UPDATED

2012-01-19T16:33:00.001-05:00

Although I was showered with gifts yesterday on my birthday, the best present I received came last weekend when I fulfilled a Christmas promise to my niece, a budding baking aficionado, and invited her out to Brooklyn to make cookies and bake bread. This was just about the most fun I can remember having in months. First we traipsed around Fairway hand-in-hand, collecting ingredients. Then dough was kneaded, peanut butter, butter and assorted shades of brown sugar were creamed together. Bits of batter plopped onto the floor, swelling loaves were spritzed with a waterjet to generate steam. We formed blobs of insanely delicious mixture into golf-balls and tined them with forks. The kitchen filled with delicious smells. We tasted the results. So much better than any amusement park!

Photo: courtesy Ashley Singer

01/31/2012 UPDATE:

Just found, the cutest shopping list in the history of shopping.

Blackout, UPDATED

2012-01-18T10:41:00.000-05:00

I'm too internet clutzy to figure out whether there is a way to black out antarcticiana in solidarity with today's webwide SOPA and PIPA protests, so these screenshots of major websites, all shut down for the day, will have to do. SOPA and PIPA are two pernicious pieces of legislation making their way through Washington. They would make much of what makes the internet great, illegal, such as the ability to link to any bit of information, anywhere, at any time. Masquerading as enforcers of copyright protection, SOPIPA essentially makes websites responsible for the copyright, piracy and trademark infringements of any other website that they link to.

In the non-virtual world the equivalent of this would be if the police were to arrest me for giving a tourist directions to Canal Street because I might have known that the reason they wanted to go there was to purchase counterfeit Louis Vuitton bags.

This legislation would have two immediate results. The radical impoverishment of the richness of the web, and a mammoth migration of the United States information technology sector, one of our last thriving industries, to parts offshore. These laws were written by over-priced movie-business lawyers and Washington legislators whose web experience is having an assistant who checks their email for them. They have to be stopped.

UPDATE: Amy Goodman's story in the Guardian does a great job of laying out the issues and explaining why this is really censorship legislation masquerading as an anti-piracy initiative.

Metropolitan Etiquette Authority

2012-01-16T13:02:00.000-05:00

Situated somewhere comfortably between street art and public service are the amazing signs of the Metropolitan Etiquette Authority. Presenting like a hybrid between an alternate-side parking warning and one of those friendly "mind-the-gap" style helpful hints you find in most subway cars, these pleas for sanity and common decency are ones you wish some city agency was actually producing and plastering all over the city. In fact, they are already fetish objects, "free" limited edition artworks that I suspect are frequently stolen just about as fast as the artist cleverly bolts them to existing signposts. So far, I have resisted the very powerful temptation to stalk one and bring it home for myself, if only because the messages on them so desperately need to get out there in front of the public.

This one is my favorite, so far. Photo spotted, and stolen from, Eileen Costa's facebook page.

Making too much of Gumbo

2012-01-09T19:14:00.000-05:00

Although it was not an event officially sanctioned by the Association for the Promulgation of Gumbo, dinner at my house last night owed a lot to the founding spirit of that organization. Call it the fraternity of consumption. Never having invited twenty people to dine at once before, I was typically concerned that there wouldn't be enough food. While at this point I pretty much grasp what dinner for eight should look like when laid out on the chopping board, were two and half pounds of okra, two chickens, and my last few sticks of Laplace, Louisiana andouille going to be enough for the gathering hordes? The affirmative RSVP rate was running at about 96%.

Not to worry. Despite my protestations that I had everything under control, "although a bottle of wine would be welcome, if you feel like bringing one," everyone bought food, and dessert, and wine, and I probably could have fed forty.

Just one little corner of the groaning board. Wild rice with a trio of mushroom species bundled up in lotus leaf, by Ordoubadi. With friends who bring platters like this to your gumbo social, you can almost get away with not even bothering to cook at all, and just blaming the lack of gumbo on a last minute scorched roux accident. But I'm ahead of myself. "First," as it says at the beginning of hundreds of Louisiana recipes, "you make a roux."

Roux, along with okra, is one of the defining, character-bestowing ingredients in gumbo. White flour, slow-fried in bubbling oil, must be whisked constantly to avoid it carbonizing and infecting your gumbo with the acrid taste of arson. Donald Link, of the brilliant Cochon Restaurant, in New Orleans, whose gumbo recipe I was following, writes that "the process of making roux can be hypnotic.... Watching the oil and flour mixture slowly change color and begin to take on its unique aroma gives you plenty of time to be alone with your thoughts."

Indeed, with the narcotic swirling of the whisk, I began almost to hallucinate. The surface of bubbling roux has the quality of primeval swamp, as if, ultimately, life may emerge from it, the product of some wondrous accident of science and heat. The world and my thoughts, reflected in this toasting caramel lake, put me in mind of that film school classic, Jean-Luc Godard's cosmos as experienced in the swirling bubbles on the surface of a cup of coffee. It's from "2 ou 3 Choses que je Sais d'elle," and while sort of fun, it is almost staggering in its pretentiousness:

It is now time to admit the artistic debt the Association for the Promulgation of Gumbo owes to Godard in its own cinematic debut from early 2011, even if our version is perhaps too minimalist to reach the same heights of pretension:

Almost ready: one wants the roux, says Link, to be the color of a dark copper penny.

Lots of stock.

Perhaps the defining moment in the preparation of gumbo is the addition of the so-called Holy Trinity, along with abundant cajun seasonings, to the lava-like roux. This mixture of equal parts finely chopped onions, celery, and peppers is an obvious manifestation of Louisiana's French culinary heritage, for the Holy Trinity is essentially a mirepoix, with the peppers substituting for carrots. Once this flavor-base is added to the stock, the only remaining question is what sort of gumbo the dish will become. Will it be foot of pork or pile of crawdad? Back of crab or eye of newt? Just about anything can go in there, because no matter what you do next, now it's unquestionably a gumbo.

This one was andouille and chicken, cooked until the chicken was shedding off the bones into string. Last to go in is the okra, a symbol of fertility and virility thanks to many attributes, from its proud, firm shape to its womb-like interior cavity, bursting with seed and slime. Okra likely originates from Africa and was brought to the new world for or by slaves to grow and eat, and Cubans call the vegetable quimbombo, a word almost identical to various West African Bantu names for okra. Gombo, ngombo, gumbo, okra is synonymous with the dish.

The (mostly) Manhattan contingent, the Brooklyn locals having (mostly) wandered home in a gumbo-induced stupor by this point. This and the first photo courtesy of WoWe.

That is the bottom of the kettle you see there. Malheuresement le gumbo est terminé.

Brooklyn Multiculturalism at its best

2012-01-09T10:33:00.000-05:00

"La Boulangerie Lopez," a bakery that obviously takes Eurozone Unity seriously. And they are not kidding. While the Mexican hipster at the counter was bagging up my tamales a most beautiful brioche came steaming out of the oven in the back of the shop. This is a newish place up on Fifth Avenue between 18th and 19th. The tamales were not bad, either.

Loafing on New Year's Eve

2012-01-01T11:18:00.000-05:00

I'm attracted to superstition, but I'm not superstitious, except perhaps when it comes to natural processes. It doesn't seem to me to be black magic to feel that if the rivers are flowing and the clouds are blowing and the trees are growing as they should, then there is room for optimism. This is the source of the solace I take from the natural world, from wild places. The tide has gone out, but it will come in again.

So I took it as an auspicious auguring that the loaves of bread I baked as my contribution to a New Year's eve dinner last night were, if I say so myself, magnificent. The dough behaved as I expected it to, it swelled and rose in accordance with my understanding of the natural cycle of fermentation, understanding gained after significant effort and observation and much poking and prodding of moist compilations of flour and water. This is a blow-hardian way of saying that my sourdough starter is kicking ass right now.

It has been months since I used commercial yeast. I have no use for the stuff. An untouched jar of it sits in the fridge in the ghetto of mouldering condiments. This bread is made from water, flour and salt, one less ingredient than the Germans allow in their beer. Unless you count life itself as an ingredient, the wild, living yeasts of the air, which find their way into the starter to feed and multiply and expand. When they are doing their job this well, it is hard not to take it as a sign that it will be a glorious 2012!

I'm not bragging, I'm just saying: I would put these loaves up against Balthazar's in a shaolin kung-fu battle for bread supremacy. I apologize that there is no crumb shot, but I didn't want to bust any of these open before taking them to dinner, and snapping pictures of my own bread laid out on the groaning buffet table seemed dreadfully gauche, even for me. Technical details in the comments.

Will work for rum

2011-12-29T10:32:00.000-05:00

Some forty-eight hours ago, a cry for help went out from Daric Schlesselman to the members of the Van Brunt Stillhouse facebook page. Schlesselman is my neighbor, three houses and a vacant lot to the west of me, and he recently launched a new alcoholic business venture. His rum distillery is another neighbor of mine, three blocks and several vacant lots to the east, and I had been eager to stop in for a visit for some time, just to watch the sweet nectar drip out of the alembic.

"Time to start the rum!" He wrote. "As a few of you know, I had to buy sugar in 20 oz. bags this time around. I know. I'm insane. Who knew that sugar is seasonal? I would love some help cutting open all the bags for the first batch. I'm offering a bottle of rum to anyone who comes and helps open sugar...."

His message captures the essence of what it is that I love about my neighborhood. New York City is not a place where people typically stop next door to borrow an onion, an egg, or a couple of inches of ginger, but I do this sort of thing all the time. Red Hook is a village unto itself, hidden away in a remote corner of Brooklyn, surrounded on two and a half sides by water. Although the population seems almost to have tripled in recent years, and I see many new and unfamiliar faces in the streets, it retains the kind of casually intimate public life and community self-awareness described by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities as essential to any thriving neighborhood. Despite her analysis, these are today rare commodities.

I'm proud and happy to live in a place where my neighbors are comfortable sending out the Brooklyn artisanal locavore version of an invitation to an Amish barn-raising. For this to work, however, one has not only to think it's a lovely idea, but also to participate. So, yesterday morning, after a couple of pots of tea, I clipped the box-cutter my father had conveniently given me for Christmas onto my belt, and headed down the block.

"She was only a bootlegger's daughter, but he loved her still."

Denise and Tim, unbaggin'

In Haitian kréyol they say "men anpil, chay pa lou," a classic aphorism of communal labor that plausibly originated with slaves cutting sugar cane. Meaning: "with lots of people, the burden is light," or, "many hands make light work." Daric had slightly pessimistically written "depending on work flow and number of hands, I'll be there into the evening [i]f you'd like to help but can't come until later...." I arrived about ten-thirty and was home an hour later, five hundred pounds of organic, unrefined sugar having been liberated from its packaging. When that bottle of rum shows up on my doorstep I just know those few drops of neighborhood sweat that went into it are going to make it taste that much sweeter.

We gathered around the vat, knives flashing. Derek Dominy (center) proposed that we form a union, but we were finished work before we had even had time to have our first meeting.

The merry crew, after licking their fingers and rinsing their blades.

Daric and his wife, Sarah Ludington, checking the plumbing. The sugar is dissolved into a slurry and then put into a holding tank much like a wine cuve, where rare Guadeloupian yeasts will hasten it on its journey rumward.

Stirring the sweetness. This would go great with pancakes.

Desert Therapy

2011-12-22T20:08:00.003-05:00

On jets flying into Las Vegas from the east, the bubbling red hills of the River of Fire are visible out the starboard side windows. Almost grotesque, these wave-like ridges of orange sandstone rise incongruously out of the desert floor, weathered into globules, as if molten. I didn't know what they were when I saw them, but later, when I saw "River of Fire" on the map, fifty or sixty miles east of the city, I was certain that's what I had been looking at out of the airplane.

It is perhaps a commonplace to note that Las Vegas is the most appalling city in the United States. My heart freshly broken, I was working on a film shoot when I probably ought to have been at a spa, or reclining on a psychiatrist's couch. I was staying at the Palazzo, twin luxury tower of the absurd Venetian, with its plastic indoor canals, imported gondolier-chanteurs ($65 for a twelve minute paddle through a mall, now that's entertainment!) and multi-story shopping experience replete with all the finest names in the franchise pantheon. There are more glorified fast-food joints bearing Mario Batali's imprimatur than you can shake a pair of chopsticks at. In my room, on my California king-size bed, operating my remote-controlled draperies, I couldn't stop thinking that someone else should be there by my side, my one-time best friend, to ridicule the laughable opulence, the black-marbled bath, the gold-brocade settee, the view, from twenties stories up, of an endless acreage of gleaming conference-center roofing dotted with air-conditioning units.

I had the brilliant idea that I would extend my trip by a couple of days, and drive away from the neon and the plastic, deep into the desert, and surround myself with an eternity of primeval rock, soothe my soul, contemplate my faults, bravely face the future.

After four days in the canned, smoky casino air and the eternal twilight of the utterly bogus Piazza San Marco, I felt I needed to get into the desert just to recover from Las Vegas, let alone the catastrophic trainwreck of my serial monogamy. The good news? Speeding along the blacktop with the windows rolled down in the desert cool, the gilded shark-fin towers of the Vegas strip receded quickly into the distance, and from memory. Surrounded by millenia-old sandstone bluffs unchanged since long-before they were wandered only by barefoot Anasazi, the grotesqueries of Vegas barely registered on my consciousness. The bad news? The heartbreak, not so easily diminished.

To try and recover from the sudden and unexpected shattering of your life by going alone into the desert, is a double-edged sword. In retrospect, I would argue that it was very brave of me. Lying, alone in my tent, the freezing desert sky filled with a billion stars, was a magnificent exercise in solitude. It was absolutely quiet. Except for the occasional bird or passing airplane, even during the day the winter desert was absolutely quiet, with a quality of silence I have not experienced since being in Antarctica. At night it was a perfect, complete silence. To be there, alone, is manifestly to prove that you are capable of being alone, that the world will not come to an end just because you are alone in it. Geologically, I was surrounded by proof that the world has existed for millions of years, compared with which the entirety of humanity and the triviality of its billion broken hearts is but an infinitesimal blip on the timeline of wind-sculpted rock.

But the tent was built for two people. Not for nothing is the desert the setting I find most compelling for Waiting for Godot. At least Vladimir and Estragon had one other to talk to. In south-west Utah I drove through places where pressing "seek" on the car-radio resulted only in an endless loop of blurry numbers. Like those numbers, the mind races. It fills with a turbulent tide of self-doubt, fear, longing and loss. The salty water sloshed around in my brain, constantly threatening to leak out of my eyes as fragile tears. The staggering beauty of the folded red rock and the striated canyons sometimes barely registered. I wanted to lose myself in the landscape, but it was difficult not to drive past all the magnificence as if trying to escape, or fleeing a crime scene.

I got to the airport four hours early, where I enjoyed bad enchiladas and the hilarious immorality of a departure gate clogged with one-armed bandits, cynically exploiting the desperate addicts who deposit the last of their dollars while listening with one ear for their row to be called.

As we slid through the orange midnight sky into JFK, I thought, the lights of New York City haven't looked this good in years.

On Newstands Now!

2011-12-14T07:17:00.000-05:00

In what I suspect will be almost the very last time I have any excuse to blow my own horn with regard to Walking to Guantánamo, I am pleased to toot that the eminent academic journal Studies in Travel Writing has a special issue devoted to Cuba out right now. My own name appears in its pages with alarming frequency. The journal, as far as I know the only one of its kind devoted to the genre I practice, one I often have difficulty explaining to people--so, you wrote a kind of a guidebook?--includes in the current issue a lengthy conversation between Peter Hulme and myself, two long excerpts from the book, and a review. I suspect I've seen the last of the last of these, although I haven't yet seen this last one, if you see what what I mean, but even if I've been raked over the coals I'll take what I can get at this point; not too many people review books three years after their publication.

In case they don't carry it down at your corner bodega, you can order your special commemorative edition here, all the way from Nottingham. Or at least look at the table of contents.

The Art just Keeps on Coming

2011-12-09T10:28:00.001-05:00

A year ago, I blogged about the artist Beriah Wall, who has a refreshingly anti-capitalist approach to art distribution: he gives his away. Yesterday, as I was leaving the house in the evening to attend the opening of the long-awaited Kara Hamilton show at Salon 94 Freemans, I found on my stoop the latest example of free art from the always timely Wall. Call it a token of the times.

Verse: See a banker...

Obverse: Smack a banker OWS

(Although Hamilton makes her objects not out of clay but of precious metals and wonderous found objects from the natural world, I believe there may be significant overlap between her work and Wall's when it comes to critiquing conventional notions of the value, worth and price of art objects. About which more soon, perhaps.)

Occupy Antarctica, a movement with a global reach

2011-12-01T21:27:00.001-05:00

Via my old friend Holly Troy, in MacTown, Antarctica.

Suspension of Fishbelief

2011-11-27T06:56:00.001-05:00

Taman Negara, Malaysia's spectacular and gigantic park, billed as "the world's oldest rainforest," is home to some amazing creatures, including the great argus, essentially a long-tailed chicken, but one so spectacularly plumed as to make peacocks seem rather petite by comparison. Tigers live here, as well as wild Asian elephants and neck-crookingly tall mahogany trees. I saw some spectacular birds(but not the argus--I'll have to go back!), but one of the oddest creatures was this fish, out for a stroll along the driveway, in its own fashion. Casual googling suggests it is an anabantoid, or climbing gourami, one of a number of species perfectly content to leave the water and walk about on the land for hours at a time, presumably in the interest of expanding territory and range.

When I first saw this fish I had an experience you will perhaps share while watching the beginning of this video, namely that the poor animal was being pulled along by some unseen hand, in the manner of a Times Square prankster dragging a twenty-dollar bill along the pavement on a bit of invisible monofilament. I looked around, to see if someone was having me on. Then I followed this little creature for a good hundred feet. Strangely, it stayed on the asphalt. After a time, perhaps exhausted, or having concluded that it was not going to have the luck suddenly to come across an unknown pond, it turned around, and started moving back in the direction from whence it had come.

I sure look good standing in front of these twin towers!

2011-11-20T20:48:00.001-05:00

What was that Boy Scout motto, again?

2011-11-15T07:47:00.001-05:00

The very beautiful Taman Negara, or National Park, in peninsular Malaysia, has one major drawback. It's infested with leeches. Luckily, I have some leech socks. Unfortunately they are at the moment in the rubbermaid bin full of camping supplies, back home on the shelf in Brooklyn, NY.

"They're not going to do you very much good there, are they?" snarked a fellow birder, when I explained my situation. I was admiring his pair and wondering where he had gotten them.

I'm starting to feel more like a World War One battle re-enactor than a birder.

Right Foot

Achilles

The problem with forgetting your leech socks is you end up going through a lot of regular socks. I suppose you could just call them "leeched socks."

Left foot. Absolutely painless, but the vast quantities of blood are stress inducing nonetheless. Leeches apparently have a combination therapy analgesic and anticoagulant which they apply while incising, so that even if you catch them at their meals and flick them off, the wound continues to bleed. And bleed.

I'm holding out for Jonathan Franzen in Double Extra Large

2011-11-08T21:05:00.002-05:00

"Shoes and Clothe" boutique, of Phnom Penh

Engrish is an endless source of amusement. For decades already we have found ourselves cackling at the excruciating, the misplaced, the misspelled, the off-center, or the just plain random words and letters that hapless Asians see fit to emblazon on their t-shirts. (Although to blame Engrish entirely on Asia may be unfair. Just today, while filming at Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, I spied a Russian gentleman wearing a burgundy t-shirt boldly emblazoned SOUTH DAKOTA IT'S ALL YOURS DANCE MASTER SCHELUDES.)

The origins of this sort of typographic festival seem to me to be rooted in the fast-fading allure of the great United States, beacon to would-be emigrants and aspirant entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe. In China, Vietnam or Russia, clothing with the English alphabet sprayed all over it denotes a certain hipness. No matter how random, the letters alone indicate worldliness, mobility. This is ironic in that the moneyed classes the world over tend to speak actual English--the Engrish shirt only works for those too low in status and education to comprehend the meaninglessness of the slogans they are sporting. Absurdity is just a click away; Google translate makes it so easy to be so very, very wrong.

The allure of the east and the rise of China as an economic power has somewhat turned the tables, with more and more attention being paid to the parallel phenomenon of Chingrish, including an excellent blog that chronicles the tattoo catastrophes of hipster Westerners.

I can't recognize Chingrish when I see it, but I'm always on the lookout for spectacular examples of Engrish, so my eye was drawn by this window display on the streets of Phnom Penh:

Rising up the NYT bestseller list, it's Erheyi Sniamla

"Going Greenly into the Future," a screenplay

2011-11-01T19:44:00.000-04:00

There was no response from the media relations office of "elegantly" Glenwood Properties in response to numerous emails inquiring why their recent marketing campaign prominently features what appears to be Merops pusillus, the little bee-eater, an insectiverous bird widespread across most of sub-Saharan Africa, but unknown from New York City or anywhere else in the Americas.

At the offices of Global Glut Realty Corp., Joe and Schmoe sit at a polished black granite conference table, wearing Brioni suits. Manhattan, viewed through the smoked glass floor-to-ceiling windows of a corporate high-rise, stretches out beneath them.

SCHMOE: They're nice apartments I have, Joe, all over the city. I don't understand why they're not renting.

JOE: You're out of date; you need to get with the whole ecological revolution. People want their place to be sustainable and stuff.

SCHMOE: What the hell is that supposed to mean?

JOE: You know, like, long lasting, and, uh...natural.

SCHMOE: WTF? You mean I have renovate? I just redid all these places. They're like minty fresh.

JOE: Nah, you don't have to do nothing. Just emphasize the environmental aspect in your New York Times adverts. Green, green, green. That's the word everyone is using. Make it green.

SCHMOE: C'mon, stop yankin' it. The apartments are painted white. Who the hell wants a green apartment?

JOE: Not green the color, you moron. Like, as in natural, you know whuttum saying? Like a spinach milkshake or some shit. Like, yoga. Put a tree in there, dickhead. I dunno, put a picture of a fountain, some bubbly water. Just make sure you call it green in big letters. Paint a picture of a tree, or a goddamn bird or something. You see how I'm helping you, here?

SCHMOE: A bird? What do I know from birds? You mean, like a parrot, or what?

JOE: No, you jerk. Like some wild natural creature, you know, that flies around in trees and stuff.

SCHMOE: How am I supposed to take a picture of a bird?

JOE: You really are thick today, Schmoe. Let me order us up a couple of frappuccinos, get that brain working. Look, it's not particle physics. Just go on the internet, and get a nice picture of a bird, and just kind of place it tastefully in your ad, there. You'll see; people will be signing leases in no time.

Backstage at the Nile

2011-10-24T21:54:00.003-04:00

That would be the "Northern International Livestock Exposition" and rodeo, not the river in Egypt. Photos from the last four days, spent filming in Billings, Montana.

Funkin' at the Hill Top Disco

2011-10-15T08:43:00.000-04:00

Snoop Dogg on the wall with Sierra Leone popstars Vida, the late Amara Kabba, and Daddy Saj.

The art of the painted sign is alive and well in Sierra Leone. I've long been a fan of African hand-made advertisements, and have bought more than one right off the facade of a business, to cart across the Atlantic and install on the living room wall. If that sounds to you like a colonialist, exploitative relationship to art-making then you have put your finger on the discomfort sometimes felt when admiring the humble, naive masterpieces that Africans from Mali to Mozambique hang in front of their shops. In my defense I can only describe the smiles of surprise and astonishment on the face of the shopkeeper when offered actual cash money for an ancient and often tattered rectangle of painted plywood.

Snoop, detail, at the Hilltop Nightclub and Guesthouse, Calabatown, Sierra Leone

The tradition, born out of necessity on a continent where creativity is more abundant than capital, is in some countries under threat. On my last trip to Rwanda digitally printed vinyl signs were everywhere. So far, these suffer from Photoshopitis, and tend to feature sandstorms, flames,lightning bolts, sunsets and masses of billowing clouds, all downloaded at low resolution from google images. The results are pale and tawdry, homogenous in their lack of personality. At home, underemployed, the former sign-painter sits on his hands and stares at the dirt, his paints crusting in the can.

The making of a sign for a tiny roadside business is an economic calculus. The beginnings of a haircutting business, called in Kenya a "saloon" and in Sierra Leone a "barbing shop," might be as modest as a single pair of scissors and a plastic stool set up under a shade-tree. The advertising budget is limited. If the vinyl sign is rising in popularity this is only because it is winning a price-war with the sign-painter.

The Hilltop is a legendary name in the history of rap music. This was the name of a Bronx after-hours club of the 1970s where some of the first raps were said to have been rapped, and some of the first deejay battles battled. I suspect the Hilltop of Calabatown, Sierra Leone owes nothing to this legacy. This fine establishment is simply at the top of a hill, on a red dirt road, in a semi-rural setting. But they are clearly ready to turn the party out. Just to step inside the place is to understand that it would inconvenient to live next door.

Donflan would like to go on record as offering our services to return and do a gig here. The club is a series of well-protected cinder-block walled enclosures (African nightlife is primarily enjoyed out-of-doors), much of their many surfaces covered with spectacular murals illustrating the fantasies of disco-going: abundant, curvaceous women, tropical diversion, musical superstardom. No partying colonialist with a fat wallet will carry these off; they are painted directly onto the block walls. We were there during the day, to shoot an interview. The place made me want to put on my dancing shoes, and go back at night.

"What happens at the Hilltop, stays on the hilltop."

Trademark Fringement

2011-10-04T18:33:00.001-04:00

I'm in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where a trip to the gas station put me in mind of a post from earlier this year in which I documented the hand painted branding efforts of Vietnamese marine diesel fuel dealers in Dong Hoi. A google search for "NP Petroleum" brings up the National Petroleum company of Trinidad and Tobago as well as a Canadian outfit called Northern Petroleum, neither of which share this BP-inspired logo. Could it stand for "Nigeria Petroleum," or was the B simply changed to an N on a whim? Perhaps these are the proprietor's initials.

Me and Eddy (Updated)

2011-09-29T10:47:00.000-04:00

A few weeks back, superstar portrait photographer and honorary* member of the Brooklyn Pinarello User's Group, Wolfgang Wesener, dropped me an email with a hot tip. The greatest cyclist in the history of the sport was shortly to venture out from his lair in Belgium on a rare visit to New York.

Known for obvious reasons as "the cannibal," Eddy Merckx won the Tour de France five times, a total since eclipsed, but in his era he dominated the sport more completely than any rider before or since. He held the one-hour record and triumphed in innumerable classics, including the savage Paris-Roubaix, which he won three times. He is a legend, at the top of any list of the most famous Belgians in history. There is a subway station in Brussels named after him. The man walks the streets of Flanders like a living god.

Did I want to come along and drink free beer and meet the monster-legend? Certainly! The event was a press-tivity celebrating the fifty years of Bicycling Magazine, held incongruously at the Classic Car Club on lower Hudson St. To accommodate the guests, the Car Club had emptied their showroom onto the surrounding streets; the sidewalks outside were strewn with Aston Martins and Porsches.

Inside, they had wine, and cheese, and some of the latest carbon-fiber bicycles manufactured under the Merckx imprimatur. While these feather-weight ugly ducklings are all the rage, it should be pointed out that Merckx himself rode in an era when men were men and bikes were made of steel.

The event logo is inspired: a view of Eddy's posterior, with the man looking back at you over his shoulder. It's a reminder to the many, feebler, one-time followers that the best they could manage was to approach the back end of greatness.

I was focused on the cheese platter, but Wesener had an ulterior motive. He hoped to convince Merckx, or Merckx's people, or Merckx's patrons at Bicycling, to schedule a sitting for a portrait. While I gobbled canapés and helped myself to pair after pair of the complimentary bicycling socks on offer at the door, Wolfgang schmoozed. He has photographed flamboyant denizens of the Manhattan nightlife demi-monde of the 1980s, patrician vintners of the grape-clad hills of Tuscany, and innumerable superstars of the crank and cog, the stage and screen. A few choice names of former subjects, a list varied gently depending on the context, are enough to serve as an impressive resumé. Within moments he was back, breathless. Merckx was due to fly back to Belgium early the next morning, but at the end of the party he might spare a few minutes. There was only one problem. Wesener hadn't anticipated being able to photograph at the very event. All his gear was 30 blocks north, in his apartment. Would I consent to stick around and keep an eye on Merckx, while he went to collect it? I looked around cautiously, trying to ascertain whether they were still serving hors d'oeuvres. "Sure," I said, spying a tray of saté'd chicken skewers, "Why not?"

Baron Merckx and Wolfgang Wesener discuss the finer points of cycling strategy.

And so, without quite intending to do so, I had volunteered to be a photographic assistant for the evening. A short round-trip taxicab later Wesener returned, and I was helping set up lights, run power cords and sit for test portraits. Suddenly, it felt like a day at the office. It was all remarkably like preparing to film an interview, when the sound person is invariably asked to sit in the "hot seat" and give the cameraman something to focus on. As if we don't have our own work to do.

"The Cannibal," graciously autographing.

The installation complete, the evening became a waiting game. There is a certain amount of suspense to these affairs, for despite the lavish promises of the minions, the possibility always exists that the celebrity subject will feel overwhelmed by the end of the evening, put upon, hungry for the fine dinner he has been promised. Imperious or petulant, the coddled star may simply announce that he or she has had quite enough of signing cocktail napkins and making banal cocktail chitchat with the teeming masses. Then with a rush the handlers converge, and the whole posse swishes out the door and into the waiting limo and are gone, leaving you forlornly toying with dials on your now impotent, subjectless camera.

But Mr. Merckx is a gentleman. He endured for much of his life the searing burn of lactic acid in his oxygen-starved muscles as he demolished the cycling opposition; such men are not daunted by the social indignities of arranged public appearances. He came and took his seat. I held the reflector. Wesener snapped away, burning quickly through a couple of rolls of film. Film, real film. With just an exposure or two left to go he urged me insert myself into the frame, for a souvenir moment with Eddy.

A few days later, the film developed, Wesener called.
"You're very lucky, Mr. Fleming."
"Why is that?"
"The best picture of Eddy is the one with you in it!"

The next week, a print arrived in the mail.

For those of you who are unaware of it, my name, Fleming, was one widely given to impoverished Belgians (the Flemish) who fled Flanders and emigrated to Ireland seeking greener pastures, possibly as early as the 11th century. "Oh, here comes another boat-load of Flemings," the Irish would remark, when on slow days they enjoyed going down to the harbor to watch the ships unload. As this image makes clear, the passing centuries have done nothing to erase the winning, world-dominating DNA of we flatlanders. The shared intensity of gaze, the identical noses, the parallel angles, the commitment to victory at all costs. Me and Eddy.

Final image courtesy of WoWe

*Manhattan residents are only eligible to be "honorary" members.

UPDATE 10/3/2011:

Wesener is not just some dilettante on a Pinarello. While my rides around Prospect Park this summer have been mainly about lowering my cholesterol and getting regular aerobic exercise, WW was in serious training for L'Eroica, the Tuscan cycling marathon held yesterday in the wine country of Chianti. (This explains, perhaps, why on our rides together I was desperately trying to hang on to his rear wheel). Today, in an email, he's written a sort of haikuish summary of the savage ride, much of it held on the unpaved roads that wind through the hills of Tuscany:

it was dark when we started and dark
when we finished
i did the 205 km (details later)
the dirt roads (50% of the race)
were hell (and nearly destroyed me)
it's so exhausting that after a while
you aren't aware of the incredibly
beautiful landscape anymore.

Eh, Congratulations, Paisan!

Deep in the Heart of Bavarian Staten Island

2011-09-14T17:54:00.000-04:00

Three weeks ago or so, when Irene was just a hot breeze swirling around the Bahamas, Laura and I had an overlapping free weekday. Usually, we would head straight for Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge, to see lots of birds amidst not so many people as on a weekend. This year, however, the unseasonable torrents of August rain and an administrative / budgetary snafu have left the East Pond, where the water level is normally manipulated to maximize its attractiveness to migrating waders, far too full for any self-respecting shorebird to pause there. "What do you say we explore the oyster-baron mansions of Staten Island?" proposed Laura.

"The what?" The murky, industrial waterfront surrounding Staten Island includes graveyards of rusting tugboats, miles of petroleum storage tanks and semi-submerged, expired ferries. But one hundred and more years ago, these now dubious waters teemed with oysters, and great fortunes were made harvesting them and serving them in the oyster bars of Manhattan and beyond. What's more, Laura informed me, a few of the grand residences of the oyster oligarchs might still be standing along Staten Island's northwest shore, enjoying a harborfront view of Manhattan.

It now costs $13 to cross the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which is close enough to the ticket price at MOMA that we were determined to savor every moment on the "borough of parks."

The nouveau-riche have always been fond of reviving the Greeks, and apparently the oyster magnates were no different. Now abandoned, the front yard wooly and overgrown, this titan is just waiting for a little bit of love and elbow-grease. One suspects it comes with a fascinating midden of oyster shells somewhere out back.

The wrought iron-fences, the closest one can approach, are more art nouveau than nouveau riche. They're very nice, and I'm frankly surprised no enterprising recycler-looters have never made off with them.

Right next door, there is no house left at all, only competing wrought iron gates complete with the presumed initials of an oyster magnate in the style of a champagne bottle label, demonstrating a certain consistency in the dominant Staten Island aesthetic over the years.

We followed the shore south and west, around the channel of the Arthur kill. There seemed to be no further evidence of the splendid oyster epoch. Suddenly we stumbled into a corner of Bavaria, not far from New Jersey, and providentially just in time for lunch. Almost across the street from a shady and overgrown graveyard filled with headstones of first generation immigrants from the old country, we found Killmeyer's.

Except for the ATM sign and the slot-mounted air-conditioner one would swear one was in any of countless villages in the surrounds of Munich.

We made for the tented biergarten in the back yard, empty of people on this weekday noon, but crowded with plastic Wal-mart patio furniture. A dirndled waitress, somewhat surprised to see us, soon brought us the list of spezialitäten. A blackboard on the wall listed an impressive array of deutsche brews. Traitors to the south, we ordered refreshing tankards of Gaffel Kolsch, a beer so delicious that it inspires in me the hope of one day visiting Cologne.

Latkes, and spaetzle mit wienerschnitzel. The latter seemed perhaps to have been breaded and frozen somewhere back in the old country, but we weren't really there for the food. Apparently on weekends Killmeyer's features their own local oompah band.

After this unexpected transatlantic adventure, we wended our slightly blurry way back to Brooklyn, where we regaled our good friend and favorite saloonkeeper St. John Frizell with our tales of intrepid outerborough exploration. "OMG!," he said, "You've discovered Killmeyer's. I love that place. Did you see the bar? It was built by itinerant Czech carpenters. Apparently they just traveled around stopping into places and offering to build authentic Praguian furnishings. Isn't it spectacular?" Absolutely, we agreed at once, and made on the spot a vague plan someday to return together, and polka.

In the Hood

2011-09-10T02:02:00.000-04:00

Nairobi has more than its fair share of slums, including Kibera, said to be Africa's largest. One imagines that worldwide only Asian megalopolises like Jakarta, Dhaka or Mumbai can compete in terms of sheer acreage of shantytown. Life is grim here, with up to a dozen family members packed into a single dirt-walled shed. Open rivulets of sewage stream down narrow trails between rows of houses. When it rains these turn into foul raging rivers of mud and filth, eroding away the base of the houses. An utter lack of security and civil services mean most people are afraid to venture out at night for the dangerous trek to the latrines. Such toilet blocks, where there are any, can be hundreds of yards from the house, and serve hundreds of families, but getting to one in the dark invites rape and abuse. The result is the notorious "flying toilet": urgent nocturnal movements are deposited into plastic bags which are then flung randomly over the corrugated tin rooftops at dawn. The price of staple starches, like maize and cassava flour, has more than doubled in recent years. But life, commerce and community still manage to cling on. Vendors line the wider mud avenues selling vegetables, charcoal and chapatis, and music booms out of the rum shops, including, at the top of the last photograph here, the "Obama Busaa Club".

Laboring on Labor Day

2011-09-05T15:14:00.000-04:00

I spent this morning, labor day, filming in Nairobi with the wonderful and inspirational Rebecca Lolosoli, pioneer founder of Umoja, the all women's Samburu village. It's apparently a sort of Amazonian women's power move, established as a retreat from the endemic abuse and wife-beating of traditional Samburu society. Male relatives are allowed to visit the village, briefly, but on the whole the Umojians are doing just fine without us men.

Photo courtesy David Smoler

I laughed, I cried, I soiled my garment...

2011-08-29T19:32:00.000-04:00

Via boingboing

Together, we can rebuild Red Hook!

2011-08-28T15:56:00.001-04:00

08/28/2011 Hurricane Irene

Waiting for Irene on Saturday, 1PM

2011-08-27T13:14:00.000-04:00

This morning you could feel her for the first time, the air thick, wet, gray and heavy. Gone was the surreal, disconnected feeling attending yesterday's balmy blue skies and glorious regiments of perfect white clouds. Hurricane? Yesterday calamity seemed impossible, although there was not a single parking spot to be had at Lowe's, and the checkout lines at the Pathmark supermarket snaked back into aisles denuded of pasta. The sheets of plywood screwed down tight over the doors and windows intensify the silence of the streets. It rains from time to time with quick, fierce downbursts that quickly fade into a drippy calm, as if we are already feeling a kind of cyclonic, circular churning of the oblong Irene, still 400 miles away. Down the block, I hear the whine of circular saws.

Waiting for Irene

2011-08-25T23:50:00.000-04:00

The homestead is in Zone "A", which describes the lowcountry areas of the city most vulnerable to flooding. I would estimate that the floor of my basement is within inches of mean high tide. Another way of putting this would be to describe Irene as payback for the dozens of times over the last 9 years that I have gleefully described my house as being within a couple of blocks walk of New York harbor. One does not have to go downhill more than a few inches to take that stroll. Currently buying guns, bottled water and canoes. Don't forget us out here in the swamps, FEMA.

Reading: Need for the Bike by Paul Fournel

2011-08-20T18:43:00.001-04:00

There is nothing about Paul Fournel's meditative little volume on his lifelong addiction to bicycles that smacks of avant-garde literature. Reading it, I was reminded of an episode from my college days in which a bunch of us, fanatical devotees of experimental cinema, attended the premiere screening of an eminent vanguardist's new work. The film proved to be a remarkably normal documentary about the filmmaker's other passion. I think it was on the restoration of wooden toy train sets or dancing nutcrackers, or something along those lines (but I've forgotten, just as I've forgotten his name). It was a perfectly beautiful and simple documentary, but I was so desperate to locate deep metaphorical and formal subversions of the genre between its frames that I scarcely appreciated it.

But I've aged, and mellowed. I read Need for the Bike with pleasure, neither looking for nor noticing even one example of Oulippian technique. For Fournel is, according to Wikipedia, the president and also the "Provisionally Definitive Secretary" of Oulipo, a French group of mathematically interested writers who set up rigid constraints and then attempt to write literature within them. For instance, from the Wiki:

"S+7, sometimes called N+7: Replace every noun in a text with the noun seven entries after it in a dictionary. For example, "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago..." (from Moby-Dick) becomes "Call me islander. Some yeggs ago...". Results will vary depending upon the dictionary used. This technique can also be performed on other lexical classes, such as verbs."

Only the French could turn Mad Libs, the mildly amusing children's word replacement game booklets we used to fill out on long pre-teen car rides, into an avant-garde literary movement. But the sense one gets from Fournel's book about cycling is that in describing the many roads he's taken on his bicycle, he's also meditating on the road not taken. Deep into this short book of short chapters he writes "for a long time I wondered why I wasn't a racer." He then answers his own musing: "the objective reasons are many: I had 'better things' to do, and at the age when one tries to become a racer, I had set off on other adventures."

Wherever he has been, whatever he has been doing, Fournel has always had a bicycle to turn to, for exercise, escape, meandering, socializing. "I've only owned beautiful bikes," he writes. "I prefer rigid but supple steel, which isn't really so heavy...." Fournel writes about crashing, about the absurd tan that results from thousands of miles cycled in shorts, jersey and ankle socks. He writes of scaling the most notorious mountain roads made famous by the savageries of the Tour de France, and the sense of ownership of the landscape that comes from pedaling urgently through it. Before they even get on their bikes he knows from the look of his companion's legs what sort of a ride they will have together, how much competitive potential is there. He fondly describes the state of permanent, dull ache the rider feels in his calves and quads for the duration of the cycling season. The bike is his barometer of all things: "I know that if I succomb to depression, it will start with a breakdown in my thighs. It will start with cycling sluggishness, and the rest will follow."

This, you may have gathered, is not a book for everyone. If hearing the word "Campagnolo" doesn't trigger a flutter of acquisitive adrenaline at your temples, if you're uninterested in having a peek at the cutouts in my bottom bracket, if you find nothing romantic about a velodrome, or don't even know what one is, if you object to spandex shorts, if your legs aren't sore and you're scarless, if you've never heard of the Paris-Roubaix, you may not find this book as charming as I do.

Rick Perry for President? UPDATED

2011-08-15T12:16:00.007-04:00

Obersturmführernkadet Ricardo Perry in full-on patriotic purple turtleneck Texas A 'n' M swashbuckler mode, photo via nedslist. This image alone is enough to get me charged up about the Obama reelection campaign.

UPDATE: In response to the above, jumping on the Obama bandwagon, an anonymous friend sends the following photo of Michele Bachmann corndogging her way around the Iowa State fair. Not surprisingly it seems already to have gone viral.

The Wall Burners of Camden

2011-08-08T10:52:00.001-04:00

The Manhattan subways have been all but graffiti-clean for close on two decades, at least the rolling stock. (Cars that are painted in the dead-of-night are immediately removed from service until cleaned). In my rugged youth, I quite liked the chaos of riding in a subway car whose contours, doors, maps, seats, warning signs and windows were buried under a miasma of tags, inch-wide marker strokes and spray-painted curiosities. The dense lattice of indecipherable texts were their own advertisement; the ensemble announced that you were living on the edge, in an overwhelmed city, a place at once vibrant and out-of-control. This was New York in the 1980s, a place far scarier than today's city, but more alive, more thrilling and unpredictable. (I'm aware that this is the classic lament of any middle-aged person throughout history, that their formative decade of entrance into adulthood was the most vibrant, and raw, but who would disagree that today's clean and shiny subway cars are but the tiniest indicator of the ongoing sanitizing of our city?)

In the 1980s the most adept graffitists came out of the ghettos and into the galleries. Guys who in the middle of the night risked german shepherds, barbed wire and prison time in their quest for the fleeting glory of seeing their name ride by on a train found themselves suddenly invited to fly to Amsterdam and sip white wine with museum curators. Op-editorialists argued about whether graffiti was art or plague, as if it couldn't be both. Meanwhile the MTA spent more and more dollars trying to keep the trains clean. They tried space-age coatings, attack dogs, advanced stainless-steel treatments and multiple rings of perimeter fencing around the train yards, until the resting subway fleet was as well-protected as Riker's Island. (If you were caught after getting through all the defenses of the former you then became eligible to try and escape from the latter).

The graffiti-eradication budgets ballooned. Slowly the vast resources of the transit system prevailed. The immediate and rigorous quarantine of "infected" subway cars and the MTA's gigantic buffing machines destroyed countless masterpieces before they ever rolled down the line and into the public eye. But simultaneous with the cleansing of the trains, graffiti was going international; youth inspired by the 1970s New York legends were painting on walls, bridges, overpasses, storefronts and derelict vehicles from Romania to Australia.

"Mecro"

"Above-ground" graffiti was never as interesting to me as the full-car canvases that once rolled through the tunnels of New York, and I rather lost interest in the phenomenon. As an art-form, graffiti has the most in common with Chinese calligraphy. Marking a clean line with a spray can demands the same combination of precision, speed, and commitment that underpin the zen master's slash of camel hair brush on paper. In both, tentativeness is the greatest weakness the artist can show. In both, the form and shape of the letters eclipse their meaning. The motion of the artist's hand is implicit, and supreme, in the finished work. Graffiti is all about this motion, and it is about the fame of the letter. To use a train as a canvas was first to put the motion into the letter, and then to put the letter in motion, to send word of one's existence and talent from the margins to the heart of the city. Without the train, without the awe and surprise of standing on a midtown platform as the subway pulled in, bringing the revelation that every square-inch of its surface had been carefully, masterfully, coherently, freshly and lovingly painted, graffiti literally lost its dynamism.

"Empty"

But sometimes I'm still awed. Around the country and the world, well-known to "writers," are walls comparatively free of the buffer and the white-washer. These graffiti walls of fame can have long lives. Sometimes they develop in collusion with the authorities. If given a remote corner of industrial wasteland to paint as they wish, the thinking goes, the graffitists will be less likely to vandalize the bank downtown. In other places, authority is simply overwhelmed, as New York was in the 1970s. There is more to worry about than paint, and less to worry with. Camden, NJ, is a place like that.

Graffiti removal cannot be high on the list of priorities for the government of that small city. I spent a couple of days in Camden last week with my friend Camilo José Vergara. He has been regularly visiting for some thirty years, photographing the fortunes and misfortunes of this little-known but staggeringly blighted place. Once a thriving blue-collar appendix of Philadelphia, the city has lost the vast majority of its once-diverse industrial base, half its population, most of its tax revenue, its reputation and its pride. The landscape will be familiar to anyone who has seen "The Wire," or watched Baltimore go past the windows of the Amtrak. Weedy vacant lots are punctuated by countless empty, doorless buildings with jagged holes and blown-out double-pane windows; boarded up storefronts, the plywood that was long ago nailed there to prevent egress now itself ancient and weathered and warped and curling away from the facades; enormous factories, burned to the ground, with melted and rusted i-beams curling skyward from perilous mountains of brick rubble. Prostitution and drug-dealing seem to be the most thriving and visible of the few remaining commercial ventures.

"Joker"

Here, among auto scrapyards and vacant lots, Camilo guided me to an epic "wall of fame," a place graffiti artists from all over the tristate area, and perhaps beyond, have been coming for years, to paint and repaint hundreds of yards of cinderblock wall. Few people likely see this work besides other artists; it is a kind of constantly evolving collective scrapbook of wall-art, as impressive in scope and scale as anything a major museum could find the outdoor space to present.

Camilo José Vergara photographing The Great Escape.

"The Great Escape," detail. As Camilo put it, here a Peter-pan like figure rides rocket-like crayons up into outer space, as if metaphorically managing to get out of Camden.

"Distinct," I think

A rabid, evil bleach-bottle, rushing to eradicate the graf.

A goose-stepping buffing squad, here to erase all the hard work.

They're Breeding!

2011-07-30T14:32:00.002-04:00

Faithful antarcticiana readers may recall an item from last fall celebrating the original bicycles manufactured by Giovanni Pinarello and the cult-like dedication with which certain cycling nerds perpetuate his legend. Earlier this week a second meeting of the Brooklyn Pinarello Society convened in Prospect Park for a few blistering laps, generating the envy of the poor, misguided trendoids who have replaced the timeless elegance of Italian steel with one of those absurd carbon-fiber monstrosities that now passes for the "state of the art" in road bikes.

I tre Pinarelli. I believe you are looking at 148 years of combined cycling wisdom in the image above. And I'm not talking about the bicycles, which probably have about 75 years between them. Portrait of the musqueteros courtesy of champion shutterbug Wolfgang Wesener, left. In the middle, in the ominous glasses, our man from ATLAS.

The day was not without its purple hearts, as yours truly suffered a head-on collision with a tentative and indecisive fourteen year-old girl who weaved back and forth down the hill on a mountain bike directly into our churning peloton. I was inches off of the back of Wesener's wheel, enjoying the draft, and I didn't even see the threat coming until the moment before impact. Although I was bloodied, and the girl suffered a very fat lip and enormous embarrassment, the precision steel of Treviso came through unscathed. Without even so much as a wobbly wheel I managed a further six laps before leaving the park in search of a winery.

Birding in Somaliland: A Somalia Trip Report

2011-07-25T12:04:00.004-04:00

Birdwatchers come in all shapes and sizes, from grannies who venture no further than the bay window view of their garden feeder to list-crazed maniacs who will risk bullets, kidnappings and divorce in their quest for new species.

In February, in northern Vietnam, I met one of the latter, a florid brit named Hugh Buck. He is third on the list of world listers, having seen upwards of 8500 species of birds out of a recognized world total of between 10 and 11,000. A staggering percentage, but he seemed intent on seeing the rest.

One evening in Cuc Phuong National Park, as the mosquitos buzzed in our ears, we shared a revolting bottle of Vietnamese plum wine. Hugh explained that he was leading a tour showcasing Vietnam's rarest species, largely in order to defray the ever-mounting “cost-per-bird” of his own list. Cost-per-bird is an unofficial mental calculation of how much the desperate birder is spending per new species added. If one flies to South-east Asia for the first time and ticks off hundreds of “lifers,” the CPB is comparatively low, but Buck was looking for just a small handful of birds he hadn't already seen in Vietnam, or elsewhere: Blue-naped pitta, chestnut-eared laughingthrush, a night-heron so rare and obscure that I can't remember its name.

“Our last trip,” he announced, “was to Somaliland.”

I had never heard of such a country, but the name alone was redolent of adventure. Technically speaking, it is part of Somalia, that ultimate failed state, a region of maximum concern to the world's anti-terror analysts, a lawless desert wasteland of trigger-happy warlords and Indian Ocean pirates. Hardly anyone's idea of a vacation paradise.

But the horn of Africa is home to many endemics. Buck told me that a couple of years earlier he had led one of the first tours to the region in years, adding numerous local and isolated species to his list in the process. What are a few landmines and the risk of years stuck in a pirate's holding cell compared with the chance to see the Warsangli linnet?

I'm willing to go to a lot of places, but I had never considered a birding excursion in Somalia. “It sounds pretty crazy, to me,” I said.

A few weeks later, back in New York, I got a call for a sound recording job. “We'll be filming in Somaliland, are you okay with that? Don't worry, though, we're getting kidnap insurance.”

I emailed Hugh: “By a strange coincidence....”

Never mind that the breakaway, independent north has not been recognized by a single other government: the people who live there will give you dirty looks if you suggest that they are residents of Somalia. They have their own currency, the Somaliland shilling, unexchangeable, except perhaps in neighboring Djibouti; their own license plates, with which you are unable to cross any borders; their own leaders and security apparatus. In Hargeisa, the self-proclaimed capital, there are Somalilander traffic police who stop you and ask you who you are and where you are going, all without attempting to extort any money.

There is exactly one nature-tour operator in Somaliland, and Hugh was glad to put me in touch with him. From a business point of view, the good news is that Abdi Jama has a monopoly. The bad news for him is his country's gigantic image problem, but I am glad to be able to report that you will not be defying death by going on safari in Somaliland. Abdi Jama is a splendid fellow and a first-rate outfitter, and has a personal story so fascinating that while he is telling it you may even let a few birds slide unidentified past the windows of his Toyota Landcruiser ragtop.

Hargeisa is usually reached by air from Nairobi, Addis or Djibouti. Our happy film crew flew up from Nairobi on Jetlink. Once lodged at the Ambassador Hotel, on a slope above the city quite near the airport, I called Abdi. He promptly drove over in his splendid vehicle and had dinner with me at the Ambassador, and asked whether his car would be sufficient, or if I would prefer that he rent something with air-conditioning. I announced that I wouldn't dream of going in anything other than his olive bomber, with its tattered canvas roof. “It drips when it rains,” Abdi warned. Given Somalia's terrible drought, and the horrifying famine currently being suffered in the south, rain seemed sadly unlikely. We planned a very short safari, with departure scheduled for the moment the film shoot was complete.

Don't be in a hurry to leave Hargeisa. A few days before the completion of filming the Jetlink return flight to Nairobi was cancelled without explanation, and the production went into a full-on scramble to change a dozen Hargeisa-Nairobi-Dubai-NY tickets. For a few minutes, I gloated. I was booked on the next flight out, allowing for a three day trip with Abdi. But soon we learned that in the few days since our arrival in Hargeisa Jetlink had entirely eliminated all service from Nairobi. Suddenly a very short safari was to be even shorter. The only flight available was on East African Airways, a day earlier than I had planned to leave.

The result was that the three days I had planned to spend with Abdi were divided up into a day off from work spent birding in and around Hargeisa, and a two-day, two-night trip into the bush, after we had completed filming. I've also included here a very few species which I saw only to the south of Hargeisa, around Baligubadle, on the Ethiopian border, and on a half-day trip to the excellent rock art site at Las Gaal (see map, below). These were seen in some brief moments (lunch break, primarily) snatched away from the busy filming schedule.

In two days, on dirt roads, it is impossible to reach many of the habitats which hold some of Somalia's most exciting species, but Abdi showed me some fabulous birds, and you will search for a very long time anywhere in the world before you will find anyone as knowledgeable, interesting, outspoken and informed as Mr. Jama with whom to share your time.

A typical village main street in rural Somaliland. Women are wrapped and often veiled in the Islamic way; the country essentially follows Shariah law. In contrast to countries I've visited in the Gulf, however, women here wear all sorts of bright and spectacular color combinations. Goats are a staple of the diet and the economy. Birds are eaten not at all, which accounts for the comparative abundance of large game species like bustards, of which we quite easily saw three species.

Deforestation is not just a problem in moist tropical jungles like the Brazilian rainforest. Here bags of charcoal for sale sit along the paved main road east of Hargeisa. My preconceptions of Somaliland included vast tracks of dry desert and thorn scrub, but the country was once thick with a vast acacia forest, the largest on the continent. These woodlands have been savaged by charcoal cutters and clearance for pasture. Everywhere we went Abdi despaired that just in the few months since his last travels that way the forests had been visibly denuded. Evidence of fresh cutting of trees and the black scars of the charcoal pits was everywhere.

The recreational use of khat seems to be almost universal among adult Somalilander men, and khat stands like the one above, often showing an asparagus-like bundle of leaves floating in a pastoral landscape, line the main streets of Hargeisa. The drug is said to have mild amphetamine-like effects. It is common to see men standing on street-corners fondling bundles of leaves and discussing the merits of various shipments and strains, as if the stuff were fine french wine, or coffee beans. It diverts huge percentages of the average household daily income. Alcohol is illegal in Somaliland, whereas khat is not, underlining the fact that just about every culture needs to have access to its daily intoxicant. Abdi has no time for it. He bemoans its negative influence on productivity and the Somaliland family, so I abandoned my plans to buy some and chew it while we were on Safari. I did have some once, back in 1992, with some Yemenis who ran my corner bodega on the lower east side, but I don't remember noting much of an effect other than my gums turning green.

The giant leopard tortoise is abundant across the dry, rocky landscape.

The truly awful offal dump outside Hargeisa, a Dante's inferno of dumped, stinking blood, cartilage and bone, worth a visit if you want to see hundreds of hooded vultures, marabou storks, and jackals. As I held my nose and coughed back the acrid ammoniac fumes, Abdi tried to claim that a visit to this place has wonderful immune-system enhancing homeopathic effects on the human organism. I was highly skeptical. What is certain is that this is the only place we saw Rüppell's griffon vulture, now exceedingly rare across much of Africa because of furadan poisoning.

Abdi Jama. Reach him at abdi [DOT] jama [AT] ymail [DOT] com for all of your Somaliland adventure travel needs.

More like a small automobile than a bird, the kori bustard, although by no means a Somali endemic, was a trip highlight. It is said to be the heaviest flying bird. We saw several, stalking the plains, including an enraged male, its feathers bristling as it marched away from an unsuccessful confrontation with a rival.

Nothing wrong with the car, we're just cooling the engine at a lunch stop. Abdi's team includes a young cousin who took care of setting up tents and cooking meals while Abdi and I were birding, and an armed security guard. Having a guy with a loaded AK-47 stretched out on the luggage behind me as we bounced along the rutted desert roads took some getting used to, but the Somaliland government requires all foreigners to have such an escort along when traveling east of Hargeisa. Ultimately I felt this poor guy had the most boring job imaginable, as everywhere the people were friendly and curious; there wasn't a moment on the trip when I felt remotely threatened.

A beautiful, archetypal acacia vista. Unfortunately, there should be a lot more acacias.

The tiny, beautiful village mosque on the Tuuyo plains.

The Tuuyo plains hold some of the best endemics within close reach of Hargeisa. As Abdi put it during our planning meeting: "larks, larks and larks...." Lesser hoopoe lark is common here, as is Somali lark and Desert cisticola.

Our camp near the Tuuyo plains. Heuglin's courser and Buff-crested bustard called incessantly at dusk, providing the soundtrack for the evening meal. Abdi likes to sleep on a platform on top of the truck, which was his home in Botswana and Tanzania for six years.

A juvenile darter in a tree on the edge of Baligubadle village. There is no open water or darter habitat for perhaps two hundred miles, so this bird is probably a confused victim of its own post-breeding dispersal urge, when young leave the nest to go out and find their own way in the world. I've included this here because Abdi suspects this is a new record for Somaliland.

Somalia was engulfed in civil war for much of the 1980s, with the result that there are still many minefields, junked tanks and artillery scattered across the landscape. Painted rocks indicate the possible presence of mines. It makes for worrisome birding, although at every turn herds of camel and goats are grazing the parched earth, and I think you would have to have very bad luck to detonate anything. Nonetheless, it would be the last bit of bad luck you would ever have. If Abdi suggests you shouldn't walk there, take his advice.

Khat is not permitted in the departure lounge of the airport, just so you know.

Here's a snapshot from Google Earth of my Somaliland travels with and without Abdi. The jaunt south from Hargeisa ending in the triangle on the Ethiopian border was for our film shoot in Baligubadle. The figure-8 loop to the east plots the two-day safari with Abdi. Click on the map to see a larger version. If you want more specific GPS data leave a comment with your contact details.

SPECIES LIST Most birding was on April 30th, May 3 and 4, 2011
darter (Baligubadle only, as noted above)
hamerkop (One only, a couple hours east of Hargeisa on our first day out)
abdim’s stork (A dozen or so at the Hargeisa offal dump)
marabou stork (Hundreds at the Hargeisa offal dump, often overhead in Hargeisa)
sacred ibis (Offal dump)
egyptian goose
hooded vulture (Hundreds at the Hargeisa offal dump, often overhead in Hargeisa)
rüppell’s griffon (One at the Hargeisa offal dump)
eastern chanting goshawk (the common raptor of rural Somaliland)
gabar goshawk (One, Baligubadle)
crested francolin (Numerous near Hargeisa)
yellow necked spurfowl / yellow necked francolin (Near the main wadi in Hargeisa)
kori bustard (Noted on the map, also seen at Quoryaale Plains)
little brown bustard (widespread east of Hargeisa)
buff crested bustard (perhaps the commonest bustard, widespread)
spotted thick knee (on day off spent near Hargeisa)
cream colored courser (or "Somali courser")
double banded courser
three banded courser / heuglin’s courser (one very vocal pair at our Tuuyo plains camp)
crowned lapwing / crowned plover
common ringed plover (one, obviously migrating, on stony desert, was a Somaliland first for Abdi)
chestnut bellied sandgrouse (common, i.e. at Tuuyo plains)
speckled pigeon (common around Hargeisa)
african mourning dove
ring necked dove / cape turtle dove
laughing dove
emerald spotted wood dove / green spotted dove
namaqua dove
red bellied parrot / orange bellied parrot
white bellied go away bird
little owl (one only, at Wadi Debis, second night's camp)
little swift / house swift
blue naped mousebird
grey headed kingfisher / gray hooded kingfisher (several singles, in heavier wooded wadi situations)
little bee eater (commonest bee eater)
somali bee eater (singles and pairs frequently encountered in open country)
white throated bee eater
madagascar bee eater
european roller (one only)
eurasian hoopoe
abyssinian scimitarbill
red billed hornbill
eastern yellow billed hornbill (common around Baligubadle)
red and yellow barbet
black throated barbet (Las Gaal cave paintings site)
nubian woodpecker
cardinal woodpecker
singing bushlark
somali long billed lark / somali lark (Tuuyo plains only)
gillet’s lark
lesser hoopoe lark (Tuuyo plains only)
chestnut headed sparrow lark / chestnut crowned sparrow lark (Tuuyo and Quoryaale plains)
desert lark
blanford’s lark (Quoryaale plains)
somali short toed lark
short tailed lark (one only, Quoryaale plains)
thekla lark (widespread, presumed not to be crested larks)
barn swallow
ethiopian swallow (widespread breeding, i.e. in Hargeisa buildings)
red throated pipit
yellow wagtail / blue headed wagtail
common bulbul
rufous tailed rock thrush / common rock thrush
blue rock thrush
desert cisticola (Tuuyo plains only)
red fronted warbler
gray wren warbler
great reed warbler (one migrant on the grounds of the Ambassador hotel)
eastern olivaceous warbler
yellow bellied eremomela
willow warbler (migrant, abundant at this time)
asian desert warbler (rather common in acacia scrub)
banded warbler / banded parisoma
african gray flycatcher (numerous)
spotted flycatcher
white throated robin (widespread migrant at this time)
rufous tailed scrub robin / rufous bush robin
common redstart
whinchat
somali wheatear (found near Hargeisa, but rather more work than expected, likes rocky slopes)
pied wheatear
blackstart (rather scarce. one at Las Gaal)
gray headed batis
scaly chatterer (good stop on first day out with Abdi)
somali tit (wadi debis campsite only)
mouse colored penduline tit (mixed flock in acacia scrub near Tuuyo plains camp)
kenya violet backed sunbird / eastern violet backed sunbird (Las Gaal)
mariqua sunbird / marico sunbird
shining sunbird
variable sunbird / yellow bellied sunbird
eurasian golden oriole
red backed shrike
rufous tailed shrike / isabelline shrike
lesser grey shrike / gray
somali fiscal (common around Baligubadle and most of drive with Abdi)
white rumped shrike / northern white crowned shrike (a few, first morning in patch of acacia forest)
brubru
slate colored boubou (one, first morning in patch of acacia forest)
rosy patched bush shrike (fairly common, dryer desert situations)
fork tailed drongo
pied crow
somali crow / dwarf raven
wattled starling
greater blue eared glossy starling
golden breasted starling / golden bellied starling (a few singles from the car, driving)
superb starling
white crowned starling (around rural human habitation, i.e. village on Tuuyo plains)
magpie starling (one in Baligubadle, a few near Las Gaal site)
red billed oxpecker (only one group of a few, on livestock)
swainson’s sparrow (widespread)
yellow spotted petronia
red billed buffalo weaver
white headed buffalo weaver
lesser masked weaver
rüppell’s weaver (colonial breeder at the Ambassador hotel)
chestnut weaver (huge roost at Ambassador hotel grounds, each evening)
red billed quelea
black cheeked waxbill / black faced waxbill (a few at the Las Gaal cave-paintings site)
blue capped cordonbleu / blue headed cordonbleu (photographed on the outskirts of Hargeisa. Abdi has seen this bird before, near Baligubadle, so there is obviously a relict population, or a range extension, as range maps show this bird's nearest range in southern Somalia)
purple grenadier (a single female in remnant acacia forest)
green winged pytilia / melba finch
red billed firefinch
cut throat / cut throat finch (in dry wadi near Hargeisa)
eastern paradise whydah
straw tailed whydah
white bellied canary
somali bunting / somali golden breasted bunting

Southern Fried

2011-07-16T10:18:00.001-04:00

Hard on the heels of a Vermont mountain 4th of July weekend, we headed to Edisto Island, beneath the frying skies of the Carolina low country, for another five-day relax. It's almost as if we're trying to sample all the archetypal American summer vacations in a row. Like most great holidays both of these long weekends have involved a lot of communal cooking. Teams of family and friends gathered together in the kitchen, sweating shoulder to shoulder over the open flames of a gas range, all looking forward to a splendid meal together. In Vermont we were hosted by the lovely Sue Schickler, a professional chef. Here on Edisto, at the beautiful beachfront home of Henry and Virginia Woodhead, Frank Harmon arrived from Raleigh with a copy of Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock's The Gift of Southern Cooking under one arm and two tubs of lard under the other. Lewis, he announced, "treats lard as if it is a precious commodity." It was clear we were in for some serious cuisine.

Lard has gotten a bad name in the last fifty years, thanks to the cholesterol police. You won't find it on the shelves at Whole Foods, and we couldn't find any at the fancy granola and organics version of Whole Foods on the outskirts of Charleston, SC. These sorts of places have half a dozen brands of butter imported from France, Ireland and Denmark jostling for refrigerated shelf-space, but they don't carry lard, which seems to be one of the few blacklisted ingredients that has yet to be widely redeemed in our foodie culture. Lewis and Peacock, however, seem to have set that redemption as their goal; a quick look through their cookbook reveals pig fat to be a crucial ingredient.

Frank Harmon had purchased his lard at Doscher's supermarket, on the Savannah highway, an unrenovated time capsule entirely free of organic tomfoolery. The contrast between the two supermarkets was sociologically fascinating: Doscher's clientele overlaps with that of a Wild Oats even less than its selection of products. All the other shoppers were African American. There, next to the tubs of crisco, was the lard.

Harmon announced that we were going to cook fried chicken, which I had always thought heart-stopping enough when prepared in what I thought was the traditional manner, namely submerged in boiling vegetable oil. No, Harmon explained, that results in flavorless nonsense when compared with the results of Dame Edna Lewis' recipe, which is skillet-fried in lard and butter. It isn't often that I'm accused of being a health-nut, but here was Harmon scoffing at my fear of hardened arteries. Nonetheless, I would argue that Lewis' recipe verges on the comical in its rococo employment of fats:

First: Brine the chicken pieces overnight.
Second: Drain the chicken and soak it all day in buttermilk.

Third: Melt one pound of lard with a stick of butter and flavor this abundant compilation of animal fats by frying in it a few healthy slabs of "country ham" for approximately 45 minutes, until the country ham is brown and leathery, having rendered all of its own fat, salt and flavor into the lard mixture.

Periodically skim the bubbling butter foam to prevent it from burning.

Remove the dessicated country ham from the fat and "reserve for other uses." You now have two skillets full of ridiculously flavorful pig grease in which to fry your chicken. Just don't invite any cardiologists over for dinner.

After completion of the complex two-stage chicken marination process, I stirred the bubbling fat with abandon, coaxing every last bit of flavor from the slabs of country ham. Between bubbles, I prepared the "dredge" as Frank read out the ingredients to me from where he sat perched on a bar stool on the far side of the kitchen island. I was looking forward to the moment when the two of us would toil side-by-side, slipping the breaded chicken pieces into the twin skillets of now-flavored lard. "The next step I think should be to put the chicken in a colander to drain off the buttermilk," he suggested helpfully, while taking a sip of wine. I hastened from one patch of granite countertop to another, preparing the flour mixture and removing and draining the now-shriveled bits of ham from the skillets, all the while looking about rather frantically for a colander.

"We probably ought to get the tomato gravy going as well," said Frank, savoring his Sauvignon. "First, you need to finely chop a large onion, it says here."

I was starting to feel somewhat overwhelmed, but I was thankful for Frank's calm and encouraging presence there in the kitchen as he read more and more of Dame Edna's time-seasoned instructions to me in a reassuring and professorial voice. "Is the chicken draining? How's that onion coming? The guests will be arriving in about twelve minutes, and then we should probably start cooking," he said.

Start cooking? I had been under the impression that I already was. By now I was feverishly chopping gallons of tomatoes to add into the gravy. "You'll probably want to hold off a bit on adding the cream to that," said Frank, sharing the wisdom earned from years of experience, which I was so eager to absorb.

"Please, Frank," I begged. "The guests will be here any moment. I feel I'm not ready. I just don't have the experience necessary for the dredging process. Could you help me, please, oh Jedi master?"

Frank strolled over and began gently and expertly rolling the still buttermilk-moist chicken parts across the dishes of seasoned flour. This complex and burdensome task was for Frank but the work of a minute or two, and he quickly regained his observational perch as I slid the breaded chicken parts into the sizzling lard.

Cook chicken approximately 7 minutes per side.

Until golden brown. You can underdo them just a bit, as after fifteen minutes in bubbling lard the interior flesh will continue to cook after you have removed the parts to a plate lined with crumpled paper towel.

Frank Harmon, architect of the poultry, passionately engaged in ~~telling me what to do~~ cooking up the world's most delicious fried chicken.

Peacock and Lewis' tomato gravy makes a fabulous addition to the lard-fried chicken, as it should, since it consists essentially of fresh Carolina tomatoes simmered in heavy cream.

"Seeing as you've got your camera out, why don't you snap an action shot of me, cooking up the chicken?" suggested Frank. (Note lack of chicken; this is the culinary equivalent of a wedding photograph, or a "dramatic recreation" in a documentary film. Which is to say, fabricated out of whole cloth after the fact. All the chicken has already been consumed.)

The results? Ridiculously delicious. Iced tea, corn salad, white rice, salad, tomato gravy and "OMG" chicken.

Yesterday in Warren, Vermont

2011-07-05T19:01:00.000-04:00

Although I've been invited before, I had never managed to make it to Warren, VT on July 4th, until this year. For reasons too complex and insular to explain briefly, every Independence Day, an exodus departs Red Hook, Brooklyn for that small mountain village.

Each year, Redhookians aid the Prickly Mountain posse in the construction of their irreverent parade float, while swimming in the pond and consuming vast quantities of beer. Each year they threaten that "next year" they will build their own float and float it as competition. Each year they take up a collection and have their own, private-yet-massive fireworks display. We'll be putting the weekend on the annual calendar from now on.

Simba!

2011-06-27T08:51:00.001-04:00

My most recent flurry of travels included flying from Somalia to Calcutta with a layover in Kenya, permitting me to revisit a favorite haunt.

The vast, sprawling city of Nairobi, and both of its airports, butt right up against a premier game reserve, Nairobi National Park, the splendid legacy of a time when the city was little more than a tiny high plains retreat for British colonials. Imagine if New York's Central Park was the size of Queens, and roamed by herds of wild game. The park holds all of the so-called "Big Five," the animals on the "must see" most-wanted list: elephant, buffalo, rhinoceros, lion and leopard.

As the city expands, the pressure on this real estate must be significant, but so far the park survives, ringed by dozens of miles of electrified fence, minimizing contact between urban human and dangerous wild game. The insensate Buffalo is the most dangerous; it will rear and charge and trample you under its mighty hooves before it has even evaluated what sort of threat you might pose. The hippo, separated from its offspring, or rushing back to the safety of the water, will flatten you like a diesel road roller. In East Africa, the elephant, a genial creature by nature, has had too many unpleasant experiences with humans. It does not trust you, and the rogue, lone male will sometimes attack even your vehicle. For all these reasons and more, it is prohibited to descend from the car in many African game reserves.

But this regulation makes birdwatching difficult. One wants, always, to follow that elusive call into the bush, to peer deep into shrubs, to get out of the car and stroll in the forest. I cautiously ignore regulations against walking in Africa. After all, millions of carless Africans have been living in relative harmony with all these animals for years. If someone is occasionally munched, or flattened, that is the way of things. I accept that. In Rwanda's Akagera National Park I have camped, alone, where I liked, hiked into the acacia forests, startled giant crocodiles at the edges of the swamp, and even skirted herds of elephant on foot. Always keeping a healthy distance dictated by respect, but not paranoia.

On my last trip to Nairobi National Park I had therefore fearlessly gotten out of my hired taxi whenever I spotted a bird, which is to say, almost constantly. But on this visit, within minutes of pulling through the front gates, I was embarrassed to be busted by a park ranger, who pulled up short in his green Toyota Landcruiser when he saw me standing in the road, some fifty yards from my van and driver. "What you are doing is very dangerous. And it is not permitted," he said, in crisp, officious, post-colonial English. "Yes, sir," I said.

"Return to your vehicle at once." After I complied, the ranger drove up and held a brief conference in Swahili with my driver, the excellent George Olukuye. Then he sped off, and George and I wrestled open the safari pop-top of the van. "He said that if he sees you out of the car again, you will be fined," George told me. I fumed. Birding out of a van, even a convertible one, was not what I had had in mind.

Tourists in game reserves demonstrate a herd mentality, as if eager to prove they are not so very different from the animals they are watching. Pause for a few moments looking out of the top of a van through binoculars, and every other van within sight will hurriedly u-turn its way back to your patch of track, fearful of missing something. "Een ornitholoog," I heard one disgusted dutchman tell his family, after they sped over, only to realize that I was looking at a small, nondescript bird.

An Ostrich might get a pause and a glance, but what most visitors really want to see are the Big Five. Two drivers passing in the track pause and ask each other if there have been any rhino sightings. "Simba?," they ask, in hushed tones. The lion is king. It is possible, but difficult to see. It is perhaps at the top of the list for most visitors. (You could spent twenty days of layovers here and never see a leopard, so that spectacular cat generally remains in the realm of fantasy).

Imagine our joy, then, as we were driving slowly up the track, to come upon a lioness, drinking from a puddle in the road.

In the natural state of things, unless startled, harassed, or abnormally hungry, the lion does not attack we humans. Like bullies, they prefer prey smaller than themselves. The phenomenon of the man-eater, of the lion that has tasted human flesh and found it to his liking, gives one pause, but the presence of lions is not normally enough to keep me in the car. (However, I would never get out of a car in the presence of a lion).

Where there is one lion, there are generally more, and as we sat, parked in the track, watching and waiting, another one appeared from an insignificant shrub beside the road, just the sort in which on another day I might have searched for a singing bird. If they are unlikely to attack humans, they also care little about them. Simba is not scared of you, and he will walk languidly across the road and examine your car with a slow twist of his powerful neck.

Soon, three lions had settled into the shade of the only shrub found on our patch of savannah. Had you told me that the lone bush, above, provided sufficient cover for three lions, I would have laughed at you, but I saw the lions go in to it and become invisible. Had I not seen them I must admit that here I would happily have gotten out of the car after looking around, certain that there was no big game, no threat, just open bush. A lesson learned.

Half an hour later, when we passed back that way, they were still there.

Geography Quiz

2011-06-18T18:19:00.000-04:00

You don't have to be very specific to win this one, folks. I'll accept anything within 500 miles as a correct answer...

The Greening of Brooklyn

2011-06-16T16:54:00.000-04:00

The heartwarming sight of a truck fulla landscape, crossing the Gowanus Canal today on Hamilton Ave.

Photo: courtesy Laura Harmon

Auspiciousness Maximization Strategies

2011-06-08T10:56:00.002-04:00

Any country as large as India has profound regional variations that are manifested in culture and politics, tugging and teasing at the fabric of national unity. Kashmir is only the most obvious example. Around Darjeeling, in the Himalayan foothills, the original citizens of the mountains have more in common with the Nepalese and Bhutanese they are sandwiched between than they do even with the other residents of their own state of West Bengal. They want autonomy, and a state, to be called Gurkhaland. One senses that independence from India itself would be just fine with them. In the vast south, over much of peninsular India, the people speak Tamil, militantly avoiding Hindi in the manner of Barcelonans refusing to speak Castillian. They enjoy the most progressively vegetarian cuisine on earth (meat-serving restaurants are labeled "non-veg"). They are darker skinned, and have their own burgeoning movie industry, threatening the supremacy of Bollywood. It's called Tollywood. T for Tamil.

My friend and sister-in-law, Melanie Dean, speaks Tamil, and she is an expert on much of what is distinct in the region. Her doctoral dissertation, recently completed, and which she will be defending before the august sages of the Uni of Penna tomorrow, discusses Tamil Nadu superstitions related to the concept of the "evil eye." In Tamil culture, an excess of admiration is often interpreted as a possible threat to the thing admired. For instance, it is considered very bad form to goo and gush over a newborn, complimenting it on its good looks, chubby cheeks and overall deliciousness. Your envy is showing, and you likely mean the child harm. (I wish a bit of this would rub off in Brooklyn, where the abundance of children one is all but required to lavish with praise quickly becomes exhausting).

I'm a sucker for whatever bits of voodoo and hoo-hah survive into our more and more culturally homogenous iPad age, and while in Tamil Nadu recently (I'm just back as of three days ago) I kept my eyes peeled for manifestations of popular belief. I wasn't really sure what I was looking for, so I just snapped photos of things I don't see in Red Hook every day. I then sent the snaps along to Melanie. Knowing she was in the mad crush of preparing for her dissertation defense, I didn't have high hopes that she would have time to share the knowledge, but on the other hand, it isn't every day that the illustrious antarcticiana offers outsiders the one-way ticket to fame and glory represented by a guest post in these pages. Within hours the hot copy was on my screen:

You've taken pictures of just the very things that sent me down the road of this crazy dissertation I just completed. They are all apotropaic in the sense that they attract auspiciousness (in the case of the kolams or rice flour designs drawn on the ground), or they repel inauspiciousness (in the case of the other items you photographed which are evil eye or drishti amulets). The threshold of the home (or business), as a liminal space, is the most vulnerable to evil influences and energies. So, as you have no doubt noticed, it is at the entrance to homes and businesses that you find the greatest concentration of such evil-eye repellent forms.
The rice-flour designs on the ground are called kolam in Tamil and are drawn only by women and girls, usually at the crack of dawn. These types of patterns have mathematical properties that computer programmers are actually quite interested in. They can get very complicated and are drawn freehand by women. These skills are passed down from mothers to daughters. Kolams are a sign that everything in the home is well. They invite auspiciousness into the home, and especially the goddess of prosperity: Lakshmi. They are ephemeral art forms, akin to sand mandalas. They are meant to be trampled and dispersed, and it looks like you have a pic of one in just this state.

The two Kolams above and below were photographed on the same threshhold, one in front of each of two metal gates giving access to the courtyard. They appear to have matched before one of them was mussed by pedestrians.

Some people say that putting out a kolam is like feeding a thousand souls, because ants take away the rice flour and eat it. Kolams, with their lines that have no beginning and no end, are understood to confuse evil spirits, who are baffled by them.

The famous anthropologist Alfred Gell called such designs (like kolams and Celtic knots) "demonic fly-paper" for their ability to "trap" and distract the attentions of wayward spirits. (A great video on kolams can be found here.)

Veve for Ogoun, scanned without permission from Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen:The Living Gods of Haiti

An interesting aside: Above and below are veve, ritual drawings of Haitian vodou, which, coincidentally or not, share a number of attributes with kolam. Both are "drawn" on the ground by carefully allowing a trail of flour or meal to escape from between the thumb and forefinger. Both invoke the supernatural. Both are ephemeral artworks which may begin to be dispersed almost as soon as they are finished. "The veve is not a permanent record," wrote Harold Courlander. "It is made as an act of supplication or veneration, and once it is finished it has no further value. In the ensuing ritual and dance, the veve is obliterated by the feet that pass across it."*

And, from Alfred Métraux: "These emblematic drawings have a magical nature. Merely by tracing them out a priest puts pressure on the loa [spirits] and compels them to appear.... (T)he loa will be irresistibly attracted by the magic of the veve...."**

Veve for Legba, perceived as the guardian of portals and doorways--the "liminal space" and threshold of the spirit world. Also taken from Divine Horsemen.

Your pic of the amulet dangling down is a classic "evil eye" or drishti amulet. It consists of a rope of human hair (grotesque and chosen for just this reason!) which holds a conch shell, a palm fruit (?) wrapped in yellow, turmeric smeared cotton string, and a chunk of alum. Alum in particular has interesting evil eye repellent properties. When you burn it, it pops and makes a lot of loud noises which are said to be evidence of drishti. This combination of the hair rope with the conch shell, etc., is quite popular.

Finally, you've got a very nice pic of an evil eye-repellent coconut demon head! Demon heads are made from papier-mache, they are painted on pumpkins, and they are also-somewhat more rarely-painted on dried out coconuts. These demons (called butam in Tamil) usually have horns, big mustaches, and a tongue sticking out with a scorpion on it. Such scary and ugly amulets are supposed to draw the attentions of onlookers (and potential evil eye casters) who will then be frightened or disgusted by the amulet and look away--their evil eye averted. This one appears to be hanging outside a shop. Places of business are protected from evil eye just like homes.

The shopkeeper of the store adjacent to this spectacular coconut-head saw me photographing it, and I struck up a conversation with him that went something like this:

Me: What on earth is that?

Shopkeeper: We have a strong belief here, that if you have something very beautiful, someone can come and admire that thing, and somehow take something away from it. We call it drishti. That coconut relates to that.

M: Make it less beautiful?

S: Yes. perhaps damage it, in some way. And our ancestors, you know, they were not such fools as we may think, so there may be something in that. To prevent it, you must hang something hideous, something ugly there. To guard against that.

M: But I rather like the coconut. What I'm enviously admiring is the very amulet that is supposed to repel me. Story of my life.

*Courlander, Harold, The Drum and the Hoe, Berkeley, 1960, The University of California Press, pg. 125.
**Métraux, Alfred, Voodoo, New York, 1959, Oxford University Press, pg. 165.

(All italicized text courtesy of Melanie Dean, to whom I am extraordinarily grateful for this erudite and illuminating contribution. Best wishes to her on the eve of her doctoral dissertation defense. She cannot but emerge diplomaed and victorious even if she brings to it only a fraction of the clarity and concision demonstrated in this post.)

Curb Yourself

2011-06-03T06:50:00.002-04:00

Today's Semiotic Malfunction is also from Ooty, in Tamil Nadu, India. However, given the way cars are driven through the streets here, this may not be an error; perhaps it is meant as a warning to pedestrians rather than to would-be parkers.

Leeches, Part Deux: Leech avoidance in the Himalaya

2011-05-30T23:00:00.002-04:00

You may wish to read part one of the leech sock saga, if you haven't enjoyed it already

On the trail in Lava, near the Bhutanese border, northern West Bengal

...The leech socks remained tucked into the bottom of my backpack during a two-week stay in Somaliland. Somalia may have certain security issues, but leeches are not one of them. After a pleasant sojourn amongst the acacias of the Horn of Africa, I then flew to Calcutta and took an overnight train to the base of the Himalayas, in the northern extremities of West Bengal. In Darjeeling, I hired a jeep to drive me east, to the village of Lava, surrounded by leech country. Here, finally, I would have a chance to put the leech socks, and the handiwork of my friend Ashley Singer, to the test.

One looks a right nerd wandering the muddy cobblestoned streets of Lava in puffy blue gaiters, so I stashed the leech socks in my field bag and headed for the hills. After less than a kilometer climb up into the forest, I paused to catch my breath. There, bobbing and weaving at the tip of my boot, was my first leech. I flicked it off. Now paranoid, I had no desire to sit down anywhere to put on my socks, as this would doubtless allow hordes of leeches direct access to my soft, white flesh. Swaying on one foot, I removed the boot from the other. Standing on the one leg like a stork, I realized I was imminently going to fall over and harm myself. I sat down hastily on a somewhat dry rock and "socked up" in a hurry.

Like a lover, leeches smell your heat, inching their way towards where you stand in a moist and misty forest grove, contemplating the bounty and beauty of nature. Do you think inchworms are cute? There are only two differences I can find between them and their Austro-Asian cousins: arboreal leeches are black, and they like to suck your blood. They move exactly as inchworms do, by alternately moving the front and back halves of their bodies, stretching forward, then bending double as they bring their rear grabbers up to meet their front. This might look cute in green; on a leech, that moment of indecision when the creature lifts up on its hind whatevers, swaying its body this way and that, is particularly revolting. Because you know it is sniffing the air for flesh, your flesh.

If you think the answer to this problem is not to sit on mossy logs, then beware the leech that senses your warmth below and drops silently out of a tree onto your hat like a ninja. Or the posse of leeches that wait on the underleaves of a shrub, grabbing onto your pants as you brush past. I suppose technically they are insects, but I call them devilspawn.

User view

For the next seven hours or so, I thrashed about in the jungle, searching for rusty-bellied shortwing, blue-fronted robin, hoary-throated barwing and other birds most people have never heard of.* Between bouts of sweating profusely, I obsessively examined the rich blue denim surface of my socks, I found nary a leech, and can therefore proclaim the leech socks an unqualified success.

Warning: Graphic images follow. Parents, please control your childrens' internet privileges. I cannot blame any failure of the socks for the disturbing images you are about to see; I suspect the guilty leech came from somewhere up above.

Undoubtedly mashed to death by the binoculars bouncing on my chest, the remnants of the disengorged leech are here clearly visible.

*All seen except the blue-fronted robin. Leeches or no leeches, I suppose I shall have to go back.

Now with New and Improved Extra Melty Deliciousness!

2011-05-30T12:56:00.002-04:00

Today's Semiotic Malfunction is from Ooty, in Tamil Nadu.

I love me some cloud forest!

2011-05-28T11:21:00.002-04:00

In and around the village of Lava, in the Himalayan foothills of West Bengal, two weeks ago.

Rickshaw Richard

2011-05-26T11:50:00.001-04:00

The indignities of the economic disparity between the poor and the rich are many, but the rickshaw is in a class of its own. In the west we routinely hire those less fortunate than ourselves to do the jobs we would never do: "illegal" Mexicans are paid substandard wages to pick our tomatoes while they live eight to a motel room; maids trying to get a toehold in the new world scrub our toilets. Nonetheless, the typical enlightened westerner is revolted by the human-powered rickshaw, a basket on wheels pulled through the streets by a jogging coolie. One person reclines in a padded chair, elevated above the other. His fellow human, reduced to a beast of burden, runs ahead, all the while pulling this wicker chariot by two sturdy steel bars. The truths this relationship exposes are too raw.

There are few places where rickshaw-pulling remains a thriving trade. I did not see a single one in Vietnam or Cambodia in the two months I spent in South-east Asia this winter. Rumor has it they have been banned. In Vietnam, even the far more civilized tricycle taxi, or trishaw, seems endangered. Tourists are happy to ride in those, but in the era of the ubiquitous motorcycle taxi they are no longer a popular form of transportation for the locals, who are in far too much of a hurry. In Calcutta, however, rickshaws are still to be found on almost every block.

Photo: Shiva Sripathi Passenger: Uday Sripathi

I don't just want the muscle mass, I want the uncontrollable anger...

2011-05-22T09:56:00.006-04:00

While wandering past Shivam Medicos, Chemist and Druggist of the central market in Darjeeling, India, last week, I noted that muscle-building supplements are given display-case prominence here in the land of the Gurkha, India's most notoriously fierce and loyal fighters. For all I know, these are over the counter steroids, but I rather suspect that like many "dietary supplements" sold in the United States, Mega Tripple Mass Truly Hardcore Supplement is essentially a concoction of vitamins.

The packaging, however, suggests that the box contents are intended to reproduce the effects of steroids, and I'm not just talking about the bulk and definition of your tricepticals. With Mega Tripple Mass you obviously get necklessness and skin-stretching muscle definition, but apparently you will also acquire the beady eyes, testicular shrinkage,* and irrational, semi-rabid fury of the chronic steroid abuser.

The extra "p" is for "Pissed Off"

*Granted, the testicles are not illustrated on the box, but we feel certain they have suffered some shrivelage.

Stalking the wild leeches of Red Hook

2011-05-19T21:27:00.004-04:00

Now, I love nature and almost everything in it, perhaps more than most people, but there are a few creatures out there revolting enough to make one question the existence of God. The leech, for instance. Those which swim about in the warm shallows of pebbly freshwater lakes waiting for plump toddlers to go wading are bad enough, but the swimmers scarcely rank on the grotesque-o-meter when compared to the arboreal varieties of Asia and Australia. These prowl through the moist monsoon jungles, inconspicuous and thirsty, until, sensing the body heat of a passing mammal, they leap from the trees like kamikaze caterpillars. Brush up against the wrong leaf and your flesh will promptly be swarming with black, blood-sucking inchworms.

At home in Red Hook during a "comfort and fashion" leech-sock evaluation session in early April.

Short of a full-body Tyvek suit of the sort used to combat radioactive discharge at earthquake-damaged nuclear power plants, there is no entirely leech-proof costume. Precautions are possible, however. At Cat Tien National Park in Vietnam in late January, I met a party of German adventurers in the outdoor canteen, looking rather bashful as they sat drinking beers while wearing four sets of matching purple twill gaiters. These, they explained, were "leech-socks." January in Vietnam is the height of the dry season, widely advertised as leechless. Nonetheless, I had managed to collect two of the gruesome creatures that day, during a ten kilometer hike on a narrow and overgrown forest trail. I stared at the Germans in their aubergine accoutrements for so long that I was finally forced to assure them that I was not making fun of their socks, but was rather jealous. Where, I asked, had they obtained them?

Their outfitter had provided them. As it turns out, there are few places to purchase leech socks. The locals of the leech-infested zones don't seem to use them, and I could not find any for sale in Vietnam, much less in purple. Knowing I was to be in the Indian Himalaya in mid-May, primo leech drinking season, I attempted the mail-order route when I returned from Vietnam. Googling revealed this guy, who claims to sell the world's best. I briefly considered dropping the forty bucks he charges for a pair, but when I realized shipping and handling was not included and that I was looking at a $55 tab for a pair of socks, I temporarily forgot my fear of leeches. More googling. At last I found the sort of post I had been looking for.

The advice was simple. Cut off the legs from a pair of old pants, sew closed the bottoms, and add a drawstring at the top. Apparently leeches cannot penetrate twill or other densely woven cotton, as opposed to regular socks, which they treat like a revolving door, an access-panel to your hard-earned corpuscles. There is no need to use Tyvek, Gore-tex or anything else other than tightly woven cotton.

I'm not much of a quilter, so I consulted my friend Ashley Singer, one of the craftier people you will ever meet. She owns industrial sewing machines and knows Matt Damon's hat size. She spends her days making monsters and goblins for the sets of big Hollywood movies, and blocking custom-made fedoras out of beaver felt. She plays the harp.

"How would you feel about helping me make a pair of leech socks?" I asked. (I suspect both of us knew this really meant: how do feel about making some leech socks for me?) A pair of old lightweight jeans, ten or so minutes with the sewing machine, and presto.

When I asked her if my new leech-socks made me look like a brave and intrepid explorer, Ashley suggested that it might be best if I peered out at the horizon "as if scanning the area for leeches."

All photos courtesy Ashley Singer

COMING SOON: PART TWO, In which THE LEECH SOCKS are PUT TO THE TEST in the LEECH-INFESTED CLOUD FORESTS OF THE INDIAN HIMALAYA, a post that will include GRAPHIC IMAGES OF MY naked TORSO.

The Broadway Hotel, Kolkata

2011-05-10T11:36:00.006-04:00

Yellow shutters and soot-crusted screens. In the bar, curtains, the warm beige of dim lightbulbs and eighteen ceiling fans on full; their whirring rush of air dulls the incessant honking outside on Ganesh Chandra Avenue. (Calcuttans simplify life by using the horn in lieu of brakes, clutch and turn signals). The dark wood-wainscotted walls of the Broadway Hotel saloon are made of primeval hardwoods no longer available at any price. Smoking is prohibited these days. A sign announces that it "is an offense,” but the tall walls are a suspicious dingy ochre, as if they had had the chance to collect smoke for many long-passed decades. This hotel does not have a faded grandeur; it has whatever it has always had, unchanged.

The waiters wear wrinkled burgundy Nehru smocks with black embroidered patches above their hearts, reading: Broadway Hotel. Oh, how I wish there remained such a place on Broadway! Squat red leatherette chairs crowd against brown formica tabletops buffed almost white in places; there is little left of the original faux-burl woodgrain pattern. Mildew specked mirrors along one wall double the already ample space, which has soaring ceilings. The soap at the men's handwashing station is dispensed from a swinging tin bottle that pivots on a mount, bolted to the wall above the sinks. If it ain't broke please Lord don't fix it.

When I alight from the elevator cage the children of the manager are laughing and howling in their adolescent Sikh turbans, playing narrow soccer on the polished red cement floor of the fourth floor corridor. Moments after I have dropped my bags on the single bed, the half-deflated miniature basketball is kicked through my still-open door. On purpose, I am certain. It rolls about the room, and within seconds the curious duo are peering through the curtain at the door, sticking their noses right into my room, demanding to know how tall I am. I've been here ten minutes, and I could live here forever.

The hotel's website (they are not out of date) almost proudly announces that none of the rooms are air-conditioned. The bed, edged away from the wall, better to be under yet another churning ceiling fan, has no top sheet. This saves everyone time and bother. You would be no more likely to require a top sheet than to walk out into Calcutta wearing a sweater.

It is 11am. I stretch out under the helicopter downdraft, close my eyes, and lean into the single pillow. I have flown all night from Africa, with a 2am to 6am layover in Mumbai. I couldn't be more tired, but I am ecstatic to find myself in the most splendid ten dollar hotel in all of Asia.

Somaliland Safari

2011-05-05T22:27:00.002-04:00

More on this later, but the people of Somaliland would like you to know that they represent a politically distinct entity unaffiliated with the terrorists, warlords and pirates of Somalia. That this autonomous enclave on the northern side of the Horn of Africa remains unrecognized by any other government annoys them. Security, hospitality, and chai are all comparatively abundant. Travel, even independent travel, is possible here.

At the end of a recent film shoot in and around Hargeisa, I squeezed in an all-too-brief safari with wildlife guide extraordinaire Abdi Jama. Emerging from the Somali bush this morning, we drove directly to the airport, and I'm writing to you now from the wifi convenience of the very comfortable Ole Sereni Hotel in Nairobi. Here's a slideshow:

Saïd, packing the truck in front of the Ambassador Hotel, Hargeisa

Passing the Airport on the way out of the city. Camels occasionally wander onto the runway at inopportune moments.

Random obligatory shot of cute rural toddlers.

Obligatory shot of self in desert.

Big sky country.

Abdi Jama enjoys a Somali chai.

Minuscule mosque in teensy windswept village on the Tuuyo plains.

The end of the day on the Tuuyo plains.

Improvised rain cover.

Camp One.

Termites can be a problem.

But they make beautiful houses. No two alike.

Abdi Jama, stalking the Somali Lark on the Tuuyo plains.

The crew. Chief cook and bottle-washer Saïd, birder and bushman extraordinaire Abdi, and my personal security force, Mustafa.

Going back to Vietnam

2011-04-30T23:57:00.001-04:00

My story on the phenomenon of Vietnam War tourism and US veterans who return to visit the places they once fought ran yesterday in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung, although not in their online edition. Today is the anniversary of the Saigon airlift. Here's the pre-translation original:

On the telephone, Mr. Vu speaks English with a clipped, military precision, quickly dispensing with the logistics of the next day’s excursion. “Do you need to visit Khe San?” he asks. “No? Fine. Just to confirm: the driver will pick you at 10:15 in Hue and bring you here to Dong Ha, where you will collect me and drive up into the DMZ.” Mr. Vu sounds like the real deal, a veteran of the Vietnam war; it is almost like the planning of a tactical assault. Mr. Vu is one of the very best, but there are many people in and around the ancient Imperial City of Hue who do what he does. Vu is a DMZ tour guide who takes visitors and Vietnamese alike on customized trips through the many notorious locales dotted along the former border between North and South Vietnam.

Replica of the "Peace Bridge"

Demilitarized zone tourism is a thriving business in Hue, something that would be impossible if the wounds were still fresh. The savage conflict that unfolded here is quickly receding into the fog, not of war, but of distant memory. Overwhelmingly youthful, the population of Vietnam seems focused on the future and the country's bustling, Chinese-style economy, while America is deeply mired in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that have defined war in the present millennium. In the inevitable comparisons the lessons of Vietnam would seem to have been forgotten; for most, the war has become history. But not for the veterans who fought here.

Along the esplanade on the north bank of the Perfume River, near the gates of the famed Hue Citadel, street vendors hawk used dogtags, the steel identity badges all GIs wore around their necks, listing their name, blood type and religious affiliation. Apparently authentic, they are lined up on a low stone wall along with other knick-knacks: North Vietnamese medals, Soviet-style enameled communist friendship pins, and antique Chinese porcelain. Not far away, behind the ancient and imposing walls of the old city, stand rows of tanks and US artillery seized by the North in the conflict known only here as The American War. Dozens of agencies dotting the tourist quarter of the city offer tours to the DMZ. Options range from an inexpensive day in a bus full of other travelers to the kind of individual tailored experience Mr. Vu offers, on which former servicemen can seek out the particular places that were of personal significance to them forty and more years ago.

Inside the Vinh Moc tunnels, where North Vietnamese lived underground on the edge of the DMZ in order to avoid American bombs. The network of burrows is now a showcase bit of propaganda intended to underline the resilience of the outgunned but ultimately victorious North.

Mr. Vu, it turns out, is 34 years old, born in 1976, the year after the Saigon airlift. He is extraordinarily knowledgeable. He knows which branches of the US forces served where, and when, and which regiments were involved in which conflicts. On the drive to the preposterously named “Peace Bridge,” across the Ben Hai River, Vu pulls out a binder full of maps and Life Magazine photographs showing the landscape as it appeared in the late 1960s. The tranquil but dreary rice paddies stretched out on either side of the 17th parallel appear in them as a cratered, lunar devastation, like a heavily polka-dotted carpet.

It is gray, and raining, and peasants are driving their water buffalo along the muddy banks above the paddies. There is almost nothing left to indicate that the DMZ was the scene of some of the war’s heaviest fighting. The southern half of Quang Tri province, below the Ben Hai, was the first area in the south to fall, and the area to the north, Mr. Vu says, was the most heavily bombed of all.

Replica of the battle-scarred and bullet-holed loudspeakers used by both sides to broadcast opposing ideologies across the Ben Hai River.

In many ways, this is a simulated experience. The Peace Bridge is a copy, right down to the guard booths at each end and the towering columns of gunmetal gray loudspeakers, non-working replicas of the ones which used to face-off, broadcasting competing propaganda across the river in an incessant, deafening battle of volume. All this was bombed to splinters; these reproductions have only been here for the last ten years or so, Mr. Vu says, to satisfy the tourist demand. Why, a visitor wonders, do so many people want to see the DMZ?

“Most of my clients,” he says, “are in their 40s and 50s. Khe San, Hamburger Hill, the DMZ, these places are familiar to them from books and movies.” DMZ tourism has gotten lots of free publicity from Hollywood. Nonetheless, the phenomenon began with Vietnam veterans in 1991, the moment the US eased travel restrictions that had prevented its citizens from visiting the country. “So many of them are my clients,” says Mr. Vu. He estimates that in 1999, when he began giving tours, 30% of those he guided had seen active duty in Vietnam, and still today at least one in ten are veterans.

Mr. Vu with artillery shells, carefully repainted with the identifying codes and letters of US ordnance of the period.

Rob Allerheiligen, who was a First Lieutenant in the US Marine Corps in 1969, at Monkey Mountain outside of Danang, wrote in an email that “I think I always thought I would come back some day.” He spent a day in 2010 with Mr. Vu. “Even though I had not been stationed at any of the sites we visited, I had friends who were, and I have read enough about Marine Operations…to know what I was looking at and to be impressed at what those Marines accomplished there.” He says he experienced a “funny feeling” landing at Danang almost 41 years to the day after he deployed. “There was a flutter in my stomach and an increase in my heartbeat.”

Glenn Prentice experienced the siege of Khe San on the notorious hill 881S as a forward artillery observer, one of only 17 out of 350 Marines there who was neither killed nor wounded. In 1995 he felt “overtaken by an overwhelming urge to go back to Vietnam,” and returned on his own to the hilltop scene of his youthful trauma; the siege began on his 19th birthday, in 1968. “You come back with guilt that you survived,” he says. But the sense of obligation he feels as a survivor seems not only to extend to his fellow American servicemen; after making friends with a North Vietnamese colonel who had fought at Khe San as his enemy, he collaborated on building a water treatment plant in a village near Hue, and since his unlikely friend's death he has helped the man's daughter with her college expenses. “I promised I would take care of his family,” Prentice says.

“When you have so many traumatic events, and when you are so young, they are basically permanently imprinted in you,” he says. “You need to go back, because at times it feels surreal.” He has now returned 14 times since his first revisit, and helps other veterans who aren't sure how, or whether, they can manage the trip. Their reactions “run the whole gamut,” he says. “Sadness, depression, relief.”

“They are very quiet, and don't really want to share,” says Mr. Vu, barreling back towards Hue in a minivan through the misty rice paddies of today's utterly transformed Vietnam. “They're very emotional. I don't know why.”

New York Times solves Jamaica Bay National Wildlife Refuge Hindu Conundrum

2011-04-24T14:14:00.000-04:00

A couple of years ago, after stumbling upon countless yards of cheap saffron and scarlet "silk," ruined, rotting offerings, washed-up floats and soggy bunting littering the pebbly beaches of eastern Queens, I blogged about the evident use of Jamaica Bay for an unspecified Hindu ritual. Finally, the New York Times explains. Broad Channel, apparently, is New York City's answer to the mighty Ganges.

Cosmic Slop: The Gumbo Movie

2011-04-16T16:19:00.003-04:00

The inaugural meeting of the Association for the Promulgation of Gumbo was, if the co-president may permit himself to say so, a resounding success. On Thursday night, St. John Frizell and I served two subtle variations on the theme of fried chicken and sausage gumbo in the boardroom at Cabinet Magazine, along with caruru, a Brazilian okra stew. Caruru is a ritual food of the Candomblé religion, often available in Brazil from Bahiana vendors who wear pristine white cotton finery to demonstrate their religious proclivities. It is essentially a gumbo, but one made with dried shrimps and ground peanuts, and it was included on the menu in order to demonstrate the connective culinary tissue (okra fiber) linking the far-flung corners of the African slave diaspora. Staggeringly decadent and delicious pies from Four and Twenty Blackbirds rounded out the meal, and the tummies of the guests.

At the meeting, during which vast quantities of gumbo was consumed by about twenty ravenous board members, we showed the following film. According to the filmmaker, the surface of the bubbling pot of gumbo serves as a metaphor for the creation of the world and everything in it.*

I'm not only the co-president of the Assoc., I'm also ~~a client~~ the secretary. The minutes of the meeting are in preparation and will be posted here shortly. For the moment, please enjoy this classic of kitchen cinema.

*From a Darwinian, rather than creationist, perspective.

APG® Okra graphic ©2011 Laura Harmon; used here by permission of the artist

First loaf of the year

2011-04-13T15:45:00.000-04:00

Impassioned bread-baking and relentless world travel seem close to incompatible. Even though I'm a purist whose bread only involves three ingredients--flour, water, and salt--I failed to find any opportunities to bake a few loaves while tramping about in the National Parks of Vietnam. Before leaving at the end of December, I had distributed samples of my sourdough starter to diverse friends, family and acquaintances in the hopes that some would survive until I returned. When I got back I had scarcely time to locate someone who hadn't killed it off (thanks, Mom!) before I departed for Haiti on a film shoot. So it wasn't until this week that I managed to fire up the oven.

Like the Sugarhill Gang said, I don't mean to brag and I don't mean to boast, but I like hot butter on my breakfast toast. Also, I like a crisp, nutty crust and an open spongy crumb, and it's just like riding a bike, apparently, because if I say so myself my first effort for 2011 is an unqualified winner. No yeast involved.

Technical details in the comments.

New York Times almost writes a sensitive article about Vodou

2011-04-10T10:14:00.001-04:00

Dan Bilefsky's effort at a cautious, politically correct and balanced article about New York area practitioners of vodou was reading better than I might usually expect on the subject from the New York Times, until I reached the last paragraph. After framing his story around a ceremony to celebrate computer engineer Jack Laroche's ritual marriage to the lwa Ezuli Frida, such weddings being a common mode of expressing allegiance and affiliation with a particular spirit, he concludes with the non-observation that Laroche "sees no contradiction between wielding an iPhone and marrying a voodoo bride." (After all, what would those pagan pin-pushers be doing with a mobile telephone? What if you were to spill goat's blood on it?)

You don't have to have been to journalism school to know that "sees no contradiction between" is a construction that does absolutely nothing except raise the spectre of just such a contradiction. Now go back to that sentence and replace "marrying a voodoo bride" with "keeping kosher" or "lining up in church to receive the holy communion." Would Bilefsky have included those sentences in articles about the resurgence of orthodoxy in Jewish youth, or the fascinating Sunday-morning antics of hedge-fund managers?

...

The Social Life of Caged Birds, on PRI's "The World" UPDATED

2011-04-06T13:51:00.003-04:00

On weekend mornings at dawn, Saigonese songbird aficionados like to bring their pets to a café in the corner of one of District One's most popular parks, where they drink coffees and teas, and chat, perhaps about birds, perhaps not. Meanwhile the birds make friends among neighbors of their own kind, at least to the extent possible while trapped in their bamboo prisons. They also do their best to out-sing one another.

I realize this is rather short notice, but my "audio postcard" about these caged-bird fanciers in Ho Chi Minh City runs on PRI's "The World" today on your local NPR affiliate. In case you missed it, ~~I'll post a link here later,~~ the segment is now available online at The World's website, along with a groovy slideshow of my photographs.

Reading: Imajine by Claudel Casseus

2011-04-03T11:42:00.001-04:00

In Port au Prince, before the earthquake, living on the brink of disaster was the status quo for countless Haitians. Now, almost fifteen months after the disaster, life among the ruins is the new normal. The media tells us that half of the 1.5 million people made homeless have now returned to their former homes, or have found new ones, but wherever we drove in the capital last month it seemed that every vacant lot and public space was still crammed with tent cities. No major roads remained blocked with rubble, but I saw many buildings in a state of near-collapse, tilted and slanted, their poorly engineered concrete slabs jutting into the sky at all angles. They look, these former buildings, as if the earthquake had only happened last week.

Not so the tent cities, which are developing a sense of permanence. The once grand, open expanse of the Champ de Mars, directly in front of the as-yet still undemolished, collapsed and impotent national palace, is full of tents, some now with reinforced walls of plywood and metal. It looks as if every last rusted tin corrugation, ersatz television antenna, tattered blue polytarp and urine-stained alleyway of a Rio de Janeiro favela had been teleported here and dropped in front of the equivalent of the White House. This is no longer a refugee camp, it is a community, complete with restaurants, bars in which to gather and watch television, hair salons, hookers, fried plantain salesmen, midwives, neighbors and hoodlums. It is all too easy to imagine that unless presented with a pleasant alternative, nobody is going nowhere no time soon. At the moment neither options pleasant nor unpleasant seem to be presenting themselves, despite the hundreds (thousands?) of NGOs that have flooded the city with housing schemes, feasibility studies, risk assessments and white SUVs.

It is an unfulfilled cliché of development and aid work that the population being aided should, for best results, be consulted, involved in the process and invited to help shape its own destiny. But a recent literary project showcases, for me, just how rare it is for a Haitian perspective on the earthquake to take center stage. Imajine, by Claudel Casseus, is not a prescription for relief or reconstruction, it is a personal narrative of how one Haitian man experienced the earthquake and its aftermath. Reading it makes one realize that our comprehension of what the quake was like is based on images, and on a few quotes from traumatized citizens collected and selected by foreign reporters in the days immediately following the catastrophe. It showcases, by extension, the limitations of the very narrow lens through which we view most international events, despite the potential of the internet to bring us direct reports from those affected.

Imajine is essentially a work-for-hire, produced, enabled and published by conceptual artist and musician Bill Drummond. But the words in it are those of Claudel Casseus, perhaps a typical underemployed, eager, brilliant and sometimes desperate Haitian young man. There are many like him in Port au Prince, people with vast unrealized potential, their creative possibilities and dreams squelched by racism, borders, corruption, politics and poverty. Nobody else, however, could have written Imajine.

As a participant in the December 2009 Ghetto Biennale, Bill Drummond painted the provocative and uncomfortably prescient slogan "imagine you wake up tomorrow and music has disappeared" on a wall in the Grand Rue of Port-au-Prince. Claudel Casseus steadied the ladder for him. In the days after the earthquake, less than a month after the triumphant finale of the biennale, participating artists, now back at their homes all over the globe, set up a master list and an email network to exchange news and reports of how their newly made Haitian friends and collaborators had fared in the earthquake. Nobody knew anything of Casseus' whereabouts, nor what might have happened to him.

"Imagine you wake up tomorrow and music has disappeared."

Some two weeks later Bill Drummond's cellphone rang. Through the electronic fog he recognized Casseus' voice, but the connection was too bad and the language barrier too great for him to understand much more than the simple fact that his former ladder-holder was alive. He wondered how he could help, for surely that transatlantic telephone call represented a request for assistance. Drummond's answer to this question continues to elude many of the NGOs working in Port-au-Prince, despite its simplicity: if you want to help a Haitian in this nightmarish time, give him or her a job. Drummond proposed a work-for-hire, commissioning Casseus to write a five-thousand word account of how he had experienced the earthquake. Imajine is the result of Casseus seizing this opportunity by the horns; he spent countless hours in an internet café pouring out his memories in emails to Drummond. Ultimately, his account ran to some sixty pages.

The Grand Rue on runoff election day, March 20th.

Casseus' descriptions of the psychological effects of the earthquake demonstrate the shortcomings of journalistic accounts, so often written by observers arriving on the scene after a catastrophe has already occurred. I remember reading in various stories that Haitians were traumatized and that many "refused to set foot in any building," and that this was complicating efforts to get people to return to their homes, but I didn't really understand the emotional depth of their sentiment until I read Casseus: "It was impossible to walk by a collapsed building without having the illusion that there might be someone under the rubble screaming for help. Sometimes it might be true and sometimes it might be just a vision that got stuck in your head. If you walked by a building, you can't help but think it is about to fall down on you or that you could have been dead under there if it wasn't for the grace of God and the Spirits."

The power of Imajine lies in the raw, unpolished delivery of Casseus' memories. Typing directly into a terminal in an internet café, the author had neither the means nor the technology to review and edit his own work. He simply let the words flow onto the screen and then pressed SEND, making this book the Zapruder film of earthquake memoirs. It is full of elliptical meanderings, digressions and repetitions, none of which manage to diminish the visceral quality of the writing. Profound truths and painful observations await the reader with each turn of the page. This gives Imajine a unique mode of narrative tension; you continue to read because at almost any moment you may stumble across a surprising thought or illuminating sentence. "This tragedy made me come to the understanding that we human beings are nothing," Casseus writes early on, "and that we should make good use of our time because we do not know when we are going to die."

The deservedly proud author, Claudel Casseus, in the Grand Rue two weeks ago.

I got my copy of Imajine the best way one can acquire a book: I bought it directly from the author, who autographed it for me. It is available directly from Penkiln Burn, and also from Amazon.co.uk, but there are very few copies for sale in Haiti. I'm hoping on my next visit it will be available in every gift boutique in the airport. Ask for it, when you are there buying your duty-free rum.

Coney Island Rest in Peace

2011-03-30T14:52:00.000-04:00

I blogged last spring about joining a joyous New Orleans-style 2nd line parade over the Brooklyn Bridge. This Sunday, April 3rd, more or less the one year anniversary of that event, NOLAphile James Demaria is organizing another. This one is a funeral for the late, great Coney Island.

If you are worried that a funeral might make for a depressing Sunday beside the gray and so-far unspringlike seashore, you don't know much about New Orleans 2nd lines. Furthermore, Demaria remarks on the facebook invitation page that "This event is symbolic of our hopes for Coney Island's rebirth. It's joyous. And hopeful. And if you don't agree with sarcastic fun we don't want you there."

Despite just how strongly I do agree with sarcastic fun, I unfortunately won't be able to attend. But you should. Surf Avenue and West 12th, at 2PM.

I've always wanted to know the Secrets of Women

2011-03-26T13:25:00.000-04:00

Perhaps they would let me enroll.

Spotted on the Rue Capois, Port au Prince, this wall painted with an advertisement for a gender-specific technical school, presumably on the premises. "The Professional Center for Women's Secrets announces its regular classes," including cooking, baking, haircutting and styling, cake decoration and cosmetology.

Ciné in the Nation's Service

2011-03-19T10:44:00.002-04:00

The arrival of exiled former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide yesterday in Port au Prince did not provoke quite the same media frenzy as his similar return in 1994, when dozens of journalists thronged the tables along the terrace at the Oloffson Hotel and I met countless people I am still pleased to number among my friends.

Nonetheless, there were journalists at the airport to greet him, and, according to my friend Daniel Morel, perhaps five to ten thousand citizen well-wishers. Although the few mentions of Haiti in the international press yesterday focused on Aristide's return, the bigger story here is the tidal wave of support for Michel Martelly, the former konpa musician turned political outsider. Barring a fraud of monumental proportions, he is certain to be Haiti's next president. Martelly is the closest thing to a local version of a rock star, and the people treat him like one. He enjoys a sort of pre-emptive cult of personality not seen here since Aristide's heyday. At his demonstrations people swoon and raise their arms toward the sky. On the one hand it is tragic to see the Haitian people once more investing their infinite and exuberant faith in a mere mortal, and one with no government experience at that. On the other hand, it is that very exuberant faith that grabs hold of the visitor to Haiti and enchants forever. So the spectacle is both beautiful and depressing, like so much in this country.

Port au Prince is awash with pink posters of "Tet Kale" (the bald-headed man), Michel Martelly.

For once, I am working on a documentary here that refuses to get caught up in the cyclical vagaries of Haitian political life; the return of Aristide and the cheering crowds of pink-shirted Martelly supporters are things we hear about over dinner at the Oloffson, not experience firsthand. Yesterday, I encountered on the terrace there a television crew who had been at the airport covering Aristide's arrival from South Africa. To my delight, I recognized them and they me; the cameraman and soundman were both alumni of my sound recording seminars at the Siné Lekol in Jacmel. Although both their administrative building and their classrooms were destroyed in the earthquake, often described here as "the events of January 12th," the school's spirit was not. The students immediately set to documenting recovery and rebuilding, filming the living conditions of tent-camp residents and seeking out gripping stories of survival. They have already made countless films.

To see two of my students gainfully employed using the skills I had helped to teach them filled me with pride and hope. Cesar "Bougon" Massena was clutching a boom pole and a shotgun microphone, and threatening my livelihood with his abilities. I couldn't be more pleased.

Crew photo: Pradip Malde

The Don of Flans

2011-03-13T23:48:00.001-04:00

Super-delicious Vietnamese street food, example #646B

Flan in bite-sized nocturnal take-away cups near the market in Dalat, fifteen cents per.

I've known a few guys like that

2011-03-08T11:44:00.001-05:00

I'm safely back in Brooklyn where it is pleasant, but chilly, at least compared with balmy Saigon. All in all it was a fabulous trip to Vietnam, even if I failed to completely miss the winter. I now judge these things by the wealth of blog-worthy images and experiences that I come across, and in this regard Vietnam was extraordinarily rich. So I still have a number of Vietnam-related posts to dole out.

Here's one, a Hanoi restaurant I didn't eat at.

Why I love the Guardian, dept.

2011-03-07T21:30:00.002-05:00

Because they point out that it's impossible to tell the difference between Muammar Kaddafi and Charlie Sheen.

...

A visit to Van Long Nature Preserve

2011-03-02T01:32:00.000-05:00

Cuc Phuong National Park, about three hours south-south-west of Hanoi, is visited primarily by birdwatchers and those wishing to see the Primate Rescue Center, where various gibbons, langours and macaques confiscated from poachers or rescued from cages are rehabilitated with the ultimate goal of reintroducing them into the wild. One of those primates, Delacour's Langour, is among the ten rarest in the world, with less than 200 remaining in their only habitat, the karst limestone jungles of northern Vietnam.

They are not doing well, and we are the principal threat to their survival. (Humans are by far the commonest primate, with over 8 billion of us now having colonized every corner of the globe. We are the Cockroach, Norway rat and House sparrow of the primate world, able to adapt to almost any environment and thrive). Having seen some Delacour's in their cages at the Rescue Center, I decided to try and spot them in the "wild" on my way out of the park. The only place they are regularly found is at Van Long Nature Reserve, a sort of minor appendix to the National Park, some twenty kilometers outside the park entrance. This primeval lake is surrounded by mist-shrouded limestone pinnacles and inhabited by thousands of egrets and herons. It is also what is politely known as a tourist trap.

Turning off the minor highway from Ninh Binh to Nho Quan, one follows a road suitable for tour buses to the lake's edge and finds at the end of it a restaurant-resort complex with too many rooms and overpriced food, and a dozen stalls set up in the dust selling embroidered tablecloths and sun-hats embroidered with the Vietnamese communist star. The only way to visit the lake is to hire a boat. Not a problem; there are countless boats lined up along the embankment and a majordomo who assigns each group their particular vessel and boatman. The price of the boat has already been charged at the ticket desk, saving one the unpleasant task of haggling. (The price is absurdly reasonable, not to say third-world, something like three dollars for an advertised ninety minute tour).

Tourism is, of course, the new colonialism. Here I monkey around taking autoportraits of myself being ferried around Van Long by a diminutive Vietnamese boatlady while she simultaneously scans the hillside for monkeys to show me.

The lake has many boats of many different sizes, ferrying tourists of all nations out onto it, but none of them are motorized, which is blissful, and I appear to be the only one on this particular afternoon who has come to try their luck at seeing the Delacour's Langour, a handsome black monkey with a long tail and, apparently, white shorts. Sightseers are steered east along the lake, while monkey-fanciers bear left, down a spur of the lake trapped between facing walls of limestone. None of the other boats have taken this route, and within minutes of departing the dock I am all alone, surrounded by misty reedbeds and lily-pads. Well, all alone except for the tiny oarswoman valiantly rowing my considerable bulk around in her boat.

The disappointing aspect of visiting Van Long is similar to that of visiting Giverny, where Monet allegedly invented impressionism by painting the waterlilies in his garden. One realizes that, much like Monet, those Chinese painters who painted stylized mountains of dripping rocks, stunted trees and swirling clouds did not actually invent a new way of seeing; instead, they were accurate and realistic painters who sought out, or were surrounded by, incredible landscapes.

Just as soon as we have taken our own route, and the gabble of my fellow dominant primates has paddled out of earshot up the lake, we hear haunting and booming calls coming out of the mountains. They can only be simian in origin. I glance at my guide. She points up into the fog-shrouded rocks above us and whispers conspiratorially to me in Vietnamese. I shrug, uncomprehending. She points again. Does she see something, or is she just indicating the source of the sound? I scan the area of the hillside she is indicating. I see nothing but tortured streaky black and white rock, and vibrant green shrubbery. There are clefts and caves and canyons. The Delacour's could be anywhere up there.

I am certain I hear a return call, coming from the facing rocks to our left; the sound is too present to be the echoes of the first, which we also hear. I point out the other side of the boat. She shakes her head; she does not agree. ~~We row on.~~ She rows on. Egrets by the hundreds flush from the marshes, fly up and around us, and then resettle a hundred meters further along, waiting for us to paddle up and flush them again. Kingfishers zoom above the reeds. I see white-browed crake, and coots, quite uncommon here in Vietnam.

As I'm watching one bird or another the boatwoman whispers again, urgently. She is now pointing to our left, and from her attitude it is clear that she sees something important. I bring up the binoculars and see them immediately, scampering about on the brutal rock face. All black-monkeys with white diapers, almost extinct, Delacour's Langour.

Do you see those two pairs of white shorts, below, in this detail from the image above? With tails extending from them?

I'm hoping the wave goodbye means my gratuity was sufficient.

Gassy Feeling

2011-02-26T03:36:00.001-05:00

Today's sunshine in Dong Hoi, Quanh Binh province, was the first I have seen in at least ten days, five of which I spent shrouded in mist in Cuc Phuong National Park. I arrived here last night with rotting laundry after spending all day on the train crossing North Annam on my slow, rail-bound route back to Saigon. Dong Hoi is a pleasant and little visited fishing port city only an hour or so north of the former Demilitarized Zone, meaning it was flattened during the Vietnam war. Now it is calm and balmy; I emerged from the air-conditioned railway car to discover that I had left the Vietnamese winter definitively behind to the north.

Just steps across the street from my excellent and comfortable hotel, the Nam Long, I found the riverfront fishing boat refueling fleet, wooden vessels outfitted with large diesel holding tanks and standard-issue gas pumps sprouting from their decks. Smoking on board is not advised.*

The concept of branding seems to have great traction in Vietnam. As I noted recently on facebook, if I had a dollar for every iPhone I saw on the streets of Hanoi, I could afford my own iPhone. The notion extends to gasoline sales. I have seen many of the small, rural oil-barrel mounted, hand-pumped gasoline dispensers sporting a crudely painted "Shell" logo.

Here in Dong Hoi, the news that BP is responsible for the toxic death of a major world fishery seems not to have penetrated, for the company is still getting free, hand-painted advertising.

Another hand-painted logo, the "P" for Petrolimex, which sounds like a joint Peruvian-Mexico oil company, but is actually Vietnamese.

Note the gas pump shrouded in blue polytarp, and the two others, one on each vessel in the background. Just pull your ship into the adjacent berth and gas up with the extra-long hose.

*Although I'm told you can stub a cigarette out in diesel fuel and it won't ignite.

And no, I'm not staying there...

2011-02-24T18:58:00.000-05:00

In Ninh Binh, the "Mark of the Beast" Hotel. Just like the Eagles said, the kind you can check into, but you can never leave.

No Country For Old Birds

2011-02-18T00:30:00.001-05:00

Caged Hwamei (Melodious Laughingthrush), Hanoi. I have yet to see one in the wild.

It has been more than ten years since my last intensive birding exploration of Asia, and I had forgotten just how oppressive this continent can be, if you happen to be a bird. It isn't that people here don't love our little feathered friends, it's that they love them so much that they want to keep them in cages at home, or eat them as crispy fried snacks. One Vietnamese in Dalat put it to me this way: "Vietnam people don't want to have to go to the forest to hear birds sing. They like it, and they want to have birds at home, so they can hear it every day!" Between the hunting, the trapping, the snacking, and the shooting of birds with slingshots, a perfectly acceptable pastime for small boys here, the avian world in Vietnam is under constant attack. (Anecdotal reports suggests that in neighboring Laos the situation is far worse; travelers report seeing nary a wild bird there, and of walking in forests almost devoid of birdsong).

The results of this human versus bird armageddon are that even in the deepest, best protected forests, the birds are very, very wary. The innocent birder who wishes nothing more than to see the poor little critters through some high-quality optics must settle for distant views of cautious and skittish creatures going out of their way to place leaves, trunks and branches between themselves and any visitor. Even families of birds that elsewhere in the world are often curious and confiding, like the genus Parus, the titmice and chickadees of European and North American feeders, stay at least three times as far away from intruding humans as they would on other continents. One must be patient and silent.

Here's a compilation of threats I've encountered in my travels here:

1. At a coastal forest preserve near Binh Chau I came upon this concerted effort to catch terrestrial gamebirds, such as pheasants, partridges and silverbacks. I saw similar snares on Sulawesi in Indonesia fifteen years ago. The pictures are a bit difficult to follow, as the whole idea is that the traps blend into the forest background.

Over a long stretch where secondary forest bordered on a clearing, perhaps several hundred meters, someone had created an obstacle course of chopped brambles, twigs and brush. Note the diagonal line of brush running from the upper left to the lower right, above. It is only about eighteen inches high, but heavier, meatier birds like pheasants and partridges are reluctant to fly unless absolutely obliged to, and the spines and tangle of these narrow twigs prevents them from easily hopping over. Every five meters or so the hunter leaves a gap in the "fence" for the bird (or small mammal) to pass through on the way back from feeding in the clearing to the relative security of the forest. Across the gap is the hair-trigger for the snare, below.

Note the horizontal string across the lower third of the right hand half of the image above. When the bird hits this string, the trigger is jostled, and the loop, held in tension by a bent sapling, yanks the bird into the air. Below is an image of the tripwire from above. The vertical string to the upper left is attached to a springy, bent-over branch.

Above is the sapling, bent over by the tensioned string. Below, the taught string, before I released the mechanism.

2. Those birds not destined for the pot, or the skewer, tend to be champion singers, prized for their morning serenade. While life in a cage is perhaps preferable to being eaten, the number of caged birds in Vietnam is staggering. Walking down busy urban streets in the early morning one hears all manner of deepwoods jungle species calling out from tiny wicker homes hung on balconies and from the eaves of homes and businesses.
Below, a bird shop in Hanoi.

Green Magpie. I have yet to see one in the wild.

3. So-called mist nets are used by scientists to catch forest birds without harming them, so that they can be measured, weighed, banded and released. But very fine fishing nets work just as well, to catch birds for food or for the cage trade. At the bottom of a trail outside of Dalat, well-known to birders, at the southern end of Lake Ho Tuyen Lam, I found at least a hundred meters of this netting strung in a loop around a wooded stream. The sites favored by birders are also interesting to the trappers. This netting was in poor condition, and to judge by the dead Mountain Fulvettas it had caught, was not being regularly attended (or perhaps Mountain Fulvetta is a worthless species to the trapper and he therefore had not even bothered to untangle these corpses).

The small white lozenge in the center of this net is a float; these are very fine gauge gill nets used locally for fishing small species of freshwater fish.

I'm afraid I admit to having at it with my pocket knife. I cut down, shredded and balled up all the netting I could pull out of the bushes. Like the thousands of miles of "ghost nets" abandoned or broken off and drifting on the high seas, fishing on and on for fish that will never be eaten, netting like this will continue to catch and exterminate birds indefinitely, until wind and broken branches tangle it into inefficiency.

4. Scene: A long row of foodstalls at the Sapa barbecue pavilion in extreme northwest Vietnam. The vendors clamor for each passing visitor to choose their particular restaurant, which is much the same as all the others.

Me: What's that, next to the marinated pork ribs and the broccoli-rabesque vegetable wrapped in beef tenderloin?
Girl: Birds. Small birds. (I look incredulous, or perhaps mystified. The girl flaps her arms like wings and repeats).

Halong Bay Tragedy

2011-02-17T19:43:00.001-05:00

In the budget hotels of Hanoi today the tragedy at Halong Bay is a source of widespread worry and conversation. One of North Vietnam's premiere tourist destinations, these sculpted limestone outcrops are visited by almost all the travelers who pass through the region. If yesterday's terrible disaster, in which ~~at least 11~~ 12 tourists perished in the sinking of an overnight tour boat, made it onto any friend and family radar screens, please rest assured that I was not on board.

A great idea for a Red Hook Bed and Breakfast

2011-02-16T22:28:00.005-05:00

Enjoy waterfalls sightseeing, Jungle trekking, Elephant riding, Dug-out boating, and your very own Gongs show. (click image to enlarge).

The so-called "hill-tribes" of Vietnam, numerous ethnicities resident in the most remote areas of the country, near the Cambodian and Lao borders, have traditionally been oppressed, repressed and marginalized by the dominant "ethnic Vietnamese." Adding to their burden of racial discrimination, many of the southern hill-tribes threw their lot in with the South and the Americans during the war, suffering for it after the defeat. These valiant fighters were known as the Montagnards; many of them moved to live in the Carolinas after my government valiantly recognized their unique level of service and extended a green-card welcome in the denouement of the war. Those who remain continue to be treated as second-class citizens, but their "rustic" way of life and "colorful" costumes make them a major draw for tourists, who are offered countless opportunities to experience "authentic" hill-tribe life via visits, tours, sleepovers in long-houses elevated on stilts and the like. The ensemble of hill-tribes are generally referred to as "minority people."

Also on offer, spend an evening with a minority.

Progress is a woman's best friend

2011-02-14T22:05:00.002-05:00

The shops in Buon Ma Thuot, a mid-sized city in the hot western lowlands of Vietnam, not far from the Cambodian border, were full of tabletop gas ranges, a critical barometer for a certain level of development. The humble gas range, while not a full on home oven, is a great leap forward in cooking efficiency from charcoal. When an economy reaches the stage where most families can aspire to, and attain, a home kitchen appliance like this, the piecemeal clearing of forests for charcoal production wanes (although valuable timbers are still looted). Those members of the family who do the cooking are no longer at constant risk of tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses caused by smoky cookfires. The kitchen moves indoors. This is modern efficiency, progress.

However, assuming the Vietglish (or Chingrish, for these burner units are likely made in China) on this model more or less accurately reflects the marketing thrust of the manufacturer, gender stereotypes are still firmly planted in the premodern, charcoal-cookstove era.